Delicious ice cream! And the whys, and wherefores.
Oct 2, 2018 6:07:15 GMT -5
Gerard Angelo likes this
Post by Sicko on Oct 2, 2018 6:07:15 GMT -5
This is the well from which the dark magic sprouted. The deep, hidden well brought on by stolen, secret knowledge. Tapped from aquifers and buried springs of untouched, eldritch potential. The water that flows from this well has been unleashed on a small suburban cul-de-sac in Phoenix, Arizona. The well that hums with darkling potential, crackling from a long-unmoved, rusted shell left to bake in the heat of the desert. This is the story of the intertwined destinies of two very bad people bound by sick, twisted fantasies. A young girl corrupted by black magic and evil gods into a profane, undead horror. And, mostly of all, this has always been the story of Ephrain Ortiz.
You can turn back from this story, sickened and perturbed by it's earlier contents, and that, honestly, would be fine. The story of Ephrain Ortiz was considered lurid and taboo even before a large, catatonic specimen of humanity was brought in handcuffs to a secluded, lockdown sector of a facility known as Springdale. It was considered bleak even when Dr. Daniel Shomron, LCSW, cracked open a case file of a vagabond entrusted back into the state's care, detailing the long history of institutionalization and jail of the man who wore the clown facepaint and worked as a henchman in professional wrestling stables.
Ephrain Ortiz was a man who nobody ever thought was capable of what he did. Not Sicko, the clown. Just another freak monster, just another brainless hardcore wannabe jabbering about pain and torment. Nobody really thought he was for real. Not Warpath, not Jason Twisted. And if your image of Sicko in your mind is that, then that's where the story ends, with it better left fading out of your memory, the after-effects making you feel ill at ease, but knowing they'll pass.
But if you continue to peer into who Ephrain, who Sicko really is, and what he's capable of becoming, then that bears further inspection - and the closer glimpse into the madness that came from Hall C of Springdale all the way to Lexington Court will haunt you for some time to come. It will leave scars. Just like it's left on the little cul-de-sac.
Or, truthfully, on Ephrain Ortiz himself.
Because as we examine the threads left hanging, we come in to that rusted, burned out shell in the desert. The night sky is pale with a hanging moon, washing the stones white and casting long shadows on the cold sands. Coyotes howl in the night, and wind sprays sand against the now-buried hulk. In the three months since the shooting took place it's once spotty paint has peeled and bubbled, sandblasted off. It's metal surface has darkened. Inside, the big tubs and freezers that held novelty ice cream treats have been left open to the elements, and the old ice cream has congealed around the boxes. It is a smell that mingles with decay as the foulest scent ever. The sticky morass of melted ice creams that are held in the freezers are thick with swarms of flies and desert bugs, and maggots crawl out of every possible opening and squirm on the floor. Flies buzz around the interior the the bombed out shell like a black cloud. There is death and decay to feed off of in here, and deep, black magic lingering.
The flies buzz over a dead body too.
In life he had been fat. Corpulent, but strapped with thick muscle. Now his body is bloated like a whale corpse, greened and bursting and grotesque. Decomposition has eaten away at him, the holes shot from the pump shotgun fired into him by George Turner sick reminders as they provide a daily smorgasboard for maggots and bacteria which are slowly working to dissolve the body of Ephrain Ortiz. The black cloud seems to coat his skin, too, making it if not move then at least twitch. Now and then a pustule bursts. What had been cooked in the shell of the ice cream truck oven in the desert heat blistered as he rotted. Some scavengers likewise had been at him, gnawing flesh, birds pecking out his eyes, leaving stalks and sinew hanging out of orifices. This body was dead. Ephrain Ortiz, three months dead.
Ephrain Ortiz, three months dreaming.
