Writings on the Wall - Pt. 6

Writing spree, yay! A little more introduction for Luigi and a few hints towards his background. Want to take a guess as to his profession? :D

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Patient is dangerous, erratic and has a tendency to harm himself and others. Patient has expressed his belief of being a prophet, angel or Moses himself, after a month-long phase of wearing women’s clothes and calling himself ‘the reborn Lilith’. Evidence of self-medication found.

~

“Who the hell are you?” he whispered with a trembling voice.
I shrugged. “I am Crave. I’ve got to go now.” And with those words, I turned and walked towards the river. Time to cash in my reward, and it better be a big one. They hadn’t told me I’d face a real one, a demon instead of a tainted mortal.
I was halfway through the garden when Adonis finally caught up with me. “Wait! We’re not done here!”
The Dark was still clinging to the plants, but it looked tired now, like a bullheaded, old geezer clinging to his condemned house. “You are out of bullets,” I reminded the man with the gun and hopped over a garden hose that slithered like a snake. It couldn’t really move, of course, but it tried very hard nonetheless.
He hopped after me out of instinct, throwing a glance down to make sure he didn’t touch the hose as he did so, and grabbed my arm, pulling me around and slapping the back of my head with his other hand. “What are you trying to do, swim in handcuffs? You’ll drown.”
I looked down at the shiny metal around my wrists and tilted my head. I had forgotten about those, they were comfy now that they were warm. The tickling in my nose came back, almost eliciting a sneeze from me before my mucous membranes started to swell and closed up my nose. Sniffing, I held up my hands to him and made an expectant face. He had the key, after all.
Another frown rippled over his classic face, then he snorted derisively. “If you actually think I’ll just take them off and let you go, no questions asked, you’re sorely mistaken.”
He grabbed the short chain between the cuffs, but only to turn around and drag me after him, keeping me at arm’s length to hold me in check. I still had no idea who my Adonis was, but his actions and the way he moved told me enough to be careful. He knew how to fight and how to protect himself. Also, the suit. Fighters in suits were, as a rule of thumb, serious business and not to be messed with.
I stumbled after him silently, relishing the switch from corrupt vegetation to nice, clean, scalpel-blade-ish lawn as we closed in on the now familiar back door with the broken window next to it. The phone in the neighbor’s house behind us started ringing, clearly audible through the crisp winter night.
“Cops will be here, soon,” Adonis mumbled, shoving me into his— if it was his— house and closing the door quietly behind us. “You’d better start talking before they come by here and ask questions I can’t answer.”
I blinked at a swirl of blue in the white marble floor, frozen in stone for eternity. “Or we could go swimming before they come by,” I replied, not really offering an opinion but rather speaking my mind. The fuzzy, flitting threads of thought in my brain were hard to catch, like flies— once I had one in hand, I hated to let it go to waste.
Adonis pointed down to the floor, where glass shards speckled with now dry blood stains lay scattered over the marble like pieces of a puzzle. “You swimming away won’t stop the police from hunting you,” he explained with a frown, trying to sound patient when he didn’t feel like it.
Oh, right. My blood was still here. I tipped and turned my head sideways to watch the glittering lights bounce off the almost dry drops of blood, letting my subconscious wander. Adonis was chattering on, walking up and down beside me, gesturing around as he explained things I neither understood nor cared about. I didn’t listen to him. Bleach. That was what I needed. I’d find it in the cleaning closet or the cellar, maybe beneath the sink if this house had a kitchen. Humming a tune that somehow matched the spots of light on the glass shards and the blood, I trudged away to find the kitchen, the cellar- if this house had such a thing- and a closet.
Adonis grabbed my shoulder to stop me, but it didn’t last long. The doorbell rang, followed by fists on wood as the policemen hammered their hands against the front door, calling their usual hymn of “Police, open up,” and “Mister Cave, are you in there?”
Humming on, I waited. Patience was all I needed, for Adonis couldn’t very well let them kick in his door without having to explain things he really didn’t want to explain. At the second round of knocking, he let go of me and cursed, stomping towards the front door and once again hissing words towards me that I didn’t listen to. I simply continued with my search and sheer luck would have it that the first door I opened actually was a kitchen. It wasn’t easy to open the canister of bleach with my hands in cuffs, but I managed.
Adonis was still arguing with the po-po, holding the door slightly ajar to block their line of sight and keep me hidden. And to hide the tire iron he held in his right hand, ready to use.
I softly whistled the same nonsensical melody I usually used to drown out the splash of piss on the toilet, as I emptied the bleach all over the shards and my blood. I was just about to drop the canister into the mess, when I finally heard something that caught my attention after all.
“Mister Provenzano, either you let us in or we come in against your will,” said a female voice with a hint of green smoothies in her tone.
A male voice intervened with a nervous hiss, resembling switchblades and packs of coke on a shameful night. “Are you crazy? Do you want to get us killed?”
I hugged the empty bleach bottle to my chest and sucked a piece of afternoon patty from between my teeth. I, personally, knew why I was careful of Adonis, what with him being a suit-fighter and therefor especially vicious and all, but ‘the Man’ usually toughed things like that out, bullheaded as officers were. One of them acted like I expected them to, the other didn’t, but what did that mean?
The lady cop piped up again. “I’m not afraid and I don’t care who he or Mr. Cave are to the Pergliotti family! Yes I know who you are, don’t give me that smarmy look,— get your damn hands off me, Josh!”
I hugged the bottle tighter at the sound of a tame skirmish. Adonis, Provenzano, whatever his name was, stood in the gap between me and the police officers, calm as cucumbers. I saw flailing hands fluttering by above his shoulders, and something rattled against the door as shuffling steps left the front porch. Mister Josh was obviously physically wrestling his lady cop partner away. It took all of his concentration to do so, he didn’t even say goodbye as he threw her in the car. The sounds of their fight were muffled down to a droning background noise as Adonis closed the door.
My tongue played with a natural flap of skin in my cheek as I watched his suit jacket throw wrinkles above his ass, mulling over what to do next.
Adonis closed the door and turned around, looking appropriately gruff as he glanced at me and the mess I had made. The bleach spread lazily, tinting the marble pink as it dissolved the blood and lapped against the soles of my boots, creeping towards a dried, bloody footprint in front of a dark vanity set to one side of the roomy hallway. The stench burned in my nose, but it also opened it enough to enable me to breathe through it again.
“So my neighbor was a cannibal. And you were sent to kill him.”
I gnawed at my lower lip, ducking my head. Was that what it had looked like to a normal person? Interesting. It made sense and probably wasn’t much better to look at than my vision of the scene, but that had been a full-blown demon, not a tainted person. I usually tried to stay as far away as possible from those, not only because of how blatantly evil they were. Demons always sought for a climax of violence and chaos, to sow as much destruction for as long as possible. A run-of-the-mill fetid guy could live his whole life and never hurt a hair on anyone’s body. Under normal circumstances, I might as well have killed someone who looked totally innocent to Adonis’ eyes, and I bet that wouldn’t have gone this smoothly. I had been incredibly lucky to have things turn out as they had.
“He was a demon. He was so much a demon, he had his own garden of rot mold growing on his Klimt rip-offs, and a little tar river of Dark through his sun room. And he had warts,” I replied. “I don’t like demons. I wouldn’t have taken the hit if I had known.”
Confusion and dismay warred on his face as he regarded me with a tilted head. His thoughts concerning me pranced through his facial expressions like proud little ponies, but I looked for pity in vain. At last, he sighed and wiped his face tersely.
“Whatever. The police will be swarming this place and the neighbor’s home in minutes. It would be better if you weren’t here when that happens, so I’ve got to make a few calls. I’ll take you home to my place and hide you there until this has blown over, but you’ll still have to answer my questions when I’m done here. I want to know what the hell is going on, and you will tell me.”
“So no swimming?” Yes, I still held on to that thought, it was hard to let go.
“No swimming,” he confirmed, frowned and pointed at the sea of bleach. “Wipe that up and get rid of the glass, while I make my calls.”

