Sex and Murder Magazine

By Richard Radford

It took Chester Rakestraw an entire cigarette to amble from the beat up chair in the living room to the kitchen sink. He would have preferred to stay reclined until much later in the morning, but it was feeding time. Standing in front of the rusty basin, he coughed up a thick rivulet of phlegm onto the pile of fermenting dishes. He threw the cigarette butt in after it, which bobbed in the few inches of opaque water in the bottom of the sink. Placing his hand on the dirty orange counter for support, he stumbled around in a half-circle and looked at the clock. It was only six-thirty in the morning and he felt exhausted. Had he slept? He wondered. Swiping an unlabeled bottle from the counter, he took a swig, cringed, wiped his mouth with the back of his bathrobe sleeve, and belched.

Chester felt his age today. Every joint in his body felt like it was pulling out of its socket. He was only in his late forties, but most of the folks who saw him on his bi-monthly trek to town gauged him to be around seventy. Beneath his frayed and discolored bathrobe, his bones jutted out in odd angles, and his wild grey hair flowed across his shoulders and into his beard surrounding his swollen face. Mostly he resembled a toad poking its head out of a half-crushed tin can.

Weak sunlight sprayed along the water-stained ceiling from a triangular space at the top of the thick brown curtains. He panicked. The wooden clothespin that held the curtains together to keep anyone from seeing in had slipped off, and he strained to reach up and clasp it together again. A feeling of safety flowed through him.

From the back bedroom he heard a rattling noise, and sighed. He felt like going back to sleep, but feeding time couldn't wait. He slammed the bottle down and plucked up the dog food bowl off the counter. Plodding towards the refrigerator he lit another cigarette. He shuffled slowly and managed to smoke two-thirds of it before stubbing it out against the side of the fridge. The burning cinders fell amid a pile of refuse pushed up against an immense sack of potatoes, and he slowly stomped on it with one beslippered foot, just in case it caught. The last thing he needed was a fire to tend to.

On the kitchen floor, as throughout the entire house, several inches of litter covered everything except well-worn paths made from the continuous trips between the fridge, the sink, the recliner, and the back bedroom. Some trash usually collected around the front door, and was only scooped aside with a snow shovel when he left for town. He kept so much to his routine he didn't need to think to get around. He simply let his body follow the paths, barely lifting his soles from the floor. If he strayed too far he would be buffeted back on course. Routine kept his life from complete collapse.

Opening the refrigerator, he groaned as he reached in to lift the lid off a five-gallon bucket. All of the shelves had been removed to accommodate it, and the fridge was only occupied by a collection of bottles, some empty, and what appeared to be a few moldy vegetables. The freezer was filled with several pounds of frozen meat. Peeking into the bucket, he saw the food supply was nearing the bottom, so he removed a few packages of meat from the freezer and set them out to thaw. From the back bedroom the rattling sounded again, this time a little louder.

"'K, 'K, hearya," he croaked. His voice sounded unused and old, like a rusty garden shed hinge.

Picking up a large ladle next to the bucket, he scooped some of the food out and smelled it. It didn't seem as though it had turned yet. He cooked in large quantities, which made the feedings easier. He boiled several pounds of meat and potatoes at a time and kept it in the bucket. Usually one load would last for a week or two, but he always checked to make sure it hadn't gone bad.

Lifting the spoon to his mouth, he tasted a piece of meat and chewed it slowly. It was still good. He often skipped meals entirely and subsisted from the bucket as well, after all, the food was fit for humans too. At first he had tried mixing in some of the bulk dry dog food they had at the supermarket, but it ended up being cheaper to simply use meat and potatoes. It was a healthy enough diet for anything, and it made her stool more regular, so cleaning up the cage became much easier. The dog food didn't taste very good, either.

He spooned a heaping portion into the bowl with the three fingers and thumb of his left hand. Though he was conspicuously lacking his ring finger, which ended in an untidy stump, the hand still functioned well enough for what he needed to do. Capping the bucket and closing the refrigerator, he clutched the bowl in his arms and trundled towards the back bedroom.

He opened the door and stepped into the darkness of the room. From the faint light of the living room the makeshift chicken wire wall shone dully, and from behind the cage came the sounds of scampering and scratching. A putrid smell made him squint his eyes. It would be time for a cleaning soon.

"K, Sammy, K, K, K," Chester breathed. She was excited today. He felt bad about the confinement, but letting her out into the yard to run around was just out of the question. The outside world was too dark and too wicked for anyone to survive in. He would never leave the house if not for his need for food, as well as cigarettes and liquor. After a trip to the supermarket, it took him days to recover from the dread that trailed him home, its black tentacles seeping in through the cracks and spaces.

