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BK: That’s one of my favorite songs you were singing just then.
Ian: Well, doesn’t that just fill my heart with fucking joy, making you so very happy. There is nothing to enjoy about that song.
BK: Yet, here you are doing it.
Ian: What fucking choice do I have? You tell me, man.
BK: I’m not sure what to say to that, but I do think we got off on the wrong foot. My name is Brian Keane, and I am a blogger interested in learning more about this town, but specifically about the songs being sung. And you are?
Ian: Ian Bryce.
BK: Are you in any way related to the Mr. Bryce that Neil was just talking about. The gentleman who owned the scrapyard?
Ian: Ha-ha. Gentleman? You are fucking joking, right? Having a laugh at my expense, are you? Well, fuck you and fuck all the rest of them in this place. None of you know anything about that miserable fuck.
BK: Then why not use this as your opportunity to tell your side of the story? I’m assuming that “Bad to the Bone” makes you think of your father, am I right?
Ian: It does, but probably not in the way that you are thinking. Yes, he was a bad motherfucker, but there’s more to it than that. He was, from what I was witness to, totally fucking evil.
BK: Tell me, Ian. It sounds to me like you are the victim here, but I can’t really be sure until I get the whole picture. From what Neil told me, your father sounded like a pretty decent man.
Ian: He went out of his way to make everyone think that he was the salt of the fucking earth. It was when he was around the people that should have mattered to him, by which I mean me and my fucking mom, that the very worst came out in him. He was bitter and angry all the time and given that he spent the whole fucking day hiding it, his true nature would come pouring out in ways you wouldn’t even imagine when he walked over the welcome mat and into the family home.
BK: He was abusive?
Ian: Fuck, yes, he was abusive, but it was the thought that must have gone into those abuses that was the scary thing. He didn’t really drink, so you can’t even blame the booze for his appalling fucking behavior. He was just rotten to the core, yet you won’t find a single person outside of me and my mom, God rest her fucking soul, who will ever say anything bad about him. Fuck, stuttering Neil there probably believes that the sun rose and set in and out of dad’s asshole.
The really scary thing was that he didn’t have a trigger. The house was always kept immaculate by my mom, dinner was always on the table, and I was always respectful and polite, yet none of that stopped him from going off. He couldn’t wait to get home and just lay the fuck into both of us. I got it bad, but I know mom got it worse. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep, and I could hear muffled screams coming from down in the cellar. He at least had the common fucking decency to wait until I turned 13 before he introduced me to the shit show that he had created down in that cellar, but I spent years wondering what was down there and what he was doing to my mom.
BK: What was down there?
Ian: Have you ever seen one of those medieval movies where the king has a torture chamber used to fuck with people who didn’t kiss his ass?
BK: Yes.
Ian: It was like that, only way more over the fucking top. He kept all his hunting gear down there, but he also made a solid fucking collection of torture toys that he loved to test out on mom and me.
BK: Wait a minute. You said he made them?
Ian: Oh yeah, he was a regular fucking handyman. Made that Jigsaw dude look like an arts and crafts teaching pussy. I count myself lucky that I only ever got to see a few of those things in action, but that was more than enough for me to figure out that my dad was out of his fucking mind. I know he used to take some things to Neil to fix, although I’m also pretty sure that stuttering fuck didn’t have any idea what it was he was actually fixing or making work.
BK: I’m not sure I really want to know, but what did these devices do?
Ian: I can only talk about the one that he used on me, but I can sure as shit guess what some of them were for. Those would be the ones that he saved for my mom. They were shaped like dicks, but they were fucking huge. I never saw a mark on my mom, but there were days when she would be walking around real slow and stooped over. She would always smile and say she was fine, would tell me that she was having women’s problems. She was probably all fucking torn up inside given the state of those devices. They were often caked in what looked like dried blood and shit. If I got a little too loud when he was working me over, he would pick up one of those bad boys and wave it in front of my face. The idea of one of those things jammed up my shitter was enough to shut me up and keep me in line.
BK: I’m sorry. I get the idea. You don’t need to go into detail about what he did to you.
Ian: Well, bless your heart, aren’t you just the sweetest fucking thing. Listen to me, man, if you want to get my story, you don’t get to pick and choose what you get to hear. I’m not here to make you comfortable, so just make sure that you keep on listening and recording because I’m only telling you this once. I hear and see this shit in my head every single goddamn fucking day, so you’ll excuse me if I want to jump on the opportunity to spill all this shit out in a venue outside of my own fucking skull.
BK: Understood. Go ahead.
