This Is Not A Reflection of You

By E A (Edward) St Amant

Fascinating; something completely different. Readers who listen to their hearts will recognize the link between the old Ancien Regime and Gloria Bowmen. Great plot twists; absolutely delicious evil characters. The cute old Nazi-grandma living in a secluded wealthy Greek neighborhood in Toronto. She is at war with the world. She hates everything and everyone. An exciting tale of death, rebirth and the worst side of human nature. Gloria Bowmen is a sort of real-life vampire. A life of evil and a hater of all things good perfectly described in an outstanding adventure.

Gloria Bowmen is a child of Nazi Germany; a thoroughbred Teutonic anvil who has resisted all charity, society and civility. She is hidden safely and unsuspected in a cloistered community in Toronto Canada. Not even Dahmer, Pickford or Bernardo is a match for her iniquity. With all of her considerable power she becomes the master of her world and reaps a vengeance on one man which is both ingenious and perfectly monstrous. Good and evil is her most popular past-time and she revels in the destruction of all around her; only a single person stands in her way, the man who already killed her.

She is the cute old lady next door who would like to Stalinize the whole world. An unexpected and outstanding journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E A (Edward) St Amant
• Release date: May 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452337876

E A (Edward) St Amant

E A St Amant is the author of How to Increase the Volume of the Sea Without Water, Dancing in the Costa Rican Rain and Stealing Flowers.https://www.minds.com/edwardatedstamant/https://tededwardstamant.substack.com/

Book preview

This Is Not a Reflection of You

Published by E A St Amant at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition August 2011

Web design by: Edward Oliver Zucca

Web Developed by: Adam D’Alessandro

Canadian Press eimpressions Toronto

Copyrighted E A St Amant May 2009

Author Contact: [e-mail]

E A St Amant.com Publishers

www.eastamant.com

All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, emailing, ebooking, by voice recordings, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author , the publisher or their agents. This Is Not a Reflection of You ISBN: 978-0-9782603-1-6, Digital ISBN: 978-1-4523-3787-6. Thanks to the many people who did editorial work on this project and offered their many kind suggestions, including Les Broszkowski, Maya Crystal and Lisa D’Alessandro. I was inspired by Christine Harris and Dr. Wilfred Lowe to write this story. Elizabeth Drury volunteered practical help and research on German history and Polish Jews in the years where the Nazis came to power. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances whatsoever to any real actual events or locales to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

By Edward A St Amant

How to Increase the Volume of the Sea Without Water

Dancing in the Costa Rican Rain

Stealing Flowers

Spiritual Apathy

Restrictions

Book of Mirrors

Perfect Zen

Five Days of Eternity

Five Years After

Five Hundred Years Without Faith

Fog Walker

Murder at Summerset

The Theory of Black Holes (Collected Poems)

The Circle Cluster, Book I, The Great Betrayer,

The Circle Cluster, Book II, The Soul Slayer,

The Circle Cluster, Book III, The Heart Harrower,

The Circle Cluster, Book IV, The Aristes,

The Circle Cluster, Book V, CentreRule,

The Circle Cluster, Book VI, The Beginning One

Non-Fiction

Atheism, Scepticism and Philosophy

Articles In Dissident Philosophy

The New Ancien Régime

By E O Zucca and E A St Amant

Molecular Structures of Jade

Instant Sober

Living Animal

Chapter 1

A strong fall wind created a cylindrical vortex which spun maple and elm leaves through the walkways between the headstones around Gloria Bowmen’s coffin. Rain came often in autumn, sometimes there was snow. Presently, an endless gray sat on the tombstones. The day was delightful. The leaves were brown, dry and noisy. They burst forth, then fell and rose again among the hundreds of monuments. The endless traffic on the roads and avenues surrounding the cemetery had a dull drone, the gut-level embrangle of machinery. October is harvest time for squirrels. Many of these cunning rodents could be espied shuffling back and forth between the gravesites. The green conifers saved the necropolis of much of the sparseness caused by the bare deciduous. The preeminent church on the corner afforded it some gravity. Mausoleums on the north hill broke the monotony.

The corpse in the coffin had reached 93 years of age. In her long life, she had crafted herself into one of the most vile humans Tego had ever had the misfortune to meet. Egotistic, spoilt, obnoxious, amazingly petty were things that you could say about this almost-centenarian.

She had been a skirt of laziness her entire span and loved to brag of it. I never did a day’s work in my whole life, she was fond of saying in her creepy falsetto voice if you asked her to fend for herself in even the smallest matter, and I don’t intend to start now. This was followed by an uncontrollable cackle as if she had said something in the most funny original way.

