Post by Non Compos Mentis on Jul 1, 2015 16:17:51 GMT -5
“Don’t you dare try and lift that thick head of yours out of that bed.” Godfrey had the mixed tones of a schoolteacher and a strict father when I arrived back from Greenville three weeks ago. Trauma 173 had been, to all intents and purposes, an abomination. The loss was one thing, a demoralising stoop to the Black Hand, but the aftermath? That was something altogether more soul-shattering.
“…what?” I croaked, crumpled up on my mattress with little knowledge of how I’d arrived back in Schenectady. Somehow I had, and I suspect flouting several state and national regulations regarding the health of a person sat behind the wheel of a truck in the process. The lingering thought above all others was that Kelli Starr of all people had done this to me.
“You heard. If that ain’t a concussion then I’ll be a son of a bitch.” The old man snapped back, and he may have been right but I’d have been damned if I was going to admit it. Dollface and her Candygram loomed over my mind, a constant reminder of what she had done and what I had done myself. The contract was signed and it said ‘PCW International Title’ right on that dotted line. Concussion or not I’d be in Greenville soon enough to try and make things right.
“I thought you always said your mother was a good woman…” I managed a grimacing snigger and tried to sit up but a lightning bolt of pain shot up my spine and into the hollow thing I called a brain. It’s not a concussion, I told myself, you just got hit pretty hard. It’ll pass soon. But it wouldn’t.
“I ought’a give you a helluva slap, boy.” Godfrey mumbled indignantly as he moved to the door.
“Maybe you should, might knock some sense into me.” Was that an admission of guilt? A confession that maybe he was right about the concussion? No. I believed in that moment that my foolishness had purely been in not escaping that ring while I had the chance. Before The Black Hand had gotten hold of me.
“Get some rest, Sean. What’s done is done, no use blaming yourself.” Perhaps I blamed myself for Kelli Starr being in the situation she’d found herself in. Perhaps I blamed myself for being too stubborn to cut and run when I had the chance at Trauma 173.
“I don’t.” But I didn’t blame myself for what he meant. The contract was signed and Frank Foley, two weeks later, would make it clear… the signature is valid. I didn’t blame myself for being in the International Title match instead of facing Billy Sadistic for the World. I blamed The Black Hand. I blamed Kelli Starr. I blamed Frank Foley.
Godfrey left the room quietly, not willing to fight the issue this time. He’d leave me to stew and come back later to see if anything had changed. It wouldn’t.
I blamed The Black Hand for making the choice for me. They surrounded me, vultures circling the seconds-to-be corpse and watching just in case it showed a sign of life and tried to escape. If I even began to sign ‘World’ on that worthless piece of paper they would have buried my face in it and used my hand like a puppet’s to sign the acceptable answer. Sadistic, Starr, Grimm, Showtime… Stormm who stood by and watched, pretending that he wasn’t a part of it when he knew damn well what he was involved in, I blamed all of them.
I blamed Foley because, while all common sense dictated that a contract signed under duress with a million witnessing eyes was a phoney contract, I had heard the match was made. The Black Hand had run roughshod over all of PCW, having its way with impunity. Foley did nothing to curtail their rampage, nor did Icemann or anyone else above that smarmy son-of-a-bitch Foley’s head. Instead they sat back and watched as Pure Class Wrestling buckled to Billy Sadistic and his band of black brothers.
So I blamed them all. I blamed Foley, I blamed The Black Hand. I blamed Stormm who, after all the evil he’d done in the past, was denying his new transgressions. What’s worse than a son of a bitch is a son of a bitch who denies it. All of them had their part to play and all so they could protect William Dillinger and his World Title.
Sleep, rather than being troublingly absent, now became a wearisome interference. I lay in bed night after night, most days even, trying to find a way to get back what I had been forced to give away. ”Let me go.” I begged Godfrey as he in turn pleaded with me to rest more. But I was sick of being in bed, sick of convalescing in the useless chains of Schenecady. ”Let me go!” And I went.
I resorted to attacking Frank Foley at Trauma 174, I was that furious with his decision to allow to contract to stand. Security had dragged my concussed carcass out of the arena and sent me packing back to St Jude’s.