Ian: I’m not really sure when he started fucking with me. It could have been from the day that I was born, but the first real memory I have of shit not being right was when I was about 6. We lived in the country, so it was always fucking dark at night, but your eyes would adjust. Even when I had to get up in the middle of the night to go for a piss, you could make out enough to find your way to the toilet and back. Putting on a light when you were supposed to be in bed was a cardinal fucking sin in my house, so you just made do with the dark and the shadows.
I remember one night when I had the shits real bad and was scared that I was going to make a fucking mess all over myself. I jumped out of bed, flicked on that light, and bolted for the toilet. I remember coming back out, and he was right there, screaming in my face and demanding to know why I was spending his fucking money on electricity that I damn sure didn’t need. I was sobbing and apologizing, saying it wouldn’t happen again, and all that he said in return was that he would show me what true darkness looked like.
I went back to bed, terrified that he was going to hurt me, but nothing else happened that night. My stomach hurt like a bitch when I woke up that next morning, as I had spent the rest of that night with my asshole puckered tight. I was not going to risk getting up and getting another reaming or something worse. It wasn’t until about two weeks later that I found out what the fuck he was talking about. I had just about put the memory of the toilet night out of my mind when it all came rushing back in a real hurry.
BK: What did he do to you?
Ian: I remember my mom being really nervous and jumpy all day. She kept fussing over me and being a whole lot more attentive than usual. She was a good mom and always paid me a lot of attention, but she was taking it to another level that day. By the time dad got home, she was about out of her mind. She never showed him any affection, but she was on him the moment he came in the door, loving on him and making sure that all his needs were attended to. She has his favorite fucking dinner made and a glass of good whiskey waiting for him when he got in. Dad just kept brushing her off and asking what had gotten into her, all the while looking over her shoulder at me with a little smirk on his face.
He ate his dinner, drank his whiskey, and pulled my mom to the bedroom, telling me it was time to get to bed. I knew better than to argue, so I went to my room and hunkered down for the night, listening to the old man pounding my mom for what seemed like an eternity. It eventually went quiet enough for me to relax and fall asleep. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I opened my eyes, the room was pitch fucking black and I couldn’t breathe. I also couldn’t fucking move, and I realized that was because my dad was on top of me with a pillow over my face. He would get me to a point where I thought I was going to die before he pulled the pillow away long enough for me to gulp in some fucking air before putting that pillow back on me again. I was in total fucking panic, but he seemed positively giddy. He kept singing that line from a Simon and Garfunkel song, the one that goes “hello darkness my old friend” over and over again. No emotion in his voice, just that same fucking line.
BK: Did you talk to your mom about what was going on?
Ian: I’m sure she already knew. What the fuck could she do? She was getting it worse than I was, at least at that time. She would have loved to have gotten us out of there, but my dad controlled the money and played mom and me against one another. He told me that he would kill her if I ever said a word, so I assume he made similar promises to her. I prayed for him to die every single fucking day of my life. I finally got my prayer answered, but not before he sank deeper into some seriously fucked up shit.
BK: What do you mean?
Ian: He fucked with me at least once a week after the smothering incident. Sometimes it was just little fucking head games that he would play with me, which usually involved going into some serious detail about the things that he was going to do to mom. Other times he would physically fuck with me too. He would tell my mom what he wanted for dinner before he left the house each morning, very often choosing things that he knew I fucking hated. He would stare at me while I ate, taking some perverted joy seeing me trying to get done some awful fucking vegetable or piece of shit meat that he had killed during a hunt. Squirrels, rats, and fuck knows what else were part of my daily meals. If I complained, he would shovel a forkful of food into my face, cover my fucking mouth with his hand, and pinch my nose. Have you ever tried to swallow when you can’t fucking breathe? It should be impossible, but I found a way to do it. When I was about 13, I made the mistake of throwing up during one of those dinner sessions. That was when I was introduced to the cellar and his fucked-up bag of tricks.
BK: Can you tell me a bit about what was down there?
Ian: The door down into the cellar always had this huge fucking padlock on it, the key for which was always in his pocket. That night, the one when I threw up, he grabbed a handful of my hair and dragged me to the cellar door. The pain was fucking excruciating, and it was all I could do not to throw up another load of whatever mystery fucking meat he had shoveled into me that night. When we got to the door, he took off his belt and tied it around my neck, pulling me downstairs as though I was a dog on a leash. You had to stoop to get down those stairs, and I remember he bumped his head against the light bulb on the way down. I was struggling a little but started to put up an even bigger fight when the swinging light started to reach deep into the cellar proper.
I had seen some of the devices that he had made, as well as all his hunting gear, but I did not know that he had a fucking surgical table set up down there. There were weird symbols painted all over the walls and a bookshelf filled with all kinds of weird ass titles, many of which were in Latin and other languages that were foreign to me. The spines that I could read and understand were mostly about the occult, black magic, and a ton of other creepy fucking shit. As he dragged me down those stairs and onto the surgical table, I remember thinking that I was about to die.
