'Pushover' (looking for criticisms)
Mar 1, 2011 22:40:55 GMT -8
Post by nchaos on Mar 1, 2011 22:40:55 GMT -8
I think the ending sucks. Really, really sucks. I'm horrible at endings.
Let me know what should be fixed, what's glaringly bad, etc. It's for an anthology at the end of this month.
“Johnny…wake up, Johnny. Sleepytime’s over, my dear boy”.
Christ, he was talking already, almost before I’d even woken up…more likely, he’d been talking since I fell asleep but I had no way of knowing. What Daniel said was for my mind only, unfortunately. What I wouldn’t have given to pass him off on someone else, though.
“Johnny, it’s time to wake up. Sleep time is over, playtime is now”.
Obnoxiously chiding, his voice would’ve been cheery if not for the blatant sickness redolent in it; the subtle promise of cruelty hidden just below his forced kindness. I felt around on the side table for my pills, quiet as I could, not wanting to wake up Jessica again. My fingers closed on empty air every time. I rolled over, switched on the side lamp and found the table to be bare of anything besides the lamp and a paperback. “Son of a bitch” I muttered, technically to myself.
In my head I could hear him laughing, a self-sure and confident chuckle. I don’t need to rush, it seemed to say. We’ve got years, Johnny-boy. Years and years.
I don’t know where Daniel had come from, or why he was there, but as far as I was concerned he was an obnoxious parasite set on a path of destruction for me and everyone around me. When I started seeing him at first, I thought I was being stalked. This tall, middle-aged man in a spotless suit following me everywhere; briefly I became paranoid that I’d somehow unintentionally pissed off a Mafioso and was scheduled for a routine whacking, but when it never game my terror subsided and was replaced by an uneasy, if only vague confusion.
When Daniel started showing up in my house, I panicked. I called the cops the first few times even though all he did was stand in the corner and talk at me, never quite smiling but somehow always seeming to. It got to the point where the police department stopped responding to my calls, stopped dispatching a hapless patrolman every time something ‘went bump in the night at the old Dowers house’. I gave up asking them for help and resigned myself to terror of this inexplicable, discomforting man. Jessica finally confessed her long suspicions and pleaded with me to see a shrink, and eventually, after waking up to find Daniel leaning over me in my sleep with almost grandfatherly pride, I caved.
Stress-induced hallucinations and delusions, they said. They blamed my childhood, but doesn’t everyone nowadays? Daniel had been given an origin but still not a reason, a home without an explanation, and it did nothing to help my fears of him.
When they first prescribed me the medications, I took it almost joyfully. Anything to get rid of this stalker-thing, anything to feel normal again. And at first, nothing happened. Weeks passed, I would hear Daniel’s constant commentary at work, or while driving. I’d nearly have a heart attack when I looked up from my desk and saw him eyeing a co-worked like a starved dog, following me home in the back seat, wandering my halls at night. But after a while, it started to change. Daniel started to change.
I was asleep one night when I felt heavy hands grab hold of my shoulders, shaking me awake.
“You son of a bitch, trying to kill me are you? It figures, it really does. You try and help someone, try to show them their potential and they spit in your face. Well, my friend, I’ll not have it. I’ll convince you yet, just you wait.”
Daniel glowered down at me, his eyes somehow both calm and infuriated, his voice never rising above a quiet rumble. And yet, the lack of screaming and yelling made him all the more terrifying. The calmness, the sureness… I visited my therapist the next day, pleaded with him to up my dose. He refused, reminding me yet again that it took time for the medication to do it’s job, to work its way entirely into my system and thus cleanse my suit-wearing parasite from my mind.
From that point though, he told me, it was just a matter of keeping up with it. I hardly thought that would be a problem; if I’d have been allowed, I would’ve taken the things like dinner mints, anything to subdue that obnoxious son of a bitch.
