In Laymon's Terms

Robert Morrish

RECISELY AS THE clock struck midnight, Leonard struck his mother.

Hard.

With an axe.

Having seen more than his share of slasher movies, Leonard had thought himself prepared for the blood, but he was still startled by both its escape velocity and the sheer quantity. In the midst of his carefully-planned act, he paused for a moment, red drops trickling down his pallid features, struck by the absolute finality of what he was doing. It was that same thought that spurred him to continue. It was, after all, too late to turn back now.

He brought the carefully honed head of the axe down in less-than-careful arcs, settling into a kind of mindless rhythm, like a spastic, razor-sharp piston. Leonard’s sunken countenance took on a peculiar mix of quiet determination and fierce hatred, the two expressions briefly battling for dominance before settling themselves into their queer compromise.

He had come upon Mother in her sleep and, other than a brief initial squawk of surprise, she had offered no resistance. Soon, the only sounds were that of the clean whoosh of the axe cutting through the air, the disgustingly fleshy sound of the head striking home (nothing like the movies—Leonard had heard they used cabbage heads for that), and Leonard’s increasingly labored breathing. It went on like that.

Finally, when there was little left at his feet that was still recognizable, Leonard let the axe fall from his hands, his chest heaving and bony arms aching from the effort. He stared down at the strange mingling of springs and bones, blood and feathers, fabric and flesh, and a smile crept into place.

He had finally done it.

An act contemplated for years, but always shunned for fear of Mother’s vengeance—should he fail again, as he had botched so many of his life’s undertakings—had finally been executed. The recipient of so many years of abuse, Leonard reveled in finally turning the tables on his tormentor.

Of course, to be fair, life hadn’t always been an unforgiving cycle of punishment and forced forgiveness. He hadn’t always looked upon this woman with fear and loathing. There had been a time, a time that seemed more than a lifetime away now, when the thought of his Mother had conjured images of softness and sweetness. Leonard’s recollections of these times were tinged by a filmy haze, the soft-focus effect of a movie’s dream sequence. He remembered a distant kindness, a firm dedication, and the softness of his mother’s breast. Long-buried memories flooded Leonard; he glanced down involuntarily at the subject of his thoughts. Seeing—really seeing—the mess he had made, Leonard’s eyes bulged. He slapped a hand ineffectually over his mouth, cheeks ballooning, and sprinted for the bathroom leaving sticky red tracks in his wake.

The morning after Leonard killed his mother, he was ten minutes late for work. Confused skies threatened rain between intermittent flashes of a sun seeking center stage. Leonard worried.

Rain would be bad. The ground was still loose, despite his attempts to pack it down. The rain would break up the soil, bring her remains floating to the surface, a head here, a foot there...didn’t bury her deep enough, should’ve been more careful...

Entering the company lot, Leonard’s runaway paranoia train was nearly derailed by a collision. With a Mercedes, no less. Fiesta vs. Benz, clerk vs. VP—the loser, on all counts, would be me. Again.

Leonard ducked lower in his seat to avoid the heat-seeking glare of the other, executive-level driver. Killed my mother, wrecked my car, lost my job—not my week. Leonard struggled to control a sudden attack of giggles before they became uncontrollable hiccups of hysteria.

Taking a last look at the bunching clouds, Leonard flashed again on the carefully detailed disposal of his mother’s body, a process that had kept him up all night. Not that he could have slept anyway.

He’d spread Mother far and wide in the field behind the house, drawn pentagrams in the dirt over each spot, then finally burned her various nefarious possessions. Just like it had said to do in her books. Just the way he had planned it. All the precautions had been taken; everything required to prevent her from coming back had been done.

But it was hard to remember exactly what the books had said. There were so many of them, each seemingly filled with conflicting wisdom, advising on everything from potions to poisons, from familiars to phases of the moon. And it all tended to run together in his mind—although it pained him to admit it, Leonard had to admit that his research on safeguards against Mother’s reanimation had been less than meticulous. In truth, he had recalled as much as he could, and...extrapolated the rest. At least he’d been careful to commit the act precisely at midnight—he was pretty sure he remembered reading something about that.