He had sat behind the wheel of his ice cream truck, watching his life playing back over it's windshield like a movie. For the longest time, he just smiled absently, as if some waitress was going to come over to ask him if he wanted to refresh his drink, and he'd smile genially and say, oh, no thank you, miss, I'm just enjoying the show. He didn't recognize the tall man who strode across the projected screen. He hadn't, couldn't know he'd watched this movie over and over again, thousands of times.
He didn't recognize the man in the dress and uniform shirt of a fireman who'd come home to a wife and daughter, and kissed them on the cheek. He wanted to remember their names, but it was another life. He wanted to remember why, in some freak fit of irony, when this firefighter's house had burned down, the man had snapped and he had, in a complete regression back to a primal, savage Neanderthal tribe mindset, cut the burned bodies apart. It played by his eyes, and he watched it with the wonder that other people might see a light show at the planetarium.
And then the firefighter was placed in a cell. And as years passed by, he morphed into something else, going from a tall man in the dark cell to a grotesquely fat man. Who was released out of the cell through the shenanigans of another man who assumed his guardianship? Why would he be let out of a cell and put in the care of a total stranger?, he wondered, but as always, as it passed by on his screen, he forgot about it. This stranger, Warpath, gave him a new identity, a face painted clown, and he stuck to it. Through different incarnations, until for his own assertion the giant had walked away. Then he created a new identity, far divorced from the Sicko identity Warpath had given him. A mild-mannered ice cream vendor who drove a beautiful, shiny truck.
He took it in, like it was a vista on the horizon and he was just driving Route 66. Where he was dreaming, it was showing him this for a purpose, he knew.
He saw the ice cream vendor mask start to break. Sicko was reasserting himself. And Jason Twisted, manipulative, sadistic piece of shit that he was, pushed Sicko to come out. He put the germ of an idea in Sicko's head, families are made of broken pieces stitched together. And so, he watched in neutral silence as his past self took that very literally, building a family for himself by kidnapping women and making Frankenstein dolls of sewn together parts.
"That was the beginning of our association, whether you knew it or not", said a voice, whispering in his ear.
"Hello?" He said, snapping out of his langourous daze, realizing that he had had a dopey smile on his face for so long. And realizing that his truck was sitting still. He peered back into the windshield, suspiciously. There was just a cracked, broken highway road. And then the story resumed, as if it was explaining itself.
He saw Sicko retreat into himself, become more than dormant, become docile, broken, speaking only in tics as the ice cream vendor randomly tried to assert itself. Because the ice cream vendor was a safe, peaceful life, away from pain. Away from constantly obsessing. Away from the sick compulsion that flared up in his guts to take his fist, which was twice that of a normal sized human, and crumple a bone between his fingers like tissue paper just because. That rid him of the sick pleasure that had awoken when he had taken a hatchet to those girls and chopped them apart, feeling the judder of impact as the blade cleaved. The ice cream man didn't know any of that, and when the urges got too bad, just reciting something the ice cream man would know calmed it down.
Somewhat.
He tried it out now, testing it like he expected a squeal of mic feedback addressing a room from a podium, he spoke aloud, "The first novelty bar, or I-Scream Bar, was created in 1920 by a pharmacist named Christian Nelson Kent. A customer of his store couldn't decide whether to buy an ice cream cone or a chocolate bar. Kent applied melted chocolate on top of a block of vanilla ice cream, and began selling his invention. In 1921 he applied for a patent of it, and secured an agreement with local chocolate makers Russel-Stover to mass-produce his confection, which were named, Eskimo Pies. And thus, a crucial first in the innovation of ice cream was created, leading to many other novelty bars or ice cream flavors to be sold on sticks."
He breathed, in and out, and in his minds eye he added a silent "thank you," and stepped down from the podium, checking his guts to see if the always-there insistent urge to break and bleed was quelled.
After a while, in that minds eye, the road returned, as if the curtain had come up on a brightening stage.
And the voice he'd heard earlier said, "Who are you fooling, ice cream man? That isn't you. It never was you. This was you."