Old Doc hadn’t figured on one thing though, and that was sleep. Maybe the medication didn’t work well enough, maybe I’m some immensely deep sleeper, or maybe Daniel was just that dedicated. I’d wake up, roll over to find the bottle and find it missing. I tore the house apart looking for it, accused Jessica of taking them, swore that someone had broken in and stolen them. A few times I found them, most often I didn’t though. After a while, the doctor started getting suspicious that I was selling them or using them recreationally, and he threatened to cut off my prescription. In the back of my mind, that quiet roiling laughter, the overpowering presence of an incredibly self-assured, cruel man.
I started waking up in different places. Sometimes I’d be in the
kitchen, sometimes the living room. A few times I woke up in the car with a list of names and a map in my hand, never knowing who or why. Once I woke up in a nearby park, a heavy kitchen knife tucked neatly into my jacket. Never in my life had I sleep walked, had never been plagued by unusual nightmares. Now, I was waking up out of my bed at least twice a week, usually armed with a weapon of some sort. Jessica threatened to start locking me in, and I almost wanted her to. If not out of the terror at being literally locked alone with him (instead of just locked within my own head), I would’ve gladly bought the chains and padlocks for her.
While at work one day, one of my supervisors began to chastise me for my constant deadline evasion. In the back of my mind, I could feel Daniel raising his head, popping his knuckles, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“Johnny, look at him. He’s weak. Far weaker than you, and yet he’s got the audacity to nit pick at you like this. Kill him, Johnny. He’s inferior. He’s minor. He’s pathetic. Kill him and you’ll be free.”
I shut my eyes, ground my fists into my temples and prayed for Andrew to finish his tirade and get away. But of course, it only antagonized him. I was ‘ignoring’ him, I was ‘avoiding the problem’. He got louder, closer, more agitated and I felt something inside my head welling, seeping out from it’s lockbox and infecting everywhere else. From behind me, Daniel’s voice again.
“Kill him before I make you, Johnny. It is all about personal choice, you know, but don’t think that’ll stop me from getting my way. Kill him. Kill him.”
The chant repeated over and over, somehow both monotonous and raging, his fingers digging into my shoulders like bony spiders. I shook my head, swung my arm and tried to force him away. Andrew stared at me in a mixture of confusion and maybe disgust, shook his head and commented that I was using this whole ‘crazy thing’ as an excuse to be a slacker.
“KILL HIM” Daniel shrieked in my ear and I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw myself at Andrew, clenching my eyes shut and beating blindly, raining down impact on the man, screaming in desperation to drown out Daniel’s voice. Someone yelled for security, Andrew tried to get his arms up to deflect the blows, and somewhere out of everyone else’s reach I heard a man laughing.
I was never convicted of anything, due to my ‘mental state’, but I was fired and more or less restricted to my house. Jessica took up all the shopping, filed my unemployment, tried to get me on welfare for my ‘disability’. Disability…I felt like it mocked me, and Daniel knew it. I wasn’t disabled. I was a healthy, 24 year old man with a mental problem that should have been under control. It was the other way around, though. Me being the one under it’s control. Daniel’s control.
He started to whisper to me of his ‘plans’, though he never explained them. For all of his apparent intelligence, Daniel was like a rabid animal or a cruel child with a gun; not really thinking, not really planning, just searching out the nearest possible target. When I rode the bus to therapy, he was seated next to me, pointing people out. “That one, you could take her and no one would ever know. Nobody would miss her” He would almost plead to me, and in his lawyer’s voice it would almost sound logical. It would almost sound enjoyable, but I forced it away. I tried to shut him out, tried to avoid him but couldn’t. You can only run from yourself for so long, and sleep is when all defenses seem to be rendered null and void.
