Prologue 2

The boy blinked. Seeing as his Dad had girlfriends, he wasn’t sure what the issue was – he had yet to learn the word hypocrite.

“Oh, I know you thought she was a fucking saint, but you were way wrong.” His father looked down at the woman’s body, looked at the blood snaking across the food-splattered floor, cutting a scarlet river through the mashed potatoes. “Stupid whore opened her legs for anything with a dick, did it anywhere she got the chance. What did she think I was gonna do when I found out? Huh? Huh?”

The boy opened his mouth, then shut it again. He didn’t yet know the term rhetorical question, but he did know that he wasn’t expected to respond to his father; it was clear that the man already knew the answer.

The answer was laying at his feet.

“So.” Now his father’s tone changed, became almost gentle. “I just need to do one last thing before I go myself.”

The boy had no earthly clue what that meant, but he didn’t like it, at all. The calm and quiet was unnerving and disquieting, but he didn’t have any power here. He’d never had any where his father was concerned, so all he could do now was stand motionless in front of his bedroom door and look at the man pointing the gun right at him. Holding the boy’s fate in his hands, as usual. Some more.

It felt like minutes that he stood there staring at his father, staring down the barrel of the gun, but in reality, it couldn’t have been more than a few fleeting seconds… seconds that would stay with the boy for the rest of his life.

“Huh,” said his father again, but this time his tone was defeated. He lowered his arm. “I thought I could do it, but I can’t. Fuck me.”

He gave his son a long, searching look, then shook his blond head. “I’m gonna tell you one thing, kid, before I get on with it. If you remember nothing else that I’ve ever said, you remember this.”

Numbly, barely hearing his father’s words over his heartbeat pounding in his ears, the boy nodded.

“Don’t trust a woman. Not one, not ever. Don’t let one close to you. Never let one get anything over on you. Use ‘em, fuck ‘em, beat ‘em up if you feel like doing that… but don’t ever let one in.” He looked down at the woman sprawled across the floor, then raised his arm again. “Believe me when I say that no bitch pussy is fucking worth it. Whores will wreck your whole damn life, if you give them the chance.”

“Daddy.” The boy’s throat thawed and opened just enough for him to croak out the word. “Daddy, what –”

His father moved so fast, the boy barely saw what was happening until it was all over: in a single, fluid motion, his father placed the gun under his chin, pulled the trigger, and was flung backwards like a rag doll. He fell heavily, his hand still clutching the gun. In a second of bizarre and diabolical observation, the boy noticed that he’d landed smack on top of the turkey carcass, and for some reason, that struck him as absolutely and hysterically funny.

The boy felt the laughter bubbling up in his chest, threatening to burst from his throat, but then something else took it over, rammed it back down so hard that he felt like he was choking on it. That something was dark and inhuman and ice-cold, and the boy suddenly understood that this something was going to be a part of him forever.

In a daze, he turned and went back into his bedroom. Mechanically, he pried the floorboard up, took his chocolate Santa and car out, placed the board back perfectly. Then he sat on his bed – a small blond boy in too-small smiley-face pajamas – and ate his candy, running his car back and forth, muttering under his breath, the motion and sound both soothing and hypnotic. Then as quick as a light being switched on, he suddenly understood what was in the living room, and he started to scream.

Six hundred miles away and twenty-nine years later, that little boy woke up.