A Black House... Or, A Million Nightmare Lifetimes.
Jun 3, 2019 16:39:46 GMT -5
The Anarchist likes this
Post by Sicko on Jun 3, 2019 16:39:46 GMT -5
"You think you're something special, don't you."
They had gathered at the entrance to his - let's not bullshit around the block and call it what it is, a cell. A white, omnipresent cell. It is the beginning and ending of his world. It is an egg in which a slumbering beast is now curled in a fetal position, while the shut door to the outside world has it's slot pushed back, and sets of eyes are peering through.
The voices are of Jason Twisted and Daniel Fehl, the two handlers of the Inner Circle prime, and they snicker and egg each other on as their cold, cruel eyes peer in at him. He wouldn't be able to see anything of them but their eyes through the slit, but hearing those unmistakable voices, even if they were jeering raucously like the crows in Dumbo, was his clue. Throwing in taunt after taunt, telling him he's nothing. He's curled on his side, cringing and insensate, shivering, a wasted specimen who is stripped to his waist. He's more like a wounded, broken animal, the kind of tortured pet that well-meaning idiots post on their Facebook pages; a dog that's been lit on fire has about the same level of dignity as here and now. His hair had been singed off from the fire, all of it, and his body was covered in pitted, puckered, ugly burn scars, which shone pink in the light, the new raw skin under the third degree burns. His swim to consciousness in this scene overrode everything... for many precious moments this was his all. And they are giggling at him, mocking him. "Fat boy, thinks he's special... lookit him, Danny... we're sp'osed to be Scaaaared of him!"
"The monster Sicko!"
"The De-Mon Clown."
"Hunter's right, he's nothing special. Makes him think he's worth more than Tyler Scott or Muscles Malone. He's nothing."
"Burned up freak."
"Weirdo wearing kid's birthday party makeup."
"Fucked up freak is absolutely nothing to be afraid of, we've seen it a million times."
"Only interesting thing he ever did was kill his wife and kid."
"That's right... you killed them. You killed them. You killed them." The taunt became a chant, a ritual, booming chorus from more than the two hecklers, and it drove into him with such grating, unreal insistence that now he did scream, contorting there on the floor. This naked, bald, gestalt being born of the fire like the phoenix burst from it's egg, yet without plumage, feathers and reason. He laid on his back, on the cracked-open pink blister-skin, and he placed his hands to his temples and screamed. He screamed in denial. He screamed in rage. In vengeance. In rejection. He projected his scream so loud he thought that it would make his head explode, and then he projected it louder. He flooded everything out with a torrent of sound. Until he felt it causing fissures in the walls of the cell itself, but he did not stop. He was never going to stop, not even if he caused fissures that broke the world.
And then, the world went away, and he was cast into the void. Exhausted, spent, he closed his eyes and floated in the black inky darkness, dormant. His skin glowed with burning orange runes, covering his face, bald head and arms. He did not recall having cycled through scenarios a million times. He did not know that they had escalated, had gone from reliving one nightmare to reliving all of them at once. He just knew, in the shelled-up little nub that was at the very center of his mind, that he had screamed so loud that it had shattered the already fading illusion and he'd been cast back out into the black, for however long it took for it all to start anew again. And he could take this as a chance to rest. It may have spanned lifetimes, this torture, and he wouldn't know it. Nor did he know that the illusion breaking caused everything to freeze.
(Why isn't it working, Jason.)
(I don't understand. His mind... can't be this strong. His will can't be stronger than your power.)
(I instructed you when I made you my avatar that the only way for me to be whole was to drain the power of the final remaining disciple of my brothers, the last instrument of Moloch's will. You assured me that you would be able to dissolve his bond and corrode him. But he has been run through the Strangeways for a thousand years and subjected to his worst nightmares time and time again, he should have dissolved into a million screaming, traumatized atoms.)
(I TOLD you, I will weaken him, I was the one who built this creature like a clay golem. All of his nightmares will break him apart and let the power ooze out like an egg. I just need to apply a bit... more... pressure...)
The runes on his skin glow yellow-white hot in the darkness, and his brows furrow. And behind his eyes, a flash of white illuminates this void he's drifting through, and he's run through the nightmare. Everything moves at an accelerated pace, like he's viewing it through the port of a ship going lightspeed, and it's enough to bring a tear to his eye as he sees him stepping down the stairs, not noticing the spilled kerosene on the ground as he endeavors to light the pilot; and the fireball that engulfs everything. And as everything slows, and quiets. The fires have gone out. And the insane skipping forward has quieted down to simply a dark cocoon that used to be a human shape amid a bombed out cellar. A blackened floor covered in ash. And he was not just given third degree burns at the epicenter of the fiery explosion. Bent over double, in a fetal position with his head touching the floor, in a flayed, charred figure, a blackened mass of muscle and bone turned into a molten statue; like one of the figures in the ruins of Pompeii, preserved forever in his last moment.
The statue of blackened sinew and bone then, torturously, grotesquely, begins to stretch. There are snapping, ripping and tearing sounds as the cooked meat and tendons begin to move, and this soul begins to show signs of life, letting out choked, gnarled yells through a throat that has been constricted and flash-fried. It screams. It screams more agonizingly than any human had ever heard, if it was being poked by pitchforks in the fires of hell it wouldn't be in this much pain as it's blackened limbs try to move.
(Scream, damn you. SCREAM.)
