He wants me to agree, to lie, to say that somehow the past is being conjured and brought into the present, and if we try hard enough, perhaps we can capture what it felt like to be a family again, back when his mother"my sweet Elaine"was still alive. She's out there still, having been brought back from the dead. I learn all I can about her by working on the monster below"the fiend that turned her into what she is now"before she comes back to entice Billy or seduce me.

Billy is so young and innocent. I think about how easily he succumbed to the monster in the basement, how easily he fell for mental enchantment and I panic. Billy isn't ready for when Elaine comes home, that much is obvious. Not when a stranger can hypnotize him; what will Billy do when someone he knows and loves looks him in the eye? Is Billy ready for that? Am I?

We all have monsters in our basement. Billy, me. Everybody. Not skeletons, but purebred monsters, nightmares raging in our past. They play tricks on our minds, making us believe they're not there or not that bad. Hypnotic. Seductive. I realize the monster in the basement has weakened Billy, making him downplay the situation and connect to the past. Dangerous for us both.

Thinking such thoughts unnerves me. The silverware trembles in my hand. Billy tries not to notice, tries to watch the game, but he flinches, catching my hands with his peripheral vision. I watch his smile fade, the excitement in his eyes grow dim. I want to say I'm sorry but I can't.

I have to learn more, find out the monster's weaknesses. Have to hurt him some more.

"Where are you going, dad?"

I hesitate at the basement door before answering. "Your mother's still out there, Billy."

"But the game… "

"There"s still a lot I don't understand about her."

"All you do is work anymore, dad."

"I know, but I'm doing it for you."

Billy nods, and then his attention is pulled back to the game. Bases are loaded. I open the door and descend into our own private hell. I take my TV dinner. The monster in the basement greets me with a snarl.

"Hello, Karl."

I take a bite of chicken while surveying the damage to its diaphragm. Its dark intestines have slithered up its legs. I watch its body pull its guts back into itself while I continue to eat. When the chicken leg is nothing but bone, I raise the machete and bury the past once again until the present wails with insanity. Upstairs Billy cheers, his voice loud but drowned out by a monster's screams in the basement.

I wonder about Billy. Is he safer upstairs without me than he is downstairs in the presence of this fiend? He has to recognize his mother, though understand what she is and what she no longer is. He has to know how to kill his mother when she returns. Understand what she has become by observing this vampire. It's my job to train my son, to prepare him.

I won't study it like some lab rat. I bury my rage into each cut, each thrust, and I lie to myself and my son. I execute my rage and hatred with each strike as the vampire pulls me into its world of inflicted pain and misery, until I become like it, until I am the monster I am hoping to kill. I don"t wish to study it in order to prepare for Elaine"s arrival; I wish to hurt it. Pure and simple, I am getting off on these basement 'lessons' of ours. I have become different from the man I used to be. Alien, monstrous. There are two monsters in the basement, but which one is worse? I honestly don't know.

"Bases loaded, dad," Billy shouts between the monster's howls.

Crack! I hear the sound of a bat, Billy must have turned the volume up. Almost sounds like the front door.

The Cubs may win this year.

The monster's intestines are cold and slimy, but they move of their own volition, slowly towards the cavity I carved into its belly. I begin sawing through the intestines, trying to figure out how much damage can kill one of these things. How much is enough? The sounds of baseball and Billy's cheering is lost to screams of the chained nightmare.

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