The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller by Richard Long Page B

her forehead. A dimple of red, just a drop really, appeared above her eyes like a shiny red bindi . Momma didn’t move. Martin thought he must have done something wrong and began to squeeze the trigger again. Then he saw her eyes. They were changing from a sweat-soaked stare of horror to a milky glaze of utter confusion.
    The tiny .22-caliber bullet was ricocheting inside her skull like a pinball, lighting up old memories of love and cruelty as it whipped the spidery gray filaments of her brain into a six-egg omelet. When the lump of lead finished its final twists and turns, there was nothing left of life inside her but the last few twitches of jangling nerves and pulsing capillaries. The same look of bewilderment remained painted on her face as her body slowly crumpled beneath her.
    “ Yesssss!” Paul shouted at the top of his lungs, sweeping the little boy up in his arms. “ You did it! You did it! YOU DID IT!”
    Martin’s face lit up in a rainbow of triumph and vindication...his smile beaming from ear to ear and back again. Yet, as he watched the drops of blood ooze slowly from his mother’s nostrils he felt an emptiness rising from his toes and burrowing into his chest. The switch clicked again, so hard he could almost hear it. All the feelings he had ever known…love, sadness, hurt, longing…all of them folded up inside his head, tucking themselves away into old wooden cupboards and dark, musty closets where they could never be found again. One by one, the doors closed like an endless hotel corridor. When the final door slammed shut, everything that could have called itself Martin had been silently locked away. And the smile on his face vanished like a wisp of smoke.

Sad, wasn’t it? I almost hated telling you, but I figured you’d want to know. Everybody wants the backstory. Everyone wants to know how people “got that way.” Personally, I don’t think explanations help very much.
    They certainly didn’t help with me. I went to therapy for years, digging up all the worms and green goop that were supposed to free me from my demons. The results were less than liberating. I’m not saying I had it worse than Martin, but it was quite horrible in its own way…in its own special way. I won’t go into it now; you’ve already been through enough. Let’s just say it was bad. Take my word for it.
    Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. I suppose everybody does now and then, some more than others. But whenever I feel really sad about my lot in life, all the terrible things that happened, all the wonderful things that didn’t, I start to feel really icky about the self-pity too. I guess feeling sorry for myself makes me feel weak. Then I feel ashamed. So instead of just feeling bad about how shitty my life is, I feel bad about my feelings about how shitty my life is. All in all, it’s not worth it. Better to hop off the pity-pot and find something else to do.
    Actually, that was how this all started. I was feeling sorry for myself. And I was feeling bored with feeling sorry for myself. So I went on the web.

It seems so long ago now, but when I first discovered the website I thought it had to be a joke. I was just prowling around, looking for…well, looking for the stuff I always look for, when I clicked on a link and… boom! …there I was, staring face to face with an angry young man, dementedly sticking his tongue out. Not very startling, except for the fact that his tongue was split in two. My immediate appraisal of the blurry low-res image was to guess that it was a Photoshop alteration, poorly done. It was the poorly done aspect that captured my attention, drawing me in for a closer investigation that made my stomach churn and tighten. I know a thing or two about Photoshop and if I wanted to make a forked tongue look like it belonged to some Heavy-Metal-Demon-Snake-God, I’d make it long, tapered, slithery, curly, mobile. Not these twin fat lumpy wads of tissue that looked like your pal Jimmy just clipped