He reached down cautiously to the latch on the cage. He knew Sammy was good deep down in her heart. It was Sammy who had bitten off his ring finger, but he knew it wasn't her fault. It was just in her nature. Evil did not exist inside the walls of the house. It could not exist there. He didn't care much about the loss of the finger, except the harrowing trip to the hospital, where they asked too many questions, and he was sure he had contracted more diseases there than he went in with. Otherwise life went on as normal, though digging had become a challenge. He had wanted his wedding band back, but despite searching Sammy's stool for days it had never turned up.

At the precise moment he unlatched the cage, the most horrifying noise imaginable, a sound he had not heard in years, emanated from the living room. Chester gasped like a fish out of water. It took a moment to rationally pair the origin of the sound with his explosive fear, and when he connected them it only made him more afraid.

It was the sound of the doorbell.

After a moment Chester gathered himself together. He had flung the bowl of food against the wall during his panic attack. He sucked air into his lungs and steadied himself against the chicken wire, his nine fingers grasping like the paws of a monkey.

It was fine, he told himself. Whoever it was at the door would go away and leave him be.

He reached for the bowl slowly, joints creaking as he bent. The doorbell rang again, and he grimaced. After another pause the knocking started. Chester steeled himself and decided it would be OK if he could only keep the evil out. It wasn't until he heard the voice from outside that he wept with confusion.

"Mr. Rakestraw?" it said from the other side of the cheap plywood door.

A voice. A voice from the evil outside. It knew his name. It must be the devil. Come to claim him finally.

With desperate effort Chester clawed himself along the walls to the front door. He tried to peek through the curtains to see who it was, but the overgrown bushes obscured the view. The knocking started again and a voice called his name. He sunk to his creaky knees. Whatever beckoned him from the porch would not go away. There was no way to avoid this fate, he knew. He would have to face whatever demon that had come to consume him, and Sammy too no doubt.

The devil cares nothing for the living, be it human or otherwise, he thought. Unlocking the door's several bolts, but keeping the chain latched, Chester grabbed the snow shovel and peaked out into the blinding light. At first all he saw was a dark shape on the front porch, tall and gangly.

"Mr. Rakestraw?" a cheerily smarmy voice said.

As Chester's eye adjusted, he saw a man, or what looked like a man, dressed in black mostly, with a white collar. A preacher, no doubt, or a devil disguised as a preacher. He remained silent.

"Mr. Rakestraw? Is that you in there? Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Reverend Paul D. Coulter. I've only been here about six months but I've heard…"

The minister looked polished and shiny, a spotless figure with soft blue eyes below shortly cropped black hair and thin, girlish eyebrows. He appeared newly minted, as if nothing had actually affected him in his life. To Chester, Coulter's pink face looked like an unused pencil eraser, hardened and clean, with a wicked, smiling face drawn on it.

Chester slammed the door and sunk against it. If it was in fact a devil, it would come in and get him anyway. There were always cracks and spaces somewhere. If it was just a fool preacher, he would eventually get hungry and go home.

For a while there was silence, then the knocking continued again and Chester started.

"Mr. Rakestraw? It's me, Reverend Coulter. I've come…well, I've come to see about your needs, bring you back into the fold. Into the light. I just want to come in a moment and sit a spell, talk about some important matters." There was a long pause. "I'll come back with police if necessary," the voice said somberly.

The statement had the desired result, and within a few seconds the door stood wide, with the withered and tattered figure of Chester Rakestraw barring the entrance. Next to the pristine and clean-shaven figure of Coulter, he looked like a shrunken wild beast. Even Coulter was taken aback by his appearance, but quickly regained his composure.

"Well it is just so nice to meet you, sir!" Coulter said brightly, extending a hand toward Chester, who neither moved nor broke his fierce squint. "I always pop down this way on Tuesdays, a nice walk to take in the nice scenery." Coulter swept his hand behind him across the expanse of the dead grass and gnarled, ghoulish bushes.

"Wha' you wan'," Chester growled.

"Why, just to catch a word with you for a moment," Coulter replied. "I haven't seen you down at our church since my family's arrival to this God blessed town, so I thought I'd pay you a visit. May I come in?"