In spite of whatever hindsight doubts might plague him, the plan had worked. Leonard was sure. There was no way she could come back from what he had done to her. Her parts were scattered across the back field like a long summer’s worth of pollen.

Once safely inside his work cubicle, though, Leonard wound up staring at his monitor in a numb fugue, fingers occasionally crawling over the keys with all the vigor of two slowly expiring spiders. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he held a vague hope that his stupor was not too noticeable to his co-workers. In a more lucid moment, Leonard would have realized that he needn’t worry. To his fellow employees he held all the visibility, and attraction, of a social disease that stubbornly refused to go away. A lifetime of Mother’s ministrations had left Leonard a collective vegetable, unable to function in social situations, a complete turnip in front of a group.

Thankfully, maintaining a reasonable facade was the extent of Leonard’s cover-up duties.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about publicly covering up Mother’s disappearance.

Happily, she’d been a recluse for so many years that hardly anyone knew she existed anymore.

Luckily, he’d had the means to dispose of her in the necessary way.

It was all good.

Leonard’s worries really were few, because as far as neighbors, acquaintances, and the rest of the world were concerned, dear Mother was a name on a mailbox, and nothing more. She hadn’t left the house in several years. In fact, Leonard felt there was a good chance that an entire decade had rolled by without Mother’s stubborn jaw being struck by the light of day. A few co-workers and neighbors probably vaguely recollected from brief, awkward conversations with Leonard that he still lived with his Mother, but no one had laid eyes upon her emaciated hag-frame for a long, long time.

The failure of anyone to miss his Mother was perhaps the only benefit of her extended, self-imposed hermitization. The downside of her internal exile, on the other hand, was indeed a steep slope, for her self-imposed seclusion meant that Leonard had been the sole subject of her perverse whims and desires. He’d tried, when he was younger, to run away, and later to simply move out, but Mother would have none of it. She’d tracked him down and forced him to return home, all without ever actually leaving the house herself. Whatever else he felt about his Mother, Leonard had to admit that her powers were indeed impressive. He refused to even think about the time he’d tried to burn down the house, and her with it. The weeks of Mother-induced agony that followed were more than he could bear even to recall.

Through it all, there’d been no one to liberate Leonard from her mistreatments and molestations. Relatives on her side of the family were pretty much nonexistent, at least as far as Leonard knew. There had been Nana, of course—Mother’s mother, and a Wicked Grandma if ever there was one, at least until she’d gone to her grave when Leonard was sixteen. It was from Nana that his mother had acquired her cruelty. And her power...

As for his father, he had persevered for several years, but his eventual abrupt disappearance was testimonial to Mother’s overpowering aura. The poor man had clearly had all he could take. And Leonard’s sister, well, she had tried to cope with Mother in her own way, but in the end, her strong will—inherited from her maternal family tree, no doubt—had led her to rebel, and she had simply left one day, never to return.

Mother, meanwhile, went on with business as usual while her family fell by the wayside. She had always been a reclusive sort, but her hibernations had taken on agoraphobic proportions when Nana died. With her passing, Mother inherited the all-important secrets that the elder witch had hoarded until her dying day. Within a few weeks of the funeral, Mother had severed all ties with the outside world—although those ties had largely consisted of monthly consorts with twelve accomplices in locked-basement rituals. The strange sounds that emitted from that subterranean chamber were often sufficient to drive Leonard from the house—temporarily, of course. Once armed with Nana’s matriarchal wisdom, Mother had dismissed her former peers and carried on alone. The basement became her private sanctuary; no one else in the family had been allowed to venture down there in over a decade. Whatever toys, comics, and other possessions of Leonard’s that had been left or stored in the basement became forever lost to him once she barred the door at the top of the stairs.

Flying solo, Mother had become even more obsessed, performing her rituals with increasing frequency and fervor. The secrets that had finally been revealed to Mother began to ferment in her brain, proving to be a catalyst, transforming her from an insignificant practitioner to one of frightening potency—and driving her over the edge into stark lunacy.

What it all meant now, though, was that there were no close friends, no caring relatives to notice her absence. For that, Leonard was extremely thankful. But would he be able to maintain his composure, his guise of innocence and ignorance, in the face of suspicious questioners? He was afraid not. He particularly doubted if he possessed the strength to stand up to police interrogation, at least not the way he imagined such a session:

“Where’s your mother, son? What did you do with her?”

