Soulless

Blissful oblivion enveloped me and my dream either ended, or I had became unconscious. At the time I couldn't have sworn on either.

CHAPTER 3

I opened my eyes and before I did anything else, I tried to move. I lifted my head off the pillow, blinked my eyes, jerked my arm and slowly rolled over to the side. The sheets felt damp against my skin and I believed that it must have been my own sweat that had made them so.

What a nightmare! I thought and with great relief let the head fall back onto the pillow. The room was bright with sunlight; it was late morning. It was the first time in over two months that I had afforded myself to sleep this late. Not quite dreamless as I had wished it to be, nevertheless, I felt re-energized. I was wondering why Dick hadn't come up to wake me. Normally, he would have been banging on my door and calling out to me soon after the first crack of dawn.

I pushed the covers off my body and sat up, letting my legs slip off the bed. That dream must have been something, I thought. I have never had any kind of hip pains in my life. I was too young for that and despite my vigorous interest in sports, numerous bruises and cuts, even broken bones, hips were never ones to suffer. This morning however, I had a very odd achy feeling and stiffness that I had never felt before. I looked down into my lap and jumped off the bed screaming.

My white boxer shorts were soaked in blood. I turned around and checked the bed sheets. Blood everywhere.

"Fuck! Oh, God! Oh, my God!" I kept yelling, panic tightly gripping at my chest, almost preventing me from drawing a breath.

I ran into the adjacent bathroom and literally ripped my boxer shorts off, slipped into the shower and turned on the faucet, not caring that the water was stone cold. I stood under the spray of slowly warming water, half listening for Dick's heavy footsteps to run up to my door. He must have heard me screaming. They never came.

I felt faint; my heart was slamming against my chest; I couldn't touch the blood on my body. I let it wash off before I reached for the soap and forcefully leathered my body - arms, chest, legs, back and even my face. I washed my hair and rinsed the soap off, only to run the bar of it all over my body again. I looked down and realized that the drain was half-clogged and I now stood in two inches of pinkish water, colored by the blood off my body. I couldn't even tell if it was my own or somebody else's blood that I had woken up in. A million thoughts raced through my mind. They were flashes that lasted only a second or two, some familiar, others completely alien to me. I couldn't think straight. I tried to wrap my mind around the events in my dreams and somehow connect them to the reason I was now standing in the shower washing off blood, but I couldn't stabilize the rush of thought enough to grasp onto one comprehensive explanation.

As I was stepping out of the shower I sneezed. I don't know why I did that; nothing was tickling my nose, it was just something I did. A searing pain shot from my bowels through my body and brutally stabbed into my brain. For a moment I was certain I could feel my spine ache. A pressure built up inside my head, and my eyes felt as if they were just about to pop out. I believed that my head was going to explode.

I felt a warm trickle down my legs, something more than just the water from the shower and as I looked down, I was horrified to notice that narrow streaks of blood were finding their way over my skin to the white and black tiled bathroom floor. The blood seemed to ooze down the back of my thighs.

I turned my back towards the large mirror and twisted my head and upper torso, hoping to find some sort of cut on my back or shoulders, which still wouldn't explain the profound bleeding, but I was certain it would have calmed me down. Again I felt as if I was ready to pass out. The site of blood, especially my own had always made me weak and sick to my stomach.

One look at my body in the mirror told me that the dream from the night before was not just a dream but a true occurrence. Someone had immobilized and then raped me, hurting my insides, messing with my mind and leaving me sore and feeling broken. The source of blood trickles came from the lower part of my buttocks and as I realized that, I also became aware of an achy and burning feeling in my colon, as if I had just taken a hard shit.

I reached around my hip and gently pushed the finger into the crack of my ass. I didn't want to touch myself like that, I've never done it before, save for washing and I felt dirty being forced to do it now. Gentle touch of the finger against my asshole made me jump, as the burning seemed to intensify. I brought the hand to the front, looking at the stain of fresh blood that coated my middle finger.

The feeling of nausea overwhelmed me and I could feel the contents of my stomach surging up, pushing against my Adam's apple. I retched and tried to keep it down, but the force of the nature was stronger than my body and I just had enough time to lift the toilette seat, bend over and throw up violently.

