Delicious ice cream... And... Coming Home.
Jan 28, 2019 6:27:39 GMT -5
Alexa Black and The Anarchist like this
Post by Sicko on Jan 28, 2019 6:27:39 GMT -5
I can remember quite distinctly, the feeling of the itch underneath my knitting skin.
It served as a physical gadfly, stinging me and pushing my senses into a pained frenzy, but the itch also prodded me forward, as if the maggoty impulses of an eldritch horror were squirming behind my eyeballs. I exited the front of the truck with a slam. The air of the Arizona night was frigid against my exposed skin, and it tingled in the mending slashes which were beginning to zipper back together. There were still patches, you see. A body left to decompose in the desert doesn't just stand up whole. And maybe, I could have attributed that itch, and the propulsive, maddening impulses that beat in my brain as parasites, worms or pustules that were still digging in my resurrected organs. A worm that still burrowed it's way into the sinews of my heart. Centipedes now having to deal with the face that my amygdala was reconstituting around them. But the outrageous itch, the impulse behind the bones of my eye sockets, pushing me forward was his illicit deal. Vengeance for someone who spurned his promise of immortality for worship by setting up her own little fiefdom here, now, in this once tranquil little cul de sac. He wanted his revenge for Mariah reneging on the deal to pay homage to the one that made these bodies possible. That made this all possible. Was not a forgiving elder god, was Moloch.
It had taken me time to start pulling the pieces back into position so they knit. The knitting did itch.
But as I stood on a gentle, sloping hill, a grassy knoll overlooking the gentle cupola of a small row of houses, I thought of where it all began, so long ago. Wistfully.
I remembered driving my ice cream through this neighborhood for the first time. And with Mariah's urging, we both felt it would make... a delicious little spot to grow. I'd start my little business from home. I'd make a little money on the side selling popsicles to the kids. When she had her body, she would become the belle of the neighborhood, throwing just the most darling little luncheons and Tupperware swaps. And it would all be... beautiful.
As I stood on that hill overlooking Lexington Terrace, spread out below, and I knew that it wasn't Moloch that had called Mariah here. Nor me, either. It was the promise of what we could have built here, together.
I started down the hill, on foot.
"He's out there," said George, his inflectionless voice ringing in the kitchen, a hollow shell, robbed of it's life. It carried only a niggling, lingering bit of it's personality, the hatred of the ice cream truck. He vaguely remembered, (from another life,) the sheer, almost atavistic terror instilled by him seeing that old, battered hunk of shit start up at night. (It has teeth)
His wife, meanwhile, was busy in the kitchen behind him. Behold George and Nora Turner. Two forty-somethings in a respectable duplex setup, both of whom are under the thrall of power they would find incomprehensible. "Well, I think you're being ridiculous," Nora said, humming over the cookie tray she placed down on the kitchen counter. Instead of hibiscus cookies it had molded charges of C-4, ready to be placed at the intervals their mistress specified. "There is nothing that Ephrain can do in his power to stop the mistress now."
Nora had indulged her husband enough, but she peered at him out of the corner of her eye, and she just shook her head. "Worry no more about the clown, George. We're a family, and he is alone."
"A family?" George snapped as irritably an undead wraith could. "We still haven't stitched together the Olsens from down the street, or Jeanie Nusbaum and her stepson in 217. Family... it's just us and those three children guarding the homes."
"You are ridiculous, George," Nora said bullishly, and she went back over to the plate of C-4, arranging them neatly on the plate. "Now, mistress Mariah wants us to go down in the basement and look in on the guest." George looked coldly back at her, but out of the corner of his eye he was drawn to the idea that the man standing at the edge of the cul-de-sac, silhouetted by a white arc of moon, was not a human being at all.
I can never forget the looks on their faces when I first came here to Lexington Terrace.
I was drive by some... itch, I can never explain. Boszhe moi, I tell you this I think of it now and it petrifies me. I had been haunted ever since an incident on my hall at Springdale. The girl, Mariah. I thought that she was a negative influence on my patients mental state. And even when she began acting out in ways that baffled... baffled every clinical and scientific raison d'etre of thinking. And that was my mistake. It always was. Treating her... treating Ephrain, like some case study. The more I saw of the behavior patterns, the more it seemed to fit. Mariah was a strong personality that over wrote the wills of weaker minded people. She had a god complex, and a need to gain power, because her multiple repeated childhood traumas left her feeling at baseline powerless. She felt a need to commit acts of self harm because it was the only way to shock her system that had been desensitized. It all carried a very logical basis in reality, until the night she incited a riot, escaped the grounds with Ephrain, and had him chop her body into pieces with an ax. No, even THAT, I could have bought, had some strange, secret logic, some ritual.
It was when the man Ephrain played to the outside world resurfaced, a bizarre clown masquerading as a - professional wrestler? - resurfaced, that I began taking interest. And I followed the bread crumbs all the way to Scottsdale, and my earliest observations could have fit with my hypothesis. There needn't have been any supernatural elements about it. Ephrain Ortiz was a study in how madness and hysteria spreads in an insular community, I had seen in on Hall C, and I was seeing it again here, it was nothing to me more than the actions of puppet masters pushing people around. So why wasn't I able to get it off my mind? Why did I continue staking out Lexington Terrace, when I could have returned from a leave of absence, resumed my practice and put it out of my mind? Why was this... itch pushing me into it?
I was wrong. I was so, so, wrong.
They fell upon me in the night. Unfeeling eyes, hands cold as the grave, stitched together from pieces, pieces that had been chopped up and reassembled. And they brought me down to see the girl in the makeshift sarcophagus.
When she had opened her eyes and begun speaking to me I had shrieked loud enough to wake the dead themselves.
Now I understood, completely. It never was hysteria. This never was a case of psychological manipulation. I had seen the face of true... evil. And all it had ever wanted was to find a place to take root.
"No way, I'm not goin' near it," sneered Connor. The frigid air of the desert at night would have brought a chill but he still brought up the rear, trying despite his bravado to edge as much distance between him and the shape sitting by the curb. It had teeth.
Tyler gulped as he looked at it. He couldn't help it. Your eye was always drawn to the box van. It's paint was chipped and scored, and some of the yellow sticker adverts on it's side had faded to white and scratched over years of abuse. On the surface it seemed like just any ice cream truck. "The mistress says we got a job to do," he said, pedaling his bike towards the big man standing by his ice cream truck.
"I wish the mistress hadn't taken away our stomachs," fat Davey said, even in his reconstituted tulpa body bringing up the rear, huffing and puffing, out of shape. The giant bald man had just spotted them. Brash, arrogant Conner, his stitched lip peeling back in a tween fuck-you snarl of defiance to adults, pedalled harder. Tyler swerved his bike off track. Davey, huffing harder, pedalled to keep time with the head of the triad. Conner yelled, much like a Highlander would have let out his rebel yell to pierce fear into the hearts of the men on the battlefield. Conner called out, half warning, half instruction to his phalanx, ordering the first sortie to come in for the attack.