“I didn’t do anything with her. She...she just disappeared.”

“Disappeared, huh. Killed her and buried her in the yard, didn’t you?”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Don’t lie to me. It’s written all over your face. You ungrateful despicable little shit.”

“No. No. You don’t understand. She hurt me, she...”

It would be at least that bad. Or worse. Under the hot lights, his resolve would crumble like stale Saltines. It was too horrible to even contemplate.

And if he tried to tell them of the experiments that Mother had tried on him, the crimes she had perpetrated—they’d never believe such awful things of a frail old lady. And even if he could convince them of her evil, they’d most likely come to the conclusion that immorality and instability ran in the family. After all, witchcraft had been considered the province of the deranged for some centuries now.

Thinking of Mother’s treatment led Leonard to absentmindedly rub his wrists, massaging scars that had long since faded—physically, if not emotionally. His return to the here-and-now was accompanied by the realization that his bladder was uncomfortably full. Pushing himself away from the varied piles that constituted his desktop, Leonard rose to go to the washroom.

Turning the corner from his cubicle, he spied Heather and Anna from Accounting, standing together at the coffee station. They were both total babes, although almost exact opposites—Heather tall and willowy, golden-haired with small, perky breasts, a taut bottom, and incredible legs that seemed to just keep going and going and going, from her tightly-muscled calves all the way up under the hemline of her barely-there skirts; Anna, meanwhile, was short, dark-haired and very curvy, with hourglass hips and huge breasts that nestled beneath her tight sweaters, demanding attention. The two gals were close friends, and had played starring roles in Leonard’s fantasies—both separately and together.

Still staring at the pair, he caught his toe on the carpeting and stumbled, barely catching himself before he fell. When he looked up, the two women were eyeing him with undisguised amusement.

“I hate it when that happens,” Leonard offered, rearranging his substantial lips into what he hoped was a tentative smile. He hurried on past them.

As the Men’s room door swung shut behind him, he thought he heard one of them make a remark. To Leonard’s burning ears, it sounded like: “What a geek.”

Someday, they’ll be sorry...It was an old vow, but with this particular utterance came the sudden realization that, with Mother’s resources now at his disposal, he might be able to finally bring to bear some of his dimly conceived vengeance. Of course, with his inattention to detail, he could just as easily get himself into some serious trouble.

Leonard cast a quick, reflexive glance at the mirror and suddenly froze. There, just above his arrow of a chin, speckled on his sunken cheek, was a telltale spot of red. Leonard’s Adam’s apple seemed to grow larger and lodge in his throat as he stepped closer to the mirror, marveling at his own carelessness and stupidity.

Except...it looked a little too bright to be blood. Wetting his finger and scraping off a bit of the unknown substance, Leonard brought a fleck first to his nose and then to his lips.

“Not bad,” he muttered in response to the familiar tang.

Leonard never ate his scrambled eggs without catsup, and sometimes it seemed that he never completed his breakfast without wearing some of it. Wiping the smudge of Heinz away, Leonard couldn’t help but wonder how many people had already seen that beauty mark this morning and smirked accordingly.

With a final, resigned glance at the mirror, Leonard turned away to proceed with his business. Possessed of beak-like nose and similarly bird-like body, Leonard resembled nothing so much as an ornitharian shoved rudely and unwillingly into a human form. All elbows and sharp angles, prominent Adam’s apple and fly-away ears, Leonard was decidedly unattractive—or at least that seemed to be the verdict of all those who had ever cared to pass judgment.

With matching sigh and shrug, Leonard continued on his way to the urinal. He took his time, hoping that his audience would have departed the coffee station by the time he exited. Even though potential tormentors still lurked around every corner, Leonard sought refuge in the thought that his elementary enemy—his Mommy dearest—had been conquered...and divided.

In the hours and days that followed, though, Leonard’s cheery bravado began to falter. Despite repeated self-assurances, he couldn’t completely convince himself that he had done an adequate or thorough job on his Mother. This was perhaps not surprising, given that Leonard was almost innately incapable of self-confidence. Most of his waking moments in the first few days after the act were marked by an ever-present anxiety that he attempted to sublimate, but which kept popping to the surface of his mind with the persistence of a gas-bloated corpse.

