Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

SECOND HAND GOODS Natalie L. Sin

I acquired Bowie when he was fourteen years old. At least we think he was fourteen. Bowie told me that was how old his father said he was and showed me the tattoo on his right hip as proof: 10-4-91. As far as I was concerned, the tattoo only proved that Bowie’s dad was a bigger piece of shit than I had given him credit for.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s shit fathers. Granted, I never met my biological one. My stepfather was the only father figure I ever had. He used to come into the bathroom while I was taking a bath, grab my hair and shove me under water. I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He got off on watching me think I was going to die. A world class douchebag, no question. Next to Bowie’s father, on the other hand, my stepdad was fucking Mike Brady.

Though I never saw Bowie leave the apartment, I heard him getting beaten all the time. More nights than not, I fell asleep hoping the Doberman across the hall would break into the apartment and tear Bowie’s dad’s throat out. Unfortunately, Winky, the Doberman pinscher, was about as lethal as a hamster. I once saw him run away from a squirrel when he was out for a walk with his pothead owner. Calling the landlord wouldn’t have done anything either. The guy never left the first floor, despite also being the building super. Once a month, I slipped an envelope with the rent in it under his door for the privilege of having to fix my own plumbing and cockroach problems.

If I was younger, or more naïve, I would have called the cops. At twenty, I knew better. Assuming any police did show up, it wouldn’t have been happily ever after for Bowie. He would end up in foster care which, based on what I’ve heard, isn’t much better than the situation he was already in. Maybe that was all stereotypes and misinformation, but I wasn’t about to bet on it. Then one day the noise stopped. For three nights straight, I didn’t hear a peep from the next apartment: No beating, no tirades about how Bowie was a fucking waste of skin who was lucky to be alive. Nothing. I figured they moved. Maybe times got hard, and Bowie’s dad didn’t have money to pay the rent. I felt bad for Bowie, and more than a little guilty. When they were in the building, I could tell myself that if things got too crazy I would do something. Having that shred of control let me tell myself I was a decent person. With Bowie gone, all I could do was wonder how much worse life would get for him.

The knocking started on the fourth day. It came from the other side of my bedroom wall in sets of five, with a quick break in between sets. I walked up to the wall, to get the attention of whoever was making the commotion.

“Hello?” I asked.

The knocking stopped abruptly. I waited, but no one said anything back.

“Can you hear me? If you can hear me, knock again.”

One knock. This time I could tell it was coming from somewhere close to the floor.

“Are you all right? Knock once for yes, twice for no.”

I felt ridiculous, like someone in a bad spy movie. Then two knocks came back, loud and firm, and it started to feel a lot less silly.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

One knock. Then two knocks, close to together.

“Does that mean you don’t know?”

One knock. I decided that was enough; I was going over there. On the chance that it was Bowie’s dad, playing some kind of sick joke, I brought my mother’s electric turkey slicer. It was one of the few things she left behind, after my stepdad left and she went after him. That was almost ten years ago, and the checks from the government were still coming in the mail. I considered them the rest of my inheritance.

The door to Bowie’s apartment was locked, but it was a low quality one. The kind that would inspire most people to invest in a dead bolt. Like me, however, Bowie’s dad was cheap. I had the door open in no time, using two flattened soda cans with the ends cut off. The inside of the apartment was eerily immaculate. Everything was spotless, there wasn’t even a stray magazine on the floor, and the whole place had a fresh pine scent. I had passed Bowie’s dad a few times in the hallway and never pegged him for a clean freak.

Bowie was in the bedroom. His wrists were handcuffed behind his back, with the chain between the cuffs looped to a larger chain attached to the heater. Bowie’s mouth was taped shut, leaving only his feet to tap out their rough SOS against my bedroom wall. I could smell urine in the air, though it seemed he was able to refrain from any other bodily functions. Given how skinny he was, it might not have been much of a struggle. He looked scared when he saw the electric knife, so I tossed it onto the bed before I went to take the tape off his mouth.

Bowie said he didn’t know how long he had been there, other than “a few days.” Nor was he sure if his dad had been gone the whole time or if he was punishing Bowie for something.

“This isn’t punishment,” I told him. “This is fucking disgusting.”

