A Black House... Or, Just Like Coming Home.
Mar 5, 2019 5:15:40 GMT -5
Alexa Black and The Anarchist like this
Post by Sicko on Mar 5, 2019 5:15:40 GMT -5
Prologue
Early 2004
"I know I have to sell you on this guy, it's okay", says the dark man, spreading a series of photos out on the table.
They're seated across from each other in a bar. Back in the say this was how most people used to spend their off-time, truth be told. A rather nondescript blonde man, and a man who, as the patrons of the bar pass by their booth, they shift their eyes to avoid his gaze.
The cocky little blonde picks a Polaroid up, mouth puckered as if he's bitten into someting sourly as he looks across the table at his partner. The dark man smiles, and is already beginning to work his magic. Lotta people used to look at the team of Downfall and Twisted and see the blonde and the dark man as a chickenshit heel and his heavy partner that did all the work back in the hazy days of 2004. A lot of people missed the subtle dynamic of manipulation. Which, honestly, worked well in his advantage.
This meeting was about expanding their team, bringing in other heavies, ostensibly to act as enforcers, muscle for Downfall's World title hopes in the IEW. But the trout-mouthed little shit had, in his infinite arrogance, let the recruiting calls and the legwork for gathering this proposed band up to him. And while Daniel hadn't really cared one way or another as names like Redd Dogg or Hightower were laid on the table, they were just jacks in the deck. He knew, smugly, in his hidden heart now, that as Danny looked at these photos, he was holding an ace.
"So, what? ." Unimpressed, Danny had laid the Polaroid down, picking up his beer, downing a third.
"No he's - " internally, the dark man was bristling at having to explain this to someone, as if they lacked the imagination. "Let me paint you a picture -"
Danny stabs a finger into one of the Polaroids. "This guy is the one you want, right here, out of all the candidates. Look at these pictures you're showing me, Jason he's doped up on so many meds that he can barely think. Why do we want that?"
"Because, he's malleable. Okay? Listen, when he was in the asylum - "
"Asylums, Jesus christ, Jason, that's one thing this business is flush with is two-bit psychopaths that get supposedly loaned out of asylums. What makes him any different?"
What he did his wife and kid, comes to the dark man's mind. A happily married, suburban family man, found in the ruins of his home after a fire and in some kind of break, tries to reassemble them like dolls. But, in his instinctive need to keep his ace close to his vest, he keeps this from Danny. But he knows, in Danny's line of questioning, there is a hook on which he can bait him.
"What I'm saying to you is that we have a man here who's mind is so broken, who barely has any sense of identity or self left. So we take him in, and we make him anything we want."
"We 'take him in?' How do we do that?"
"I have an... in at the asylum," the dark man says, papering over it, not wanting Danny to look into the methods. "I'll get them to shift some paperwork around so that he is released early, and into our care."
"So, great, we have some mindless sicko as our backup. This is some superteam you've assembled for us, Jason." Danny says, pushing aside the nearly empty beer, but he sighs, and he thoughtfully plucks up one of the Polaroids again, and the dark man hides a smile behind his mustache. A mindless sicko, he thinks to himself. How very droll.
But he thinks of the Polaroids he didn't show Danny in the file, of the doll-like assembled forms of a woman and a little girl, laid carefully in a tableau in the burnt remains of a bed, and the longing and thought process that went into such an act.
Six Months Later, 2004...
"So how do the new meds feel, Ephrain?" he says solicitously, and looks over. They're walking through the park, side by side, and while a few people have chance to look twice at the sight of the two very big men walking side by side, they do nothing untoward. They're both dressed warmly for the fall weather, the dark man in motorcycle boots and a leather jacket, the bald man in a grey sweat suit. And for his compatriot's part, he is just shuffling along, meekly and mildly blinking, and looking at his hands in wonder. The fog has lifted from his brain, enough that he doesn't feel the confusion, or the rage. He cranes his massive head to the crowns of the trees, drinking in the sunlight and appreciating it for what it is for the first time; to be out of confinement, to be walking in the park, feeling the air on his skin, processing everything with a functional mind. The man at his shoulder, the dark man, the one who makes his skin crawl, smiles.
"I'm going to be your best friend out here on the road, you know," says the dark man, sincerely. He digs in the pocket of his leather jacket, coming out with a orange prescription, showing Ephrain the pills. "You need these, Ephrain. Whenever you don't get your dosage, you slip into the Bad place again. And you don't want to go there."
"I don't," Ephrain affirmed, but he was wracking his brains, trying to piece together the last... two years of his life, trying to remember what was hidden behind brick of mental block, and dulled by the sedation. "Jason, please, tell me... how long was I in there... why was I gone?"
The dark man gives him a sober, calculating look. "Maybe I'll tell you about it. But you just remember, you trust me."
"I do," Ephrain said, a little unsure, but the dark man wheedled him, "You trust ME. You don't trust Danny. You don't trust that other little shit Danny brought into the group, Nate. Redd Dogg. The rapper wannabe. Danny is saying the Inner Circle is all his idea, Ephrain. Can you believe that?"
Not knowing what to think, except that he didn't really like the small, cocky man, he shakes his head, and, rolling his eyes innocently up to look at the birds chirping in the branches of the park, the dark man continues. "And Danny, he just thinks of you, of us, all of us, as pawns for him to move around. But me, I can see a lot more out of you, Ephrain."
"So..." he says, rubbing the back of his shaved head, "Who's idea was the clown outfit? I look... stupid..."
"Hey, no, buddy, listen to me," the dark man says, turning on the charm. "What you are out there is playing to their expectations. Danny wants to package you as something like something these people have seen before. You ever played Playstation?"
The middle aged man blinks at his new friend, dim eyes flat. The dark man moves on. "Not important. Danny wanted to give you a gimmick, because if you're wrestling, you need a gimmick. You need something to stand out." The dark man didn't tell him that the gimmick was his idea, but it didn't matter. "Danny wants to sell you as HIS monster. A demon hiding underneath the innocent facade of a clown."
"I'm not... his monster..." the first itch of a very deep, very profound well of anger began rising in his gullet, and seeing that, the dark man holds his hands up soothingly. "I know, I know, but just remember. You can't trust Danny. But, for now, we stick together. You play your part. You do your part in Danny's Inner Circle, you be his Sicko." (Unspoken, hidden meaning: No, you be my Sicko.) The dark man, smiling, puts an arm around the massive shoulders of the man.
"But Jason, all of this, this going out on the road, teaming up with these guys, being a, a clown, it's not what I'm - " he trips, not able to get the words to come out, because it's something that is missing from deep within him. He hesitates, thinking hard, and when he closes his eyes he is walking through a burned out, blackened, and charred ruin, still smoldering and glowing with ash in places.
"It's not what you're searching for," the dark man says, with the most profound sympathy, and he nods.
"You and me, we can find it, Ephrain," he says, and he holds out the bottle of pills, raising them to eye level, and keeping it sacred, like a talisman between them.
He dreams of that black foot.
As the months begin to turn into years. As the pills flow from the orange bottles like rivers without end, and he no longer takes note to the dosage being given to him. Only that it keeps his thoughts from derailing. Or does it? Sometimes it seems like the well of anger is rising like a flooded creek, more and more filling him up. Sometimes it seems like it fills until the well is all that he has inside of him, and worse is that when he takes the pills and still feels the anger, he feels like taking a pill exacerbates it, making it an all-consuming itch. Makes his fists, heavy stone bludgeons they are, itch to lash out, to break, to hit, to release, to hit and hit and hit and hit. When he tells Jason that, Jason smiles and gives him another pill. When the pills run out, and he starts slipping back, the world seems duller, like the washed out whites and dingy, fluorescents cast overhead by dirty, bug-filled lights of a hospital wing. It lacks the color, the vibrance, the aliveness of that first day when he had stepped out in the sun and walked in the park. That day is the clearest painting, expression he can give of what he hungers for. But it is not what he dreams of. That sense of longing for that first day carries with him as he sinks down to sleep, but when he closes his eyes, he dreams of that black foot.
