Now he picked up the weights and started working out with them. His enormous shoulders and powerful arms quickly got into the familiar rhythm, and he began to work up a sweat.
Twenty-eight years ago, when he’d first expressed a desire to lift weights and become a body builder, his mother had thought it was an excellent idea. Long, brutal workouts with weights helped burn up the sexual energy that he was just then beginning to generate, caught as he was in the throes of puberty. Because he didn’t dare expose his demonic penis to a girl, vigorous weight training preoccupied him, seized his imagination and his emotions as sex might otherwise have done. Katherine had approved.
Later, as he packed on muscle tissue and became a formidable specimen, she had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting him grow so strong. Afraid that he might develop his body only so he could successfully turn on her, she had tried to take his weights away from him. But when he broke into tears and begged her to reconsider, she realized that she would never have anything to fear from him.
How could she ever have thought differently? Bruno wondered as he curled the dumbbells to his shoulders and then slowly let them down again. Hadn’t she realized that she would always be stronger than he was? After all, she had the key to the door in the ground. She had the power to unlock that door and make him go into that dark hole. No matter how big his biceps and triceps became, as long as she possessed that key, she would always be stronger than he was.
It was around that time, when his body began to develop, that she first told him that she knew how to come back from the dead. She’d wanted him to know that, after she died, she’d watch over him from the other side; and she’d sworn that she would come back to punish him if she saw him misbehaving or if he started getting careless about hiding his demonic heritage from other people. She had warned him a thousand times or more that, if he was bad and forced her to come back from the grave, she would throw him into the hole in the ground, lock the door, and leave him there forever.
But now, as he worked out in the dusty attic, Bruno suddenly wondered if Katherine’s threat had been empty. Had she really possessed supernatural powers? Could she really come back from the dead? Or was she lying to him? Was she lying because she was afraid of him? Was she afraid he would get big and strong–and then break her neck? Was her story about coming back from the grave nothing more than feeble insurance against his getting the idea that he could kill her and then be free of her forever?
Those questions came to him, but he was not capable of holding on to them long enough to explore each one and answer it. Disconnected thoughts surged like bursts of electric current through his short-circuiting brain. Each doubt was forgotten an instant after it occurred to him.
Contrarily, each fear that rose up did not fade away but remained, sparking and sputtering, in the dark corners of his mind. He thought of Hilary-Katherine, the latest resurrection, and he remembered that he had to find her.
Before she found him.
He began to shake.
He dropped one dumbbell with a crash. Then the other one. The floorboards rattled.
“The bitch,” he said fearfully, angrily.
***
The white cat licked Mrs. Yancy’s hand as she said, “Leo and Katherine worked up a complex story to explain the baby. They didn’t want to admit it was hers. If they did that, they had to point a finger at the man responsible, at some young suitor. But she didn’t have any suitors. The old man didn’t want anyone else touching her. Just him. Gives me the creeps. What kind of man would force himself on his own little girl? And the bastard started on her when she was only four! She wasn’t even old enough to understand what was happening.” Mrs. Yancy shook her gray head in shock and sorrow, “How could a grown man be aroused by a baby like that? If I made the laws, any man who did that sort of thing would be castrated–or worse. Worse, I think, I tell you, it disgusts me.”