Post by Sicko on Oct 3, 2017 2:26:19 GMT -5
The feeling of speed is the first impression, as well as the nightmarish haze that makes reality waver. All he knew was that he was hunched in the bucket seat on the passenger side of a large open-air vehicle, and it rattled dangerously with creaky disrepair as it drove through the night. A speed that came along with the rushing of air through the open box doors. The seat jostled and bucked as if the driver were hitting every divot and the box truck's old springs magnified them. And yet, he sat, hunched over in the seat, his body turned away from the driver, curled in a defensive ball, and he was locked into place by a thick seat belt. He tried to get more from his surroundings but for the moment that was it, Tyler's body was locked into the rigid structures of a night terror. He couldn't influence the dream even if he could think clearly... but the nightmarish shimmer over all and the surreal sense of speed and wind pushing against him held him spellbound.
It was as if he was in a car that was out of control, careening towards doom.
Mustering his will he looked over.
"So, do you want to see how the chocolate factory worked, Charlie?" the massive shape sitting behind the bucket driver's seat tittered, and he felt a sick feeling drop low into his stomach.
A giant figure sat on the seat next to him. Horror struck him as the figure's smile stretched like a shark's. Lip pulled back to reveal a growing row of fanged teeth, and as a halogen lamp of whatever cul-de-sac they were speeding through illuminated the cab for a second, the eyes that were glowing like shiny gold coins in the gloom were actually corneas of blood red.
"You asked the questions, Tyler... you asked, if the figure of the clown that played at being a wrestler, wasn't a mask... if the tragic figure of Sicko wasn't a glammer covering something... and you wondered... this truck has been running through your dreams for weeks... until it finally caught up to you... do you want to know why...?" The greasepaint had been thickly applied, some of it stuck in clumps and smears to the skin of the man.
All of these details were read in minor, hindbrain fashion, quicker than it took to tell. But the fleeting glimpse in the orange street lamp's light receded, and the cabin was dark again, and the speeding truck was again piloted by the hulking shape, the yellow eyes in the dark.
"But it's more than the truck infesting your dreams, and more than just me... what you're experiencing is an eye opening... an awakening... and I'm taking you with me... because you're seeing... exactly what I saw, what Mariah opened my eyes to..."
He pushed against the chains binding him into the role of the dream. His muscles seemed so sapped of energy that he couldn't lift them, his throat remained closed, and yet he gathered everything he could to shout. All he could muster was a squeak.
"Before, I did things just to do them, because I was muscle, because I was told... but I've seen the beauty of what comes from this... the promise of immortality through pain..."
His mouth hung open slackly, and despite his terror his body remained weak, docile; unresponsive.
"Your home, and your neighbors, have had a dark magic begin to take hold over them... and they too have become avatars of the beast that my lady and I have pledged our service to... and do you know what that means, Tyler?... Say, does your mom still carry that little 9 mil in her pocketbook?"
He chanced to look over, and as he did the manicured lawns and driveways that made up Lexington Terrace as the truck turned onto Spooner Street began cracking and splitting open. The ground was coming up in furrows, and the splits in the earth hissed an ungodly steam. The cracks in the earth began widening into breaches of some unknowable gulf... and glowing red, as if the ground was giving way to the molten core of the earth itself. The sky was turning from black night to reddish purple overhead, as he looked through the vast screen. It was like looking into a disaster movie about the rise of Hell on earth.
The houses ahead of them as they drove were crumbling.
The ground had split on either sides of them into vast canyons, until the farther ahead down Spooner Street they went it was only one cracked and scorched bit of asphalt hanging over a red lava abyss.
The wind howled at him. It felt like it was tearing flesh off his bones in hot strips, unbearably. The clown next to him barked a mad laugh.
"Yes, you're going mad... and just like it was promised by her, it's spreading... because madness is infectious. Look at the world today... the rise of mass shooters... the madness takes hold of one person because they grow up on a culture that fetishizes, worships - even if they would deny it - that pays homage to human misery and the weapons that foster it. Say, Tyler, about your mom's 9 mil... how good would it feel in your hand?"
Flames licked up as they continued their high-speed, full-tilt barrage behind the wheel of the ice cream truck, and the ground on either side of the only thing still solid and real belched acidic fumes. The sky was a sick color, a red that made him violently ill to look at.
"It has taken hold and spread, and why wouldn't it. So many of your neighbors deep down have the inclination for it. All it takes is the introduction of a single cancer cell into a system to begin rotting an organism from the inside..."
