[SScherr]

Chapter 1-2: Demon Night

~~~

Janet Schuler went to bed earlier that evening with a heavy heart.

Since the big blow out with Gerald a few weeks prior, a deep and long-suppressed depression had surfaced, threatening to overwhelm her after accumulative years of trying to stay afloat in her shipwrecked marriage. Janet had first sought professional help and was given a prescription for anti-depressant medication. She never took a single pill, but kept them at the ready right beside the .38 Special revolver she’d recently acquired through a friend.

Two nights ago, the gun began to beckon, as she started placing it beside the pills in her night stand each evening as matters continued to get worse.

On the surface, she’d always played her part: a well-to-do accessory wife of a successful lawyer and cheating husband. Janet had attended all of Gerald’s dinner functions, laughing at all his jokes and entertaining potential clients’ wives. She’d always been the perfect little hostess/servant when Gerald’s self-important friends all got together in her home and drank too much over-priced whiskey and smoked those horrid imported cigars. They had always carried on late into the evenings, sharing exaggerated stories of war in the courtroom, or the conquests of esteemed virgins from younger days, and of course, Janet’s favorite: stories of the lives they had ruined to climb a little higher on their corporate pedestals of power and corruption. They were always loud, obnoxious and disgusting. Those pigs hit on her whenever Gerald’s back was turned.

She had tolerated all of this and the affairs that came later. She’d long suspected them, although she never confronted him or pushed the matter. A woman knows that something is wrong when her husband stops touching her… she just knows.

Gerald never really loved her. Janet knew that now. He was in love with the idea of making the ‘hot blond’ his wife, like a stamp of ownership allowing him bragging rights among his peers. Perhaps Gerald was simply incapable of real love. Whatever the case, she no longer cared.

The final straw was when Gerald refused to give her children. He had been stalling for years with worn-out lies: “I’m not ready for fatherhood,” or “I just need a little more time,” or “Let me get my career off the ground and then I’ll be ready to focus on having a family.”

Three weeks ago, Gerald had come home after losing an important case in the courtroom (something Janet wished she had not been home for). Gerald had been violently drunk, got into a bar fight, and somehow managed to get his precious Corvette home in one piece.

All she had asked was, “What happened?”

From there, he’d exploded on her.

Gerald was too smart to ever strike her physically. As a lawyer, he knew too well where that would land him. That night, Janet saw the anger and loathing in his eyes. Just before it looked like he would strike her, Gerald took a deep breath, smiled and said, “Bitch, you and I are never going to have kids. So stop waiting around for me with those hope-filled doe eyes of yours and wake the fuck up!”

Janet had never understood where his rage came from. It just came. She honestly thought a punch across the mouth more preferable.

Before she could get a word in, Gerald had continued his verbal assault, striking her where it hurt the most. “I got a vasectomy over a year ago. It hurt like a mother fucker but you never knew because I found you too repulsive by then to want to have sex with you. How do you like them apples?”

Gerald was fond of saying that when he knew the argument was his or after the verbal dagger was firmly inserted into a vital area.

At the time, Janet had wished he had simply put a bullet in the side of her head.

He had gone on to say more hurtful things, unloading his true heart for the first time about how he saw her as weak and pathetic—everything he’d been holding back for years.

In the end, it was Gerald’s confession of how much he despised her that prompted Janet to fly to her family’s home in Phoenix to meet up with an old college boyfriend who had been emailing her for months to come down and run away with him. After one impulsive night, Janet had slept with the boyfriend and then left him high and dry the next morning, taking the earliest flight back to Cleveland.

The nights to follow became a struggle for her to find the will to keep on living, to keep on surviving.

After a long battle with her guilt for committing adultery, but silently praying she would end up pregnant, Janet had her period followed by a mental breakdown. It would seem that sleeping with a man in the desperate hope that she would be impregnated would also leave her barren. By then, Janet wanted it all to end.

Now, it simply came down to choice: a bullet or the pills.

In one of many haunted dreams, Janet struggled to stay afloat in a sea of little white pills while Gerald held her ankle and tried to pull her beneath. In one arm she desperately tried to save a crying infant who simply smiled, held up the gun in its little hands and shot her in the face.

How do you like them apples?

~~~

He stood at the foot of her bed like the Reaper pausing to measure dead time between breaths. Russell’s hand went nearly numb around the hilt of the knife before relaxing his grip. Then, he repeated this ritual again… and again. The long-awaited moment had arrived. His blood boiled with feverish anticipation. If he couldn’t steady himself, Russell would be messy, unable to keep himself from stabbing her in the chest repeatedly.

Like the last time.

Bathe in that bitch, boss! Drown in her blood!

Janet lay partially exposed by moonlight and a discarded blanket. She was drenched in cold sweat, tossing and turning to escape the nightmares that would not let her go. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, revealing the curves of her breasts as nipples attempted to penetrate a transparent cream-colored silk gown.

Why are you fighting it, boss? Bang the shit out of her dying, bloody flesh. Stop resisting me! Do it… NOW!

It was all Russell could do to ignore the other one and resist that black hunger that drove at him to ravage her like a savage beast. He began slicing blindly at the air as if that demon within were something tangible he might slay once and for all. Stop pushing me you filthy animal!

No. Russell would not give the other one an ounce of gratification. It would be clean and quick; one deep cut across the jugular and Janet would be free. He would see it in her eyes—the moment the pain was no more, the moment the fear was no more, the moment of salvation.

She deserves to be tortured, boss. You know what she did! Fucked that old boyfriend, and now she ain’t no better. She’s tainted meat. You hear? Tainted unrighteous fucking meat!

Russell ignored him. He silently moved along the bed, dodging patches of moonlit space, until his shadow fell menacingly across Janet’s face.

With one gloved hand, Russell slowly moved to cover her mouth, holding her down firmly long enough to cut her throat open. The act would be quick, precise… liberating. Then he would simply watch that look of fear and shock fade as the life slowly left those deep, blue eyes forever, never to be enslaved by this world again. He could already envision that warm fluid of life running freely down the front of her gown as she briefly tried to yell out, tried to breathe, tried to struggle… and then, she would be gone. Janet would be free.

Just before his hand reached her mouth, Russell froze. His ears were like finely tuned radars honing in on the faint and muffled sounds coming from the direction of the foyer.

Russell knew what it was immediately.

There was an intruder in the house.

~~~

(Continued in the next reply...)