When that didn’t work I tried to come up with another solution. PCW management had made their stance clear though, the match was made and there was no going back. The harder I thought, the more dead ends I met, the most exhausted I became. Any train of thought was cut off by a sudden, unwelcome slip into unconsciousness.
“You have a choice to make, Sean; join us or die.” That voice poked at me through the veil of darkness. Every night over the last few weeks I’d heard those words repeated at least once; sometimes accompanied by others, other times just once and left to linger alone in my mind. Over the weeks, however, I would hear more and more spoken through the angular mouth of a man I couldn’t identify.
“Go to hell…” I recalled, feeling as though the words had been spoken out of my mouth in that moment. They hadn’t, I knew that much. They were words remembered from over a year earlier. I drifted on the verge of sleep, somewhere in the purgatory between consciousness and dreams, and wished to remain in that state as I learned more.
“Such spirit, admirable for a man in your position but foolish.” I felt, truly felt, the figure move around me. I tried to move my arms but remained shackled to my side. Figuratively? Literally? It could have been either, or both. The Angular Man paced from my side to in front of my face, dressed in a pale grey suit styled to make him look all the more gaunt.
“Who are you? Where am I?” The walls, the obsidian masses they were, seemed ever so far away. I could only see the Angular Man and his accomplice who stood, squat and silent, on the edge of my vision. I had no allies there, no comfort or security. The feeling was beginning to become all too familiar.
PCW finally allowed me back into the building, on the proviso that I team with two men I had no lack of animosity for: Loki, my on-and-off rival with whom I’d shared many a battle but not quite a war, and, of course, Justin ‘Stormm’ Michaels. Whose sick idea of a joke was it to place the Black Hand’s own sleeper agent in a team with two of their most vehement rivals? Did I even need to ask? Frank Foley’s name immediately popped into my mind.
“In time, Sean. First you must understand a little of the situation you are in.” One situation I knew nothing about, the one lurking somewhere in the back of my mind that I couldn’t remember and couldn’t even find room to place into the timeline of my life. The other I almost knew too much.
I could see it then; a dysfunctional trio trying to pull together only for a typical story of mis-communication and deceit to topple any chance of success. While Stormm may have been sowing seeds of denial, I didn’t trust a single word he said. I’d be waiting for him to stab us in the back at a moments’ notice while Loki and I attempted to put our differences aside. I may not have been best friends with Brandon, but I could at least respect him as a great wrestler and I knew we both had a common enemy in the Black Hand. We, at least, would try to pull in the same direction. But could that possibly be enough?
“You put your nose in business that really was not yours to meddle with. Normally individuals who ingress into our society are ‘disposed’ of with extreme prejudice, but occasionally one such individual is given the option to live. Do you know why?” I heard the Angular Man speak in my semi-sleeping moments. He too had the tone of a lecturer teaching a wayward student but the other, Godfrey, had known to stay clear of me in the days following Trauma 174. I was a brooding mess, a maelstrom to be watched from a distance and not crossed.
There was no obvious threat in his voice, more a tone of enlightenment. He wanted an answer, one I remembered not giving him. “Go… to… hell.” Whoever he was, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing what he wanted. So I’d stepped into his lair, I’d meddled in affairs that weren’t mine to meddle in. That obviously wasn’t an isolated incident, the Black Hand might have said the same. I wouldn’t allow them to ransack PCW where I had tried, failed and been forgiven for the same before. I’d stood up to them, placed myself in their business… and now I guess I’d received my payback.
I was alive though, in these visions and in real life. The Angular Man and The Black Hand hadn’t decided to put me out to pasture yet and that was all that mattered. I was still alive and still ready to throw everything at my enemies, but I was well aware that they were out there too, just as ready for me. “It’s because they possess a ‘strength’… it’s not something you can measure or put your finger on, but these individuals have the fortitude to face horrors that most mortals could barely imagine. You have that fortitude, you have already seen the worst that this life has to offer and you’re still here, still fighting.”