On the fourth or fifth day afterwards, though, he began to relax a bit. The nervous glances over his shoulder when he was home alone became less frequent, and soon he ceased to peer around corners with dread.

After a full week, a certain enthusiasm took hold, and Leonard even began to display a newfound heartiness at work, although his cheerfully offered greetings were generally greeted with curious stares from those who had come to regard Leonard as an ambulatory aspect of the decor, no more capable of speech than the average fern, and perhaps slightly more diseased.

Soon caught up in his newfound ebullience, Leonard barely noticed the days slipping by. Another week came and went like a blur, and Leonard found himself actually viewing the onset of the weekend, and the resulting loss of interaction with other people, with disappointment, a shocking discovery in view of the fact that he had formerly eagerly awaited the two-day respite. The only thing he was looking forward to this weekend was finally removing the impressive assortment of padlocks that were still adorning the cellar door. He hadn’t a clue where Mother had put the keys, but he was now the proud owner of a top-of-the-line set of bolt-cutters, and those would most certainly do the trick. Truth be known, Leonard held out faint hope that some of his old comic books might still be down in the cellar, shoved back in a cobwebby corner.

Whistling his way out through the revolving doorway and into the sunny late afternoon, he felt a twinge of jealousy as he watched a clique of co-workers head off rowdily with cries of “happy hour.” So moved was Leonard, in fact, so full of his new carefree, jocular attitude, that he came to the momentous decision to go out on the town himself that evening.

Moving in random spurts through the herds of cars that jostled through two- and three-lane chutes, Leonard mulled over his evening’s destination, sampling random club names from those he had heard mentioned by others at work. “McMullens, I think,” he crowed to his empty Fiesta, “or maybe Uncle Ernie’s!” Buoyed by his effusive new attitude, Leonard took little notice of the bothersome traffic, and was home before he knew it.

Having decided upon Dapper Dan’s as his destination—at least initially, and after that, who knows, he might even go bar-hopping—Leonard pursed his lips now in consideration of what to wear on his coming-out night. Trying vainly to visualize an acceptable mode of dress from the meager, outdated selection hanging in his closet, Leonard entered the house (his house now, he reminded himself) and was halfway across the living room before the word insinuated its way into his head, causing his jolly whistle to wither and die upon his lips.

“Leonard.”

If Leonard hadn’t relieved himself prior to leaving work, he would have wet his pants at that moment, guaranteed.

“How nice of you to come home to take care of your poor, sick mother,” came the voice, muttered fleshily, as though through lips numb with Novocain.

As Leonard turned, the key ring slipped from his hand, jangling as it struck the hardwood floor and echoing the tortuous strumming of his every nerve ending. In the shadow of the kitchen doorway—a shadow too deep to exist this early in a summer afternoon, a shadow that bore a stench of rotting carrion—there, there stood Mother.

Or more accurately, there hunched Mother, her upper body twisted forward and sideways at a crazy angle, the etchings of Leonard’s handiwork plainly visible on her flesh. No miracle had recombined her various parts from beyond the grave, no sudden deific act had assembled her wholly and artistically; rather, it appeared to Leonard as though the sundry bits and pieces of Mother had burrowed and wormed their way up through the soggy ground, squirming together like lustful lemmings, attaching themselves to their neighbors as best they could. In places the reformation was impressively accurate, marred only by still-healing angry scars and clumps of drying mud, in other spots the job was more...haphazard, as though reconstructive surgery had been performed by a blind man with hooks for hands.

“What are you staring at Leonard? Come closer, let me kiss you, like a good mother should. I’ll introduce you to some of the friends I met in the earth.”

Leonard thought he had known despair before in his life, but now he learned the true meaning of the word. His worst fears realized, he stumbled backwards, knowing with the inevitability of the damned that he was staring straight into the gaping, gap-toothed mouth of his downfall.

Terror and desperation saturating his mind, he attempted to turn and run, but flight was denied him, as he felt an icy-cold shroud envelop him, glaciating him in mid-step. Slowly, against his will, against the efforts of his still-straining muscles, he felt his body twisting into a position that any contortionist would have viewed with admiration. Leonard’s head bent backwards in a position so painful, so physically impossible, that he found himself listening, straining to hear the sound of his own neck breaking. Mother watched impassively, chewing on a bit of her cheek.

