They Call Me Teddy: (Enemies to Lovers Horror Romance) Read online

  They Call Me Teddy

  Ella Burns

  Copyright © 2020 Ella Burns

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover design by: Opulent Designs

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Playlist and pinterest

  Preface

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part 2

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part 3

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART 4

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Afterword

  Acknowledgement

  Books By This Author

  About The Author

  Playlist and pinterest

  If you want to listen to the playlist that helped inspire Teddy, you can listen to it on Spotify here

  If you want to check out the board and images I inspired myself with, you can check it out here

  Trigger warning!

  This book is dark and not for the faint of heart. Contains mental and physical abuse of the hero for long time periods of time as well as death, torture, erotic/BDSM themes and of course lots of fucks.

  I promise you no redemption in these pages and this is not for the faint of heart.

  Preface

  If you know me in any form or fashion then I implore you to pretty please, put this book down. And yes, mom, though I know you want to be supportive, this includes you too.

  Do us both a favor, let’s not make this awkward.

  Just… put down the book.

  I've seen too much death and pain for the short twenty-one years I've been alive. Any memories of my early years have been snuffed out by the depravity of the last almost two decades, and here I stand at the end of it all with nothing left.

  Coming to hell was an accident, at least in my case. Most people who end up here are brought here for Her. Then again, most people who end up here didn't last nearly as long as I have.

  Here I am, though, at the end of it all, and honestly? I envy the dead, for they remember nothing.

  'They Call Me Teddy', a dark, enemies to lovers story featuring young Branson and Amelia, two youths who are taken in and raised by a psychopath artist with a penchant for creating art with human flesh.

  This is an erotic horror love story, not a romance. You will find depravity, abuse, and death within these pages, and this is not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.

  Part 1

  When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

  William Shakespeare

  Chapter One

  Branson - Six years old

  When I woke up it was dark, and Mommy wasn't with me anymore. I don't like the dark, and I miss my nightlight. It's shaped like Eeyore. I like Eeyore. Everything smells funny here, and it's cold. At least my teddy is still here. There’s a red mark on him, though, and I don’t know why.

  I miss Mommy.

  I woke up to Her watching me. My first reaction was to cry, but she told me to ‘shh’ and that it was alright. She said some bad words, said that I was too young and not supposed to be there. I don't know what that means but I ask for my mommy. She tells me Mommy's gone. That she isn't coming back. I cry some more, and she shushes me again and tells me she'll be my mama now. Then she tells me her name is Jane.

  Branson - Eight years old

  “Like this?” I ask excitedly, holding the pieces like she showed me.

  “Yes, precious, just stay still,” Jane replies as she hurries to tie it together.

  “There we go!”

  I wait, wanting to make sure she is really done before I move my hand. When I help Jane and do a good job, she’s happy. I always want to make Jane happy. When she’s happy, she smiles and gives me treats. Jane scares me when she’s mad.

  “You can let go now,” she tells me after stepping back to survey her work. I slowly take my hand away and step beside her, taking in the now finished project.

  “What’s it called?” I ask her, knowing she loves when I take an interest in her art.

  “I think this one will be only ‘Portrait’.”

  I nod as though I know what that word means. Jane has been teaching me to read and giving me lots of homework. I bet I could spell it, but I don’t know what it means. I critically eye the piece in front of me. The stretched-out face is skinned perfectly and tied neatly to the edges where I helped hold it in place. It doesn’t look the same as the person before. The small bones—fingers I think—frame it nicely.

  The blood and stuff used to make me feel icky, but Jane says it's all nonsense. I'm doing better now and only get sick sometimes. Today, I didn't get sick.

  “I like it,” I tell her with a grin. She smiles at me and pats my head.

  “Good boy. Now, let’s get this cleaned up.”

  I start picking up small pieces and placing them into the trash bin, ignoring the slow sense of ickiness building in my tummy as I do. It’s all nonsense, I tell myself.

  “What’s this part called?” I ask when I peer into the trash. Jane leans over and picks up the part, squinting at it.

  “I think that’s the liver,” she says before dropping it into the pile.

  “Oh,” I reply, looking at the flabby discolored flesh. “How can you tell? How do you know so many things?”

  Jane chuckles lightly. “Many, many years ago I learned all of it—how the human body works. I was going to be a doctor.”

  “What’s that? I thought doctors made sick people feel better?”

