Chapter 6
On libations and infants
Next to the lobby in the Grand Hyatt, was the Grand Met Restaurant and Lounge. Nom wanted to take the evening off from his problems and let his subconscious mull on the proper solutions.
At the bar he ordered his favorite, a Tanqueray extra dry gin on the rocks with tonic water. Not wishing for the other patrons to intrude in his solace, he put in his earbuds and selected the overture to Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel.
The drink arrived, and with the first sip, Nom felt his tensions melt away. He closed his eyes as the smooth swelling entity of sound swelled. His internal consciousness took him into the depths of Gesamtkunst. The canvas of his mind showed him every detail of the opera theater, from the marble statues, to the golden curtain, to the crystal chandeliers.
Deep in his paradise, Nom suddenly felt a deep disturbance in the Force. His paradise was being interrupted, nay destroyed. Keeping his eyes closed, he finished his drink. Then he tapped the counter to request another. When it slid into his hand he took a sip and commanded the maestro to continue.
The alcohol helped, but the distracting noise pulling him away from the music grew even stronger. In his head a wrecking ball smashed through the roof of his theater. In shock and horror Nom's eyes snapped open at the blasphemy. Pop art intruding into high art, indeed! Across the bar, in a booth nearby, a feral imp of an infant squealed endlessly in octaves usually reserved for summoning canines.
There were few things that Nom despised more than improperly muzzled and controlled children. Small human larva revolted him. Where most people saw a bundle of joy, all he saw was a small ball of feces. A mistake, one destined to cost the moronic parents a quarter of a million-dollars to raise. That thing would: defecate and urinate on everything in sight, spread germs more efficiently than a rat during the bubonic plague, make chaos out of order, demand endless attention, and worst of all… make those squealing sounds.
It was probably the single greatest mystery in the universe to Nom. Once the nature of the quarter million-dollar ball of germs was discovered, why did the parents not immediately dump it in the nearest convenient river or lake? Nom flagged down the server, and requested that she take a bottle Chateau Jordan cabernet to the offending table. He took out the note pad he used to keep track of his trucking load assignments and ripped out a clean page. Scribbling a quick note, he asked her to give it to the father along with the wine.
Nom sat and watched as she went to the barkeep, grabbed the bottle, and headed over. The server opened and decanted about half the bottle. With the first glass she handed the note to the imp's father. With glee in his eyes, Nom watch the man read his words. "I will pay for your obviously needed vasectomy if you silence the shit stain. Otherwise, drink the wine and piss off, your failure as a parent is ruining everyone else's evening."
Watching the man reread the note and unable to believe its contents, Nom stood, finished his second drink and left chuckling. Those morons would do perfectly for his next experiment. The father had failed to even demand to know who had sent the note. Obviously, they were a waste of oxygen. The world could easily spare them. Besides, the global population had tripled in the last sixty years.
Nom went out to the lobby and watched, pretending to be engrossed with a news clip on his phone. Like a scurry of spooked squirrels in a field looking for the nearest tree, the family trio soon made their way out of the restaurant and to the elevators. Not wanting to lose his prey, Nom followed them and stumbled into the elevator. The smell of gin on his breath sealed the image of a man who had tied on a few too many. In a slurred voice he asked them to press the button for the sixth floor, after having seen that they had already pressed it.
The father said, "We already did."
Nodding and grumbling. Nom muttered a slurred "Thanks", and leaned his head against the metal wall.
The husband and wife passed worried looks between each other, and hurriedly exited the elevator as soon as it arrived. Nom stumbled after them, fortunately there was only one corridor of rooms, and thus no chance for them to lose him now. Nom pulled his room key card from his pocket and inserted it into the first door the family passed by. Muttering drunkenly, he tried again and again, turning the key every which way. The family made their way to room six hundred twelve. Nom turned to them and slurred "Muss be broken…" he belched to play up the role. "I'll go see the clerk..." As he turned towards the elevator the family got their own door open and quickly shut it behind them.