No church service had been performed in her honor. She had willed it–he had squelched it. She had lived over nine decades and mustered three people at the final service on an otherwise beautiful day. All three of them likely hated her. He knew he did.

He was rather amused that he was walking away with her wealth and with even a feeling of benevolence. The world was rid of her. The money hadn’t gone to false purposes. He wished he had choked the life out of her with his bare hands. But no, he had flirted within the bounds of legality. The feelings of continuing hate were irrational. She brought it out in everyone whose life she had touched, so repugnant that she would have cannibalized the entire city had she the power. The Stalina of Toronto.

Tego Lyaise wasn’t willing to have blood on his hands, then later, feel obliged to repent to regain his humanity. He was an experienced middle-aged opportunist trying to get by without too much damage to anyone. A libertarian without moral pretensions. What is more, no matter what some philosophers say, we are not reasoning beings. Brilliant (perhaps cowardly), impulse had called to him. He had answered it. Better the money in his hands than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the clergy she had intended should receive it, a church he in particular found repulsive.

Mrs. Mary Danielle Chapman on his left was the lonely neighbor who had been loyal to this monster for 20 years. She had expected plentiful amounts from the noteworthy Bowmen estate, not a penny. The bitterness writhed through her facial features. The hate was hidden in her voice. Her eyes were nearly blind with it.

Susan Serrano, to his right, was rotund and unanimated. She had only partial use of her right hand and a large purple birthmark on her otherwise pretty face. She too, wouldn’t collect on any of Gloria Bowmen’s promises. She had only invested two years. That’s not so bad in a scam such as getting some rich old sucker’s will. The idea for Mrs. Bowen’s fine end – not the how, why and where of his perfect little dispatch – but the inspiration for it, had been supplied by her. In an instant of anger, she had provided him the motive and means–put the sin in his sinus, so to speak. His investment had been under a year. That was remarkable, walking away with two million dollars for a 12month’s run.

In 1935 when Mrs. Bowen was just 20 years old, she had married an established Polish doctor of some wealth. With the help of his ministerial and nursing staff, he ran a successful practice in the east-end of Toronto which doubled as a drop-in clinic in a strip mall on O’Connor Avenue. Dr. Murray Bowmen spent his time with patients and had a long-term romantic relationship with one of his hard-working secretaries which was most satisfactory. He dreaded on any given day, even dead on his feet, to turn right at the bridge and go home to his wife. He was 40 when they had married, and soon after, realizing his grave mistake, he became a workaholic. From seven in the morning to eight at night, there were patients waiting to see him and he was happy for it.

Gloria would phone and try to berate him for it. Such was his lot. Better being tormented over the phone than having to spend one more second with her in person than necessary. Every day, the secretary who he slept with would buy flowers, confectionary or penny novels for him to take home to his wife as a guilt-gift.

Drachenflutter, she would whine with a shout, taking his gift anyway. Come to bed, I’m lonely.

Many years before he retired, in 1955 at the age of 60, he died under a cloud of mystery. She lived almost four more decades and yet never remarried. Men came in droves. Back then, she was a compact and even pretty dark-haired woman – a rich one – but after a few conversations, they saw with their own eyes what they had been warned about by neighbors. Her open sore: immense unerring greedy love of herself taken to a level where even pets were driven into insanity or early graves. The cats, dogs, budgies and gerbils whose demise she had been singularly responsible for numbered in the hundreds. Many had died of starvation. Some had committed suicide. She had not once made a payment to a veterinarian.

They’re wannabe doctors, she would say in her shrill voice of total petulant certainty. They overcharge for the smallest procedures. This was followed by her seeming uncontrollable irritating cackle. Best to be rid of your pet, then spend a dollar at the vet.

And she didn’t.

The two women looked at him with warm regard. They hoped against hope that he would give them something of their hard-earned and rightful due.

Reverend Arnold Armstrong was an anemic unpleasant-looking man with pimples and held an expression bordering on autistic. I didn’t know, Mrs. Bowmen, he said in a soft inoffensive voice, when he was done with the tedious task of blessing and praying for a soul who certainly didn’t deserve it. Would anybody like to say a few words?

I will, Tego volunteered softly, wondering if he could straddle the line between verity and fable. She was an exceedingly charitable woman as many of the televangelists know. She was constantly giving it to others. A complete paragon of chastity. Never a man came to her house without being stricken with her unusual bent. Although many admired her, none so much as didn’t know her well.

