I was three when my step-father started touching me. My father - my real father, not this... impostor, this impressionist - had died some three months earlier. I write died, I mean to imprint: taken off of life-support. My mother must have been having an affair... it was obvious: baby-sitters, child-minders, what have you, whatever you'll call them, but it was fairly obvious even at that age. If there was any grief, she didn't sit through it and mourn; instead she threw herself into sexual congress and brought home this man, sooner rather than later. No explanation was given - just: "this is Sam. He's your new step-dad."
She said 'new' step-dad like there had been others, and for all I knew she might've been auditioning them, to see how they worked in the bedroom before she brought them home.
...Heaven knew, and Hell knows, it's what he did to me.
With masochists there's a certain sort of distress to the sexual sensations that they enjoy and suffer through. I can relate, and I don't doubt that what happened when I was younger has had an effect on previous thoughts - or lack of - to: 'safe, sane and consensual'. But that's later from what I'm telling now, and previous to where I'm writing it from.
It didn't start straight away. His interest in my mother didn't wane until her interest in him did. She sought him out as a baby-sitter, I realised and, far from finding a step-father for me, she had simply found someone she didn't have to pay herself. But she walked out on him one night and she did it each night thereafter, except for Saturdays where I was safe, if not in relative terror. On Sundays she went to Church while Sam, as I got older, took me to various and fictitious trips to funfairs and beaches. If my mother noticed the blood on the seat of my trousers... well, it would explain the funny glances she gave me, if she at least didn't say anything about it.
As you can imagine, that sort of repetitive trauma - loss at a young age with the sudden immature dealings of a kind that is gruesome at any stage of nature's decree and lessons - cuts and chips away at a child.
Four years and it had become routine. Four years and I inflicted pain of a non-scarring (but physical) sort on myself. Instead of crying I bit my mouth and tongue and instead of or as well as groping at myself claw-handedly, I scratched and twisted at my genitals.
Four years passed and I had been left alone with him for a year, my mother having died a year previously in a train wreck. ...It sometimes comes back as a visual of a car crash, but that might just be fantasy.
Four years the man had been in my life. ...It took three years to turn me into a murderer, the day that I smashed his skull - his hands, his chest and his face post-mortem, and haphazardly - in with a claw-hammer that I had snuck previously from his tool-chest, thinking that I might instead do the same to me. My chance came from one of his rare drunken stupors. Rare for him to be in a drunken stupor - he was either entirely on the wagon, or entirely off. It took me the better part of ten minutes to kill him. He seizured at two minutes, stopped at three, went into shock and cardiac arrest by five, brain-damaged at six. ...I carried on for four more minutes to make sure, the claw-hammer hitting blow after blow. And because I could think of nothing else worth doing by that point.
I killed him and felt... numb. Not hollow, but numb, in a sort of 'oh, shit' way. The claw hammer dropped to my feet and his head, I remember, tilted back against the sofa, his neck at a curved angle. He could've been asleep if not for the gore and the brains and the blood spattered across him- and myself.
My t-shirt was a sodden mess and my face was red with blood.
Despite the numb feeling I sat down on the floor, my legs crossed, and sobbed. Sobbed solidly for an hour, maybe more, two or three for all I cared to tell the time, and then I stopped, wiping the snot from my nose, the tears from my cheeks and the drool from my mouth.
And then they came from the shadows of the room. I thought they were police at first and was wholly unsurprised. Bad people went to jail and, admittedly, while my step-father hadn't been taken to prison and as traumatic as the experiences had and have been, I didn't think it wasn't the norm: my trauma was my own and its effects many, but I did not think I was alone.
...And then I saw them. And saw a new fit of screams reach me, not entirely unlike the ones at night-time had.
It's far easier to explain imagery to someone who has nothing in mind: anything you might miss they can make up for in their mind. It's invariably harder to describe something to someone with expectations. ...but regardless of what you think you know in any regard, you couldn't expect this at all, ever.
Black clothes - what might have been cloaks to my boyish mind - and an intent that wasn't unfulfilled. Their shaven - bald, rather, right down to the flesh tight over their skulls - heads adorned with various ...headpieces. Forms of identification and torture in equal measure. ...I can't help but still see them as beautifully decorated headpieces, reminiscent of the geishas of Japan. Their stitching and cuts and scars all unique to each of them - three of them, they stood as a trio with a leader in front - and they displayed it with knowledge of themselves if not with pride. Oh god, imagine the frightful terror of these strange, and yet darkly glamorous monstrosities who came to seek me out - or took me, at least, if they hadn't sought me – and me just having had just killed my step-father.
God, I thought, had decided to step right in and let Hell have a go at me rather than waste His time with police officers.
As it was... well, it's no wonder that I see Hell as its own version of Heaven, make of it what you will.