I think he fell in love with me right then. I didn’t notice at the time; how do you tell when a fourteen-year-old gives his heart to you? Plus I was a tad distracted with figuring out how to get the handcuffs off. The key turned up in a change bowl, by the front door. Bowie was so light, that I was able to scoop him off the floor and carry him back to my apartment.

I had to keep him. I was afraid what would happen to Bowie, if I sent him away. I told him he could be my roommate, since I didn’t know what else to think of him as. I sure as hell didn’t think of him as my kid and looking at him as a little brother felt creepy. It took forever to convince Bowie that his father wasn’t fucking with him. It was simple science I explained, as weeks went by with no sign of the guy. The human body couldn’t stay chained to a heater indefinitely. Whatever happened to Bowie’s dad, he wasn’t expecting to come home and find his son alive.

Even after Bowie stopped jumping at shadows, there were other problems. Physically, he wasn’t that bad off. Regular meals and a bed to sleep in had him a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier within a year. Other matters required more time and patience: Bowie was completely illiterate, had never attended school, and appeared to have been socially isolated since birth.

I could only do so much education wise. While I did well in school, my parent’s disappearance forced me to drop out and made college a pipe dream. I managed to teach Bowie to read and write, and covered the rest with old National Geographic tapes and a set of children’s encyclopedias that I bought at a thrift shop. Bowie also watched a lot of television. We didn’t have cable, so selections were limited, but he seemed to really enjoy PBS. Cooking shows, in particular, fascinated him.

Since he couldn’t help pay for anything, Bowie did everything around the house. The way he cleaned made Martha Stewart look like a pig in its own filth. My olive green linoleum, which had been installed sometime during the civil war, gleamed when he was done with it. He also cooked, folded laundry, and made the beds. It was like living in a hotel, without the ridiculously small bottles of shampoo.

I don’t know if it was post traumatic stress or self imposed pressure to catch up with other people his age, but Bowie frequently had insomnia. Some nights, I would go for a drink of water or midnight snack and catch him on the couch with the volume turned off on the television. If he was still awake, I would join him and we’d watch reruns of bad talk shows and Court TV. As he got more comfortable around me, Bowie took to resting his head on my lap. He asked a lot of questions, especially during the talk shows. He didn’t get a lot of slang expressions or colloquialisms, having previously been exposed to a tyrant with a limited vocabulary.

“I don’t understand,” he told me one night, when the theme to an episode of Maury Povich flashed on screen.

“What part?” I asked.

Bowie squinted, and painstakingly worked his way around the words “Jail bait teens gone wild.”

“It means the show is about hot girls who are too young to have sex,” I told him. “Or guys. You never know with Maury.”

“How young is too young?”

“It depends on the state. Here it’s sixteen, so you’ll have to keep it in your pants a few more years,” I joked.

On screen, a young girl in a leather skirt called her mother a bleeped out word, probably cunt, and flashed the studio audience. Bowie and I got caught up in the show, as Maury frowned disapprovingly and asked the little tramp why she would want to behave so provocatively. I doubted she knew what the word meant.

Looking back, I can see the arc Bowie and I were on. Day by day, I was simply too close to it. The changes that happened did so gradually, so much so, that I might not have ever noticed them if one day Bowie didn’t decide to take a jump instead of a baby step.

It was October fourth, his sixteenth birthday. Later, I would wonder how long he had been planning what he did. Weeks? Years? Whatever the case, I woke up that morning with Bowie naked in my bed. He kissed me before I could say anything, not that I know what I would have said. I was surprised that he knew what to do with his mouth, and how sure he was of how to move his body. Only his hands seemed lost, like they knew where they wanted to go but not what to do once they got there.

I would like to say that I stopped him, but that would be bullshit. Sometimes, you don’t know what you want, until its tongue is in your mouth. I wanted Bowie to want me. I wanted to feel him between my legs, hot and ready. I came the first time, just feeling the length of him enter me. Bowie told me that he wanted to be everything for me, when I came again and he was still going strong.

“I’ll make you happy,” he promised.

I believed him. We spent the rest of that day in bed, alternating between making love and sleeping. During the latter, Bowie curled into me like a cat. I could see the tattoo on his hip, and a dull rage germinated inside me. It grew every time we kissed, or Bowie came inside me. I tried not to dwell on the dark thoughts, but I was angry.

