Beneath the Mask of Sanity Read online

  Their heads tilted, as if a different angle would bring a different experience. To Bentley it was just more flesh and spit taste in his mouth. He felt Katie’s hand drop down to his pants. She massaged his cock through his jeans as her mouth continued to try and suck out the contents of his. Bentley felt her touch, but it did nothing. His member remained a limp noodle.

  Katie’s other hand reached around behind her and grabbed Bentley’s right hand. She moved it to the front and placed it on her breast. It was firm underneath his hands and he began to massage.

  Katie’s hand left his cock for an instant and then grabbed his zipper. Bentley pulled away.

  “What are you doing?”

  Katie smiled. “I want to taste you.”

  Bentley stood up. “This is very sudden. We only just met.”

  Katie’s face dropped. “Don’t you like me?”

  “I do,” Bentley said. “That is why I don’t think we should do this now.”

  Bentley turned towards the door.

  “Wait.”

  He stopped, turned around.

  “I’m a virgin.”

  “Me too.”

  Relief burst across Katie’s face. “You are? Oh thank God. I just didn’t want you to think I was a slut or something.”

  Bentley walked over to the bed and kneeled down in front of Katie. “I never would.”

  “I just. I just wanted to know what it’s like. I mean, I’ll be sixteen in a few months and I’ve never done it. I just wanted to start with.” She indicated Bentley’s crotch. “With that and see what it’s like. I mean everyone I know has done it. God Brenda’s done it three times.”

  And no more, Bentley thought.

  “I like you Katie. I like you a lot. I just think that we should slow down a little. I’m not expecting you to do anything that you don’t want to do.”

  Katie leaned forward and they kissed, but Bentley cut it off after a few seconds. “I really should be going though. I’d like to come over tomorrow after school, though, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure,” Katie said.

  “Until then.”

  She watched as Bentley walked out. When he was gone, she cried into her pillow so that her mother wouldn’t hear.

  69.

  Bentley knew where he was going, but it wouldn’t do to go there right away. It was still daylight and, judging by the shape of the lawn, the homeowner wasn’t bound to examine the tangle of brush and bush near in the corner of his backyard for a long while.

  Instead, he wandered around the neighborhood. It was like many he’d seen. There were no niggers here, he was sure. Probably not a lot of spics or Jews either. One of the most glorious things about the world was that everyone knew their place. Or, almost everyone.

  The houses all looked alike, except for the blue house of course, and they passed his field of vision. They were a testament to the logic that dominated the world. The only problem was, those that designed logically, did so for people that never thought logically.

  There was a park at the end of the block and Bentley walked through the fence. There was a set of swings near the front and a large play structure in the middle. Woodchips had seemed to go by the wayside. The play structure was equipped with a foam rubber floor. Now when all the little bastards fell off the jungle gym they wouldn’t get any splinters in their eyes.

  Bentley walked up the tiny steps and sat down in front of a large plastic board with the letters of the alphabet pressed in it.

  The bitch had been willing to blow him. She wanted to taste him. Bentley shook his head and lay down. Better not to think about such things. Better instead to sit and wait for dark. His time.

  70.

  Rick opened up his cell as he drove back towards the station. It rang twice before a man with a Jewish accent answered.

  “Are you Doctor Goldberg?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Rick Pappas; I’m investigating the assault of one of your patients.”

  “Is this about the shooting victim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I already told everything I knew to detective Williams. I said I’d call if I thought of anything else.”

  “I understand that sir, but I’m investigating a different aspect of this investigation. How ‘bout you humor me?”

  There was a long sigh on the other end of the phone. “All right. As I told the other officer, it was a miracle that the first four shots didn’t kill the man and an even bigger miracle that the head wound was so minor. How you shoot someone four times and not hit a major organ, I don’t know.”

  “How do you know the torso shots were the first ones?”

  “Did you not talk to detective Williams at all?

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, as I explained, the wounds had already begun to close when he got to me. That made the job much more difficult, I can tell you that.”

  “What do you mean; they had already started to close?”

  “When our bodies receive an injury our defense system goes to work. Your body doesn’t know whether or not the work is in vain, it simply does it. No matter what the injury your body tries to repair itself, the only difference is, whether or not the damage is too great to be fixed.”

  “The head wound was fresher?”

  “Yes, chiefly the reason he lived.”

  “So whoever did this shot Frank four times much earlier in the day and then shot him again in the head.”

  “Apparently. Listen, I’m in the middle of entertaining right now. Do you think we could do this later?”

  “Sure.”

  Rick clicked the phone shut and threw it on the passenger seat.

  Why the hell would someone shoot Frank four times, watch him bleed and then shoot him in the head?

  The car hummed on. Then a swatch of their conversation came back to Rick. “How you shoot a man four times and miss every major organ.”

  “The son of a bitch was torturing him. He shot him four times, dragged him to where he wanted to bury him and then shot him in the head.”

  It is a serial killer, Rick thought. And he’s got a good knowledge of human anatomy.

  71.

