Eternity of Horror

1. Osiris

Chapter 1

Osiris

T hey say that you can't really remember things before the age of three. Your memories are just pictures your brain painted based on stories you were told or photographs you’ve seen. It makes me wonder if what happened to my parents was as graphic and brutal as I remember. The man who butchered them in front of me never let me forget.

It was a cool autumn day in a small town just outside of Salem, Massachusetts. A place that, if you blinked while driving by, you'd miss. The foliage is so colorful that time of year. It's beautiful watching things die. But the leaves, unlike my parents, will come back to life.

They were decorating the house for Halloween. The holiday was a shared favorite between the two of them. It’s something they would unknowingly pass down to me despite only being a baby when they were killed. If only they knew who was looking in through a window, watching them hang cutouts of Frankenstein and changing out the pillows on the couch for ones shaped like pumpkins and ghosts. If only they knew those were the last moments we would all be together.

I was a baby, about a year or so old at the time. Back then, locking your door wasn't as common as it is now. Things like this didn't happen. Some would say they were simpler, peaceful times. I enjoyed about twelve months of that peace until it was torn away from me. Like setting off a bomb in a daycare, it went from calm to chaos in a matter of moments.

Darkness had just settled in on that October night. We were finishing dinner at the dining room table when Father, as he later would force me to call him, made his way inside. He was a careful and calculated man. He didn't do a thing unless it was thoroughly planned. So, when there was a noise near the front door and my dad got up to investigate, that wasn't an oversight.

The details of what happened next were told to me repeatedly, at least weekly, from the moment I was taken to the moment I… made it stop.

My dad looked around for the source of the sound, moving slowly and carefully. Father stood like a statue in the darkness and watched him as he searched. He found it amusing: the fear in one's eyes when they think they aren’t alone.

After seeing a knick-knack on the floor in front of an open window, my dad blew out a sigh of relief before picking it up and calling out, "It's okay, honey. The wind blew over your little skeleton on the end table."

Those were my dad’s last words before the squelching thud of a freshly sharpened ax sank into the back of his skull. The force was so hard that it nearly split his head into two pieces. The pressure from the blow and the foreign object now buried in the middle of his skull forced his eyes right out of their sockets. Father says he picked them up and pointed them at the body from which they were freshly ejected so my dad could watch himself die.

My mother had just started to wash the dishes when the slaughter began, or she may have heard the thud. The clatter of plates, cups, and silverware, coupled with the soothing melody she was singing, drowned out the horrific sounds.

When she finished the dishes, she turned to find a man sitting beside me in my dad's chair. Seeing a stranger covered in blood less than a foot away from her baby must have been the most terrifying moment of her life up until that point.

She scanned the man, taking note of the splatters of blood on his rotten tooth grin. The muck of brain matter on his shirt. The blood-stained fingers poking out of ripped, dirty gloves. A small chuckle fell from Father's lips as he lifted his hands from the table to reveal a set of human eyeballs. There was no doubt she knew who they belonged to. I like to think that they stared into one another's eyes so often that she would have recognized them anywhere, even resting in the filthy palms of a lunatic.

Instinct took over and she ran toward me, trying to put distance between me, the stranger, and the pieces of my dad that were now resting on the kitchen table. It was a valiant effort that I don't fault her for when she could have just as easily turned and run out the back door, leaving me behind. I mean, the end result would have been the same, but she tried. I think Father liked to remind me of her efforts just so that it hurt more when he tells me how she failed.

He grabbed her wrist and twisted until the bones snapped like stalks of celery. Despite Father looking like a dirty and decrepit homeless man, his strength wasn’t something to fuck around with. In one fluid motion, he grabbed my mom by her hair and pulled her whole body onto the table. She writhed with the literal fight of her life until a fist was brought down onto the center of her face so hard that the cartilage in her nose broke, and her front teeth were bent inward. He proceeded to swing his fist like a sledgehammer. Over and over, he bashed my mother’s face in, her head thumping against the wooden table as his knuckles split her flesh and fractured her orbital bones. He made turning off the fight in her look as simple as flipping a light switch.

He didn't have to tell me the next part, I remembered. His account perfectly matches my memory, which led me to believe that everything else he said is true. My mom tilted her head back to look at me as I faced her, watching her sluggish body twist and writhe like a toy running out of batteries. I watched as the ruptured blood vessels filled her eyes with red before she released a guttural scream that barely sounded human.

"Don't…" she struggled to get out between gasps for air and groans of agony. "Don’t watch... close... close your eyes, baby. Please! Please, close… close your..." That's when her words were replaced with a wet gargle.

She was so worried about me witnessing what was going to happen that she didn't see Father reach behind his back to unsheath a thick hunting knife. By the time she felt him pushing it so deeply into her gut that the tip almost lodged into her spine, it was too late. I sat, buckled into my highchair, watching.

Her eyes never left me.

I watched as he tore the blade up to the bottom of her rib cage, twisted it while it was still inside, and pulled it all the way down to her pelvis. Over and over, like a kid scribbling with a crayon, he carved her up.

Her eyes never left me.

I watched as he slid his blood-soaked hands from her mutilated abdomen up to her face, the fingers on one hooking under the roof of her mouth, while the other took hold of her mandible.

Her eyes never left me.

I watched as he leaned his face close, taking deep breaths of her final gasps of air before looking me in the eyes, a low chuckle leaving his lips as he pulled in opposite directions until her bottom jaw snapped from her skull.

Her eyes never left me .

I watched as he rolled up his sleeve and peeled his blood-saturated gloves off before sliding his hand into the eviscerated abdomen of her freshly murdered corpse. Inch by inch he forced his way up inside her body until, in the torn broken cavity that was her mouth, I saw his fingers. It looked like she was birthing his hand from her face; her lips grew taut around the girth.

Her eyes never left me.

He reached forward with the hand that was still inside of her to firmly grip my chubby little cheeks. With his other arm, he braced her body, heaving her upward as he pulled me toward my mother’s grotesque face. The light of the room began to fade as her torn lips formed a ring around my entire face, almost big enough to swallow me whole. I could feel the weight and texture of her wet, squishy tongue on my forehead as he spoke.

"That's it… give your baby boy a kiss goodbye," Father said as he watched with a proud smile on his face.

Rolling my mother over, he took out his knife and carefully removed all of the flesh from her back, shoulder to shoulder, all the way down to her ass crack. When he was finished, he took me out of my highchair and swaddled me in my mother’s still-warm flesh.

"Anyway," I say to the nameless, sobbing girl who is currently chained to a wall in my basement. "What was your childhood like?" I affix the rat-filled bucket to her stomach before setting up the blow torch. I’m going to enjoy watching this play out.