My dreams became nothing more than Daniel screaming at me, begging to me, coercing me to do his work. He never gave me a reason, simply told me that I’d understand when I picked it up, as if the knife would explain to me why it belonged in someone’s chest; as if the young man he’s pointed at would calmly tell me why he deserved my hands around his throat. I couldn’t find any sense in any of it, didn’t understand why this Daniel was fixated on me; of why he’d been created in or for me. I wasn’t a violent man, I had no real problems with people on the whole. I just wanted to live my life with as little issue as possible-which, apparently, was becoming an issue.
The point where things began to seriously worry me was when I woke up to find myself standing over Jessica in her sleep, Daniels hands at my shoulders again, pushing me forward ever so lightly.
“Look at her, Johnny. She runs your life for you. She holds you prisoner in your own house! No man should be a prisoner, Johnny.”
One hand dropped and he pressed a knife into my hand, curling my fingers around it.
“I feels natural, doesn’t it my dear boy? Like it belongs there?”
I shook my head, trying to shake him away but his hand stayed tight at my shoulder. Seemingly in response, his fingers clenched down hard. I could almost see his face tightening, his teeth grinding together.
“Do it before I force you to, Johnny. Don’t make me take control of things, you wouldn’t like the direction we’d head into. No, you wouldn’t like it at all.”
With every ounce of strength left in me I shrugged hard, and it still wasn’t enough. Physical strength means nothing when the monster at your back is really in your head. His fingers stayed clamped onto my shoulder, digging at the bone. I felt myself shaking and looked down at Jessica, the woman who’d stayed beside me through all of this, the one who’d taken up the responsibilities I was apparently no longer fit to carry. I wished for her to wake up, tried to make noise to wake her, prayed for any kind of miraculous intercession.
Nothing came. There was nothing but the presence of pure viciousness behind me, the weight of the knife in my hand, and my absolute terror of what would happen next.
Without warning, Daniel shoved me hard against the wall. The knife came at my throat, holding tight there as he leaned in close to me. Absently I wondered how silly this must look, me with a knife to my own throat. I wondered what Jessica would do if she woke up now, if she would run or fight me for that knife. I hoped fear would kick in for the first time in her life, that she would run out of the house and leave me to my demons.
“You ungrateful little shit” Daniel spat, his face almost imperceptible in the dark. I questioned how the hell something that technically didn’t exist could have such bad breath, how the hell I could feel him practically vibrating with rage against me. I wondered how I could live through this, and feared that the answer wouldn’t be one I wanted to hear.
“I can give you things you can’t even imagine, Johnny. All I’m asking is that you do a bit of work for me, is that so much to ask from you? IS IT?”
I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t face his unnaturally dead looking eyes, nor could I reason why he’d look the way he did. His face looked tight across his skull, his lips peeling back from yellowed teeth like cracked leather. He never moved, just held me against the wall somehow completely motionless. He dropped the knife, glaring at me.
“You’ll come over eventually, Johnny-boy. I’ve got all the time in the world. How much longer do you really think you’ll hold out?”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw him wink at me. Daniel stepped casually through the wall behind me and left me standing in the dark, even more confused than I’d been.
Daniel didn’t show up again for a few days, which worried me. I’d grown so accustomed to his near constant leering, threatening presence that the absence of it actually made me more nervous. I feared what would happen when he returned. I worried that he’d show back up, worse than ever, starving for whatever destruction it was that he seemed to crave.
I stopped taking the medications, questioning if they’d ever truly worked in the first place. I doubted my doctor’s diagnoses, filtered through countless webpages on mental diseases and disorders and abnormalities, and still couldn’t make sense of him. Some deeper, baser part of my mind started whispering ‘Maybe it’s not you, John. Maybe it IS an external thing. And inexplicable and nonsensical one, but maybe this isn’t on you’.
I pushed that voice aside, pushed on through pointless research and almost managed to forget about it. Still, I questioned myself though. If I truly was crazy, would I know? Certainly if I was delusional, I wouldn’t be bothered by the delusions…would I?
