Page 29 of Fear No Hell
“We can either talk about one of two things,” Sam says conversationally as he places a hand on either side of Arthur’s knee, his thumbs resting gently over the kneecap itself.
“You can either repeat what you tried to say about Lila—which I guarantee will piss me off—or you can tell me what you know about who my father really is.” He presses down, his fingers digging into Arthur’s leg. “The choice is entirely yours.”
“Okay, okay, okay!” Arthur shrieks as his kneecap shifts incrementally under the pressure of Sam’s thumbs. “Okay, fine, you win, you fucking psycho.”
Sam shakes his head, seemingly unfazed at the insult to himself. Whereas I want to leap past him and claw Arthur’s face off.
“You’re not my kid.” Arthur’s words wobble.
“I wanted kids, but your mother kept miscarrying.” The way his lips turn down, his tone going mocking, tell us more than words that he blames Michelle for this.
“At the time, she was friends with this crowd of weirdos. Kind of cult-y. We had dinner with them a few times, and their house looked like some kind of shrine to the devil.”
Ever the dramatic storyteller, he glances at us like he’s hoping for some sort of reaction. Sam simply inclines his head in a clear indication for Arthur to continue, so he sighs and continues.
“There were upside down pentagrams everywhere. Paintings of demons everywhere. They had an altar with a goat’s head on it and an obsidian bowl filled with blood.
On the table where we were eating fucking dinner, they had this weird grimoire-looking thing with red stains all over it.
Burned candles everywhere. Just creepy shit.
And the kicker was they showed it to us like they were proud of it. ”
Now that he’s talking, he can’t seem to stop, the words rolling off his tongue without prompting from either me or Sam.
“I told Michelle to stop seeing them because they freaked me out, but she kept hanging out with them after she got off work. A few times, she didn’t get home until the sun was coming up.
She had hickeys all down her neck and scratches down her back.
She didn’t even fucking try to hide them.
” He snorts. “Then we stopped having sex. After a few weeks, she stopped coming home at all. Months like that, where the only way I knew she still lived in our house was because I would smell her perfume during the day.” He gives me a pointed look before saying, “I didn’t really pay much attention to how long she was gone for because I was getting a ton of writing done. ”
We both know what Arthur is leaving unsaid: while Michelle was having her affair, Arthur was with me in the attic. That’s how he got so much writing done.
Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Hold. With each breath, I gain a little bit of clarity. If my claws are still digging into my palms, if I’m still seeing red, at least I’m able to control myself by not tearing into Arthur. This is Sam’s moment. I won’t steal it from him.
Next to me, Sam’s jaw flexes as he grinds his teeth and his fingers dig in deeper around Arthur’s kneecap.
Arthur yelps in pain but keeps going. “After a few months, Michelle finally came home with a huge smile on her face and wearing this see-through black dress and smelling like incense. She didn’t say anything to me, just headed into the bathroom, took a shower, and went to sleep.
I tried to join her, but she had locked the door to our bedroom.
“It went on like that for a few weeks. Maybe two or three?” he guesses.
“One night, she came into my office and told me she was pregnant. There was no way you were mine—both of us knew it—but I was still excited to have a kid.” His face darkens.
“Then you were born, and you were so clearly not mine, even the hospital staff knew it. Instead of putting my name on the birth certificate, the nurse asked your mother who the goddamn father was. And she told him, get fucking this, she fucking told him—” Arthur pitches his voice upward in a terrible mimicry of Michelle. “‘Lucifer Morningstar.’”
Sam flinches in surprise, but his hands stay steady around Arthur’s knee.
“She told the nurse that her bastard’s father was the fucking devil rather than put me on the birth certificate.” A hysterical, horrible laugh rips out of his mouth.
“Is that why you’ve always hated me?” Sam speaks for the first time in minutes.
“Was I supposed to treat you like my son after everything your whore of a mother did?”
“Couldn’t have hurt, especially since you supposedly wanted a kid.” Sam tilts his head. “And that’s why you abused Mom all those years too?”
Arthur shrugs as best he can in the chains. Which makes sense. A serial abuser who can't accept responsibility for his own actions isn't going to acknowledge that he abused his wife for their entire marriage because he's a piece of shit.
“Okay. Well, thanks for telling the truth, I guess.” Without warning, without so much as blinking, Sam forces hard into Arthur’s leg, a sharp, sudden movement, wrapping his right hand around the kneecap and driving his left thumb behind the bone as his other hand drags the movement further.
There’s a grinding, cracking noise followed by a resonant pop, and then Arthur is screaming, wailing, tears and snot oozing down his face while his kneecap sits jutted out to the side.
“That’s for blaming Lila for what you did, you piece of shit,” Sam snarls, his face a mask of rage as he storms across the room and up the stairs.
Arthur is sniveling when I turn on my heel and follow my sweet doctor upstairs.