The entire play began again, speeding in front of his eyes, and now they widened as the horrors began replaying, and they sunk in a little more. He recoiled a bit as the man wearing his face picked up a hatchet, raising it over his head while a poor, helpless, naked girl had squirmed on the table, strapped down and unable to move. Blood spatter rained over his face as he chopped through her arm, and in every gruesome detail magnified as he lifted it off the table, the last strings of tendon snapping as he held his demented doll part.
The sewn-together Barbies. His family. He saw it all again, and it was like he was seeing it for the first time.
And after the horror he had been led into, the dull period of the broken man shuffling onto Hall C at Springdale. And then the movie brightened, because his perception shifted to a newer identity to him, one he was unfamiliar with.
A man in love.
Her name had been Mariah Bamford and she was a teenaged terror, one who could, sickly enough almost have been his daughter. But she had worked her magic on him, and pushed his mind in just enough direction that he had become enamored of her. He saw it, right there, playing out over the screen that had been his life. And the snake-oil voice was silent, but noticeably there, simmering in smug gratification.
"This is what she wanted to happen," he said to himself as he watched the giant in love, mooning over this girl Mariah. Sitting next to her in the courtyard as she read and outlined her theories about black magic, pain, and power. She showed him a book obtained from some other orderly. Pointing to a name.
Moloch.
"That's right, big boy," said the voice at last as the movie went on, "Now you're catching on. But let me quiz you, did you pay attention to teacher in these lessons or were you too busy swimming in Mariah's eyes?"
"It's called a Tulpa, Ephrain," Mariah was saying, and now the movie had full surround sound, "and it is our chance, baby."
"Tul...pa?" the long-ago, love sick giant was sitting side by side with Mariah on the bleachers out on a cold, October morning 18 months ago. He hung there, jaw slack, eyes questing, trying to make sense of concepts outside of his broken kin and his infatuation with the pretty girl petting his arm.
"A Tulpa is a magical construct, sort of like a Golem. Some cultures have done extensive research on the magics needed to form a body that is created out of negative emotion and thought. The theory is, Ephrain... that the body is weak, and decays. But a body created with a blood price offered to an elder one like Moloch... given a blood price, and paid for with sufficient pain and suffering, will be immortal, unstoppable, and given full magical power. The body needs to be constructed to exact specifications."
She smoothed the book out in her lap. "The body would be dead. But if we pledge our souls to Moloch, he would take us into his den, where our spirits would remain."
Gaining more and more slow realization, he looked around him. The ice cream truck was no longer travelling down a dark desert highway. But in the darkness of the cab, the movie kept playing.
"My body, for example... Ephrain, baby... I'm going to need you to trust me on this. What you did to those girls... can you do it to my body?" Mariah was leaning forward, hungrily.
He'd recoiled in shock and horror at the thought of hurting his new love, something he wouldn't have even thought of, not the Sicko who was Warpath's puppet, not the jolly ice cream man, not any man since the firefighter. "Hurt... you? No, I- I can't, I can't, Neopolitan ice cream wuh-was made in the town of Naples Italy to - " but the bloodlust had already begun swimming up, and the thought that maybe he could cut and break bone was already intriguing the side he'd tried to tamp down.
Mariah's eyes searched his, deeply. "Please, Ephrain. Please. It's the only way that we can be out of here. It's the only way we can be free and live forever. I pledge to live with Moloch forever. We both pledge our service to Moloch. He gifts us powerful magic, and you sew my new body out of the parts. I'll grow stronger the more power you feed into Moloch's realm, and my body will heal into a new Tulpa form, better than it ever was."
Mariah had pointed to the book, in a frenzied, eager tone. "With both of us working together... we can give lord Moloch enough pain and anguish to live in his good grace forever. We can spread his will, and he'll give us enough power to be unstoppable. Immortal. Think about it, babe... Ahhh, I'm just a girl from Scottsdale, and if you just give me your help... I could be a god on Earth. Uh, with your help."
