Free Bestial by Ray Garton Page B

is why it did not look nearly as old as it was. She claimed it once had belonged to and had been blessed by a bishop who had used it to dispatch the undead creatures of the night that had terrorized his people.
    Abe turned to Claire and found that she was looking at the archway through which Illy had passed, frowning.
    “Something wrong?” he said.
    She looked at him. “Has Illy seemed to you more... I don’t’ know, more worried than usual?”
    “Worried? About what?”
    “I don’t know. Something seems to be bothering her. I asked her about it yesterday, and that seemed to bother her.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Nothing. She avoided the question.”
    “Hm. Maybe I should talk to her.” He finished off his vodka tonic, crunched a piece of ice between his teeth. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back.
    “You should get some sleep,” Claire said.
    “Exactly what I was thinking.” He squeezed her to him, kissed her, then stood and said, “I’m going to bed.”
     
     

 
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Preparation-H Day
     
     
    At midnight on that Friday night, Bob Berens sat at his computer wearing only a T-shirt, masturbating slowly as he watched a buxom brunette woman perform oral sex on a petite, skinny blonde. Bob spent a lot of time masturbating at his computer. Other people had friends and lovers, attended parties, went to the movies, went out dancing or drinking, had things to look forward to and fill their leisure time. But Bob, when he was not caring for his mother and grandmother (which was most of the time), typically sat at the computer and masturbated.
    Seventh-day Adventists observed the seventh-day Sabbath, and Friday was known as Preparation Day. Sabbath began at sundown Friday, so the day was spent preparing for its arrival by cleaning the house and doing extra chores to make sure no work would have to be done on the Sabbath. From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, there was to be no TV-watching, no buying or selling or conducting business of any kind, no listening to secular music or reading secular material. However, there always was a great deal of napping, jokingly referred to as “lay activities.” Bob had attended Adventist private schools from first grade into college, and back in his school days, he and his friends had referred to Preparation Day as Preparation-H Day. It embarrassed him that the joke still made him chuckle all these years later.
    The video he was watching on the monitor ended and he scrolled through the website’s selection, found another that appealed to him, and clicked on it. A redhead and an Asian girl this time.
    The day had been tense, as Fridays always were in his house. It had been Bob’s experience that Friday brought a certain tension to many Adventist homes—his oldest friend, Royce Garver, agreed, and back in their boyhood had labeled it “the Friday willies.” When Bob’s dad was alive, his parents used to shout and fight more often on Fridays. Actually, it was his mother who did all the shouting—Dad always clammed up and did not react beyond an occasional nod. She would loudly berate him and Bob as she rushed about the house anxiously getting ready for the Sabbath, as if they expected Jesus to drop by for a visit—or maybe Sister White. Bob sometimes imagined the dusty long-rotted corpse of Ellen G. White standing at the front door with the grey tatters of a decayed old conservative 19 th -century dress hanging from her like the skin that was no longer there, her ugly face far uglier than ever, smelling of the mustiness of the grave and the moist, funky odor of earth worms, grinning, maybe with her lower jaw missing, rotten tongue waggling in what was left of her mouth, words garbled and hoarse as she tried to say, “Happy Sabbath!”
    As a boy visiting friends, he’d noticed their parents barking at each other more on Fridays, too. Royce had said his had done the same. The Adventists Bob had known had smiled so much when they were around