  Bentley had escaped from Hell. He was on the road with the wind blowing and the cars passing by. Life had begun, and oh what a life it was going to be.

  Trash littered the road; apparently the convicts hadn’t come to pick it up yet. There were snack wrappers glinting in the sun, fast-food bags, and cigarette butts. This last made up the majority of the clutter on the side of the road.

  People do whatever they can to kill themselves, he thought. Dying is part of their living wish.

  This thought was alien to Bentley. It was a thought of The Master. The Master that he’d just met. The Master that would give him his purpose.

  Cars sped along, depositing their rush of carbon dioxide into the air. Bentley didn’t have his thumb out. It wasn’t time yet. Now was time for walking. The ground felt good under his feet, it felt solid and real. For too long, he’d had to walk the soft grassy ground of Hell.

  Bentley had a singular purpose, but not much to go by. But he didn’t feel nervous or lost. When he found what he was looking for, he would know.

  The sun began to arc on the horizon. There was a blue sign for a rest stop. It was as good a place to sleep as any.

  Bentley walked up the shoulder of the ramp. The rest stop consisted of a small building with several parking spots in front of it. There were only three cars, occupying the three center spots. Bentley walked down the long walkway towards the building.

  A sign above the door proclaimed that there were restrooms and free maps inside. The doors were black metal with a long push bar. Bentley pushed them opened. The air inside was stagnant; apparently the state had decided that neither heat nor air conditioning were justifiable expenses for a building that most people would only be spending a few minutes in.

  Vending machines (selling lethal amounts of salt and sugar disguised as snac
ks) lined the walls. The men’s bathroom was on the right, the ladies was on the left. Ahead, was a long counter built into the wall. Several pamphlets sat on the counter. Most of them were maps, but there were some Illinois travel guides as well. Bentley grabbed one of the travel guides and then walked into the bathroom.

  The bathroom was empty. Bentley selected the last stall and locked the door behind him. He removed his shoes and placed them in front of the toilet. Then he folded his legs underneath him and began to read.

  After a while, he fell asleep.

  What woke him up were the sounds of grunting coming from the stall next to him. Bentley’s eyes fluttered open. At first, he thought what he was hearing was some roadside trucker straining at a stool. Then he heard a second man’s moans join the first.

  “Fuck,” a voice next to him moaned. “Oh shit.”

  The second voice only moaned incoherently. Now that Bentley was awake he could hear other sounds as well. Flesh slamming together and a wet kind of sloshing. The metal walls of his temporary sanctuary were shaking.

  Bentley got up, put his shoes on and unlocked his door. The other stall was open. A tall man with a well muscled back was standing behind another man. The man standing was completely naked, the other still had his shirt on. The other man was fat, his ass was a large white target and the tall man was hitting the bull’s-eye on every thrust. The fat man was using the toilet seat to hold up his massive upper body.

  Bentley stood and watched them for several minutes. Then, they both uttered some kind of primordial groan and the tall man backed up. His penis was already starting to lose its steal. There was a fine glaze of cum on it. Bentley looked and saw the majority running from the fat man’s asshole.

  The fat man turned to look at his partner and then his face became stormy. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  The tall man turned. Bentley looked up at him. The tall one smiled. “What? Are you looking to get in on this?”

  “No,” Bentley said. “I just wanted to watch.”

  The fat man stood up, his penis stood erect in front of him. “Let me have him.”

  “I’d rather not,” Bentley said. He turned to go back to his stall, but the tall man’s hand wrapped around Bentley’s arm.

  “It don’t matter if you want to or not.”

  Bentley snaked his free arm down to his pocket. It was empty. He had placed the knife in the left pocket.

  The tall man spun Bentley around and they both hit the wall. Bentley’s arms shot out to try and prevent his face from slamming into the porcelain. The tall man wrapped his fingers around Bentley’s wrists and held his arms up on the wall.

  “Get his pants,” he said to the fat one.

  “Come on let me have him, he looks young.”

  “Do what the fuck I say. You can have him after.”

  Bentley felt his jeans fall to the floor, then his underwear. He tried to squirm his lower half, but the tall man had his knees pressed into Bentley’s thighs.

  The tall man had apparently gotten his reserve back, because Bentley felt the stiffness behind him.

  “Let me go,” Bentley said. He didn’t yell or scream. He simply spoke these words, hoping that they would listen.

  “You a virgin,” the tall man whispered. When he leaned in to do it, his penis brushed up against Bentley’s left ass cheek. It poked the soft flesh, as if in foreplay.

  “I’ll kill you,” Bentley said. Again his voice wasn’t loud or commanding; it was stated as mere fact, without emotion.

  “Sure you will,” the tall man said.

  Suddenly, there was an invader inside of Bentley’s body, and it didn’t come softly. The pain was immense and it blocked out any coherent thought that he could have mustered.

  It was as if someone had shoved a table leg inside of him. The pushing was even worse. While it went on, Bentley felt a tearing and heat. The pain seemed to radiate up from his ass into his abdomen.