"You'll... be a corpse, Mariah... a doll made of sewn together parts."
"No... I'll be the girl - the woman, you love, still." She had raised his shlubby chin with a finger, and made him look in her eyes. They were beating with a charismatic, irresistable lure. "Don't you want to be by my side? I thought we were bound together. Don't you remember, you made me that clay heart in art class?"
The giant in love had grunted, then. "My heart is bound to you."
"And mine to you, baby... I promise..." She had kissed him, furtively and so suddenly that a guard wouldn't be able to notice and tell them no touching. "Even before we do any of this, even before you... put me back together, sew me up... my heart is bound to yours. Heh. It's like our hearts are sewn together."
"Our hearts... are sewn together," the giant had repeated.
And then the vision faded, the movie finally over.
And the sky swam like a black whirlpool opening up, a morass of eldritch energy crackling in the air as the sky cracked like an egg. The sky around him began turning a sickly purple. And black mass oozed into the air, like the remains of some foul pit.
In that black, bubbling mass forming in the air, multiple eyes opened. Green, glazed and blinking eyes, with no other discernable features.
"She promised you power, Ephrain... that promise, that made you cut her body to pieces, and send her spirit to this plane. Build her a strong, indestructible Tulpa body out of those doll parts. All you had to do was spread my influence."
Fully remembering now. Everything. Mariah luring him out to the middle of nowhere, the middle of the southwestern desert for a bloodprice ritual and then, as he had stepped out of the bed of the ice cream truck, the hot lead that had kissed his gut, as the ensorcelled form of George Turner stood there with a shotgun.
"She lied."
"She played you as she played the orderly to bring her the books which taught her my name. As she played Dr. Ronald Toney. As she'd played others in her relatively short life. Mariah Bamford, wicked little thing that she is, was an insignificant girl, who was made to feel powerless and weak by those that tormented her. They made her a monster... but she saw in you another kind of monster. One she could use."
"What do you say to that?"
"I want... to pay her back," he said, honestly. "I don't care how it happens. She used me, at the end, just like Warpath did, just like Twisted did. All of them, pushing me, twisting me to their own ends... using me. I thought she cared. I thought- " he grimaced. "I just want to pay her back."
"That can be arranged," the eyes mused, new eyes growing out of the soup and turning to him now and then.
"How?"
"Tulpa."
A new vision formed in the windshield, showing the ring at Pure Class Wrestling, a set dressing for Deadly Intentions.
Jerry Andrew's voice was tight with terror and awestruck, dumbfounded admiration, "Sicko has returned from out of nowhere!"
Ace Anderson's voice was more worried, tense and full of revulsion, "This Sicko is fighting with a purpose, with intentions. He's hit people harder than I've ever seen. He's out here not to win a match... Sicko is trying to break that man's bones, turn his face into powder."
The wrestling ring, and the vision of himself standing tall, hands raised, mouth flexing in a carnivorous roar, faded.
"Do that, "Sicko"... be that version... pay the blood price, and the body that is currently bloated and rotting in the shell of an old ice cream truck will live, and be better than it was before."
"For a price." He rejoindered.
"Oh, the price is understood. You will not be your own creature. Not anymore. You will belong, body and soul. But you'll live... and honestly, won't that be so much better than being what you never were... ice cream man?"
It was a good, fair question, and one that made him hate with an intensity he had never known in all of his days, not as the firefighter, not as the dancing clown sidekick to Warpath, not as the depraved, unstable killer set loose by Jason Twisted, not on Hall C. He would be someone new, someone bound to a reconstituted body and slaved to an Elder God, feeding him pain and torment and hatred and screams. Moloch was candid about that. He was going to be used. Used. Like always before. He hated that.
But he would be reborn in his hate, and live his new life in his hate... as long as the first target was the Tulpa that had created this bond.
"Done," he told the god. There was no expression... but the inky mass of eyes seemed to smile, all the same.
