The Delilah Complex

Forty-Seven

The long living room wall was covered with newspaper clippings. There must have been a good twenty-five stories cut out and taped up. Each one telling the story in a slightly different way.

Once in Italy, he had gone into a church. Was it in Siena? The whole back wall had been covered with slips of paper, different sizes and colors, each covered with handwriting. Every note had been a prayer. Some old and yellowed. Others with the ink still black and fresh. He had taken a picture of the wall of prayers.

This then was his wall of answered prayers. The men who had taunted him were getting what they deserved. One by one by one. The only thing he was sorry about was that, although they described the other photographs of the dead bodies, they weren’t showing them. The silly small shots of their bare feet, with the numbers, were disturbing and gruesome, for sure. Graphic, too. In fact, if he were doing a cover for a book about these serial murders, he’d use this image of the insignificant filthy feet, so vulnerable with the bold bright red numbers printed on them.

His glance traveled from the number 1 on Philip Maur’s feet to the number 2 on Timothy Wheaton’s feet to the number 3 on Grant Firth’s feet. And now the number 4 on the bottom of Bruce Levin’s feet.

Number 5 would be up on the wall next. But he could be patient. Today was for luxuriating in Bruce Levin’s demise. He had been one of the worst of them. Laughing at his cock, flaunting his own erection. Stud. Fucking stupid stud.

He smiled.

Not anymore, he wasn’t.

Paul Lessor wished there were someone he could tell. Because it was so satisfying that he needed to share it.

They had laughed at him and now they were dying.

And no one had any idea why.

On the news and in the papers, reporters kept asking: What connects these men? Why these four? What is their bond to each other? And the longer they searched and the more they looked and the more bodies that showed up, the more baffled they became.

Paul knew. The thing that bound them together was the deepest darkest secret each of these men carried. Secrets they each had gone to great lengths to hide so that no one could find out about their nocturnal wanderings, their willingness to subjugate themselves to the powerful women who had them lie down or stand up and kiss them or lick them or fuck them or massage them or bathe them, or the one who had even been so bold as to ask him to wipe her pussy after she had gone to the bathroom.

No. None of these powerful men-who ran companies and made money and ordered other people around- wanted anyone to know that they belonged to a secret society where they were as powerless as ants under a gardener’s shoe. And so they had hidden their secret so well that neither their families nor the police or the reporters could find the connection between them.

It was late. After two on Sunday night. He should go to sleep. He would pay the price for this tomorrow when he went to work. But he wasn’t tired yet.

He picked up the red magic marker on his desk and walked over to the wall of answered prayers and began to underline his favorite parts in the articles that had appeared in the weekend papers. And he wondered how much longer it would take until the secret leaked out. Until everyone who had laughed at him was being laughed at. That would be rich.