Pedalling madly on his bicycle, a fat boy with a stitched body rode straight in towards the giant bald man, swooping down like a kamikaze fighter going on a run, and then the block of C-4 he carried in his knapsack, wadded up with the expert, cookie makers hands of Nora Turner, exploded, combusting in a fireball. The flames licked at the rear end of the ice cream truck. Tyler, despite the fact that he was only nominally animated by dark magic and evil power holding together a stitched corpse, stopped, slack jawed. The big man, cursing, pushed himself up. His white outfit, which was already marred and soaked through with months worth of caked on blood and grime, was singed, but he stood, and glared at them with a terrifying scowl.
It was in the flickering light of the fireball raging behind him that they saw his giant corpse, riddled by holes as if from a wide-spray shotgun, an exposed section of cheek only held together by a string of ugly gristle, and a protruding eye. The glare of that eye chilled even those beyond the grave.
The children. They were the first in this neighborhood, the first that Mariah's dark hold really put it's hooks in. She made the demon truck and the murder clown a regular visitor of Tyler's dreams, and urged him to start committing madness, start spreading her power. Start causing pain. Because nothing spread Moloch's - Mariah's - power, like spreading pain. And here they were. Head of their class.
"You don't scare me!" Conner sneered, "You're fat! And slow!" And he circled his bike around the burning ice cream truck, doing a loop around, taunting the burned tulpa. "You aren't the machine that mistress needs to dig her well. You aren't strong enough to grow her power!"
The big man's arm pistoned out, catching the boy that would never be a boy and yanking him off his bike with irrevocable, irresistable force. Big hands grabbed a backpack with a charge of explosive in it and tore it away, sending it flying, and the boything squirmed in his grasp. "You want to talk about power, kid?" the voice shifted into that hucksters' spin, the giddy, off-handed fact telling nonsequitur voice he got when he gave out ice cream facts. "Since the dawn of the primordial eras when man hadn't even begun to walk on two legs yet, and dark gods ruled the miasmic soup of bacteria and single cell life forms, there has always been one element that kills the black magic of the Elder Ones."
He threw the stitched boy into the flames, watching it writhe and let out an inhuman shriek as it flailed in the fire. Seams and stitches split apart, and the magic holding Conner together evaporated in the flame.
The giant, standing, looked over at Tyler. The boy who started it all.
That one, protruding eye glared at him. "If you knew what was good for you, Tyler... you would run."
"But - but - " the afraid former little boy stammered, holding his ground on his bike, unsure. "If I leave the cul-de-sac, if I go out of mistress' sphere of power, won't the magic holding this body she put back together... evaporate? Will I fall apart?"
Balefully, the monster shrugged out of the white ice cream man's jumpsuit, exposing healing but wasted muscles under a strappy t-shirt. He looked at the former boy now demon. "I don't care. But this has to end. Mistress has to end."
"Because you say so, or cuz Moloch says so?"
The big clown, wiped of his outside shell, said nothing.
"He's going to burn the world. He told me. In my dreams. I remember my dreams... from my life..." the boy looked upset, wanting to go home, now more a lost little boy than ever before. "I miss being alive... I want to go home..." if he could have cried anything but crusted dry blood and dust, he might've.
Home.
That's what the itch drives at. What I have been missing for so long, I looked for it in the wrongest places. I looked for it as a bodyguard to an arrogant man in a wrestling stable called the Inner Circle. I looked for it as a feral, mindless beast abducting women and cutting their bodies up to make a Frankenstein version of my family. It's what I've been missing for decades, ever since the first fire boiled away my humanity. I even looked for a home here, with Moriah, as a servant of Moloch, and I've looked directly to the dark one to bring me back, full circle, return me to Earth as his puppet and place me back here, in Lexington Terrace. All because I was looking to replace what I'd lost, somewhere I could finally feel at home. Don't laugh. It's all we ever want, in the final analysis.
The big man stood on the step built into the box truck. Amazingly, even though the flames still licked at the chassis, and had torn away a section of the back panel in a ragged hunk of sheet metal, the twisted metal, black as soot, gave the truck an ever more sinister look. Now it looked like it really did have ragged teeth on it's back. The big man was able to start the ice cream truck, bringing the demon vehicle roaring to horrible life.
The boy, no longer wanting to chance it, scattered, forgetting his bike and the backpack with the explosive. The ice cream truck, peeling wheels, squalled on down the hill into the neighborhood.
And a few of the awakened neighbors came out. George had been right. It wasn't enough. Their army hadn't been readied. Preparing a tulpa took time for the dark magic to bind the stitches, animate the decayed flesh, mend the wounds into a workable zuvembie carcass.
I'm coming home, then, Mariah.
Hope you set a place for me at the table, baby.
The body of a neighbor popped and crunched under his tires as he moved it down. The engine rawed. Furrowed tires dug through what had, previous to the murders, been a manicured lawn, leaving streaks, and the Sicko ice cream truck swerved over lawns, battering tacky lawn ornaments and mailboxes. He no longer cared as cement birdbaths flung into view, shattering his windshield glass. The back end of the ice cream truck was aflame, from the concoction of liquid fire and C-4 Nora had baked in her kitchen. He was going to burn.
It could all burn.
Down the end of the cul-de-sac was the split-level duplex, two two garages, two two-stories, and a certain sarcophagus for a young lady in the crawl space. He aimed for it there, and he barely registered mowing down a neighbor with a shotgun. Moloch was barking mad laughter behind his eyes, as much as an Elder God could feel a giddy rush of joy. This was the kind of chaos that the old ones loved.
So he embraced it. He was damned anyway. He had given it all away to return here, now, and tear down his home, so fuck it, why not give in and enjoy the chaos as much as the song of triumphant evil surging behind his eyes? "Did you know," Sicko called over the wind, and roaring to anyone in the neighborhood, "The first ice cream truck was created in 1956? 'Round the streets of West Philadelphia on St. Patrick's Day. Two Irish brothers, they took the first Mister Softee van out on St. Patrick's Day and gave all their customers free soft whipped green ice cream!" He cackled madly.
The rapidly fraying, falling apart van careened into the front of the duplex, rolling up the front porch steps, tipping sideways and smashing through the front door of the Turner's.
The fire was spitting from it like a hellcat.
A giant lump that might have been a body extricated itself from the destroyed, burning heap, falling into the shattered masonry and lumber of the front door. The blackened man was burned so badly, second and third degree burns, that if his body wasn't technically already dead he wouldn't be able to continue. His burned lips peeled back in a smile, which nonetheless winced as the black skin stretched and came off, leaving bubble-gum pink burn under. "Hey kids, ice cream," he said, and he let out a laugh.
"EPHRAIN!"
Mariah stood, almost completely whole. He had overlooked the fact that she had had months more time for her body to heal.
"How did you - "
He pushed himself up on his elbows. His ear fell off. "Let's just say, someone isn't very happy with you keeping all the power for yourself," and he coughed up a lungful of smoke in the burning house.