I spoke to Jessica less each day, stopped answering the phone and eventually began to lock myself in my home office more and more. I wanted to be alone, to wait for Daniel’s reappearance. I wanted to talk to him privately, to beg of him these answers I needed desperately, to avoid the constant barrage of questions from concerned onlookers. I stopped caring.
After two weeks of near silence and avoidance, Daniel came back. He stepped through the wall and over the couch I’d been lying on, sat on the edge of it and steepled his fingers.
“Well, Johnny. It’s been a while hasn’t it?”
For the first time in two weeks, I felt a calm settling over me and nodded. “Why’ve you been gone?”
Daniel lifted a little shrug, the ghost of a smile hiding somewhere in his features. His filmy eyes seemed to glimmer, his outlines seemed to twitch. “I was giving you time, my boy. Time to reconsider, time to plan, personal time.”
I nodded. I was beginning to understand. I had been asking too many questions, had been assuming too much. Maybe Daniel was in for my best interest, maybe he was right. After all, why else would he get so vehemently angry when I refused to listen? Surely it would be frustrating as hell trying to convince someone of their best interest when they wouldn’t even hear you out.
So, I let Daniel talk. I let him explain himself and while some of it went over my head, I got the general gist of it all.
And I realized, Daniel was right. Some things you needed to do didn’t always make sense at first. A lot of things that happened in general didn’t make sense until far after the fact, and only then could you look back and puzzle things out. I had a strong feeling that whatever Daniel was gearing me towards was something like that. So we talked. And planned.
I walked into my own bedroom for the first time in two days, an
alien calmness pulsating through me. I almost had to laugh at myself for neglecting Daniel’s better judgment. Jessica’s eyes came open as my hands settled around her neck, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. I could feel her throat convulsing beneath my hands, her expression shifting from confusion to terror to rage. Her legs bucked, her hands beat at mine wildly, and still it was pointless.
I squeezed harder, pushing my weight into it. The choked wheezing quieted, her eyes focused on something distant behind me and she was gone.
I looked around behind me for Daniel but he wasn’t there. I went back to my office to find it empty as well. Had I done it wrong? Had it been too quick and painless? I tore through the house, calling his name, reminding him that we still had work to do. I was greeted by silence, by shadows and looming doorways. I screamed his name, banging on the walls.
And then it dawned on me that this was a test. Daniel needed to know that I had the drive, that I wasn’t just relying on him. I took up one of the kitchen knives and walked across the street, certain that he’d be out there waiting and watching from some well-hidden vantage point.
This time around, I didn’t strangle them. I stabbed them both for Daniel, absolutely certain that this would be much better and definitely more impressive to him. Mr. Gage went down fast, barely having time to wake up before I drove the kitchen knife into his stomach. Mrs. Gage, however, had the common sense to run and I chased her into the bathroom before finally getting hold of her long enough to use the knife.
She screamed at first and for a split-second I feared someone would hear, but I continued. Daniel needed commitment, Daniel needed dedication. I stabbed her countless times, working her further into the corner between the sink and the toilet.
When I was positive she was dead, I went back into the living room expecting to find Daniel. And again, he was nowhere to be found. I was beginning to panic, maybe this wasn’t what he’d been asking me. Maybe he’d wanted something worse, something sicker, something more terrible?
And then I remembered something.
The Keller family a few houses down had just had a baby.
Certainly that’d been Daniel’s big goal, the big challenge, the final lap. I headed down the street, knife still in hand, trailing Mrs. Gage’s blood down the sidewalk. Someone called after me but it wasn’t Daniel, so I didn’t bother with it. There were lights, someone was screaming. None of it mattered, I was on a mission, and I was dedicated.
I felt a sudden pain in my chest and forgot what I was doing, where I was heading. The pain expanded, like heartburn from hell and I looked down. The sidewalk began to get fuzzy and my legs apparently decided to stop working. I hit the pavement, rolled to my side and finally realized the incredible amount of pain I was in. Surely I hadn’t gotten this much blood on me from the Gages? Who was yelling? Where the fuck was Daniel?