BK: Good God. How do you deal with that, especially when you are just a kid?
Ian: Honestly, it was thinking that I was going to die that helped me calm the fuck down. I felt totally at peace and was ready to move on. My only worry was that he was going to take his sweet ass time getting the job done. I was all for dying, but I was not about enduring a shitload of pain in order to get there. I should have known he wouldn’t kill me though, as that would mean having to give up one of his playthings.
BK: What did he do to you that night?
Ian: He wasn’t as cruel as I thought he was going to be. He spent a lot of time talking about his devices and his hunting trips. He told me about casting spells and how they helped him become a great hunter. Spoke about how thankful I should be for his practice of the dark arts. Yes, that’s what he called it, the dark fucking arts. He said I should be thankful because we would never go hungry and would always have as much meat as we needed to live. I think he forgot that I had just fucking barfed up his last great catch.
As he was talking, I saw him fiddling with what looked to be a modified drill. This was before the days when you could get the drills with all the interchangeable bits and pieces, so it was a little odd to see him hooking this thing up to what looked like a mini fucking bone saw. Once he had that bit attached, he went a little quiet as he tested it. It was the silence that was the worst, as it made that little fucking drill sound all the more menacing. I would rather have listened to that, though, than have to live through what he did next.
He had me strapped to the table, my hands and feet cuffed like they do with the crazy folks at the looney bin. He took that bone saw contraption and ever so fucking gently nicked the skin right under each of my fingernails. They were the tiniest little cuts, and they barely bled at all, but the pain was fucking intense. I was sobbing and could barely catch my breath. He told me to settle the fuck down, or he would do my feet too, so I pulled my shit together as best I could at that point. Once I had calmed down, he pulled out a Mason jar filled with some Vaseline looking shit, rubbing it on the ends of my fingers. He told me he had made it himself and that it would heal all sorts of injuries. It smelled like ass, but I’ll be damned if it didn't work. He told me then that he was trying to make it even better, which meant that more tests would be coming and that me and my mom should be proud to be his little fucking guinea pigs.
BK: Do you need to take a break? We can continue this conversation later if need be.
Ian: Do I look like I need a fucking break? I lived through years of his torturous shit, so I can almost certainly live through talking about it. He fucked with me in the worst possible way, but rather than messing me up, it made me a whole lot stronger. I was going to kill him, but he beat me to it by going and getting himself done in while out hunting.
BK: Tell me about that, about his death.
Ian: When we had out little father/son bonding sessions down in the cellar, he would talk to me about the crazy shit he was up to as he was fucking with me. Some nights, he would use his tools to inflict all manner of wounds on my body, always healing them with his magical fucking salve. Other nights, he would go to town and beat the fuck out of me, sometimes with tools, other times with just his bare hands. Through it all, though, he would always talk crazy shit. Near the end, he started making his own bullets down in the cellar. He would grind down animal bones and mix in dust with the gunpowder, always after he had said a spell over those bones. It sounded as though he was speaking in tongues when he was babbling that fucking nonsense, but he told me that the bullets would become more powerful when they contained the spirit of an animal that he had slaughtered.
BK: I’ve never heard anything like that. He was truly insane.
Ian: You’d fucking think so, right, yet he was able to hold his shit together when he was running his business and dealing with the general public. Our family had been in Redfield from the very beginning, so that, combined with his general good nature, made him a bit of a beloved character here. Just one more reason why my mom and I could never say a word. The people in this town would never have fucking believed us.
I was about 16 years old when I started to play along with his bullshit. I told him that I wanted to spend more time with him, so I asked for a job at the scrapyard. He seemed pleased with my request, but he also said that working there was below me and that he had bigger fucking ideas for me. I then told him that if I couldn’t be part of that family business, then maybe I could help him with the other one, which was the creation of the devices and that fucking healing cream he was making. It was the only time I ever saw him cry when I said that. He fell to his knees, sobbing and chanting some weird fucking tune. He stayed down for quite some time, during which I stayed strapped to the table. When he finally stood up, he looked very unsteady on his feet, but he maintained his shit long enough to tear open my shirt and carve an upside down cross on my chest. It wasn’t a deep cut and really didn’t hurt, but he licked up the blood that oozed out of the wound before rubbing on his healing cream. Two days later, you would never have known I’d been cut.
BK: How did he behave after that?
