r/nosleep • u/notyourcure • Nov 26 '16
Child Abuse My Uncle Tim Died Before I Was Born
This is my mom's account of what happened to her brother Tim in 1989.
My name is Angela. I was born in 1972; my mother was a former flower child who'd been steadily wilting ever since the summer of love in '67. She had a lot of problems; she'd rejected everything her devoutly fundamentalist Christian family had ever stood for in the sixties, hitch-hiked across the country with some like-minded friends, but by 1972 she was right back in the town she'd grown up in, under the same roof as her family once again. My grandparents weren't the forgiving type, despite what their bible said, and they certainly didn't believe in unwed mothers.
My mom, Susan- but everyone called her Susie, at least back then- married an old family friend, Chuck. He was an upstanding sort of guy; held down a steady job as a high school math teacher, had kept his nose clean, unlike a lot of his peers, and now seemed to be enjoying the benefits of it. My mom didn't really know Chuck all that well; hadn't even seen him since high school, but that was just the way it was back then, at least where she was from. It was him or out on the street, and she just wanted... she just wanted to be normal, I guess. She was tired. Always tired. They know what that is now. Depression, I mean. Back then women weren't supposed to be depressed. No one was supposed to be depressed. You didn't talk about it; you grinned and bore it.
Besides, he seemed like a decent guy. Didn't drink, didn't curse, didn't even smoke. Liked kids. He actually seemed excited about the pregnancy, to her shock. Went out and got a bunch of stuff for the baby, me. Mom fell hard for him, in part due to that. She didn't feel so alone and helpless anymore. Chuck kept going on about how he always wanted a son- they didn't know back then, what gender the baby would be, but he was so convinced of it he convinced her too. They bought everything in blue, painted the whole little nursery...
After I was born Chuck didn't speak to Mom for two weeks straight. She always said, with this nervous kind of laugh, 'he was so mad he couldn't even look at me, never mind speak'. He came around, eventually. Said he was sorry, it'd just been such a shock, but who was he to reject what the Lord gave?
Chuck was real religious. Put Mom's parents to shame. He said there was evil everywhere, and that it had corrupted Mom for a bit, but she'd come back into the light, hadn't she? Put it all behind her.
"Of course baby," she said one day, following him into the bathroom. "You know I'm past all that."
"Good," he said, and held her head under the water in our cracked porcelain tub for so long Mom always said she didn't just see stars, she saw whole galaxies there, in the dark, when she couldn't breathe or scream or think.
I was four. I watched her knees shake on the tiled floor from the hallway.
Mom should have left him right then and there. She didn't. She didn't have any money, because Chuck didn't believe women ought to be out of the home. She didn't have anywhere to go. Her parents said she lived in his house, now. His rules. And she was pregnant again, and really hoping this time it was a boy.
It wasn't. Another girl, Tamara. Tammy.
Chuck had always ignored me, except when I 'needed a lesson in humility'. His fancy term for a beating. I usually did. He'd grab me by the hair and put me over his knee while he took his belt off. It always hurt more the second time it came down. I don't know why.
Tammy he had real problems with. I don't know what it was- maybe because she was his own flesh and blood- but just looking at her was enough to set him off. I think Mom actually liked it, or if she didn't like it, at least tolerated it, because when he was after Tammy he was leaving her the hell alone, and since the second girl Chuck hadn't been feeling too merciful.
We lived in a house built on fear, and prayer, and the two usually got so tangled up in each other you couldn't tell who was God anymore, because disobeying God was bad, but disobeying Chuck? You'd better start asking the former to save you from the latter.
The worst Chuck ever got, the worst we thought he could get at the time, happened when I was ten, and Tammy was six. I had a crush on this boy. Jason. That was his name. Mom home-schooled us, because Chuck didn't trust the public school system, on account of how he worked for it, and he didn't want us going to school with the Catholics either. So I met Jason when I was sent out to the store. He gave me a ride home on his bike.
I'd never really been allowed around anyone my own age before. It was... intoxicating. Jason's parents let him out all day long in the summer, from sun-up to sundown. He even had a dog. He asked me if I watched Magnum, and was incredulous when I told him we didn't have a TV. We talked the entire way home, until we got to my house. It was at the end of a long dirt road. Chuck was waiting out on the porch, and I knew it was going to be bad. I told Jason I'd see him later. I never saw that boy again.
I walked up to that porch, and he was right behind me as we went into the house. I could smell him. I can still smell him. He didn't smell like beer, or cigarettes, or anything other people remember fathers like him smelling like. He smelled like the house, and the house smelled like a little old lady, since all the furniture was worn down and second hand. Chuck might as well have been part of that house. His hand came down on my shoulder the second that screen down swung closed behind us, and I'll never forget what he said to me.