Let me know what should be fixed, what's glaringly bad, etc. It's for an anthology at the end of this month.
“Johnny…wake up, Johnny. Sleepytime’s over, my dear boy”.
Christ, he was talking already, almost before I’d even woken up…more likely, he’d been talking since I fell asleep but I had no way of knowing. What Daniel said was for my mind only, unfortunately. What I wouldn’t have given to pass him off on someone else, though.
“Johnny, it’s time to wake up. Sleep time is over, playtime is now”.
Obnoxiously chiding, his voice would’ve been cheery if not for the blatant sickness redolent in it; the subtle promise of cruelty hidden just below his forced kindness. I felt around on the side table for my pills, quiet as I could, not wanting to wake up Jessica again. My fingers closed on empty air every time. I rolled over, switched on the side lamp and found the table to be bare of anything besides the lamp and a paperback. “Son of a bitch” I muttered, technically to myself.
In my head I could hear him laughing, a self-sure and confident chuckle. I don’t need to rush, it seemed to say. We’ve got years, Johnny-boy. Years and years.
I don’t know where Daniel had come from, or why he was there, but as far as I was concerned he was an obnoxious parasite set on a path of destruction for me and everyone around me. When I started seeing him at first, I thought I was being stalked. This tall, middle-aged man in a spotless suit following me everywhere; briefly I became paranoid that I’d somehow unintentionally pissed off a Mafioso and was scheduled for a routine whacking, but when it never game my terror subsided and was replaced by an uneasy, if only vague confusion.
When Daniel started showing up in my house, I panicked. I called the cops the first few times even though all he did was stand in the corner and talk at me, never quite smiling but somehow always seeming to. It got to the point where the police department stopped responding to my calls, stopped dispatching a hapless patrolman every time something ‘went bump in the night at the old Dowers house’. I gave up asking them for help and resigned myself to terror of this inexplicable, discomforting man. Jessica finally confessed her long suspicions and pleaded with me to see a shrink, and eventually, after waking up to find Daniel leaning over me in my sleep with almost grandfatherly pride, I caved.
Stress-induced hallucinations and delusions, they said. They blamed my childhood, but doesn’t everyone nowadays? Daniel had been given an origin but still not a reason, a home without an explanation, and it did nothing to help my fears of him.
When they first prescribed me the medications, I took it almost joyfully. Anything to get rid of this stalker-thing, anything to feel normal again. And at first, nothing happened. Weeks passed, I would hear Daniel’s constant commentary at work, or while driving. I’d nearly have a heart attack when I looked up from my desk and saw him eyeing a co-worked like a starved dog, following me home in the back seat, wandering my halls at night. But after a while, it started to change. Daniel started to change.
I was asleep one night when I felt heavy hands grab hold of my shoulders, shaking me awake.
“You son of a bitch, trying to kill me are you? It figures, it really does. You try and help someone, try to show them their potential and they spit in your face. Well, my friend, I’ll not have it. I’ll convince you yet, just you wait.”
Daniel glowered down at me, his eyes somehow both calm and infuriated, his voice never rising above a quiet rumble. And yet, the lack of screaming and yelling made him all the more terrifying. The calmness, the sureness… I visited my therapist the next day, pleaded with him to up my dose. He refused, reminding me yet again that it took time for the medication to do it’s job, to work its way entirely into my system and thus cleanse my suit-wearing parasite from my mind.
From that point though, he told me, it was just a matter of keeping up with it. I hardly thought that would be a problem; if I’d have been allowed, I would’ve taken the things like dinner mints, anything to subdue that obnoxious son of a bitch.