  All the while, the tall man was panting in his ear. He might have been saying words, but, if so, Bentley blocked them all out. Instead he concentrated on two things, his arms and his pants.

  Unfortunately, the tall man had decided that Bentley’s arms were a good thing to lean against and his grip never loosened on them.

  Bentley gritted his teeth against each thrust and waited for his time.

  Finally, the man uttered a final shove and a warm sensation spread across his raw insides. It was like a salve that had come too late. The tall man turned and looked at the fat man. Bentley bent and reached into this right pocket. The knife felt warm under his grip.

  “He’s all…”

  The rest of what the man had been going to say was cut off with a line of blood that ran from his throat.

  The fat man had remained naked; his hand was stroking his cock. Blood splattered with the tall man’s last heartbeats and sprayed him. The fat man screamed but, Bentley noted, continued to stroke.

  Bentley rushed towards the man and pushed him to the ground. The fat man lay there, like a turtle that couldn’t get off its shell.

  “Your friend was lucky,” Bentley said. “You won’t be.”

  Bentley grabbed the man’s penis and arched the knife through the air. It hit the flesh and tore threw it like a hot spoon through ice cream.

  Blood poured out like a fountain. Bentley threw the hunk of meat aside. The fat man remained on the ground. The sound that was coming through his mouth no longer sounded human. It sounded like the plea of some animal caught in a trap.

  Bentley leaned over the man and cut into his chest. Blood seeped out, but it seemed the flow was slackening.

  He worked for two hours on the bodies, cutting them into small enough pieces that they could be carried out of the bathroom and disposed of. There were large sections, like the torso, that he simply couldn’t do much with.

  Bentley kept expecting someone to walk into the restroom, no one ever did.

  The burial would have been hard if it hadn’t been for the small creek that ran behind the rest stop. Bentley walked his pieces over there and threw them in. With any luck, the fish would finish off what he had begun.

  When his work was over, Bentley walked back into the bathroom. He was a mess. His face, clothes, hands, all covered in blood. Bentley stripped the clothes off and looked around. The tall man’s clothes were still inside the stall. There were a few splatters of blood on them, but not many.

  After washing off his face and hands in the sink, he tried on the tall man’s clothes. They were ludicrously large on them, but it was better than walking around with a confession on his clothes.

  Bentley balled up the rest of the clothes, careful to hold them away from his body, and threw them into the creek as well.

  “So I need a new set of clothes and a book on human anatomy,” Bentley said to himself.

  He wanted to return to the bathroom, to make sure that he’d gotten all of the blood off the bathroom floor, but he didn’t dare. Instead, he took to the road again and watched the cars go by. When he saw the one he needed, he would know…

  Bentley stirred awake. His eyes were wide and sweat had soaked every part of his body.

  What the fuck was that, he thought.

  The dream had started out normally enough. The words of that moron made into dream form, but this one had shifted. Instead of the idiot’s inane ramblings of his early life, this one had turned on the truth. This dream had shown him a message from his own past. Why?

  Bentley looked down, eager to forget the dream. The anatomy book sat opened in front of him. He could quote nearly every passage in the book by now, but he still liked to read it. To get every bit of knowledge out of it that he could. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could see the pages in his head. Actually see a page, the page number and everything that had been written on it. It was as if the book had become part of his brain.

  There had been two others before this one. Bentley had discarded each old one when he picked up a new one, but any time he wanted t
o, he could close his eyes and call up pages from the first two.

  He didn’t know what time it was, but night had fallen and covered everything with an inky blackness. Crickets chirped, locked in some never ending argument.

  He rose from the play structure and his knees popped. Bentley stretched in all directions, feeling the glory of having his ligaments once again perform the job for which they were made.

  The walk to the blue house was short. All the lights inside the house were still off.

  Did you go out of town? Bentley thought. Is that why the grass is such a mess? Or maybe no one lives there.

  All of that was beside the point. It seemed as if he wasn’t going to be disturbed in his work and that was the point.

  “One thing at a time,” Bentley said as he kneeled next to Brenda’s body. “One thing at a time.”

  He opened his backpack and pulled out a large plastic bag. Bentley had stolen several of them from a hospital a year ago or so. He had been on a surgical floor, looking for items that he might find useful and he’d seen the bags. He grabbed them out of instinct, and his instinct had paid off.

  Bentley laid the bag on the ground, away from the body. Then he reached back in and grabbed his tools.

  The hospital had kept all their really good equipment locked up, but it hadn’t been hard to steal a doctor’s badge. He hadn’t even had to kill the prick. All he had to do was wait until he bent over for a drink from a fountain and clip it right off the waistband of his pants.

  Bentley discovered that the badge granted him access to any room in the hospital. After consulting a nurse it became clear what floor he wanted.

  Most of the implements were knives of a sort, but all of them had different shapes and different uses. One of them looked like something out of a ninja movie. The blade was long and curved to a near circle shape. The blade was ridged on one side. It was used for chest extractions; there had been a picture of one in the first medical book Bentley owned.