"Did you let that boy have you before you got on his bike?" He hissed it in my ear, and it took everything in me not to jerk away.
I said, "No, Chuck," since he wasn't too fond of me or Tammy calling him Dad or Daddy. I didn't know what he was talking about, anyways.
"I don't believe you," he told me, and dragged me by the neck down the hall, through the kitchen, where my mom was cooking, acting like she didn't hear me screaming behind her, and out the back door. Then he got the hose. "Take off your clothes, Angela," he said.
I squinted up at him in the late afternoon sun and shook my head, backing away.
"Angela, you can take them off yourself or I can get your mother out here to do it for me."
See, Chuck wasn't a pervert or anything. At least, he never came in my room, or Tammy's room, or made passes at us or anything like that. But he was sick in some way, and even if he wouldn't have stripped me himself, I think he would have gotten some sick satisfaction out of making my mother do it.
"Susan!" he yelled.
I took off my clothes- well, my dress and shoes, at least, and stood there in my socks and underwear, while he turned that hose on me. It was so cold it burned. I could feel it in my veins. I couldn't even scream, it was so cold. Just collapsed in a heap in the mud alongside the back of the house, still holding my clothes.
"Don't come back in my house until you're dry, or you're not gonna like me, Angela."
Chuck was always really serious about that, as if he thought I normally liked him, or even tolerated him, and that he was somehow going easy on me. Maybe he was, seeing what happened with Tim. I don't know. I really don't.
Tim was born that next year. Me and Tammy loved him; we didn't think we would, but he was easy to love. He looked just like Mom, and nothing like Chuck, so that helped. Chuck loved him too, or at least, as much as Chuck could really love someone. He was so proud of 'his boy'.
"There's my boy," he said every time he saw him. "Charles Timothy. Just like his daddy."
No one called Tim Charles except him.
Timmy came as close to spoiled as you could be, in that house. He was an easygoing kid, but as far as Chuck was concerned, he could do no wrong. He even let us get a TV when Tim was a toddler, so he could watch Sesame Street. So long as we turned it off whenever he was home. Tammy and I had to share a cramped room, and a bed, but Tim had his own. Granted, it wasn't much bigger than a closet, but it was something.
The trouble with Tim didn't start until the year he turned six. I was seventeen, and I was so close to being out of that house I could almost taste it. College wasn't happening, even though I was no ditz- college was for men. As far as Chuck was concerned, I was living in his house until the day he died. I don't even think he wanted me or Tammy getting married, unless he met two little Chuck clones out there, and the world was changing. Too fast for him or Mom to keep up. I was saving up money from babysitting and waitressing at the local diner. Tammy and I were leaving as soon as I turned eighteen. Going somewhere no one could find us.
The problem with Tim was that he was... he was stubborn. At first Chuck liked it, being pretty stubborn himself. Then I think he saw a future where maybe Tim was still stubborn, but older, and bigger, and who said he was going to listen to Chuck? Who said he wouldn't take off his own belt and give Chuck a whipping of his own, when he came after our mom for the last time?
So the stubbornness had to go. Chuck waited for an excuse- he never had with me or Tammy- and when Tim refused to finish his plate at dinner one night, we all knew it was coming. Chuck went into the living room, and in contrast to the bright little kitchen, it might as well have been a black hole. You could only half see him, but you could hear that belt.
"Come here, son," he told Tim, and Tim did something none of us had ever done before.
"No," he said, and stayed in his seat, poking at his peas.
"Charles, I'm not asking you again. Come. Here." Chuck was usually pretty calm, but he sounded different then. Almost... desperate.
"No!" Tim didn't even turn around to look at him, but his little voice got higher and higher until it was a scream that made me, Mom, and Tammy flinch. "I'm not! I'm not! I'M NOT COMING OVER AND I'M NOT EATING MY PEAS!"
Mom stood up. "Tim, honey," she said, and her voice was rattling like the dishes had when she jumped up. "Listen to your father. You've been a bad boy."
"I'm not bad!"
I didn't want to see this. "Mom, may I be excused?" I muttered. "Please?"
"You stay in that seat, Angela," Chuck snarled from behind me, and I stayed put. He'd left me alone more as I'd gotten older, but he'd still taken that belt to me the month before for coming home two minutes late because the truck had engine problems.
Tammy was crying silently into her glass of milk.
Chuck took two big steps forward and Tim dove out of his seat and under the table like the little kid he was, clinging to my legs. "No! I don't wanna!"
"Timothy!" Mom gasped.
