Long Hard Road Out of Hell Read Free

attention to the trains circling furiously around him. His pants were down around his knees, a magazine was spread over his legs, and he was hacking and moving his right hand rapidly in his lap. At the same time, with his left hand, he was wiping phlegm from around his tracheostomy with a yellow-crusted handkerchief. We knew what he was doing, and we wanted to leave right away. But we had trapped ourselves behind the stairs and were too scared to come out into the open.
    Suddenly, the hacking sputtered to a halt and grandfather twisted around in his chair, staring straight at the stairwell. Our hearts froze. He stood up, pants sliding to his ankles, and we pressed against the mildewed wall. We couldn’t see what he was doing anymore. My heart stabbed at my chest like a broken bottle and I was too petrified even to scream. A thousand perverted and violent things he was about to do to us flashed through my mind, though it would have taken nothing more than for him to touch me and I would have dropped dead with fright.
    The hacking, jacking and shuffling of feet began again, and we let our breath out. It was safe to peer around the staircase. We didn’t really want to. But we had to.
    After several excruciatingly slow minutes, a gruesome noise leapt from his throat, like the sound a car engine makes when someone turns the key in the ignition when it’s already on. I turned my head away, too late to keep from imagining the white pus squeezing out of his yellow, wrinkled penis like the insides of a squashed cockroach. When I looked again, he had lowered his handkerchief, the same one he’d been using to wipe away his phlegm, and was sopping up his mess. We waited until he left and then clambered back up the stairs, vowing never to set foot in that cellar again. If Grandfather knew we were down there or noticed the broken workbench drawer, he didn’t say anything to us.
    During the ride home, we told my parents what happened. I had the feeling that my mother believed most if not all of it, and that my father already knew from having grown up there. Though Dad didn’t utter a word, my mother told us that years ago, when my grandfather still worked as a trucker, he was in an accident. When the doctors undressed him at the hospital, they found women’s clothes underneath his own. It was a family scandal that no one was supposed to talk about, and we were sworn to secrecy. They were in utter denial of it—and still are to this day. Chad must have told his mother what we had seen, because he wasn’t allowed to hang out with me for years afterward.
    When we pulled into our driveway, I walked around back to play with Aleusha. She was lying in the grass near the fence, vomiting and convulsing. By the time the vet arrived, Aleusha was dead and I was in tears. The vet said someone had poisoned her. I had a funny feeling I knew who that someone was.

    A LEUSHA

for those about to rock, we suspend you
    [B RIAN W ARNER ] WAS JUST AVERAGE . H E’S ALWAYS BEEN REALLY SKINNY LIKE A TWIG. I WOULD GO OVER TO HIS HOUSE AND WE’D LISTEN TO RECORDS TOGETHER, STUFF LIKE Q UEENSRYCHE , I RON M AIDEN, LOTS OF J UDAS P RIEST . I WAS MORE INTO IT THAN HE WAS .... I DIDN’T THINK HE REALLY HAD ANYTHING GOING FOR HIM [MUSICALLY] AND MAYBE HE DOESN’T . M AYBE HE JUST GOT LUCKY .
    —Neil Ruble, Heritage Christian school, class of 1987
    B RIAN W ARNER AND I WERE IN THE SAME CLASS AT A C HRISTIAN SCHOOL IN C ANTON , O HIO . B OTH B RIAN AND I REJECTED THE RELIGIOUS PRESSURE OF OUR EDUCATION QUITE STRONGLY . H E, OF COURSE, PROMOTES HIMSELF AS A SATANIST . I ’VE REJECTED THE WHOLE IDEA OF GOD AND S ATAN, FIRST BY BEING AN AGNOSTIC AND THEN RECENTLY BY BECOMING A WITCH .
    —Kelsey Voss, Heritage Christian school, class of 1987
    I’ D LIKE TO ASK [M ARILYN M ANSON ], “D ID I INFLUENCE YOU IN ANY WAY TO THIS LIFESTYLE ?” I KEEP THINKING , “W OW, DID I DO SOMETHING I SHOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY ?”
    —Carolyn Cole, former principal, Heritage