Of that burned out, smoke-filled ruin, ash and ember still glowing from the heat in places, him coughing. And as his tear-filled eyes try to parse through the smoke, choking and gagging, he sees a black limb, the tendons and muscles cooked until they shrunk, the grisly remainder of the foot and the little toes of a six year old girl, and as his mind comprehends the horror of that blackened foot, he spirals back into madness, screaming himself awake. He wants to think of the calmness, the serenity, the peace of lifting his face to the sun in the park, the avatar of what he's wanted, but when he thinks of the intangible concept he sees that black foot, and knowing it is his fault in his heart of hearts, he breaks every time.
He will go, shaking and broken, to Jason the morning after each dream, and Jason will subtly, so much that he won't even see it, smile and hand him a pill. And he tries his best to focus on his role as this Sicko, but he finds it hard to focus on the matter at hand when he can't define that intangible feeling of what he wanted, can't really express, even to Jason what it is he was always really looking for. And then the next night, the cycle will begin over and over again. He will think of that day in the park, and let it carry him down to sleep. And then, at night, he will dream again of that black foot. And time passes on.
Late 2006...
The dark man opens the door, and as he stands there momentarily in the crack, the light from the hallway spilling onto Ephrain sitting in his bunk, head slumped down, he looks like what he is inside, living shadow, an oily black silhouette.
"You lost the Tag titles for us, Ephrain," the dark man says, his voice equal parts reproach, hard-edged condemnation and regret, remorse. It's the tone of a parent that's not mad, just disappointed, and as he hangs his head something about a parental tone strikes a chord with him, but he says nothing. The well of anger has filled his head, and he grits his teeth. The door closes, they're both plunged into darkness, and it is only in the hint of light that silhouettes them both that he sees Jason standing there, looking down. He seemed to be waiting for some kind of explanation. But there really wasn't one, he thought, his mouth tasting of bitter, familiar ash. He didn't care about the Inner Circle's Tag Team championships, the feeling he'd gotten holding on to that gold was worthless, weightless. Men like Downfall, ego-driven, narcisstic, loved to hold up belts, polish and glitter, see their face in them and look at themselves, the gold sheen reflecting how much self-love they had. When he looked at his reflection he only saw things missing. When he looked at himself he saw a gaudy reflection of what others molded him into being. Not himself. When he looked at other people holding titles, he saw no value. But the figure looking down on him, the one man who he thought understood this.
And maybe Jason did, in his dark secret heart, because titles and the validation therefrom didn't make him happy. But what did make him happy was collecting the fruits of manipulation and breaking people's wills to fit his. And as he stood there now, looking down at the unhappy and unfulfilled man with the deep lined face and the clown outfit, he decided to poke it a little more. "You don't care about Danny, Redd, Tower... any of it, because it's not your family. These Inner Circle clowns, they play themselves up like a unit, a family, but they're not your family." He replied nothing, continued looking down unhappily. So the dark man persisted. "But I am your family, Ephrain. And you left me out there to take the pin, get beat because of your carelessness. I thought you had my back out there. But you failed me. You failed to help me. I guess I was wrong about you, Ephrain. I thought we were going the same places. If you went where I went, I would tell you about the pieces of your life that were missing, I would let you know about the things you crave to make yourself whole." The shadow turned it's shoulder, making a show of going towards the door and walking away from him. "I guess not..."
"Jason, wait," said the figure from the bed, plaintively. "I want... what you're promising me... I want... to find what I've been craving..."
The figure was on him in a flash, and violently grabbed him, choking him. "Then why... did you LET... ME... DOWN, Ephrain." Hands clasped around his throat, and he gagged, but he didn't resist. "Why... are... YOU... FAILING ME?! HUH?" His windpipe being crushed by the manic gasp of the shadow looming over him, the teeth glaring in the darkness snarling at him. "Jason..." he choked, and then, finally, the mad fingers released from his neck, and he sank down to all fours. "Get yourself sorted, Ephrain. Try harder. Apply yourself. Do it right. Because you know what, I might lose that paperwork that signed you over to me as your sponsor, Ephrain. And if that paperwork ever got lost, you would have to go back in the hole. You don't want that, do you?"
The well of anger was draining away, and he felt desperation grip his heart like a claw. "No, Jason... please..."
The shadow took something out of a pocket, dumped out a smattering of pills and hurled them so that the beads rained against his upturned face. "Take your meds. And do what I tell you, Ephrain or so help me I'll send you back."
Faced with the prospect of being locked back in that little room and not being let out, he grasped for the pills. The irony of course, was that the room wasn't all that much smaller than the room he was in now, and he was kept to much the same cycle of upping the dosage of a particular drug until he came to depend on it, but it's often truest that we all build our own little cells to inhabit, and sometimes for the people that come to depend on the cells the most they don't realize of who's making they are. But none of this went through his mind as he frantically scraped pills off the floor, trying to gain the notice of the man who spilled them from his hand. He didn't. He had shut the door, and locked it behind him in disgust.
As debasing as it was, and as much as he was starting to grow cognizant that he was being kept on a leash, he didn't see much choice in it as the years of the Inner Circle went on. Titles won and lost, men attacked, blah blah, wrestling tends to go through cycles. Factions rose to power and fell, and federations they were in closed down. And as the drugs continued to rain down on his upturned face, the more he felt a secret, second heart of his own. There was Ephrain's heart, the cowardly one, the one that quailed for the pills and lived in fear of being sent back to the asylum, and there was the heart that pumped the well of anger and hatred. That, then, was the heart that really began to make the monster run, as it began to define the... something that Ephrain's heart had never been able to put into words. It was like finding a corner piece to a puzzle, and beginning to work inward from there.
The second heart dreamed of that black foot and saw it for what it was. Knew what it meant. It meant that something was being taken away, and that he had done a very bad thing to put it back. The Ephrain heart was squeamish and weak and cringed at the thought of the Very Bad Thing but you know, the secret second heart, it kinda liked it. It felt right, justified. And it too longed for that feeling of stepping out into the sun.
As much as a secret heart could ever want.
About 2013.
The dark man peeled back his eyelid to closely inspect his eyeball, sneering coldly.
"You thought it was all done, didn't you, Ephrain. Time got away from us after IEW closed but ahh, that's alright. Found you out here in the Southwest. Selling ice cream from a truck, man Danny gave you that Sweeth Tooth gimmick and you just, you ran with it, didn't you..." He was pacing back and forth, nervously and anxiously, like it was roles reversed and now he was on drugs. But really, it was just the manic energy of something he'd long been toying with falling right into his lap.
But him, he watches, strapped into the chair as he is. His head is held static by the straps, his hands are strapped down, and he just watches Jason pace back and forth. The Ephrain heart is screaming in fear at being caught, but the Ephrain heart had settled into it's weak little life. The Ephrain heart just wanted to sell it's ice cream, and now, shivering, it spouted the facts it had learned about it's new vocation as a verbal shield, word diarrhea combatting off the shivers "B-butter brickle ice cream was the registered trademark of a toffee ice cream flavoring and of a toffee-centered chocolate-covered candy bar similar to the Heath bar, introduced by the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1920s..."
The dark man had squinted at him, scrunched up his face and gritted his teeth, "What?!" and then he had produced a syringe, plunging the needle into Ephrain's thick neck. Ephrain's chest expanded, and his eyes rolled up, and he let out a sigh. "That is the highest dosage I could get from my pharmaceutical... contact. You know those pills I used to give you? I just gave you a dose that would dope a rhino. You're feeling nice and, Twisted, now, aren't you my friend."