The Angular Man circled around me, sizing me up as prey or partner. Partner for what? I didn’t know but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Still I couldn’t move, my hands and legs immobile but my mind conscious. I had no idea why, even if this was a real event that I was remembering of fantasy concocted by hallucination. “You do not comprehend exactly who or what you are, you do not even know there is anything to comprehend, but embrace the offer we make and I can help you.”
“What can you possibly offer me?” I choked out. What help did I need? There was no doubt that I’d needed help at many times in my life, but all those moments were accounted for. And yet, these recollections seemed so very real. Feelings I didn’t know I’d felt. Words I didn’t think I’d heard. People I didn’t think I’d met. ”I don’t even know who you are!”
His piercing ice-blue eyes glared into mine at that moment. I could see his face that clearly that his eyes materialised in my mind. The lecturing tone was gone, now he showed a resolve as steely as his features. “Now is the time to drop the act, Sean. I know you are a survivor, a fighter, and I admire that. It is the reason you are not already dead. You are an intelligent man too, so please do not make the mistake of misreading this situation.”
Had I misread another situation? Had Loki and Myself picked a fight with the wrong people backed by the wrong shadows. My own shadows circled in the unknown past as The Black Hand circled like vultures very much in the present. Stormm may have had shadows of his own to deal with, but his conscience was his own to sort. For all we knew, Stormm’s shadows were his two teammates whom he’d been sent to sabotage.
“I can offer you an opportunity to join a society so far advanced from what you know. I can offer you a chance to experience a life you can scarcely imagine. I openly admit it comes at a great cost, but it is a cost I believe you are capable of bearing. Accept it and I release you from these bonds. Deny it and when I release these bonds your body will fall from them.”
“Who ARE you?” I asked, my mind boggling with thoughts and conspiracies of who this man was. My new mind told me that it was a projection of The Black Hand, trying to manipulate their way into my scarred psyche, but something wasn’t right. If the Black Hand wanted me out of their path they’d already found a way to do it. I was on my way to face Kelli Starr, on my way out of Sadistic’s hair for the time being, and wasn’t that the plan all along?
I asked who this tormentor, this seducer, this recruiter and captor was. He answered. I didn’t hear. I tried to focus, for the night I first experienced these words and every night after, but the words he had spoken did not come. His sharp features moved, but no sound followed. But time after time I felt the effects.
“Let me go.” I asked, and the Angular Man did. The shackles that held me in place lifted, and I walked out of them into the dark.
“…what?” I croaked, crumpled up on my mattress with little knowledge of how I’d arrived back in Schenectady. Somehow I had, and I suspect flouting several state and national regulations regarding the health of a person sat behind the wheel of a truck in the process. The lingering thought above all others was that Kelli Starr of all people had done this to me.
“You heard. If that ain’t a concussion then I’ll be a son of a bitch.” The old man snapped back, and he may have been right but I’d have been damned if I was going to admit it. Dollface and her Candygram loomed over my mind, a constant reminder of what she had done and what I had done myself. The contract was signed and it said ‘PCW International Title’ right on that dotted line. Concussion or not I’d be in Greenville soon enough to try and make things right.
“I thought you always said your mother was a good woman…” I managed a grimacing snigger and tried to sit up but a lightning bolt of pain shot up my spine and into the hollow thing I called a brain. It’s not a concussion, I told myself, you just got hit pretty hard. It’ll pass soon. But it wouldn’t.
“I ought’a give you a helluva slap, boy.” Godfrey mumbled indignantly as he moved to the door.
“Maybe you should, might knock some sense into me.” Was that an admission of guilt? A confession that maybe he was right about the concussion? No. I believed in that moment that my foolishness had purely been in not escaping that ring while I had the chance. Before The Black Hand had gotten hold of me.
“Get some rest, Sean. What’s done is done, no use blaming yourself.” Perhaps I blamed myself for Kelli Starr being in the situation she’d found herself in. Perhaps I blamed myself for being too stubborn to cut and run when I had the chance at Trauma 173.
“I don’t.” But I didn’t blame myself for what he meant. The contract was signed and Frank Foley, two weeks later, would make it clear… the signature is valid. I didn’t blame myself for being in the International Title match instead of facing Billy Sadistic for the World. I blamed The Black Hand. I blamed Kelli Starr. I blamed Frank Foley.
