The Book of a Thousand Sins Read online

  Todd had now been stuck in the drainpipe for three days and two nights. When he slept he had nightmares of grinning demons dragging him down into hell through a long narrow tunnel. When he awoke they were still there with him, pulling at him, trying to drag him deeper into the drainpipe. He could feel their claws digging into his flesh as they tugged at him. Sometimes he even heard them laughing at him, taunting him.

  “You stuck fat boy? One too many trips to Fat Burger eh? You’re lucky though. It’s much worse down here. I’ll show you as soon as you lose enough weight for me to pull you through. It won’t be long now. You’re already starving. Soon you’ll be down here with us.”

  Todd wanted to scream so badly his entire body would tremble, but his mouth was still underwater. Instead he thrashed violently in the pipe abrading more of his skin on the rusted metal and still not managing to budge more than an inch.

  More days went by and the demons grew more and more hideous and more insistent. Tugging on him and gibbering madly in his face. Laughing and raging as they raked their claws over his wrinkled flesh.

  “Hungry fat boy? Still haven’t lost enough weight? You thought your life was bad before, wait until we get you down here with us. We’re going to make what you did to those women look like euthanasia. Because we won’t let you die. We’re going to torture your fat ass forever!”

  Todd had learned to tune them out. He could almost ignore them completely as long as they weren’t touching him. But their scaly claws were always worrying at him, pulling and yanking at him.

  “Why hasn’t anyone found me yet?” Todd wondered.

  He must have been stuck in that pipe for over a week. Surely one of the construction workers or one of the other building inspectors would have noticed his legs sticking out of a drainpipe.

  “Not if the whole basin is still underwater,” Todd realized with increasing hopelessness

  “But they’d notice that the water wasn’t draining and they’d send someone down to investigate wouldn’t they? But how long before they did that? They wouldn’t send a diver down there in scuba gear. They’d wait for all the water to evaporate and then fix the problem. That could take another week or more.”

  Todd began to struggle. He pushed and squirmed with renewed desperation and the last of his waning strength. Somehow he managed to move backwards a few inches out of the pipe. His face submerged completely now. If he didn’t escape now he would drown. His struggle became even more frantic. He opened his eyes and peered through the murky water and thought he saw a demon with a face like an eel and claws like a lizard scampering towards him staring at him with intelligent anthropoid eyes and grinning as it reached out for him to pull him back into the pipe.

  “Where do you think you’re going fat boy? You’re coming down here with us.”

  Todd thrust with all his might and suddenly he was free of his prison. He’d starved off just enough weight to allow him to squeeze out of the pipe. He swam desperately for the surface as slimy taloned fingers clawed at his backside trying to hook their nails into his flesh and pull him back under. His head broke the surface of the murky water and Todd stared at the sky for the first time in eight days.

  He was out of breath and weak from dehydration and malnutrition. He called out, but his voice was weak and barely audible. He’d used the last of his vigor escaping the pipe. Todd floated there on the surface of the water trying to summon the energy to climb up the side of the wash to the street above. That’s when he felt the first drops of rain strike his face. Then the heavens opened once again.

  “Fuck! Another storm,” Todd groaned in a hoarse whisper.

  Todd forced himself to swim to the edge of the basin using nothing but sheer will power. All he could think about was how many people he would make suffer for this latest injury life had dealt him, how many ways he would make them scream. He had just reached the edge of the basin when he felt the hands on him. He looked back and the demon with the eel face was behind him trying to pull him back.

  “Come on fat boy. You’re coming down here with us. No more lonely housewives or teenaged runaways for you. You’re the victim now. You belong to us.”

  Todd struggled up the rocky embankment in near panic as more demons broke the surface of the water and came for him. Some of them looked like humans with animals parts grafted to them for unnameable reasons. Antlers and rhinoceros horns protruded from their backs along their spines, others had thorns and teeth sprouting from odd shaped craniums like military armament. Some were covered in scales and some with fur. Some had multiple arms, tentacles, or fins. Still others had mouths filled with rows of shark like teeth and while others were toothless except for two saber-like tusks. They were all coming right for him determined to drag him back down into the water.

