Beast of Venery (33 page)

              The fear and anticipation from the action must have made her stronger than she knew she was. The crowbar seemed cemented into his chest and neither of his hands wiggling the tool could make it move. He wasn't getting up.

              This was her time. With her arms hanging down, clenching her fists, she stared at the squirming worm on the ground. He didn't seem so tough now.

              She slowly made it over to him, and looked down into his face.

              “Baby, you've got to help me.”

His breathing had turned into wheezing sounds traveling between them in the night air, but it didn't face her. He was suffering. And she liked it.

              “Please help me get rid of this. Pull it out for god sake! I love you. Please, I've always loved you. Help me.”

              His wheezing had suddenly turned into a desperate plea. She knew he was in pain and might not even last that much longer. Somehow, it didn't bother her. She just couldn't make herself to care enough to help him. Instead she squatted down on the ground a few feet away, and watched him struggle. Fighting for his life, as he had made her do. Time and time again.

              “Baaaaabe, help me!”

              His wheezing sound had turned bubbly, and with erratic sweaty hands his fingers slipped over the cold metal that sat chiseled straight into his chest. From the short distance she could see his gray shirt turn dark around the strike of impact. And moving her eyes to view his face she noticed the paleness of his skin, and understood that the gurgling sound transferring through his voice came from the blood slowly running out of the side of his mouth.

             
“His lungs must be filling up with blood.”
She thought.

He spit on the ground next to him as more blood seemed to stain the insides of mouth.

              “Are you not going to help me?”

              She said nothing. She moved nothing. She simply watched his few slippery attempts with the crowbar. If this was the end, she had to see it with her own eyes. She needed proof that he could not comeback to hurt her again. She had to know that after this she would be free to live.

              His head tilted backwards and rested on the ground. One of his hands followed the same path and fell off the crowbar and landed smoothly on the ground next to his chest.

              A cough was heard. Some more bubbling. Then his eyes closed. At last his left hand loosened its grip on the crowbar and slid down to sit itself on his chest.

              It was only silence around them. Not even the needles on the pine trees rustled. No creaking of branches or leaves in the shadows. Only silence. His body looked motionless.

              After a short while she stood up on stiff legs and took the few steps between them, leaned over his body and looked down on him. It was hard to feel sad for a person like this. After everything he had done to her over the years. The rape, the violence, the threats, and the fighting.

              He was supposed to have loved her and taken care of her, but everything had instead turned into his dominance over her and everything she thought and did in life. What she was allowed to think, eat, and sometimes even how she should act and carry herself. His willingness to use her for various kinds of kinky sex when she was too drunk to make her arms either fight him back, or too drunk to care what he was doing. Never had he turned an opportunity like that down. Like a predator hunting for the weakest link in the herd, he had made her weak in every possible way during their years together. His dominance over her had been his top priority and he had never seemed to fail at his attempts to use it to his benefit.

              “Is he dead?” The voice behind her startled her. Making her jump high in the air. The voice repeated. “Is he dead, is he gone?” It was Annie.

              “How did you get here? You shouldn't be here?”

              “I hit Jonathan over the head with a hammer.”

              “What?” One minute everything was clear. Brian was gone and freedom was born, now things were a tangled mess inside her head once more.

              “With this.” One of her hands clutched tightly to a hammer. The other shook nervously, and kept fidgeting in the strands of her hair.

              “Why? What? I don't understand. I'm sorry... what are you doing here again?”

              “For so long I thought Jonathan was cheating on me behind my back.” She said nervously, still pushing imaginary strands of hair behind her ear. “His cell phone would beep with messages at random times throughout the day and night. Then he would tell me he had to go away for a weekend or two, without letting me really know where he was going. Things were not adding up between us. So, I followed him up here. It surprised me he knew where our cabin was.” She dropped the hammer to the ground and rubbed both of her hands across her chest, as if to clean off her dirty hands.

              “I followed him through the woods on foot. He stopped a few miles from here as if he was waiting for someone, and then suddenly a man stepped out of the woods and into this small clearing. It was like a meeting place. At first I panicked and thought he truly was cheating on me, with a man, but as soon as they started to talk it hit me like a freight train that the guy he was talking to must have been
your
Brian.”

              “He is, was,
not
my Brian.” Irritation flared inside her. She didn't know why the comment bothered her so much, but let Annie continue.

              “You know what I mean.” Then she kept going. “They started talking about things I had no idea about, and suddenly, with all the information they spitted out between them, I understood. Jonathan was that man, you, know, on the news a few years ago, who raped and murdered that prostitute in Boise.”

              “Yes, I remember.” Danielle nodded in utter shock.

              “The body was found in the forest, decomposed, a while later, but the attacker wasn't. It was Jonathan. Fucking Jonathan. The man I've been sleeping with for the last seven months. The man I've introduced into my life and to my family.”

              “But how did he know Brian?”

              “I overheard Brian telling him he owed him a favor for helping him disappear from the public eye, and for hiding the body. Getting into our lives, mine, yours, our family's life, was just to get to you. To help Brian find you.”