In the end, he had to help me clean up. I had no idea how to use a mop and my definition of getting rid of glass was kicking it under the vanity set, but once he showed me how to use a broom and where the dumpster was, I did alright. He didn’t take off the cuffs and he didn’t leave me alone long enough to make myself scarce and try my luck with the river, but I was happy enough next to him for now.
The cleaning took all but ten minutes, but in that time, half a dozen police cars, an ambulance and even the coroner arrived and stormed through the neighbors house, an event I watched through the kitchen window until Adonis pulled me back and sharply ordered me to stay next to the stairs where I couldn’t be seen from next door. He loaded his gun with new bullets, throwing me a disdainful glance when I frowned, and all but jumped at the sound of the doorbell, nervously ushering the visitor in.
The man, an olive-skinned, pot-bellied man with a bad shave and sweat stains around his pits waited until the door was closed, but not a second longer. “What in God’s name is going on, Luigi? The police frequencies are all but exploding with chatter about a double homicide, Tony almost had a stroke when you called!”
Again that accent, thicker this time. And I finally had a name for my Adonis. Luigi, like Mario’s brother, but without the green overalls. I sat down on the second lowest step, clinking around with the handcuffs and trying not to let my mind drift away too far.
“And who is that?”
“That would take too long to explain. Which I will do, Bruno, I promise, but not now. Right now, I’ve got to get him back to my apartment and make sure he doesn’t bolt. Then I’ll come back and deal with the disaster next door and explain everything to you. Can you stay here until then? Keep the officers out?”
Bruno grumbled and shuffled, a strange habitual move that looked faintly familiar, then shrugged and nodded gruffly. “A fine job you did of sitting Mr. Cave’s house. Pray that your explanation is good enough to satisfy me, or I’ll have you back on street rounds faster than lightning,” he threatened and turned away.
Luigi sighed, then gestured for me to stand up and follow him as he led the way out the front door and straight towards a rather nice limousine. I did follow his lead, but my eyes were glued to the shiny blue and red lights blinking through the night and hunting shadows across the neighboring houses and trees. It was a pretty sight.
“Don’t gawk, move it,” Luigi hissed next to my ear, grabbed the chain of my handcuffs and dragged me to the car, ignoring my half-uttered protests as he shoved me into the back. He almost threw the car door closed, but hesitated when he saw the shiny wooden baseball bat I was currently sharing the seats with, squirming to stop it from digging into my hip. He stared at it for a moment, as if wondering where it had come from.
“Is that blood on the top?” I asked curiously, leaning forward to examine my find closer. I had once seen a bum being hit with such a thing. He hadn’t gotten up after.
“Don’t touch that,” Luigi barked and grabbed the bat to pull it out of my reach. He shut the door and walked around to the driver side, hiding the piece of wood against his long leg, and stowed it on the passenger seat as he crawled behind the wheel.
As the car awoke to life, I pondered the riddle that was Luigi. A man in a suit, with a gun, a bloody bat in the car, a strange accent he shared with his friends, and surprising influence on the police. And he hadn’t insulted me yet, even though he had seen me at my almost worst. More importantly, he had killed at my command, had he not? I felt like a princess. The swerving of the car lulled me, but I felt for my head a few times, just in case my tiara might fall off. All princesses had tiaras, right? And “Cake,” I mused. “I want cake, not bread.”
“Oh, shut up already.”

"Writings on the Wall" now on Gay Authors!

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Writings on the Wall - Pt. 5

“Don’t listen to him, the man has been placed under disability for the last ten years. He’s only out on the streets because he keeps slipping his orderlies and there’s not enough money to put him into a more secure facility.”