Chuckling and straightening, Nom pressed the down button, and waited for the car. When it arrived he took it to the second floor, and found his room, number two hundred sixteen. Nom had requested that number, since one of his favorite childhood book series had used that number for the antichrist character.
"Those morons are in the room which makes a palindrome of mine!" he chortled. The numerology coincidence sealed their fate. Nom knew that he would have to make a few arrangements. To start, he focused all of his will and malevolence on the family above him. He wished for their laryngeal nerves to be paralyzed, so that they would not be able to cry for help.
The shit stain? He thought. What am I to do to it? Whatever it is, I need it to be readily apparent, so that it doesn't look like SIDS. After all, I need to be able to tell on sight that I caused its condition. What to do, what to do? He mused with a wry chuckle.
"In the meantime, both of you parents need to sit still." He said to the ceiling.
In his mind he could almost feel them rampaging through the room beginning to panic at their inability to speak. He sent them a wish that they should collapse to the floor, with all of their voluntary muscles nerves paralyzed at the C two vertebra.
That's strange. He thought. I think I really can feel them without seeing them.
He felt the pair. The wife was in front of the door. She had been preparing to leave and find help. The husband had collapsed on the bed next to the shit stain. He had his phone out and was starting to type a text message.
Well I guess I fixed that problem in the nick of time Nom thought. Next time I'm going to have to remember to trap them first. Now the shit stain needs to go in a relatively painless way. After all, my goal here is to experiment. I don't mind punishing these swine for their crimes of unnecessary breeding.
From the noise it made, clearly bad breeding. Then there was the terrible parenting. Taking the shit stain out in public in the first place. Had they no shame?
So… relatively painless for the shit stain… obvious… and yet fast… Blocked carotid arteries… yes... that would do the trick. Put something hard and solid in them that I could feel, if I checked. The brat will lose consciousness in seconds, and die in minutes… that is my wish.
With the mental acknowledgment he wanted the arteries to be blocked, Nom could feel it happening. There was a glowing of life he could almost see. It was small, yet clear, and rapidly growing dim. It began to flicker, and soon it went black. Nom thought that if he acted quickly, he could bring that spark back to life, just as he could resurrect a camp fire with a little work. But he let the flames grow cold and pass beyond recovery.
The father and mother now. They had committed the true crimes. The child could have been left in the care of a sitter or relative. In the event that they could not afford such a thing, all US states had laws permitting kids to be abandoned at fire houses, police stations, and hospitals. If they could not afford assistance and care, and still had to go out and about, then they clearly were inhumanly evil for not caring for the good of society.
Society went to restaurants and bars to relax and enjoy its time off, not be serenaded by the sounds of a feral cat being eviscerated by a coyote. The fact that they had imposed their spawn on the rest of the world, with neither care nor apology for the noise, was unforgivable. The fact they let it go on for several minutes, made no effort to silence it, and had even seemed to ignore it, proved they needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Their poor breeding habits being proven by their spawn's manners, they had to die for the cleansing to occur.
They were paralyzed and unable to seek help. Nom reached into a life glow. He realized that the camp fire analogy had been perfect. This thing danced and flickered. It pulsed with essence and heat, its very existence a tenuous combination of internal fuel and outside conditions. It truly was a life fire. By its feel he knew it was masculine. He added an element, one that would eventually quench that flame.
Nom felt the fingers and toes of the man, they were healthy. Well, not for long. Nom felt the muscle fascia, and invited some of the staph living in the man's socks to come in. They entered almost with glee. He spiked them with a mutation to increase their metabolic rate. Within a few minutes necrotizing fasciitis had begun. The man would literally rot to death, a fate he would feel all too severely. Nom had done nothing to dampen his sensory nerves.
The wife, now she was the real cause of the problem. Had she not spread her legs, or more importantly seen to the proper care of her spawn, then they would all three be happy and healthy. Her fate needed to be just to her crimes. Watching justice being done to her conspirator simply was not enough, she too had to pay a price.