In the province of repeat nightmare forever, this eternal, never-ending agony as the sinewy thing tries to right itself lasts decades, but here seconds tick by and it obliges the sadist. It does. It's jellied, no longer solid eyes still turn in their sockets, and it's unworldly screams keep coming. And it somehow is able to see two figures standing on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. Before they had always been found upstairs, flung like rag dolls by the force of the explosion. Here, two equally gruesome burn victims, blackened, seared and bubbled flesh as they were, stand and grin down at him. The taller one, no longer with distinguishing figures of a woman, reaches her arms out, the black layer of top flesh pulling off like chicken as she holds her arms out for a demented embrace. She does not scream. If she was still capable of a beatific, warm smile, she would be, beckoning the burned man to come towards her.
"You killed us, Ephrain... me and our little girl. Now we're all going to be trapped down here. All of us trapped in the basement."
"MMM-MAA-LRS-S-S-" the burned man moaned.
"Come, sweet baby. Come join us."
"MMMMLLLR-RRRR-DDDDSSSSS"
"You've always been obsessed with death. You've courted Shadrach for the longest tiiime," she sang, and she twirled down the stairs. She was a tornado of burned flesh, moving gracefully. "But those visions of you becoming the beast, that isn't the avatar of Moloch, that isn't the end you were so desperate for... that was your way out."
The little girl joins them, giggling merrily, and skipping despite her badly seared flesh. It's too fucked up to contemplate.
"You wanted it both ways, in both worlds. But living has become too much a chore for you, Ephrain, and that beast, was just a mask you put on. But the mask has taken you off. And now you're food for the real avatar, the sweet release."
His tongue is gone, melted away, and his face is little more than a million leaking blisters cracking open underneath the hard black shell, but his jaw slackens, and he roars, "MMMMMMNOOOOO"
He became aware of a clicking sound, like a thousand castanets. "We all dance in the end, my love. We dance through life..." The clicking was louder, it was a cacaphonous scraping and clacking, and the metal grates of the floor were being pushed aside.
"Or we dance into the next world."
The rising skeletons came from underneath, in hidden sewage tanks, and underground mass-graves.
They began building each other, connecting their mates bones together as they began linking hands in a ring-around-the-posey type of circle.
They began whirling around, a dance of death.
A scream ripped from his mouth, again and again, and again, and despite the burned away body, despite his muscles being shrivelled up strings, cooked fats and blackened bone, he pounded hard. He brought a fist down into the earth, and the skeletons around them began to shake to pieces. He brought the other fist down with the strength of a piston. Then, he reared his wasted body, back arching, lifting both arms over his head, to bring them smashing into the ground like a triphammer, shattering everything in sight.
The illusion shattered again. And then, his eyes closed and it was back, falling into the void. He felt energy seething through him, as if something very profound was filled with pique at this latest development. He couldn't see the runes on his actual skin as he floated there, but they were now burning angrily cherry red.
And as he floated there and dreamed of nothingness, something spoke in his mind. Not Moloch or a voice he recognized, but a kindly whisper, a benevolent feeling, like a touch of light on his shoulder.
(Don't give up. You are so close now...)
"Huh?" he mumbled.
(Just resist... a little while longer... the spell is weakening...)
The runes covering his face flashed, burned, and the void opened up. When he opened his eyes, he was in another place.
It was a dank little equipment shed. He had enough awareness in this version of the Strangeways to see and know his surroundings, but not to speak, not to cry out. He lay there helpless. And then, the face he had never expected to see drifted into his view from over top, and so piece by piece as she became visible was the machete in her hands.
Mariah Bamford smiled the smile of someone doing a great service. "Just remember baby. Our hearts are sewn together, too."
She plunged the machete down, hacking off his right arm.
His eyes bulged at the excruciating icefire flash of pain that came with the sudden traumatic severing. And then, he found that his bursting lips were sewn together with a cord that pierced through his gums. Despite himself, he thrashed. Mariah removed the machete from between the parts, and as it scraped bone and severed muscle every nerve ending was lighting up on fire. A total reversal from the ritual in which Mariah's tulpa body was created. This was the black night at Springdale, where they had given themselves to Moloch, cruelly reversed.
"We backed the wrong horse on this one, my love," Mariah said soulfully, almost sorrowfully, as she propped the heavy machete up on her shoulder. "I ordered you to cut me up just like this and sew me together so that our bodies could be made sanctified for Moloch. To feed him our pain and anguish forever. But Shadrach needs no such blood price. His gift is already eternal."
And the machete came down again, cutting off the hand on his left side with a terrible, uneven, lopsided stroke. Grimacing, Mariah extracted the machete, let rise to it's apex, and brought it down again, this time below the elbow.
And then, she tilted her head coquettishly, letting out a savage little giggle. "Aww, why don't you scream, baby? I did. Let it out." She brought the blade up to continue her work.
"You are lost, Ephrain. Let yourself go. Let yourself be broken into pieces, and let the power of the blood gift ebb from you as you fall apart. It's over now. You've... resisted long enough." She's looking down her nose at him. She draws the machete back, brings it down with a sick, meaty thwack, cutting another part of him. "Go ahead. Break down into bits. Stop trying to hold yourself together."
She looked at the blade, in the dim moonlight of the shed where they had performed the ritual, the aesthetic of it looked like jam. "You were never more to me than a project, Ephrain. A monster that I wanted to mold."
Thwack. She sliced off a foot.