~

I stared down at the handcuffs. “Why do you have police issue cuffs in your pants?”
Adonis, concentrating on tightening the cuffs, shrugged his broad, dress shirt clad shoulders. “They are the best on the market.”
I was wearing casual garment from one of the boys’ rooms. They were twin boys, as my captor explained to me, about sixteen years old and my size, which made for a exciting excursion into two full-size sets of closets. I had a chance to look at myself in one of the closet door mirrors, and I looked freakish. Clean and all, no holes in the dark blue jeans, no blood or vomit on the white shirt with the red print, and socks. Oh, socks, the sporty ones, thick and fluffy and warm.
I looked so good, I almost didn’t mind the manhandling and the handcuffs. Almost.
“I’m sorry I got the wrong address,” I said, staring down at the shiny metal bands around my wrists. I had a lot of experience with cuffs and given enough time, I was able to slip them, but my captor didn’t look all that ready to put me on a backseat of a car and leave me alone for a few minutes. He also was the most confusing person I had ever met. I couldn’t decide if he was stupid, oafish or simply playing along to see what I was all about, but right now I had bigger things to worry about. He wanted me to prove my Dark-theory to him. To do so, we had to go over to his neighbors, which was easier than it sounded, since there were no fences between the gardens. The hard part would be to figure out how to show him what I saw. I hadn’t managed that so far, not with anyone, so there was that.
“I’m sorry I might have to kill you,” he replied, tugged at the bit of chain linking the cuffs together, and stepped out of my way. “You walk in front of me. If you run, I shoot you. If you try to jump me or the neighbor, I shoot you. We go over there, you show me whatever it is that’s lurking there, we go back and I decide what to do with you. Understood?”
I bobbed a bobblehead nod and started walking, along the hall, down the stairs and back into the marble-covered first floor. It’s fantastic how many creaky and groany spots you find if you don’t try to avoid them. I relished each woody crackle beneath my feet and stomped extra loud when we walked towards the back door.
Adonis tsked at the broken window, threw me a sideways glance that had way too much father in it for my dirty imaginings of his body, and opened the door for me. His other hand clutched the gun casually, very unlike a policeman, very much like a lady might carry her purse. I stepped back outside, careful not to make any sudden moves as he followed me out into the darkness. The lawn looked like a little ocean of scalpels, pale white where the moonlight hit the blades of grass, but since he had at least given me my wet boots back, I wasn’t afraid to step off the marble porch.
We made our way across the lawn, him pushing me forward when I lost my train of thought, usually while staring at the foliage lazily moving in the nightly breeze. Even without a fence, I immediately knew when we stepped onto the neighbor’s property. I almost got myself shot, too, since I stumbled back gasping, right against the muzzle of Adonis’ gun.
Luckily, he had a good composure, had my captor. “What’s wrong?” he asked, standing all clueless and calm between the rose bushes drenched in Dark. I could see their buds flow and twitch beneath the evil, like tightly wound wreaths of tentacles, thirsty for my touch and blacker than a moonless night. Adonis even got some of it on his sleeve and I had to make fists out of my hands to stop myself from trying to brush it off him.
“Don’t touch the plants, they are hungry,” I wheezed, more as an excuse than to warn him, because he wouldn’t believe me anyway. One of the rose branches curled at my words, as if to slap me for my traitorous words, but I backed up and gave it a wide berth. As I turned around, I saw Adonis stoop down a bit to take a closer look at one of the rose buds, then back off with a puzzled expression. He heeded my words, staying away from all the bushes and flowers as he followed my steps, but his face said that he was humoring me.
This was definitely the place. I snaked my way through the tainted vegetation, shuddering at the sheer mass of Dark around us. It was dripping from branches, curling around giant flower stems, sitting in stagnant pools on the path stones, humming with strength and malice. Either the people in the house spent massive amounts of time in their garden, or they were in some way more powerful than any of my prior victims. It was almost impossible to avoid all of it, but neither the Dark, nor that eye-burning Light ever stuck to me like it did to other people, so all I had to worry about was my confused companion.
He still stepped where I stepped, looking bemused but calm, clutching his gun. “You know,” he said, throwing a glance at the beautiful sandstone-paved patio we walked towards, “it’s a shame those people never look at their garden. I mean, here you have all this beauty, and the only beneficiaries are the insects and birds.”
I sniffed, feeling a tickle in my nose that promised a major cold in the next days. “Maybe they see it as I do,” I offered, swallowing down the increasingly queasy feeling developing in my stomach. It felt a little like a bad garbage dinner, but since I hadn’t eaten anything for more than twelve hours, it could only be fear.
A nervous breeze blew through the pillar seamed patio, as we stopped in front of the back door. This one was all glass and plastic with a touch of chrome, but it breathed with darkness, bubbling and undulating like a bursting, maggot-filled carcass. I had never seen darkness this thick up close, and I absolutely didn’t want to touch it. This was bad, really bad. I needed a weapon.