His vision was beginning to blur, the world to spin. Jason, grinning, slid a chair around, sat down straddling it right in front of his strapped doctor's chair, regarding him. "You and I, we've had the longest history of all the ol' Inner Circle gang, didn't we Ephrain. I tried my best to keep you under my thumb, keep your real deal hidden. And we made it work, we made a convincing little psycho clown with that face paint and that cackling, but Sicko was never really the monster. You were. What I kept under my hat from Danny, from Redd, from all of them is just who and what you really were." He smiles, continuing his monologue. "And it was fun for a little while. To have you begging me for another pill after a bad night, a bad dream because you thought it calmed you down."
His voice slurring, but he recited again, trying to tamp down the fear in his Ephrain heart, beat back against it with the mental block technique he had learned in his last stay in the hospital. A mental block, a phrase or a shield that can be used to ward off unhappy thoughts. "In the aftermath... of the Great Depression, William Dreyer named his concoction of chocolate ... and walnuts Rocky Road, to give folks something to... something to..."
"But you escaped from me, came in and out of the hospitals a few times, and now that you and I are done with the wrestling thing, I've had some time on my hands. And I've wanted, very much to continue an old experiment that I never finished. I'm going to push my monster right up to the edge to see if he goes off, or not."
Ephrain wanted to flinch back, to cry out, his soft and weak heart afraid as Jason came forward, caressing his face, and he continued to spout facts. "The island of Hokkaido Japan makes a crab-flavored ice cream that's - "
But his secret, second heart was intrigued, and he looked Jason in the eye. His gaze was engaged, listening. His longtime tormentor smiled, his shark's smile. His devil's smile. "Tell me, Ephrain, that first night all that long ago, do you remember what happened? Do you remember what happened to your family?"
This was it. This was the moment when the friendly ice cream vendor he had allowed himself to be was stretched to the snapping point. And it was then he recalled Jason's line about it being a part he was playing. But it was getting so hard to think at all... and his eyes, far from shivering, were invested. Listening to the pitch.
"I always said I would tell you the real deal... but here it is, Ephrain." He took great relish as he leaned in. "In the early 00's, there was a man who lived at home in Palo Alto with a wife and a little girl. A happy life, a happy family... a happy home. But what do they always say about a home, Ephrain? A home isn't where you live. A home is where you are wanted. And the wife, she wanted more out of her life. She wasn't satisfied living there, on such a low-paying salary, she had dreams of moving out, becoming an actress. She wanted to break apart the suburban tranquilty, to shatter the happy father's dream of a life together. The father, he snaps. He loses all sense of reason, and in a scuffle, he breaks the woman's neck with his strength, this big boy. Now he has a dilemma. He can't let his wife's body lay there. And their little girl. She sees this all, walks in on daddy standing over mommy when she gets up for a glass of water. So what is the father to do? He kills her too. He destroys everything, he takes a gallon of kerosene, he pours it all on their bodies, and he lights them on fire. He stays there, in the fire, as it destroys everything he knows. And he wakes up. He's singed, burnt, scarred... but alive. He's alive, surrounded by the ruins of everything he knows."
"No."
Yes, it happened that way. He dreamt it.
"So now, the father sees his wife and his child, they're burnt to pieces. Unrecognizable. So he picks them up, walking through the burned, firestormed rubble of what used to be a decent little house in the suburbs, and he lays them down. Poses them, like little dolls. That's how you phrased it, to your shrink Ephrain, they were just like little dolls." He's waving a file folder, nearly foaming with manic glee. If his prey wasn't strapped to look straight forward, he would turn his face away. He's still trying to turn his face away. "And that's the secret that's been blocked out all those years. What you dreamed about, every night. You killing the two girls so they wouldn't leave you, shatter your happy little sense of home."
"No... Nuh-nuh-no...."
When he closes his eyes, he dreams of that black foot. Those blackened, caramelized tendons and muscles, the little toes.
He breathes shallowly, rapidly, the overcast sky reversing, time reversing, taking him back to that one day where he stepped out into the park.
A mental block, a phrase or a shield that can be used to ward off unhappy thoughts.
He the black foot tries the ashes and embers still glowing from the fire to block both of the girls posed like little dolls the memories out
"NO!!"
The dark man gives just a little sigh, nodding as if that's alright, and pats one of his pockets on his canvas pants. "I'm going to get what I want out of you, Ephrain. I always wanted to cultivate my own monster. And you wanted... you always wanted that home. In any way you could have it." He pulls out another syringe, another huge dose of the medicine. Flicks the end of the needle, prepping it as he looks at it with interest. And then, he turns, and he taps a few keys on a computer, and above it a string of five monitors, arranged in a semi-circle behind him, come to life. The images are burned onto the screen, police photos of when authorities finally arrived to the bombed out house and found the bodies of Stephanie and Luz Ortiz of Palo Alto, with no sign of the husband, him having fleed into the woods. The grisly found footage style. The grainy, black and white crime scene photos of them removing the bodies from the burned house. They all play over the monitors Jason has set up.
And before he sticks the needle in, his head lolls over, as much as the restraints will allow. And he looks at Jason, in the eyes, coldly, calculatingly. "Jason," he says clearly, and with no fear, as the second heart, the monster's heart, with all of the anger and rage that years of being punished and manipulated would allow. "This isn't going to go the way you think."
"Isn't it, now?" he rejoinders mirthfully, stabbing the plunger deep into the neck of the bigger man. "I've always been fascinated by what makes a monster."
As he goes under, losing himself to the mind-taking malleability of the drugs, the lined, aged face of the killer turns up in a disturbing smile. "Maybe... but I'll never be yours."
He closes his eyes.
The dark man just stands over him, watching him with interest as the drugs begin to take their hold, and the conditioning to make him listen takes it's effect. "We'll see," says the dark man. "We'll see."
Now.
He closes his eyes, lost in remembering. And when he opens them, he's behind the wheel of the ice cream truck. He looks around him, and in the California desert, the damn sun has gone down. He curses, slightly, wondering how much time he has lost. As he looks at where he had parked the box truck, way out in the middle of a mesa, scanning the surroundings, an inky black soup pours itself out of a fold in the air and takes a vague man shape, the outline of a human against the moonlight night sky.
"You are troubled by memories, plagued by the past," Moloch observes. "If you give them too much creedence, they will eat at you."
He mumbles out of the corner of his mouth, "That's why I prefer to keep most memories walled off," to Moloch, and he shifts the clutch, bringing the truck rumbling to life. He's wearing only a strappy t-shirt and a pair of the work slacks he uses in the guise of a uniform against the freezing night desert sky. As he puts the truck in reverse, hares raise their heads from the brush.
"Jason is not unknown to me," Moloch remarks from the side, "I can see his impact on your life before. But what he promised you..."
"Jason never gave me anything. If anything, he only served to make me weak, subservient, and he never really understood what I really am."
"Do you hate him for that?"
He considers for a long time, and for a little while the elder demon considers asking again. They've driven off the desert brush, and started onto a trail that will take them back to a road again. Finally he answers, "No. His effort was impressive, and it did show me. What I want."
"And what might that be?"
He thought of waking up for the first time, in a blackened, destroyed, fire-ravaged husk of a building, of the first time in his life he really opened his eyes and SAW. Of the feeling that filled him. It was the inverse, and yet it was connected to the swelling feeling of freedom he felt that first day he had stepped out into the sun as a free man, felt the sunlight shining on his face as he had stared at his hands, and felt the warmth of sentient rebirth. It was the feeling of coming awake. The feeling of finding everything you've been looking for. It was the feeling of coming home. Jason had shown him a lot of things through his manipulation. Many, many things, some of which now, that he knew Jason was still alive would need to be paid back. But putting a name to that feeling, letting him fully define what it was, was a gift.
