The Vanishing Read Free Page B

they were or who they could be. Too many hands and feet littered the crimson carpet. The butchery had obviously been going on for some time, probably all day, and Victor stared in horror at the extent of the carnage. This was so far beyond anything he had seen in even the goriest slasher movie that his brain felt numb and heavy and slow, overloaded by the sight. The smell was overpowering, a terrible noxious stench unlike anything he had ever encountered before. The only reason he wasn’t throwing up all over his shoes was because the numbness had engulfed all of his senses.
    But that wasn’t the worst thing.
    No, the worst thing was in the far corner of the room.
    His dad.
    Victor stared at his father. The old man was naked, his bare chest streaked with smears of blood, handprints visible in the thick crimson patina that covered his hairy skin, his arms so drenched with gore that they appeared to be skinned. Machete in hand, grinning crazily, his dad bounced from foot to bloody foot, his arousal evident in the large erection that bobbed with each jounce.
    Only . . .
    Only something was wrong. Very wrong. Victor’s eyes were drawn to his father’s midsection where, beneath the red wetness, the skin of his stomach looked white and slimy and wormlike. On the sides of his abdomen grew thick, coarse hair, and beneath the overlarge penis, where testicles should have been, was a rounded bony protrusion, like a rhino’s horn with the point softened. He tried to remember whether or not he had ever seen his dad naked before. Surely he would have remembered something this unusual, something this extreme—unless it was new, unless it was the result of some bizarre disease or a plastic surgery effort that had gone horribly awry.
    No. He knew even as he thought it that that was not the case. This was who his dad was. His father was hideously malformed and had no doubt been born this way. Victor glanced automatically at his mother’s limp, empty body. She’d known all along that her husband was like this.
    How could she have brought a child into the world, knowing it might inherit its father’s genes?
    Thank God he took after her.
    His dad was still bouncing from foot to foot, but he was moving forward as well, approaching Victor with the machete extended and an excited gleam in his eye. ‘‘Hi, Vic,’’ he said in that singsongy voice. ‘‘Hi, Vic.’’
    Whether or not his father had always been deformed, he had not been psychotic. This was something new, and Victor backed up, slowly reaching for his cell phone, not wanting to make any sudden moves. He wondered where the craziness had come from, whether it had been gradually building or had arrived full-blown. He didn’t recall any unusual behavior over the past few days. Glancing down for a moment at the keypad of the phone, he heard the wet slap of feet, saw a blur of red in his peripheral vision.
    ‘‘Hi, Vic.’’
    His father was standing right in front of him, grinning, machete raised.
    Victor tried to run.
    And then his dad was upon him.
     
Tom Lowry didn’t want to leave his lair, but when the night passed and then the day and then another night and another day with no one coming to visit him, no new victims arriving, he decided to venture out of the room and out of the house.
    The result was liberating.
    He found a sparrow on the lawn, crushed it in his fingers, feeling the guts ooze between his knuckles. Then he ran through the overgrown bushes on the edge of the property, blade in hand, hopping the fence that led to the Akkads’ lot next door, snaking along the perimeter of their property and sneaking into the next yard down the hill. A guard dog came after him, and he cut off the animal’s head with one swipe, reveling in the blood as it gushed from the gaping wound. Before anyone could come out to investigate, he was gone, onto the next property, where he drank water from a birdbath and ate half a dozen mosquitoes. Branches slashed his buttocks, thorns