"My Friend, Albert Fish" © 2011 by Lee Adam Herold

Albert Fish was never anything but kind to me. In the fall of 1934 he took a room at our house for a month, maybe less. My mother took on boarders for a few dollars a week, most of them drifters, short-term renters. She got stiffed as often as not, many of those men staying for just a night, maybe a day or two at most, skipping out without paying. But Albert stayed for several weeks, always paid, always on time.

I was just a boy of fourteen, naive but not innocent. I’d seen my share of things. Money was scarce and life was hardscrabble, and mother had more pressing concerns than tending to me. So long as I didn’t go out of my way to cause the kind of trouble that led to the police bringing me home or come looking for me, she figured everything was as it should be, or at least good enough. So I’d seen and learned more than I probably ought, but such was life.

When Albert knocked on the door one day in response to the “Rooms for rent” sign in the window, he seemed meek and grandfatherly. He was polite and had money, and mother didn’t ask questions. His personality and manner gave no indications of his delusions, or his odd sexual proclivities, or the likely dozens of murders to which he could rightly lay claim. He befriended me almost immediately.

We spent a goodly amount of time in one another’s company, and I never suspected I might be in danger, though he eventually revealed to me that he’d originally intended to fuck me, kill me, and eat me, in whatever order may have seemed appropriate when that time came. But for some reason, that time never came. He never really told me why. We started out playfully. He knew lots of riddles, and I delighted in being stumped by them. On the rare occasions I was able to answer them, he’d give me a nickel. More often I had to admit I couldn’t figure them out, and he’d laugh and tell me the answer, and say I owed him.

“Charlie,” he’d say to me as I sat on the bunk in his little room, off our upstairs hall, not much bigger than a closet. “Got one for you.” He liked to sit in the hard wooden chair which was the room’s only other ornament besides the bare-bulb electric lamp on the wall. A high tiny window, seemingly added as an afterthought, let in little light.

“Shoot!” I’d say, tucking a foot beneath me and leaning forward to meet the challenge.

“You sure?” as if there was danger involved, as if by agreeing to hear the riddle, I was entering into a dubious and unbreakable contract.

“I’m sure, Albert. I’ll get this one.” I believed it, without good cause based on my track record.

“All right, then. I am said by one letter. I’m spelled with three. There are two letters in me. I am double or single; brown, blue, or green. I’m read from both ends and the same either way. What am I?” What am I riddles were his favorites. Mine, too, though they were often the trickiest.

I’d think on it a long time. Albert was always patient. He would sit and smile at me for as long as I wished to take in the figuring. Sometimes I’d ask if I could come back tomorrow. “Take as long as you wish,” he’d answer. “But no cheating!” One of the few hard and fast rules of our game was that I wasn’t to have any help in figuring the riddles. Albert said there was no value in just parroting something that someone else knew. He said that it wasn’t worth his time nor mine if I wasn’t going to bother setting my own mind to work on his puzzles. I didn’t know about any of that, but I wasn’t going to cheat because I wanted to be the one to figure it out. There was nothing in the world like the feeling to be had when I got one right. And besides that, I didn’t want to disappoint Albert.

I was outside one morning still thinking on that one, chucking stones at crows on the telegraph wire, when Albert called from the porch for me to come upstairs with him. I somewhat reluctantly dropped the handful of perfect-sized rocks I’d gathered and went in, feeling that the crows were mocking me for giving up the fight. But I took the stairs two at a time, always happy to visit with Albert. I was drawn to him, for whatever reason. He bade me close the door as he sat down in his hard chair, and then instructed me to pull out the small travel trunk he kept under the bed. I slid it out, heavy as it was and resistant to my efforts against the rough hardwood floor. He handed me the key from his pocket. “Open it, Charlie,” he said. Inside was a canvas bundle and a length of wood fashioned into something of a paddle, one end narrowed like a handle, the other with a number of nails driven through it. “Give me the wood, boy,” he instructed, and gripped the handle like a baseball bat. “You owe me for the riddles you couldn’t answer, Charlie.” He admired the nailed end of the board almost reverently, his mouth slack and his eyes focused singularly upon the nail points.

My heart quickened nervously, and my stomach lurched. “No, Albert,” I whispered, frightened. Was I to be paddled with that torture device, just for losing a few friendly games? I’d never agreed to that outcome.