He didn't feel the need to tell Moloch that, because he didn't think the demon would understand. If anybody ever could.
He turned from the trail, onto the long stretch of desert highway.
Have you ever gone for a long period in your life feeling lost? Feeling adrift, without any purpose, and listening to what other people think your life should be like? That, in many ways, is the crossroads I have come to. I have been a servant to many masters, Mariah... Danny... yes, even Jason. And now, I have been in many ways, quite literally reborn. Depends on if you believe in demons or not, whether you'd consider being coughed out of Hell and rebuilding a body from a mystical construct a metaphor or not. And even though I do have a (again, literal or metaphorical, up to you) demon on my shoulder, I have been ordered around long enough. In all of my years since I was signed out to a man as his charge and thrown into this world of wrestling I was never really was given a chance to articulate what I want before. And what do I want? Again, it goes back to that feeling of being lost. Of not having a home.
And what is a home?
A home isn't a roof over your head. It isn't rooming with people or where you sleep at night. Home is, in the purest sense what you feel safest being part of... but it is also somewhere, someplace... or someTHING, that embraces you utterly. You never have to worry about being rejected for being what you are at home. If you are really, truly at home somewhere, it will be the place where all of your flaws are seen as desirable.
Now it may be maudlin or unmanly or piercing the fourth wall, killing a tough guy mystique to say that mushy stuff, but I've never really had that. I've been a vagabond a lot of my life, I haven't belonged anywhere, and yes, even when I've been included as part of things like stables or federations I haven't felt at home. Until I looked at the Underground division in 2017 going into 2018. There, where the Underground title defenses were a rising tide of brutal punishment, clash of metal, where men would go through tables made of glass and break through ladders, where barbed wire and steel cut flesh and tore ligaments, where men cried out in pain on a weekly basis. When I was under the spell of Mariah and feeding Moloch pain, it was a symphony to my ears. The Underground is where brutal men got celebrated, where someone who actually enjoyed causing pain was looked at as a literal king, and for the first time since I began asking what I wanted, I wanted that. I wanted for the first time to be accepted for the unholy levels of punishment I've always been able to dish out, to be lauded for doing to people what I was taught to do anyway. Maybe it's simplistic. Maybe it's psychotic, maybe bloodlust as a siren call to something isn't "Good enough" reason for me to want to make the Underground division my playground, but I saw what the Underground title was capable of and God, I fucking wanted it. I wanted it with a thirst that had always been denied me, because Sicko, the backup character, the fucking gatekeeper, always existed to make OTHER people happy. To be their muscle, their tag partner, enforce THEIR will. No more of that. No fucking more.
The problem is that the Underground division I fell in love with, that I wanted to make my home in has been infested by parasitic, degrading mites that have undermined all the hard work that was put in there. Remember back when Kyle Shane or Dominator held the Underground title and it was given prestige, stakes, when it was held to a high standard and it's matches REALLY delivered, so much so that they were the most looked-forward-to part of a card. Not so now. Since Dominator left that title behind in October you've had a never-ending string of pathetic, weak, unimaginitive also-rans. This isn't news. Everyone has referenced it. But the continued backslide goes on every successive week, and who will walk away with the title now? Will it be Arsen Goodstone? Tyler Scott? Muscles Malone? Some other wasted little fourth-rate up-jumped nothing? To take advantage of a triple threat setting and score an Underground title which has become just about as much a prestigious accolade as handing a kindergartner a congratulatory "You did it" star for taking a nap on time.
My Underground, the home I fell in love with, is a mansion in terrible disrepair, a house with a foundation that is falling to rot. That needs to be torn down and started anew.
It is squarely at the feet of the manses' owner that I lay this rubbish, and it is to him I am sending the bill for the demolition and reconstruction of my intended Home.
David Hunter. I am going to tear you down brick by brick. I am going to tear your weak, flabby little dreams from under you, I am going to take you inside my head so you can see the dreams of the world I want to live in, the Underground division I AM going to make mean something and I am going to show you, who's house you are disrespecting, boy. Make no bones about it, it may have your name on the port, but God dammit, I am it's master. It is because of you that I HAVE to do this, in fact. If it wasn't for you, I could have continued watching from afar in delight and happiness at the weekly carnage of the Underground gladiators. You've made it soft, you've made the contests as lackluster and unimaginative as you are. You have brought the home of the truly hardcore's property value down to the ghetto, and it's all because of who you are, David.
You are a soft, spineless man. I thought beating you would require the violent effort of shattering the brittle icy buildup in a freezer with a hammer but it's going to be even easier than that. You are as soft and useless as a foam cup of ice cream given to a senior from a retirement home. You're a pathetic specimen of a man and what's most unbelievable about your whole shtick is according to your Pure Class Wrestling biography (Oh, yes, Sicko gets on the internet, I even use the library's computers) you are supposed to have hardcore wrestling in your blood.
And I've heard all of this noise, that you're a star of tomorrow, that you show such promise. Well where is this promise on a weekly basis David? Where is this level of skill when you're facing a Tyler Scott or a Muscles Malone, two men who were not able to scrape together one win before you made the scene? Hell where was this level of skill in your debut where, if you'll remember, I fucking outlasted you? Now it doesn't matter who you're facing, when you're in an Underground championship match there is a fifty fifty chance you are going to lose, unless you happen to be facing Razor Blade that week. And through it all, you keep giving these dry, boring, bland monologues about how great you are, and being completely honest I think my biggest want for all of the Underground division is for there to be a strong enough champion to kick your ass, send you packing and not lose it on the rematch back to you, because trading it back and forth with you has weakened it more than anything.
I've seen your like before, David. You're the mediocre offspring of someone who was celebrated once, but unlike what you sprung from, you don't have a fraction of what made them special. It's nothing new, of course, hell Bob Dylan's son tried to get a music career going in the 90's but despite them having two hits, you don't see anyone still pretending like the Wallflowers were ever talented enough to remain relevant. (What's that, a reference? I told you, Sicko has used the internet.)
And I'll be fair, it's quite likely you've seen shapes that are like mine before. I've been called them all, Sweeth Tooth, Ronald McDonald, Doctor Rockso he does cocaine yeah. I do not fucking care. I don't care what clown I'm told I remind people of, or if some blase old guard gatekeeper like Grimm wants to act like he's seen and done it all here. You, David, are just enough of a hack that you'll probably still use some example of something I remind you of even after I've called those out. But I do not care anymore. Because none of you have seen this. None of you have seen the will Sicko has shown. None of you has seen the devastation I can and I will bring down upon all of your heads. I will even eschew the Underground trappings of steel and blades and beat you to a bone powder with my own fucking hands. I don't need the conventions that weak people like you use as a crutch, David. Muscles Malone, stood in my way, I broke him. Razor Blade, stood in my way, I broke him. Tyrone Smith stood in my way on three consecutive weeks and I fucking broken him time and time again. You, weak little boy that you are, you said I "went too far" hurting poor Razor Blade. You cried and said that I crossed a line hurting your little friend, and people need to respect him because he shows heart.
That is the first level of this broken home that will go. No empathy for those weakening, cheapening, decaying what I have always admired.
I have gone for too long, wanting but never taking, lusting but being told who to hurt and when to do it. Now I have come into myself and I have just finally seen something, somewhere I have always wanted to go, and I've finally asked myself, why not? Who's going to stop me from taking the Underground? You? Go fuck yourself.
I am going to torch the Underground division at Mass Destruction, David. Leave it blackened, scarred, destroyed, the smoldering ashes and embers still glowing, the charred and twisted bodies of those beneath it left in place as a reminder of who's fucking house it inhabits.