Godfrey left the room quietly, not willing to fight the issue this time. He’d leave me to stew and come back later to see if anything had changed. It wouldn’t.
I blamed The Black Hand for making the choice for me. They surrounded me, vultures circling the seconds-to-be corpse and watching just in case it showed a sign of life and tried to escape. If I even began to sign ‘World’ on that worthless piece of paper they would have buried my face in it and used my hand like a puppet’s to sign the acceptable answer. Sadistic, Starr, Grimm, Showtime… Stormm who stood by and watched, pretending that he wasn’t a part of it when he knew damn well what he was involved in, I blamed all of them.
I blamed Foley because, while all common sense dictated that a contract signed under duress with a million witnessing eyes was a phoney contract, I had heard the match was made. The Black Hand had run roughshod over all of PCW, having its way with impunity. Foley did nothing to curtail their rampage, nor did Icemann or anyone else above that smarmy son-of-a-bitch Foley’s head. Instead they sat back and watched as Pure Class Wrestling buckled to Billy Sadistic and his band of black brothers.
So I blamed them all. I blamed Foley, I blamed The Black Hand. I blamed Stormm who, after all the evil he’d done in the past, was denying his new transgressions. What’s worse than a son of a bitch is a son of a bitch who denies it. All of them had their part to play and all so they could protect William Dillinger and his World Title.
Sleep, rather than being troublingly absent, now became a wearisome interference. I lay in bed night after night, most days even, trying to find a way to get back what I had been forced to give away. ”Let me go.” I begged Godfrey as he in turn pleaded with me to rest more. But I was sick of being in bed, sick of convalescing in the useless chains of Schenecady. ”Let me go!” And I went.
I resorted to attacking Frank Foley at Trauma 174, I was that furious with his decision to allow to contract to stand. Security had dragged my concussed carcass out of the arena and sent me packing back to St Jude’s.
When that didn’t work I tried to come up with another solution. PCW management had made their stance clear though, the match was made and there was no going back. The harder I thought, the more dead ends I met, the most exhausted I became. Any train of thought was cut off by a sudden, unwelcome slip into unconsciousness.
“You have a choice to make, Sean; join us or die.” That voice poked at me through the veil of darkness. Every night over the last few weeks I’d heard those words repeated at least once; sometimes accompanied by others, other times just once and left to linger alone in my mind. Over the weeks, however, I would hear more and more spoken through the angular mouth of a man I couldn’t identify.
“Go to hell…” I recalled, feeling as though the words had been spoken out of my mouth in that moment. They hadn’t, I knew that much. They were words remembered from over a year earlier. I drifted on the verge of sleep, somewhere in the purgatory between consciousness and dreams, and wished to remain in that state as I learned more.
“Such spirit, admirable for a man in your position but foolish.” I felt, truly felt, the figure move around me. I tried to move my arms but remained shackled to my side. Figuratively? Literally? It could have been either, or both. The Angular Man paced from my side to in front of my face, dressed in a pale grey suit styled to make him look all the more gaunt.
“Who are you? Where am I?” The walls, the obsidian masses they were, seemed ever so far away. I could only see the Angular Man and his accomplice who stood, squat and silent, on the edge of my vision. I had no allies there, no comfort or security. The feeling was beginning to become all too familiar.
PCW finally allowed me back into the building, on the proviso that I team with two men I had no lack of animosity for: Loki, my on-and-off rival with whom I’d shared many a battle but not quite a war, and, of course, Justin ‘Stormm’ Michaels. Whose sick idea of a joke was it to place the Black Hand’s own sleeper agent in a team with two of their most vehement rivals? Did I even need to ask? Frank Foley’s name immediately popped into my mind.
“In time, Sean. First you must understand a little of the situation you are in.” One situation I knew nothing about, the one lurking somewhere in the back of my mind that I couldn’t remember and couldn’t even find room to place into the timeline of my life. The other I almost knew too much.