"You are too late, my love," Mariah said. She was wearing her beautiful blue dress. Her raven hair was a mane that reached to her mid back. No longer the teenager he met on Hall C who had been dabbling in arcane books and elementary love spells. She looked like a sorceress. Like Hecate. Like Persephone herself. Here in her hellish domain, the fire licking around them, consuming the curtains and the sofas he had crashed into.
"I grew my power by having these fools turn on each other one by one, killing each other. Feeding me their anguish, their pain, and their fear... it strengthened my body until I was able to inhabit it. And now I fulfilled what the books of Moloch promised me. Immortal, am I. Undying. Forever."
"You think you're on par with Moloch," he rasped, still trying to get up. "You're a girl. Still the girl I knew on Hall C. You never grew up."
She kicked out with a sharp toe, catching him right in the cheek, making meat slough grotesquely off his burns. "I did grow up, Ephrain. And I outgrew petty, weak henchmen like you. I have followers now."
She motioned, and George and Nora Turner came. Obeying their mistress they lifted him up, struggling under his weight. They didn't complain, remained passive even as the house was still burning around them.
"And it will keep growing from here. It will never stop spreading."
"I do want to thank you, Ephrain. You gave me this body by our first sacrifice. And now that it's healed and fully empowered into an immortal shell, and your decaying tulpa is falling apart, I can leave you and this miserable little hovel behind."
"I thought this place was what you wanted, Mariah. I thought you wanted us to live here, stay in this little house, grow our base and live our lives served to Moloch here, not with an army, but with a family. A home."
Mariah sneered at him. "You are pitifully naive."
"And you, Mariah..." the giant said, pushing out with his burnt muscles, "Are full of shit."
He had shoved George Turner, sending him off balance. George fell into the flames, and he gasped, sparks going on behind his eyes as the impassive soldier seemed to register panic. And then, his body, too, began to burn, his strips breaking apart and falling to pieces, and George Turner falling into nothing. We did say, by the time this was all over, George Turner was going to be on fire.
He turned to Nora, the sweet older lady who had provided cookies and lemonade for a welcome wagon on her new neighbor all, those months ago.
He lifted her up bodily, and slammed her down, impaling her on a coat rack. And then he turned to Mariah.
Mariah, her eyes flying open wide, began holding her hands out, waving them and beginning to mutter a spell, perhaps one of the many she'd learned in study sessions over books not approved for the Springdale library.
His meaty fist closed around Mariah's hand, squeezing it tight like a vise, and she choked out a cry, cutting off her spell.
"No more, Mariah."
He grabbed the other hand in his other, big fist, and they stood there, entwined, almost a parody of a danse macabre there, in the burning duplex building. Timbers of wood began splintering due to the heat, falling down, as heat sparks flew in the air.
"Ephrain - Ephrain - AHHH - please, please, let me go, you were right, okay, you were right, all of this, all of this is because I never knew what a real home was like, have been in foster care since I was six, they all treated me so badly, I never knew what a home was and then I met you and we formed this plan and we came here, and baby, baby, I thought we could make a home here, it would be magical, we - "
"Enough," he said, but his voice was weaker. He felt himself slipping beyond the veil. He felt a bulbous, protubing green eye swimming in and out of a black, inky soup watching him, knowing that Moloch was watching his two erstwhile servants here, in their struggle in this burning duplex.
And he did struggle. It felt at any moment like his arms were going to fall off, like his skin was going to melt off like a candle, like he was going to lose cohesion. And Mariah's voice was rising, to a panicked shriek. She was getting weaker too. It was the fire. Cleansing fire. Burning the tulpa bodies and burning away the dark magic. Just like had worked since the days of the primordials and the soup and all.
"Ephrain, Ephrain, please? Please? I?"
He groaned, exerting all of his considerable strength on his discorporating tulpa body. And Mariah's babble became a squawk of pain, and then, a full on, full throated scream of continued agony.
Like a hungry man pulling at a chicken he had doggedly gripped him of her left arm and was pulling it off. Stitches and seams split and tore, meat gave way in a juicy, satisfying way like it was cooked right off the bone. Mariah screamed as he pulled the entire God damn arm right off her body.
"EPHRAIN!!! PLEAAAASE!!! AH - NOOO IIIAAAAIIIRGGHH" she shrieked and wailed like a banshee. Grimly, he held on to the other arm.
"No more spells, Mariah. No more ill-gotten power, fed by pain." It was all she had ever been looking for. He had known that from the start. Maybe, in a way, she reminded him of Downfall, of Jason Twisted, of men that let Sicko know he was nothing more than a tool for them to use. Mariah was frank about it, but... he liked it. He liked her. And he had empathized with that. But he had let it go on for too long. As he began the sick task of pulling the other arm off, letting strands of muscle fiber snip off like rubber bands and her scream again, he felt... sorry for her. But in doing this, he was saying to her, and to himself, that he would never let her, or someone like her, do this to him again.
In the blackest way possible, he smiled, noting the growth and the irony that it came at the last moment.
They were both little more than corpses as he placed his hands on either side of Mariah's temple. Her body was tearing apart, decaying, and tears of blood were running down her ruined, no longer beautiful face. "I love you, Ephrain, please, please don't do this, remember? Our hearts, Ephrain... our hearts are sewn together. Just like our bodies are - your heart is bound to mine, and - "
"I know, Mariah," he said, wearily, giving it one last gasp of energy. "I know. Our hearts are sewn together, too."
She let out a piercing, never-ending wail, as he pulled up. And up. And up. Her neck elongated. Splits formed. He grunted with effort, screaming with effort at last. And then he pulled her head off the body that they had spent months forming.
And then she was gone.
The air wavered around him, and he began closing his eyes. He felt that veil slipping around him, coming down like a funeral shroud. No, like a curtain. Fade to black.
So in the final analysis, where was home for me?
Is this it?
Is the only peace, the only purpose I'd ever find, here?
Feels like I should just sink in to it... just let go... and dream...
"You're a hard man to get a hold of, Mister Ortiz."
They stood side by side in the junkyard. An indeterminate amount of months later.
"That's by design, I had been... let's just say, under the weather," said the big man evasively. He was peering into the cab of the box truck, which was sitting, alone, untended, and in need of either drastic repair or just scrap. The big man wore a completely body covering white jumpsuit, which strained over his big belly. He moved around the chassis of the wrecked old box truck, inspecting and tutting like a fretting old Jew about to haggle. The salesman noticed his fussy demeanor, but he didn't want to say anything. Not to a man with a giant, ill-healed scar hole in his cheek, showing lines of meat and gristle between his teeth. It looked weirdly like a burn. Or a brand.
"I gotta say, I'm baffled what you wanted this for. This specific model of truck, had to be a specific year," said the dealer. He had gone through a lot of intermediaries since he'd gotten the call. Some unscrupulous. Well, if they didn't care about being paid from the bank account of some couple in Scottsdale, why should he? Money was money.
"I wanted familiarity. I like familiar," said the big man in the white jumpsuit as he opened up the rear doors and dug around in the cold boxes in the back. He looked back at the salesman, eyes glinting with interest, asking how much freon the coils take.