This is MY HOUSE NOW, DAVID!
And at Mass Destruction, daddy is coming home.
Early 2004
"I know I have to sell you on this guy, it's okay", says the dark man, spreading a series of photos out on the table.
They're seated across from each other in a bar. Back in the say this was how most people used to spend their off-time, truth be told. A rather nondescript blonde man, and a man who, as the patrons of the bar pass by their booth, they shift their eyes to avoid his gaze.
The cocky little blonde picks a Polaroid up, mouth puckered as if he's bitten into someting sourly as he looks across the table at his partner. The dark man smiles, and is already beginning to work his magic. Lotta people used to look at the team of Downfall and Twisted and see the blonde and the dark man as a chickenshit heel and his heavy partner that did all the work back in the hazy days of 2004. A lot of people missed the subtle dynamic of manipulation. Which, honestly, worked well in his advantage.
This meeting was about expanding their team, bringing in other heavies, ostensibly to act as enforcers, muscle for Downfall's World title hopes in the IEW. But the trout-mouthed little shit had, in his infinite arrogance, let the recruiting calls and the legwork for gathering this proposed band up to him. And while Daniel hadn't really cared one way or another as names like Redd Dogg or Hightower were laid on the table, they were just jacks in the deck. He knew, smugly, in his hidden heart now, that as Danny looked at these photos, he was holding an ace.
"So, what? ." Unimpressed, Danny had laid the Polaroid down, picking up his beer, downing a third.
"No he's - " internally, the dark man was bristling at having to explain this to someone, as if they lacked the imagination. "Let me paint you a picture -"
Danny stabs a finger into one of the Polaroids. "This guy is the one you want, right here, out of all the candidates. Look at these pictures you're showing me, Jason he's doped up on so many meds that he can barely think. Why do we want that?"
"Because, he's malleable. Okay? Listen, when he was in the asylum - "
"Asylums, Jesus christ, Jason, that's one thing this business is flush with is two-bit psychopaths that get supposedly loaned out of asylums. What makes him any different?"
What he did his wife and kid, comes to the dark man's mind. A happily married, suburban family man, found in the ruins of his home after a fire and in some kind of break, tries to reassemble them like dolls. But, in his instinctive need to keep his ace close to his vest, he keeps this from Danny. But he knows, in Danny's line of questioning, there is a hook on which he can bait him.
"What I'm saying to you is that we have a man here who's mind is so broken, who barely has any sense of identity or self left. So we take him in, and we make him anything we want."
"We 'take him in?' How do we do that?"
"I have an... in at the asylum," the dark man says, papering over it, not wanting Danny to look into the methods. "I'll get them to shift some paperwork around so that he is released early, and into our care."
"So, great, we have some mindless sicko as our backup. This is some superteam you've assembled for us, Jason." Danny says, pushing aside the nearly empty beer, but he sighs, and he thoughtfully plucks up one of the Polaroids again, and the dark man hides a smile behind his mustache. A mindless sicko, he thinks to himself. How very droll.
But he thinks of the Polaroids he didn't show Danny in the file, of the doll-like assembled forms of a woman and a little girl, laid carefully in a tableau in the burnt remains of a bed, and the longing and thought process that went into such an act.
Six Months Later, 2004...
"So how do the new meds feel, Ephrain?" he says solicitously, and looks over. They're walking through the park, side by side, and while a few people have chance to look twice at the sight of the two very big men walking side by side, they do nothing untoward. They're both dressed warmly for the fall weather, the dark man in motorcycle boots and a leather jacket, the bald man in a grey sweat suit. And for his compatriot's part, he is just shuffling along, meekly and mildly blinking, and looking at his hands in wonder. The fog has lifted from his brain, enough that he doesn't feel the confusion, or the rage. He cranes his massive head to the crowns of the trees, drinking in the sunlight and appreciating it for what it is for the first time; to be out of confinement, to be walking in the park, feeling the air on his skin, processing everything with a functional mind. The man at his shoulder, the dark man, the one who makes his skin crawl, smiles.
"I'm going to be your best friend out here on the road, you know," says the dark man, sincerely. He digs in the pocket of his leather jacket, coming out with a orange prescription, showing Ephrain the pills. "You need these, Ephrain. Whenever you don't get your dosage, you slip into the Bad place again. And you don't want to go there."
"I don't," Ephrain affirmed, but he was wracking his brains, trying to piece together the last... two years of his life, trying to remember what was hidden behind brick of mental block, and dulled by the sedation. "Jason, please, tell me... how long was I in there... why was I gone?"
The dark man gives him a sober, calculating look. "Maybe I'll tell you about it. But you just remember, you trust me."
"I do," Ephrain said, a little unsure, but the dark man wheedled him, "You trust ME. You don't trust Danny. You don't trust that other little shit Danny brought into the group, Nate. Redd Dogg. The rapper wannabe. Danny is saying the Inner Circle is all his idea, Ephrain. Can you believe that?"
Not knowing what to think, except that he didn't really like the small, cocky man, he shakes his head, and, rolling his eyes innocently up to look at the birds chirping in the branches of the park, the dark man continues. "And Danny, he just thinks of you, of us, all of us, as pawns for him to move around. But me, I can see a lot more out of you, Ephrain."
"So..." he says, rubbing the back of his shaved head, "Who's idea was the clown outfit? I look... stupid..."
"Hey, no, buddy, listen to me," the dark man says, turning on the charm. "What you are out there is playing to their expectations. Danny wants to package you as something like something these people have seen before. You ever played Playstation?"
The middle aged man blinks at his new friend, dim eyes flat. The dark man moves on. "Not important. Danny wanted to give you a gimmick, because if you're wrestling, you need a gimmick. You need something to stand out." The dark man didn't tell him that the gimmick was his idea, but it didn't matter. "Danny wants to sell you as HIS monster. A demon hiding underneath the innocent facade of a clown."
"I'm not... his monster..." the first itch of a very deep, very profound well of anger began rising in his gullet, and seeing that, the dark man holds his hands up soothingly. "I know, I know, but just remember. You can't trust Danny. But, for now, we stick together. You play your part. You do your part in Danny's Inner Circle, you be his Sicko." (Unspoken, hidden meaning: No, you be my Sicko.) The dark man, smiling, puts an arm around the massive shoulders of the man.
"But Jason, all of this, this going out on the road, teaming up with these guys, being a, a clown, it's not what I'm - " he trips, not able to get the words to come out, because it's something that is missing from deep within him. He hesitates, thinking hard, and when he closes his eyes he is walking through a burned out, blackened, and charred ruin, still smoldering and glowing with ash in places.
"It's not what you're searching for," the dark man says, with the most profound sympathy, and he nods.
"You and me, we can find it, Ephrain," he says, and he holds out the bottle of pills, raising them to eye level, and keeping it sacred, like a talisman between them.
He dreams of that black foot.
As the months begin to turn into years. As the pills flow from the orange bottles like rivers without end, and he no longer takes note to the dosage being given to him. Only that it keeps his thoughts from derailing. Or does it? Sometimes it seems like the well of anger is rising like a flooded creek, more and more filling him up. Sometimes it seems like it fills until the well is all that he has inside of him, and worse is that when he takes the pills and still feels the anger, he feels like taking a pill exacerbates it, making it an all-consuming itch. Makes his fists, heavy stone bludgeons they are, itch to lash out, to break, to hit, to release, to hit and hit and hit and hit. When he tells Jason that, Jason smiles and gives him another pill. When the pills run out, and he starts slipping back, the world seems duller, like the washed out whites and dingy, fluorescents cast overhead by dirty, bug-filled lights of a hospital wing. It lacks the color, the vibrance, the aliveness of that first day when he had stepped out in the sun and walked in the park. That day is the clearest painting, expression he can give of what he hungers for. But it is not what he dreams of. That sense of longing for that first day carries with him as he sinks down to sleep, but when he closes his eyes, he dreams of that black foot.