I could see it then; a dysfunctional trio trying to pull together only for a typical story of mis-communication and deceit to topple any chance of success. While Stormm may have been sowing seeds of denial, I didn’t trust a single word he said. I’d be waiting for him to stab us in the back at a moments’ notice while Loki and I attempted to put our differences aside. I may not have been best friends with Brandon, but I could at least respect him as a great wrestler and I knew we both had a common enemy in the Black Hand. We, at least, would try to pull in the same direction. But could that possibly be enough?
“You put your nose in business that really was not yours to meddle with. Normally individuals who ingress into our society are ‘disposed’ of with extreme prejudice, but occasionally one such individual is given the option to live. Do you know why?” I heard the Angular Man speak in my semi-sleeping moments. He too had the tone of a lecturer teaching a wayward student but the other, Godfrey, had known to stay clear of me in the days following Trauma 174. I was a brooding mess, a maelstrom to be watched from a distance and not crossed.
There was no obvious threat in his voice, more a tone of enlightenment. He wanted an answer, one I remembered not giving him. “Go… to… hell.” Whoever he was, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing what he wanted. So I’d stepped into his lair, I’d meddled in affairs that weren’t mine to meddle in. That obviously wasn’t an isolated incident, the Black Hand might have said the same. I wouldn’t allow them to ransack PCW where I had tried, failed and been forgiven for the same before. I’d stood up to them, placed myself in their business… and now I guess I’d received my payback.
I was alive though, in these visions and in real life. The Angular Man and The Black Hand hadn’t decided to put me out to pasture yet and that was all that mattered. I was still alive and still ready to throw everything at my enemies, but I was well aware that they were out there too, just as ready for me. “It’s because they possess a ‘strength’… it’s not something you can measure or put your finger on, but these individuals have the fortitude to face horrors that most mortals could barely imagine. You have that fortitude, you have already seen the worst that this life has to offer and you’re still here, still fighting.”
The Angular Man circled around me, sizing me up as prey or partner. Partner for what? I didn’t know but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Still I couldn’t move, my hands and legs immobile but my mind conscious. I had no idea why, even if this was a real event that I was remembering of fantasy concocted by hallucination. “You do not comprehend exactly who or what you are, you do not even know there is anything to comprehend, but embrace the offer we make and I can help you.”
“What can you possibly offer me?” I choked out. What help did I need? There was no doubt that I’d needed help at many times in my life, but all those moments were accounted for. And yet, these recollections seemed so very real. Feelings I didn’t know I’d felt. Words I didn’t think I’d heard. People I didn’t think I’d met. ”I don’t even know who you are!”
His piercing ice-blue eyes glared into mine at that moment. I could see his face that clearly that his eyes materialised in my mind. The lecturing tone was gone, now he showed a resolve as steely as his features. “Now is the time to drop the act, Sean. I know you are a survivor, a fighter, and I admire that. It is the reason you are not already dead. You are an intelligent man too, so please do not make the mistake of misreading this situation.”
Had I misread another situation? Had Loki and Myself picked a fight with the wrong people backed by the wrong shadows. My own shadows circled in the unknown past as The Black Hand circled like vultures very much in the present. Stormm may have had shadows of his own to deal with, but his conscience was his own to sort. For all we knew, Stormm’s shadows were his two teammates whom he’d been sent to sabotage.
“I can offer you an opportunity to join a society so far advanced from what you know. I can offer you a chance to experience a life you can scarcely imagine. I openly admit it comes at a great cost, but it is a cost I believe you are capable of bearing. Accept it and I release you from these bonds. Deny it and when I release these bonds your body will fall from them.”
“Who ARE you?” I asked, my mind boggling with thoughts and conspiracies of who this man was. My new mind told me that it was a projection of The Black Hand, trying to manipulate their way into my scarred psyche, but something wasn’t right. If the Black Hand wanted me out of their path they’d already found a way to do it. I was on my way to face Kelli Starr, on my way out of Sadistic’s hair for the time being, and wasn’t that the plan all along?
I asked who this tormentor, this seducer, this recruiter and captor was. He answered. I didn’t hear. I tried to focus, for the night I first experienced these words and every night after, but the words he had spoken did not come. His sharp features moved, but no sound followed. But time after time I felt the effects.
“Let me go.” I asked, and the Angular Man did. The shackles that held me in place lifted, and I walked out of them into the dark.