Old Doc hadn’t figured on one thing though, and that was sleep. Maybe the medication didn’t work well enough, maybe I’m some immensely deep sleeper, or maybe Daniel was just that dedicated. I’d wake up, roll over to find the bottle and find it missing. I tore the house apart looking for it, accused Jessica of taking them, swore that someone had broken in and stolen them. A few times I found them, most often I didn’t though. After a while, the doctor started getting suspicious that I was selling them or using them recreationally, and he threatened to cut off my prescription. In the back of my mind, that quiet roiling laughter, the overpowering presence of an incredibly self-assured, cruel man.
I started waking up in different places. Sometimes I’d be in the
kitchen, sometimes the living room. A few times I woke up in the car with a list of names and a map in my hand, never knowing who or why. Once I woke up in a nearby park, a heavy kitchen knife tucked neatly into my jacket. Never in my life had I sleep walked, had never been plagued by unusual nightmares. Now, I was waking up out of my bed at least twice a week, usually armed with a weapon of some sort. Jessica threatened to start locking me in, and I almost wanted her to. If not out of the terror at being literally locked alone with him (instead of just locked within my own head), I would’ve gladly bought the chains and padlocks for her.
While at work one day, one of my supervisors began to chastise me for my constant deadline evasion. In the back of my mind, I could feel Daniel raising his head, popping his knuckles, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“Johnny, look at him. He’s weak. Far weaker than you, and yet he’s got the audacity to nit pick at you like this. Kill him, Johnny. He’s inferior. He’s minor. He’s pathetic. Kill him and you’ll be free.”
I shut my eyes, ground my fists into my temples and prayed for Andrew to finish his tirade and get away. But of course, it only antagonized him. I was ‘ignoring’ him, I was ‘avoiding the problem’. He got louder, closer, more agitated and I felt something inside my head welling, seeping out from it’s lockbox and infecting everywhere else. From behind me, Daniel’s voice again.
“Kill him before I make you, Johnny. It is all about personal choice, you know, but don’t think that’ll stop me from getting my way. Kill him. Kill him.”
The chant repeated over and over, somehow both monotonous and raging, his fingers digging into my shoulders like bony spiders. I shook my head, swung my arm and tried to force him away. Andrew stared at me in a mixture of confusion and maybe disgust, shook his head and commented that I was using this whole ‘crazy thing’ as an excuse to be a slacker.
“KILL HIM” Daniel shrieked in my ear and I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw myself at Andrew, clenching my eyes shut and beating blindly, raining down impact on the man, screaming in desperation to drown out Daniel’s voice. Someone yelled for security, Andrew tried to get his arms up to deflect the blows, and somewhere out of everyone else’s reach I heard a man laughing.
I was never convicted of anything, due to my ‘mental state’, but I was fired and more or less restricted to my house. Jessica took up all the shopping, filed my unemployment, tried to get me on welfare for my ‘disability’. Disability…I felt like it mocked me, and Daniel knew it. I wasn’t disabled. I was a healthy, 24 year old man with a mental problem that should have been under control. It was the other way around, though. Me being the one under it’s control. Daniel’s control.
He started to whisper to me of his ‘plans’, though he never explained them. For all of his apparent intelligence, Daniel was like a rabid animal or a cruel child with a gun; not really thinking, not really planning, just searching out the nearest possible target. When I rode the bus to therapy, he was seated next to me, pointing people out. “That one, you could take her and no one would ever know. Nobody would miss her” He would almost plead to me, and in his lawyer’s voice it would almost sound logical. It would almost sound enjoyable, but I forced it away. I tried to shut him out, tried to avoid him but couldn’t. You can only run from yourself for so long, and sleep is when all defenses seem to be rendered null and void.
My dreams became nothing more than Daniel screaming at me, begging to me, coercing me to do his work. He never gave me a reason, simply told me that I’d understand when I picked it up, as if the knife would explain to me why it belonged in someone’s chest; as if the young man he’s pointed at would calmly tell me why he deserved my hands around his throat. I couldn’t find any sense in any of it, didn’t understand why this Daniel was fixated on me; of why he’d been created in or for me. I wasn’t a violent man, I had no real problems with people on the whole. I just wanted to live my life with as little issue as possible-which, apparently, was becoming an issue.