"Uh huh... and this has no connection to the remains of that truck that hit a house a couple states over, hit a gas line, caused a whole neighborhood to go up in flames?"
He thought of them now, as he stood in the back door, looking at the freezer boxes. "I don't know what you mean. I just got off an extended stay in a hospital. Perhaps you want to call my doctor, Dr. Shomron..."
Schumacher nodded, and stood, taking a perfunctory inspection of the back of the ice cream truck from the cab, noting the scattered empty ice cream tubs, the wrappers and debris left long before it was left in the junkyard, "So, again, I'm curious, why the ice cream truck?"
The jovial, happy-camper voice went down a pitch and said, "It's easier to hide bodies in the back."
The finder, almost not hearing, did a double-take and stared at the figure who now loomed like a nightmare monster behind him. "Wh-what?"
The laugh was back and his voice was higher as he said, "Just for transport. Big guy needs a big cab to get around. Plus, it'll fit all the ice cream I can eat."
He could tugged at his tie, "So do you sell the ice cream then? Like to kids?"
His fist was curled, and instantly his mind sprang to a fantasy about gripping his head like an eggshell and dashing it against the metal coldbox until his skull caved in and blood swathed the entire interior of the freezer. "No. Me and children... don't get along."
"Well, Mister Ortiz, then here are your keys. Any idea where you're going now?"
His eyes shined darkly in the dimness of the back of the cab. He almost wondered if the finder could see it, up there in the corner, the inky black mass swimming in the corner of the box truck's roof, staring down at them both with one glowing, green eye. "Oh, I'm just going to live life on the road. See, I've been searching for something - some place for a while, mister Schumacher. And I don't know if I've ever really found where it was. I looked for it with people, but never really found that place to settle down on my own. You know?"
"Well. They say, mister Ortiz, that a home isn't where you go to live. It's where you find a purpose that keeps you there." The big man looked impressed, raising his eyebrows and nodding, a little creepy smile crossing his face.
"As long as you find that, you won't ever be alone, I reckon."
"Oh," he said, eyes rolling back to that spot on the ceiling, "I don't think I'm doing this alone... I've got a friend riding with me. Think he's gonna give me some directions."
And he shut the door to the back of the box truck with a cold, final click.
You all saw it.
The crowd at the 8th Anniversary show saw it. They went from cheering about how awesome my that fatal fourway for the Underground title was, to wincing in sympathy when the Demon Clown Sicko made the scene and began caving in people's faces. And I know, as much as I opened eyes, I set more than a few shoulders to shrugging. Sure, whatever. A big, evil giant attacks a bunch of people in a hardcore setting. Someone of Muscle's Malone's mental aptitude is GOING to compare me to some shit for brains named Grimoire Xmyles, another hardcore clown who went to an asylum once or twice. And I've been shrugged off as less than, because I take medication and people think my sharp edges are blunted. But that is just a paper skin that covers me, a hide that is shed. Who I am, underneath, scratch the surface, is someone that just does not care about labels. And in that, I am more honest than any one of you are with yourselves, because I didn't come out there and lie and promise brutal vengeance or pandering words like Muscles Malone did... I just unmasked myself and let him see me for what I really am.
What you saw at the 8th Anniversary wasn't a "statement". It wasn't a cheap shot, it wasn't an attempt to gain attention or sympathy or get you people talking about the similiarites to me against any other clown that's come before me.
What I did at the 8th Anniversary I did because, after so many years of searching, I have finally found a home.
Home is defined not as a place you inhabit or a world you live in. How is where you finally find the place that owns your soul, that lets you define who you are by what you surround yourself with. It is Pure Class Wrestling and it's uniquely singular Underground division that I finally have found that i can step past the pretense that I'm only doing this because I want to make people bleed and I don't care about titles. It is the Underground division that will allow me to inhabit it, make it mine, make it reflect everything about who I am and it will define me in return. I will do this in a way that it's current champions and contenders are all, FAILING to do. Because as much as they all want the belt, not one of them is really, truly at home in what the Underground division means. They don't have the skill set to make that title mean something. Ever since stronger champions like Kyle Shane and Dominator left the title behind it went through periods where it changed hands every two or three weeks. That isn't news. What makes it sad is that the men vying for it, David Hunter, Muscles Malone, are so fucking weak that they present themselves as uncomfortable guests, fleeting passersby in the hallway, never sitting down and taking the steps to make that title their own, their home.
But I look into that beautiful gold, and I see everything I've ever wanted. I see everything I never let myself have, because I let other people define what I could and could not take. No fucking more of that. I take WHAT I want, when I want it. And if I want to take the Underground title, I'll take it. On my first try. And not drop it back the next Trauma in a shitty triple threat match that also involves Holden Ross. And not waste my time pretending men like Tyrone Smith or yes, even Muscles Malone are worth entering into my house.
Tyrone Smith isn't worth talking about, Muscles, because I've destroyed him multiple times before now. But it's you. The one that fervently snarled that you weren't a fucking joke and you were going to make David Hunter your bitch. The one that spouts empty phrases about how sleazy you are. You're the one who does not fucking belong here. Why did you ever want the Underground title, Muscles? I always got the sense you just sort of... lucked into the first title win, and decided to roll with it. You could proclaim it was a prize you wanted, and you can try to play yourself up as the toughest of the tough, but the size of your pecs has little and less to do with why people look to the Underground division for the burgeoning sideshow of ultraviolence it is. In fact, your entire skill set and repertoire means nothing in that conversation. So why keep going after it? Were you miffed that Hunter got one over on you, and you had to get your respect back? Was the Ultimate Male emasculated by the fact that he couldn't keep a belt to hold his pants up and keep the rest of the boys in the locker room from laughing at his pecker? I'm blueskying, Muscles. I don't care.
When I look at you. When I looked into your eyes, as I stormed that ring and laid every single one of you to waste, I felt satisfaction. Not because I was executing a basic attack; I could have and should have done worse than that. Never fear, I will, to you, and Crazy Boy, again. But I was satisfied in what I wrought, and what I saw in your eyes because I know you felt it as the steel bit into your back and left you laying there... you felt the paradigm shift away from you. You felt this gold ticket that slipped into your lap once when half the roster no-showed on a title defense and you won your first title, leave your grasp. Truthfully, you ever having the Underground title was bad enough; you yourself are an ill thought out paradigm, a frat boy's concoction of rohypnol of Jagermeister thrown into a blender with a Cool Story Babe, Go Make Me A Sandwich shirt. You are a one trick pony, a one note joke that's never really been given much thought about where to progress from there. It's of little surprise that David Hunter now owns you. You don't belong in this world.
And I will happily escort you out.
This Trauma. This triple threat. This is my homecoming party.
It will be a brutal, violent unveiling, a welcome to the neighborhood that will never be forgotten, and will leave you pathetic never should be's in rightful terror. And awe.
The Sicko you know and want to reference, the clown, the joke, the "I'm going to compare him to some other person wearing makeup" has gone away.
