Stevens School Runaways - Part 18 (hist, tort, CBT, psych)
By Platypus (formerly Dark Man) 
plupy@surfbest.net

copyright 2005 by Platypus, all rights reserved 
(First published on Eunuch Archive)

* * * * *
This story is intended for ADULTS ONLY.  It contains
explicit depictions of sexual activity involving minors. If
you are not of a legal age in your locality to view such
material or if such material does not appeal to you, do not
read further, and do not save this story.
* * * * *

Stevens School Runaways - Part 18
"Alfred's Secret"

It was daylight now, actually late morning, but when peering
through the van's darkly tinted windows, and it was hard to
tell. Rich opened his eyes first, but Tom was awake within
moments; his consciousness activated by his friend's first
awakenings. Tom yawned rather loudly.

"You're up. Finally!" Rich said laconically.

"What?" Tom was still half asleep, and rubbed his eyes.
"Where are we?" he said.

Behind the wheel, Mr. Cousins had heard the yawn. "That was
a rather vocal demonstration of getting oxygen to your
brain," he remarked to Tom, or maybe it was more of a
comment voiced to no one in particular. "Glad to see you
boys are up. Ready for some breakfast?"

"Where are we?" Tom repeated.

"Mr. Cousins has kidnapped us. Isn't it cool?" Rich said,
and then added, "Yeah, I'm starved. Are we going to stop
somewhere?"

Mr. Cousins and "the kids," as it became his wont to call
them, soon ate breakfast. After stopping at a Canadian clone
of the International House of Pancakes, Cousins instructed
them to stay in the van while he brought out the food. "We'd
best not arouse undue suspicion," he said.

The breakfast was heaping platefuls of pancakes and maple
syrup and bacon and scrambled eggs and all the orange juice
they could drink - food enough for any army of three. "I
appreciate everything that you're doing for us, Mr.
Cousins," Rich gushed in-between mouthfuls.

"Me too," Tom added, "I know that you're taking a humungous
risk. I bet that the FBI is after us by now. Maybe the CIA.
It's great what you're doing, Mr. Cousins."

"Call me Alfred from now on, if you'd like. No need to be
that formal anymore, is there?"

Rich noticed a twinkle in Mr. Cousins' eye. He felt the edge
of a tear in his - along with a crying jag coming on after
all he and Tom had suffered through at the Stevens School.

"I guess not," Rich choked out, "Alfred."

Tom was a bit more suspicious. "You're not going to hurt us
too, are you sir?" He looked Alfred Cousins right in the
eyes as he said it.

Mr. Cousins found himself teary-eyed, sitting in the seats
at the back of his van with these 13-year-olds. Reaching out
with his right hand, he used it to playfully mess up Tom's
hair - which was a dirtier-than-usual blonde since the boy
hadn't taken a morning shower. "No, I'm not going to hurt -
either one of you," he said, "and where we're going,
nobody's going to find us if we don't want them to." He
hoped that both promises could be kept in the end, but he
knew that such things might not be totally under his
control.

"Okay, Alfred," Tom said. "That's all I needed to know." He
was giggling now, laughing hard enough to drool spittle
between every bite.

"Ewwh gross! You're getting egg all over me -- you jerk --
quit it!" Rich yelled.

"Kids, kids!" Alfred began admonishing. But then he was
laughing at seeing Tom and Rich returning to some semblance
of normalcy.

*

Sometimes Alfred had second thoughts. Why am I doing this?
My career, and my life teaching at Stevens or anywhere else,
ruined, definitely over. What do I know about anything else
besides teaching? Where I am taking them - will it really be
safe for these boys? Had it been safe for HIM so many years
before? Some people once considered Edgar Mansen crazy,
others went a bit further and called the man extremely
dangerous. But Mansen was Alfred's mentor, his role model,
and his oldest friend. It was all set, Edgar had agreed to
everything on the phone. They'd have a place to stay – the
boys AND Alfred -- for as long as they needed -- for the
rest of the summer, maybe forever. The movement of the van's
radial tires - steady, rolling, steady on the asphalt
surface -- created a monotonous wall of sound. Would it work
out? He tried to convince himself. It's the only solution I
can think of, Alfred mused. There weren't exactly a
multitude of choices.

"Are we almost there? Does Mr. Mansen, I mean Edgar, live
anywhere around here?" Tom was tired, maybe a little
impatient, sitting in the backseat for Canadian mile after
Canadian mile gets tedious even for a boy whose recently
been released unexpectedly from a living hell. They'd
traveled past a thousand mile markers since crossing the
U.S. border. "Rich is sleeping again," Tom added. It seemed
like he was trying a little too hard to make conversation.

"Won't be long now, a couple of hours maybe - he lives about
eighty miles from here, northwest of Banff. We'll be driving
back roads or it wouldn't even take us that long."

"He sounds creepy. I've heard of Charlie Mansen. Didn't he
murder a bunch of people a long time ago?"

"Remember, he'll want to be called Edgar. He's funny that
way - you're not the first person to compare him to
Charlie."

"But you didn't answer me. Is this guy Edgar - your friend -
is he anything like the famous mass murderer guy?" Tom
pressed.

While Edgar hadn't ever been guilty of murder as far as
Alfred knew, what to say to the boy was worth pondering.
There was the matter of the eunuch cult to consider - at
least fifty members last he'd heard -- all recluses, all
unpredictable and according to reports from Edgar, more than
a few of them were nutcases. Could the whole lot of that
strange community be trusted to "go easy" on Tom and Rich?
It was a delicate matter.

"No, he's nothing like Charlie Mansen - he's not even
related to him," Alfred ended up saying, smiling when he
said it, trying to make his evasion sound like a quip.