"I recruited you in this asylum, because I saw a man with such a broken mind that I thought the pieces would be easily configured, a jigsaw puzzle with answers determined by whoever held the pieces. Answerable only to me. Doing what I said."
Thunk. The blade, screeching, came down with enough force to first break and then cut through his shin bone.
"You are not more than this, Ephrain. You never were. You never will be. So just let go. Fall apart. You're becoming undone anyway."
Thhhhwackkkkk. The blade made it into the meat of his thigh with the hearty sound of a lumberjack's wedge cutting into oak, and it stuck there. Mariah had to wiggle the blade back and forth, extracting it out in disturbing detail as the blood gushed out like a geyser.
"Fall apart. Fade away. Sink into nothing and let Shadrach take the last power of the brothers and ascend. You can join me, here. You can join me, forever."
He flexed his jaw so hard, and with snapping pops, one by one, the stitches gruesomely gave way. As each stitch popped, Mariah looked up at him, with dawning fear.
"No. No! Shadrach, this isn't possible -"
"Go to Hell, Jason" came roaring through his stitched, raw lips, as he lay there in severed pieces.
Her snarl twisted into a demonic carciature, and she brought the machete blade across his throat, cutting his head off.
Mariah lifted his severed head up, holding it in both hands like a pumpkin. She raised it, and her nasty, otherworldly toothy snarl twisted into a sick grin. "You will obey. You always did. You never could do anything else."
His severed head blinked, turned it's eyes to Mariah, struggled with the shock of being decaptitated, he gathered himself and stared down at her, stuttering out, "Fuck you, Jason."
In a fit, she took the severed head in both hands and flung it towards the ground, the way a teenager would defile a jack-o-lantern. It spun, falling in an extended, slow arc that lasted a lifetime. Then, when it hit the earth in a wet, pulpy explosion, everything went black.
(Please... don't give up.)
He dreamed, fully whole, but the glowing writing on his skin buzzing and crackling with fury as the forces manipulating his journey through the Strangeways void bickered and argued. The void shuddered, and it seemed like the void rushed like a wind tunnel. All was losing cohesion. And then, annoyed, the master of the spell turned his attention to the figure floating in fetal position one last time, and the runes glowed.
He opened his eyes.
He was standing, sunlight on his face. He blinked, and he held his hands up. He felt the warmth and the beauty of the day, for the first time in untold eternities. It was a dawning revelation, a welcoming back to humanity and the world, as if he was seeing it newly born.
Jason walked down the trail, just as he had that first day after Ephrain had been released into their custody. Wearing the same jacket and leathers, his hair the same, everything. And Ephrain was still wearing his hospital fatigues. 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."
"Jason..."
His opposite looks at him. "You been out of it for a while, Ephrain. Dreaming all of this stuff about dark passengers and avatars of ancient entities. It's heavy stuff. But you remember what the doctor says. It's not real. Here, take your pills."
He shifts his eyes from the pill bottle in Jason's hand to his face, balefully. But he does not move to take the pills. The clear, sober clarity, the joy of reminiscing about this perfect day holds a spell over him.
"I do... last remember being in the hospital..."
"That was your last moment of lucidity. Everything else has been a lie. Just... let go of all of it, Ephrain. Come on, you take your meds, and you lie down for a nap."
"A nap."
In this early time period, when he was being gaslit, he wanted to trust the dark man. To believe in what he said, even as his low, even tone of voice made him want to fall in. But some nub in the center of his mind flashed a warning. And he squeezed his eyes shut. Because try as he might, he could not get out of his head that this perfect day was not real.
And when he opened his eyes, it wasn't the timid, mild mannered, hesitant fear of the man who had just been let out into a world he did not know. He stared up at Jason, his own man, his own monster. And that was what Jason was always refusing to forget. So many people made the mistake, thinking he was a brainless brute with no soul of his own. Jason refused to believe in him, at every turn, thinking that he was still the puppet he had set upon the board.
He swatted the pills out of Jason's hand.
"NO! Dammit!"
Before he could get his hands on Jason again, the dark man swirled into himself, vanishing into a hole and exiting the simulation. But the park stayed where it was, and he was not extricated again.
And he breathed. And finally came to himself, the awareness dawning of the simulations he had been forced to run. It all crashed into his mind at once, the dreams he had been forced to live over and over in an attempt to make him give up his will, and despite the escalating struggle to force him to break, he had refused every time. And now he stood here.
The sky was beginning to unravel into white, like threads being pulled in a sweater. The entire world was now breaking apart and being swallowed, the park, all of it breaking apart and going to a new, white void.
And then a voice spoke in his head. Kindly, majestic, filling him with the same sense of wonder as his first hesitant steps into the sunlight in that long-ago park as a free man.
(You have done so well, Ephrain.)
(You resisted tortures that would break most men, but your ordeal is not over.)
(Together, we can free my brother, and then return you to the church. But it will be up to you to stop Shadrach and his avatar.)
"Who are you?" he called, as the world around him was being pulled apart.
(I'm the third brother. And I've been waiting for this for a long time.)
It is hard not to see this as a repeat of last week.
Another turn on the wheel becomes another, endless session of torture in the void. Another fatal fourway for my Underground championship, against 2/3's of the same cast. Except... well, no Razor Blade, since I inflicted grievous injury on his poor little arm and gave David Hunter something else to bitch about. Oh, no.
But Darren Hughes, Tyrone Smith, and this time Holden Ross? What this match boils down to is an entirely different tune, a waltz we've all seen played before. Yeah... can't you hear the music? Can't you see the steps?