But the Sicko that is going to finally claim everything he's ever wanted, everything he has ever NEEDED, will find himself right at home, at long last.
It served as a physical gadfly, stinging me and pushing my senses into a pained frenzy, but the itch also prodded me forward, as if the maggoty impulses of an eldritch horror were squirming behind my eyeballs. I exited the front of the truck with a slam. The air of the Arizona night was frigid against my exposed skin, and it tingled in the mending slashes which were beginning to zipper back together. There were still patches, you see. A body left to decompose in the desert doesn't just stand up whole. And maybe, I could have attributed that itch, and the propulsive, maddening impulses that beat in my brain as parasites, worms or pustules that were still digging in my resurrected organs. A worm that still burrowed it's way into the sinews of my heart. Centipedes now having to deal with the face that my amygdala was reconstituting around them. But the outrageous itch, the impulse behind the bones of my eye sockets, pushing me forward was his illicit deal. Vengeance for someone who spurned his promise of immortality for worship by setting up her own little fiefdom here, now, in this once tranquil little cul de sac. He wanted his revenge for Mariah reneging on the deal to pay homage to the one that made these bodies possible. That made this all possible. Was not a forgiving elder god, was Moloch.
It had taken me time to start pulling the pieces back into position so they knit. The knitting did itch.
But as I stood on a gentle, sloping hill, a grassy knoll overlooking the gentle cupola of a small row of houses, I thought of where it all began, so long ago. Wistfully.
I remembered driving my ice cream through this neighborhood for the first time. And with Mariah's urging, we both felt it would make... a delicious little spot to grow. I'd start my little business from home. I'd make a little money on the side selling popsicles to the kids. When she had her body, she would become the belle of the neighborhood, throwing just the most darling little luncheons and Tupperware swaps. And it would all be... beautiful.
As I stood on that hill overlooking Lexington Terrace, spread out below, and I knew that it wasn't Moloch that had called Mariah here. Nor me, either. It was the promise of what we could have built here, together.
I started down the hill, on foot.
"He's out there," said George, his inflectionless voice ringing in the kitchen, a hollow shell, robbed of it's life. It carried only a niggling, lingering bit of it's personality, the hatred of the ice cream truck. He vaguely remembered, (from another life,) the sheer, almost atavistic terror instilled by him seeing that old, battered hunk of shit start up at night. (It has teeth)
His wife, meanwhile, was busy in the kitchen behind him. Behold George and Nora Turner. Two forty-somethings in a respectable duplex setup, both of whom are under the thrall of power they would find incomprehensible. "Well, I think you're being ridiculous," Nora said, humming over the cookie tray she placed down on the kitchen counter. Instead of hibiscus cookies it had molded charges of C-4, ready to be placed at the intervals their mistress specified. "There is nothing that Ephrain can do in his power to stop the mistress now."
Nora had indulged her husband enough, but she peered at him out of the corner of her eye, and she just shook her head. "Worry no more about the clown, George. We're a family, and he is alone."
"A family?" George snapped as irritably an undead wraith could. "We still haven't stitched together the Olsens from down the street, or Jeanie Nusbaum and her stepson in 217. Family... it's just us and those three children guarding the homes."
"You are ridiculous, George," Nora said bullishly, and she went back over to the plate of C-4, arranging them neatly on the plate. "Now, mistress Mariah wants us to go down in the basement and look in on the guest." George looked coldly back at her, but out of the corner of his eye he was drawn to the idea that the man standing at the edge of the cul-de-sac, silhouetted by a white arc of moon, was not a human being at all.
I can never forget the looks on their faces when I first came here to Lexington Terrace.
I was drive by some... itch, I can never explain. Boszhe moi, I tell you this I think of it now and it petrifies me. I had been haunted ever since an incident on my hall at Springdale. The girl, Mariah. I thought that she was a negative influence on my patients mental state. And even when she began acting out in ways that baffled... baffled every clinical and scientific raison d'etre of thinking. And that was my mistake. It always was. Treating her... treating Ephrain, like some case study. The more I saw of the behavior patterns, the more it seemed to fit. Mariah was a strong personality that over wrote the wills of weaker minded people. She had a god complex, and a need to gain power, because her multiple repeated childhood traumas left her feeling at baseline powerless. She felt a need to commit acts of self harm because it was the only way to shock her system that had been desensitized. It all carried a very logical basis in reality, until the night she incited a riot, escaped the grounds with Ephrain, and had him chop her body into pieces with an ax. No, even THAT, I could have bought, had some strange, secret logic, some ritual.
It was when the man Ephrain played to the outside world resurfaced, a bizarre clown masquerading as a - professional wrestler? - resurfaced, that I began taking interest. And I followed the bread crumbs all the way to Scottsdale, and my earliest observations could have fit with my hypothesis. There needn't have been any supernatural elements about it. Ephrain Ortiz was a study in how madness and hysteria spreads in an insular community, I had seen in on Hall C, and I was seeing it again here, it was nothing to me more than the actions of puppet masters pushing people around. So why wasn't I able to get it off my mind? Why did I continue staking out Lexington Terrace, when I could have returned from a leave of absence, resumed my practice and put it out of my mind? Why was this... itch pushing me into it?
I was wrong. I was so, so, wrong.
They fell upon me in the night. Unfeeling eyes, hands cold as the grave, stitched together from pieces, pieces that had been chopped up and reassembled. And they brought me down to see the girl in the makeshift sarcophagus.
When she had opened her eyes and begun speaking to me I had shrieked loud enough to wake the dead themselves.
Now I understood, completely. It never was hysteria. This never was a case of psychological manipulation. I had seen the face of true... evil. And all it had ever wanted was to find a place to take root.
"No way, I'm not goin' near it," sneered Connor. The frigid air of the desert at night would have brought a chill but he still brought up the rear, trying despite his bravado to edge as much distance between him and the shape sitting by the curb. It had teeth.
Tyler gulped as he looked at it. He couldn't help it. Your eye was always drawn to the box van. It's paint was chipped and scored, and some of the yellow sticker adverts on it's side had faded to white and scratched over years of abuse. On the surface it seemed like just any ice cream truck. "The mistress says we got a job to do," he said, pedaling his bike towards the big man standing by his ice cream truck.
"I wish the mistress hadn't taken away our stomachs," fat Davey said, even in his reconstituted tulpa body bringing up the rear, huffing and puffing, out of shape. The giant bald man had just spotted them. Brash, arrogant Conner, his stitched lip peeling back in a tween fuck-you snarl of defiance to adults, pedalled harder. Tyler swerved his bike off track. Davey, huffing harder, pedalled to keep time with the head of the triad. Conner yelled, much like a Highlander would have let out his rebel yell to pierce fear into the hearts of the men on the battlefield. Conner called out, half warning, half instruction to his phalanx, ordering the first sortie to come in for the attack.