Nom felt the woman's life spark and reached into it. Her husband would only take a day or so to die. The toxins produced from the necrotic tissue would kill him before the smell alerted the house keepers. The wife on the other hand, while microbe infection would do well for her, a different choice was needed. Peritonitis. That could last for days, even untreated. Nom reached into the part of the life fire that held her bowels. He slashed several times that the large bowel perforating it, and releasing her gut flora into her mesentery. She would have quite a while to meditate on her sins, before she found mild relief in the delusions of the inevitable fever.
Nom grinned and got up from his room. He returned to the sixth floor, and put the do not disturb sign from his room on the door for room six hundred twelve. He then returned to his room and called the front desk. The family in the room above him were old friends, and he wanted to help them out by picking up the check. In fact, he wanted them to stay for the next four days, so they could continue visiting family. Yes, they could go ahead and charge his credit card now.
Nom went ahead with his nightly ceremonies. Ceremonies, were the logic around which his world orbited. One simply could not live without the soothing order. The night stand items had to be laid out in precise relationship to each other and the edges of the stand. His bag of earplugs went to the top corner opposite the bed. The sleeping mask went one half the way down on the bed side. His Icy / Hot lotion went at the bottom corner of the bed side. The center of the table went to his Vaseline tub, the top far corner to his Benadryl bottle, and the far bottom corner went to his mascot, a stuffed Beanie Baby skeleton named Bob.
Nom stripped, took out his sleeping clothes, and dressed. Despite being alone, Nom hated the thought of sleeping in a bed that other people had used without something protecting him from their filth. From his duffle, he took out a clean flat sheet and laid it over the one the hotel provided. He removed the blankets and replaced them with his own, doing the same for the pillows. The commode was first sterilized by a fifteen-minute bath in a mist of Lysol. After he had waited for the annihilation of any germs, he took care of nature's call. He scrubbed his teeth with one-hundred-twenty-seven strokes, flossed with five strokes between each tooth, washed his mouth, and returned to the bed.
With his core ceremonies completed, Nom took off his glasses, put them in their case, and put the case in the middle far spot on the night stand. The Icy / Hot was applied to his hands and wrists to relax the arthritis in them, the gift of a hiking accident a few years before. The Vaseline to protect his nose from the dry air. Then he tucked his phone under his pillow, put on the mask, took three Benadryl tablets, and inserted his ear plugs. The lights he would leave on, in case he needed to act quickly in self-defense. Sleep as always took its sweet time coming, but inevitably it came.
In the morning Nom's alarm shook his pillow bringing him back to reality at seven. His morning ceremonies were his nightly ceremonies in reverse, only he added in a shower. The gods of order having been sated, Nom executed the next phase of his plan. He used the room phone to call the front desk and request additional towels.
A few moments later there came a knock on his door. Nom got up from the desk where he had been browsing the NY Times on his laptop. He checked the peep hole and saw a rather attractive strawberry blond girl standing there. She was wearing a black business suit and holding a small stack of towels in her arms. Funny Nom thought. They usually would send the maid.
He opened the door. The concierge was even better looking in person than in a fish eye lens. Short and slender, she looked like the perfect college co-ed fantasy. Just a newbie working a summer job to pay for tuition. Nom took a moment to see if he could feel her life fire, as he could still feel the fires of the parents in the room above him. Her's was fresh and vernal, he could detect nothing wrong with her. It was time to perform the second step of his experiment: whether he could alter a person without killing them.
Nom had noticed something the night before, time seemed to slow to a crawl when he was exploring the life fire of other people. It wasn't that he was bored; it was almost as if the universe wanted to be sure that he had enough time to make any changes he wanted. His eyes showed the concierge beginning to smile, and the slightest lift in her wrists, as she extended the towels towards him, while his mind's view seemed to overlay his real vision, like the heads up display a military fighter jet used to show tactical information. Nom looked at her face, it was everything a middle-aged man could dream for.
He zoomed in, and his inner vision eliminated her skin and hair leaving the musculature. The facial muscles were tightening in slow motion, and he could see a slow moving pressure wave in an artery, showing him her pulse.