11 - Grandpa's Dirty Book

Leroy's long fingers stretched out to snatch a thin white candle, holding it in his hand like a Frenchman holds a cigarette...and smiled.

"We all think we like secrets. That we want to know what people have locked away, even if it's something uncomfortable. Nasty, even. Sometimes, though, things are secret for a reason. Such was the case with...

GRANDPA'S DIRTY BOOK

The old man's breath was a rasp. Rhythmic. Mechanical. Machines buzzed around him, extensions of his self. Not exactly keeping him alive, because Andrew couldn't call the hospice care living. It was like being lowered respectively into a grave, instead of rolled into the nearest ditch. The end was the same, only the journey differed.

Not long now, Andrew thought to himself, as his eyes left the old man's form to settle on the black book on the top shelf. Andrea, on the other side of the old man, shot him a sharp look. Guilty, he glanced at his cousin, and then back to their grandfather.

The old man had taken both of the children in after their parents died. He had not been a harsh old man, and while his business as a photographer didn't bring in wealth, it had brought in a love for art and color, composition and focus, that had defined his grandchildren's lives. Their shared home had been a place of captured moments, of carefully staged beauty, a library of images that could hold the pair rapt for hours.

Yet the old man had his secrets. There were some photos that he had not shown his grandchildren as they grew up. Working together, Andrea and Andrew had poked and pried about the house, whenever he was asleep or out of the house. They giggled when they saw the naked men and women, in their black envelopes. They remembered when the old man had caught them, the haggard look on his face. Not angry, just sad.

When Andrew was 19 and Andrea was 18, he sat them down and went through one of the brown leather photo albums from his private study. The delicate, slim, yet somehow homely face of the young woman, her knees spread, smiling shyly at the camera.

"Your grandmother," he said softly. "Was my first model. These were not for money, you understand. It was just that she was the first one to show me her secret. It made a bond between us, that shared secret. I did not even show your parents this, before they each left the house and married."

He flipped the page. More shots. Not just their grandmother. Another woman. Black, slim, their lips caught in the moment before the kiss, eyes closed.

We never knew what grandfather intended by showing us that book. Perhaps he hoped that it would sate our appetite. That we wouldn't want to delve deeper. Yet it was the opposite. That first layer of secrets made us hungry for more. One by one, whenever we convinced him to let us go through his forbidden volumes. He was getting old. Needed their help, especially for those special jobs where people took their clothes off...and other things. Year by year, as the old man faded, the cousins saw all the things he had kept from them.

Each book was more intense. Some documented perversions, fetishes. Others, crime scenes. One book consisted entirely of rituals, from churches that the cousins could not name, yet who counted amid their services rites of blood and fertility. Yet none of them sated the cousins. Each one fueled the shared hunger for greater revelation. For the depths of the depravity.

Andrew remembered the strange, twisting sensation in his stomach when he saw the photo of the human leg roasting over the fire. Of the human cock caught in the moment of thrusting into a skull. The three heavy needles that pierced through a woman's breasts, the blood dripping down from the twelve wounds. The masked and robed figure that held a book, a woman's nipple clearly visible on the cover, above a naked woman that served as the altar.

When he came out of the hospital the last time, he had the penultimate book. He spoke with a wheeze, but his eyes were clear, though filled with pain.

"This one. This is not the last. But the last book. I wish you would burn it. I did not have the strength. It would not let me," he wheezed, and his hands, wrinkled and whithered like claws, caressed the leather cover. "If you must read it...wait until I am dead. That is all I ask."

They had promised. Too quickly. The last book was in black leather, on the highest shelf, and banded with iron, closed with an old Russian lock that required two keys to be turned at once to open. Andrea could have picked it. She was the technician of the two, better with her hands; Andrew is the one who had the better eye behind the camera.

The penultimate album had begun as a family photo album. Andrew's father, Andrea's mother, as teenagers. Young, fresh-faced, smooth-skinned. By the inked dates and names on the back, the cousins saw that the two were the same age that Andrew and Andrea had been when their grandfather had opened that first album to them. Then...the clothes came off. Faces mashed together. Clothes coming off. A frantic jumble of young coupling bodies. His father in her mother. Their eyes locked on each other, even as his cock slid into her cunt.

As they stared together at that image, Andrea gripped his arm. That could have been the moment he came in her. The moment one of them was conceived. And their grandfather had watched—had shot—the whole thing.

The weddings to both of their spouses were captured in glorious color. There was a sickening thrill to those mundane photos, having seen what had gone before. The way the siblings looked at each other, standing next to those strangers. The album documented both pregnancies. The births. Andrew's adoption. The inevitable divorce.

"Do you think she knew?" Andrew said, as he touched the photo of the woman he thought had been his mother, whom he thought had abandoned him.

"Does it matter?" Andrea laid her head on his shoulder, her hand on his thigh.

It seemed like such a small line to cross, considering. They had already started fucking. Their grandfather had caught them in the moment, his cock pounding into her skinny ass. Andrew had seen the old man quietly close the door, without even breaking the stride of his thrusts. A silent blessing? Or a resignation? Andrew had never dared to ask.

The end of the penultimate album was more terrible. The aftermath of the car crash. Their father's head had smashed into the windshield and threw it. The steering wheel had been driven through their mother's skull; in ****, her jaw had bit clean through his penis. Their mangled bodies caught in the instant of an act of incestuous lust.

Andrea had not turned her eyes away, but her warm tears leaked onto Andrew's shoulder.

At last, the old man's rattling breath stopped. The machines beeped. The attending nurse, who knew nothing of it, checked the pulse and left to make the call.

While she was gone, Andrew and Andrea took the keys from about the dead man's neck.

They had to wait. An aching, terrible wait through the slow process of having the corpse taken away, the paperwork. It was late at night when they returned to the empty house. Yet they were almost giddy as Andrew put the book ladder in place, and Andrea rushed up it to grab the book. She laid it out on the kitchen table, which had the best light, right above. The keys were in their hands...and then they paused.

Neither moved for a long moment. They breathed in uneasy silence, neither willing to put it into words. Then, at last, Andrew said.

"If that wasn't his deepest, darkest secret," he said softly to his sister—their relationship now entirely changed, he had to admit that now. "What else could it be?"

She shrugged her shoulders. Mind racing with possibilities. There were crimes. Perversions. ****. Yet as each possibility raised itself, she dismissed it as too mundane. Too...simple. There was nothing she could imagine that answered to what she needed to be inside that dark, iron-bound photobook.

"We have to see," she said simply.

They turned the keys. The lock came off. With great care, Andrea took hold of the cover and opened the book.

The neighbors heard the scream. They found Andrea on the floor, clawing at her eyes, Andrew barely able to hold her wrists away from herself. The police came, and the ambulance. A sedative calmed her down, for a while, though she was never the same. The story he told them was that the shock of their grandfather's **** had been too much. The pregnancy, when it became obvious, was attributed to a lover who had left her. Perhaps some suspected there was more to it than that, but the boy that was born looked very little like either Andrew or Andrea.

Andrew did not burn the book. Or dare to turn the page. He did turn the photo over, to see the neat ink scrawl of his grandfather, with a simple legend:

The Great God Pan, Walpurgisnacht, 1969.

"Those two, they never really knew their grandfather. They never asked what happened to their grandmother. They saw only the surface of things, and never understood that secrets can become a part of you. Can change you. Redefine you and your relationship to the world," Leroy said, his voice suddenly somber. Wax dribbled from the candle he held obscenely. With a puff of his cheeks, he blew it out.