Fate has a strange way of showing people its approval. If it wasn’t for the local video store going out of business, I wouldn’t have been out of the apartment the day Bowie’s dad came to claim him. I went down alone—Bowie never liked to leave the apartment, let alone the building—intent on picking a few movies up for him. On the way back, I came across a pile of someone’s ‘moving out’ crap on the sidewalk. It wasn’t an unusual sight. Lots of people preferred to abandon personal items and furniture, rather than have to transport it to a new place. Especially if the stuff was junk to begin with.

This wasn’t all junk. There was a bookcase in fairly good condition, a few wastebaskets, and three golf clubs. I didn’t know much about golf, but two of them had skinny heads and one had a big fat one. I took the fat one. I thought maybe I could buy some cheap balls and paper cups to play mini-golf around the apartment.

I noticed the apartment door was slightly open before I got to it. My body tensed, and my pace immediately slowed to cushion my footsteps. When I reached the door, I left the bag of VHS tapes in the hall and turned the golf club around so that the head was pointed up. As much as I wanted to rush in and see if Bowie was all right, I couldn’t be sure who else was in the apartment. They could have guns, which meant I needed to sneak up on them if I didn’t want to get shot.

I heard heavy breathing, the closer I got to the door. I recognized that particular staccato and my jaw clenched.

“Don’t you fucking move,” Bowie’s dad panted. “I’ll break your neck, if you fucking move.”

There was a rip of fabric followed by a heavy thump.

“Did you let anyone else touch you while I was gone?” He demanded. “Did you let anyone else fuck you?”

I was no longer concerned with strategy. I kicked the door open, and entered the apartment with the club drawn back. Bowie was pinned down, in a pile of his own shredded clothes. His father looked up, mouth agape, as I sailed the club into the side of his head. A hunting knife rolled out of his hand, and I quickly picked it up. Bowie’s father didn’t move. My first golf swing ever, and I had knocked the guy out cold.

He woke up in my bathtub, about five minutes later. I had taped his ankles and wrists together, but hadn’t gotten his mouth yet. Bowie’s father gave me a bleary look, which sharpened as soon as he laid eyes on Bowie.

“You fucking bitch,” he hissed at me. “Let me out of here!”

“No.”

I reached for the duct tape, and pulled out a foot or so.

“Did you touch him?” He asked. “Did you put your filthy bitch hands on him?”

“None of your business,” I told him.

Bowie’s father made a gurgling noise and hacked a wad of phlegm at me. I dodged to the left, and it splattered against the side of the toilet bowl.

“Do you know how much I paid for him? I sold my fucking car, and pawned my dead mother’s ring!”

I paused. “Excuse me?”

“Cute little boys don’t come cheap,” the man in the tub sneered.

“I’m not a boy,” Bowie whispered, from where his body was pressed against the bathroom wall.

The man I used to think was his father ran his eyes down Bowie’s body.

“You’ve still got some good years in you,” he told him. “I’ll bet you’re still nice and tight.”

I ripped the last piece of tape free, and slapped it over his mouth. He protested with angry grunts, until I held up the hunting knife.

“Are you going to behave?” I asked. “Are you going to be a good boy?”

He nodded frantically, his eyes wide. I leaned in and pressed a hand against his knee, to keep his leg steady.

“Tough shit,” I told him.

I read in some comic book, a long time ago, that people bled out if you cut their femoral artery. Since I wasn’t exactly sure where that was, I picked a spot on the guy’s thigh and sliced across it. I cut him one more time, for good measure, before I turned the shower on. It helped cover up the noises he was making and washed the blood down the drain before it could stain the tub.

When I turned to Bowie, he had a glazed look in his eyes.

“You don’t have to watch,” I told him, though I knew he would.

He shook under my lips, as I moved them down his body. Bowie was hard by the time I got down on my knees, and he made a grateful noise as I took his cock in my mouth. Muffled shrieks rose from behind me, accompanied by pounding against the sides of the tub. It weakened by degrees, until there was only the sound of water. A moment later I stroked Bowie’s hip, as his cum spilled across the back of my tongue.