The point where things began to seriously worry me was when I woke up to find myself standing over Jessica in her sleep, Daniels hands at my shoulders again, pushing me forward ever so lightly.
“Look at her, Johnny. She runs your life for you. She holds you prisoner in your own house! No man should be a prisoner, Johnny.”
One hand dropped and he pressed a knife into my hand, curling my fingers around it.
“I feels natural, doesn’t it my dear boy? Like it belongs there?”
I shook my head, trying to shake him away but his hand stayed tight at my shoulder. Seemingly in response, his fingers clenched down hard. I could almost see his face tightening, his teeth grinding together.
“Do it before I force you to, Johnny. Don’t make me take control of things, you wouldn’t like the direction we’d head into. No, you wouldn’t like it at all.”
With every ounce of strength left in me I shrugged hard, and it still wasn’t enough. Physical strength means nothing when the monster at your back is really in your head. His fingers stayed clamped onto my shoulder, digging at the bone. I felt myself shaking and looked down at Jessica, the woman who’d stayed beside me through all of this, the one who’d taken up the responsibilities I was apparently no longer fit to carry. I wished for her to wake up, tried to make noise to wake her, prayed for any kind of miraculous intercession.
Nothing came. There was nothing but the presence of pure viciousness behind me, the weight of the knife in my hand, and my absolute terror of what would happen next.
Without warning, Daniel shoved me hard against the wall. The knife came at my throat, holding tight there as he leaned in close to me. Absently I wondered how silly this must look, me with a knife to my own throat. I wondered what Jessica would do if she woke up now, if she would run or fight me for that knife. I hoped fear would kick in for the first time in her life, that she would run out of the house and leave me to my demons.
“You ungrateful little shit” Daniel spat, his face almost imperceptible in the dark. I questioned how the hell something that technically didn’t exist could have such bad breath, how the hell I could feel him practically vibrating with rage against me. I wondered how I could live through this, and feared that the answer wouldn’t be one I wanted to hear.
“I can give you things you can’t even imagine, Johnny. All I’m asking is that you do a bit of work for me, is that so much to ask from you? IS IT?”
I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t face his unnaturally dead looking eyes, nor could I reason why he’d look the way he did. His face looked tight across his skull, his lips peeling back from yellowed teeth like cracked leather. He never moved, just held me against the wall somehow completely motionless. He dropped the knife, glaring at me.
“You’ll come over eventually, Johnny-boy. I’ve got all the time in the world. How much longer do you really think you’ll hold out?”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw him wink at me. Daniel stepped casually through the wall behind me and left me standing in the dark, even more confused than I’d been.
Daniel didn’t show up again for a few days, which worried me. I’d grown so accustomed to his near constant leering, threatening presence that the absence of it actually made me more nervous. I feared what would happen when he returned. I worried that he’d show back up, worse than ever, starving for whatever destruction it was that he seemed to crave.
I stopped taking the medications, questioning if they’d ever truly worked in the first place. I doubted my doctor’s diagnoses, filtered through countless webpages on mental diseases and disorders and abnormalities, and still couldn’t make sense of him. Some deeper, baser part of my mind started whispering ‘Maybe it’s not you, John. Maybe it IS an external thing. And inexplicable and nonsensical one, but maybe this isn’t on you’.
I pushed that voice aside, pushed on through pointless research and almost managed to forget about it. Still, I questioned myself though. If I truly was crazy, would I know? Certainly if I was delusional, I wouldn’t be bothered by the delusions…would I?
I spoke to Jessica less each day, stopped answering the phone and eventually began to lock myself in my home office more and more. I wanted to be alone, to wait for Daniel’s reappearance. I wanted to talk to him privately, to beg of him these answers I needed desperately, to avoid the constant barrage of questions from concerned onlookers. I stopped caring.