In the desert, in the shell of burned out, broken ice cream truck, a figure began to stitch itself together. It sat up, amid a cloud of black flies. And it took a deep, gasping breath.
"Mariah," came a rumble deep from within the repairing, savaged vocal chords, the gravelly voice of revenge from the grave. It was going to Lexington Court, after a few pit stops to appease a certain someone.
"Mariah," said the Tulpa. And nothing more.
You can turn back from this story, sickened and perturbed by it's earlier contents, and that, honestly, would be fine. The story of Ephrain Ortiz was considered lurid and taboo even before a large, catatonic specimen of humanity was brought in handcuffs to a secluded, lockdown sector of a facility known as Springdale. It was considered bleak even when Dr. Daniel Shomron, LCSW, cracked open a case file of a vagabond entrusted back into the state's care, detailing the long history of institutionalization and jail of the man who wore the clown facepaint and worked as a henchman in professional wrestling stables.
Ephrain Ortiz was a man who nobody ever thought was capable of what he did. Not Sicko, the clown. Just another freak monster, just another brainless hardcore wannabe jabbering about pain and torment. Nobody really thought he was for real. Not Warpath, not Jason Twisted. And if your image of Sicko in your mind is that, then that's where the story ends, with it better left fading out of your memory, the after-effects making you feel ill at ease, but knowing they'll pass.
But if you continue to peer into who Ephrain, who Sicko really is, and what he's capable of becoming, then that bears further inspection - and the closer glimpse into the madness that came from Hall C of Springdale all the way to Lexington Court will haunt you for some time to come. It will leave scars. Just like it's left on the little cul-de-sac.
Or, truthfully, on Ephrain Ortiz himself.
Because as we examine the threads left hanging, we come in to that rusted, burned out shell in the desert. The night sky is pale with a hanging moon, washing the stones white and casting long shadows on the cold sands. Coyotes howl in the night, and wind sprays sand against the now-buried hulk. In the three months since the shooting took place it's once spotty paint has peeled and bubbled, sandblasted off. It's metal surface has darkened. Inside, the big tubs and freezers that held novelty ice cream treats have been left open to the elements, and the old ice cream has congealed around the boxes. It is a smell that mingles with decay as the foulest scent ever. The sticky morass of melted ice creams that are held in the freezers are thick with swarms of flies and desert bugs, and maggots crawl out of every possible opening and squirm on the floor. Flies buzz around the interior the the bombed out shell like a black cloud. There is death and decay to feed off of in here, and deep, black magic lingering.
The flies buzz over a dead body too.
In life he had been fat. Corpulent, but strapped with thick muscle. Now his body is bloated like a whale corpse, greened and bursting and grotesque. Decomposition has eaten away at him, the holes shot from the pump shotgun fired into him by George Turner sick reminders as they provide a daily smorgasboard for maggots and bacteria which are slowly working to dissolve the body of Ephrain Ortiz. The black cloud seems to coat his skin, too, making it if not move then at least twitch. Now and then a pustule bursts. What had been cooked in the shell of the ice cream truck oven in the desert heat blistered as he rotted. Some scavengers likewise had been at him, gnawing flesh, birds pecking out his eyes, leaving stalks and sinew hanging out of orifices. This body was dead. Ephrain Ortiz, three months dead.
Ephrain Ortiz, three months dreaming.
He had sat behind the wheel of his ice cream truck, watching his life playing back over it's windshield like a movie. For the longest time, he just smiled absently, as if some waitress was going to come over to ask him if he wanted to refresh his drink, and he'd smile genially and say, oh, no thank you, miss, I'm just enjoying the show. He didn't recognize the tall man who strode across the projected screen. He hadn't, couldn't know he'd watched this movie over and over again, thousands of times.