This is the dance done between three men who have only their shared desire to pull themselves out of their slump and have no history or, even an underlying thread of hate to spark a heated exchange between them. The dance where the steps are already laid out, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, for us to follow blindly as we all waltz each other's character's around. Predictable and slow. Every single challenger in this match is coming off of a losing streak. For Holden Ross, it's aggrieved because his partner in the self-proclaimed Best Tag Team in the World has a spiteful enmity towards me. So if Holden could just get it together enough to win the big one for once, he would gain a measure of revenge, and satisfy his partner, right? Here's the undeniable facts, we're going to dance. It's going to be a tango of sublime violence, a heartrending, nonstop waltz of pain and devastation as I make you shine brighter than ever. To beat that metaphor to it's conclusion. But Holden, I know you think of me as unimpressive. You, taking your cues from David, said you weren't scared of me, because I took my aesthetic from Rob Zombie's discography. And that is what a brainless meathead like you will never get. This identity, this look, was all given to me. I was formed long ago. I was born as if whole from a void, and shaped. I was made to be only what Jason Twisted said I was, but I finally, after years of changing and shifting, began to defy his expectations and be more than he said I could ever be. Now, I don't need the Sweeth Tooth character, I don't need to be just the ice cream truck clown, I've made my name in my own right and I've succeeded in being too big for the box other people created for me.
Can you say the same, Holden? You can not. Because you are always a lackey. When you aren't at somebody's side, your career suffers so much that you can barely scrape a win against someone who's showing up. You crawl like a whipped dog to any master's side that can stomach the breadth of your mediocrity. First it was Seromine, then it was David, and who knows how many others you've allied with? You think you're equal partners? David has every reason to view you with contempt, not the least because you've now ruined two of his little boasts about your duo stepping up to the plate and dominating. And even if you scored the biggest win of your life and pinned me to win this title, how long would it be before you lost it to someone better, if not back to me? David himself would be tripping over his own feet to reclaim his precious Crown and go back to being a King where he mattered, and it would give him reason to cheese his face in the dish yet again and smile to Kassandra Black that it proved he was better than me. Given half a chance, David Hunter will not ever help you, Holden, he will use you until you no longer provide even the slightest shake of worth and then he'll cast you to the side. And you'll continue to lose without a mentor or a boss, because you have never done what I've done. You've never stretched yourself, tried to exceed limitations, grow beyond anything. You just want to remain a Bastard.
Tyrone I don't care about, because really, what else is there to say about the man. How many times can we be subjected to his promos in the gym, training for a comeback as he talks to someone not relevant about how he's really going to try hard this time, and how he has such a history with the Underground title; he's such a staple of hardcore wrestling. I know I'VE heard that spiel from him three times now in the year and a half I've been here off and on. And yet Tyrone has never just shut up and done something about it. That's the lesson, stop talking about this being the time you push yourself to try harder and get out of your slump, stop saying this is the time you turn it all around. I've been in a void reliving nightmares for a cumulative thousand years, and yet dealing with you has been the most repetitive exercise I could ever think of.
It's that which calls to mind this entire premise. That I proved stronger than the nightmare last time around, so my tormentors are going to drop me back into the simulation to try again, see how I do this time. And what, can I say differently about Darren Hughes now that I didn't say last time, that Kyle Shane didn't say the time before that? Is Darren Hughes, now at a deficit of two losses and nothing worthwhile to say going to make an impassioned plea that he is going to get his life in order, because he needs the win and the validation? Because that's the same spiel we hear from Crazy Boy. It's been weeks, Darren, and I have to admit I'm growing bored and frustrated. The promise of your initial, cute segment has waned, and you haven't ever really shown a real sign that you were sincere in your resolve. You said first time out that you needed to step up to the plate, work harder this time around and erase the stain of the piss poor tenure from before around. But when it's all said and done, you've failed at that. You have not done any better now, and just because you weren't pinned last time doesn't give you an out. You haven't even tried. You didn't double down from the first loss and work harder, you just gave up. That isn't how you course correct your legacy. That's how you become as much a failure as Crazy Boy or Holden.
And it is why you will fail here, again. Because you all aren't seeing the bigger picture of why I rose.
Why since my return in February I have only been pinned once, and why I've claimed this Underground division as my home.
I work because I have fought through my demons and my nightmares, pushed past the shackles and limitations. I have been broken down, torn apart, forgotten and locked away at multiple tenures in my career. I have been an afterthought. I have been a henchman. I have had an embarrassing legacy of failure I wanted to fix before, so I was in many ways like all of you. But I did something about it.
I toiled through thousands of nightmares, but I walked through fire to get where I am. Nobody expected me to ever be anything more than a simpleton, an idiot, but instead I am my own man... my own monster. And now the most idiots like you can say, is you aren't afraid of me?
I don't care if you fear me. I don't care if you point out details from what I say or what I've filmed when I talk to David Hunter and whine that they're not scary and that I'm just what you've seen before. I seem familiar to you because I was given a mold to fit into, I was given multiple realities, nightmares and scenarios to live through and yet, somehow, every single time I have evolved out of them.
I am going to stay Underground Champion because I am not like you. And I've proven it to the person that has doubted me the most by powering through a million scenarios in infinite lifetimes. I proved myself more than he ever thought I could be. All the three of you have ever done is justify why people talk about you with such disdain and lack of care.