Pedalling madly on his bicycle, a fat boy with a stitched body rode straight in towards the giant bald man, swooping down like a kamikaze fighter going on a run, and then the block of C-4 he carried in his knapsack, wadded up with the expert, cookie makers hands of Nora Turner, exploded, combusting in a fireball. The flames licked at the rear end of the ice cream truck. Tyler, despite the fact that he was only nominally animated by dark magic and evil power holding together a stitched corpse, stopped, slack jawed. The big man, cursing, pushed himself up. His white outfit, which was already marred and soaked through with months worth of caked on blood and grime, was singed, but he stood, and glared at them with a terrifying scowl.
It was in the flickering light of the fireball raging behind him that they saw his giant corpse, riddled by holes as if from a wide-spray shotgun, an exposed section of cheek only held together by a string of ugly gristle, and a protruding eye. The glare of that eye chilled even those beyond the grave.
The children. They were the first in this neighborhood, the first that Mariah's dark hold really put it's hooks in. She made the demon truck and the murder clown a regular visitor of Tyler's dreams, and urged him to start committing madness, start spreading her power. Start causing pain. Because nothing spread Moloch's - Mariah's - power, like spreading pain. And here they were. Head of their class.
"You don't scare me!" Conner sneered, "You're fat! And slow!" And he circled his bike around the burning ice cream truck, doing a loop around, taunting the burned tulpa. "You aren't the machine that mistress needs to dig her well. You aren't strong enough to grow her power!"
The big man's arm pistoned out, catching the boy that would never be a boy and yanking him off his bike with irrevocable, irresistable force. Big hands grabbed a backpack with a charge of explosive in it and tore it away, sending it flying, and the boything squirmed in his grasp. "You want to talk about power, kid?" the voice shifted into that hucksters' spin, the giddy, off-handed fact telling nonsequitur voice he got when he gave out ice cream facts. "Since the dawn of the primordial eras when man hadn't even begun to walk on two legs yet, and dark gods ruled the miasmic soup of bacteria and single cell life forms, there has always been one element that kills the black magic of the Elder Ones."
He threw the stitched boy into the flames, watching it writhe and let out an inhuman shriek as it flailed in the fire. Seams and stitches split apart, and the magic holding Conner together evaporated in the flame.
The giant, standing, looked over at Tyler. The boy who started it all.
That one, protruding eye glared at him. "If you knew what was good for you, Tyler... you would run."
"But - but - " the afraid former little boy stammered, holding his ground on his bike, unsure. "If I leave the cul-de-sac, if I go out of mistress' sphere of power, won't the magic holding this body she put back together... evaporate? Will I fall apart?"
Balefully, the monster shrugged out of the white ice cream man's jumpsuit, exposing healing but wasted muscles under a strappy t-shirt. He looked at the former boy now demon. "I don't care. But this has to end. Mistress has to end."
"Because you say so, or cuz Moloch says so?"
The big clown, wiped of his outside shell, said nothing.
"He's going to burn the world. He told me. In my dreams. I remember my dreams... from my life..." the boy looked upset, wanting to go home, now more a lost little boy than ever before. "I miss being alive... I want to go home..." if he could have cried anything but crusted dry blood and dust, he might've.
Home.
That's what the itch drives at. What I have been missing for so long, I looked for it in the wrongest places. I looked for it as a bodyguard to an arrogant man in a wrestling stable called the Inner Circle. I looked for it as a feral, mindless beast abducting women and cutting their bodies up to make a Frankenstein version of my family. It's what I've been missing for decades, ever since the first fire boiled away my humanity. I even looked for a home here, with Moriah, as a servant of Moloch, and I've looked directly to the dark one to bring me back, full circle, return me to Earth as his puppet and place me back here, in Lexington Terrace. All because I was looking to replace what I'd lost, somewhere I could finally feel at home. Don't laugh. It's all we ever want, in the final analysis.
The big man stood on the step built into the box truck. Amazingly, even though the flames still licked at the chassis, and had torn away a section of the back panel in a ragged hunk of sheet metal, the twisted metal, black as soot, gave the truck an ever more sinister look. Now it looked like it really did have ragged teeth on it's back. The big man was able to start the ice cream truck, bringing the demon vehicle roaring to horrible life.
The boy, no longer wanting to chance it, scattered, forgetting his bike and the backpack with the explosive. The ice cream truck, peeling wheels, squalled on down the hill into the neighborhood.
And a few of the awakened neighbors came out. George had been right. It wasn't enough. Their army hadn't been readied. Preparing a tulpa took time for the dark magic to bind the stitches, animate the decayed flesh, mend the wounds into a workable zuvembie carcass.
I'm coming home, then, Mariah.
Hope you set a place for me at the table, baby.
The body of a neighbor popped and crunched under his tires as he moved it down. The engine rawed. Furrowed tires dug through what had, previous to the murders, been a manicured lawn, leaving streaks, and the Sicko ice cream truck swerved over lawns, battering tacky lawn ornaments and mailboxes. He no longer cared as cement birdbaths flung into view, shattering his windshield glass. The back end of the ice cream truck was aflame, from the concoction of liquid fire and C-4 Nora had baked in her kitchen. He was going to burn.
It could all burn.
Down the end of the cul-de-sac was the split-level duplex, two two garages, two two-stories, and a certain sarcophagus for a young lady in the crawl space. He aimed for it there, and he barely registered mowing down a neighbor with a shotgun. Moloch was barking mad laughter behind his eyes, as much as an Elder God could feel a giddy rush of joy. This was the kind of chaos that the old ones loved.
So he embraced it. He was damned anyway. He had given it all away to return here, now, and tear down his home, so fuck it, why not give in and enjoy the chaos as much as the song of triumphant evil surging behind his eyes? "Did you know," Sicko called over the wind, and roaring to anyone in the neighborhood, "The first ice cream truck was created in 1956? 'Round the streets of West Philadelphia on St. Patrick's Day. Two Irish brothers, they took the first Mister Softee van out on St. Patrick's Day and gave all their customers free soft whipped green ice cream!" He cackled madly.
The rapidly fraying, falling apart van careened into the front of the duplex, rolling up the front porch steps, tipping sideways and smashing through the front door of the Turner's.
The fire was spitting from it like a hellcat.
A giant lump that might have been a body extricated itself from the destroyed, burning heap, falling into the shattered masonry and lumber of the front door. The blackened man was burned so badly, second and third degree burns, that if his body wasn't technically already dead he wouldn't be able to continue. His burned lips peeled back in a smile, which nonetheless winced as the black skin stretched and came off, leaving bubble-gum pink burn under. "Hey kids, ice cream," he said, and he let out a laugh.
"EPHRAIN!"
Mariah stood, almost completely whole. He had overlooked the fact that she had had months more time for her body to heal.
"How did you - "
He pushed himself up on his elbows. His ear fell off. "Let's just say, someone isn't very happy with you keeping all the power for yourself," and he coughed up a lungful of smoke in the burning house.
"You are too late, my love," Mariah said. She was wearing her beautiful blue dress. Her raven hair was a mane that reached to her mid back. No longer the teenager he met on Hall C who had been dabbling in arcane books and elementary love spells. She looked like a sorceress. Like Hecate. Like Persephone herself. Here in her hellish domain, the fire licking around them, consuming the curtains and the sofas he had crashed into.