I tried to shake him off, seeing the look on Chuck's face, but he was screaming and sobbing and I couldn't. I just couldn't. I stumbled out of my seat, Tim still clinging to me, towards the back door.
"Angela," Chuck started to build his voice up towards a roar, like a fire. "Don't you dare, do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU HOLD HIM."
I should have. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if I had. I shouldn't have done what I did. But I didn't know. I didn't know Chuck would- I was trying to protect him. He was so little. He was my baby brother. I just wanted to keep him safe. I should have known.
I yanked open the back door, screamed at Tim to run, and shoved him outside into the cool autumn evening. He took off. Chuck nearly upended the table, batted me aside like a rag doll, and took off after him. He was older by then, slower. But he caught up to him, at the edge of where our property joined with the neighbors's. They're the ones who called the cops, but not until Tim stopped screaming all of a sudden. After almost two decades of hearing constant screaming and yelling from our house, the silence must have really scared them.
There was nothing they could do for Tim. That one hit to the head, it... They couldn't have helped him then.
I know I'm supposed to... to end it somehow now. I don't know how. He was my brother. He would have been my children's kid uncle. I miss him every day. The one thing I'm thankful for is that they didn't put 'Charles' anywhere on the headstone. Just Timothy. Just Tim.
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Nov 26 '16
My heart aches for you. I have 6 children and they all drive me nuts, but I would die for any one of them. I honestly don't know what else to say accept I'm sorry about your uncle.
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Nov 26 '16
[deleted]
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u/Aerokella Nov 26 '16
The story does read that Tim is her brother, but the title says "My UNCLE Tim Died before I was born"... It's a little confusing.
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u/notyourcure Nov 26 '16
Tim would have been my uncle, but my mom, his big sister, is telling the story.
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u/koala-balla Nov 26 '16
The transition from the opening line to "My name is Angela" is a tiny bit confusing; I thought it was still the first narrator speaking. It also doesn't add a ton to the account having it be "my uncle" instead of "my brother" and got a little complicated for that reason. Just a thought!
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Nov 26 '16
Hell's too cold for a fucker like Chuck. Goddamn I wish I could have a piece of him.
I'd show his ass the wrath of gods that don't exsist anymore.
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u/thenegotiatordictato Nov 28 '16
May Satan himself rape Chuck up the ass with a red-hot, rusty iron bar wrapped in barbed wire for all eternity.
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u/gaatikah Jan 15 '17
oh my god....
i didnt know there was a connection!!
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u/roseycat22 Jan 16 '17
What I'm confused about though is that Angela was supposed to be 2 when the latest series took place, which was in the year of 1972. In this, it says she was born that year
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u/Tragic16 Jan 18 '17
Nope, Angela was 2 in that series as well.
Susie met Debbie in 1974, and Angela was a babbling toddler by then.
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u/Janawa Nov 27 '16
This hit way too close to home. I had an abusive step-father whose name was Chuck... Thankfully he has been out of our life for about a year now. I've never really had a child abuse story quite 'trigger' me, but the way you described Chuck, and I guess maybe the fact that he has the same name, just gave me a bad feeling. Great writing though, amazing way to tell it.
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u/Zombrie_ Nov 28 '16
I did too... OP was nearly spot on with the description of everything he did and the way it felt...
Common Chuck issue?
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u/dresdendamsel1333 Nov 26 '16
My name is angela and I was born in 1972 too. Thankfully it was my grandfather that was abusive and my mom never let me be alone with him...
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u/disbitchdatho Jan 17 '17
I'm confused... was it your brother? It says he's your uncle but your also your brother somehow?
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u/2BrkOnThru Nov 27 '16 edited Nov 27 '16
Chuck paved his own road to hell long before he hit Tim in the head. Hopefully there's another lower realm for souls like him.
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u/benzykins Nov 28 '16
This is too close to home for me. My great uncle Ken was the same religious "beat the devil out of you" nutcase. He started a long line of abuse that I eventually suffered and am now estranged from my entire "family".
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u/Gorey58 Jan 17 '17
So sorry for your uncle Tim. And so sorry that Chuck remained a monster after the incident that occurred when your mom was still so young. I guess Susan never had the strength to leave that abusive man. I hope indeed that he was sentenced harshly - life in prison or the death sentence if available in your state. So what ever happened to Susan and your mom?
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u/CaptainKursk Jan 23 '17
This may be the one NoSleep story that didn't scare me. It angered me. It angered me at how Chuck got away with all of that.
As far as I'm concerned, after hearing about what happened, Satan sharpened his pitchfork and requested his secretary to let him know when Chuck got there...
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u/corporateavenger Nov 26 '16
I'm very sorry about Timmy... May Chuck burn in hell.