“You’re paler. What do you see?” Adonis whispered, trying to keep me in his sight and throw a look at the door at the same time. I could have taken his gun, now that he was preoccupied with his own worries, but I didn’t. I’d have to kill him, and I really didn’t want to. He was the only person to ever actually make an attempt to find out what I was talking about, and I wanted him all to myself for a little longer.
I could have told him, but words weren’t enough. I bobbed my head a little, trying to identify the worst section on the squirming, bloated mess, then pointed at a spot that was bulbous with pressure. “Touch that, there,” I whispered, stepping off to one side to allow him more room.
Adonis stared at me, then at the spot I had pointed at. His gun never wavered away from my chest as he did so. “I don’t want to,” he finally said, frowning at his own words as he heard them.
“Why?” I asked, although I knew the answer. I wouldn’t have wanted to touch the door there, either, not even blindfolded, but he had ordered me to show him what I was talking about, so he had to come to his own conclusions.
He shrugged and his fingers played, like he was plucking at invisible harp strings. Not that I had ever seen a harp in person, but this was how I imagined a harp player’s hands to move. “I don’t know, I just…. really don’t want to touch the door there.”
I nodded slowly. “It sticks. Sullies. Rots. Your fingers know, that’s why.”
His face told me how silly he thought I was, but he didn’t disagree. Instead, he nodded towards the door, whispering. “So, how do you plan on getting in if you can’t touch it?”
“You can’t. I can.” I inched closer to the door, grabbed the handle and shuddered as the Dark wrapped its wet, cold-hot tendrils around my wrist. It felt like touching a bucket of hot glue and I really didn’t want to, but it was part of the job. I still intended to get paid at the end, it just had gotten a bit trickier. Bubbles of blackness popped and sizzled as the door morphed into a pool of tar, pricking the skin of my hand as I turned the doorknob and pulled the door open. Maybe my Adonis didn’t see anything, but by the way he rolled his shoulders and made a face, he surely felt it.
The door swung open and gave way to a luscious living room, if the onlooker disregarded the mushroom-like growths of violet and black Dark all over the walls and the floors. I stepped in, followed closely by the suit-clad armed man I hadn’t wanted to let go. He hissed behind me, I simply stared. The door fell shut at his heels.
In the middle of the room, a demon stood. Pocks and growths distended his nice pantsuit, sieving yellow and brown fluids through the cloth where the pressure got too much. It had claws, at least I hoped it were claws, but not at its hands and feet— they grew right out of its crotch, snapping at the air as the thing turned towards us. Small, pig-like eyes glared out of a vomit-yellow face, and pieces of pink, twitching flesh fell out the creature’s mouth as it opened its lips to a big, cruel smile. The Dark stood up to its ankles in the room, filling it slowly but surely and rising like the morning tide. Funny enough, it didn’t stink.
No, the room was filled with a whole different scent, and it was coming from the broken, disemboweled body at the feet of the demon. The small creature had been sullied, both by the loss of clothing and by the ripping of flesh. The whole room stank of blood, fear and death, sticking sickly to the insides of my mouth and nose. As the demon lifted his foot to take a half step backwards, a single lock of golden hair stuck to its distorted and warped toe nails, coming clean off what had been a head once.
Adonis had his gun up, side-stepping me to get a clear line of sight at the thing. I wondered how he saw the demon, wondered if the massacre looked as bad to his non-Dark eyes, wondered if he had ever seen something like this, something so purely malicious.
“What is this?” he hissed, sounding out of breath and twitchy like a fly-ridden horse. Cold wind blew against our backs, pulling long threads of Dark out of the sea around the demon and whisking them away as the beast stammered and gurgled. It probably was trying to explain the dead girl’s body at its feet, but something obviously stuck in its throat. It hacked once, twice, a third time, then it spit two fingers out, like a cat regurgitating a fur ball.
“What is this!” Adonis yelled, sounding appropriately panicky.
The demon roared, taking a step closer, stomping into the mess of entrails in front of him and squirting blood everywhere, like a kid jumping into a autumn puddle. A glob of pinkish pus dribbled out of its shirtsleeve.
“Shoot him,” I said, trying my best to sound helpful. Nobody listened to me, probably because I wasn’t yelling.
The demon took another step forward, dragging the ribcage with it as the bones got stuck on its stunted foot. This was not good, it was getting too close.
I turned around and threw all good manners into the wind. “Shoot him, god almighty!” I yelled, shocking Adonis into action.
He shot until the gun clicked empty. Then he vomited and ran out.
The demon fell, slipping in the blood and guts of its victim, gargling its last breath and then adding its black blood to the red of the little dead girl. The room fell silent.
I stood there for a few more moments, confused as to what best to do next. There was nothing here I wanted to touch or take, no bed I wanted to lie in and no food I wanted to steal, but having been robbed of my usual after-kill-activities, I felt strangely bereft. I finally drifted after Adonis, when the stench of blood and death inside got too much even for me. He was walking up and down the patio, barrel side pressed against his forehead and muttering to himself. He stopped when I fell in step beside him, though, and turned to examine me like he hadn’t seen me before.
“Who the hell are you?” he whispered trembling.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 4