"I grew my power by having these fools turn on each other one by one, killing each other. Feeding me their anguish, their pain, and their fear... it strengthened my body until I was able to inhabit it. And now I fulfilled what the books of Moloch promised me. Immortal, am I. Undying. Forever."
"You think you're on par with Moloch," he rasped, still trying to get up. "You're a girl. Still the girl I knew on Hall C. You never grew up."
She kicked out with a sharp toe, catching him right in the cheek, making meat slough grotesquely off his burns. "I did grow up, Ephrain. And I outgrew petty, weak henchmen like you. I have followers now."
She motioned, and George and Nora Turner came. Obeying their mistress they lifted him up, struggling under his weight. They didn't complain, remained passive even as the house was still burning around them.
"And it will keep growing from here. It will never stop spreading."
"I do want to thank you, Ephrain. You gave me this body by our first sacrifice. And now that it's healed and fully empowered into an immortal shell, and your decaying tulpa is falling apart, I can leave you and this miserable little hovel behind."
"I thought this place was what you wanted, Mariah. I thought you wanted us to live here, stay in this little house, grow our base and live our lives served to Moloch here, not with an army, but with a family. A home."
Mariah sneered at him. "You are pitifully naive."
"And you, Mariah..." the giant said, pushing out with his burnt muscles, "Are full of shit."
He had shoved George Turner, sending him off balance. George fell into the flames, and he gasped, sparks going on behind his eyes as the impassive soldier seemed to register panic. And then, his body, too, began to burn, his strips breaking apart and falling to pieces, and George Turner falling into nothing. We did say, by the time this was all over, George Turner was going to be on fire.
He turned to Nora, the sweet older lady who had provided cookies and lemonade for a welcome wagon on her new neighbor all, those months ago.
He lifted her up bodily, and slammed her down, impaling her on a coat rack. And then he turned to Mariah.
Mariah, her eyes flying open wide, began holding her hands out, waving them and beginning to mutter a spell, perhaps one of the many she'd learned in study sessions over books not approved for the Springdale library.
His meaty fist closed around Mariah's hand, squeezing it tight like a vise, and she choked out a cry, cutting off her spell.
"No more, Mariah."
He grabbed the other hand in his other, big fist, and they stood there, entwined, almost a parody of a danse macabre there, in the burning duplex building. Timbers of wood began splintering due to the heat, falling down, as heat sparks flew in the air.
"Ephrain - Ephrain - AHHH - please, please, let me go, you were right, okay, you were right, all of this, all of this is because I never knew what a real home was like, have been in foster care since I was six, they all treated me so badly, I never knew what a home was and then I met you and we formed this plan and we came here, and baby, baby, I thought we could make a home here, it would be magical, we - "
"Enough," he said, but his voice was weaker. He felt himself slipping beyond the veil. He felt a bulbous, protubing green eye swimming in and out of a black, inky soup watching him, knowing that Moloch was watching his two erstwhile servants here, in their struggle in this burning duplex.
And he did struggle. It felt at any moment like his arms were going to fall off, like his skin was going to melt off like a candle, like he was going to lose cohesion. And Mariah's voice was rising, to a panicked shriek. She was getting weaker too. It was the fire. Cleansing fire. Burning the tulpa bodies and burning away the dark magic. Just like had worked since the days of the primordials and the soup and all.
"Ephrain, Ephrain, please? Please? I?"
He groaned, exerting all of his considerable strength on his discorporating tulpa body. And Mariah's babble became a squawk of pain, and then, a full on, full throated scream of continued agony.
Like a hungry man pulling at a chicken he had doggedly gripped him of her left arm and was pulling it off. Stitches and seams split and tore, meat gave way in a juicy, satisfying way like it was cooked right off the bone. Mariah screamed as he pulled the entire God damn arm right off her body.
"EPHRAIN!!! PLEAAAASE!!! AH - NOOO IIIAAAAIIIRGGHH" she shrieked and wailed like a banshee. Grimly, he held on to the other arm.
"No more spells, Mariah. No more ill-gotten power, fed by pain." It was all she had ever been looking for. He had known that from the start. Maybe, in a way, she reminded him of Downfall, of Jason Twisted, of men that let Sicko know he was nothing more than a tool for them to use. Mariah was frank about it, but... he liked it. He liked her. And he had empathized with that. But he had let it go on for too long. As he began the sick task of pulling the other arm off, letting strands of muscle fiber snip off like rubber bands and her scream again, he felt... sorry for her. But in doing this, he was saying to her, and to himself, that he would never let her, or someone like her, do this to him again.
In the blackest way possible, he smiled, noting the growth and the irony that it came at the last moment.
They were both little more than corpses as he placed his hands on either side of Mariah's temple. Her body was tearing apart, decaying, and tears of blood were running down her ruined, no longer beautiful face. "I love you, Ephrain, please, please don't do this, remember? Our hearts, Ephrain... our hearts are sewn together. Just like our bodies are - your heart is bound to mine, and - "
"I know, Mariah," he said, wearily, giving it one last gasp of energy. "I know. Our hearts are sewn together, too."
She let out a piercing, never-ending wail, as he pulled up. And up. And up. Her neck elongated. Splits formed. He grunted with effort, screaming with effort at last. And then he pulled her head off the body that they had spent months forming.
And then she was gone.
The air wavered around him, and he began closing his eyes. He felt that veil slipping around him, coming down like a funeral shroud. No, like a curtain. Fade to black.
So in the final analysis, where was home for me?
Is this it?
Is the only peace, the only purpose I'd ever find, here?
Feels like I should just sink in to it... just let go... and dream...
"You're a hard man to get a hold of, Mister Ortiz."
They stood side by side in the junkyard. An indeterminate amount of months later.
"That's by design, I had been... let's just say, under the weather," said the big man evasively. He was peering into the cab of the box truck, which was sitting, alone, untended, and in need of either drastic repair or just scrap. The big man wore a completely body covering white jumpsuit, which strained over his big belly. He moved around the chassis of the wrecked old box truck, inspecting and tutting like a fretting old Jew about to haggle. The salesman noticed his fussy demeanor, but he didn't want to say anything. Not to a man with a giant, ill-healed scar hole in his cheek, showing lines of meat and gristle between his teeth. It looked weirdly like a burn. Or a brand.
"I gotta say, I'm baffled what you wanted this for. This specific model of truck, had to be a specific year," said the dealer. He had gone through a lot of intermediaries since he'd gotten the call. Some unscrupulous. Well, if they didn't care about being paid from the bank account of some couple in Scottsdale, why should he? Money was money.
"I wanted familiarity. I like familiar," said the big man in the white jumpsuit as he opened up the rear doors and dug around in the cold boxes in the back. He looked back at the salesman, eyes glinting with interest, asking how much freon the coils take.
"Uh huh... and this has no connection to the remains of that truck that hit a house a couple states over, hit a gas line, caused a whole neighborhood to go up in flames?"