His eyes turned to me, moist and blinking. He smiled at my apprehension. “You misunderstand, son,” he said. “I mean for you to paddle me. That is to be your payment.” I gaped at him, understanding that result even less. Why should Albert be paddled if it was I who had failed at the game? But Albert did not explain further, nor wait for me to come to understanding. He handed me the paddle, which I accepted dumbly, and stood, moving to the bed. There he unfastened his belt and dropped his trousers, exposing to me his pale, wrinkly bare buttocks. He lay face down on the bed. “Go on, Charlie,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t hold back. Hit hard, and make sure the nails find flesh. If you miss, I’ll be unhappy with you.” I moved into position, holding the paddle weakly. How was I to do this? I couldn’t imagine hitting my dear friend, least of all with this wicked implement of mayhem.

“I… I… I don’t want to, Albert,” I protested timidly.

“Go on,” he insisted. “You lost the game, Charlie. You owe me. We had an accord.” He was calling my honor into play. I knew I must comply. It was my duty as per the rules of the game. I swung lightly, hit him softly with it, closing my eyes. Pulling it away, I peeked to find no blood, no gaping wounds. Just small pink marks where the nails had barely jabbed him. “Hit me, Charlie!” he growled. “Drive the nails in. Do it, boy. Or are you a welcher?” I was no welcher. I swung harder, and Albert grunted. I swung again, this time hearing the satisfying SMACK of wood against meat, and when I pulled back for another swing there was resistance, the nails pulling out of his buttocks where they’d bitten in. Small holes in his skin oozed blood. I must have hit him a dozen or more times after, with increasing force upon each repetition. When I stopped I was sweating and breathing hard, and Albert’s hindquarters were bright pink and quite bloody. Blood dripped from the nail-studded paddle. Albert had moved one hand beneath himself, and was moving it vigorously. His breathing was heavy, laced with grunts, finally ending in a protracted groan. “Good boy, Charlie,” he breathed, standing and pulling up his trousers. He looked down at the soiled bedcover. “I’ll wash that myself,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to trouble your mother with it.” He patted me firmly on the shoulder. “You did well, my boy. Go ahead and put that away now.” I lay the paddle back in the trunk. The unseen contents of the canvas bundle clinked together as I put the wood atop them. Albert sent me away then, and I went off by myself to do some thinking. He did not instruct me not to tell anyone what had happened, either knowing that I would not or not particularly caring either way. I felt very strange inside.

A day or two afterward, Albert was sitting in his room upon the chair, his door open, when I passed in the hall and he called me in. It was the first I’d seen him since the paddling. He was holding one of his socks, his hand inside it, and regarding the tip of his finger poking through a frayed hole. He asked if my mother might have a needle and thread he could borrow, and I said that she did, and I knew just where she kept them. “Would you fetch ‘em for me, Charlie?” he asked sweetly.

I returned with the tin containing my mother’s sewing kit to find Albert’s door closed. I rapped a knuckle upon it, and he called me in. I opened the door to find him lying naked upon the bed, and quickly closed it again thinking I’d misunderstood and come by mistake, but he called my name once more and told me to come in. I do not know what made me do so, but I obeyed. I did not feel as though something terrible might happen. I merely felt like I was perhaps intruding upon something I shouldn’t be, for his privacy’s sake. But he did not try to conceal his nakedness, nor act as though anything was out of the ordinary at all. Lying upon his back, his knees bent and his thighs spread apart, he told me to put the sewing box down beside him and have a seat upon the chair. I was shaking as I did so. Then I watched him open the box, fumble within for the pin cushion that bristled with flat-head pins and sewing needles like porcupine quills, and pull a long straight needle from it. He put the sliver of metal into his mouth, point first, and withdrew it slowly. A strand of saliva clung to it from his lip, breaking as he pulled it away. Then he lifted his buttocks off the bed and reached down with his left hand to lift and pull his genitals out of the way. With his right hand he inserted the needle into the fleshy, white-haired region behind his wrinkly scrotum. He pushed it with his index finger until it disappeared completely up inside of him, a satisfied “Ahhhhhh” issuing from his parted lips. One small red drop stuck to his fingertip as he pulled it away. He sat up to face me, and sucked his finger clean. I looked him in the eye, and he smiled. I did not know what I should do. “How about you, Charlie?” he said casually. “How about you take a turn?”