Of that burned out, smoke-filled ruin, ash and ember still glowing from the heat in places, him coughing. And as his tear-filled eyes try to parse through the smoke, choking and gagging, he sees a black limb, the tendons and muscles cooked until they shrunk, the grisly remainder of the foot and the little toes of a six year old girl, and as his mind comprehends the horror of that blackened foot, he spirals back into madness, screaming himself awake. He wants to think of the calmness, the serenity, the peace of lifting his face to the sun in the park, the avatar of what he's wanted, but when he thinks of the intangible concept he sees that black foot, and knowing it is his fault in his heart of hearts, he breaks every time.
He will go, shaking and broken, to Jason the morning after each dream, and Jason will subtly, so much that he won't even see it, smile and hand him a pill. And he tries his best to focus on his role as this Sicko, but he finds it hard to focus on the matter at hand when he can't define that intangible feeling of what he wanted, can't really express, even to Jason what it is he was always really looking for. And then the next night, the cycle will begin over and over again. He will think of that day in the park, and let it carry him down to sleep. And then, at night, he will dream again of that black foot. And time passes on.
Late 2006...
The dark man opens the door, and as he stands there momentarily in the crack, the light from the hallway spilling onto Ephrain sitting in his bunk, head slumped down, he looks like what he is inside, living shadow, an oily black silhouette.
"You lost the Tag titles for us, Ephrain," the dark man says, his voice equal parts reproach, hard-edged condemnation and regret, remorse. It's the tone of a parent that's not mad, just disappointed, and as he hangs his head something about a parental tone strikes a chord with him, but he says nothing. The well of anger has filled his head, and he grits his teeth. The door closes, they're both plunged into darkness, and it is only in the hint of light that silhouettes them both that he sees Jason standing there, looking down. He seemed to be waiting for some kind of explanation. But there really wasn't one, he thought, his mouth tasting of bitter, familiar ash. He didn't care about the Inner Circle's Tag Team championships, the feeling he'd gotten holding on to that gold was worthless, weightless. Men like Downfall, ego-driven, narcisstic, loved to hold up belts, polish and glitter, see their face in them and look at themselves, the gold sheen reflecting how much self-love they had. When he looked at his reflection he only saw things missing. When he looked at himself he saw a gaudy reflection of what others molded him into being. Not himself. When he looked at other people holding titles, he saw no value. But the figure looking down on him, the one man who he thought understood this.
And maybe Jason did, in his dark secret heart, because titles and the validation therefrom didn't make him happy. But what did make him happy was collecting the fruits of manipulation and breaking people's wills to fit his. And as he stood there now, looking down at the unhappy and unfulfilled man with the deep lined face and the clown outfit, he decided to poke it a little more. "You don't care about Danny, Redd, Tower... any of it, because it's not your family. These Inner Circle clowns, they play themselves up like a unit, a family, but they're not your family." He replied nothing, continued looking down unhappily. So the dark man persisted. "But I am your family, Ephrain. And you left me out there to take the pin, get beat because of your carelessness. I thought you had my back out there. But you failed me. You failed to help me. I guess I was wrong about you, Ephrain. I thought we were going the same places. If you went where I went, I would tell you about the pieces of your life that were missing, I would let you know about the things you crave to make yourself whole." The shadow turned it's shoulder, making a show of going towards the door and walking away from him. "I guess not..."
"Jason, wait," said the figure from the bed, plaintively. "I want... what you're promising me... I want... to find what I've been craving..."
The figure was on him in a flash, and violently grabbed him, choking him. "Then why... did you LET... ME... DOWN, Ephrain." Hands clasped around his throat, and he gagged, but he didn't resist. "Why... are... YOU... FAILING ME?! HUH?" His windpipe being crushed by the manic gasp of the shadow looming over him, the teeth glaring in the darkness snarling at him. "Jason..." he choked, and then, finally, the mad fingers released from his neck, and he sank down to all fours. "Get yourself sorted, Ephrain. Try harder. Apply yourself. Do it right. Because you know what, I might lose that paperwork that signed you over to me as your sponsor, Ephrain. And if that paperwork ever got lost, you would have to go back in the hole. You don't want that, do you?"
The well of anger was draining away, and he felt desperation grip his heart like a claw. "No, Jason... please..."
The shadow took something out of a pocket, dumped out a smattering of pills and hurled them so that the beads rained against his upturned face. "Take your meds. And do what I tell you, Ephrain or so help me I'll send you back."
Faced with the prospect of being locked back in that little room and not being let out, he grasped for the pills. The irony of course, was that the room wasn't all that much smaller than the room he was in now, and he was kept to much the same cycle of upping the dosage of a particular drug until he came to depend on it, but it's often truest that we all build our own little cells to inhabit, and sometimes for the people that come to depend on the cells the most they don't realize of who's making they are. But none of this went through his mind as he frantically scraped pills off the floor, trying to gain the notice of the man who spilled them from his hand. He didn't. He had shut the door, and locked it behind him in disgust.
As debasing as it was, and as much as he was starting to grow cognizant that he was being kept on a leash, he didn't see much choice in it as the years of the Inner Circle went on. Titles won and lost, men attacked, blah blah, wrestling tends to go through cycles. Factions rose to power and fell, and federations they were in closed down. And as the drugs continued to rain down on his upturned face, the more he felt a secret, second heart of his own. There was Ephrain's heart, the cowardly one, the one that quailed for the pills and lived in fear of being sent back to the asylum, and there was the heart that pumped the well of anger and hatred. That, then, was the heart that really began to make the monster run, as it began to define the... something that Ephrain's heart had never been able to put into words. It was like finding a corner piece to a puzzle, and beginning to work inward from there.
The second heart dreamed of that black foot and saw it for what it was. Knew what it meant. It meant that something was being taken away, and that he had done a very bad thing to put it back. The Ephrain heart was squeamish and weak and cringed at the thought of the Very Bad Thing but you know, the secret second heart, it kinda liked it. It felt right, justified. And it too longed for that feeling of stepping out into the sun.
As much as a secret heart could ever want.
About 2013.
The dark man peeled back his eyelid to closely inspect his eyeball, sneering coldly.
"You thought it was all done, didn't you, Ephrain. Time got away from us after IEW closed but ahh, that's alright. Found you out here in the Southwest. Selling ice cream from a truck, man Danny gave you that Sweeth Tooth gimmick and you just, you ran with it, didn't you..." He was pacing back and forth, nervously and anxiously, like it was roles reversed and now he was on drugs. But really, it was just the manic energy of something he'd long been toying with falling right into his lap.
But him, he watches, strapped into the chair as he is. His head is held static by the straps, his hands are strapped down, and he just watches Jason pace back and forth. The Ephrain heart is screaming in fear at being caught, but the Ephrain heart had settled into it's weak little life. The Ephrain heart just wanted to sell it's ice cream, and now, shivering, it spouted the facts it had learned about it's new vocation as a verbal shield, word diarrhea combatting off the shivers "B-butter brickle ice cream was the registered trademark of a toffee ice cream flavoring and of a toffee-centered chocolate-covered candy bar similar to the Heath bar, introduced by the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1920s..."
The dark man had squinted at him, scrunched up his face and gritted his teeth, "What?!" and then he had produced a syringe, plunging the needle into Ephrain's thick neck. Ephrain's chest expanded, and his eyes rolled up, and he let out a sigh. "That is the highest dosage I could get from my pharmaceutical... contact. You know those pills I used to give you? I just gave you a dose that would dope a rhino. You're feeling nice and, Twisted, now, aren't you my friend."