But Tom kept pressing. He was a bright boy, but wary now, so
very wary. Adults had hurt him, didn't you know, and it
would take him a long time to really trust any grownup
again. "You still haven't answered me." The look on Tom's
face, which Alfred couldn't see since he was watching the
road but could certainly sense, was truly an anxious
expression. He knew he had to answer.

"He's a good man deep down," Alfred ended up saying, "Not a
murderer, very gentle in many ways - and he likes kids.
We'll have to leave it at that until you meet him. He's very
strange in some ways, eccentric perhaps, definitely not used
to, err, most people, and you'll form your own impressions,
I'm sure."

"I guess so," Tom yawned again, "Guess I'll get some more
shut-eye in the meantime. Wake me up when we get there."

At least the interrogation is over for the time being,
Alfred thought.

*

Edgar Mansen was up to greeting them when they got there. It
was past midnight and pretty cold for late April. Alfred had
picked up warm clothes for the boys at a thrift store back
in Calgary, so at least they could get out of the van and
into the mountainside lodge without much discomfort. Boots
even, for the deep snow.

"It looks like a ski lodge," Rich said.

"Used to be one," replied 'Edgar' in a low gruff voice. The
boys considered him, this new person in their lives. His
voice was fathomless, without shape or edges, odd sounding,
like he spoke through a voice box in the manner that a
cancer survivor who'd lost his larynx might, but without an
echo of any kind. He was a very large man, with a great long
silvery-brown beard, neither boy had ever seen such a beard,
wide and luxuriant and part and parcel of his head hair,
itself a silvery-brown mass of unkempt tangles. His nose was
sharp, probing like a sword into the Canadian chill, with
icicle snot dangling at the end reminding Tom and Rich of
something comical, like a facial penis. He stank, or at
least his breath did, the boys weren't sure where the smell
exactly emanated from. Also evident was the queer
masculinity he exuded - raw and male, so very male; if the
boys could articulate it they would have described Edgar's
essence as the penultimate maleness, there was nothing in
the slightest way feminine about this rogue man, this
primitive man, as to physicality. The boys, always seeking
adult role models at their age, even if unconsciously, were
simultaneously repelled and attracted, certainly impressed.

"How tall are you, Edgar?" Tom asked.

"Six-foot-five, and I weigh close to 300 pounds," Edgar
said.

Rich thought that Edgar looked like a cross between a pro
wrestler and Grizzly Adams, except he was older, like God.
He had to be at least sixty.

Soon everybody was in the house. It wasn't exactly a four-
star ski lodge, but it had lights and heat and basic
necessities. They talked, Edgar and Alfred catching up it
seemed for hours with small talk and chit-chat, mostly facts
about how the surrounding environs were getting too settled,
how people were encroaching on the world of Edgar and of THE
OTHERS, mysterious others the men knew about and took for
granted but who were a complete mystery to the boys. Finally
some hospitality commenced and the boys were able to join
in.

"Time for a hot toddy!" Edgar exclaimed.

These "toddies" as Edgar called them -- hot Belgian
chocolate spiked with rum - were prepared on a nearby
stovetop. Soon enough, they were bubbling and ready to
drink.

"This is excellent," Tom remarked.

"Bloody decent," Rich chimed in, imitating what a Brit might
say, perhaps to impress Edgar and sound manlier. Wasn't most
of Canada British? Anyway, the drink's alcohol content
wasn't lost on Rich and he realized a sound sleep was
definitely in the offing. Sipping their drinks, getting a
slight excited buzz from the new experience, ended when the
last dregs were gone from their cups. The immediate effect
was a certain pronounced restlessness, a desire for boyish
conversations to evaluate their newest situation.

Another factor was their surroundings. Banal, even stark,
compared to what they'd been used to all of their brief
lives. Although there was a ham radio in the kitchen area,
no television or electronic entertainment device graced the
premises anywhere. It might be boring here - in some ways,
the boys thought, all of a sudden. Yet boring might be good
in a way considering their cumulative recent experiences.

They would be sleeping upstairs. Somewhere in the
conversation, the boys had learned about their own room to
share, upstairs - everything prepared for them, made up,
ready.

"I'm getting sleepy again," Tom said.

"Yeah," Rich added, "We'd best retire for the evening."

So they marched upstairs to their cozy, an alcove with
unmarked log cabin walls graced with twin beds covered with
thick homemade quilts, and since it was cooler in their room
than downstairs, they hopped straight under the covers after
undressing down to their pajamas again.

It was only later, in the wee hours of a new morning, when
Tom became the first to learn Alfred's secret. It was
premature, an accident - not yet intended - but life tends
to unravel when you least expect it. Sneaking downstairs to
the bathroom, he saw Alfred in the altogether for the first
time, getting out of the bathtub - the door was open a crack
and the boy had let himself in, not realizing that his
former math teacher was even taking a bath.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Tom said, "I didn't know." But seeing the
naked man was like peeping in a freak show. He couldn't
believe it. "You - d-don't have any balls!" Tom blurted.
Actually, his ball-sacs were pea-sized, tiny and shriveled,
and indeed the man's testicles had long ago been surgically
extracted, and Alfred's penis was oddly shaped, like it had
been cut off and then replaced with another body part; what
remained resembled more of a bulbous middle finger. Tom ran
out of the bathroom afraid to pee right then and there;
instead he decided to get dressed and to pee outside in the
cold - where it was safe. After he shook out the last drops
and found himself staring up at the black starry sky, he put
his organ back inside his pants and began sobbing,
uncontrollably, and for a long time, a very long time, the
tears trickled down his face. When they began freezing
there, like the man-beast Edgar's snot revisited, he stopped
them cold, like shutting off a faucet.

End of Part 18