"...please..."
"So, Tyler, I know Conner likes to give you lip on the playground... how would it feel the next time he said something to you if he said it muffled around the barrel of your mom's toy in his mouth?"
"...please... take me back... wake me up -" he started feeling himself thrashing in his seat. "Wake me up from this! Please!!"
He looked over, and the figure sitting in the seat next to him had a rotted, lich-like face of a grinning skeleton.
"WAKE ME UP! WAKE ME UP! WAKE ME UP!" Tyler shouted, and before he knew it, he was rolling out of his bed, freed from the grip as a mouse will finally try and bolt out of the grasp of a cobra; and he plunged over the side into what he hoped wasn't a lake of fire; but when he fumbled over, he saw he was back in his room. He took in gasping lungfuls of air, hoping he hadn't screamed loud enough to wake the house. But the effects of the dream lingered on, and he felt unsafe. He thought he heard the familiar jingle of an ice cream truck through the air, and he froze. Much of what was said had begun to fade from his mind, but he remembered one thing from the dream and he peeked his head out from his room. He was only clad in his underwear. He looked around to see if mom was still up watching TV. Thankfully, she wasn't, but she had left it on. Tyler passed by the front of the television, set to a news channel that was showing a horrific toll rising in Las Vegas. Tyler moved without thinking much, almost on instinct, and he found his mother's small leather clutch. He reached in and withdrew a tiny gun, compact enough that it felt right in his hand.
Without knowing why, he felt a rush of satisfaction. But as he held it in his hand, he felt there was something he would have to do with this.
He heard a bump and a creak as someone down the hall got up to go to the bathroom. He sheepishly hid his treasure in his waistband, moving gingerly down the hall. He would hide this underneath his pillow. And then... well, he hoped he would not have any more terrifying, feverish dreams... but he would sleep on this a while... until he figured out what important thing the back of his brain was telling him to do with this.
He could not have said why he felt someone was expecting him to give them something, but he did and he could not think of who it could be.
Elsewhere in the town of Scottsdale, Nora Turner is dreaming again. She knows it.
She's in the hospital again, the hospital where she last saw him lying in that bed. George had been nearly catatonic. Two months ago, her husband had been found lying on the floor of Ephrain Ortiz's kitchen on his part of the duplex. He was screaming about a woman who wasn't there. A decaying corpse woman who was sewn together from body parts, a grinning rictus specter who had stretched her lips and talked to him. He had screamed, enough to alert the entire populace of the block party. He had screamed, and he had screamed, and he had screamed.
Now Nora is simply walking through the ward. She looked in to his room, but she didn't see him. She is panicking, and she walks unsteadily but she can't find him and it's so damn HOT, and she's wandering the halls but they aren't quiet, they're filled with moans and screams and weak, near-dead groans and the stench of the dead the Dead THE DEAD.
Tumbling, turning around, frantic, she makes her way down the hall, trying to get to the nurse's station, because if that big black nurse that's always on duty is there she can page Doctor Symenow. But she holds her hands to her temples, screaming at the whispers and the smell.
The lights flicker on and off, buzzing like a nightmare insect. Voices whisper in the dark behind her.
She peers into his room.
"George?" she cries. He should be there. Her husband is sick. He needs her.
There's nobody there.
"George, please! I need you. You need m-"
"He needs... no one" came a voice. Smoother than cut glass. Older than time itself. Cold as the grave.
"...George?"
There's a slight chuckle. "George... is... shed.", it hisses.
"Wh- what does that mean? Where is my husband?"
He rises up suddenly, and in the dreamlike world his body has grown nearly ten feet tall, still with George's hair and face, but his teeth elongated and growing to razor sharpness, and his eyes, oh god HIS EYES -
Casually, he lifts her up by the neck and raises her into the air. Nora begins to choke.
"This is the part where I will need to become clear. Pain is his reality... the smiling mask he wears for you, the simpering and weak life of mundane suburban life has become a lie. He cannot stand his day to day life. He hates his job. You sicken him. If you were truly his soulmate and not I, he wouldn't be in the state he is today. But the facts are facts, "babe"... George... has grown into his sickness, he slumbers, but he smiles and he dreams of the eternal life that awaits him... he can't wait to awaken and discover his new life, his new purpose... no boring accountant office, no pathetic dreams of middle aged mediocrity... he is going to beat you to death with a hammer and play in your blood..."
The stinging words pierce into her core. "No! My husband wouldn't do that!"
