Chapter 5

It was deathly quiet in the cellar after Fleming and Darla were taken away for the second time. Tommy could hear his mother breathing in long, sighing breaths, and he thought he could hear the pounding of his own heart. But all else was quiet. He thought about what he had just been through- really, what his mother had been forced to endure.

Like most well-brought-up young men, he idolized his mother, and he found it impossible to believe that she had been involved in the fantastic circus he had just left upstairs. It just couldn't be! And now, Darla and their father were back up there, being forced into still more shameful acts. When would it end? Would they really be allowed to leave if the ransom were paid?

Then his mind shifted again, and he was trying to assess his feelings during the recent episode. I knew it was my mother there with met And yet I enjoyed it! I really wanted to taste her body in my mouth-I loved the smell of her cunt, and the taste of her juice-the feel of her heat pouring out of her body at me. My God! What kind of madman am I, anyhow? I even loved it when I was fucking her! The feel of her juicy cunt wrapped around me was like nothing I've ever felt before. And what was that inside her that nibbled on me? My God! Is there something wrong with her, too? Could I really have seemed like a lover to her, or something?

He was working himself up to a nervous tension that he had never known before. The perspiration was gathered on his brow and upper lip. He hadn't realized it, but he was panting with the effort of thinking and searching in the recesses of his mind for some answers. In short, he was frightened with the immensity of what he knew had been a very terribly wrong thing. A thing in which he'd been forced to participate, but which he had actually enjoyed, once he'd started!

It was several minutes after his teeth started chattering with his nervousness, and with the cold of the dank cellar, which chilled him as his perspiration dried, that his mother spoke to him. "Tommy! What's the matter? Are you ill?"

He was silent, except for his gasping and chattering Then he bubbled over. All of his fears and guilts and shame-all the things that were threatening his sanity-he poured out to her. After all, for the greater part of his young life he'd turned to her whenever he couldn't solve his own problems. He thought he'd outgrown his need of her as a confessor and comforter. But he could never have foreseen such events as this.

Ann heard him out. At times he was almost incoherent in his eagerness to get everything off his chest, hoping that complete confession would relieve him of his aching, bursting burden. But she understood him all too well everything he said. When he finally finished, running down like a record on a hand-wound phonograph that needed another cranking to get it up to normal speed, it was again silent in the old cellar. She thought a long time before she spoke. She had to be sure that she said the right thing. This could affect him for the rest of his life!

"Tommy, I may be able to answer you on everything, and I may not. I'll try to do my best. You know that I love you very much, and that I'll always love you. You know that, don't you?" She waited until he pulled himself together sufficiently to answer.

"Of course. I've never doubted that!" he replied.

"Just keep that in the back of your mind, then, no matter what else we discuss. Will you-can you do that?"

"Yes. And mother?... no matter what else I said... I'll always love you just as I have since I could remember."

"I know, Tommy. I knew that the moment you turned to me to help you with all this that's bothering you so much." She almost choked up on her emotions, then got a grip on herself, and continued.

"Tommy, I'll have to talk to you awfully plain. I know that your father, thank God, has brought you up with all the basic sexual knowledge you need, but this mess we're in now is something no one could be expected to foresee.

"You've taken enough of the basic elements of human psychology to understand how closely we parallel the lower animals in certain of our normal functions. What always seems so hard to understand is that the entire package we call civilization -all the things we try to instill in ourselves, educate ourselves with, as it were really is only a very thin coating which we manage to keep pulled over the more basic, more deeply ingrained things inside us.