His vision was beginning to blur, the world to spin. Jason, grinning, slid a chair around, sat down straddling it right in front of his strapped doctor's chair, regarding him. "You and I, we've had the longest history of all the ol' Inner Circle gang, didn't we Ephrain. I tried my best to keep you under my thumb, keep your real deal hidden. And we made it work, we made a convincing little psycho clown with that face paint and that cackling, but Sicko was never really the monster. You were. What I kept under my hat from Danny, from Redd, from all of them is just who and what you really were." He smiles, continuing his monologue. "And it was fun for a little while. To have you begging me for another pill after a bad night, a bad dream because you thought it calmed you down."
His voice slurring, but he recited again, trying to tamp down the fear in his Ephrain heart, beat back against it with the mental block technique he had learned in his last stay in the hospital. A mental block, a phrase or a shield that can be used to ward off unhappy thoughts. "In the aftermath... of the Great Depression, William Dreyer named his concoction of chocolate ... and walnuts Rocky Road, to give folks something to... something to..."
"But you escaped from me, came in and out of the hospitals a few times, and now that you and I are done with the wrestling thing, I've had some time on my hands. And I've wanted, very much to continue an old experiment that I never finished. I'm going to push my monster right up to the edge to see if he goes off, or not."
Ephrain wanted to flinch back, to cry out, his soft and weak heart afraid as Jason came forward, caressing his face, and he continued to spout facts. "The island of Hokkaido Japan makes a crab-flavored ice cream that's - "
But his secret, second heart was intrigued, and he looked Jason in the eye. His gaze was engaged, listening. His longtime tormentor smiled, his shark's smile. His devil's smile. "Tell me, Ephrain, that first night all that long ago, do you remember what happened? Do you remember what happened to your family?"
This was it. This was the moment when the friendly ice cream vendor he had allowed himself to be was stretched to the snapping point. And it was then he recalled Jason's line about it being a part he was playing. But it was getting so hard to think at all... and his eyes, far from shivering, were invested. Listening to the pitch.
"I always said I would tell you the real deal... but here it is, Ephrain." He took great relish as he leaned in. "In the early 00's, there was a man who lived at home in Palo Alto with a wife and a little girl. A happy life, a happy family... a happy home. But what do they always say about a home, Ephrain? A home isn't where you live. A home is where you are wanted. And the wife, she wanted more out of her life. She wasn't satisfied living there, on such a low-paying salary, she had dreams of moving out, becoming an actress. She wanted to break apart the suburban tranquilty, to shatter the happy father's dream of a life together. The father, he snaps. He loses all sense of reason, and in a scuffle, he breaks the woman's neck with his strength, this big boy. Now he has a dilemma. He can't let his wife's body lay there. And their little girl. She sees this all, walks in on daddy standing over mommy when she gets up for a glass of water. So what is the father to do? He kills her too. He destroys everything, he takes a gallon of kerosene, he pours it all on their bodies, and he lights them on fire. He stays there, in the fire, as it destroys everything he knows. And he wakes up. He's singed, burnt, scarred... but alive. He's alive, surrounded by the ruins of everything he knows."
"No."
Yes, it happened that way. He dreamt it.
"So now, the father sees his wife and his child, they're burnt to pieces. Unrecognizable. So he picks them up, walking through the burned, firestormed rubble of what used to be a decent little house in the suburbs, and he lays them down. Poses them, like little dolls. That's how you phrased it, to your shrink Ephrain, they were just like little dolls." He's waving a file folder, nearly foaming with manic glee. If his prey wasn't strapped to look straight forward, he would turn his face away. He's still trying to turn his face away. "And that's the secret that's been blocked out all those years. What you dreamed about, every night. You killing the two girls so they wouldn't leave you, shatter your happy little sense of home."
"No... Nuh-nuh-no...."
When he closes his eyes, he dreams of that black foot. Those blackened, caramelized tendons and muscles, the little toes.
He breathes shallowly, rapidly, the overcast sky reversing, time reversing, taking him back to that one day where he stepped out into the park.
A mental block, a phrase or a shield that can be used to ward off unhappy thoughts.
He the black foot tries the ashes and embers still glowing from the fire to block both of the girls posed like little dolls the memories out
"NO!!"
The dark man gives just a little sigh, nodding as if that's alright, and pats one of his pockets on his canvas pants. "I'm going to get what I want out of you, Ephrain. I always wanted to cultivate my own monster. And you wanted... you always wanted that home. In any way you could have it." He pulls out another syringe, another huge dose of the medicine. Flicks the end of the needle, prepping it as he looks at it with interest. And then, he turns, and he taps a few keys on a computer, and above it a string of five monitors, arranged in a semi-circle behind him, come to life. The images are burned onto the screen, police photos of when authorities finally arrived to the bombed out house and found the bodies of Stephanie and Luz Ortiz of Palo Alto, with no sign of the husband, him having fleed into the woods. The grisly found footage style. The grainy, black and white crime scene photos of them removing the bodies from the burned house. They all play over the monitors Jason has set up.
And before he sticks the needle in, his head lolls over, as much as the restraints will allow. And he looks at Jason, in the eyes, coldly, calculatingly. "Jason," he says clearly, and with no fear, as the second heart, the monster's heart, with all of the anger and rage that years of being punished and manipulated would allow. "This isn't going to go the way you think."
"Isn't it, now?" he rejoinders mirthfully, stabbing the plunger deep into the neck of the bigger man. "I've always been fascinated by what makes a monster."
As he goes under, losing himself to the mind-taking malleability of the drugs, the lined, aged face of the killer turns up in a disturbing smile. "Maybe... but I'll never be yours."
He closes his eyes.
The dark man just stands over him, watching him with interest as the drugs begin to take their hold, and the conditioning to make him listen takes it's effect. "We'll see," says the dark man. "We'll see."
Now.
He closes his eyes, lost in remembering. And when he opens them, he's behind the wheel of the ice cream truck. He looks around him, and in the California desert, the damn sun has gone down. He curses, slightly, wondering how much time he has lost. As he looks at where he had parked the box truck, way out in the middle of a mesa, scanning the surroundings, an inky black soup pours itself out of a fold in the air and takes a vague man shape, the outline of a human against the moonlight night sky.
"You are troubled by memories, plagued by the past," Moloch observes. "If you give them too much creedence, they will eat at you."
He mumbles out of the corner of his mouth, "That's why I prefer to keep most memories walled off," to Moloch, and he shifts the clutch, bringing the truck rumbling to life. He's wearing only a strappy t-shirt and a pair of the work slacks he uses in the guise of a uniform against the freezing night desert sky. As he puts the truck in reverse, hares raise their heads from the brush.
"Jason is not unknown to me," Moloch remarks from the side, "I can see his impact on your life before. But what he promised you..."
"Jason never gave me anything. If anything, he only served to make me weak, subservient, and he never really understood what I really am."
"Do you hate him for that?"
He considers for a long time, and for a little while the elder demon considers asking again. They've driven off the desert brush, and started onto a trail that will take them back to a road again. Finally he answers, "No. His effort was impressive, and it did show me. What I want."
"And what might that be?"
He thought of waking up for the first time, in a blackened, destroyed, fire-ravaged husk of a building, of the first time in his life he really opened his eyes and SAW. Of the feeling that filled him. It was the inverse, and yet it was connected to the swelling feeling of freedom he felt that first day he had stepped out into the sun as a free man, felt the sunlight shining on his face as he had stared at his hands, and felt the warmth of sentient rebirth. It was the feeling of coming awake. The feeling of finding everything you've been looking for. It was the feeling of coming home. Jason had shown him a lot of things through his manipulation. Many, many things, some of which now, that he knew Jason was still alive would need to be paid back. But putting a name to that feeling, letting him fully define what it was, was a gift.