The thing in front of her grins wider, wickedly. "The problem has never been on his shoulders, but on everyone around him. When he looks at you he sees weakness, and you justify it at every turn. Look at you now, a miserable, wretched shrew who annoys everyone in the neighborhood with her insipid 'friendliness' and bad cooking. There is only one recourse for you to survive... you can only go to him and smother him in his sleep... stop him before he comes to gestation... before the instrument of violence is born into the world... only if you, too, shed... can you live..."
She struggles with this as much as she can, in every sense of the word. She lets out a few choked gasps. Finally, amazingly, it lets her go.
"I don't care either way", it intones. "But you remember what I said. He is lost to you. He belongs where he is now, and it will sustain him much better than you ever could. You would do well to keep your distance. You and I are quits now, baby-doll. George's destiny lies in something greater than both of us."
She wakes with a start, but still, disturbingly, the apparition's laughter echoes on.
At the very hospital where the dream Nora Turner just met her beast, two doctors are consulting on the figure of George Turner, very much still in his bed, and resting, well medicated. Doctor Will Symenow is consulting with a leading expert in the field of analytical physio-psychology. His guest, a medium-built Jewish man, is simply chewing on a pen cap as his doctor flips through the chart. "I wonder if he's dreaming now," Dr. Symenow says, amiably.
Doctor Shomron, his mouth a pensive line, considers. "His mind suffered a serious break. He isn't in a state of catatonia as much as he is unable to process and has withdrawn. He sleeps, he responds to stimuli. But seeing something so shocking withdrew him from this world. What was it, Will?'
"Eh, first responders in his neighborhood said he was screaming about a woman made of parts..." Will Symenow flipped through the chart, shrugged his shoulders, put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. "I know you've been on sabbatical since you left the Springdale Rehabilitation Center, Doctor Shomron, so I'm thankful that you came in to take the lead on Mister Turner's case. But I have to ask, how did you come across this?"
Doctor Shomron rested his hands on the foot of the hospital bed tenderly. "I was following up with a former patient," was all Daniel would say. George slumbered on.
Elsewhere, a central figure in all of these dreamscapes and nightmares is resting himself. A familiar, dilapidated ice cream truck rests beneath the sprawling stars out in the Arizona desert. Despite the fact that it's bitterly cold outside the cabin, the hulking figure within sleeps on the floor of the back storage area, flanked by coolers. He dreams.
He's with her.
Mariah is as beautiful as the day she was that day they both left Hall C. As beautiful as the day she proposed that he immortalize her by bisecting her flesh. They sit side by side in the desert atop a butte, miles away from civilization as the sun goes down. It has all the makings of a romantic picnic. His blanket is spread out beneath her, to catch the leaking of embalming fluid from her stitches. She looks at him with starry eyes, rapturous, sublime as she stretches her body languidly. He plans to take her and ravish her, in ways he has yearned to do for months now. She smiles sweetly, eyes crinkling with delight and her sewn on jaw twisting in a grim simulation of a gratitude. "Eat your popsicle, sweet boy."
"You eat yours."
Dutifully, the gangrenous hand lifts the popsicle up to her tongue, which pokes out from between her broken teeth. As she swallows,juice dribbles disgustingly from between irregular stitches.
Mariah looks more serious and businesslike as she has knelt down, facing the sun. "I just want you to know that this time is serious, Ephrain. You can't be contented with just throwing men out of a ring. You have to cause serious, lasting harm. Break bones. Gouge eyes. Draw blood."
"I know, Mariah..." he says, not unkindly, but still defensively. He knows what he has to do.
"Only through causing pain, torturous, excruciating pain, can we live forever. You know it. I know it. He won't let us be together otherwise, my love." Mariah's eyes are so infinitely sad, and she stretches a hand out. The nails are black from rot, and the fingers are stiff from rigor mortis. Both hands don't match, because in the butchery, some parts had gotten wasted and had to be replaced by parts from other... donors. But she extends both hands out, palms flat, just to touch. Here, in this place of dreams, they can touch. He raises his hands, and meets hers. Her left hand and the other person's right hand touch his palms, engulfed in the size of his mitts, but they hold each other tenderly.
"So hurt people. Cripple people. Mangle... people. Do what you have to do." Her tone is urgent. "I want to live. I want to be strong enough to live in this plane, and to be immortal. And I can only do that if you feed him pain. From these people you meet in this match."
