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…

Walking Under the Rain (Part 2)

Walking Under the Rain

I love walking under the rain because no one can see my cry.

Funny how those words just simply popped into my mind. Memories, I wondered just how difficult it is to let them just fade away. My head hung low. Tear tinted rain trickled down my cheeks as I walked away from the apartment to a solitude that never exist except in fairy tales.

The faint song was still audible despite the heavy rain and the farther I walked the louder it seemed. Maybe I was just playing them in my mind; maybe I was just imagining them all along like I was imagining her love all this time. What past is better buried, that was what my friend once told me and perhaps he was right.

Rain, rain come here, come and wash away all these tears. Softly I started to sing in the tear streaked voice of mine, desperately trying to soothe my shattered heart. The heavy rain started to take its toll on me. It was cold. The rain soaked my clothes and it chilled me to the bone but I need this walk. Somehow walking always seems to calm me down like songs seems to soothe my heart.

Then faintly another melody came wafting through the heavy rain knifing my soul. I spun around so quickly that I almost tripped down. That melody, where in the world it came from? The apartment was lost in the rain and there was nothing around me except trees and grass. I looked up toward the gloomy dark sky, for there was where it seemed the melody from, and it struck me how dark it was around me. There were no more lights not even the faintest one and everything seemed to be engulfed in an eternal shadow.

Way beyond the horizon another shadow was creeping across the gloomy sky, hiding it behind its cape. I took a step back and the rain was no longer rain, it was as if the rain was something heavier and the whole world seemed to be slowing down. The melody, now a song, filled my ears and my bones reverberated with it. It was soothing at the same time it was aching. I willed myself to stop it. It was just my imagination it always was.

The shadow, now engulfing half of the sky, seemed to resonate with the song and now it came much stronger than before. Three cloaked silhouettes streamed down the ever growing shadow in the sky and flew, or rather floated, down in several graceful arcs. The song was from them, I knew it. I tried to turn away and run but my legs felt slushy and the air, the air was denser than it should be.

Calm yourself and face it with all you have. That was what Saraneth, Sara, once told me. Yeah, only then I was just facing work problems not three supernatural cloaked silhouettes that just fell down from the sky. Now I have every reason to panic. The three silhouettes descended with the utmost grace and here I stand upright like an idiot gawking at them for that was all I able to do.

Something about them seemed alluring to me and just by looking at them all that happened before seeped out of me and in my mind there was nothing except their grace and the song, the . Snap out of it, I told myself. He, she, it, they is trying to take control of you fight back, fight like a man. Fight back!

With all the courage and strength I could muster I blocked the song with my mind and willed myself to move. This time I managed to turn away from them, turned away and ran in some sort of slow motion run for the air had yet to undense itself. The cloaked silhouettes, as if realised that I was not in their spell any longer started the chase.

As I ran I felt something about the whole thing was not right. Something about the song, now that it stopped, was wrong. That song, somehow it reminded me of something, something that was once important. Now that I think about it the song was familiar. I heard it before, I heard it somewhere where it was hot not in this rain, and somewhere where it felt like home not in this shadow clad world, somewhere when it was alright and not bleak and somewhere, somewhere where it all begun. I heard it from her, from Sara herself.

And suddenly there she stood, right in front of me. Whether by imagination or plain reality she stood there clad in her usual melancholy air and smiled her usual sad smile. The cloaked things were hot on my heels but I skidded to a stop. Anger consumed me and it ruled out fear.

I drew in a breath and shouted: Why did you betray me?

Sara looked at me as if digesting, pondering what I said and mouthed something. She smiled her smile and the song started again this time louder and stronger and I knew I am no longer able to block it. The shadow started to fill my eye sight and slowly she was shrouded by it, hidden under its cape.

I stood there, drenched in the rain and exhausted from the run and anger, knowing that the silhouettes were just a hair breath away; I stared helplessly at her as she was slowly hidden away from me by the shadows. I tried to run to her but unable to. The Song of Saraneth filled my ears stronger than ever. I tried to block it again though I know it was useless. She betrayed me, she betrayed us all. The shadows shrouded her, me and the world...

Walking under the rain

Slam!
The phone went dead. I sat there as if a bombshell just hit me. I could not bring myself to believe that it just ended that way but the other part of me was glad it finally over. I could care less ; yet I could not explain why my tears flowing so uncontrollably?

The night seemed eternal. I could not close my eyes no matter how hard I tried.Even if i could, pieces of my shattered memories kept returning to haunt me. I got out of bed and walk to my window stilt. The city which was brightly illuminated a few moments ago was now nothing but black and bleak save for a few street lamp and pub that dotted the horizon.

The cold night wind blew through my opened window. The wind which would usually send shivers down my spine felt nothing. Nothing at all. I caught scent of the oncoming downpour hidden skillfully among the cold night wind. I wonder if the wind saturated with moisture of the oncoming rain is as damp as what I was feeling.

The howling of the dogs seems to be singing to the melancholic tune of my heart. I could not believe that my tears are forming again in my eyes, yet because of it I am sure that beneath this skin lies the feeling of a normal human being. It's had been so long, so very long since I last felt this heart torn.

Today was exactly two months since I found out that she had been unfaithful to me. But love had blinded and bounded me so that I made reason after reason just to make myself believe that love still exist between us somewhere somehow. Just a few moments ago, my made believed reasons were completely shattered and our memories together are nothing but the distant past.
The song "The First Cut is the Deepest" my neighbour was listening to flooded my entire room. I felt that I could not hold in the pain anymore.

I opened the door and went out of my room. The poshly decorated apartment corridor was completely deserted and only illuminated by the dim light bulbs by the elevator.The elevator came, I went in and press the lobby button. The unchanging elevator music just only made my mood seemed heavier.

I walked out of the lift and and onto the street. Small drops of rain began to fall as I stepped outside. Slowly the rain became heavier and heavier and heavier; along with the rain, my tears also began to fall uncontrollably.

Rain......
rain down on me
and wash away all my
tears, sorrow and my memories of you.




~Dreamerz~