So as we begin this simulation and run through another reality in which you all attempt to break me apart, and wear me down, just remember, this match is not going to end up in my nightmare.
I am going to be yours.
They had gathered at the entrance to his - let's not bullshit around the block and call it what it is, a cell. A white, omnipresent cell. It is the beginning and ending of his world. It is an egg in which a slumbering beast is now curled in a fetal position, while the shut door to the outside world has it's slot pushed back, and sets of eyes are peering through.
The voices are of Jason Twisted and Daniel Fehl, the two handlers of the Inner Circle prime, and they snicker and egg each other on as their cold, cruel eyes peer in at him. He wouldn't be able to see anything of them but their eyes through the slit, but hearing those unmistakable voices, even if they were jeering raucously like the crows in Dumbo, was his clue. Throwing in taunt after taunt, telling him he's nothing. He's curled on his side, cringing and insensate, shivering, a wasted specimen who is stripped to his waist. He's more like a wounded, broken animal, the kind of tortured pet that well-meaning idiots post on their Facebook pages; a dog that's been lit on fire has about the same level of dignity as here and now. His hair had been singed off from the fire, all of it, and his body was covered in pitted, puckered, ugly burn scars, which shone pink in the light, the new raw skin under the third degree burns. His swim to consciousness in this scene overrode everything... for many precious moments this was his all. And they are giggling at him, mocking him. "Fat boy, thinks he's special... lookit him, Danny... we're sp'osed to be Scaaaared of him!"
"The monster Sicko!"
"The De-Mon Clown."
"Hunter's right, he's nothing special. Makes him think he's worth more than Tyler Scott or Muscles Malone. He's nothing."
"Burned up freak."
"Weirdo wearing kid's birthday party makeup."
"Fucked up freak is absolutely nothing to be afraid of, we've seen it a million times."
"Only interesting thing he ever did was kill his wife and kid."
"That's right... you killed them. You killed them. You killed them." The taunt became a chant, a ritual, booming chorus from more than the two hecklers, and it drove into him with such grating, unreal insistence that now he did scream, contorting there on the floor. This naked, bald, gestalt being born of the fire like the phoenix burst from it's egg, yet without plumage, feathers and reason. He laid on his back, on the cracked-open pink blister-skin, and he placed his hands to his temples and screamed. He screamed in denial. He screamed in rage. In vengeance. In rejection. He projected his scream so loud he thought that it would make his head explode, and then he projected it louder. He flooded everything out with a torrent of sound. Until he felt it causing fissures in the walls of the cell itself, but he did not stop. He was never going to stop, not even if he caused fissures that broke the world.
And then, the world went away, and he was cast into the void. Exhausted, spent, he closed his eyes and floated in the black inky darkness, dormant. His skin glowed with burning orange runes, covering his face, bald head and arms. He did not recall having cycled through scenarios a million times. He did not know that they had escalated, had gone from reliving one nightmare to reliving all of them at once. He just knew, in the shelled-up little nub that was at the very center of his mind, that he had screamed so loud that it had shattered the already fading illusion and he'd been cast back out into the black, for however long it took for it all to start anew again. And he could take this as a chance to rest. It may have spanned lifetimes, this torture, and he wouldn't know it. Nor did he know that the illusion breaking caused everything to freeze.
(Why isn't it working, Jason.)
(I don't understand. His mind... can't be this strong. His will can't be stronger than your power.)
(I instructed you when I made you my avatar that the only way for me to be whole was to drain the power of the final remaining disciple of my brothers, the last instrument of Moloch's will. You assured me that you would be able to dissolve his bond and corrode him. But he has been run through the Strangeways for a thousand years and subjected to his worst nightmares time and time again, he should have dissolved into a million screaming, traumatized atoms.)
(I TOLD you, I will weaken him, I was the one who built this creature like a clay golem. All of his nightmares will break him apart and let the power ooze out like an egg. I just need to apply a bit... more... pressure...)
The runes on his skin glow yellow-white hot in the darkness, and his brows furrow. And behind his eyes, a flash of white illuminates this void he's drifting through, and he's run through the nightmare. Everything moves at an accelerated pace, like he's viewing it through the port of a ship going lightspeed, and it's enough to bring a tear to his eye as he sees him stepping down the stairs, not noticing the spilled kerosene on the ground as he endeavors to light the pilot; and the fireball that engulfs everything. And as everything slows, and quiets. The fires have gone out. And the insane skipping forward has quieted down to simply a dark cocoon that used to be a human shape amid a bombed out cellar. A blackened floor covered in ash. And he was not just given third degree burns at the epicenter of the fiery explosion. Bent over double, in a fetal position with his head touching the floor, in a flayed, charred figure, a blackened mass of muscle and bone turned into a molten statue; like one of the figures in the ruins of Pompeii, preserved forever in his last moment.
The statue of blackened sinew and bone then, torturously, grotesquely, begins to stretch. There are snapping, ripping and tearing sounds as the cooked meat and tendons begin to move, and this soul begins to show signs of life, letting out choked, gnarled yells through a throat that has been constricted and flash-fried. It screams. It screams more agonizingly than any human had ever heard, if it was being poked by pitchforks in the fires of hell it wouldn't be in this much pain as it's blackened limbs try to move.
(Scream, damn you. SCREAM.)