He looks stern. He's thinking of nothing but holding her again. If the seeds planted in the cul de sac, the dreams, would take root and blossom faster, then he would not need to. But he knew this was the fastest way. And she is right. He is committed. He is desperate. He wants nothing more than to find a way back to her, and he will break whoever is in his way to achieve this goal.
At length, she brings a rotted hand up to stroke his broad chin. She kisses him, and he soothes a broken stitch holding her neck on as he kisses her blue lips back.
"I love you, Ephrain. Please..." He shushes her. Everything is going to be all right.
"I love you, Mariah."
It was as if he was in a car that was out of control, careening towards doom.
Mustering his will he looked over.
"So, do you want to see how the chocolate factory worked, Charlie?" the massive shape sitting behind the bucket driver's seat tittered, and he felt a sick feeling drop low into his stomach.
A giant figure sat on the seat next to him. Horror struck him as the figure's smile stretched like a shark's. Lip pulled back to reveal a growing row of fanged teeth, and as a halogen lamp of whatever cul-de-sac they were speeding through illuminated the cab for a second, the eyes that were glowing like shiny gold coins in the gloom were actually corneas of blood red.
"You asked the questions, Tyler... you asked, if the figure of the clown that played at being a wrestler, wasn't a mask... if the tragic figure of Sicko wasn't a glammer covering something... and you wondered... this truck has been running through your dreams for weeks... until it finally caught up to you... do you want to know why...?" The greasepaint had been thickly applied, some of it stuck in clumps and smears to the skin of the man.
All of these details were read in minor, hindbrain fashion, quicker than it took to tell. But the fleeting glimpse in the orange street lamp's light receded, and the cabin was dark again, and the speeding truck was again piloted by the hulking shape, the yellow eyes in the dark.
"But it's more than the truck infesting your dreams, and more than just me... what you're experiencing is an eye opening... an awakening... and I'm taking you with me... because you're seeing... exactly what I saw, what Mariah opened my eyes to..."
He pushed against the chains binding him into the role of the dream. His muscles seemed so sapped of energy that he couldn't lift them, his throat remained closed, and yet he gathered everything he could to shout. All he could muster was a squeak.
"Before, I did things just to do them, because I was muscle, because I was told... but I've seen the beauty of what comes from this... the promise of immortality through pain..."
His mouth hung open slackly, and despite his terror his body remained weak, docile; unresponsive.
"Your home, and your neighbors, have had a dark magic begin to take hold over them... and they too have become avatars of the beast that my lady and I have pledged our service to... and do you know what that means, Tyler?... Say, does your mom still carry that little 9 mil in her pocketbook?"
He chanced to look over, and as he did the manicured lawns and driveways that made up Lexington Terrace as the truck turned onto Spooner Street began cracking and splitting open. The ground was coming up in furrows, and the splits in the earth hissed an ungodly steam. The cracks in the earth began widening into breaches of some unknowable gulf... and glowing red, as if the ground was giving way to the molten core of the earth itself. The sky was turning from black night to reddish purple overhead, as he looked through the vast screen. It was like looking into a disaster movie about the rise of Hell on earth.
The houses ahead of them as they drove were crumbling.
The ground had split on either sides of them into vast canyons, until the farther ahead down Spooner Street they went it was only one cracked and scorched bit of asphalt hanging over a red lava abyss.
The wind howled at him. It felt like it was tearing flesh off his bones in hot strips, unbearably. The clown next to him barked a mad laugh.
"Yes, you're going mad... and just like it was promised by her, it's spreading... because madness is infectious. Look at the world today... the rise of mass shooters... the madness takes hold of one person because they grow up on a culture that fetishizes, worships - even if they would deny it - that pays homage to human misery and the weapons that foster it. Say, Tyler, about your mom's 9 mil... how good would it feel in your hand?"
Flames licked up as they continued their high-speed, full-tilt barrage behind the wheel of the ice cream truck, and the ground on either side of the only thing still solid and real belched acidic fumes. The sky was a sick color, a red that made him violently ill to look at.
"It has taken hold and spread, and why wouldn't it. So many of your neighbors deep down have the inclination for it. All it takes is the introduction of a single cancer cell into a system to begin rotting an organism from the inside..."
"...please..."
"So, Tyler, I know Conner likes to give you lip on the playground... how would it feel the next time he said something to you if he said it muffled around the barrel of your mom's toy in his mouth?"
"...please... take me back... wake me up -" he started feeling himself thrashing in his seat. "Wake me up from this! Please!!"
He looked over, and the figure sitting in the seat next to him had a rotted, lich-like face of a grinning skeleton.
