alsih2o said:
Round 1, Alt match of Rodrigo istalindir vs. Noskov
4 pics, 72 hours, 5000 word limit.
The Penitent Man
The waves that morning were some of the best that beach has ever seen. A big storm was heading our way that day and I was not about to miss the good surf that preceded it.
As usual, the beach itself was cluttered with trash and debris from years of neglect. It had been abandoned long ago because of its poor location and conditions. Not too many people come out this way. The water was cold, the surf bad and the hazards plentiful….It was my favorite beach. I came here a lot not only to surf, but also read, swim, or just plain hang out. The lack of people made it the perfect of place for me. Here I could be alone…and alone was my favorite state of being.
The day had started bright and sunny, with fairly large wind gusts. The weather people had been talking about the storm for days now and I woke up early hoping to find some nice waves on my beach. I was not to be disappointed. By the time I arrived at the beach, the surf was perfect. I swam out and caught a mammoth and rode it all the way to the shore. After going non stop for about two hours, my stomach started showing signs of discontent. I looked out to the see and saw the glower of the storm approaching fast and decided I should head in after then next wave.
I prepared myself for the next ride as the water started surging up. I moved into position and was about to pick up the wave when
I saw large silhouette in the water. I had already stood up on my board before I made out what I was looking at. The sudden realization that an 8ft-10ft shark was directly below me threw me off my board and into the now deadly, swirling water. Cursing my bad luck and debating whether becoming religious for the next few minutes would violate my personal convictions; I began to try and swim back to the shore.
The undertow was hard and the current strong. I don’t remember the swim back to shore, but I do remember waking up with my face in the dirty sand of the beach. I now question whether I just didn’t see him earlier, or if he just appeared, but when I looked up I found a man standing in front of me.
He was very well dressed for someone strolling along a beach before a storm…particularly this beach and before this storm.
Most sensible people would have left the beaches by now.
The gale had started rolling in faster then before and would be on top of us within the hour. The wind was picking up and I was starting to realize that the long walk back to my house was not going to be fun in this weather.
The man looked at me inquisitively, as though trying to figure out if he had met me before. I got up and made for my belongings and began to strip my wetsuit off. He approached, squinting at me to keep the blowing sand out of his eyes. He was wearing dress shoes and a very fine, silk robe over a white button up shirt and pleated dress pants. The wind was blowing his robe so hard it looked as though it was going to rip right away from his shoulders. His salt and pepper hair was cut short except where he had combed it over his large bald spot. The look of his hair blowing in the wind would probably have been funny if he was not catering such a serious look about him.
“You should come with me.” He said.
I thought for a minute and wondered if I knew him. I even considered that I may be on some reality prank show, or that maybe this guy was some kind of pervert trying to get his kicks in for the day…but something was odd about him. He was very serious and grim. He seemed so old and frail that the wind would carry him away, but he stood there, motionless, like a statue, against it, his clothes flapping so violently I wondered how much longer the stitches were going to hold.
“I’m not interested.” I said flatly, standing up to leave.
“I can answer your questions.” He retorted.
“I don’t have any questions that you can answer, old man.” I laughed back.
“I can tell you that it was a dolphin and not a shark that scared you into the water.”
“So,” I shrugged. “Look you crazy bastard, I’m getting the hell out of here and you should too. This storm is about to come down on us and when it does, I’m not going to be saving your ass. Now…” I could feel the rage boiling up inside me.
“What if I told you that I know that you have murdered thirteen people.”
Now he had my attention.
I was four when I moved here with my father. My mom had gained custody of us after their divorce, but dad could never be one-upped. He stole me and my brother away to this wretched town where we tried to start new lives. It didn’t take long after getting here and my father was right back where he left off. He jumped from job to job and what little money he made, he spent on drugs and hookers. On rare occasion, he would bring some food home and my brother and I made due on our own. Sometimes we would go for weeks without ever seeing our father.
I shouldn’t really say my brother and I made due. Really, it was just me. Lonnie was retarded. He had been beaten several times by my father as an infant and the doctors even thought at one point that he wasn’t going to survive. I don’t know how I managed to get through without the same problems, I surely wasn’t spared the beatings, but I did.
It was during one of my father’s longer romps with an out of town whore that I killed Lonnie.
For days he had been running through the house, yelling about his stomach hurting and being hungry. I had told him that dad should be home shortly and to chew on the leather shoe I gave him in the meantime. Lonnie hated that damn shoe, but he’d sit there and chew on it just the same, just to try and curb the hunger.