It took forever to empty my stomach. When I was done I felt no better. A massive headache made my temples throb with each beat of my heart. Still naked and wet I staggered out of the bathroom and fell back onto the bed. The fact that the sheets were bloody didn't bother me anymore. Obviously, the blood was all mine and I had to choose between passing out cold on the bathroom floor or crawling into bed and wait for nausea to pass. I felt revitalized when I first awoke earlier, but now it seemed as if energy had drained off me and I was left feeling empty.

Despite the fear and incoherence of my mind I managed to fall back asleep. This time, however, it was dreamless. Soft rapping on the door awakened me and I jumped off the bed in panic, bursting towards the door and making sure it remained closed, even though the person on the other side didn't try to enter.

"Boy?" Dick's voice pierced my head, my eyes hurting from the pressure of the headache. "Boy, are you up?"

"Yeah, but I'm not feeling well." I said, at the same time inspecting my legs. The blood flow seemed to have stopped. It was now caked all over my legs in trickles, but there was no sign of any fresh traces.

"Okay," said Dick. "When ya feel better, why don'cha come down? I reckon we have to have a talk."

I heard his heavy steps moving away from the door and softly thudding their way down the staircase. I still wasn't myself completely. The headache was just as bad as it had been before I fell asleep. My body didn't hurt as much, but I had a feeling like somebody had beaten the life out of me. I was frightened and depressed. I didn't know if I could face Dick with my wild story about Jeannie's late night visit. I certainly could not tell him about what I thought was rape.

After another shower and a probing cough, which to my great relief did not produce any additional bleeding I dressed myself and with a heavy heart descended the stairs. I saw Dick standing outside, leaning against a big oak tree that cast the cooling shadow on the house in the hottest of days.

He looked at me as I approached and then turned his head away. He appeared like a man with something on his mind.

"I reckon you'd better sit down, boy." He said and pointed to a bench under the tree. I didn't want to sit down, I didn't want to have a heart-to-heart talk, although I felt that one was coming and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. I sat down slowly and carefully, as if fearing the pain from the night before might return.

After the initial eye contact Dick didn't look at me for a long time. That, however, didn't stop him from talking.

"Now, I know this will all sound very strange and ya might even be angry at me, boy." He said and my stomach knotted in fear. "I'll explain as much as I can if ya'll let me and maybe years from now ya'll even find it in yer heart to forgive me."

A twinge of anger fired somewhere deep in my guts, but I was ready to listen. There was nothing else I could do.

Dick spat and ran his hand through the mop of black graying hair. Notably, his cowboy hat had been missing. This was the first time I had seen him bareheaded since I've known him. I looked at him closer and noticed that in the last couple of weeks his hair had receded drastically. It wasn't as bushy as it had been and I could almost swear that there was a bald patch forming on the top of his head.

"I know what happened last night, boy." He said and my heart froze. "I din't hear nothin', nobody did or ever will, which might be a bit of a relief to ya. But I do know what happened."

"You let Jeannie into the house?" I asked incredulously.

"Is that what she told ya her name was?" He laughed hoarsely, but there was a definite sadness on his face. When his lips parted in a smile I realized one of his front upper teeth was missing. I could have sworn it was there the day before. Dick's face was gaunter than normal; the skin had sort of a scaly texture as if he had some sort of a disease or eczema. He was not a handsome man to begin with, but now he looked like I felt.

"What do you mean?" I asked, the fire of anger intensifying.

"Well," he spat again and I hoped that there would be more talking than spitting. It started to get on my nerves. "When ya're a kid, ya're afraid of the boogeyman and things that go bump in the night, monsters under the bed or in the closets, shadows and funny noises. Ya get the pich'ure.

"They keep tellin' ya it's all in yer head. There's supposedly no spooky things in yer room, not even out on the balcony."

Talking about spooky, this particular statement spooked me almost out of my wits. When I was a kid I had a bedroom with a balcony and many a time I would terrify myself with suspicions that there was a monster standing on my balcony, waiting for me to go to sleep so that it could enter and do whatever horrible thing monsters do. It had been a very long time since I believed that, but to this day, I still don't like rooms with balconies. In the dead of night my imagination might get the better of me and not quite scare me, rather make me feel uncomfortable. I wondered how Dick had known about the monster on the balcony.