Reverend Armstrong nodded, accepting the woven truths without really listening. Mary and Susan caught his eyes with half-smiles. They knew. Gloria Bowmen sent her money not as charity but as hate. She despised the world and prayed for The Rapture in her lifetime. She firmly believed in it and spoke about it every day. She thought she could buy her way into heaven. Perhaps, in all, she had spent over a million dollars on Christian fundamentalist organizations in America, and hundreds of thousands on ones in Canada.

Money speaks louder than words. she had cackled so many times in his presence.

You will stay behind and suffer once The Rapture comes, she cried out if he offended her. She was piqued by people every waking moment, so she constantly repeated it like some mantra.

Canada is a Godless country, she professed. Phew, I give to it anyway. What’s a gal to do?

She equated giving money to Huntley St., to paying taxes. She prayed daily for Armageddon where sinners, unbelievers, Jews, Muslims and the people from all other faiths, would burn at last in an eternity of fire. True Christians, especially Orthodox Greeks, Roman Catholics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Evangelist-Baptists, would be taken body and soul without pain into the palm of bounty, bathing in the loving font of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps two or three billion people would be exterminated in this divine holocaust in the time of the Apocalypse. Maybe zillions of souls from the beginning of Humans’ time on earth would find themselves also in hell. Every day she walked down to the Mormon Temple, the closest church to her house, to pray, trusting against hope that the Rapture would happen that day.

Like most religious people, the terror of damnation combined with the expectation of everlasting reward accounted for most of the reason for her superstitious belief, that Jesus, if such a man ever existed, was so bankrupt and hated people who did not believe in him so much, as to set them on fire for all of the time into the future. So unfair that repentant murderers, thieves and immoral folks of all sorts, would get to heaven if they atoned in time. Meanwhile, moral giants like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jonas Edward Salk, Nelson Mandela or Thomas A Edison should go up in smoke every instant of infinity.

This is real meaningful Gloria Bowmen hate. Terror beyond what even Mao Tse-tung or Osama bin Laden could generate, the cornerstone of all good religion and ideology. Human beings with the poverty of lessened intelligence often caused by faith, survived in a spot between the wish for forever and the fear of oblivion.

My whole life I’ve been a good Christian, she had professed to him on occasions too numerous to count. Her soul had progressed from the color of green to slate blue. It shaded as she aged to an unhealthy ignorant darkness that was as thick as mud. By the time she died, her soul was the color of shit-brown. How did he know? Not bogged down by religion, one could see the color of it in her eyes.

Chapter 2

In the late Gloria Bowmen’s backyard dozens of symmetrically shaped apple, cherry, plum, peach and pear trees blossomed – a beautiful miniature orchard – many of them half a century old. Around the tall wire fence surrounding the entire back property lay raspberry bushes, rhubarb, blackberry and grape vines. In the central part of the yard, grew a large well-cultivated knee-high fenced-in strawberry and cherry tomato plot. The boles on the trees were thick and the well-pruned, sprayed for tent-caterpillars, wasps and other flying insects twice during the summer, maintained by outside landscapers and gardeners. No expense had been spared. Her harvest was protected by the locality. It shared a bielded dip in the land and was sheltered on four sides. By her large house at the front, the Don Valley on one side, a large forested backyard to the east, whose owner for decades had let the property go to seed. A nine foot wooden fence held her western front. They were neighbors she had never spoken to. Her yield every year was startling. Certainly it would have supported a fruit-stand through August.

That isn’t what she did with her harvest.

When ripened, she had the fruit culled under her close supervision. What she couldn’t use for herself was carted down with ceremony to a nearby footpath into the Don Valley in the early evening near darkness. Then she had it dumped into the warm polluted water of the river so that no one should have it. It rotted there or was eaten by the slugs and wasps when it washed up on the banks or got caught inside the many overturned grocery carts which had been pushed into the river by the young restless echo-boomers.

Some neighbors, knowing this, had phoned the newspapers, but none of the big four, or even Eye, Now or the Mirror, came to report the story of some old lady’s tyrannical pettiness in the Toronto’s oldest Greek suburb. Perhaps no journalist believed it. Or they thought that it would turn out that Gloria Bowmen was senile or suffering from brain dementia even though she had never endured an illness in her whole life for which she was hospitalized.

Some would deem to pick the fruit before she destroyed it. Her home video surveillance made this difficult. Not an August went by when the police weren’t at her door. Over the years, she had successfully prosecuted individuals for property trespass violations and Theft Under. Woe to the dozens of teenagers who perhaps didn’t believe the stories of who lurched in their midst. They would scale the fence with bravado for an apple or peach only to fall sick the next day.

Mary Danielle Chapman was the plump neighbor of some 20 years who came everyday to check on her and collected a weekly stipend for it. She pleaded with her every year to let her neighbors have some of the fruit, As an act of good will.