Ian: He became a little less rough on me, but that didn’t mean that the cellar visits ground to a complete halt. If I left stuff on my plate at dinner, he would let that shit slide, choosing instead to hit my mom and blame her for making food that wasn’t good enough for her son to eat. When he started with that, I knew I was going to fucking kill him. I just had to earn his trust first. More and more often I was able to distract him by asking questions about his tools and his fucked-up belief system, the latter of which he seemed to have mashed together by taking chunks out of all those weird books is his collection and creating a bad juju jambalaya. He finally reached a point where he trusted me enough to lay out his entire fucking story and let me tell you, it was a doozie.
BK: What did he tell you?
Ian: He admitted that he was trying to work up the courage to kill either mom or me, but that he had so far failed because he was weak. When I asked him why the fuck he would want to kill his family, he started talking about a giant fucking goat that lived in our little part of the world. This was no ordinary goat, mind you. My dad said that its heart was the source of all the power in the world and that the person who killed the goat and ate the heart would come into possession of that power. The problem was that it had to be killed using a human bone, which is easier said than done when you consider that this big fucking beast had horns as sharp and powerful as it gets. My dad had the idea that if he created a bullet containing human bones, he would be able to take that fucking goat down without ever needing to get close.
BK: So, he wanted to kill you or your mom and have a nice supply of human bones?
Ian: That would be correct, but he told me that he loved us and that he couldn’t go through with killing one of us. It sure didn’t stop him trying to reach that point, though. From out of nowhere, the torture stopped. He came bursting through the front door one night after work, hugged my mom and tousled my hair, all with this big shit-eating grin on his face. He wolfed down his dinner that night and told me to come downstairs with him once I was done. He was positively bouncing off the fucking walls as he pulled a piece of bundled cloth out from his inside jacket pocket. He handled that thing like it was the most fragile thing ever, unwrapping it to reveal a decent sized chunk of bone.
I could tell by his behavior that this was not your average animal bone, yet I had no idea how he would have been able to get his hands on something human. It turns out that the fucking stuttering boy had found it wedged in the engine of the car that fucked up that girl in town. He finally had his human bone, and he wanted me to help prepare the bullets. We ground that bone down into powder and mixed it in with the gunpowder, although the truth of the matter is that there was more bone powder than anything in there. It took us a few days to make those bullets, during which I begged him to take me on the hunt. I saw this as my opportunity to get him out in the woods and into a situation where I could fucking kill him and sell it as a hunting accident. He would not let me come, though, saying that the hunt for the fucking goat was dangerous and that it was a job for men.
BK: Did he go out there on his own?
Ian: No. He had a regular hunting buddy called Pete Miller, a dude you are probably going to hear more about from someone else. Pete and my dad went out hunting a few days after the bullets were made, which was the last time we ever saw him alive.
BK: How did you find out that he had died?
Ian: They were gone a few days before people really started getting worried. There was talk about a search party being put together, but Pete came stumbling out of the woods before it was required. He was a fucking mess and looked like he had just stepped out of a war zone. His eyes were all glazed the fuck over, and he was mumbling incoherently. The town doctor gave him a shot of some sedative or another, after which he calmed down enough to tell what happened while they were gone.
He said that everything was fine at the start, but he said that my dad started acting a little nuts on the second day, talking about hunting a giant mystical fucking goat. Pete believed that the old man had snapped and suggested that they turn back, but dad ignored him. Pete was scared to leave him on his own, so he stuck with it, getting deeper and deeper into the woods with each forward step.
Pete was beginning to panic, but just as he was about to take one more shot at getting my dad to head back, he said that the old man started crying and pointing off in the distance. He kept repeating, “Do you see him, Pete, do you see him?” Pete said he couldn’t see shit but trees and more trees, but the old man had his fucking weapon shouldered and was aiming at something off in the distance. The gun apparently jammed on the first shot, and when dad tried again, the whole thing just blew up in his face.
BK: The gun?
Ian: Yes, the fucking gun. Pete said that a big piece of shrapnel blew off and went right through my dad’s eye, blowing off the back of his fucking skull. He also said that the whole area around my dad became covered in some sort of dust. The cops said it was probably smoke, but Pete insisted that it was dust and that it got in his eyes and nostrils, blinding him and making it hard to breathe for a couple of hours. I’m guessing it was the bone powder, but Pete could just as easily have been imagining things, although that seems a little less likely when you hear what happened to him after that. What happened to my dad after the accident was nothing short of fucking brutal. By the time they found him, most of his face had been eaten away, his eyes sucked out, and his brain totally gone. His stomach was torn open and his insides gutted. The bears and wolves in this region had themselves a fucking picnic over the course of a few days.
BK: Ugh! Can you tell me more about the aftermath, particularly in regard to Pete Miller?
Ian: That’s not my story to tell, but I’m sure you’ll hear all about it soon enough. They’re about to play my song, so I have to get back. I’d love to say it was a pleasure meeting you, but it really fucking wasn’t, so go fuck yourself.