In the province of repeat nightmare forever, this eternal, never-ending agony as the sinewy thing tries to right itself lasts decades, but here seconds tick by and it obliges the sadist. It does. It's jellied, no longer solid eyes still turn in their sockets, and it's unworldly screams keep coming. And it somehow is able to see two figures standing on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. Before they had always been found upstairs, flung like rag dolls by the force of the explosion. Here, two equally gruesome burn victims, blackened, seared and bubbled flesh as they were, stand and grin down at him. The taller one, no longer with distinguishing figures of a woman, reaches her arms out, the black layer of top flesh pulling off like chicken as she holds her arms out for a demented embrace. She does not scream. If she was still capable of a beatific, warm smile, she would be, beckoning the burned man to come towards her.
"You killed us, Ephrain... me and our little girl. Now we're all going to be trapped down here. All of us trapped in the basement."
"MMM-MAA-LRS-S-S-" the burned man moaned.
"Come, sweet baby. Come join us."
"MMMMLLLR-RRRR-DDDDSSSSS"
"You've always been obsessed with death. You've courted Shadrach for the longest tiiime," she sang, and she twirled down the stairs. She was a tornado of burned flesh, moving gracefully. "But those visions of you becoming the beast, that isn't the avatar of Moloch, that isn't the end you were so desperate for... that was your way out."
The little girl joins them, giggling merrily, and skipping despite her badly seared flesh. It's too fucked up to contemplate.
"You wanted it both ways, in both worlds. But living has become too much a chore for you, Ephrain, and that beast, was just a mask you put on. But the mask has taken you off. And now you're food for the real avatar, the sweet release."
His tongue is gone, melted away, and his face is little more than a million leaking blisters cracking open underneath the hard black shell, but his jaw slackens, and he roars, "MMMMMMNOOOOO"
He became aware of a clicking sound, like a thousand castanets. "We all dance in the end, my love. We dance through life..." The clicking was louder, it was a cacaphonous scraping and clacking, and the metal grates of the floor were being pushed aside.
"Or we dance into the next world."
The rising skeletons came from underneath, in hidden sewage tanks, and underground mass-graves.
They began building each other, connecting their mates bones together as they began linking hands in a ring-around-the-posey type of circle.
They began whirling around, a dance of death.
A scream ripped from his mouth, again and again, and again, and despite the burned away body, despite his muscles being shrivelled up strings, cooked fats and blackened bone, he pounded hard. He brought a fist down into the earth, and the skeletons around them began to shake to pieces. He brought the other fist down with the strength of a piston. Then, he reared his wasted body, back arching, lifting both arms over his head, to bring them smashing into the ground like a triphammer, shattering everything in sight.
The illusion shattered again. And then, his eyes closed and it was back, falling into the void. He felt energy seething through him, as if something very profound was filled with pique at this latest development. He couldn't see the runes on his actual skin as he floated there, but they were now burning angrily cherry red.
And as he floated there and dreamed of nothingness, something spoke in his mind. Not Moloch or a voice he recognized, but a kindly whisper, a benevolent feeling, like a touch of light on his shoulder.
(Don't give up. You are so close now...)
"Huh?" he mumbled.
(Just resist... a little while longer... the spell is weakening...)
The runes covering his face flashed, burned, and the void opened up. When he opened his eyes, he was in another place.
It was a dank little equipment shed. He had enough awareness in this version of the Strangeways to see and know his surroundings, but not to speak, not to cry out. He lay there helpless. And then, the face he had never expected to see drifted into his view from over top, and so piece by piece as she became visible was the machete in her hands.
Mariah Bamford smiled the smile of someone doing a great service. "Just remember baby. Our hearts are sewn together, too."
She plunged the machete down, hacking off his right arm.
His eyes bulged at the excruciating icefire flash of pain that came with the sudden traumatic severing. And then, he found that his bursting lips were sewn together with a cord that pierced through his gums. Despite himself, he thrashed. Mariah removed the machete from between the parts, and as it scraped bone and severed muscle every nerve ending was lighting up on fire. A total reversal from the ritual in which Mariah's tulpa body was created. This was the black night at Springdale, where they had given themselves to Moloch, cruelly reversed.
"We backed the wrong horse on this one, my love," Mariah said soulfully, almost sorrowfully, as she propped the heavy machete up on her shoulder. "I ordered you to cut me up just like this and sew me together so that our bodies could be made sanctified for Moloch. To feed him our pain and anguish forever. But Shadrach needs no such blood price. His gift is already eternal."
And the machete came down again, cutting off the hand on his left side with a terrible, uneven, lopsided stroke. Grimacing, Mariah extracted the machete, let rise to it's apex, and brought it down again, this time below the elbow.
And then, she tilted her head coquettishly, letting out a savage little giggle. "Aww, why don't you scream, baby? I did. Let it out." She brought the blade up to continue her work.
"You are lost, Ephrain. Let yourself go. Let yourself be broken into pieces, and let the power of the blood gift ebb from you as you fall apart. It's over now. You've... resisted long enough." She's looking down her nose at him. She draws the machete back, brings it down with a sick, meaty thwack, cutting another part of him. "Go ahead. Break down into bits. Stop trying to hold yourself together."
She looked at the blade, in the dim moonlight of the shed where they had performed the ritual, the aesthetic of it looked like jam. "You were never more to me than a project, Ephrain. A monster that I wanted to mold."
Thwack. She sliced off a foot.
"I recruited you in this asylum, because I saw a man with such a broken mind that I thought the pieces would be easily configured, a jigsaw puzzle with answers determined by whoever held the pieces. Answerable only to me. Doing what I said."