It is not theirs, Gloria returned in her harsh shrill voice. If they want some, let them grow and care for fruit of their own.

But you throw it away.

What would it matter if I ate it? she said eyeing the folds of Miss. Chapman’s body with disgust. Often she had scolded Mary about her ‘adipose tissue’ Gloria’s word for fat. Whether I sell or scatter it into the Don Valley River, it is mine to do with what I please.

But it makes no sense.

Get out.

Larkspurs, roses, tulips, pansies, cherry-pink fuchsia, purple lilac, pale-blue forget-me-nots, multicolored impatiens and sweet yellow marigolds had a large area along the back behind the strawberry field where there still remained some morning sun. Hundreds of tulips in the early spring. Every day in the summertime and fall, even near the end, she would journey into the backyard to clip bouquets and put them into vases to display in her front bay windows.

After the funeral, he stood in the backyard studying it before he went into the house. He didn’t have total legal possession of the property yet, but was the guardian and had the keys. It was only a matter of days. On the bare mud ground between the trees, there lie animal chankings, the rotted carcasses of fallen fruit, dried brown leaves and fallen twigs. The smell was primarily musk and malathion with overtones perhaps of a phantasmorgia of orchids and bitter honey. It was a concoction from a decadent dream. It left a buzzing in his brain. It was not so unlike that feeling when he was young, of waking up beside a girl with whom he wished he hadn’t been intimate. Was this Gloria Bowmen’s offensive reverberation? He decided suddenly that the grove would be torn out. Brilliant sunlight and a high wooden fence would replace it. An in-ground swimming pool and a new patio set would be nice.

He struggled with his keys at the front door. Mary Danielle Chapman had always had extra keys, and still may have them, but she was no longer allowed into the residence. Tomorrow he would change the locks. Without trepidation, he entered, a thing he had done many times, but which today he did as the new owner.

I’m dying, she had whined in those last days, her voice filled with terrible fear. I’m growing weaker. Who has brought me to this? You will rue the day.

Her voice echoed in his mind as he walked through the gray cobwebbed rooms. In death, at 93 years old, someone had brought her to her knees. She couldn’t accept her end with grace even to the last. She cried like a baby and begged God to let her live for a while longer. She was greedy for every extra second.

He passed through the yellow faded back hallway into her large bedroom. The wallpaper, perhaps at one point a healthy blue was now a washed-out silvery purple colored. It had drawings of young girls in the presence of what looked to be naked men. Both were lost inside a prehistoric forest of giant tall over-trees of a steamy South American rainforest.

He doubted his perception. He put on his glasses and looked closer. Indeed, giant buttressed trunks from trees like the kopok were surrounded by smaller middle ones similar to banana, palm and fig. The huge leafs, roots, tendrils and branches of the floor of the jungle in one way or another hid the men and girls’ genitals, but it didn’t hide two obvious facts: the girls were young white and in distress, and the men were native and coming after them.

He sat on the bed and pondered this. Where would she have purchased such wallpaper? Even today, such a thing would be hard to get, and this was 40 years old, maybe more. It was nearly pornographic and clearly had racial overtones.

To his back was a dresser with a large worn mirror. More than once through that mirror as he looked from the living room he had tried unsuccessfully to espy where she kept her money. Beside the actually estate, bank accounts and investments he would inherit, he was sure there was cash all throughout the house–plenty of it. This is why he would move at once to change the locks, just in case Susan or Mary knew what he knew and decided to help themselves.

The first time he had entered the house was some five years ago. He was delivering medicine to help fight a viral infection for which she insisted, at 87 years old, she not be hospitalized. In this, he came to learn, she followed the advice of her late husband, Dr. Bowmen.

Avoid the hospitals if you want to see a ripe old age, he had often said.

Not long had Tego worked for Shoppers Drug Mart when he had quickly moved up to junior assistant, doing scheduling, staff interviews and deliveries. One of the requirements of being assistant was to have a vehicle with a G2 license. Before that, he had worked on the Western Bakery’s Front St., location until Dempster’s had purchased it in 2001, and laid off all the full-time bakers hired before 1985. He had only been working since 1996, hired at the age of 20. Even though he had a job offer from Christies Bakery on Lakeshore, he decided to leave the business and go into retail.

In 2001, he found himself leaving his first wife, who he had loved dearly when they were married. And who, a year later when she had announced it was time to start planning a family, he could no longer stomach. He hoped the two events weren’t connected. He loved children, but he was awfully glad he didn’t have any with her.

After many like deliveries to Mrs. Bowmen’s house in Woodbine Commons, she began to ask him to come back and do odd jobs around the house, such as fixing appliances, painting and small repairs for which she paid a small fee and just barely covered his costs. As well as being uncharitable and egocentric, she was also, miserly.

