Jack Burton - Steamy Screams - Anthology of Erotic Horror

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.