Read Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) Online
Authors: David Jester
Jonathan’s dad was just as bad as Jonathan's school friends. The laughter, the taunting, the occasional beatings. His dad was also a poacher and a drunk. Jonathan planned to steal his dad’s keys when he passed out drunk, use them to unlock his gun cabinet, steal his shotgun and then slip it under his bed for the night. In the morning he would hide the gun under his coat, walk the two miles he walked to school every day and then shoot every kid that had ever bullied or taunted him.
It was a simple plan and one that would give Michael a lot of work and a lot of credits, but there were many variables at play. The only thing that was certain was that Jonathan had the means and the motive.
Michael didn’t want the business, he wasn’t that desperate for credits and he certainly didn’t get enough of them to warrant bearing witness to such an event. The town was bad enough as it was, he couldn’t bear living amongst the sorrow and the spectacle that it would become should Jonathan find the right moment to go through with the act.
He wasn’t the only youngster whose life was on the line. Dean Moore, the youngster driving the majority of the kicks into Jonathan’s crumbled body, was also in Michaels’ sights, with a little more certainty over his future.
The brutish bully was a closet homosexual who had sexual fantasises about the people he beat up, including the aspiring sociopath presently on the receiving end of his frustrations. Like a six year old boy that taunts and mocks a girl he fancies at school, Dean used violence to express feelings he could never relate vocally.
He engaged in mutual masturbation with another boy in his class, a boy who walked the thin line between
the bullied
and
the bully
and didn’t want to slip. There was a strong chance Dean would try to further his fantasises with this boy, and if he did his sexual inclinations would be exposed, leading him to take his own life with the help of a bottle of his father’s whisky and a box of paracetamol. On the plus side, should his future converge with the twisted one of Jonathan Marks, then liver failure would prevent him from the romantic irony of being murdered by the hand of his tormented sweetheart.
A middle aged couple, their faces alight with the peppy glee of contentment, trudged past. They walked parallel to each other, a foot of pavement separating them. They tried to look nonchalant, uninterested in each other, but they were clearly paying more attention to each other than the dogs they walked or the park they walked in. They were telling the world that yes, they may know each other, but they weren’t exactly best of friends and certainly weren’t indulging in a sadomasochistic affair. An affair that would bring the cherry-faced woman close to Michael’s door when she forgot the safe word and her lover continued to strangle her.
Michael eyed them up as they passed, a complementary smile was dropped his way by both, but he doubted they even noticed him.
He sighed heavily and stood up to leave, cutting through the centre of the park, keen to avoid the outskirts where Martin Atkinson’s body was probably moments away from being discovered.
He shot a glance at the bullies and their victim as he moved to within ten feet of them. None of them paid any attention to him. Dean was still calling the shots as he stood over his anguished victim.
“Now, let’s jump on top of him!”
“Wait, why?”
“We’ll wrestle him! Come on, that’ll show him!”
Michael barely suppressed a smile as he moved past with quickening steps.
“
Dude
, that’s not wrestling.”
6
Daytime television, where the banal, the pointless and the idiotic combine to create a torrid and unmemorable concoction of watered down humanity that isn’t fit to show to those who choose their TV time.
Angela Washington loved it. She loved the mindlessness of it all. The topics unfit for human consumption that became fantastical during the day when all the kids were at school and she could stand and do the ironing whilst looking down, in her own modest and introverted way, on those worse-off and less intelligent than her. It made her smile, even when she had nothing to do but housework, and that was the most important thing.
When the doorbell sounded she was still smiling. She put down the iron, still fizzing a vapored dragon breath into the already humid living room; untied her apron, tainted with trails of flour and eggs from cakes currently rising in the oven; checked her appearance in the mirror above the fireplace, flicking a saturated stray hair from her forehead; and went to answer the door, humming happily to herself.
She wasn’t expecting anyone but had a few friends and neighbours that liked to drop by unannounced.
Through the peephole she could see two figures standing at the door, their height and size seemingly uniformed. She sighed, anticipating salesmen or Jehovah's witnesses. She opened the door regardless, deciding it was too late to rudely turn her back, having exposed her silhouette through the smeared glass in the door panel.
The men at the door were wearing black suits, black ties, black shirts and black tinted sunglasses. Their arms were folded behind their backs in a formal manner.
“May I help you, gentlemen?” She couldn’t see any briefcases, bags or leaflets, but also couldn’t see their hands. Nor could she gather their intentions from their blank stares.
“Angela Washington?” One asked.
“Yes,” Angela answered politely.
The two men exchanged a blank stare and then looked back at Angela -- her left hand still lightly grasped the door frame, her right toyed with the back of her tight ponytail.