Dick pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit one with trembling hands. At that very moment he seemed so vulnerable, and vulnerability is not something one would think men like Dick were prone to.

"Anyways," he puffed a thin, gray smoke and spat again. "I reckon a boy convinces hisself there really are no monsters and later on might even laugh at hisself some. He even gets to be brave enough to get up in the middle of the night and peep under the bed, open the closet door or step out on the balcony." He looked at me and I shivered. A milky film of puss was covering his left eye, the same kind as I had seen on the dog at the whorehouse.

He rolled his eyes and a tear of the puss trickled down his face. My stomach turned and I was afraid that despite emptying it in the bathroom earlier, I might have to puke again.

"Dick, are you okay?' I asked, the stench of stomach acid feeling my nostrils from the inside.

"Yep, ain't been this good in a long time, boy. I'm dyin', ya know." He said and I shook my head as if to oppose this nonsense comment. Even I had to admit that he looked like he only had a couple of more Fridays to go.

"I been miserable for years. Now I'm good. I'm ready to die in peace and I'll tell ya why. That's a part of what I'm 'bout to tell ya anyways.

"Where was I?" he asked and repositioned himself against the tree. I almost asked him to come and sit on the bench next to me, but then I remembered the oppressing stench that I had been noticing on him for days and changed my mind.

"Oh, yeah. The monsters." He nodded. "Well, boy, this is whatcha might call tough love. What I'm 'bout to tell ya is not nice or easy, but it's all true, every single word of it and the better ya listen, the more ya know, the sooner ya can get out of it. Understand?"

I simply stared at him. I had a dreadful feeling of what was to come, but I didn't want to indulge my fears and start weaving my own theories before I heard more. Although, truth to be told, my mind was full of those already. Anger, fear, and nausea seemed to run a whirlwind inside my body.

"You prob'ly won't believe half of it, if that much. All ya need to do is listen and store it all somewhere in yer mind. It'll all come handy to ya, eventually."

"Wait," I said weakly. "About Jeannie..."

"Her name's Troiana. I figure there was somebody in yer life called Jeannie that was quite important, right?"

I shook my head. "I never thought she was that important."

"Aha!" he laughed wildly and another look at his yellow stained and now gaped smile sickened me even further. "Everything that happens to ya from now on has a meaning. Ya might not realize how big it is, or was, but it'll all come from yer mind and subconscious. Trus' me. Everything has a meaning, boy!" He spat again.

"If she told ya her name was Jeannie, I'll bet my life that ya had a girlfriend by that name, or at least ya was in love with a Jeannie at some point. She looked like yer Jeannie, too. Din't she?"

"Yeah." I admitted. I was stunned over my reaction. I should have been mad, furious really. All I did was sit on the bench like a pile of misfortune, listening to this incredulous gibberish, not protesting.

"Anyway, gettin' off the track here, boy." He repositioned himself against the tree again. It seemed like his body was in a pain of its own, making it hard for him to stand for a prolonged period of time.

"I've read somewhere how bein' truthful in the moments of hardship is the best remedy, ya know? Like when ya walk into the doc's office and he tells ya to take care of all yer shit cos the cancer is killing ya and ya've but months to live."

"Aren't you getting off track again?" I asked and he laughed, coughing up mucus and spiting it to the side, away from me.

"Nah, I reckon I ain't. I'm just tryin' to make it easier to understand." He said and inhaled deeply, closing his eyes for a moment, dangerously swaying against the tree as if he was about to fall.

"I'm just gonna come out and tell ya, boy. See, the other day in the whorehouse, remember?" How could I not have?

"Well, see ya lost yer soul to Troiana. Or Jeannie. Or whatever ya wanna call her."

"I see." I said, trying hard to suppress a giggle. The old man had me scared for a moment.

Dick looked at me and his face was plastered with annoyance. "That sarcastic shit that ya're doing right now, boy? That ain't helpin' nobody. It sure ain't helpin' you!"

I couldn't hold the laughter any longer. "Oh, come on, Dick. I'm not ten, you know. I really thought you had something to tell me!"

Dick moved quickly as a snake, faster than I would attribute to any man, let alone to someone his age and obvious failing health. One second he was leaning against the tree, the next his face was inches away from my own, the pussy eye so close I was afraid some of the yellowy ooze would fall onto my skin. I shrunk away, the stale stench of garlic and whiskey assaulting my nose.

