The Contingency: Part Three - Scar Tissue

[Non Compos Mentis]

Such a sight it must have been, in that small yet upmarket coffee shop in the smart district of Schenectady. Across the road from the open-all-night club that advertised two-for-one jello shots to the students and adventurous elders, two exhausted, beaten-looking older men sat with steaming cups of java under their noses and a longing for alcohol in their guts.

One old man had sworn off liquor many a year past after it had attempted, as it always will, to kill him most viciously. The other, I, was held to a life of limited vice and doctors’ orders as anti-schizophrenic drugs pumped through my system. Booze was forbade from my lips and outright cursed from his, yet on this afternoon we thirsted equally for a dram to quell trembling hands.

“It’ll make a fine scar.” I muttered over a white coffee, negotiated with much hoo-hah from the counter girl who insisted I should call it a ‘Latte’. My eyes, however, were not laid upon my cup but were instead on the bandaged up horror of Godfrey’s right arm.

“The slice or the coffee?” Godfrey murmured in reply as he sipped the black soup in front of him, winced, added another sachet of sugar and repeated the ordeal once more. He’d already done it thrice.

“It isn’t that horrible.” My Latte tasted like the kind of coffee they put in ice-cream and give to children to make them feel grown up. Weak and synthetic, when all I wanted was a strong dose of something real and punchy. Too bad the only alcohol on sale in that cathedral of bad java was a lacklustre liqueur to top off the disappointing deal. Still I drank my milky solution and thanks god there was at least some caffeine in it somewhere.

“Yeah, could be worse. Could be better too.” Godfrey’s eyes wandered out through the window, toward the all-night bar that was closed because it was nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning. Several blocks away, St Jude’s shelter sat under the care of a hapless steward and had done since early the previous night.

“Get the fuck away from me or I’ll gut you!” He’d smelled of the kind of vomit you could set alight and his eyes showed the tell-tale signs of no sleep in weeks, but that didn’t stop the hobo monstrosity from reaching over the counter and heaving Godfrey straight over the top. He pulled the knife next, fumbling for it in his coat while everybody panicked. The old man tried to pull away but once the blade was drawn he stayed perfectly still; as he should have, one more step and no ambulance would have helped him.

“You need… to calm down.” The mess-hall of the Jude abounded with the excited, confused commotion that tends to come from random acts of violence. Still, my words were loud enough for the scruffy knife-wielder to hear and take exception to.

“Don’t tell me what to do! You fucking dump soup on my hand and you tell me to calm down?!” Godfrey had slipped, his ladle sloshing piping hot ham and pea soup all over the stranger’s hand, and caused the outburst. It could have happened to anyone, but that night it happened to the Schenectady drunk that carried a kitchen knife in his pocket.

“You got to put that knife away before it gets you in trouble.” Godfrey spoke calmly as his arms lifted just a touch higher into the air. The stranger hadn’t asked him to do that, but when confronted with a sharp implement your body does funny things. Calm and submitting as he was, though, there was no reasoning with this man.

“What’d I tell you…” And that was it. In the blink of an eye an innocent situation had led to this vagrant lashing out wildly. An accident perpetrated by the kindest man I knew, taken as a personal slight by a man neither of us had ever seen before, turned into a bloody assault with a deadly weapon. The blade gouged a four inch wound in the forearm of my friend and it was with undoubted fury that I threw the stranger’s entire body into the serving counter before he could inflict another blow.

“It’ll fix up good as new. Just a little war-paint that’s all.” The priorities of the moment were clear. The madman, upon seeing the wound he’d inflicted, ran for the safety of the open road while I swiftly got my friend to the emergency room with a dishcloth wrapped tight around his arm. A long night later and he’d been stitched up and sent on his way. The stubborn old boot could have stayed, he’d lost a lot of blood, but instead he left as soon as he could.

“And I suppose you’d be the expert on that kind of thing, huh?” He raised a knowing eyebrow at me. He knew I was no stranger to blood and pain, but had he ever truly seen the extent of it? Had he seen the matches I’d been in that put me in a hospital bed and threatened not only my career but my life? While Kelli Starr was known to shrink away from the torture of prolonged pain, I had made a career of it and had all the verification I needed on my body at all times.

Without a word I reached up to my scalp and flicked apart two swathes of unkempt brown hair, revealing a nine year old stretch of scar tissue. Godfrey, the gentle soul he is, widened his eyes at the sight of such a historical wound. “Hardcore Hell, Al Laiman.”

The match had been an especially brutal memory in an especially brutal career. Thumbtacks were one thing, but when Laiman brought out the ‘Happy Chair’ my scalp never looked the same again. I’d faced more than my fair share of bloodshed but I still had the ability to be surprised by extraordinary violence.

Now Godfrey gulped his coffee with a little more gusto. The sight of such a scar always did seem to be such a sobering thought for many. “I suppose that isn’t the only one of those you got?” I wondered why he’d ask such a thing. The only reason I could come up with was a need to make his wound seem like a perfectly normal thing, and not a reason to be mollycoddled.

