By John Dark
The VICTORIA ADVOCATE: July 31
BLACKWATERS CLOSED TO SWIMMERS
The popular swimming spot known as the “Black Waters,” has been closed to the public until further notice. Several young people who went swimming at night at The Black Waters have been reported as missing. Victoria D.P.S. Chief Don Ramsey has stated, “Until the missing persons have been Located, swimming at this lake is strictly prohibited.
* * *
Charles Marek stood naked in front of his bathroom mirror admiring his flexed arms. He pumped his arms in and out slowly, making the veins stand out like cords of purple roots that wound down and around his thick muscles.
“Tonight's the night,” He hissed through his tightened lips and strained hard into
his body builders pose.
The veins throbbed at his temples, as Charles stood flexing and shaking and admiring himself. He was an impressive physical specimen. At six foot tall and two hundred and thirty pounds of solid rock hard muscle with a face that showed no sign of compassion or kindness, Marek was a scary man.
That was just the way he wanted it.
“Tonight's the night.” He growled into his reflection. “I'm gonna get me some.”
He flexed and then flexed again, straining against some unseen force that came from inside him, until the sweat poured from his face and body and he was beet red from his exertions. Then he was done with his isometric workout and looked at his own eyes in the mirror.
Marek was thirty-six years old. He saw the first traces of gray hair at his temples. His short, crew cut hair, was still bright blond. But that would start to change soon he knew and decay would start to set in.
“I'm gonna get mine now,” He told himself, “While I still can. Tonight's my night.”
Then Marek washed himself in the shower and got ready for the Friday night ahead.
* * *
Charles Marek drove down the streets of Victoria Texas, in his white Chevy suburban. It was hot tonight. The time was about nine o'clock and it was still around ninety degrees. He watched the people on the sidewalk, like a shark watches the fish that swim around him.
Marek saw a young couple, walking hand in hand, through the parking lot of a Seven-Eleven. The boy might have been nineteen. A wanna-be cowboy, Marek thought as he saw the big cowboy hat that the boy wore. The girl might have been seventeen he saw, and grunted his approval. She was on the point of womanhood, a bright blond that looked as carefree as the wind. Her body was at the point of new bloom. The young fresh ones excited him and infuriated him at the same time.
He grunted again and Marek's face went red as he felt the juices of his loins stirring. Marek drove past them.
“Oh yeah,” He said under his breath, his voice husky, “I'm gonna get me some.”
Marek didn't know why, but tonight his urges seemed to be so much more powerful than they usually were. He usually drove to another town but tonight, Marek seemed to barely be able to contain himself. He had the mad urge to just turn around and go back to the convenience store and beat hell out of the boy and take the girl right there in the parking lot. Rip her clothes off. Fuck her right there. With everyone watching. He knew he could too. He might even get away with it. If he worked fast enough.
But no, he thought. I'll get me one and get her alone. I'll take my time and do everything, that I want to. Just like the other twelve times before. Get her somewhere, where I can make her scream and no one will hear.
Charles Marek saw the packs of young partiers parked in the parking lots, swilling their beer from their coolers. He saw the families coming out from the malls and going into the movie theaters. He had never known what a true family was. When Marek saw couples holding hands or children laughing with their parents, it was like he was studying an alien species. He had no understanding of the things that he saw.
With each sighting of the young happy people of this town, Marek grew more desperate to find release. He drove to a strip club called, The Cowgirl Club and parked his suburban near the exit. For what he was planning, a quick exit would be necessary.
Charles Marek got out and started walking toward the front doors of the club. He watched as three women, who were obviously prostitutes, ran across the parking lot and flagged down a car.
Marek just couldn't see the logic for anyone paying for sex, when you could just take it, like he did.
He went in through the front door and paid a cover charge of three dollars to a burly bouncer. He didn't like the set up. But, what the hell, Marek thought, he might as well see if anything could develop in here.
The place was smoky. The music was country. Cowboys haw-hawed and threw bills at the dancers.
Marek sat a table and ordered a beer from a smiling half-nude waif of a girl. It pissed him off the way she smiled at him. He knew it was all fake. Just a way to get more money from the guys in here. Save your smiles, he said to himself. If I get you alone, I'll give you a real reason to smile, just before I break your neck.
The women danced on the stage and he didn't want to watch them. They were only there for show. Marek, was on the hunt for action. Real action, the kind that makes your blood boil and your skin feel like it's on fire.
He drank his beer in big gulps, because he saw that there were three bouncers in the place and the crowd was too sparse for him to grab someone inside. Marek downed his last drink of beer and stood up. He sneered in disgust at some guy stuffing a bill into a dancers panties. You may as well burn it, he said to himself.
Outside, Marek walked toward his suburban and saw the hookers at work, propositioning the guys coming and going. One walked toward him. He shook his head, no. The look in his eyes, stopped the prostitute dead in her tracks. Then, when he looked back toward his vehicle, he saw a woman standing there.
She didn't have the other hookers predatory look about her. She carried a small black purse and looked lost and alone, almost like a white mouse, that has escaped from it's cage and doesn't know what to do.
The woman was small, barely over five foot two. She looked young, but it was hard to tell in the parking lots neon’s. She had shiny black hair, that was so black it almost looked painted on and skin, that was far too pale to have seen much of the Texas sun. The hookers usually ran in packs, like wild dogs. This woman was alone.