He didn't recognize the man in the dress and uniform shirt of a fireman who'd come home to a wife and daughter, and kissed them on the cheek. He wanted to remember their names, but it was another life. He wanted to remember why, in some freak fit of irony, when this firefighter's house had burned down, the man had snapped and he had, in a complete regression back to a primal, savage Neanderthal tribe mindset, cut the burned bodies apart. It played by his eyes, and he watched it with the wonder that other people might see a light show at the planetarium.
And then the firefighter was placed in a cell. And as years passed by, he morphed into something else, going from a tall man in the dark cell to a grotesquely fat man. Who was released out of the cell through the shenanigans of another man who assumed his guardianship? Why would he be let out of a cell and put in the care of a total stranger?, he wondered, but as always, as it passed by on his screen, he forgot about it. This stranger, Warpath, gave him a new identity, a face painted clown, and he stuck to it. Through different incarnations, until for his own assertion the giant had walked away. Then he created a new identity, far divorced from the Sicko identity Warpath had given him. A mild-mannered ice cream vendor who drove a beautiful, shiny truck.
He took it in, like it was a vista on the horizon and he was just driving Route 66. Where he was dreaming, it was showing him this for a purpose, he knew.
He saw the ice cream vendor mask start to break. Sicko was reasserting himself. And Jason Twisted, manipulative, sadistic piece of shit that he was, pushed Sicko to come out. He put the germ of an idea in Sicko's head, families are made of broken pieces stitched together. And so, he watched in neutral silence as his past self took that very literally, building a family for himself by kidnapping women and making Frankenstein dolls of sewn together parts.
"That was the beginning of our association, whether you knew it or not", said a voice, whispering in his ear.
"Hello?" He said, snapping out of his langourous daze, realizing that he had had a dopey smile on his face for so long. And realizing that his truck was sitting still. He peered back into the windshield, suspiciously. There was just a cracked, broken highway road. And then the story resumed, as if it was explaining itself.
He saw Sicko retreat into himself, become more than dormant, become docile, broken, speaking only in tics as the ice cream vendor randomly tried to assert itself. Because the ice cream vendor was a safe, peaceful life, away from pain. Away from constantly obsessing. Away from the sick compulsion that flared up in his guts to take his fist, which was twice that of a normal sized human, and crumple a bone between his fingers like tissue paper just because. That rid him of the sick pleasure that had awoken when he had taken a hatchet to those girls and chopped them apart, feeling the judder of impact as the blade cleaved. The ice cream man didn't know any of that, and when the urges got too bad, just reciting something the ice cream man would know calmed it down.
Somewhat.
He tried it out now, testing it like he expected a squeal of mic feedback addressing a room from a podium, he spoke aloud, "The first novelty bar, or I-Scream Bar, was created in 1920 by a pharmacist named Christian Nelson Kent. A customer of his store couldn't decide whether to buy an ice cream cone or a chocolate bar. Kent applied melted chocolate on top of a block of vanilla ice cream, and began selling his invention. In 1921 he applied for a patent of it, and secured an agreement with local chocolate makers Russel-Stover to mass-produce his confection, which were named, Eskimo Pies. And thus, a crucial first in the innovation of ice cream was created, leading to many other novelty bars or ice cream flavors to be sold on sticks."
He breathed, in and out, and in his minds eye he added a silent "thank you," and stepped down from the podium, checking his guts to see if the always-there insistent urge to break and bleed was quelled.
After a while, in that minds eye, the road returned, as if the curtain had come up on a brightening stage.
And the voice he'd heard earlier said, "Who are you fooling, ice cream man? That isn't you. It never was you. This was you."
The entire play began again, speeding in front of his eyes, and now they widened as the horrors began replaying, and they sunk in a little more. He recoiled a bit as the man wearing his face picked up a hatchet, raising it over his head while a poor, helpless, naked girl had squirmed on the table, strapped down and unable to move. Blood spatter rained over his face as he chopped through her arm, and in every gruesome detail magnified as he lifted it off the table, the last strings of tendon snapping as he held his demented doll part.