My mother loved me very much, even though I was a bastard and never did as I was told. She loved me so much, she was afraid I’d run away and get lost while she went to prison, so she chained me to a radiator. It took a while until my wrist was thin enough to fit through the big boy cuffs, but even though she loved me so much, I didn’t want to die waiting for her.

~

I did as I was told. It wasn’t a hard thing to do, since I had no need to see the face of my attacker. This, too, was a situation I had been in multiple times and I had always been able to handle them. People who told me to ‘put my goddamn hands up’ or ‘hold it right there’ usually were in the mood to talk or negotiate, or they would have simply shot me. Talking meant living, and living meant opportunities to turn the tables to my favor. I liked turning tables, it meant getting paid.
“Who sent you?” the voice behind me asked, reverberating through my bones like a cat’s purr. See? Talking, just as I had predicted.
I licked my icy lips, trying to stay upright even though I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. “A whore, awful heels, bad, evil eyes, cigarette. I could see her pubes, she wasn’t wearing a slip,” I answered, because that was exactly how I remembered her. That, and her “shrill voice. Very shrill voice. Piercing, grating.” My knees buckled slightly, but I caught myself before I fell.
The man behind me hesitated, I could hear it in his breath. In-in-out, in, like a sleeping dog. “What district?” he asked, like it would matter.
“Eastern Ghetto,” I replied obediently, mumbling like that one time I had been taken to the dentist and gotten some kind of numbing injection into my gums. As long as I had moved, the cold hadn’t been that bad, but now that I had to stand still, it crept up my limbs like the arms of those little cuttlefish the Triad people liked to fry for dinner. Maybe I would be fried, too? At least I’d be warm…
I fell like a puppet with cut strings, toppled over face-first into the nice, clean carpet, too cold to feel the fibers carpet-burn my cheek. This was not good, not a situation I had been in before, but I couldn’t think my way out of it. My brain was just as cold as my limbs, sluggish and snail-like, drooling its mucus out of my nose like tomato juice. At first, I suspected that guy had shot me because I had moved. Would be hard to feel pain when I couldn’t feel myself, right? But there was no gunpowder smell in the air, and he didn’t loom over me to finish me off, so I probably had just succumbed to the cold.
The man did in fact loom over me, but only to crouch down and fill my nose with the most exquisite cologne I had ever smelled. Spicy, musky, almost too male, but oh so befitting his giant, ripped body. And his long ponytail. And the two-piece suit he was wearing, and his bronze skin. “Adonis,” I gasped, unable to stop him from flipping me onto my back and working his way through my pockets. He found the gun and a piece of chewing gum paper I had kept because it was shiny, but not much else.
“Christ, did you swim here? You’re ice cold,” he observed with a slight accent, not much to go by, but audible. He also sounded more annoyed and gruff than worried, but why should he be worried? I was out cold, haha, pun intended, and he had the upper hand. Fortunately, we were moving back into safe territory: interrogation. He wouldn’t kill me before he knew who had sent me, and that meant more time for me to free myself and finish my part of the deal. I just needed to get warm again, soon, now, quickly.
That wonderful cologne flooded my every sense as he carefully picked me up and carried me out of the room. My body would leave dirt, river water and probably parasites on his expensive suit, but right now I didn’t care, because it meant I could be close to that burning hot, broad chest and not feel bad about it. I’d feel bad soon enough and he would be the one making sure of that, but not in this moment. Him carrying me into the other part of the house also meant I’d find out what lurked behind the doors I hadn’t opened yet, so there was that. Optimism, optimism, as my psychologist always told me.
We took the last door on the right and stepped right into a dream of a bathroom, all marble and chrome and glass. I was draped onto the floor, then the man flipped the light switch and stepped over to a big bath tub.
“I don’t care if you survive the night, but since I have to find out what you were sent to do here, and since you jolly well can’t talk while dying, I’ll warm you up before torturing you,” he explained as he leaned over the tub and got the water going, watching me out of the corners of his eyes.
Maybe he hoped to make me flinch with that threat, but hell, my life was torture, so what?
As the tub filled, he crouched down and peeled me out of my clothes. If he was disgusted by the not-so-faint smell of body odor and street stink, it didn’t show on his face, but he threw my crusty clothes towards the door where they piled against the wall. I, for my part, let him do what he wanted to do, because flopping around like a mackerel on dry land would only work against me and tire me out.
His muscles bulged when he picked me up and dropped me in the hot water. It should have helped, but it only made me shiver harder, rattling my teeth against each other and clouding my mind further. The water felt scaldingly hot on my freezing skin. I gasped and flailed a bit, coloring it brownish as the dirt peeled off my skin like a snake shedding. Adonis kept me in the tub with one hand on my chest, out of balance and out of my depth, calmly waiting for me to heat up and calm down.
He was in a good position to ram a hair pin into his eyes and the door behind him was unlocked, but that would have to wait. If he wanted to torture me by water, I was prepared; I had learned to swim because a few bums had tried to drown me for a few weeks, pushing me into dikes and the river repeatedly. I had learned to hold my breath. And to regurgitate water like an owl.
“So. Who sent you, really?”
And so it began. “A whore,” I repeated, trying for my honest voice and sounding too breathless.
He dunked me, if only for a few seconds. He didn’t need to pull me up, I surfaced by myself, spitting and coughing warm, dirty water.
He repeated the question, I repeated the answer, he dunked me. We played this game for a good ten times, at which point he held me down for half a minute and had to pull me forward so I could get all the water out of my lungs, then he gave up and went on.
“Whom were you supposed to kill?” he asked, grabbing my hair to get a better grip on my head. Dunking was hard work and I was getting clean and therefor slippery.
It was a good question. The shrieky whore hadn’t told me, so I had assumed that I’d leave the house filled with bodies and empty of heartbeat. “Everyone,” I huffed, shrugging to make a point. My throat felt funny, raspy and painful, but my voice sounded okay.
I didn’t get dunked this time, but he threw me a disgusted look. “Even the kids?” he asked, more nauseated than when he had had to touch my clothing, like this was somehow worse than bad hygiene. Maybe it was, I wouldn’t know.
“Didn’t know there were kids,” I answered, lifting a hand towards his fingers in my hair. They hurt, tight as he held me. “Don’t like killing kids, but there’s nothing one can do when they’re filled with the Dark.”
Adonis dunked me again, but only to get my hand away from his. As soon as I let it sink back into the water, he pulled my head back up and leaned forward, staring at my profile.
“What do you mean, filled with the Dark?”
Oops. If I hadn’t swallowed this much dirty water, if I hadn’t been cold and hot at the same time, if I hadn’t been dunked so many times, I wouldn’t have made this mistake. I wouldn’t have told him, just like I hadn’t told anyone else in the last years. Nobody understood and it made them look funny at me. I didn’t like those funny looks, they made me try to explain.
“The Dark is dirty. It sticks like tar, it makes you do things, think thoughts, bad thoughts. The Dark ones ooze it, it follows them like smog. Wherever they are, they stink up their surroundings, make everything worse, make you petty and mean and sad,” I said, finding his eyes and holding his gaze. This was serious business, a serious explanation, and I wanted him to know that. “I can see the Dark. I see the Dark ones. Some of them don’t know what they are, don’t see their own, ugly, messed up faces, they just spread and spread. Don’t you ever feel bad in this house? Don’t you ever get moody?”
“No.”
I squeaked at his almost bored tone of voice. Where were the questions? The ‘freak’-calling? The actual calling the police? He didn’t even make a face, except for the wrinkling of his nose. I did smell like wet, geriatric dog, so he had a reason for that, but I had kind of expected him to react differently. Even the psych docs asked questions and tried to make me doubt myself, and they were the ones supposed to be understanding!
I was still opening and closing my mouth with the outrage of it all, when he shrugged and nodded his head towards the windows.
“But I do get the willies whenever I see the neighbors.”

