The Storm King(101)
“I just remembered something about you, Nate. Pain’s your kink, isn’t it? So how do you hurt someone who likes it?”
Adam Decker had said essentially the same thing back in the lab junior year, right before battering Tom with a lacrosse stick.
Owen stood and walked to the bright end of the basement.
As Owen receded, Nate took in what he could of his surroundings. The room had no windows. From where he was bound he couldn’t even see the stairs to the main floor. His dexterity had improved enough that he thought he could stand and maneuver around the post he was tied to, but that wouldn’t do him any good as long as he remained flex-cuffed.
He wondered how long it would take people to figure out he was missing and how long from then it’d take for them to begin looking for him. Too long.
Owen returned behind a mass of something. As it rolled toward him, the edges of it quivered like the waterline.
“You remember Mom.”
Nate had prepared himself for something terrible, but it still took him a moment to reconcile the silhouette in front of him with what he knew of the human form. As he’d guessed, the poor woman was the origin of the basement’s whisper as well as its terrible smell.
You could call a person wizened in the grip of an illness a husk. Nate saw them in the hospital: ravaged patients reduced by their maladies to skin-cloaked skeletons. The woman being wheeled across the floor to him was the opposite of this. Bloated, swollen, obese: The images these words conjured weren’t in the same hemisphere as the territory where Mrs. Liffey now resided. The bands of her desiccated lips twitched and puckered as they droned endless words.
Nate gauged her weight at somewhere between four and five hundred pounds. Piled onto a frame just over five feet tall, the effect was monstrous. Saddlebags of flesh slipped around the arms of her wheelchair and dangled past her knees. Her face was lost amid her billowing cheeks, her shorn head nearly submerged in the mountains that erupted from her scabbed neck. An assortment of stained blankets were clipped together to cover her, but the woman shivered as if she was freezing.
“A bad boy, a bad friend, the worse friend, poison, poison, poison—”
The last time Nate saw Mrs. Liffey she’d been lean and impeccably styled. Now, he couldn’t even recognize her eyes, which were pocked like buttons from the pillow of her face. They were wet and drenched with animal panic.
“Owen.” Nate’s mouth had gone dry. He turned away from the woman. Looking at her felt like trampling whatever dignity she had left. Still, she whispered at him, hissing indictments and curses. He didn’t know why her voice never seemed to rise above a scoured hush.
Owen crouched beside him and turned Nate’s face so that it was again directed at Mrs. Liffey. “She loves being seen. Always checking her makeup in the car mirror, admiring her reflection in store windows. She could never get enough of herself. Now there’s so much more to look at.”
“What did you do?” A stroke could have left her wheelchair-bound, but that didn’t explain the size of her.
“Let’s show him, Mom.” Owen padded back across the room.
To his right, Pete’s eyes were wide and bright with horror at the sight of Mrs. Liffey. Nate shook his head at the boy. The kid’s instincts were good: Playing dead might be the best way to stay alive. Pete closed his eyes but his shoulders quaked.
Owen padded back, with a brown grocery bag filled with something that crinkled as it shifted. “I know we just fed you, but you always have room for more, don’t you? Greedy beast.” He plucked a snack cake from the bag. An oblong tube of joyous yellow sponge filled with a core of impossibly white cream.
“Love them, yes, thank you, more, so hungry—” Mrs. Liffey said, but as she spoke, her voice faded to a whimper, and the rate of her shaking accelerated. For the first time, Nate noticed that the cellar’s floor was laid with clear plastic drop cloths like those used by painters.
“Remember how she used to call me the Porker?” Owen asked. “A pig still lives here, but it’s not me.” He unwrapped the cake and dangled it above her mouth. “Open wide, now. You know how.”
She opened her mouth, and groaned with pantomimed pleasure as he forced the cake into her. He did this with another cake, and then a third and a fourth.
“All those years of starving yourself to look good, but this was all you wanted, wasn’t it? Isn’t it a relief to not care about what other people think?”
The woman said something, but her mouth was full and she began to gag. The mounds and rolls of her shook like a landscape caught in an earthquake.
A spray of mottled cream exploded from her mouth. Specks of it splattered over herself, the floor, and Owen. Nate now understood the viscous globs on Owen’s chest.
“You know better than to fight it. Remember, you like the cheese puffs and the French fries and gallons of cola, but these are your favorite.”
Owen grabbed a handful of Mrs. Liffey’s forearm, and squeezed. Vibrations of agony resonated from the woman. Nate now saw how her skin was dented and swollen with bruises that ran the spectrum from black to yellow. Owen clamped his hand over his mother’s nose to give her a choice between swallowing or suffocating.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Nate said. He couldn’t watch any more.
“I also give her pork rinds by the pound. You like that touch? You are what you eat, right?” Owen gave a sharp porcine squeal that made Nate jump.