Chapter 2

Ed stood at the entrance greeting everyone who came to the wedding. John stood next to him with Beth and Kelly by their sides. When Ed didn’t like the feel of one of the guests, he would turn to John and, with exaggerated formality, introduce the guest to John. This was the clue to the security guards to watch that individual closely throughout the afternoon. Rover and Shadow sat behind John. If they growled at someone, the individual was discreetly taken to a remote area for drinks and food. The idea was that after everyone arrived, those guests would be quietly escorted from the property.

The line of people at the entrance for the wedding had dwindled down to a few people that Ed knew and liked. He leaned over to John and said, “Can you cover me for a few minutes? There is something that I must do.”

Smiling at Ed, John whispered, “I’ve left the line twice to piss and you’ve been here the entire time. Get out of here. Your bladder must be about to explode.”

Not wishing to contradict John’s mistaken interpretation of what he had in mind, Ed stepped back and headed towards the house. Shadow came running over to him and followed beside him. Somehow, the cats knew what he had in mind. As always, they knew when one of them was stepping into danger.

Ed entered the house through the front door. Glancing up, he saw Tiger on the stairs looking down at the doorway. Anyone that broke into the house would be surprised by the sudden appearance of the cat from above. The cat didn’t react to his entrance, but it did make a chirping sound at Shadow. Ignoring the cats, Ed walked to his room and opened the door. Just inside the room, were ten stacks of folders on the table next to the door. He picked them up and continued walking through the house to the side door. Shadow followed, but kept its distance from the folders.

Ed walked directly to the tent where the individuals that had created a negative reaction in Rover were being entertained. These were men, misguided by a sense of macho, that rejected anything out of their normal as sinful or evil. He knew the men in this tent would be more than happy to beat him to a pulp in the hope of chasing him away.

When he entered the tent, a hush fell over the men gathered there. They all turned to stare at him. The large quantity of alcohol they had consumed allowed their real attitudes to surface, without any pretense of politeness. Ed looked around at all of the people. His pale eyes seemed to bore into everyone in the room, making each of the men a little nervous. Without greeting, he said, “You think that I’m doing something immoral and disgusting.”

More than one man answered, “You bet your ass. Oh, wait. I forgot, your ass is full of cock.”

Ed allowed the anger in the room to grow, waiting until it was ready to spill over into violence. Emitting a low growl, Shadow’s ears slowly flattened as it bared its teeth. Once he judged the mood in the room to be at the right level, Ed said, “I have come here to teach you about evil. When you leave here, you will understand what it means to be immoral and disgusting. I do not want to do this, but it’s in your best interests. Maybe, just maybe, you will also understand love before you leave here.”

One of the men shouted, “Fuck you, Ed. You’re a goddamned faggot.”

Smiling, Ed looked around the room. Without meaning it, his look conveyed the sentiment that he was looking into their souls. It was an aspect of his gift, and one of which he wasn’t yet fully aware. It had the result that it intimidated everyone in the room. He asked, “Are you afraid of learning about true evil?”

Richard Green, a man with whom Ed already had several encounters since he quit drinking, belligerently shouted, “Hell no.”

With a look that could have frozen water, Ed stared at Richard. The smile on his face suggested that Richard had made a major mistake, Ed said, “You should be. You’re going to find that all those petty little things that you consider sick and disgusting are nothing.”

There was a long history of antagonism between Richard and Ed. The fact was that Richard was only afraid of one man and that man was Ed. The last fight had been easily won by Ed, so easily that Richard was concerned what would happen if Ed actually got mad at him. Shooting back a shot of whiskey followed by a couple sips of his beer to bolster his courage, Richard answered, “Bring it on.”

Handing him a folder, Ed said, “Open it if you dare.”

As Richard slowly opened the folder, Ed passed out the remaining folders to the others in the room. There were more people than folders, but the men crowded around the folders to see what they contained. Once the folders were distributed, Ed said, “The first page is a headline from when John and I captured the Amputation Murderer. You will see that our role in that capture is completely described.”