The sewn-together Barbies. His family. He saw it all again, and it was like he was seeing it for the first time.
And after the horror he had been led into, the dull period of the broken man shuffling onto Hall C at Springdale. And then the movie brightened, because his perception shifted to a newer identity to him, one he was unfamiliar with.
A man in love.
Her name had been Mariah Bamford and she was a teenaged terror, one who could, sickly enough almost have been his daughter. But she had worked her magic on him, and pushed his mind in just enough direction that he had become enamored of her. He saw it, right there, playing out over the screen that had been his life. And the snake-oil voice was silent, but noticeably there, simmering in smug gratification.
"This is what she wanted to happen," he said to himself as he watched the giant in love, mooning over this girl Mariah. Sitting next to her in the courtyard as she read and outlined her theories about black magic, pain, and power. She showed him a book obtained from some other orderly. Pointing to a name.
Moloch.
"That's right, big boy," said the voice at last as the movie went on, "Now you're catching on. But let me quiz you, did you pay attention to teacher in these lessons or were you too busy swimming in Mariah's eyes?"
"It's called a Tulpa, Ephrain," Mariah was saying, and now the movie had full surround sound, "and it is our chance, baby."
"Tul...pa?" the long-ago, love sick giant was sitting side by side with Mariah on the bleachers out on a cold, October morning 18 months ago. He hung there, jaw slack, eyes questing, trying to make sense of concepts outside of his broken kin and his infatuation with the pretty girl petting his arm.
"A Tulpa is a magical construct, sort of like a Golem. Some cultures have done extensive research on the magics needed to form a body that is created out of negative emotion and thought. The theory is, Ephrain... that the body is weak, and decays. But a body created with a blood price offered to an elder one like Moloch... given a blood price, and paid for with sufficient pain and suffering, will be immortal, unstoppable, and given full magical power. The body needs to be constructed to exact specifications."
She smoothed the book out in her lap. "The body would be dead. But if we pledge our souls to Moloch, he would take us into his den, where our spirits would remain."
Gaining more and more slow realization, he looked around him. The ice cream truck was no longer travelling down a dark desert highway. But in the darkness of the cab, the movie kept playing.
"My body, for example... Ephrain, baby... I'm going to need you to trust me on this. What you did to those girls... can you do it to my body?" Mariah was leaning forward, hungrily.
He'd recoiled in shock and horror at the thought of hurting his new love, something he wouldn't have even thought of, not the Sicko who was Warpath's puppet, not the jolly ice cream man, not any man since the firefighter. "Hurt... you? No, I- I can't, I can't, Neopolitan ice cream wuh-was made in the town of Naples Italy to - " but the bloodlust had already begun swimming up, and the thought that maybe he could cut and break bone was already intriguing the side he'd tried to tamp down.
Mariah's eyes searched his, deeply. "Please, Ephrain. Please. It's the only way that we can be out of here. It's the only way we can be free and live forever. I pledge to live with Moloch forever. We both pledge our service to Moloch. He gifts us powerful magic, and you sew my new body out of the parts. I'll grow stronger the more power you feed into Moloch's realm, and my body will heal into a new Tulpa form, better than it ever was."
Mariah had pointed to the book, in a frenzied, eager tone. "With both of us working together... we can give lord Moloch enough pain and anguish to live in his good grace forever. We can spread his will, and he'll give us enough power to be unstoppable. Immortal. Think about it, babe... Ahhh, I'm just a girl from Scottsdale, and if you just give me your help... I could be a god on Earth. Uh, with your help."
"You'll... be a corpse, Mariah... a doll made of sewn together parts."
"No... I'll be the girl - the woman, you love, still." She had raised his shlubby chin with a finger, and made him look in her eyes. They were beating with a charismatic, irresistable lure. "Don't you want to be by my side? I thought we were bound together. Don't you remember, you made me that clay heart in art class?"
The giant in love had grunted, then. "My heart is bound to you."