  None of the demons worried Todd nearly as much as the rain, which was now pelting the ground and reducing the earth to slippery mud as Todd struggled to climb. Lightning cracked and thunder roared like a nuclear explosion as the rain intensified. Water rushed over the side of the embankment like a new river had been formed and soon Todd was slipping back down into the basin.

  “No. No! Nooooooo! Helllllllp!”

  Todd slid back down into the water just as a whirlpool had begun to form. The demons seemed to number in the dozens as they rushed to envelope him, their slavering faces and unctuous bodies pressed against his, noxious breath steaming in his face. They were all over him as suction from the drainpipe dragged him under like excrement being flushed down a toilet. Todd took one last breath before he went under. He could still hear the demons laughing and celebrating as he went hurtled back towards the drainpipe. Seconds later he was wedged in tight again. He lifted his head searching for the pocket of air and found it once again with the tip of his nose.

  He had suffered more bruises and now it felt as if his ribs were broken. He was deeper into the pipe this time and the new rainfall meant that it would take even longer for the water to evaporate meaning no one would find him for weeks. By then he’d be a corpse unless he could escape. Todd began to struggle again.

  “Why me?” Todd complained, “Why does this bullshit always have to happen to me? When do I get to catch a break?”

  Todd’s life reminded him of that Greek myth about the guy who is sentenced to hell and his punishment is to roll a boulder up hill everyday only to watch as gravity inevitably carried the rock back down the hill at the end of the day. The man made peace with his situation by accepting that it was no different than everyday of his life had been. Everything we did in life was inevitably undone yet still we toiled each and everyday of our lives. Every moment of triumph or joy was inevitably followed by moments of defeat and despair yet still we fought and struggled for that ephemeral happiness. So, Todd had struggled for that happiness everyday of his existence and so he watched each and everyday as his efforts ended in failure. Still, he continued to roll his boulder up hill. Still, he would continue to fight for every breath until hunger or exposure finally claimed his life.

  “And each time you will fail. Each time you’ll wind up right back here in this pipe.”

  One week he’d been stuck in there without food or water.

  “How long can someone survive without eating or drinking?” Todd wondered.

  He was so weak he could barely keep his eyes open but sleep was the enemy now. If he closed his eyes now he’d never open them again. He had to get out of there. He began to struggle again and he could feel the demons latch on to pull him back down. Even still, he somehow managed to free himself. This time he didn’t even make it to the edge of the basin before he was pulled back under and back down into the pipe, this time feet first so that he could stare back up at the sky from the bottom of the murky water.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! You can’t keep me here!” Todd screamed in his head as he struggled once again to free himself from the pipe.

  Todd knew now how it would go. Somehow he just knew. No matter how many times he escaped, the demons would pull him back
or the rain would come, but he’d never get out. He would never get out of this damn drainpipe, because this was his punishment in hell. The demons were not hallucinations. They were real. And he hadn’t been stuck in here for the last week. He’d drowned when he’d first fallen into the basin. But he didn’t care because he would still win. Todd was determined. He’d find a way out of this and he would get his life back and he would torture, and rape, and kill until the memory of all of this was gone from his head. No matter how many times they pulled him back under he’d keep pulling himself out until he finally escaped. Except now Todd was slipping deeper into the pipe.

  The sky disappeared as Todd began to slide. He was exhausted now, his muscles spent, too weak to resist the tremendous suction from the water rushing around his body forming a vacuum pulling him down into the sewer. After more than a week in the pipe he was now slim enough to be pulled through the narrow aqueduct. Hands seemed to come from every direction, groping at his flesh, latching onto him and tugging, squeezing him deeper into the pipe. The metal scraped his skin raw as he was towed downward. He could hear the demons laughing and gibbering, celebrating their victory.