A number of people flipped over to the next page. Two men ran from the tent, throwing up outside. Stomachs weak from excessive alcohol and the grotesque pictures made it a sure bet that they would be sick. Those that remained slowly turned white. Ed said, “The second page shows what he did to his victims. That is Kimberly. She was an active, attractive, young woman. Woman? No, she was a girl. At the time of her death she was only fifteen years old. You will notice that she doesn’t have any arms or legs and that the stumps indicate that they had healed. Unfortunately, she couldn’t live after her head was cut off.”

He looked around the room noticing that many of the people were swallowing, trying to keep the contents of their stomach where it belonged. The picture clearly showed how her head had been hacked off. Continuing, he said, “You might wonder why that happened to her. Henry Buckman did it because he was sexually attracted to statues without arms, legs, or heads. He wanted to create the perfect female.”

“If you turn to the next page, you will see a line of heads preserved in jars that he kept in his basement. Each head came from one of his victims. You will notice the large number of heads. Each one came from some young woman.” Ed paused and looked around the room. Another man ran out of the tent to throw up. One of the security guards escorted the first two men back into the tent.

“The next page is a montage that shows many of his victims before he butchered them. They were all pretty young ladies. The page after that shows the two girls that John and I rescued from that fate. They are wonderful young ladies and now have a bright future ahead of them.” Ed thought back to that afternoon when they were just two young scared girls afraid of being raped with no idea of what future had been avoided.

Ed waited until the men in the room were looking at him. With eyes that seemed to bore into their souls, he said, “That is just one form of evil. It kills people in the most horrific fashion for its own pleasure.”

“If you turn the page, you will see another newspaper article about John. He captured another serial killer that was known as the serious bandit. The page after that shows what this guy did to people. This picture came from a bank camera that captured the moment when he blew the brains out of a bank customer because he wanted to show people that he was serious about robbing the bank.”

Looking at the men averting their eyes, he shouted, “Look at it. Look at the self-satisfied smile on that bastards face. Look at the horror on the faces of the other bank customers. Look at that blur created by the old woman’s brains as they were blown across the room. She could have been your mother cashing her social security check! That woman did nothing wrong!”

Returning to a conversational tone, Ed said, “That is another kind of evil. It kills just to show that it can kill.”

The room was silent as the men avoided looking at the picture. Ed waited and then said, “Turn over to the next page gentlemen. You will notice that this is a newspaper article that describes how John broke up a white slavery ring. You will notice that all four of us are mentioned there. John was shot and killed, but was revived on the operating table. I was wounded in the leg.”

A number of eyebrows rose at that statement. Ed continued, “The next picture shows some of the victims of that slavery ring. What you see are the graves where their bodies were discovered. The bodies are just becoming visible as the dirt over them was being removed. Those four people were tortured to death by the man that bought them from the slavers.”

The bleached white skin poking through the dirt sickened the men looking at the pictures. Stomachs turned as they stared at Ed. Several other men ran from the tent to throw up. All of them were coming to the realization that there were bigger problems in the world than this marriage of the Carter Clan.

Relentless in making his point, Ed continued his lecture in a voice that resonated through the room, demanding their attention. “The next page shows one victim that was saved before his captors could have him killed. You will notice that the boy is suffering from malnutrition, has open sores on his body, and lash marks on his back. His hands and wrists have been rubbed raw from the ropes used to tie him to the bed. This nine - year - old - boy was tied to a bed in what is called ‘lock-box prostitution’. Basically, clients can come in and do whatever they want to the kid if they have enough money. Clients bid to take various kinds of virginity from the kid. They lined up to fuck the kid over and over. He served as many as a hundred different clients in one day. People paid to whip him until he was rendered unconscious. A client was ready to pay to torture him to death. You might not believe it, but there was a man that was willing to pay to fuck the corpse.”

Several more men went out to empty their stomachs outside the tent. Ed waited for them to return. This was his chance to teach a bunch of bigots what true evil looked like so that they would never confuse love with evil again. When the security guards brought all of them back, he continued the presentation of a catalog of true evil. “Turn the page and you will see a twelve year old girl that was one of their victims. The individual that bought this particular girl was particularly sick. He vaginally, orally, and anally raped her repeatedly, even inviting some friends to enjoy her body. She is confined to an institution now, unable to talk or react in any way, to anything around her.”