He searched through her chest of drawers, but found no cash, just a small top replica of a humanoid withered to bone. He couldn’t imagine what it meant or how she had come upon it.

By 2005, he was continually keeping her company and restoring things throughout the house without recompense. It was at this time, he began to fully appreciate that she was a nocuous, peccable and maculate target of his avarice, richly deserving of having her plans beyond the grave scotched for his welfare. He would feel no conscience he assured himself, and so far, hadn’t.

He rifled through her walk-in closet. Again no money in any of the dozen hats and shoe boxes. There was a third puzzle. Several hard covered German chemistry textbooks. These somewhat vaguely frightened him.

By 2006, he had educated himself in wills and guardianship issues. He had the papers in order to take over control as her legal protector, replacing Mary Danielle Chapman, if a chance should arise. Mary Danielle Chapman would likely contest any such move, but by the time he had established his presence in Gloria Bowmen’s waning years, she had turned against her stalwart neighbor. This was understandable since she hated everyone. If the time came, he had already decided that he would take a shot at replacing Bowmen’s current will which had The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints and Mary Danielle Chapman as the main recipients. Mostly the clergy got it all.

He noticed something promising. The borders or strips of the wallpaper masked a secret access panel right near the bottom corner near her bed which led to a cubby hole. It was partially covered by an overly large trash basket. He moved it and popped the panel open. Behind it, on small jerry rigged wooden shelving, was cash, and lots of it. Also a thin day-journal. He fell into a sitting position in front of it, his mouth opened in shock. He counted as his mind wandered.

Near the end of last year, he had carefully begun his plan of administering meprobamate to her in the evenings, an old-style sleeping drug with side-effects of anxiety, agitation, paranoia and severe withdrawal-reactions when abruptly stopped. To fight the anxiety it caused, he dissolved ativan, a close relation of valium, in her milk. To offset her agitation, he put desyrel in her tea, a mild antidepressant that also promoted sleep. Finally, he freely gave her percocet, a narcotic morphine-like painkiller straight from the muddy-bloody trenches of World War II. Within a year, she was completely addicted to all four substances.

She was high 90 percent of the time.

With relentless prodding, he drove her quickly to fits of complete agitation and submissiveness, and soon she had hand-written two clear, concise and straight forward wills – which he had effectively created – leaving everything to him as the soul beneficiary. He had her produce the old wills and burned them in her fireplace. He had promised verbally to make sure everything was liquidated and the money to go to her favorite faith, a parochial religion which he had no intention should get a cent.

Halfway counting, he was up to nearly 10,000 dollars.

The drugs he used could have snagged anyone. They were notorious. She fell fast and waves of what the Germans call, schadenfreude – evil glee – grew in his heart. She was despicable, and the best part was that these addictive narcotics from the mid-fifties were completely free. He had found them vacuum-packed in a small locked freezer in the basement and he mixed them effortlessly in her camomile, tea, milk or juice. He imagined she had never actually looked in her late husband’s small freezer in the basement. Fortunately it had never broke down–the pills worked wonderfully.

As her paranoia grew, she attached a lysergic import to every speck of dust in her, now, haunted house. The minutest sounds and tiniest shadows took up armies of her time. He was pretty certain from remarks she had made in anger, and she was furious most of the time, that she had murdered Dr. Murray Bowmen. He was beginning to imagine that the doctor was, through him, taking revenge on Gloria. Tego pictured himself as an avatar. When he was done counting – $16,735 – he gave a little laugh. Although she was not the first old person who hid cash in their house, it just seemed so nuts.

At the end, when her health began to fail, he discontinued administering the drugs all at once. On a pretty skimpy pretext, he moved the tiny medical freezer full of drugs to his apartment.

Her maddened personality rankled at once into fodder. She became witless, unbearable and abusive. He stayed away. Two weeks went by. Soon after, Mary Danielle Chapman, the neighbor who looked in on her daily, phoned 911. Gloria Bowmen was taken to East General Hospital and he visited her once there to reassure himself that she was indeed powerless to change anything. She cried as if a little schoolgirl lost to fear. She knew she was dying. It took all his self-control to keep the feeling of satisfaction from coming to his face. Two days later, she died. A brain tumor had got her. He straightaway showed the wills to his lawyers.

He perused the thin undated day-journal. All that had been written was half of the first page. For some reason it was marked #1593 and had a flippant but stylist hand, lots of curls and in the main legible. "Too late I’ve seen what he’s done to me. He is in the dark. He thinks I couldn’t strike at him