I uncovered my left arm, covered in a patchwork quilt of jagged markings. If one spent long enough, and I had, they could trace the path the shards of metal had taken through my skin. They could see all the damage that Murdoc had done on the day I decided, what I thought had been once and for all, to leave PCW.

“A year and four months ago, the Junkyard Brawl. Murdoc threw me into a pile of scrap metal.” I sounded almost sombre as I remembered the match. Every scar had a story, ever pain had its place in my battered psyche. The map of my body could tell such strange and repulsing tales that few would believe, but I knew the truth behind every single one.

The most recent was a small laceration on my forehead, courtesy of Kelli Starr and the Candygram, right before she caved in my chest with her knees four long, brooding weeks ago. She had surprised me more than I thought anyone possibly could. We returned with the same motives, we strove to kick the Black Hand out of PCW for good, and then somehow the candyfloss-pink glitter-psycho turned tail and joined the bastards she’d tried to oust.

I had to give it to them, as painful as it was, the Black Hand had hit a curve ball at me so hard that I was still reeling months later. Then, when I tried to refocus on William Dillinger and his pretty piece of gold, they unleashed their own brand of extraordinary violence. I learnt then that I simply couldn’t trust Dollface anymore. Any notions of duplicity, any vague ideas of a double-agent working to dismantle the Black Hand from the inside out… they died the moment she laid me out with not one but two Candygrams and a concussion that kept me out for weeks.

Did I want the World Title shot that the dark powers of Messer’s Sadistic, Grimm, Showtime and Starr had taken from me ever so cruelly? Of course, only a fool would have given up the opportunity to take the belt from Billy’s troll-like grip. But their act of barbarism opened the door to something I now want more than anything… to get my hands on Kelli Starr and make her pay for her betrayal.

I slid my hand up against that remnant of a cut as I thought of this. I’d seen hundreds of competitors come and go in a PCW ring and only two had reached a goal that I had the opportunity to attain against Kelli Starr. The International Title would complete a glorious quadruple of titles that only Ace Anderson and Michael Wryght, as repulsive as it was to admit, had held. I could, with a victory, become the third Grand Slam Champion in PCW history.

And it meant nothing compared to beating the Black Hand’s psychedelic princess into smithereens. Concussions, lacerations… sticks and stones and that mumbo jumbo, it was nonsense. I couldn’t give a shit about the scars, I had enough of them to last a lifetime. The words, though? The treachery and disloyalty that Dollface had enacted? The opportunity she had spurned to make an honest difference to PCW, to remove the despotic champion from power for good? That hurt more than any scar.

“And those?” Godfrey asked, his morbid curiosity peeked, or at least his attention diverted from pain-dulling alcohol for the moment. He pointed to a set of marks that dragged their way up the underside of my right forearm. Perhaps his interest was drawn to them because each looked like his single wound. “What story do you have for them?”

I twisted my arm to view all four scars at once, their ugliness catching me immediately. They looked too clear, too vivid, to be age old relics of ring wars. These were recent, within a couple of years. “I don’t know…”

I’d been maliciously beaten down by the Black Hand and Kelli Starr numerous times since I’d come back to PCW but in none of these encounters had I suffered this injury. I’d lived on trains and asphalt for a while before I met Godfrey, but I couldn’t remember having these inflicted during that time. The Junkyard Brawl? I would have remembered having both arms stitched and bandaged. Hardcore Hell? A smiling chair and a thousand thumbtacks did the damage that day.

These looked like claw marks. Huge claw marks.

As I stared at the marks I began to hear murmurings deep within my mind. Had I not been on medication I would have sworn them to be the remnants of schizophrenia but I knew this voice from other such rumblings. Quickly, instead of the viciously inflicted marks on my arm, I began to see something else entirely, a man I’d grown accustomed to seeing but still knew nothing about, the Angular Man from my dreams.

“You come to us at a time when a man of your very specific qualities is in very high demand and there is a great deal of… uncertainty surrounding our operations.” He spoke, and in my mind we walked through some neo-modernist corridor that I thought must have been science-fiction but felt extremely real.

“You’re going to have to stop being so vague. You need me for something, I accepted the piece-of-crap bargain you put on the table to keep myself alive, now you start talking or you can kill me.” My own voice sounded odd to me, far too resonant and real for a fantasy. I didn’t feel like I was in a dream any longer, I was remembering an actual happening that had no place to fit into my life.

“Very well…” The Angular Man, dressed in a flowing grew overcoat and matching suit that did nothing but make him appear even leaner, spoke to me with a considered and methodical tone. No matter what I said, he knew exactly what he would tell me and when. “The first thing you need to understand is that the world you have lived in until now is merely a veneer, placed over the reality of things in order to protect those unable to defend themselves. The world you find yourself in now is one we have fought to defend and control for countless generations, and our enemies have fought us every step of the way too.”

Not only could I see the actions through my own eyes but I felt my emotions just as clearly. The frustration and confusion had been building for a long time as I had been shackled and kept prisoner before, now they were increasing fast. “I don’t know who you are, how am I supposed to know these people you call enemies aren’t the good guys?”