Writings on the wall - Pt. 3

‘Knock, knock,’ said the spider, rapping on the cocoon wall. ‘Argh, grah, gah,’ said the fly, slowly disintegrating inside.

~

The marble floors came to my rescue as I crept through the giant villa. Marble never creaked, whether you walked in the middle or to the sides. All you had to do was watch how hard you stepped. Marble made the most curiously harsh and dim ‘clank’ sound, whenever one wasn’t watching their pace, but I did. There was still no alarm, no police sirens and no people attacking me with baseball bats, so either nobody was home and they had forgotten to arm the security system, or they were at home and hadn’t heard my grand entrance through the window. Judging by the size of the building, that second version was more than possible.
I stayed near the walls wherever I could, but I kept a good distance to every piece of furniture. Wouldn’t do me any good to creep around like a half-frozen ninja, only to bump into a vase and send it crashing down to the floor. My heart was pumping like crazy, doing its little dance through the rush of adrenaline I was having… for no reason at all. Well, there was a reason, getting ready for violence naturally led to rushes of adrenaline and other funny juices, but with me things were a little different. I had grown up in a number of institutions, most of them medical in some way, and it had left me broken and with no social or moral skills to mention. Maybe I hadn’t had those to begin with, but try as they might, my caregivers hadn’t succeeded in teaching them to me, either. Breaking into a house and digging through other people’s stuff didn’t feel wrong to me. I didn’t get nervous or fearful when I broke a law, because I didn’t understand the reasoning behind most of them. That didn’t spare me from instinctual responses, though; violence was one of the things even monkeys understood. Expecting violence drove my heart to its gallop.
I did know fear, of course. There were a lot of things I feared, although they probably made no sense to other people. They couldn’t see what I saw on a daily basis. They couldn’t see the dirty, malicious, depraved, foul, rancid, darkness. They couldn’t see how it stuck to everyone, everything, especially places where evil lived. Small evil bore small darkness, a smattering of tar-like drops clinging to men and women, pulling out in threads when it touched other things, like spittle. Big evil drew darkness into big, encompassing fog, or smoke, if you like. And where that evil nested, a sea of stinking rot was born, growing up the walls like fungus and seeping into the plastering like roots.
I feared the darkness like nothing else, but at the same time, I was very used to seeing it. People who paid for murder usually had evil in them. And the people I murdered, well… It made my job very easy, murdering those who bore darkness into this world. It made it easy on my heart, easy on my mind, to pull the trigger, or cut their throats, or, well, shove them off bridges. I was a creative assassin, albeit an opportunistic one.
In this house, though, there was no darkness. None. Nowhere. Not seeing it on a job made me more uneasy than the lingering cold in my limbs.
Something was wrong. There was always darkness at the places I went for money, just like the people paying me always were demon-monsters. I hated those dark places, the moving walls, the cold shiver running down my back, the innate feeling of dread, and I tried my best to stay away from them, but…
Nothing. This house was untouched by demons. Huh.
I stopped at the big, shiny-white stairwell and looked up into the bright darkness above. The steps were broad enough to make a good sleeping place, and there were enough of them to house thirty people if they squeezed together, but the pale marble and the screaming white walls would never see homeless people finding shelter. Some of my ‘neighbors’ would have killed to spend a night in a place like this, even if it were only sleeping on the stairs, but not me. I preferred dark rooms with boarded up windows and peeling paint, because they made nights darker and contours indistinguishable. Not being able to see where I was sleeping hid possible dark spots and helped with the anxiety.
Ever so slowly, I crept up the stairs, stopping on the last half dozen to peek over the upper edge into the drawn-out hall. No marble here, only dark, old, hardwood floors. Those creaky little bastards. And doors, oh, so many doors, more than any game show could ever fit into one trademark sentence. So many choices were coming my way, I really couldn’t decide how to best proceed. Contestant number one! Will it be door number one, right next to the ceiling-high window? Door two with the slightly peeling paint? Door three, with the  bump on the antique doorstep? Door number four, with that touch of moonlight shining on the wood, or maybe door number five, sitting in the shade? And would somebody please wake the audience for this next part?
I blocked out my galloping thoughts and listened and looked for a few more moments, hoping to see or hear a sign of where to head next, but everything was quiet. Too quiet, too normal, too… dark-less, for all I cared. It made me doubt my mission, if just a little bit.
Four doors were on the opposite side of the hallway, two more on my side. From what I remembered of the outside layout, there was a big, cavernous, windowed gazebo right at the back center of the house, and I could just imagine the private library inside. I decided the library would be behind the opposite right door, because in my imagination a left-turn after entering that door felt more natural. Rich people had enough money to make things more natural.
That left me with five other choices. The other door right in front of me wouldn’t be a bedroom, it was too exposed and demon-people were too paranoid to sleep right at the end of stairs. I went up the last few steps, then hovered there for a moment, trying to decide. Left or right?
Finally, I decided to turn left, because I myself was left-handed. If in doubt, do as you’d do. I crept down the hardwood hallway, wincing ever so often when one of the boards groaned softly beneath my soggy boots. Whoever had to bear the aftermath of my visit, would have a lot of fun with the drops of water I left in my wake. And the blood I was supposed to shed, but there were professionals for those kinds of cleaning jobs.
I slowly, carefully, checked both doors in the left wing of the first floor, holding my hand out against the old wood, all but touching it. I was trying to feel for the tingling sensations that the darkness usually brought upon me, but there was still nothing. That put me between a rock and a hard place— I’d have to either open every door and take a peeky-peek inside, risking to wake whoever was home, or I could sneak back, continue to the right wing, and risk tripping some kind of alarm after all.
Did I mention how bad I am with self-control?
I opened the first door on my left, risking a glance inside. It was a teenager’s room, judging by the posters on the walls, and it was clean and empty. It looked just like in a TV series, all nice and comfy, with a rug and a desk and a stereo, and I wanted to mess it up. I’d never had such a nice room. I’d never had my own room, as it happened. Sighing, I closed the door and crept over to the one vis-à-vis of it, listening for a moment. It wouldn’t do me any good to barge in on an old, rich couple going at it, after all.
That door opened soundlessly, too, and I was treated to another teenager’s room, its layout an exact copy of the other, except for a change in colors and poster themes. Two children, then. I hated killing children. I should have asked about this when I had taken the contract, damn it! Or had I stumbled into the same room again, too confused to orient myself? That, too, had happened before, and that, too, had led to a beating to remember. I carefully took a step inside the room, drippedy-dripping cold Bracket River water onto the flashy carpet beneath my boots, trying my hardest to remember and compare what I was seeing with what I had seen.
The safety-switch of a gun clicked behind me, and I froze.
“Don’t move a muscle,” a sharp, deep voice ordered.
Shit.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 2