After finally calming Lonnie down a bit, I snuck away to eat one of the cans of tuna I stashed for myself. Using the can opener I found in the dump, I proceeded to remove the top and prepared for my feast.
The wind must have been against me that day because Lonnie smelled what I was eating. Like a mad bull he stomped into my room and started screaming frantically. I could not understand a word he was saying but he was definitely going for my tuna. I tried to stop him and tell him that the tuna was mine, but he would not listen. He grabbed the can from me and turned to start eating it, telling me “bad brother, bad. You share.”
Poor Lonnie, it wasn’t really his fault. He just didn’t understand
The rage came over me like fire over a dry hayfield. A haze of anger and bloodlust fogged my vision as I instinctively grabbed the tuna lid and began to thrash at Lonnie with it. The first slash cut him deep on his back over his shoulder blade. He turned, looking at me like a puppy being disciplined for the first time as I cut him again, this time slicing open his face. The swings came faster and easier. He was screaming for me to stop, but I would not tolerate his incompetence and selfishness anymore. He needed to die. It was survival of the species and he was at the back of the pack. I cut, sliced and slashed until my arms were too tired to go on. Lonnie had been quiet for a while and I figured he was dead. I leaned down to try and hear if he was breathing and to my surprise, he spoke to me.
“Why you hurt me, brother?”
I took the tuna lid, held his mouth and cut his throat.
The cuts on my hand from the tuna lid were starting to burn. I began to tear away some of Lonnie’s clothes to bandage them when I heard the door slam. Dad was home.
I knew dad would be pretty mad about Lonnie, so I jumped to action. Not wanting to cut up my hands anymore on the tuna lid, I grabbed the can opener. The handles doubled as bottle openers and should be able to do some damage as long as I could get the drop on him.
As my father drunkenly rampaged through the house, I hid under the moldy mattress near the door and waited for him to find the body. When he entered the room, he screamed out Lonnie’s name and ran to the body. He was yelling and screaming trying to get Lonnie to respond as I snuck up behind him. I studied him for a second and wondered if I should really go through with it. Then I thought about Lonnie.
It was his fault Lonnie was retarded and was too stupid to live. He deserved to die for what he made me do to Lonnie.
As he sat there holding Lonnie to him, I suddenly yelled out behind him.
“DAD!” I yelled.
He spun around and looked at me with wide eyed curiosity. His drunken state made him a little slow to notice my arm swinging back. It was as I was coming down on him that he finally started to yell.
Too late.
The can opener handles entered his eye sockets and penetrated into his brain. He screamed for a second and lunged at me, but could only thrash about on the floor the next few minutes while I pounded on him with his lunch box until he died.
After my brother and my dad, the killings got a lot easier….even fun. I decided it was my job to trim the fat of the world. I didn’t do this actively, mind you, just if I deemed someone I met and who was around me a lot not worthy of living.
A sudden flash of lightning and roar of thunder shook me out of my euphoric reverie.
The old man stood there, grim and serious. I smiled and said to him.
“Okay, old man, I’ll play your game. What do you want?”
“First,” he said, “we need to get out of this weather.”
He walked towards the woods at the top of the beach and motioned for me to follow. I grabbed my backpack and started in the direction he headed.
The old man talked to me the whole time we walked in the woods. Most of his conversations were about my victims and the murders I had committed. I ran through the details with him openly, knowing I was going to kill him soon too anyway. He was very curious about my brother and what had happened to him, which was a subject I was not particularly happy to talk about. Lonnie was probably the only person I killed that I thought got a bum wrap. He was only stupid because my dad made him that way. I didn’t feel remorse or guilt about killing him, but I did think it unfair that he had to die without truly knowing why.
I was rattling off questions to the man’s unstoppable questions and thinking about which of my knives I was going to use to cut the old man up when it suddenly occurred to me that I had never, in all my years living here and coming to this beach, been in this woods until now.
I considered for a moment if the old man had some kind of trap in store for me. In all my years of killing people, I had never even been questioned by the police or anyone about my victims. The fact the old man knew so much about me and had better knowledge of the terrain and where we were made worry a bit. I decided it was time to kill him.
We were deep into the woods for when the old man finally slowed down. The storm that was coming on so strong before seemed unable to penetrate the dense woods. Truly, by the time we had stopped, you would have thought it was a nice day.
“I know its right around here. Just wait, I’ll be right back,”
The old man wandered off mumbling to himself about landmarks and directions as I took my pack off my back. I opened it up to find the blade I had decided upon earlier when I heard the man yell.
“Yes, I’ve found it! Come quick!”