"WAKE ME UP! WAKE ME UP! WAKE ME UP!" Tyler shouted, and before he knew it, he was rolling out of his bed, freed from the grip as a mouse will finally try and bolt out of the grasp of a cobra; and he plunged over the side into what he hoped wasn't a lake of fire; but when he fumbled over, he saw he was back in his room. He took in gasping lungfuls of air, hoping he hadn't screamed loud enough to wake the house. But the effects of the dream lingered on, and he felt unsafe. He thought he heard the familiar jingle of an ice cream truck through the air, and he froze. Much of what was said had begun to fade from his mind, but he remembered one thing from the dream and he peeked his head out from his room. He was only clad in his underwear. He looked around to see if mom was still up watching TV. Thankfully, she wasn't, but she had left it on. Tyler passed by the front of the television, set to a news channel that was showing a horrific toll rising in Las Vegas. Tyler moved without thinking much, almost on instinct, and he found his mother's small leather clutch. He reached in and withdrew a tiny gun, compact enough that it felt right in his hand.
Without knowing why, he felt a rush of satisfaction. But as he held it in his hand, he felt there was something he would have to do with this.
He heard a bump and a creak as someone down the hall got up to go to the bathroom. He sheepishly hid his treasure in his waistband, moving gingerly down the hall. He would hide this underneath his pillow. And then... well, he hoped he would not have any more terrifying, feverish dreams... but he would sleep on this a while... until he figured out what important thing the back of his brain was telling him to do with this.
He could not have said why he felt someone was expecting him to give them something, but he did and he could not think of who it could be.
Elsewhere in the town of Scottsdale, Nora Turner is dreaming again. She knows it.
She's in the hospital again, the hospital where she last saw him lying in that bed. George had been nearly catatonic. Two months ago, her husband had been found lying on the floor of Ephrain Ortiz's kitchen on his part of the duplex. He was screaming about a woman who wasn't there. A decaying corpse woman who was sewn together from body parts, a grinning rictus specter who had stretched her lips and talked to him. He had screamed, enough to alert the entire populace of the block party. He had screamed, and he had screamed, and he had screamed.
Now Nora is simply walking through the ward. She looked in to his room, but she didn't see him. She is panicking, and she walks unsteadily but she can't find him and it's so damn HOT, and she's wandering the halls but they aren't quiet, they're filled with moans and screams and weak, near-dead groans and the stench of the dead the Dead THE DEAD.
Tumbling, turning around, frantic, she makes her way down the hall, trying to get to the nurse's station, because if that big black nurse that's always on duty is there she can page Doctor Symenow. But she holds her hands to her temples, screaming at the whispers and the smell.
The lights flicker on and off, buzzing like a nightmare insect. Voices whisper in the dark behind her.
She peers into his room.
"George?" she cries. He should be there. Her husband is sick. He needs her.
There's nobody there.
"George, please! I need you. You need m-"
"He needs... no one" came a voice. Smoother than cut glass. Older than time itself. Cold as the grave.
"...George?"
There's a slight chuckle. "George... is... shed.", it hisses.
"Wh- what does that mean? Where is my husband?"
He rises up suddenly, and in the dreamlike world his body has grown nearly ten feet tall, still with George's hair and face, but his teeth elongated and growing to razor sharpness, and his eyes, oh god HIS EYES -
Casually, he lifts her up by the neck and raises her into the air. Nora begins to choke.
"This is the part where I will need to become clear. Pain is his reality... the smiling mask he wears for you, the simpering and weak life of mundane suburban life has become a lie. He cannot stand his day to day life. He hates his job. You sicken him. If you were truly his soulmate and not I, he wouldn't be in the state he is today. But the facts are facts, "babe"... George... has grown into his sickness, he slumbers, but he smiles and he dreams of the eternal life that awaits him... he can't wait to awaken and discover his new life, his new purpose... no boring accountant office, no pathetic dreams of middle aged mediocrity... he is going to beat you to death with a hammer and play in your blood..."
The stinging words pierce into her core. "No! My husband wouldn't do that!"
The thing in front of her grins wider, wickedly. "The problem has never been on his shoulders, but on everyone around him. When he looks at you he sees weakness, and you justify it at every turn. Look at you now, a miserable, wretched shrew who annoys everyone in the neighborhood with her insipid 'friendliness' and bad cooking. There is only one recourse for you to survive... you can only go to him and smother him in his sleep... stop him before he comes to gestation... before the instrument of violence is born into the world... only if you, too, shed... can you live..."