This is the one, Marek thought, and went to his vehicle and stood in front of her. He looked her up and down and could tell nothing about the contours of her body through the sack-like dress that she wore. She regarded him with passionless almost dead eyes.
Without a word, Marek opened his door and motioned the woman inside. She surprised him, when she got in without a word and slid across to the riders side and sat there looking out the windshield silently.
Marek made note that no one even looked in their direction as he drove from the parking lot. No one had even seemed to notice that the woman had got in and left with him. Marek could not believe his good luck. This one would be easier, than any of the others before.
The woman rode in silence, just looking forward out the windshield, as Marek
drove them toward the outside of town.
Thinking that the woman might start to get spooked if he drove only in silence Marek told the woman, “I'm going to take us somewhere, where it's quiet and we can get to know each other.” He knew that all he wanted to know from her, was how she sounded when she was in extreme pain.
If the woman heard Marek, she didn't acknowledge it at all.
Well, that's all right, Marek thought, I'm used to silence from women. He thought back through his life as he drove and remembered how he had grown up. The first memories Marek had, were of the nuns at the Marek House Orphanage. He had been left on the steps, when he was about two months old. The other children picked on him constantly, because he had a cleft palate, that made it almost impossible for him to speak.
Even the nuns occasionally, made fun of his heavy lisp. He was short and chubby and whenever he fought back from the other kids abuses, he was beaten up by them. He was given the orphanages’ name as his last name and when he was sixteen, he joined the army to get away. Because of his cleft pallet, he was an ugly freak. Any woman who saw Marek, tried to look the other way as quick as possible.
In the army, Charles Marek learned the ways to kill. He went into bodybuilding to stop the lifelong taunting and made himself into a large, fearsome, killing machine. An army doctor did some experimental work on Marek’s face and his looks became almost normal.
Marek had never been with a woman sexually until he was stationed in Korea and went to a whorehouse with his new face to find out what it was like. He was so nervous he couldn't get an erection. The woman started laughing at him and gibbering in Korean.
In a rage, Marek broke her neck. He found, he had no problem getting an erection, once she was quiet. The sex he had with her dead corpse, satisfied him like nothing he had ever done before.
They rode on in silence.
A bright full moon shone through the windshield. Stars like diamonds, glittered in the Texas night sky. The lights of Victoria were far behind them, when Marek turned off onto a dirt road. Crickets sang their deep night song and frogs croaked to one another. The lights of the suburban shone ahead in circles of white glow, that revealed a dark lake to the right side of the road. He drove around the lake, the tires crunching on rocks and dried earth and weeds. Then he pulled the suburban off the road and stopped with the front wheels pointing at the dark black waters before them.
The woman turned her head in Marek's direction and he turned and met her gaze. His heart was racing, pounding in his temples.
“Don't look at me!” He yelled and backhanded her with his doubled up fist. Her head rocked back and smashed against the door. Marek grabbed her by the front of her dress and shook her, like a dog shakes a rat and screamed in her face, “You are mine!” He threw her against the door again and the door came open and she fell out onto the grass, her purse spilling it's contents around her.
Marek bounded out after the woman and was on top of her in a moment. He tore his own pants off and yelled in a bestial rage, “I'm gonna fuck you bitch!” He raised himself above her on his knees, his erection sticking out in the moonlight in front of him.
The woman reached for him and touched his face. “I want you,” She said softly and caressed his face. “I want you so bad.”
Marek froze. He had never heard these words from any woman. He didn't know how to react to them. “I-I-I-I,” He stammered.
“No need.” The woman purred in his ear, “No need, I want you.” She pulled him down on her.
“I want you. I need you,” She murmured and he felt her hands on him. She was feeling his face and his hair with her left hand and touching his private parts with her right. It felt good, oh so good to him, so warm and slick and sticky and wet and now the feeling spread. It spread from his crotch, up through his scrotum and his dick, to his stomach and on up to Marek's chest. All at once, it started to sting all the way down.
Marek, then saw the strait razor in the woman's hand. In the moonlight he saw the deep wide gash, all the way from his crotch, to his chest. He tried to scream, but had no breath. Marek tried to stand, but all the strength was gone from him. He looked down and saw his intestines hanging out of his ruined stomach and he saw his dick and balls slashed open.
Marek fell to his back, blood gurgling in his throat.
The woman stood over him.
She brought the razor up to her own throat and stuck the edge into her own flesh. She brought the blade completely around her head, cutting a neat line all the way around. She worked her fingers into the fold of skin, then while leaning over, she ripped and tugged until the skin and hair was ripped with a squishing sound, completely from her head. The thing that stared down at Charles Marek, was like a vision from hell.
In the moonlight, her skin shone like shiny black leather. Gill slits inhaled and exhaled air, in large sucking gulps. The eyes of the thing were the only part of it that even vaguely looked human and now Marek could see that even those had two pairs of eyelids, one clear for underwater sight.
She leaned her head back and let out a loud screeching cry to the heavens. The cry was answered from the center of the lake.
There was no power in Marek at all. All he could do was watch as short shambling moss covered things came tottering from out of the lake. He knew, this was her children. This was confirmed by the little caressing touches she gave them as they picked Charles Marek up and carried him into the water. With only a few bubbles to mark that they had been there, the children of the black waters, disappeared beneath the surface of the lake with their families meal.
Their mother drove Charles Marek's suburban into a deep place in the lake. She knew, it would never be found. Only an oil spot on the surface of the black waters, showed that Charles Marek had ever existed.