Considering the normal state of his thought process, Chester did a surprisingly quick and logical calculation. Rudimentarily, it went like this: demon preachers were bad, but harmless mostly. Demon cops, however, came armed and ready to fight a holy war. He had learned that in his early days. At the very least, if worse came to worse, he could brain this fool with the shovel and bury him in the garden. The preacher didn't look capable of fending off a mayfly. Despite his seeming eagerness for entrance, Coulter went into the leaning house with trepidation, and gagged initially at the smell.

I've been through worse in my time of saving souls, he reminded himself, nonchalantly putting his immaculate sleeve to his face. I've been to Africa.

As soon as Coulter cleared the door, Chester threw down the shovel and slammed and locked the door with such force that the good minister felt momentarily afraid. His fears were immediately relieved when Chester, after checking all the locks again, settled into his recliner, lit a cigarette, and stared towards the battered television set. He was visibly rattled, and kept glancing towards the back of the house, but used all of his energy to create a casual air to his appearance. Although the TV was too old to have a remote control, he had solved the problem by cutting down a long branch in the backyard for changing the channels. He jabbed towards the set a few times until static images began rolling across the screen. Coulter stood smiling in silence next to Chester, who pretended to ignore him completely, until his face began to hurt. Finally he spoke.

"Why, Mr. Rakestraw, if that isn't a nice television set you've got there," Coulter said sweetly. "Mrs. Coulter and I have one just like it for the kids to watch their cartoons on!"

The old battered television set, surrounded by a mountain of trash, was marred in places on the screen from having been poked by the stick, and several holes were also present in the wall surrounding it. The single tinny speaker had been knocked out, and hung from a couple of small wires like an eyeball from its socket. Coulter cleared his throat.

"Mr. Rakestraw, may I talk to you for a moment?" he asked, and looked for a place to sit down. The only other chair not filled with garbage in the room had conspicuous brown stains on it, so Coulter decided to remain standing.

"Mr. Rakestraw, now I know I'm new to the area, but I have already heard a lot of nice things about you from your people," the minister continued in patronizing tones. "They all said 'Chester Rakestraw is such a nice man, we wonder why we don't see him more often.' And I of course said 'Well, no doubt I'll see him in church one of these days.' But they all said 'Mr. Rakestraw has not been to church in a long, long time.' I was shocked, Mr. Rakestraw. So I decided to come out here myself and see if you needed help in finding your path back to us."

The comments people from his congregation made about Chester were not exactly that pleasant, and many had claimed the old man was crazy. One fool had even told the minister Chester was an evil wizard, conjuring and breeding demons in his house. He had heard superstitions about shut-ins all over the world, but found himself surprised that a sane, well-bred white person would say anything like that.

Chester didn't flinch, and Coulter sighed but was not discouraged. Am I not, he thought, the same Reverend Paul D. Coulter who had saved an entire Burkinabe village single-handedly? Before me they had no hope. It's obvious the world can be saved, one village at a time.

Coulter walked over to the television set and turned it off. Chester scowled at him from one eye and picked up the stick menacingly, attempting to poke the minister and goad him into turning it back on. Coulter dodged the feeble attack. Chester's arm began to ache, so he relented and lit another cigarette from the end of the first, which he dropped onto the burnt circle of carpet next to the recliner.

"Just listen to me a moment, Mr. Rakestraw," Coulter said, a kind of pleading in his tone. "Listen to this: the Lord loves you." He paused, waiting for a response. None came.

"Jesus lives in this house!" Coulter said. Chester looked around conspiratorially, as if He might suddenly burst from one of the mounds of trash.

"Besides," he added, looking around the grubby room, as Chester swigged from a bottle, "a man can't live by bread alone! I talked to people from town about you. You live alone here, no family, no friends, no pets. Come to us. The Lord is your family, the Lord is your friends, the Lord is your pet…what's that, Mr. Rakestraw?"

"No'lone," Chester growled, looking nervously towards the back bedroom. "Leave."

"Mr. Rakestraw, I spoke to the previous minister at our congregation, Thomas Jaffe?" Coulter said, his tone darkening. "He told me about you and your past, Chester. About your father and mother, who abandoned you. About your wife and daughter, how they left you here years ago. About a man who was so lonely and in grief he needed a helping hand out of the darkness. 'He won't come easy,' old Jaffe said, 'he's proud and he's strong, but he's a good man and a good soul. It's worth the effort.' Come to us. Join us. Let us fill your heart with love." Coulter extended a hand out to Chester, who had his eyes fixated on the back bedroom's door with a panicked expression.