She struggles with this as much as she can, in every sense of the word. She lets out a few choked gasps. Finally, amazingly, it lets her go.
"I don't care either way", it intones. "But you remember what I said. He is lost to you. He belongs where he is now, and it will sustain him much better than you ever could. You would do well to keep your distance. You and I are quits now, baby-doll. George's destiny lies in something greater than both of us."
She wakes with a start, but still, disturbingly, the apparition's laughter echoes on.
At the very hospital where the dream Nora Turner just met her beast, two doctors are consulting on the figure of George Turner, very much still in his bed, and resting, well medicated. Doctor Will Symenow is consulting with a leading expert in the field of analytical physio-psychology. His guest, a medium-built Jewish man, is simply chewing on a pen cap as his doctor flips through the chart. "I wonder if he's dreaming now," Dr. Symenow says, amiably.
Doctor Shomron, his mouth a pensive line, considers. "His mind suffered a serious break. He isn't in a state of catatonia as much as he is unable to process and has withdrawn. He sleeps, he responds to stimuli. But seeing something so shocking withdrew him from this world. What was it, Will?'
"Eh, first responders in his neighborhood said he was screaming about a woman made of parts..." Will Symenow flipped through the chart, shrugged his shoulders, put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. "I know you've been on sabbatical since you left the Springdale Rehabilitation Center, Doctor Shomron, so I'm thankful that you came in to take the lead on Mister Turner's case. But I have to ask, how did you come across this?"
Doctor Shomron rested his hands on the foot of the hospital bed tenderly. "I was following up with a former patient," was all Daniel would say. George slumbered on.
Elsewhere, a central figure in all of these dreamscapes and nightmares is resting himself. A familiar, dilapidated ice cream truck rests beneath the sprawling stars out in the Arizona desert. Despite the fact that it's bitterly cold outside the cabin, the hulking figure within sleeps on the floor of the back storage area, flanked by coolers. He dreams.
He's with her.
Mariah is as beautiful as the day she was that day they both left Hall C. As beautiful as the day she proposed that he immortalize her by bisecting her flesh. They sit side by side in the desert atop a butte, miles away from civilization as the sun goes down. It has all the makings of a romantic picnic. His blanket is spread out beneath her, to catch the leaking of embalming fluid from her stitches. She looks at him with starry eyes, rapturous, sublime as she stretches her body languidly. He plans to take her and ravish her, in ways he has yearned to do for months now. She smiles sweetly, eyes crinkling with delight and her sewn on jaw twisting in a grim simulation of a gratitude. "Eat your popsicle, sweet boy."
"You eat yours."
Dutifully, the gangrenous hand lifts the popsicle up to her tongue, which pokes out from between her broken teeth. As she swallows,juice dribbles disgustingly from between irregular stitches.
Mariah looks more serious and businesslike as she has knelt down, facing the sun. "I just want you to know that this time is serious, Ephrain. You can't be contented with just throwing men out of a ring. You have to cause serious, lasting harm. Break bones. Gouge eyes. Draw blood."
"I know, Mariah..." he says, not unkindly, but still defensively. He knows what he has to do.
"Only through causing pain, torturous, excruciating pain, can we live forever. You know it. I know it. He won't let us be together otherwise, my love." Mariah's eyes are so infinitely sad, and she stretches a hand out. The nails are black from rot, and the fingers are stiff from rigor mortis. Both hands don't match, because in the butchery, some parts had gotten wasted and had to be replaced by parts from other... donors. But she extends both hands out, palms flat, just to touch. Here, in this place of dreams, they can touch. He raises his hands, and meets hers. Her left hand and the other person's right hand touch his palms, engulfed in the size of his mitts, but they hold each other tenderly.
"So hurt people. Cripple people. Mangle... people. Do what you have to do." Her tone is urgent. "I want to live. I want to be strong enough to live in this plane, and to be immortal. And I can only do that if you feed him pain. From these people you meet in this match."
He looks stern. He's thinking of nothing but holding her again. If the seeds planted in the cul de sac, the dreams, would take root and blossom faster, then he would not need to. But he knew this was the fastest way. And she is right. He is committed. He is desperate. He wants nothing more than to find a way back to her, and he will break whoever is in his way to achieve this goal.
At length, she brings a rotted hand up to stroke his broad chin. She kisses him, and he soothes a broken stitch holding her neck on as he kisses her blue lips back.
"I love you, Ephrain. Please..." He shushes her. Everything is going to be all right.
"I love you, Mariah."