After two weeks of near silence and avoidance, Daniel came back. He stepped through the wall and over the couch I’d been lying on, sat on the edge of it and steepled his fingers.
“Well, Johnny. It’s been a while hasn’t it?”
For the first time in two weeks, I felt a calm settling over me and nodded. “Why’ve you been gone?”
Daniel lifted a little shrug, the ghost of a smile hiding somewhere in his features. His filmy eyes seemed to glimmer, his outlines seemed to twitch. “I was giving you time, my boy. Time to reconsider, time to plan, personal time.”
I nodded. I was beginning to understand. I had been asking too many questions, had been assuming too much. Maybe Daniel was in for my best interest, maybe he was right. After all, why else would he get so vehemently angry when I refused to listen? Surely it would be frustrating as hell trying to convince someone of their best interest when they wouldn’t even hear you out.
So, I let Daniel talk. I let him explain himself and while some of it went over my head, I got the general gist of it all.
And I realized, Daniel was right. Some things you needed to do didn’t always make sense at first. A lot of things that happened in general didn’t make sense until far after the fact, and only then could you look back and puzzle things out. I had a strong feeling that whatever Daniel was gearing me towards was something like that. So we talked. And planned.
I walked into my own bedroom for the first time in two days, an
alien calmness pulsating through me. I almost had to laugh at myself for neglecting Daniel’s better judgment. Jessica’s eyes came open as my hands settled around her neck, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. I could feel her throat convulsing beneath my hands, her expression shifting from confusion to terror to rage. Her legs bucked, her hands beat at mine wildly, and still it was pointless.
I squeezed harder, pushing my weight into it. The choked wheezing quieted, her eyes focused on something distant behind me and she was gone.
I looked around behind me for Daniel but he wasn’t there. I went back to my office to find it empty as well. Had I done it wrong? Had it been too quick and painless? I tore through the house, calling his name, reminding him that we still had work to do. I was greeted by silence, by shadows and looming doorways. I screamed his name, banging on the walls.
And then it dawned on me that this was a test. Daniel needed to know that I had the drive, that I wasn’t just relying on him. I took up one of the kitchen knives and walked across the street, certain that he’d be out there waiting and watching from some well-hidden vantage point.
This time around, I didn’t strangle them. I stabbed them both for Daniel, absolutely certain that this would be much better and definitely more impressive to him. Mr. Gage went down fast, barely having time to wake up before I drove the kitchen knife into his stomach. Mrs. Gage, however, had the common sense to run and I chased her into the bathroom before finally getting hold of her long enough to use the knife.
She screamed at first and for a split-second I feared someone would hear, but I continued. Daniel needed commitment, Daniel needed dedication. I stabbed her countless times, working her further into the corner between the sink and the toilet.
When I was positive she was dead, I went back into the living room expecting to find Daniel. And again, he was nowhere to be found. I was beginning to panic, maybe this wasn’t what he’d been asking me. Maybe he’d wanted something worse, something sicker, something more terrible?
And then I remembered something.
The Keller family a few houses down had just had a baby.
Certainly that’d been Daniel’s big goal, the big challenge, the final lap. I headed down the street, knife still in hand, trailing Mrs. Gage’s blood down the sidewalk. Someone called after me but it wasn’t Daniel, so I didn’t bother with it. There were lights, someone was screaming. None of it mattered, I was on a mission, and I was dedicated.
I felt a sudden pain in my chest and forgot what I was doing, where I was heading. The pain expanded, like heartburn from hell and I looked down. The sidewalk began to get fuzzy and my legs apparently decided to stop working. I hit the pavement, rolled to my side and finally realized the incredible amount of pain I was in. Surely I hadn’t gotten this much blood on me from the Gages? Who was yelling? Where the fuck was Daniel?