“People? Some of them are people, some that go by the mantles of clandestine organisations, but others…” A chink of a smile crept onto his thin mouth as if he had anticipated that exact question. Something ticked over in his mind, I could see it in his eyes, and he appeared to move on to the next part of his script. “People in your world occasionally see beneath the veneer and if they return from that abyss they bring stories of unequivocal evil. They bring tales of demons wrought from the fires of hell and monsters bred from the very spawn of devils.”

He continued to talk as we walked through the sleek, black and glass corridors of this facility. Corner after corner we took, and even though I’m sure it was merely an illusion and my discomfort, I could have sworn the corridors were becoming darker and more confined. “Many a story you have heard of vampires, or werewolves is based on some variety of fact. The second thing you must understand is that these and many more are not mythical creatures, these are individuals of good and evil who we watch over and destroy if necessary. It is the world you have inhabited all along but been too blind to see, and now you will see it…”

The modernist architecture and design gave way then to a door. That door stuck out markedly from the corridors we had walked through, but it was familiar to something I had seen before. As I had confronted the man named Murdoc over a year ago, before our Junkyward Brawl, I had passed through something very similar. The old psychiatric hospital he’d visited, the hauntingly gaunt ‘Holder of Eternity’… the door so black and solid it looked like it was imbued with some dark sorcery.

The Angular Man pressed his palm to the door and a pained lurching of mechanics could be heard from somewhere behind it. Without a handle or an implement to open the door, it suddenly clanked open with a hiss of pressurised air. Whoever had made it had wanted it to remain in place for a very long time.

The door swung into the room slowly and my warden strode forward with a calm and expectant demeanour. Could I have told you why I followed without any such instruction? No, but I did anyway. I walked into that room and saw nothing right away. The Angular Man stared straight ahead at a plain black wall that seemed to glow with the same kind of enchantment as the door. Then he turned to the right.

As I turned, I became aware of the thick partition of see-through material than divided the room. I could sense the minute vibrations in the divider and the floor but couldn’t marry them to anything. There was no sound, no warning for what I would see. I turned fully and couldn’t understand it at first. I was such it was fantasy, a hallucination, but it felt very real and I knew it was just that.

The Lycanthrope, as I remembered now that they called it, slammed its giant lupine form into the partition and rebounded backwards before attacking again. Its eyes gleamed with the animalistic intent to tear us both asunder. I saw myself recoiling back from the beast in horror, watching as it saw me doing this and stopped its charging. Instead it raised its elongated hands and extended the pitch-black claws that had spawned my remembrance of this moment.

In that single moment my mind shattered into shards of glass. The lucidity of the memory was lost, replaced by fragments of pain and suffering the likes of which I had, unbelievably, never experienced before. These fragmented memories came fast, flashing through my eyes in an instant but the images were clear. I recoiled in my seat at the coffee shop, my hands gripping the sides of my head in terror.

“Sean? Sean!?” Godfrey shouted but I was unable to respond.

I saw the claws of some beast, another heathen monster, cleave through my arm but the pain I felt the worst was not in the form of blood. I felt a great gouge through my soul, a loss so powerful I could not hold myself from breaking into heaving howls of tears.

And in the midst of it all I remembered the last of that day in the room with the Angular Man, I remembered his words as he shattered the world I knew with the vision of his beast and shattered it again now. “You are now part of a society that has existed for thousands of years, moulding the world into the metropolis it is today. That is what we are, now for who. My name is Calder, I am a Cleric within the organisation you know as The Order, and now you have joined us.”

“I have to go…” I scrambled from that cubicle in the coffee shop, reeling from the hole left in my heart and the pain flooding through my mind. Something had happened, something I could not explain and could not place. After I had confronted Murdoc a year and four months ago, after I had left PCW altogether, I had found myself with The Order, the society that combatted the very shadowy organisation I would be fighting in just a few days, The Black Hand.

“Sean, wait…” Godfrey called out, still weakened by his ordeal and unable to keep up with me as I sprawled out of the shop and onto the street. I clung to the outside of my truck as I tried to get where I needed to go. I knew only vague details, the rest I would try to figure out on the way.

“I need to go!” I shouted as the engine coughed into life. Could it have been coincidence that I had returned to PCW intent on destroying the Black Hand after I had been at the whim of The Order so recently? Why couldn’t I remember any of this, or place it in the last year and a half? I couldn’t answer any of these questions and I had no other options than the one I could think of.

There were few people who would know of The Order, even less that were friendly. Sadistic, Grimm, Showtime or, god forbid, Kelli would kill me on sight if I approached them with this. That fight was for Return To Glory and, knowing this or not, Black Hand or not, I would be there to destroy Kelli Starr for her crimes. Murdoc was rogue, appearing and then vanishing at will. I’d tracked him once, it would not be so easy a second time.

No, only one other person was going to have the information I needed. She’d found me once, come to bring me back from the wilderness. Perhaps she knew everything already, perhaps she was in the dark as much as me, but for my sake… I needed to find Eira.