"She came in last night, din't she?" I shook my head in negation. "Oh yes, she did. I know she did! She looked different than when ya've met her in the whorehouse, but ya knew it was her, di'ncha?" I shook my head again.

"Ya laid on the bed and couldn't flinch. Ya tried and tried, but couldn't move a finger. Only yer eyes was free to roll 'round yer head." He moved away a little, but his face was still dangerously close to mine. "Ya couldn't see her very well at first, she stood too far behind ya. Then she popped her face right in front of ya and ya wished she hadn't! Ain't that so, boy?"

I felt my entire body trembling. "Well, ain't it?" He raised his arm as if he was trying to push his absent hat up his head.

"Ya could tell it was her. Troiana, or Jeannie, or whatever name she had given ya. It was her alright, but she looked different. Those crazy eyes probed deep inside yer skull and ya thought you was either losing yer mind or dying, di'ncha?"

Finally, I nodded. He obviously knew what he was talking about. If he had never experienced it, he couldn't have guessed it in a million years. He wasn't quite done yet.

"And then ya felt your legs prodded open. Far, far apart. Ya thought yer bones was gonna snap! Ya thought yer hips was gonna pop out of the sockets. You was hurtin', but ya couldn't move and ya sure as hell couldn't scream. Yer mind screamed but nothin' came out of yer mouth, did it?"

I stared at Dick's face, trying to take it all in, trying to get used to the sickly eye and not be disgusted by it.

"Did it, boy? And then she did somethin' that shouldn't be done to no man. Not unless ya're one of 'em faggots, anyways." His eyes rolled and landed on me. "Ain't that so, boy?"

"Yes!" I screamed. "Yes, you bastard, yes! I'd better not find out it was your fault! I'd better not find out you gave me something to get me stoned and let her into my room!" I tried to get off the bench, ready to punch the old man, knowing that despite the diseased look he was probably still strong enough to floor me with one powerful smack.

His heavy hand pushed against my shoulder, preventing me to move, just like I had been unable to move the night before. "Sit still, boy! I ain't finished yet."

"It was my fault in a way, I'm sorry to say. But ya went willingly, without a second thought."

Without a second thought? I had plenty of those!

"Well, maybe ya did have them, but ya went anyways. Ya listened to yer dick rather than to yer head." Was he reading my mind now? No comment was made to make me think that he did, but I believed otherwise.

"Ya let her suck yer dick that day in the whorehouse, di'ncha?" I wasn't going to honor his question with an answer. I rolled my eyes at him, the dread freezing my body into immobility.

"Oh fuck, boy! Get over yer'self, will ya?" He spat, this time not taking care to turn away first. The green mucus blob landed inches away from the bench. "Well, I know she did, so don't bother sayin' yay or nay.

"When she was doin' it, di'ncha feel the insides of yer body? The edges of each separate organ razor sharp to yer senses? Di'ncha feel yer spine and yer brain? Di'ncha feel odd 'bout it?

"Sure did, I reckon, but ya thought she was just that good! Ya silly boy! Don't worry though. We've all been there, even me and I was much older than you. I also thought she was just that good! Ya'd have thought I'd have more sense than that. Fuck!" He coughed towards me and another wave of sickly stench hit my nose.

"I felt like my insides was made of jello, with my heart and liver and kidney and everything else floatin' in it. I felt like she was sucking that jello outta me, pullin' my brain out of the skull, suckin' my eyes in and jammin' all the organs into my stomach."

I felt the same. I couldn't have described it quite that well, but now that it has been said out loud, I had seen it all as it came out of his mouth.

"That jello shit, boy, that's yer soul she was suckin' outta ya. The soul keeps yer body and mind together and now ya lost it!"

"Shouldn't I be dead?" I was still uncertain whether I should consider this a serious talk or nonsense spawn from a rotting brain of an old man.

"Don't be stupid! Ya don't die just cos ya lose yer soul. Ya suffer like hell, I can tell ya that much! Ya'll never be happy again. There's gonna be no pleasure in anythin' ya do. Every time ya smile or laugh, ya'll feel like a razor has just been thrust up yer ass, cutt'n' your insides, travelin' up your spine and jammin' itself into your brain."