“The next few pages list the names of victims taken by this ring. There are over seven hundred names there. You will notice that more than half of them have ‘deceased’ penciled in next to their names. A quarter of them are institutionalized or undergoing aggressive therapy. Many of them have committed suicide rather than live with what was done to them.” Even now, the thought of what those slavers had done to people angered him. He was fortunate that he had never been left alone with one of them.

The men in the room were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they had been given. It had made most of them physically ill. However the greatest effect was on their sense of right and wrong. A lot of the things they considered wrong were quickly becoming insignificant and petty.

Eyes boring into each and every man in the tent, Ed said, “The people they kidnapped and enslaved were young boys, girls, teenagers, and adults. Regular people, like yourselves, your wives, or your kids. Someone would put in an order for a woman, eighteen years old, blond hair, c cup breasts, and a nice figure. These creeps would go out and find one. Then they’d kidnap her and sell her to the client. They did that over seven - hundred - times!“

Ed looked at the ashen faces in front of him, pleased to see that his words were having an effect. Straightening, Ed said, “The four of us, my family, have put our lives on the line to fight that kind of evil. There isn’t one of us that wouldn’t step in front of bullet meant for you, despite what you may think of us. We are warriors for the good. We live by two rules. If it harm none, then do it; and protect the weak from the strong.”

Holding his hands open and in front of him in a gesture of peace, Ed said, “In fighting such evil, we have found what it means to be good. What we are doing is not evil, disgusting, or obscene. We are four adults who, having faced real evil, have turned to each other for love and comfort.”

Looking at the people in front of him, he said, “We know love and we know that it’s accessible to all of those who are open to it. I feel sorry for those that aren’t.”

Nauseous, with the taste of vomit still in his mouth, Richard asked, “What do you think of us?”

Looking down at the floor, Ed said, “I feel sorry for you, because you have closed yourself off from love.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Ed said, “Tonight, you will go home to wives that you barely know. You don’t even know what your wives dream about when you are out drinking. You don’t know how your kids are doing in school unless the report card is so bad that you have to slap them around a little. You don’t even know what pleasure and happiness that you have rejected without thought. You’ll find some cute thing, half drunk out of her mind, and fuck her. Odds are, that in the morning neither one of you will remember it. Such an empty shallow life that shall end one day. You will pass without having contributed anything to the greater good.”

All of the men in the room could hear the truth in what Ed had said. It wasn’t a very nice assessment of them. One of the men, Ed couldn’t tell which one, asked, “So what would you recommend?”

“Talk to your wives. Talk to your children. Learn what they dream about and help them achieve it. One day they will talk to you and find out what you dream about. They will help you achieve your dreams. It’s that simple.”

Richard asked, “What if she wants to sleep with some other guy?”

Raising an eyebrow, Ed answered, “Help her. Perhaps his wife wants to sleep with you. You see, right now you don’t know what you want, what they want, or what the person next to you wants. You might be surprised to find out that you all want the same things. If it harms none, then do it.”

Pointing to the cat, Ed said, “The cats have decided that you represent a threat to the ceremony this afternoon. I’m afraid that we have to ask you to leave once you’ve had your fill of the food and drink we have provided. I suggest when you leave here, that you think about the things that I’ve talked about.”

Ed headed towards the entrance of the tent, but paused before leaving. Turning back, he said, “One of the security guards will collect the folders and destroy them. My family and I are disturbed by the evil captured within them.”

Leaving, Ed returned to the front where his family was getting ready to head back to the house. At the look from John, Ed shrugged his shoulders and said, “I had something important to do and it could not be put off.”

John and Ed closed the fence to the property, effectively turning away anyone that had not arrived. As a group, the four of them headed to the house to prepare for the ceremony. The next hour passed in a haze for Ed. Nervous about committing formally to a marriage, his brain recorded the events but couldn’t process them at the rate they occurred. He remembered that when he drank from the wine cup it was like a jolt of electricity passed through his body. When Beth took a sip, the earlier jolt seemed like a drop compared to a bucket of water.