Thunk. The blade, screeching, came down with enough force to first break and then cut through his shin bone.
"You are not more than this, Ephrain. You never were. You never will be. So just let go. Fall apart. You're becoming undone anyway."
Thhhhwackkkkk. The blade made it into the meat of his thigh with the hearty sound of a lumberjack's wedge cutting into oak, and it stuck there. Mariah had to wiggle the blade back and forth, extracting it out in disturbing detail as the blood gushed out like a geyser.
"Fall apart. Fade away. Sink into nothing and let Shadrach take the last power of the brothers and ascend. You can join me, here. You can join me, forever."
He flexed his jaw so hard, and with snapping pops, one by one, the stitches gruesomely gave way. As each stitch popped, Mariah looked up at him, with dawning fear.
"No. No! Shadrach, this isn't possible -"
"Go to Hell, Jason" came roaring through his stitched, raw lips, as he lay there in severed pieces.
Her snarl twisted into a demonic carciature, and she brought the machete blade across his throat, cutting his head off.
Mariah lifted his severed head up, holding it in both hands like a pumpkin. She raised it, and her nasty, otherworldly toothy snarl twisted into a sick grin. "You will obey. You always did. You never could do anything else."
His severed head blinked, turned it's eyes to Mariah, struggled with the shock of being decaptitated, he gathered himself and stared down at her, stuttering out, "Fuck you, Jason."
In a fit, she took the severed head in both hands and flung it towards the ground, the way a teenager would defile a jack-o-lantern. It spun, falling in an extended, slow arc that lasted a lifetime. Then, when it hit the earth in a wet, pulpy explosion, everything went black.
(Please... don't give up.)
He dreamed, fully whole, but the glowing writing on his skin buzzing and crackling with fury as the forces manipulating his journey through the Strangeways void bickered and argued. The void shuddered, and it seemed like the void rushed like a wind tunnel. All was losing cohesion. And then, annoyed, the master of the spell turned his attention to the figure floating in fetal position one last time, and the runes glowed.
He opened his eyes.
He was standing, sunlight on his face. He blinked, and he held his hands up. He felt the warmth and the beauty of the day, for the first time in untold eternities. It was a dawning revelation, a welcoming back to humanity and the world, as if he was seeing it newly born.
Jason walked down the trail, just as he had that first day after Ephrain had been released into their custody. Wearing the same jacket and leathers, his hair the same, everything. And Ephrain was still wearing his hospital fatigues. 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."
"Jason..."
His opposite looks at him. "You been out of it for a while, Ephrain. Dreaming all of this stuff about dark passengers and avatars of ancient entities. It's heavy stuff. But you remember what the doctor says. It's not real. Here, take your pills."
He shifts his eyes from the pill bottle in Jason's hand to his face, balefully. But he does not move to take the pills. The clear, sober clarity, the joy of reminiscing about this perfect day holds a spell over him.
"I do... last remember being in the hospital..."
"That was your last moment of lucidity. Everything else has been a lie. Just... let go of all of it, Ephrain. Come on, you take your meds, and you lie down for a nap."
"A nap."
In this early time period, when he was being gaslit, he wanted to trust the dark man. To believe in what he said, even as his low, even tone of voice made him want to fall in. But some nub in the center of his mind flashed a warning. And he squeezed his eyes shut. Because try as he might, he could not get out of his head that this perfect day was not real.
And when he opened his eyes, it wasn't the timid, mild mannered, hesitant fear of the man who had just been let out into a world he did not know. He stared up at Jason, his own man, his own monster. And that was what Jason was always refusing to forget. So many people made the mistake, thinking he was a brainless brute with no soul of his own. Jason refused to believe in him, at every turn, thinking that he was still the puppet he had set upon the board.
He swatted the pills out of Jason's hand.
"NO! Dammit!"
Before he could get his hands on Jason again, the dark man swirled into himself, vanishing into a hole and exiting the simulation. But the park stayed where it was, and he was not extricated again.
And he breathed. And finally came to himself, the awareness dawning of the simulations he had been forced to run. It all crashed into his mind at once, the dreams he had been forced to live over and over in an attempt to make him give up his will, and despite the escalating struggle to force him to break, he had refused every time. And now he stood here.
The sky was beginning to unravel into white, like threads being pulled in a sweater. The entire world was now breaking apart and being swallowed, the park, all of it breaking apart and going to a new, white void.
And then a voice spoke in his head. Kindly, majestic, filling him with the same sense of wonder as his first hesitant steps into the sunlight in that long-ago park as a free man.
(You have done so well, Ephrain.)
(You resisted tortures that would break most men, but your ordeal is not over.)
(Together, we can free my brother, and then return you to the church. But it will be up to you to stop Shadrach and his avatar.)
"Who are you?" he called, as the world around him was being pulled apart.
(I'm the third brother. And I've been waiting for this for a long time.)
It is hard not to see this as a repeat of last week.
Another turn on the wheel becomes another, endless session of torture in the void. Another fatal fourway for my Underground championship, against 2/3's of the same cast. Except... well, no Razor Blade, since I inflicted grievous injury on his poor little arm and gave David Hunter something else to bitch about. Oh, no.
But Darren Hughes, Tyrone Smith, and this time Holden Ross? What this match boils down to is an entirely different tune, a waltz we've all seen played before. Yeah... can't you hear the music? Can't you see the steps?