"And mine to you, baby... I promise..." She had kissed him, furtively and so suddenly that a guard wouldn't be able to notice and tell them no touching. "Even before we do any of this, even before you... put me back together, sew me up... my heart is bound to yours. Heh. It's like our hearts are sewn together."
"Our hearts... are sewn together," the giant had repeated.
And then the vision faded, the movie finally over.
And the sky swam like a black whirlpool opening up, a morass of eldritch energy crackling in the air as the sky cracked like an egg. The sky around him began turning a sickly purple. And black mass oozed into the air, like the remains of some foul pit.
In that black, bubbling mass forming in the air, multiple eyes opened. Green, glazed and blinking eyes, with no other discernable features.
"She promised you power, Ephrain... that promise, that made you cut her body to pieces, and send her spirit to this plane. Build her a strong, indestructible Tulpa body out of those doll parts. All you had to do was spread my influence."
Fully remembering now. Everything. Mariah luring him out to the middle of nowhere, the middle of the southwestern desert for a bloodprice ritual and then, as he had stepped out of the bed of the ice cream truck, the hot lead that had kissed his gut, as the ensorcelled form of George Turner stood there with a shotgun.
"She lied."
"She played you as she played the orderly to bring her the books which taught her my name. As she played Dr. Ronald Toney. As she'd played others in her relatively short life. Mariah Bamford, wicked little thing that she is, was an insignificant girl, who was made to feel powerless and weak by those that tormented her. They made her a monster... but she saw in you another kind of monster. One she could use."
"What do you say to that?"
"I want... to pay her back," he said, honestly. "I don't care how it happens. She used me, at the end, just like Warpath did, just like Twisted did. All of them, pushing me, twisting me to their own ends... using me. I thought she cared. I thought- " he grimaced. "I just want to pay her back."
"That can be arranged," the eyes mused, new eyes growing out of the soup and turning to him now and then.
"How?"
"Tulpa."
A new vision formed in the windshield, showing the ring at Pure Class Wrestling, a set dressing for Deadly Intentions.
Jerry Andrew's voice was tight with terror and awestruck, dumbfounded admiration, "Sicko has returned from out of nowhere!"
Ace Anderson's voice was more worried, tense and full of revulsion, "This Sicko is fighting with a purpose, with intentions. He's hit people harder than I've ever seen. He's out here not to win a match... Sicko is trying to break that man's bones, turn his face into powder."
The wrestling ring, and the vision of himself standing tall, hands raised, mouth flexing in a carnivorous roar, faded.
"Do that, "Sicko"... be that version... pay the blood price, and the body that is currently bloated and rotting in the shell of an old ice cream truck will live, and be better than it was before."
"For a price." He rejoindered.
"Oh, the price is understood. You will not be your own creature. Not anymore. You will belong, body and soul. But you'll live... and honestly, won't that be so much better than being what you never were... ice cream man?"
It was a good, fair question, and one that made him hate with an intensity he had never known in all of his days, not as the firefighter, not as the dancing clown sidekick to Warpath, not as the depraved, unstable killer set loose by Jason Twisted, not on Hall C. He would be someone new, someone bound to a reconstituted body and slaved to an Elder God, feeding him pain and torment and hatred and screams. Moloch was candid about that. He was going to be used. Used. Like always before. He hated that.
But he would be reborn in his hate, and live his new life in his hate... as long as the first target was the Tulpa that had created this bond.
"Done," he told the god. There was no expression... but the inky mass of eyes seemed to smile, all the same.
In the desert, in the shell of burned out, broken ice cream truck, a figure began to stitch itself together. It sat up, amid a cloud of black flies. And it took a deep, gasping breath.
"Mariah," came a rumble deep from within the repairing, savaged vocal chords, the gravelly voice of revenge from the grave. It was going to Lexington Court, after a few pit stops to appease a certain someone.
"Mariah," said the Tulpa. And nothing more.