  She nods. “That is one way to put it.”

  “And why didn’t you become a doctor? Why didn’t you make sick people feel better?”


  Jane’s face hardens, and I regret asking the question. She leans down so our faces are level as she holds my shoulders.

  “These people that you see here,” she tells me, her dark eyes boring into my own, “Every one of them is sick, you see. What I learned was that doctors only heal a certain kind of sickness. Me? I draw every last inch of it out.”

  I swallow, not understanding but nodding anyway. Her face changes once more into a smile and she pats my head again.

  “Good boy.”

  Branson - Fifteen years old

  I watch through gritted teeth as Jane puts the finishing touches on her latest project. I learned a long time ago that if I stay quiet, she usually forgets I'm there and doesn't ask for my help. Sometimes, she'll still take me out of my cage to hold something in place for her. I'd rather be in the cage than have to see any of her ‘art’ up close anymore. It isn’t the blood that bothers me. At least not really, not anymore. In fact, the biology of it all, how sudden death is when blood is removed, fascinates me. It’s Jane that I don’t want to get close to.

  Not that she’s a repulsive monster—at least, not to look at. The monster that lives in Jane is subtle; though, if you look into her eyes, you’ll see it. Her hair is usually pulled back into a knot on her head, revealing the sharp lines of her face, the black pits of her eyes. I’m about as tall as her now, but she’s still bigger than me. I suppose she eats a bit better than I do.

  My shoulders press hard against the rails, leaving deep indents in my back. I do my best to keep my breath even, but it's hard to breathe naturally when the air is saturated with the thick smell of blood and organs.

  It's a funny thing, the smell of inside someone. Not funny like ha-ha, but interesting in that it’s unique. Unless they’ve experienced it, you couldn’t describe it to someone else. I’ve had my fair share of experience in the last almost ten years since I was taken by accident along with my mother, who Jane tells me was a worthless whore. Every so often, when Jane walks me through the gallery, I wonder which pieces are of her. But I've never asked. I don't actually want to know.

  It has been two days since she started this one and I am grateful that it's almost over. My body is aching and cold from being in the cage, and I can feel a dull ache pounding behind my eyes. Nothing I’m not used to.

  I tried to kill myself once a couple of years ago, but with how closely I’m watched, it’s hard to find the time or tools to do it properly. When I was caught, I can honestly say that Jane taught me that I can in fact feel pain still. I haven’t tried it since. The scars on the soles of my feet will forever be testament to my failure to even end my own life.

  “Well, precious, I think we're almost done here!” Jane sings as she moves away from the table. “Would you like to see Mama’s wonderful new creation?”

  “Yes,” I respond quietly through my teeth, as though there were ever a choice. Another thing I learned a long time ago was this question is not rhetorical and that saying no has dire consequences.

  Jane claps her hands happily as though surprised. “Oh goody! I think you'll really like this one!”

  I open my eyes at the sound of the lock opening and stand, taking a moment to orient myself after the days of sitting cramped in the four-by-four box. I haven’t grown all that much, but enough that it’s a lot more cramped in there than when I was younger.

  I stand on weak and shaky legs, pausing a moment while the blackness dots my vision. I only ever get water when I’m in the cage, no food. It’s probably a good thing there’s nothing in my stomach to vomit by the time I’m forced to see the end results. It’s not so much the gore that makes me sick as much as seeing the before and after of the person that was brought in. They never look the same when Jane is done with them.

  Ignoring my obvious discomfort, Jane ushers me towards her finished project. I look and see this isn’t as bad as some, although the fact that I think so is probably a testament to how fucked up I am.

  On a platter sits two severed arms. Barbed wire wraps around them, holding them in place. A heart sits inside the hands which are brought together. The overall effect makes it look as though they are offering the organ. My nose tickles with the smell of the stuff she uses for preservation. I’ve learned about a lot of different chemicals that can do it, but I’ve never been able to figure out which ones Jane uses.

  “Isn’t it amazing!” Jane squeals beside me. “I call this one, ‘Offer to God’.”

  I do my best not to grimace and nod politely.

  “Well, I’d best get you back now,” she chirps, leading me out of the workroom. This next part is one of my least favorites: walking through the gallery. As always, I do my best to keep my head down and not focus on the varying older projects. The air is thick with the smell of old blood. A rotten coppery smell that you can taste in the back of your throat and on your tongue.

