A Night with a Nutcase

Themis

Part 1

A Night with a Nutcase

By : Soobthenoob

I pull his wallet out and go through it briskly. The bum underneath me is shivering as though he’d just been shot in the guts and was bleeding all over himself.

Such an overreaction, I just shot him in his arm and once more in his foot, to get him to settle down.

“You shouldn’t have beat the shit out of that man,” I say, and find a couple of ten dollar bills that I’m not to proud of stuffing into my own pockets.

“Jesus…What the fuck are you?”

I shoot him in the guts this time.

And enough times to make sure he stays down.

The victim of the deceased is long gone. He probably left the moment I first pulled the trigger. I can’t complain. He’d probably just as soon run the moment he got a good look at me.

I head into the local pharmacy. It’s nearly closing time, but there’s still a patron or two inside. They freak out and leave by the time I get to the dispensary. The pharmacist is transfixed. I just need some band-aid and painkillers, so it didn’t matter anyway. I pay her and leave the place.

I wrap the fresh wound on my left arm with the band-aid and pop close to 10 painkillers to numb myself. I need to rest, so I get to the closest, darkest alleyway.

I lay my head down on the dry concrete. My duty for the day is done, and it’s left my hunger for justice sated. I tell myself to rest, but it’s useless. This alley is too crowded for even an ounce of peace. The druggies, hookers, and homeless, all stare at me like I’m not of this world. I’m just as much a freak as they are. Just that I look like one. I have no God-given eyes that I can see with. Instead, contraptions grant me vision to see the world through lenses, just like a camera would. I see the world in digital.

The bums round here don’t like me. One of them sums up some Dutch courage and walks my way.

I just want to rest.

“Oi, piss off retard, this alley’s my….”

I pull the trigger and he loses a toe. Then, I pick myself up and leave. No more blood needs to be spilled tonight.

Retard. Freak. Abomination.

I know it’s not their fault that they call me that. I look the part. I can take the punches. I can take the name calling. In fact, it’s second nature for me to disregard those comments. Today, I just wasn’t feeling so generous. I rarely get injured. And when I do, it usually heals itself up well.

It’s another 3 mile walk to my favorite resting spot. The one place I would dare to call home. It just so happens to be the one place no one dares to visit. No one, save the occasional ballsy kid who’d try to impress his peers. The Saint’s Shack. That’s what I heard one of the children call it. It was far from a shack though. It was once a large, masonry villa, but lost all of its beauty once its owner went insane. It now lay neglected, with creeper vines, moss and every other natural growth you could think of, on its stone walls.

Now, such a roomy place like this would have normally been a haven for the dregs of society, but there’d been stories of how haunted that place really was. It used to belong to an altruist, who in turn, received it from the church after countless years of service. Rumor has it, that the saint who owned the manor fell in love with a nun. For years, they kept they’re amorousness a secret, only meeting after hours. One day, their affair was revealed. The nun was burned at the cross by a group of over zealous church goers. The holy man, spared from execution due to his past deeds, lost his mind. He disappeared completely a month later. People still hear his mad cachinnation and the wind still blows his whispers.

The Saint’s Shack had been sanctuary for the last year and a half, yet I had felt nothing. I did, however hear occasional creaks and the shuffling of feet coming from the basement, which was conveniently barred from the inside.

The cold streets of this sleeping city would be warm and vibrant with city folk once the sun comes up.

I reached it within the hour, only stopping to save an old woman from a mugger. I broke the fools arm in 3 places and took his wallet. I needed the money. The elderly woman couldn’t even thank me. She just stared at me, wishing that she could have just been mugged rather than to see a thing like me.

The shack was just as unpleasant and unkempt as I had left it, with not a stone out of place. I remove my habit and lay myself down on my makeshift bed. Just as begin to unwind, I hear it. I hear it for the first time. Laughter. Mad laughter.

I just want to rest.

.My artificial heart thumps like a jackhammer in my malformed chest. Still, it wasn’t fear. It was my body responding to a threat. This threat was supernatural. It had to be.

I sit up and focus intently. I view nothing through my false eyes. The laughter was gone. I could have sworn it was coming from….

I see him for the first time. The bedlamite. And he’s sitting right next to me.

“Rough night, friend?” asks the mad man, chin resting lazily on his chest.

“Yes… rougher than usual. You are the one who owns this place?” said I, in my monotonous, emotionless voice.

“That I am, friend.” He chuckles. “That, in fact, I am. Pray tell, why do you trespass?”

“I meant no ill. I will leave immediately, with your forgiveness.”

He looks up to me, and with his rabid, pulsing eyes, he stares past my lenses, and into my soul.

And the bastard laughs.

“You’ve not answered my question, friend.”

“I’m here because …” I trail off. I don’t know how to answer that question.

“…Because this cruel world is unfair and selfish. Do I not speak true?” he said, completing my sentence.

“Yes… and no. True, this world is unfair and selfish…” I replied, looking at the ceiling, hoping to avoid his penetrating gaze for as long as I could.

“Yet you still aid this world. Your ambivalence is most interesting. The people hate you for what you are; an abomination. And you still toil from sunset to sunup ridding their streets of crime and injustice. The people will keep a memory of you as a freak of nature, and nothing more. And the world will return to its old and stupid ways once you are gone,” said the old lunatic.

His words are poison to me.

“I do not help the world, I help the people. They deserve so much better than this. Justice can never prevail if responsible people do nothing to uphold the people’s rights. Why should I care of my image? Look at me! I have no purpose in this world save for this,” I retort in anger, still maintaining the same robotic monotonous voice.

Then he laughs his maniacal laughter once more and get up.

“I was once like you, helping, giving, caring, and loving.” He shakes his head in sorrow and continues, “Soon, you shall find a renewed purpose, and forever change your view on society. I’ll allow you to spend one last night here. If I see you here again tomorrow night, I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

And he chuckles his way back into his basement, locking it from the inside.

The last thing he said to me reassures me of his insanity,

I try to make sense of the encounter.

He couldn’t have been alive all this while.

Yet I was talking to him just a minute ago.

Was he a figment of my imagination?

A spirit or memory, trapped forever in this house?

Or perhaps he was a mirrored reflection that my subconscious conjured?

I’m too tired to reason with myself.

I just want to rest…