He instructed me to stand up. To unfasten my trousers and let them drop. To lay over his lap as though preparing for a spanking. I did all of these, slightly embarrassed by my obvious state of arousal. My erection was the result of nervousness and the perverse excitement of doing something I knew I should not. I was not sexually aroused by Albert, nor did he appear to be by me, for though my erection dug into the wrinkled skin of his thigh when I lay across him, his own penis remained flaccid for I did not feel it stir at all against my belly. He placed the sewing tin at the foot of the bed, right before my face, and deliberately allowed me to watch him select a needle from the pin cushion for me. He put it between his teeth and sucked on it, moistened his index finger with spittle, and spread apart the cheeks of my ass with his other hand. He worked his wet fingertip just into my anus, twirling it in a circle, then took the needle and, without warning, pushed it all the way in. There was a sharp pinch as it pierced me, then a sharper pain inside as it went home. He applied pressure behind it until I was sure it was as far as he could make it go. Then he smacked my buttocks playfully and licked his fingers, one at a time. Surprisingly, as I stood I could not feel the needle inside of me as I thought I might. There was still a bit of a stinging pain where it had gone in, but I could not really tell that it was still inside. Occasionally afterward, when moving a certain way or performing particular exertions, I’d get a jabbing sensation down there, but most of the time I only knew it was there because I knew it was there.

After that day, I knew that Albert and I were kindred spirits, and that he had much to teach me. I was like him now, and wanted to be ever more so. He opened up to me in the days that followed, telling me stories of the people he’d killed, of the children he’d raped and defiled, murdered and eaten. He told me then that he’d intended to do the same to me, but when I asked why he hadn’t yet, he did not reply. I asked if he still intended to do so, and he answered that he did not. He told me with particular joy the tale of little Grace Budd, whom he said he’d kidnapped, strangled, dismembered, and eaten. He’d cut her head off with a saw, with an empty paint can beneath her neck to catch the blood, which he then drank. I was fascinated by his stories, and honored that he would share them with me, believing that I was becoming more than just his friend. I thought of myself as something of an apprentice-in-waiting. But the next day he told me that it was time for him to be leaving our house and moving along.

I begged him not to go. He seemed deeply touched by my pleas, and took me into the side yard one night well after the rest of the house had gone to sleep. He was barefoot, and had gotten a long-handled garden spade from somewhere. Splaying the toes of his left foot, he placed the point of the spade at the base of his pinky toe and told me to stomp upon the flat tread. I did so without hesitation, having learned much about Albert since the paddling, and knowing that when he told me to do something such as this, he meant it. He gave me the severed toe to keep, and slipped his foot back into his sock and shoe so that he would not bleed all over the floor as he limped back up to his room. He was gone before I woke the next day.

I put the toe in a small glass jar I found in the kitchen cupboards, and would spend hours staring at it. It was long and thin and pale, knobby-knuckled, the nail thick and yellow. It turned black quickly, and the flies soon got to it. Before long it was crawling with maggots, the flesh liquefying and falling away. By mid-December, when I heard that Albert had been arrested in New York City for the murder of Grace Budd, all that was left in the jar was a length of bone.

Albert was executed by electric chair just over a year later on January 16, 1936.

Later that same year my mother took in as a boarder a woman who had a son, several years younger than myself. I befriended the boy, and was never anything but kind to him. They were, I thought, gypsies or something like it, because the woman had given to her son a Ouija board to play with as a toy. When the boy first showed it to me, I hatched a thrilling idea. I bound the bone of Albert’s toe to the wooden stylus with twine, and told the boy we must try to contact a friend of mine who had died. The boy accepted the game with relish, and was intrigued by the addition of the bit of bone. We sat down at the board by candlelight late one night, each with our fingers resting lightly upon the stylus, and within a half hour of beginning our summons the stylus drifted, of its own accord, to the word HELLO.

“Is that you, Albert?” I asked.

The stylus pointed to YES, but I wanted sure confirmation.

“To prove to me that it’s you, then, I must ask… I never figured out your last riddle, and you never gave me the answer. If you are Albert, then tell me now… What is the answer?”

The stylus sat unmoving for a moment, then drifted, scraping quietly along the board, to the letter ‘E’. Then down and to the right, it coasted to ‘Y’. And back up again to rest upon the ‘E’. E-Y-E. Eye. I recalled the riddle: I am said by one letter. I’m spelled with three. There are two letters in me. I am double or single; brown, blue, or green. I’m read from both ends and the same either way. What am I?

An eye. Of course. And thus I knew I was truly talking to Albert. I told the boy the riddle, and he fairly squealed with delight as he saw the pieces fit together. I don’t know whether he believed we were talking to my dead friend, or whether he thought I was expertly manipulating the game for his amusement, but he was happy to play either way. As was I. I explained for the boy the rule of Albert’s riddle game… that if he had to tell me an answer, I owed him something.

“What do you owe him?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “That’s up to Albert.”

“Ask him!” he giggled. “Ask him!”

“Oh, I shall,” I smiled. “I owe you, Albert,” I called out to the darkness, winking at the boy in the candlelight. “What will you have me do?” At that, the stylus began to slide without hesitation. With an electric tingle, I felt the jab of the sewing needle where it still nested somewhere in the walls of my rectum…