I held the knife behind my back and walked to where the old man called from. When I got there I saw an immense hole in the ground. There were two repelling ropes leading into the hole and a harness lying on the ground.
“Quickly!” I heard from inside the cavern.
The old man was already strapped in a harness and on his way down the first rope. The thought crossed my mind to just cut his rope and get out of here, but it was not my style. This guy knew a lot about me and I wanted to make sure he was dead….and I was going to enjoy doing it.
I strapped on the harness and started down the rope after the old man. I tried to keep up with him, but he was moving faster then I thought possible. When I finally reached the bottom he was already heading off, deeper into the cave toward a cavern that clanged with the sound of metal striking rock.
Having reached the limit of my patience, I yelled to him. “I’ve had enough old man. I am going to leave if you don’t tell me why you brought me here.”
There was no response, just the rhythmic clanging coming from down the corridor.
Knowing that the old man knew too much and that I could not leave until I killed him, I headed down the cavern toward the noise.
As I rounded a corner of the cavern I saw the old man, standing on the far side of an enormous, hollowed out tunnel. The tunnel was dotted with hundreds of
piles of rocks all rounded into perfect spheres of all different sizes. Near the old man was a much larger pile of stones. These ones had not been chiseled. They were of all shapes and sizes and must have numbered in the hundreds or thousands, if not millions. Sitting in a wooden chair in front of the old man was the source of the clamor. There, a teenaged boy sat with a rock hammer in one hand and a large stone in the other. He was chipping away at the stone, rounding it out and chiseling it into a sphere.
I moved in closer to corner the old man when the boy looked up at me.
I dropped my knife.
“Lonnie?”
There in the chair sat Lonnie.
His face and body were scarred from the tuna can lid I used so long ago to murder him. He was ghostly pale and looked the same age he did the day I killed him.
Lonnie looked at me and smiled in the sheepish way he always did. It was the smile of an innocent, the kind of smile that knows no evil.
The old man interjected. “Lonnie has been waiting for you.”
The old man’s voice shook me back to my senses. I quickly grabbed the knife from the ground and held it menacingly.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice sounding much more frantic then I would have liked it to.
“This is your penance.” The old man said.
He patted Lonnie softly on the shoulder.
“For sixteen years your brother has sat here chiseling away at these rocks. He did it because he wanted you to be with him.”
“However, in order to spare a heart as foul and contemptuous as yours, he had to serve penance.”
My head began to swim. What was going on?
I decided it was time to get the hell out of here. I’ll have to worry about killing the old man later. Right now, it was time to beat a hasty retreat. I swiftly turned to run out of the cavern and began to run when I was viciously pulled backward. The violence of the pull had forced my feet out in front of me and I landed on the cavern floor with a thud.
“Lonnie’s penance for saving a murderous savage like you was to carve these stones into perfect spheres, each sphere representing just one of the tears he cried as you viciously butchered him.”
“What are you talking about?” I screamed. “Lonnie is dead!”
“So are you.”
“What!” Obviously, I must be having a nightmare, I thought.
“When you fell into that water, you drowned sir. You are dead and now you must pay your penance.”
“You can’t make me!” I shouted.
“Certainly not, but seeing as how you have eternity to spare, you will not have much better to do. Lonnie has done his part and given you the choice to stay with him, or return to where you were supposed to go. That choice is now up to you, but you must first serve your penance. Once you serve your penance, you may make your decision. Until then, you will sit here, in this chair.”
I thrust my face into my hands and rubbed violently, this can’t be real. As I looked back up, I saw Lonnie and the old man standing where I once was. Around my wrists are shackles and I’m not sitting in the chair that Lonnie was in when I arrived.
Exhaustion came over me and I decided that if I were not going to wake anytime soon, I may as well play along.
“Okay,” I said “and how many spheres do I need to carve?”
“One for each drop of blood you’ve spilled.”
“That’s insane! That would take forever!” I exclaimed.
“No, not forever, but certainly a long time.”
“Good bye.”
The old man turned on his heel and began walking away. After a few steps, he stopped and said softly “Come on Lonnie.”
Lonnie had been sitting on one of the piles of spheres he carved eating voraciously. At the old man’s beckon, he jumped up and dropped what he was eating. After a few seconds, the two disappeared into the darkness of the cavern.
I sat there and tried to process everything that just happened. As I contemplated the things I was going to do to the old man once I figured out how to get out of here, a strong, familiar scent struck me.
“What is that?” I wondered as I strained to see what it was that Lonnie had dropped on the floor when he left.
On the floor sat a can of tuna.