  A few hours later, I’m back in my ‘room’ with a bowl of slop sitting in front of me. Jane claims it’s porridge, but I’ve always been doubtful. At least she waits a few hours between the unveiling and offering me food. I couldn’t stomach this crap immediately after seeing people’s bodies twisted and morphed into her insane art projects. It took me a long time to realize that what she does isn’t normal.

  I’ve been spending less and less time here, it seems. It used to be that she would do a project and then there would be weeks between. Now, I am barely in my room for a few days before being pulled out again and put into the cage. I probably spend about fifty percent of my time starving in the cage now.

  When I’m in my room, I either sit and do nothing or I read.

  Fortunately, Jane taught me to read before she began to resent me, and even as a child, I was reading far above my age. A few years ago, Jane gave me some books on anatomy and biology she said she didn’t need any more and since then I’ve almost memorized most of them. A few of them have Jane’s name written inside and I assume they were from when she was going to be a doctor. My favorite is a medical encyclopedia. I have the letter T. I know a lot of things that start with T.

  T. Tuberculosis. Transverse myelitis. Tendon. Tibia.

  On the bad days, this is what runs through my mind.

  For ten years I have lived like this. Well, that isn’t true. The first few years I was treated as her child or perhaps a beloved pet, but as I’ve gotten older, Jane’s treatment of me has changed drastically. The only way I can really tell how long I’ve been here is by the amount of times I've heard Christmas songs drifting from upstairs. Nine times. Not once have I seen a tree, presents, turkey… Things which I have only vague memories from my youth. Even when I was a kid, I don’t remember doing that stuff with Jane. I wonder if I ever got Christmas with my real mom?

  My time is split between a basement room—a closet really—and the cage. I haven’t seen outside or smelled fresh air since I’ve been here, and the only people I see, who don't die within days of me meeting them, are Jane and Bud. Bud helps Jane with getting all of her victims and helps her run some kind of antique shop, but they don’t tell me much about that.

  I don’t know if I will ever really know why she spared me all those years ago. I can’t find it in myself to be grateful.

  As a child I did what I could to try to please her. I guess I’m fifteen or sixteen now, and I don’t consider myself a child any longer. Not after the things I’ve seen and done since I’ve been here. Whenever I’m in my room, I’m grateful to be away from the workshop, but at the same time, being alone for so long makes me think too much. I sleep as much as possible, though the nightmares don’t let me stay that way for long.

  Temporal lobe. Tendonitis. Tertoid.

  Chapter Two

  Branson

  It’s a few days later when Bud comes to remove me from my room and brings me back to Jane’s workshop. A large hulking man, he has a bulbous nose and tiny, spaced-apart eyes, resulting in a face not even a mother would love. His touch revolts me, and even when Jane still wanted me around, I hated Bud. Now that
Jane doesn’t ‘like’ me anymore, he revels in my misery as often as he completely ignores me.

  “Come on, time to go,” he mutters as he grabs a hold of my bicep and leads me quickly through the gallery. As we walk into the workroom, I notice something new. A second cage across from mine.

  Frowning, I ask, “What’s that for?”

  Bud smacks me in the back of my head and pushes me toward my own small prison.

  “Don’t ask questions,” is all he says. The familiar sound of the lock follows.

  I sit back against my cage and eye the other one critically. New in this place is never a good thing

  A few hours later, Jane enters the room with Bud dragging the body of a young man behind him. The guy is probably close to my age and I grimace when I notice he is still breathing. Oh god, I think, more live ones. Sometimes I’m lucky, and we go a long time with only sedated or dead bodies, but lately there have been more bodies and way more live ones. I hate having to hear them beg and cry. Makes my headaches worse.

  Sighing quietly, I watch as the two bring the body up to the metal slab Jane uses to prepare the bodies. Thick straps are in place to hold down flailing limbs and dollar sized holes line the entire bottom allowing blood to seep into the bins below. I think there is a word for this type of table, but it isn’t in the books I have. Most of my knowledge of the outside world is from my own skewed memories and listening to the chatter of the TV I haven’t been allowed to watch in years. A moment later, the boy is strapped down and they leave us alone.

  A while later Jane still hasn’t returned, which isn’t unusual in itself. Once she gets the subjects, she typically prepares them like this and then leaves to ‘inspire herself’, as she puts it. I don’t know what she is doing during these times, but I always dread when the subjects wake up before she gets back.