              “I can't believe it. They played us both.” Danielle was stunned to silence and looked straight into Annie's shattering face. Suddenly she started crying.

              “I'm so sorry, Dani. For everything. I'm so sorry I didn't know him better when we started dating and that it went on for this long. I'm so sorry...” Her hands clasped over her mouth, covering sob after sob escaping her. Leaving Brian's immobile body behind, she strode over to her sister-in-law and hugged her tightly. Wrapped her in her arms, and rocked her back and forth until no more tears could possible shed down her face.

              “It's not your fault in any way. It's over. Where is Jonathan?”

              Annie backed away from Dani's embrace, wiped the strands of tears away from her face and nodded in the direction of the cars.

              “He's out like a light behind the car. I swung as hard as I could at the back of his head. If you squint you can even see his feet sticking out from behind the back tire.”

              Sure enough. In the slight light from the moon, two sneaker covered feet where sticking out behind the car. Shoes that just recently had met up with Brian to discuss ways to trap her. To hurt her.

              With a slight rub to Annie's shoulder, Danielle pointed at Jonathan's resting body and told her they needed to secure him somehow until the rest of the family came back to the cabin. But before heading over to Jonathan she let one last glance go over her shoulder, facing Brian's lifeless body which was still in the same spot she had left him. Just as quiet. Just as motionless. Just as dead. The beast was finally asleep.

Epilogue

              Fall turned into winter, and winter into a glorious spring. Not only glorious because of the warm weather coming back, the warm evenings being spent outside, or new flowers escaping the dormant life inside the bulb. But glorious knowing she was free from the predator that hunted her for so many years. Hunted her down after all those years, destroying her further. Hunted her in her dreams even when the physical pain was over.

              A new world opened up after Brian took his last breath on the gravel up in the woods the night of the forest hunt that had left her trapped and stranded, fearing for not only her own life but that of her husband's and her in-laws.

              Jonathan's lies snared him into a vicious game of favors and left him with nothing less than a hammer to the back of his head and a life sentence in prison for not only conspiracy and attempt to murder, but for taking the life of the innocent girl he dumped and left behind in Idaho many years earlier.

              Brian's dark looming shadow which was still following her was starting to fade, increasing brightness and light in everyone's life. Maybe there was a real life worth living after this, even after all that had happened?

              She felt she had to see him pass away with her own two eyes to actually understanding he was gone. Forever. It hadn't even face her to visit the city morgue, with Andy tagging along hand in hand, to identify Brian after his passing as none of his family members were willing to either show up or take any part in his death. So sad in itself, but also showed the lack of caring and parenting that might have made him into what he was. A beast. Evil.

              Sadness should have engulfed her the night of his violent death, when he had asked her, as his last wish, to help him. But she had felt nothing that night. The nothingness had scared her. She had been a blank slate without any feelings of any kind, watching her former lover suffer until he took his last breath and passed away from earthly life. Maybe she should have said a prayer, but at the time she hadn't been completely sure he deserved it. He had made his choices, and now he had to deal with them in whatever life waited him after death.

              She knew they had never truly been in love, even though they had lived just like a married couple, just not having it written down on a paper, or gotten blessed by a minister. The years they spent together had been nothing more than days and weeks of mental mind games, dominance, and anger. Without noticing it escalated into ill jealousy, violence, and eventually rape.

              How could someone withstand those living conditions for years, even after the relationship was over? She knew she couldn't, and that's why she'd seen no other way than to end his eternal chase for her that dark brutal night. If that crowbar hadn't made its way into his chest, breaking him open, cracking his bones, she knew his hands alone would have finished her as soon as he caught up with her behind the cabin.

              With both Andy and Vernon being away from the cabin at that moment, Brian would have left her body behind on the ground and continued chasing after Jo, who would have suffered the same treatment, giving both their men new titles as widowers. It might never have ended. He would have gone after everyone and crushing everything in his way that resembled her, or connected to her. Being it people, items, or animals. No one or nothing would be spared. His rage showed no mercy.

              Perhaps he was born that way, perhaps it happened on the way through life. The only thing she knew for sure was his never ending urge to control and go after exactly what he wanted. Good attributes to have in certain areas of life, but not in regards to others, or in relationships where feelings were involved. He obviously never learned the difference.

              Somehow he became an unstoppable beast along the way of life, but that night she had put an end to all of that. The Beast of Venery was gone.

                                                                                    *               *                *

              The bright summer sun was shining through the yellow curtains of the living room, casting a bright light at the corner desk where Andy was hard at work at the computer. Life was finally good. They were doing well.

              "So, it's almost June." She said. "What would you like for your birthday, babe?"

              His computer chair swung around slightly, letting his knees clamp around her legs before coming to a halt facing her completely. Leaning closer she bent down over him, putting her hands on either side of the chair, allowing her lips to gently brush his. Just a touch, just a hint of what she could offer. He simply smiled at the interruption she was giving him in the middle of the day, and grabbed the curve of her neck to pull her back down to his lips when she started to retreat.