I want to see it painted black… (WoD)
Pretending to sleep was a lot harder than it looked.
Keeping your eyelids from fluttering, your respiration from accelerating, your limbs loose and flaccid and, above all, keeping your face composed and relaxed and empty. It was a lot harder than one would imagine it to be. He knew they were waiting for him to wake up and a tiny, angry part of himself refuses them the satisfaction. It was a small victory, but it was all he had for the time being.
He turns inside, into his thoughts, the jumbled mess that they were. An image rises, of a closet stuffed full of children’s things; baseball mitts and comic books, basketballs and Legos and mismatched sneakers, empty clothes hangers hanging from the clothes bar because there was no room for clothes to hang, fishing rods and tackle boxes and those funny hats you get at holidays that no one ever actually wore. At the very top of the pile would be a few token items of clothing, maybe a Boy Scout uniform and a suit that hadn’t fit in two years. He sees this image and smiles. His mind was a lot like that closet. Stuffed full of crap no one needed, least of all him.
Cleaning that closet was going to take a lot of work. He shudders at the thought of sifting through all that garbage, turns his mind away from the idea of unearthing things that were buried there. Things that had been buried a long time. A LONG time. Memories flood unbidden to him and bombard him before he can shy away; a baseball bat spattered with blood, muffled thumpings and banging from the other side of a cheap plaster wall, the moon shining high and cold through his bedroom window as a woman cries hopelessly down the hallway. A bruised, sunny-faced boy topped with carrot hair smiling at him over an ice cream cone at the park, while other children laugh and play. His mother’s blank face as blood rains onto the faded linoleum, the two impossiblities battling each other for dominance in a poorly lit kitchen, knowing that one was his brother and the other his father, and knowing that the end would be the same, over and over. The thud of his father’s lifeless body on the floor and the howl of triumph as the winner devoured the heart of the loser.
He curls up, reflexively. Damn them, why wouldn’t they leave him alone! A girl, with dark hair and too much make-up, looks down at him with pain raw in her blue eyes. A man with pale skin, badly scarred, stares at him in disbelief over a mahogany desk as he pulls the trigger beneath his chin. A tiny woman, preturnaturally beautiful with a face framed in a page-boy cut of black hair, peers through a sniper’s scope and reels back in shock as the bullet pierces her chest rather than that of her intended target. There is a nagging feeling in the back of his mind as he tries to dodge the images washing over him(I know her… I know her… I know her…) but he thrusts it away from him. More pictures and places and people bury his thoughts.
The images become macabre, surreal. Chanting echoes down a stone hall, carved by the hands of slaves beneath the earth, slaves who’d gone to their deaths soon after the completion of their task. He hides from those voices, hollow and haunting. Those voices signify something horrible and corrupt, and, despite his upbringing, he shies away from the savagery and insanity he hears in each chanted phrase. He hides until the words of a guard sting him into action, bring his pride into focus, drive him towards the filth and brutality of that discordant song. A boy kneels in front of him, in defeat, clad in leather leggings and a woolen tunic. The circlet on his brow pronounces his royalty. There is terror in the boy’s eyes as his head is swept from his shoulders with a practiced swing of a shortsword, and the laughter of his captors is almost loud enough to drown out the wail of horror that escapes the girl thrown carelessly to one side of the throne. She weeps, her hair like a curtain across her pale face. She is weeping…. weeping…
Coherent thought escapes him as the images pile up, pile up and bury him, a skeleton in his own closet. Feeling as if some ungentle hand is peeling his skin back, flaying nerves from flesh, he screams. And screams. Inside himself he laughs as he screams, laughs as he weeps, laughs as his heart breaks.
One phrase repeats itself in the recesses of his madness, over and over and over… spoken in the halting voice of a frightened girl.
"Can I… come with you?"