Dwellers of the ghetto, my kind as you could say, don’t get into Central District, or the Evergreen Isles, or even near the borders to those fancy places. Knights in blue armor sitting on shining metal steeds block the streets and shine the light of truth into the face of each and every one a-knocking on the portals to heaven.
~

I had never been to the fancy districts myself, but there were those in the throngs of hobos who spoke of dumpsters full of unspoilt food, and of street lights that made every nook and cranny as bright as a cloudy day, and of the police actually patrolling the streets. In cars, with real guns and enough bullets to actually shoot more than once. Even their loony bins were chock-full of rich people. I only ever got carted into one of those those mediocre, health-insurance paid places, where they kept me for a maximum of two weeks, pumped me full of the good stuff and dumped me back onto the streets without so much as a ‘hail fellow, well met’ for departure. Admittedly, the good stuff kept me happy and blissful for a few more days after that, but it never stuck.
Luckily, I only ever got picked up when my hypergraphia— this is the obsession to write things, and in a very specific way, if you need to know— got the better of me, and that only happened when one of the really powerful monsters touched me. People tended to frown on walls full of bloody scribbles, so I got sent away when I wrote my prophecies. I, personally, liked blood ink. It was easily procured and cost-effective.
I was walking bent in half, because the sewer pipes connecting the villa part of the Central District to the harbor were too low to stand upright, and there were cobwebs near the top area. I hated spiders. Their webs felt like outside thoughts trying to get into my brain when they stuck to my face. This didn’t stop me from finding the best way to my target, though. Nothing could stop me, once I had a job to fulfill.
Maybe I was crazy, but my flavor of crazy made people very intent on giving me money to do things, because somehow I always got them done. Steal drugs from a police vault? I could do it. Shove a 290 lb wrestler down a flight of stairs and make it look like an accident? Done. Break into Central District to kill a man? No problem, I always found a way. It was the good kind of crazy, not the bad kind. Okay, so maybe killing was evil, but since the monsters were paying me to kill more powerful monsters, it was a good kind of evil. Most of the time I didn’t even know how I was able to do those things, because people like me weren’t supposed to really be ‘all there’ in the head, but somehow I always managed.
And sometimes the distinction between what I saw and what the rest of humanity saw got me confused and frightened. For me, about a third of people in the world were monsters. They either looked like really horrible, demonous accidents, or like cold, frightening, heart-shatteringly beautiful creatures, but both kinds were monsters. Twenty-two years of psychological treatment, of screaming and raging, of banging my head against the floor and scribbling truths onto walls with my own blood had taught me that nobody else was seeing it. Not even the monsters themselves knew what they were, except for the powerful ones. I kept a good distance from those, and they seemed to do the same with me. I supposed they didn’t like what I was writing when I met them.
I slipped out of the end of the sewer pipe like a snake, falling the twenty feet drop into the frigid Bracket River without a sound. The water was so cold I almost breathed in from the shock as I dove back to the surface. Swimming in late February was suicide, but that was exactly why I had chosen this route. Nobody would think of it, and that meant that nobody would see me coming.
I had to swim a good ninety yards to reach the other side of the smaller confluent, and when I finally grabbed on to the steel ladder next to a painted water gauge, I was almost too cold to climb it. My felt coat was so heavy, I had to shrug it off and hang it onto the rail before I could pull myself out, and the next few minutes I spent with hopping around, teeth chattering like castanets and shaking the gun to get out the excess water. I honestly didn’t care if it rusted, I just had to get off one or two shots, and I would leave it there since there were no fingerprints to collect from it. It hadn’t been intentional on my part when I had cut my fingertips again and again to do my writing, but by now they were so full of scars I just didn’t have to be careful anymore.
The night here was even darker than it had been in the ghetto. In front of me there was nothing but a small summer cabin sitting in the midst of a dried-out, half frozen carpet of grass short and thin enough to remind me of scalpel blades, and in the background there were thee giant, ancient weeping willows darkening what little light the moon offered.
Behind the pristine landscape, I could see the white-ish shape of a Victorian style villa. Was I at the right place?
I spent the few minutes it took to get to the back patio trying to remember the address that demon-lady had given me, only to realize I couldn’t check because it probably was written on a plate outside the front gate. I was too cold to care at this point, I would simply have to remember to check the mail inside the house to see if I had gotten to where I was supposed to be.
When I stumbled trying to climb the marble stairs leading to the back door, I found out just how cold I really was: Cold enough not to feel my soggy feet. My lockpicking skills were probably down the drain too. This was going to be no fun at all.
At least it was a beautiful door. Not one of those modern steel sheets, but real, dark wood, lacquered in a nice mid-brown color and studded with bronze adornments. And the best thing: It didn’t look touched by the darkness. I could actually look at it without fighting my ever-lurking panic. Thank god for lazy rich people who didn’t visit their manicured garden to spread the taint flowing through them.
The lock unfortunately didn’t offer the same courtesy of age. It was new and tricky and stubborn beneath my frozen fingers. I felt almost warm when I finally decided this was not going to happen anytime soon, and feeling warm when you’re soaked through and out in the cold was definitely a warning sign. Why was I trying so hard anyway?
The window wasn’t nearly as fancy and new as the lock, and it broke after three hits with the butt of my gun. There was no alarm, which puzzled me a bit, but not enough to slow me down as I crawled through the self-made entrance and into the blissful, nay, painful warmth. I got a few cuts and scrapes as I rolled through the shards of broken glass, but the cuts didn’t bleed too much. If I still had my coat this wouldn’t have happened. Leaving blood on a crime scene was bad, because no matter how much I cut myself, there was nothing I could do about my genetic fingerprint. They’d be able to find me through my medical records.
I’d have to remember to spill some bleach over the shards on my way out. And maybe pee on them. No, not pee on them, that would give them only more DNA samples. But do something to ruin the blood.
The interior of the villa was like a wonderland for me, a strange country of opulent, oversized furniture, clean carpets and wide hallways. The smell was the strangest new experience for me. I knew hospital smells, loony bin smells, police station smells, and all the myriads and masses of different scents only the ghetto offered, but this was different. Stone didn’t have a smell, and of all the stones, marble was the most scentless, but the rooms still had a vibe to it that I couldn’t describe as anything else but “clean marble” with a hint of window cleanser and carpet foam. It smelled like a home, and I had never lived in one.
If I didn’t kill my victim soon, he’d find me rolling and writhing on his couch. I’d done that once, and it hadn’t been fun. They had beaten me to a pulp, and now my nose was a little crooked and I looked like a Thai boxer. Or would that be half-Thai? I wasn’t up to speed on political correctness about mixed blood heritage.
I got the scent of home out of my nostrils with a snort, then I pulled out the gun and clicked off the security switch. Time to find that rich bugger and put a hole in his devil face.
And then maybe raid his kitchen.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 1