This is the dance done between three men who have only their shared desire to pull themselves out of their slump and have no history or, even an underlying thread of hate to spark a heated exchange between them. The dance where the steps are already laid out, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, for us to follow blindly as we all waltz each other's character's around. Predictable and slow. Every single challenger in this match is coming off of a losing streak. For Holden Ross, it's aggrieved because his partner in the self-proclaimed Best Tag Team in the World has a spiteful enmity towards me. So if Holden could just get it together enough to win the big one for once, he would gain a measure of revenge, and satisfy his partner, right? Here's the undeniable facts, we're going to dance. It's going to be a tango of sublime violence, a heartrending, nonstop waltz of pain and devastation as I make you shine brighter than ever. To beat that metaphor to it's conclusion. But Holden, I know you think of me as unimpressive. You, taking your cues from David, said you weren't scared of me, because I took my aesthetic from Rob Zombie's discography. And that is what a brainless meathead like you will never get. This identity, this look, was all given to me. I was formed long ago. I was born as if whole from a void, and shaped. I was made to be only what Jason Twisted said I was, but I finally, after years of changing and shifting, began to defy his expectations and be more than he said I could ever be. Now, I don't need the Sweeth Tooth character, I don't need to be just the ice cream truck clown, I've made my name in my own right and I've succeeded in being too big for the box other people created for me.
Can you say the same, Holden? You can not. Because you are always a lackey. When you aren't at somebody's side, your career suffers so much that you can barely scrape a win against someone who's showing up. You crawl like a whipped dog to any master's side that can stomach the breadth of your mediocrity. First it was Seromine, then it was David, and who knows how many others you've allied with? You think you're equal partners? David has every reason to view you with contempt, not the least because you've now ruined two of his little boasts about your duo stepping up to the plate and dominating. And even if you scored the biggest win of your life and pinned me to win this title, how long would it be before you lost it to someone better, if not back to me? David himself would be tripping over his own feet to reclaim his precious Crown and go back to being a King where he mattered, and it would give him reason to cheese his face in the dish yet again and smile to Kassandra Black that it proved he was better than me. Given half a chance, David Hunter will not ever help you, Holden, he will use you until you no longer provide even the slightest shake of worth and then he'll cast you to the side. And you'll continue to lose without a mentor or a boss, because you have never done what I've done. You've never stretched yourself, tried to exceed limitations, grow beyond anything. You just want to remain a Bastard.
Tyrone I don't care about, because really, what else is there to say about the man. How many times can we be subjected to his promos in the gym, training for a comeback as he talks to someone not relevant about how he's really going to try hard this time, and how he has such a history with the Underground title; he's such a staple of hardcore wrestling. I know I'VE heard that spiel from him three times now in the year and a half I've been here off and on. And yet Tyrone has never just shut up and done something about it. That's the lesson, stop talking about this being the time you push yourself to try harder and get out of your slump, stop saying this is the time you turn it all around. I've been in a void reliving nightmares for a cumulative thousand years, and yet dealing with you has been the most repetitive exercise I could ever think of.
It's that which calls to mind this entire premise. That I proved stronger than the nightmare last time around, so my tormentors are going to drop me back into the simulation to try again, see how I do this time. And what, can I say differently about Darren Hughes now that I didn't say last time, that Kyle Shane didn't say the time before that? Is Darren Hughes, now at a deficit of two losses and nothing worthwhile to say going to make an impassioned plea that he is going to get his life in order, because he needs the win and the validation? Because that's the same spiel we hear from Crazy Boy. It's been weeks, Darren, and I have to admit I'm growing bored and frustrated. The promise of your initial, cute segment has waned, and you haven't ever really shown a real sign that you were sincere in your resolve. You said first time out that you needed to step up to the plate, work harder this time around and erase the stain of the piss poor tenure from before around. But when it's all said and done, you've failed at that. You have not done any better now, and just because you weren't pinned last time doesn't give you an out. You haven't even tried. You didn't double down from the first loss and work harder, you just gave up. That isn't how you course correct your legacy. That's how you become as much a failure as Crazy Boy or Holden.
And it is why you will fail here, again. Because you all aren't seeing the bigger picture of why I rose.
Why since my return in February I have only been pinned once, and why I've claimed this Underground division as my home.
I work because I have fought through my demons and my nightmares, pushed past the shackles and limitations. I have been broken down, torn apart, forgotten and locked away at multiple tenures in my career. I have been an afterthought. I have been a henchman. I have had an embarrassing legacy of failure I wanted to fix before, so I was in many ways like all of you. But I did something about it.
I toiled through thousands of nightmares, but I walked through fire to get where I am. Nobody expected me to ever be anything more than a simpleton, an idiot, but instead I am my own man... my own monster. And now the most idiots like you can say, is you aren't afraid of me?
I don't care if you fear me. I don't care if you point out details from what I say or what I've filmed when I talk to David Hunter and whine that they're not scary and that I'm just what you've seen before. I seem familiar to you because I was given a mold to fit into, I was given multiple realities, nightmares and scenarios to live through and yet, somehow, every single time I have evolved out of them.
I am going to stay Underground Champion because I am not like you. And I've proven it to the person that has doubted me the most by powering through a million scenarios in infinite lifetimes. I proved myself more than he ever thought I could be. All the three of you have ever done is justify why people talk about you with such disdain and lack of care.
So as we begin this simulation and run through another reality in which you all attempt to break me apart, and wear me down, just remember, this match is not going to end up in my nightmare.
I am going to be yours.