'My God,' I think, was some utterance that passed my lips in a mockery of a whisper, cascading from a mouth that had never before thought of God except in cursing terms for the suffering that had been inflicted upon me.
Whether one chortled or not I've still no clarification; maybe just the scuffling of further monstrosities in the dark.
But the leader, appointed so by his - or her, I was still young enough to have a hollow of ambiguity with gender and still naive enough to not know of sexuality, but who was later confirmed to me as male, as he was, even later, then confirmed to me dead - positioning at the front of the group, stepped further and approached me with a hissing flute of breath; a rancid odour of teeth drenched in decay bellowed in a perfume and filled the air: '...has never been your god.'
I had the sense - and maybe even the sensibility - to understand that this creature knocked all capitalisation off of 'God,' rendering it 'god'.
I trembled in an unspoken understanding and with an immense sense of fear. Fresh tears sprung to my eyes and my hands, clammy with sweat, grasped on to my step-father's; realising this, a yelp brushed across my tongue, ejecting itself through my teeth, and yet I could not let myself take my hand from this - really, and truly - genuine beast and monster who had needed no scars and no dark clothing to frighten the wits out of me.
"Help me," I squealed, even as I wanted to back away from the adorned man - embracing even his artful sadomasochism, he was no new creature, merely a far more brilliant man than earth had not commonly seen - who stepped closer toward me.
His body was long and his limbs crept up the sides of me as he pulled me up. I'm sure my childish body was stockier than his even though I held no fastening meat to my limbs, and yet he seemed to carry me with relative ease across to his companions who had watched, placated by my presence, seemingly.
"Safe with me," he spoke in that soft volume of voice that sounded like the crackling of bare branches of a tree in winter.
And then the darkness engulfed the three of them, and myself, and swallowed us up like the black sea and a shoal of fish into a whale's even darker crevice of a mouth.
Oh, how to describe the glory of Hell with its - no word says it better: hellish! - snow-storms, its furious winds, its brilliant gasps of air emitted from the dying screams even as fresh wails are drawn from the tortured, the condemned, the damned.
And how, even more maddening, how to make you understand the sheer happiness of it all? How happy Hell made me. ...How I learnt compassion from suffering, where others before me had fell from it.
But not to be absent from the present track...
Hell whipped us up its own storm as we breached its perimeter with all of a metaphysical flourish. I couldn't tell you then how we made the journey or what we had come through and neither now do I feel like trying. This is much more exciting.
Hell's corridors smelt rancidly fresh - and by that I mean you could smell the essence of new decay and rot, overlapping the old stench. Such a stench could knock you back off your feet and have the strength to pick you back up again.
Black light in a density shone above me and below me and arced around me, throwing lights in a chaotic fashion even as it - it being a huge, black and gold patterned diamond - preached order from the noise of a klaxon that bellowed forth from the dark reaches inside of it.
As if I had been trained in the tongue of understanding deep instruments such as horns and bugles and cellos, this was no different and I understood it with a personal discretion even as it reached all ears: LEVIATHAN, it sang; shouted; screamed; screeched: whatever you could make it form in your head in tone, it still preached itself.
"Indeed it is, the Leviathan."
The Leviathan: something I then heard considerably over the many years - decades - I stayed in Hell, along with the corresponding 'Leviathan' from others, who perhaps wished to, or were allowed, to decorate their speech with a more personal touch.
This Leviathan, this God of Hell as I found out it was, keeping the Labyrinth - and indeed, we stood on a raised corridor that overlooked thousands of others, walled-in and open alike - in a state of serenity and order, as well as keeping the damned and the chaotic - Agents of Chaos, as they were known as - also kept a menagerie of children. The Too-Innocent-To-Be-Truly-Damned, as they were known. As I was known. I had just killed a man... and I was Too-Innocent-To-Be-Truly-Damned. Somehow.
God decreed it.
The screaming started at around midnight, if there was ever any semblance of time left in Hell except for the countenance of a watch that was strapped around my too-thin wrist - and I didn't notice that it had stopped ticking some time ago, believing it to be coincidental when I thought I started it each time with a shake of my wrist and then when I re-examined it some days later to find it had 'stopped' yet again on 12:01.
The thrashing of my limbs invariably got caught up with the sheets and I soon became immobile, managing to stop myself from causing any harm to myself or those who might try and restrain me: not that any of the children did - their complaints had long since reached the ears of the Elders, as I dubbed the wanderers of the corridors of Leviathan's magnificent Hell, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's creations, a book I had managed to get my hands on some time ago from some place in Hell, conveniently (and not entirely without the placement of someone who knew I had been looking for it) found shortly after I expressed such a desire - as I had been given a separate 'room', an alcove of a cell with a bed and ...really, not much else, due to interrupting their own sleep-patterns with my repeat episodes of flashing nightmares and grabbing hands and thrusting hips.