  “You’re going to hell now boy. No mercy for you fat man. Now you’ll know what all those girls you raped and murdered felt like. Now you’re going to know what it means to be in hell!”

  Todd was drowning. He gasped and struggled for air as he was dragged along by the rushing water. His lungs burned for oxygen. The pipe seemed to stretch for miles. He could feel the sides of it contracting against him as if it was breathing and each contraction squirted his helpless form down further into the sewer. The demons released him as a new larger set of hands latched onto his feet and pulled. The sides of the pipe felt warmer now and even more slippery than before as if coated with filth and slime, reinforcing the idea that he was sliding through the bowels of some tremendous beast about to be expelled from its rectum. Even the thick sewage seemed to have warmed somewhat. He could hear his own heartbeat thundering around him, only now it seemed somehow slower and much louder as if the pipe had its own separate heartbeat. Todd’s consciousness began to fade as oxygen deprivation murdered more of his brain cells. The deeper he went the less he could remember about how he had gotten into this predicament or even who or what he was.

  It felt as if his body were changing too. The pipe got smaller and smaller the deeper he went and Todd’s own body seemed to be diminishing as well. Reshaping itself into whatever form he would wear in the afterlife.

  “Perhaps I am shedding my mortal trappings of flesh and bone, shrugging off this mortal coil so to speak, so that my soul can enter hell?” Todd wondered.

  Finally, one of Todd’s feet burst free and he could feel it dangling in space. His other foot slid out of the end of the pipe next and then his entire lower half up to the waist. Next came his torso and then his head slid out last, gasping for air and struggling to breathe.

  “It’s a breech birth! She can’t breath! Clear her airway.”

  Todd felt fingers in his mouth sweeping back and forth removing the sewage he’d sucked in while struggling to breathe. Then he felt a thud on his back and he belched out all the water he’d inhaled and let out a wail. An oxygen mask was strapped onto his face and Todd took his first lungful of clean oxygen since the eternity ago that he’d fallen into the wash.

  Todd didn’t know where he was or even who he was. He looked down at the smooth hairless slit between his legs where his penis had been and realized he was no longer even a man. Something in the pipe had changed him. He looked back at the pipe he’d emerged from and saw a bleeding maw surrounded by dense pubic hair and two tree trunk sized legs held up in stirrups. He screamed again.

  “Now you’ll know what all those girls you raped and murdered felt like. Now you’re going to know what it means to be in hell!” The demons had said and only now did Todd truly understand what that meant.

  “Here’s your new baby girl Misses Wilkins. She’s going to be just fine. She’s very pretty too. You’re going to have your hands full keeping the guys away from this one.”

  Now Todd knew what it truly meant to be in hell.

  A Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man

  Father Martin O’Reilly drove himself from the airport stopping briefly at a supermarket deli to pick up some meat on his way to the federal prison. He pulled up outside the gate and stared at the twenty-foot walls topped with razor wire then down at the newspaper under his arm. The sensational headline splashed across the front cover in 24 point Times Roman read: “Terrorist Crashes Fight! 7 Dead!” Father O’Reilly tossed the paper back onto his seat before shutting his door and walking into the building. He’d had enough of headlines like that.

  After submitting to a cursory search from a bored and disinterested looking prison guard in rubber gloves, he followed another soldier to the heavily guarded prison hospital. There were FBI agents and military personnel everywhere. The old priest introduced himself and showed his ID and visitor’s pass and was immediately escorted upstairs by two FBI agents to the floor where Sharod Abdin’s upper torso lay on respirators and monitors, slowly dying. He had been blown apart by the same weapon he’d used to attack the Capitalist devils he believed to be his enemies, a twin engine private plane packed with a nitrogen based fertilizer soaked in gasoline. In other words, a two-ton Molotov cocktail. Somehow the impact had thrown the terrorist free of the plane just before the explosion. He’d been badly burned but not incinerated. Now he was pumped full of morphine and luckily most of his nerve endings were fried. When they started to heal he’d be in screaming agony. Morphine would be little or no help. Unfortunately, Sharod Abdin wasn’t expected to live that long.