He thought of them now, as he stood in the back door, looking at the freezer boxes. "I don't know what you mean. I just got off an extended stay in a hospital. Perhaps you want to call my doctor, Dr. Shomron..."
Schumacher nodded, and stood, taking a perfunctory inspection of the back of the ice cream truck from the cab, noting the scattered empty ice cream tubs, the wrappers and debris left long before it was left in the junkyard, "So, again, I'm curious, why the ice cream truck?"
The jovial, happy-camper voice went down a pitch and said, "It's easier to hide bodies in the back."
The finder, almost not hearing, did a double-take and stared at the figure who now loomed like a nightmare monster behind him. "Wh-what?"
The laugh was back and his voice was higher as he said, "Just for transport. Big guy needs a big cab to get around. Plus, it'll fit all the ice cream I can eat."
He could tugged at his tie, "So do you sell the ice cream then? Like to kids?"
His fist was curled, and instantly his mind sprang to a fantasy about gripping his head like an eggshell and dashing it against the metal coldbox until his skull caved in and blood swathed the entire interior of the freezer. "No. Me and children... don't get along."
"Well, Mister Ortiz, then here are your keys. Any idea where you're going now?"
His eyes shined darkly in the dimness of the back of the cab. He almost wondered if the finder could see it, up there in the corner, the inky black mass swimming in the corner of the box truck's roof, staring down at them both with one glowing, green eye. "Oh, I'm just going to live life on the road. See, I've been searching for something - some place for a while, mister Schumacher. And I don't know if I've ever really found where it was. I looked for it with people, but never really found that place to settle down on my own. You know?"
"Well. They say, mister Ortiz, that a home isn't where you go to live. It's where you find a purpose that keeps you there." The big man looked impressed, raising his eyebrows and nodding, a little creepy smile crossing his face.
"As long as you find that, you won't ever be alone, I reckon."
"Oh," he said, eyes rolling back to that spot on the ceiling, "I don't think I'm doing this alone... I've got a friend riding with me. Think he's gonna give me some directions."
And he shut the door to the back of the box truck with a cold, final click.
You all saw it.
The crowd at the 8th Anniversary show saw it. They went from cheering about how awesome my that fatal fourway for the Underground title was, to wincing in sympathy when the Demon Clown Sicko made the scene and began caving in people's faces. And I know, as much as I opened eyes, I set more than a few shoulders to shrugging. Sure, whatever. A big, evil giant attacks a bunch of people in a hardcore setting. Someone of Muscle's Malone's mental aptitude is GOING to compare me to some shit for brains named Grimoire Xmyles, another hardcore clown who went to an asylum once or twice. And I've been shrugged off as less than, because I take medication and people think my sharp edges are blunted. But that is just a paper skin that covers me, a hide that is shed. Who I am, underneath, scratch the surface, is someone that just does not care about labels. And in that, I am more honest than any one of you are with yourselves, because I didn't come out there and lie and promise brutal vengeance or pandering words like Muscles Malone did... I just unmasked myself and let him see me for what I really am.
What you saw at the 8th Anniversary wasn't a "statement". It wasn't a cheap shot, it wasn't an attempt to gain attention or sympathy or get you people talking about the similiarites to me against any other clown that's come before me.
What I did at the 8th Anniversary I did because, after so many years of searching, I have finally found a home.
Home is defined not as a place you inhabit or a world you live in. How is where you finally find the place that owns your soul, that lets you define who you are by what you surround yourself with. It is Pure Class Wrestling and it's uniquely singular Underground division that I finally have found that i can step past the pretense that I'm only doing this because I want to make people bleed and I don't care about titles. It is the Underground division that will allow me to inhabit it, make it mine, make it reflect everything about who I am and it will define me in return. I will do this in a way that it's current champions and contenders are all, FAILING to do. Because as much as they all want the belt, not one of them is really, truly at home in what the Underground division means. They don't have the skill set to make that title mean something. Ever since stronger champions like Kyle Shane and Dominator left the title behind it went through periods where it changed hands every two or three weeks. That isn't news. What makes it sad is that the men vying for it, David Hunter, Muscles Malone, are so fucking weak that they present themselves as uncomfortable guests, fleeting passersby in the hallway, never sitting down and taking the steps to make that title their own, their home.
But I look into that beautiful gold, and I see everything I've ever wanted. I see everything I never let myself have, because I let other people define what I could and could not take. No fucking more of that. I take WHAT I want, when I want it. And if I want to take the Underground title, I'll take it. On my first try. And not drop it back the next Trauma in a shitty triple threat match that also involves Holden Ross. And not waste my time pretending men like Tyrone Smith or yes, even Muscles Malone are worth entering into my house.
Tyrone Smith isn't worth talking about, Muscles, because I've destroyed him multiple times before now. But it's you. The one that fervently snarled that you weren't a fucking joke and you were going to make David Hunter your bitch. The one that spouts empty phrases about how sleazy you are. You're the one who does not fucking belong here. Why did you ever want the Underground title, Muscles? I always got the sense you just sort of... lucked into the first title win, and decided to roll with it. You could proclaim it was a prize you wanted, and you can try to play yourself up as the toughest of the tough, but the size of your pecs has little and less to do with why people look to the Underground division for the burgeoning sideshow of ultraviolence it is. In fact, your entire skill set and repertoire means nothing in that conversation. So why keep going after it? Were you miffed that Hunter got one over on you, and you had to get your respect back? Was the Ultimate Male emasculated by the fact that he couldn't keep a belt to hold his pants up and keep the rest of the boys in the locker room from laughing at his pecker? I'm blueskying, Muscles. I don't care.
When I look at you. When I looked into your eyes, as I stormed that ring and laid every single one of you to waste, I felt satisfaction. Not because I was executing a basic attack; I could have and should have done worse than that. Never fear, I will, to you, and Crazy Boy, again. But I was satisfied in what I wrought, and what I saw in your eyes because I know you felt it as the steel bit into your back and left you laying there... you felt the paradigm shift away from you. You felt this gold ticket that slipped into your lap once when half the roster no-showed on a title defense and you won your first title, leave your grasp. Truthfully, you ever having the Underground title was bad enough; you yourself are an ill thought out paradigm, a frat boy's concoction of rohypnol of Jagermeister thrown into a blender with a Cool Story Babe, Go Make Me A Sandwich shirt. You are a one trick pony, a one note joke that's never really been given much thought about where to progress from there. It's of little surprise that David Hunter now owns you. You don't belong in this world.
And I will happily escort you out.
This Trauma. This triple threat. This is my homecoming party.
It will be a brutal, violent unveiling, a welcome to the neighborhood that will never be forgotten, and will leave you pathetic never should be's in rightful terror. And awe.
The Sicko you know and want to reference, the clown, the joke, the "I'm going to compare him to some other person wearing makeup" has gone away.
But the Sicko that is going to finally claim everything he's ever wanted, everything he has ever NEEDED, will find himself right at home, at long last.