I was bored. ;)


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Walls are barriers to keep the empty from the full. There is always one side to a wall that is poor and void of anything worth notice, and another one holding precious and dear things in. This is why houses are so sought-after: So many two-sided barriers, so many precious things inside, so much to collect, so much to lose.
~

I stared at the brick wall. The seams were moving ever so slightly, following the pull of passing car lights like flowers followed the sun. In the darkness, it was all too visible, even better than in the daylight. It also made it way more creepy for me. Other people didn’t see it for what it really was, they called it ‘physics of light’, but I did. I was sweating profusely as I watched some stones bend forward, some bend backward, like a corn field in the wind, and I knew. I knew that something dark had passed this wall, and maybe even the one on the other side of the street, and I was very sure that it was a bad sign for the remainder of my evening.
My breath became shorter and gaspy, but I tried to keep it quiet. If I only made low panic sounds, the rustling of late-winter leaves and the constant hum of the cars would drown my whimpering out, and nobody would find out. And maybe if I didn’t move, that unholy movement in the bricks would go away? But if I didn’t move I would starve to death, or freeze to death, or die of thirst… oh, there were so many different possibilities for perishing, just because of this one dark spot.
A hand hit the back of my head none too softly.
“Crave!” a female voice hissed, but the pain helped more than her noisy voice. I could finally look away from that bad, bad wall. I used my newfound freedom to turn around and stare at the woman’s breasts, drawing in deep, controlled breaths, just as I had learned at the nuthouse— pardon my language, clinic. It helped with keeping my panic attacks in check, but it didn’t make the fear go away. It never did, so I didn’t bother trying.
“Please call me Bart,” I mumbled, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I had seen her face before, and it was like the wall. Not good. Really not good. It looked like rotten meat, half-eaten by rats and worms and burnt with a flame-thrower. Nobody but me could see it, to everyone else she probably looked like any other burnt-out street walker, but I saw. All that was left of her human face were her thin, angry lips and her chin. I didn’t want to risk another glimpse at the horror before me, so I glanced at her perky stuff.
Sometimes people, especially women, hit me when I stared at their chests, but this one didn’t. The one guy who called himself my friend— I really didn’t know his name or how he came to the conclusion of us being friends— probably had told her that I was a wacko, and it did make things easier. It didn’t lighten her mood, though, and it didn’t make her any more patient.
“I’m talking to you, you freak! Can you do it?” she hissed, crowding me against those angry, moving bricks. Her dirty stilettos made nerve-grating, shrieking sounds as she ground her heel onto the gutter lid. She probably could punch a clean little hole into a man’s head with those things.
I tried to concentrate, but knowing that wall was about to touch my back didn’t make it any easier, so I slipped to the side and out of her corralling arms. “The wall is tainted. You shouldn’t touch it,” I offered in a breathless whisper, because along with the rest of the human race she probably didn’t see the darkness, and being helpful was a good trait for someone who didn’t have much else going for them.
Another car drove by and the passing lights made the bricks shuffle and shift. I took a step back and gasped, then turned away my eyes. Sometimes if I stopped looking, those dark places stopped moving, and there really wasn’t much I could do other than that.
I saw her fingernails as she grabbed my collar. They were chewed down and badly painted, a shade of pink so bright it shone out of the grimy blackness of my old felt coat. “Can you do it, or not?” she practically screamed at my face, shaking me just a bit to make her point. How she was keeping her balance and what little dignity her belt-like skirt offered on those shoes, I’d never understand. The street whores around this part of the ghetto were cat-like and incredibly nimble, and they had to be. With walls like this around, they probably had to run for their lives on a daily basis.
“Kill someone? Yes,” I finally answered, and turned my head away so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at her mangled demon-face. It was all she had wanted to hear and she promptly let me go. Sometimes I wondered why none of the frighteningly beautiful monsters ever came to offer me a job, or maybe a normal person. It was always those demon-faced ones who wanted me to do things for them.
She slapped a badly maintained gun into my hand and turned with a huff. As the clickedy-clack of her pumps disappeared into the distance, she muttered a last “damn fucking lunatic”. I blinked and pulled my coat tighter.
She didn’t even know half of my lunacy.
I am a prophet of god.