  The old priest greeted the two guards outside the terrorist’s door. One of them was obviously FBI and the other was a Military Policeman from the National Guard. There were National Guardsmen everywhere.

  “Captain O’Reilly . . . uh . . . I mean Father. Which one do I call you?” asked the MP as he stared from the gold bars on the priest’s shoulders to the white collar around his neck.

  “Either one is fine.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here for this one. These Muslims don’t seem to like priests much.”

  “A man of God is a man of God. If he doesn’t want me here then I’ll leave, but he did reach out to me once. Perhaps he’ll do so again. Maybe I can even get some information out of him to find out who his accomplices are.”

  “You think he’ll confess to you?” The FBI agent asked hopefully.

  “I doubt it, but like I said. It’s worth a shot. Make sure no one enters this room until I’m done. And that includes you. If I’m to get anything out of him before he dies I can’t be disturbed.”

  “Yes Sir! Uh . . . Father, Sir.” The MP stuttered as he stepped aside to let the old priest pass. Father O’Reilly blessed them both as he stepped between them and opened the door to Abdin’s room.

  “Excuse me Father?” The FBI agent asked, placing a hand on O’Reilly’s shoulder and gently turning him back around. “What’s that under your arm?”

  Father O’Reilly followed the agent’s gaze down to the package with the blood-stain soaking through the brown paper wrapping and leaking out onto the floor. He looked back up into the agent’s eyes and smiled warmly.

  “That’s my dinner. My sister lives here and she’s going to cook up some chitterlings for us tonight. I haven’t had good Southern food in a while. You should come join us.”

  “Uh, no thank you. When you go in there and smell that guy I don’t think you’ll be too anxious to eat that either. He smells just like barbecued pork.”

  “Nothing could make me lose my appetite right now.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to come in there with you father?” The National Guardsman offered. The soldier was turning colors imagining the old priest eating pig’s intestines after spending an afternoon with the deep fried terrorist.

  “No, I’ll be fine. I don’t want anyone in
that room but me. Not anyone. If he thinks he’s being interrogated he’ll clam up and take his secrets to the grave with him. It’ll go much smoother if it’s just him and I. We have history. Besides, he’s pretty harmless now. And hey, I’m Irish. I know all about handling terrorists.”

  The two men laughed as the old priest closed the door behind him. The MP looked visibly relieved not to be accompanying him. He would have probably regurgitated the minute he set foot through the door.

  The innocuous looking Federal agent turned towards the soldier with a derisive sneer.

  “It’s funny how that works huh? He’s willing to go interrogate that bastard and use his status in the church to secure information that he’d never be able to get otherwise, just to further his own military career. But if we asked him to do that for us, how much do you want to bet he’d pull that shit about not violating the sanctity of the confessional?”

  “Well, this ain’t exactly a confessional?” The soldier offered.

  “Like that shit would matter?”

  “Hey, the Captain is alright. He did get that Jeremy Leary guy to confess last year. That sniper who shot all those guys outside the federal building in Pittsburgh? Got him to give up his accomplices and everything.”

  “Yeah, but he was Irish and Catholic. This towel-head will probably spit in your Captain’s face as soon as he takes one look at that collar around his neck.”

  The agent rubbed his chin and looked down at the spot of pig’s blood that had dripped onto the floor from Father O’Reilly’s package.

  “You ever hear of an Irish Catholic eating chitterlings?”

  “Captain O’Reilly spent a lot of years stationed down in Kentucky with all those hicks, coons, and rednecks. Those country sons of bitches will eat everything but a pig’s ass. Looks like he assimilated a little too well.”