“I don’t know what to do with you Leonard. You disappoint me so. After your father and sister proved to be such failures, you were my last hope.”

She ran ragged stumps over her calamity of a face. “You’re a bad, bad boy, Leonard. It was such slow work putting all my pieces back together. And my knowledge of anatomy isn’t all that it should be. I’m afraid it’s going to take a lot of experimenting before I’m seamless again.”

She sighed, a sound that came out more like a dry heave due to the numerous patchy openings in her throat. “Despite all the pain and frustration you’ve brought me, Leonard, I find that I still can’t bring myself to dispose of you once and for all.”

Hearing her words, Leonard was torn—almost literally—between hope of reprieve and a baneful wish to finish it—just finish it, you bitch—and end his suffering.

“Because you’re my one and only son, I’ll spare you this one last time. But this is the last time. One more act of treason and I’ll see to it that you suffer for all eternity. For now, you’ll just get a taste of that punishment.” Her diatribe complete, Mother mushily snapped her fingers at Leonard, and he collapsed in a silent heap.

Vaguely, Leonard felt the scraping and bumping of steps beneath his back and realized he was being dragged down to the cellar. The always-locked-and-bolted cellar, guarded by Mother like Cerberus at the Gates of Hell. At least I’ll find out what’s so damned important down here, a voice whispered insanely in his head.

The sounds of his arrival seemed to awaken other denizens of the cellar. A voice croaked from the distant corner of the blackened basement, rasping as though its very vocal cords were being stretched on a rack: “Leonard! Have you come to free us?”

“Yes, yes, is it finally time?” echoed another, burbling and gurgling through a liquid prison of some sort.

“Dad? Sis? Is...is that you?” Leonard’s voice cracked.

He was looking around, trying to make sense of the darkness when another voice, one that seemed familiar yet somehow altered, came from everywhere and nowhere.

“Dear Agnes. It’s so nice to see you again.”

A gasp. From Mother, it seemed.

“You’ve been so distracted with your little facelift, you’ve forgotten all about me, haven’t you?”

Perhaps more whimper than gasp in response this time. And Leonard was sure that response came from Mother this time. And he thought maybe he recognized the voice of the other speaker as well, although it...it just couldn’t be.

But just then Mother released her grip on him, sending him sliding past her down the stairs, his head performing a particularly sharp ricochet off the bottom step. Colored lightning zig-zagged across his vision and Leonard had a moment to wonder whether the light was real or he was literally seeing stars, before consciousness slipped away.

Some time later, awareness seeped back. Leonard felt cold stone beneath his back, a sticky wetness oozing around an epicenter of pain on the back of his head.

“Hello, Leonard.”

That voice again. He was sure now that he knew it.

“N-nana? Is that you?” He struggled to raise his head.

“Oh, Leonard. I’m so touched that you remember your grandmother after so long.”

“Where’s Mother? Have you...? Is she gone?”

“She is quite gone. I think it’s safe to say she won’t be plaguing you any further.”

“Oh, Nana...Thank you! Thank you!” Leonard was embarrassed to realize he was starting to cry, but the relief he felt...oh God, free at last.

“I wouldn’t be thanking me just yet.”

“Why?” Leonard asked. “What do you mean?” He tried to raise his head again, realized there was more holding him down than just bruises and stiffness. A moan came from somewhere in the darkness behind him.

“Your Mother was right about one thing. You’ve been a bad boy.” Her wizened, desiccated face loomed down at him out of the darkness. Whether spent alive or dead, the years had not been kind to Nana.

“A very bad boy. And you must be punished.”

Leonard heard himself whimper. The sound was echoed by a second whimper from elsewhere in the cellar. His grandmother’s face vanished back into the gloom, her steps echoing through the cellar as she tottered away.

“Nana! W-wait! I...”

“Oh don’t worry,” came the fading reply. “I’ll be back. Eventually.”

Leonard felt something like a fat, cold snake slither across his chest, and he started to scream.

He was still screaming when a weary but satisfied Grandmother closed the cellar door, her family together again at last.