“May we come inside?” Two wondered.
Angela swapped a stare between the two men. “Why?” she inquired with a hint of curiosity.
“We have a few things we need to discuss,” he replied.
Angela ducked her head in between them and threw a gentle wave to her neighbour across the street, passing by with his small Jack Russell tugging mentally on the lead two feet in front of him. He threw a wave back and hollered a friendly greeting.
The two men watched the neighbour closely, only turning back to Angela when he had escorted the dog down the driveway and was trying to usher him into the house.
“What are you trying to sell?” Angela asked courteously.
They exchange a look again. The man on the right, the first to speak, turned around to make sure the neighbour had vanished inside with his ferrety canine.
He turned back. “Salvation,” he said darkly.
The curiosity on Angela's face trebled, there was barely a smile left to supplement her Stepford charm.
They stepped forward as one, pushing Angela back and barging roughly into the house. They slammed the door shut behind them and took up parallel positions in front of it.
Angela stumbled backwards across the hallway, almost losing her balance. She looked concerned. Her eyes were alive with terror.
“What do you want?” she begged. The fear was evident in her trembling voice; the smile had been wiped clean off her face.
“Your soul.”
They both produced pistols and whipped them in front of her. Aiming the menacing barrels at her tearful face.
She backed up until her ankles were restrained by the bottom step of a narrow staircase. “I don’t understand,” she trembled with quivering lips. She looked from gun to gun, barrel to barrel, dead face to dead face, horrified at what she saw.
There was a moment’s hesitancy in both men, they looked ready to pull the triggers but they paused, keeping the guns aimed at the shaking homemaker.
“Angela Washington?” One asked. “Aged forty-five. Housewife. Divorced. Three kids?”
“Yes! Yes!” Angela cried, throwing her hands into the air in maddening desperation. “What do you want? Please, what do you want from me?”
“I guess we were expecting a little more…” One replied, trailing off.
Angela was hysterical. “A little more?” she asked, something other than hysteria and fear crept into her voice and onto her face. Her trembling body became rigid; her frightened face took on a different emotion.
The two men looked at each other.
“Hair?” one of them asked.
The other nodded in agreement.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Angela screamed.
Again the intruders exchanged stares. This time they lowered their weapons and for a moment their concentration waned into curiosity.
“You think we’ve made a mistake?” One wondered softly.
Before Two could answer the question posed by his doppelgänger Angela launched herself at them both. Her face had been transformed in its entirety, the smiling mother of three was now a snarling animalistic killer bent on blood.
Her neatly arranged sparkling white teeth were hideously large, protruding through her snarling lips like the serrated edge on an unsheathed knife. Vicious claws, capable of opening a man like a tin can, dominated her delicate hands, hands that merely moments ago were baking cakes and ironing clothes.
She tackled one of the intruders, wrestling him violently to the floor, his head and back slammed against the carpeted foundation. His lungs heaved out every inch of air under Angela’s powerfully body which transformed by the second.
With a jaw still protruding from her neck as if being inflated from behind, she tried to take a bite out of his throat, succeeding only in tearing the fabric from his suit as he twisted away. He grasped her by the shoulders and tightened his grip on her flesh, but he could feel it growing in his palm, getting strong and stronger with each passing moment.
His hands slipped from her flesh, his body yielded against her sudden strength. She growled in excitement, a snarling hungry glimmer in eyes that still appeared human, but glowed with a monstrous radiance. She opened her mouth, eyed his throat and dove in for the kill.
A hissing sound preceded a barely audible thump and the beast jolted to a rigid stop, stuck atop the fallen intruder like a rigid cowboy on a beaten horse. A torrent of blood issued forth from an exit wound in the torso of the she-beast, spraying over the spectacled face of man in the black suit -- his sunglasses shielding the viscous crimson from his eyes.
The thing that had been Angela Washington jerked violently on the straddled man. She coughed a splutter of blood from her fearsome jaw, wheezed through damaged lungs, shuddered as her life-force spat out of every muscle, and then slumped forward, eclipsing the man beneath her.
There was a struggle, then Two managed to pull himself free, tossing Angela aside like a hefty, sluggish rag-doll. His colleague stood above the crumpled, muscular figure with his gun still raised.
“That was close,” Two said, scooping globs of blood from his face and flicking them onto the floor. The blood left a sickly sheen on his hand which he wiped onto the seat of his trousers with a grimace.
“Very,” One agreed. He lowered the gun that had blown a hole straight through Angela’s chest.
“Messy as well,” Two added, removing his sunglasses and using his sleeve to clear the sickly smears from the rims.
“I had no other choice.”
“You could have pushed her off first.”