Jacob Jaffe had actually described Chester as "more worthless than two dog turds," but Coulter was of a new breed of holy man. He had told Jaffe that Jesus himself wouldn't turn his back on even a single dog turd.

"No'lone, leave," Chester rasped.

"Now Chester, I won't leave till I get a promise to see you in church on Sunday. Why, I have half a mind to bring the whole congregation with me here to sing and praise the Lord!"

"Leave!" Chester yelled, stumbling up from his chair and into a mound of garbage.

"I tried to find your family…reuniting estranged relatives is my main focus in my ministry, you see," Coulter said, turning back to Chester to aid him in standing. "I find that gluing back a shattered whole is better than sinning as a single fragment alone! But I couldn't find head nor tail of them anywhere. Do you have any idea where they moved? Or if she took back her maiden name?"

Chester collapsed to the recliner and groaned.

"Do you know where Genie is?" the minister asked, leaning close and putting a hand on Chester's shoulder. "Where is Genie?"

"Gar'en," Chester said, exhausted and defeated.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Gar'en!"

"Garrum…?"

"Gar'en! Dead!"

Coulter paused. He had found no record of her death. It was probably a delusional fantasy brought on by loneliness. The minister had been dealing with people like Chester for years, and he felt he knew them inside and out, how to push their buttons, though it was of course for their own good. He had learned that even the worst shut-in would immediately open the door with a mere mention of the police, though he had never been required to follow up on the threat.

He found how easy it was to research background on people and their families, and their estimated incomes. Nine times out of ten any of these sorts of people had at least one normal, financially well-off family member, who could be encouraged to donate money to Coulter's church. Sometimes they would fork over the money easily, and sometimes it took some mild coercion, but Coulter knew the Lord was working through him. Ten times out of ten the family member begged to make the donation anonymously, even to their family member, making Coulter promise he would keep their contribution, and more important their whereabouts, unknown. All that really mattered was helping people, though, he thought, and the more family he brought in, the more holy aid, and holy financial aid, he'd have in Chester's, and others just like him, spiritual recovery. This simple method had made God a considerable sum of money over the years.

"Oh, in the Garden of Heaven!" he said, and frowned delicately. "I'm so sorry to hear that. Did someone in her family come see you? Did they leave any documents? Any letters? Did they tell you if they adopted your daughter? Or where they live?"

"Leave!" Chester yelled, and stood up again, stumbling to weakly push Coulter from behind. "Leave, leave, leave!"

The minister could feel he was close to a breakthrough. A broken bone was painful to mend, he thought, but once it did it was a hundred times stronger than before.

"Where is Samantha?" he asked emphatically. "Where is your family?" From the back bedroom, the sounds of growling and mewling were heard. Coulter looked toward the door, which was slightly ajar.

"Leave! Stayaway!" Chester screamed, and fell into a fit of coughing to his knees, barring the path to the bedroom door.

"Why not let all of your life out into the light?"

"Leave! Stayaway!"

"It's OK, Chester; I'm not going to hurt you! I'm trying to help you, my son!"
Coulter tried to grab the old man's shoulder, but Chester dropped, clutching and biting at his leg.

"No!" Chester spluttered and coughed, as the minister tried to kick him away. "Don' take my family!"

Coulter reached down and shook Chester. From the doorway burst a small figure that pounced onto the minister, biting and clawing at him. A sound escaped from Coulter and he tried to fight it off, but he was in too much shock to speak. The little creature's long dirty blonde hair flew as it bit into the minister's throat, tearing and pounding at his chest. In a minute it was over and Coulter was still, the little creature having receded into the darkness and safety of the room on its hands and feet.

"Good Sammy, good Sammy," Chester said from where he was, leaned up against the wall half buried in refuse. He coughed and looked at the preacher on the floor lying in a large pool of blood, throat shredded, eyes wide open, silent except for a distant gurgling.

Probably already dead, and if not soon enough. Demon preacher after all, Chester thought.

Pulling a broken cigarette from his bathrobe, he lit it, inhaled deeply, and lowered to his knees, crawling along the path to the bedroom door. It would be a long week, he could tell already. He would have to rest up. A lot of digging to do. Tomorrow he would force himself to get the tools out and start, though it might take him several days to finish. It was warm out, though, and at this time of year the soil in the garden was easy enough to turn over. He hadn't done it recently, but he had a little while, at least a week, before the body of the minister would become a real problem.

From inside the room he heard some noise and looked in. Sammy was waiting on the inside of the open cage, bloody jaws dripping, rattling the empty food bowl in her hands against the chicken wire.



















































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