He didn't feel the need to tell Moloch that, because he didn't think the demon would understand. If anybody ever could.
He turned from the trail, onto the long stretch of desert highway.
Have you ever gone for a long period in your life feeling lost? Feeling adrift, without any purpose, and listening to what other people think your life should be like? That, in many ways, is the crossroads I have come to. I have been a servant to many masters, Mariah... Danny... yes, even Jason. And now, I have been in many ways, quite literally reborn. Depends on if you believe in demons or not, whether you'd consider being coughed out of Hell and rebuilding a body from a mystical construct a metaphor or not. And even though I do have a (again, literal or metaphorical, up to you) demon on my shoulder, I have been ordered around long enough. In all of my years since I was signed out to a man as his charge and thrown into this world of wrestling I was never really was given a chance to articulate what I want before. And what do I want? Again, it goes back to that feeling of being lost. Of not having a home.
And what is a home?
A home isn't a roof over your head. It isn't rooming with people or where you sleep at night. Home is, in the purest sense what you feel safest being part of... but it is also somewhere, someplace... or someTHING, that embraces you utterly. You never have to worry about being rejected for being what you are at home. If you are really, truly at home somewhere, it will be the place where all of your flaws are seen as desirable.
Now it may be maudlin or unmanly or piercing the fourth wall, killing a tough guy mystique to say that mushy stuff, but I've never really had that. I've been a vagabond a lot of my life, I haven't belonged anywhere, and yes, even when I've been included as part of things like stables or federations I haven't felt at home. Until I looked at the Underground division in 2017 going into 2018. There, where the Underground title defenses were a rising tide of brutal punishment, clash of metal, where men would go through tables made of glass and break through ladders, where barbed wire and steel cut flesh and tore ligaments, where men cried out in pain on a weekly basis. When I was under the spell of Mariah and feeding Moloch pain, it was a symphony to my ears. The Underground is where brutal men got celebrated, where someone who actually enjoyed causing pain was looked at as a literal king, and for the first time since I began asking what I wanted, I wanted that. I wanted for the first time to be accepted for the unholy levels of punishment I've always been able to dish out, to be lauded for doing to people what I was taught to do anyway. Maybe it's simplistic. Maybe it's psychotic, maybe bloodlust as a siren call to something isn't "Good enough" reason for me to want to make the Underground division my playground, but I saw what the Underground title was capable of and God, I fucking wanted it. I wanted it with a thirst that had always been denied me, because Sicko, the backup character, the fucking gatekeeper, always existed to make OTHER people happy. To be their muscle, their tag partner, enforce THEIR will. No more of that. No fucking more.
The problem is that the Underground division I fell in love with, that I wanted to make my home in has been infested by parasitic, degrading mites that have undermined all the hard work that was put in there. Remember back when Kyle Shane or Dominator held the Underground title and it was given prestige, stakes, when it was held to a high standard and it's matches REALLY delivered, so much so that they were the most looked-forward-to part of a card. Not so now. Since Dominator left that title behind in October you've had a never-ending string of pathetic, weak, unimaginitive also-rans. This isn't news. Everyone has referenced it. But the continued backslide goes on every successive week, and who will walk away with the title now? Will it be Arsen Goodstone? Tyler Scott? Muscles Malone? Some other wasted little fourth-rate up-jumped nothing? To take advantage of a triple threat setting and score an Underground title which has become just about as much a prestigious accolade as handing a kindergartner a congratulatory "You did it" star for taking a nap on time.
My Underground, the home I fell in love with, is a mansion in terrible disrepair, a house with a foundation that is falling to rot. That needs to be torn down and started anew.
It is squarely at the feet of the manses' owner that I lay this rubbish, and it is to him I am sending the bill for the demolition and reconstruction of my intended Home.
David Hunter. I am going to tear you down brick by brick. I am going to tear your weak, flabby little dreams from under you, I am going to take you inside my head so you can see the dreams of the world I want to live in, the Underground division I AM going to make mean something and I am going to show you, who's house you are disrespecting, boy. Make no bones about it, it may have your name on the port, but God dammit, I am it's master. It is because of you that I HAVE to do this, in fact. If it wasn't for you, I could have continued watching from afar in delight and happiness at the weekly carnage of the Underground gladiators. You've made it soft, you've made the contests as lackluster and unimaginative as you are. You have brought the home of the truly hardcore's property value down to the ghetto, and it's all because of who you are, David.
You are a soft, spineless man. I thought beating you would require the violent effort of shattering the brittle icy buildup in a freezer with a hammer but it's going to be even easier than that. You are as soft and useless as a foam cup of ice cream given to a senior from a retirement home. You're a pathetic specimen of a man and what's most unbelievable about your whole shtick is according to your Pure Class Wrestling biography (Oh, yes, Sicko gets on the internet, I even use the library's computers) you are supposed to have hardcore wrestling in your blood.
And I've heard all of this noise, that you're a star of tomorrow, that you show such promise. Well where is this promise on a weekly basis David? Where is this level of skill when you're facing a Tyler Scott or a Muscles Malone, two men who were not able to scrape together one win before you made the scene? Hell where was this level of skill in your debut where, if you'll remember, I fucking outlasted you? Now it doesn't matter who you're facing, when you're in an Underground championship match there is a fifty fifty chance you are going to lose, unless you happen to be facing Razor Blade that week. And through it all, you keep giving these dry, boring, bland monologues about how great you are, and being completely honest I think my biggest want for all of the Underground division is for there to be a strong enough champion to kick your ass, send you packing and not lose it on the rematch back to you, because trading it back and forth with you has weakened it more than anything.
I've seen your like before, David. You're the mediocre offspring of someone who was celebrated once, but unlike what you sprung from, you don't have a fraction of what made them special. It's nothing new, of course, hell Bob Dylan's son tried to get a music career going in the 90's but despite them having two hits, you don't see anyone still pretending like the Wallflowers were ever talented enough to remain relevant. (What's that, a reference? I told you, Sicko has used the internet.)
And I'll be fair, it's quite likely you've seen shapes that are like mine before. I've been called them all, Sweeth Tooth, Ronald McDonald, Doctor Rockso he does cocaine yeah. I do not fucking care. I don't care what clown I'm told I remind people of, or if some blase old guard gatekeeper like Grimm wants to act like he's seen and done it all here. You, David, are just enough of a hack that you'll probably still use some example of something I remind you of even after I've called those out. But I do not care anymore. Because none of you have seen this. None of you have seen the will Sicko has shown. None of you has seen the devastation I can and I will bring down upon all of your heads. I will even eschew the Underground trappings of steel and blades and beat you to a bone powder with my own fucking hands. I don't need the conventions that weak people like you use as a crutch, David. Muscles Malone, stood in my way, I broke him. Razor Blade, stood in my way, I broke him. Tyrone Smith stood in my way on three consecutive weeks and I fucking broken him time and time again. You, weak little boy that you are, you said I "went too far" hurting poor Razor Blade. You cried and said that I crossed a line hurting your little friend, and people need to respect him because he shows heart.
That is the first level of this broken home that will go. No empathy for those weakening, cheapening, decaying what I have always admired.
I have gone for too long, wanting but never taking, lusting but being told who to hurt and when to do it. Now I have come into myself and I have just finally seen something, somewhere I have always wanted to go, and I've finally asked myself, why not? Who's going to stop me from taking the Underground? You? Go fuck yourself.
I am going to torch the Underground division at Mass Destruction, David. Leave it blackened, scarred, destroyed, the smoldering ashes and embers still glowing, the charred and twisted bodies of those beneath it left in place as a reminder of who's fucking house it inhabits.
This is MY HOUSE NOW, DAVID!
And at Mass Destruction, daddy is coming home.
