Sam West: Home Intruder

“Please don’t hurt us,” the woman said between hitching sobs.

Jason Jacks looked dispassionately down at her and took a drag of his cigarette, the hunting knife dangling loosely from the fingers of his other hand. She lay on her side on the concrete floor of the basement, her hands tied behind her back with rope. Her husband watched on helplessly. His wrists were also bound by rope, his arms stretched high above his head, the end of the rope looped in a secure knot around one of the meat hooks that hung from the ceiling.

Like his wife, he was naked. Unlike his wife, three small fish hooks had been inserted deep inside his rectum, piercing the walls of his rectal passage. The three correlating strands of the thin fishing twine attached to each hook extended out of his anus and all the way up to the hook above his hands where the ends were tied.

He was shuddering in pain, Jason noted with some satisfaction.

Jason crouched down next to the trembling woman.

“Don’t cry. I want you to live. Really I do. I want you both to live. I want love to win.”

It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. But he knew they wouldn’t live. None of them ever did.

“You sick fucking freak!” the man screamed through what must have been unspeakable pain.

“Now, now,” Jason replied, having to speak loudly because of the woman’s persistent sobbing. “Please don’t shout at me, or insult me. Every time you do that, I will do this. Or something much worse.”

He stubbed the cigarette out on the hysterical woman’s shoulder. She howled in agony and tried to slither away from him using her feet as leverage.

Jason didn’t want her crawling away like she owned the place and he stood up, kicking her square in the stomach with the tip of his steel toe cap boot.

“I didn’t say you could move either.”

Her beautiful body was sheened in sweat and he felt a pang of arousal.

Not yet, he told himself. Patience. I’ve barely even started …

He went over to the man and reached up to slice through the rope, freeing him from the hook. His hands, however, were still secured tightly together and fell down to cover his flaccid penis. Whether that was intentional or not, Jason didn’t know.

“I’m going to have some fun with your wife now,” he called over his shoulder as he walked back over to the woman who was making pitiful noises like a run over cat. “Feel free to come and stop me. If you can prove to me that the love you have for your wife is stronger than the pain you will inflict upon your flesh, then I will let you both live.”

The lie tripped easily off his lips and he stood over the terrified woman.

“Don’t do it,” the woman sobbed. “You’ll rip yourself open.”

Her husband didn’t answer. Jason watched in fascination the way the veins in his neck protruded and his tightly clenched jawline as he stupidly tried to reach round for the hooks in his anus. There was no way he was going to be able to insert his fingers into his rectum to remove the hooks with his hands tied before him like that. The only way to remove them was by brute force. For his next move he reached up and tugged on the twine. Neither the hook screwed into the ceiling nor the twine budged.

Nothing was going to snap that twine, you could land fucking Jaws with that stuff. The man must have realised this for he let go with a howl and Jason could see the bloody streaks where the twine had bit into his palms.

Jason turned his attention back to the sobbing woman.

What should he do first? Sever the toes or the fingers? Perhaps gouge out an eye? Or maybe just jump in and do what he was dying to do. That is, to fuck her with the husband watching.

He rubbed the crotch of his black jeans just thinking about how good she would feel.

An ear splitting scream from the husband commanded his attention.

Wow, he’s really going to rip open his arsehole for his wife. How sweet.

Jason leaned down and fisted the woman’s long hair and lifted up her head. He placed the edge of the knife at her hairline. Blood spurted, momentarily blinding him as he drew back the knife, sawing until her scalp came away in his hand. He held the bloody wig out in front of him, waving it at the husband like a red rag to a bull.

The woman had stopped screaming. She wasn’t dead though, just out cold. Probably in shock.

The husband let out an inhuman sounding howl and lunged forward. The hooks pulled free in a spray of blood that erupted from his anus in a red fountain. The man went sprawling, landing heavily on his stomach.

He dragged himself across the floor with hands like claws, drawing closer. Jason stomped on his buttocks and the man flattened out like a human rug, arms and legs spreads wide.

Jason smiled. “Come on lover boy. Let’s play. Let’s see how far you will go in the name of love.”

Edward Sullivan pulled up into the driveway of eight Dallam Avenue, his childhood home, killing the engine of the white Hyundai hire car.

A small shiver ran through him. It hadn’t changed a bit.

Hs wife, Jazmine, immediately flung open the passenger door to let some air into the stifling hot interior.

“It’s lush. I think we should live here.”

Ed turned to look at her beautiful profile as she gazed up at the house. A small knot of apprehension twisted in his guts because he knew she was only half joking. She might have been only twenty-five, but the stresses of her London career had been getting to her lately. He could imagine her carving a life out for herself in Cornwall, as one of those bohemian artist types. She was almost as good an artist as she was a photographer. A life here would suit her.

But not him. He felt sick just thinking about it. He reached over her slender, bare thighs and clicked open the glove compartment for his cigarettes.

“And give up everything we have in London?” he asked, lighting up and keeping his tone deliberately light. “Our friends? All the money we make? Our lifestyle? Should we chuck it all away to become country hicks?”

“I would hardly call Treeve the back of beyond. It’s a proper town.”

“Barely. It’s not dubbed the poor man’s St Ives for nothing.”

“If you’re so down on it, then why bother coming here at all? Why not just stick the house on the market and forget about it?”

Because you made me …

“Let’s just go in, shall we?”

“Fine.”

Jaz swung her long legs out the car and Ed briefly admired her derriere in the blue denim cutoffs before it disappeared from view.

“Come on then,” she called out to him when she reached the front door, her irritation at him apparently forgotten. “And you needn’t think you’ll be smoking inside. Same rules here as at home, mister.”

But he barely heard her. The fingers of one hand remained curled around the steering wheel as he stared up at the house, thoughtfully drawing deep on the cigarette. Dallam Avenue, perched on the cliff top and overlooking Leven Bay was by far the quietest, most upmarket and sought after spot in town. This was the only street that consisted entirely of Victorian detacheds, not cute cottages or new builds that made up the rest of town. It was number eight in a row of eight. Beyond this house was nothing, just a meandering cliff path that eventually led to St Ives.