With the ability to thrash and writhe in my sleep taken away from me, I soon enough woke with a jolt, my teeth biting suddenly down on my tongue in surprise, eliciting a final scream and a gasp from me.
My head pounded, and I let the attention of those nightly - not that they cared for the time to dictate them... - wanderers take me over as they unwrapped me from the sheets carefully and extricated my body from the bed, sitting me on its edge as they either gave me careful glances and sweet milk, or worried conversations with meaningful messages - talk, and all will be well.
And yet how could it be?
No doubt they knew who I screamed because of: those who knew desires also knew fears, repressed or otherwise, and a child had layers which they didn't know about, unlike an adult who might try to veil the layers themselves, making them much easier to pick at.
Oh god, the tears that would follow those nightmares. The tantrums. And as I hailed my storm of emotions I wasn't unaware of the other children - in a different cell, yes, but not far from them: I couldn't be ushered from the other end of Hell each awakening! - waking up and crying their own grievances, though theirs mainly from disturbance, I think, of me, rather than any closeted darkness attempted to be held close to their chests.
It was this theme at least three nights out of seven - not so much, in retrospect, but when you consider the situation and the reasons why, it's far more than enough - and I'd kick and bite and scratch and punch, my hands clammed up into small fists, at any cenobite - cenobites being the mystic corridor wanderers and those who tortured the damned in hell and who kept order throughout the chaotic world and who served Leviathan and were created by him - who wanted me to talk, regardless of whether they were high-ranking or not, whether they threatened to punish me or not - they didn't: their punishments were unusual and bizarre and decadent and modern and brilliant and they all shared a running theme: sadomasochism meant, really, for the sexual torture, no matter how subtle it was.
This all went on until I was introduced to a man called Paul Gregory. The first man I had seen in Hell who wasn't chained or hooked up to some device or other. A man completely at home with the gloriously glamorous super-butchers. A man who taught me that if I was going to have temper tantrums I could at least have the common courtesy to speak of why I kept waking everyone up.
...I liked his sense of humour. And his beard. Even if it was flecked with blood.
He was a psychiatrist, of sorts. A psychiatrist with a beard, how original. He might've been a product of anyone's imagination in that literal Hell-hole, and he might've even been mine if I'd had the fanciful production of such sinister greatness at that age, but I hadn't. All I knew then was that I loved him, or could at least summarise up in my small, tiny, fragile and childlike mind that he was a safety blanket of some sorts. Screams in the night? Call Paul. Shaking and rocking back and forth, refusing to eat and screaming at people [read: other children who, even then, wanted to stay as far away from me as possible; and the occasional casual cenobite who wandered through our carnivalistic home...] who came close? Call Paul.
Paul worked wonders with me, simply put.
Whatever sins of my father he thought I wouldn't want to talk about - read, once again: all of them - then he simply talked about what I liked and what I didn't like, and soon I was talking about myself for reasons that I didn't know. I wanted to. I found him a comfort, a brilliant substitute for the father I told myself I never knew; a great mentor and tutor who wouldn't leave me.
I broke down, on occasions, when he spoke to me - or, more accurately, when I decided to speak to him. And on one such occasion, he discovered the scars. Intricate - intricate enough for a seven year old with no idea of a design scheme but a whole load of inspiration to spiral from - little criss-crosses dancing up and down my left arm, and a few nicks and scratches on the elbow and shoulder of my right. The criss-crossing scars ran all up my forearm - oh, the cenobites weren't careless, stupid or ignorant enough to leave knives or torture devices or what-have-you around; all I needed was some small, fractured shard of glass or bent metal-work lying about, or left over from the carnival's showing - and showed what little-disguised self-hatred I harboured for myself.
I didn't have self-esteem issues - far from: I liked being the centre of attention, and Paul Gregory quickly realised that, by hook or crook - hah! Hook... - I would attempt to serial-establish circumstances where I was. Brought on by a grand sense of ego and a distorted perception of 'good' and 'bad' attention due to the abuse inflicted upon me by my father and a neglectful mother.
A stern expression appeared on his features when he saw them and, gently taking hold of my wrist and further rolling up my sleeve to expose all of the scars - most recent and fresh, indeed, the crusted blood still crimson and frail to touch - he fixed me with a look of disconcerting pity and concern. And if that pity was compassion then I still, in my mind, cannot see it as such. A man like that cannot know compassion, being so high above everybody else, and as much as he wishes to argue it, I can't believe it. So... pity and concern.
An unenviable silence encompassed me and so for the next third of an hour he spent trying to prompt me - not because he believed he could get an answer from me if I wished not to speak, but because he knew he was going to let me know that he wasn't going to let this go... - to tell him why I did this.
He knew about as much of my father as various and certain cenobites did - that being, just about everything there was to know, if not a little more past that, and much more that I was yet to find out.