Beyond Perdition, page 12
‘Thank God it’s the weekend’, one said, kicking his polished loafers under his bed.
‘You going home?’ Asked another
‘Nah parents are in Paris for two weeks, cheaper to keep me here.’
The chatter continued, only the bookish Billy not contributing.
Mrs Bachlom marched in, her nun’s habit an intense black like a shawl of shadows. She carried a cane which she flourished with maniacal pride relishing the swishing sound it made as it cut through the air. Her eyes, a feline green, possibly achieved by contacts, flashed through the muted interior light.
Outside Dusk had descended over the ground elongating the shadows of the elms populating the courtyard. A wild wind whistled through the archways and alcoves of the Victorian building sounding like a disgruntled spirit haunting its eternal abode. In the same disturbing way, Mrs Bachlom’s presence was just as haunting, just as disconcerting. She stood in silence, just those eucalyptus peepers drilling through the semi gloom. Only Mason and Paulie knew the reason behind the deepened frown lines and her stoic muteness. Only they knew what devilish punishment she was concocting as her sight moved studiously from bed to bed, face to face.
‘Which one of you little sprites has been in my office?’ She spoke quietly but at the same time accusingly. Her eyes continued to scan like a Marksman’s sight as he aimed his rifle.
No one answered, most were confused. Paulie’s face had lost its fiery red and was ghostly white.
‘Someone here has trashed my office. Someone here will be facing criminal proceedings so speak up or by God, I’ll have the whole lot of you punished.’
A palpable tension accompanied the collective quietude, the only punctuating sound the turning of pages as Billy refused to look from his latest read. Paulie began to shake. Rivulets of perspiration ran freely from his brow. Mason shot him a glance, a ‘shut up and don’t squeal’-look but it was to no avail. Paulie’s mouth began to tremble as the urge to speak climaxed.
‘It was Mason’, he blurted, the relief obvious on his face.’
Mrs Bachlom’s accusatory glare moved precisely to her new target. The cane slapped her open palm so hard it caused red welts on her skin. Her face had not changed, her perpetual colic look had only intensified, the frustration lines now so deep they were three dimensional. She crossed the room with preternatural speed at the same time grabbing Mason’s earlobe and wrenching him forward.
It was around eight in the evening when Mason was on his knees on the linoleum, brushing away the plaque-like dirt from the cracks in the tiles. He had forty square feet to clean and already the toothbrush’s bristles were weak and splayed, threatening to wilt and fall away but something kept him scrubbing. It wasn’t the fear of Mrs Bachlom and her cursed cane but an overpowering urge to make the whole place sparkle. Everywhere, he could see specks of dirt, streaks of something crisscrossing the tiling like a germy lattice work of bacteria. No matter how hard he scrubbed, the dirt would not shift. He had made a little progress in an area no bigger than a Parisian paving slab but beyond that, the room was alive with virulent germs teasing him with high-pitched squeals and the tiny pattering of insectoid feet. It would be twelve hours and three brush tips later before he would finish.
3
Masons’ eyelids opened like a fleshly theatre curtain. A glaring, disorientating white flooded his vision and the familiar antiseptic smell entered his consciousness with equal vividness. At first, he could only see the walls of children’s pictures, crayon stick men with disproportionate heads and smudged limbs, only something was different. These crayoned figures were no longer remaining static within their paper borders but were moving animatedly from stapled sheet to stapled sheet. A blue-headed man was lowering himself from under a smiling sun and into the wiggling lines of the sea. An overly tall man with twigs for legs was climbing up into an area of semi-circles and incomplete rectangles.
Mason went to sit up but found his hands and ankles shackled once again. Slowly the memories of the clown holding the dentist drill returned. He instinctively stared towards his feet, acutely aware that he no longer felt any pain there. As he began theorising on his situation, trying desperately to make sense of it all, the clown returned, stepping with comically large strides across the Dentist’s office. He raised one white-gloved hand and with a pronged finger gestured for silence. The depressed mouth lines had been inverted into a creepy, unnerving smile. His mascara-edged eyes were larger than Mason recalled, looking now like some children’s Japanese anime. Mason could see himself reflected in the gleam of the marble-like irises; his terrified expression framed by the black cosmetic lines.
The clown approached the tabled tools and ceremoniously fondled the metal instruments. They had changed, no longer were they Dentist’s’ implements but an array of medieval weaponry. A scythe, a mace, even a gauntlet, its studs gleaming. He picked up a curved blade and walked slowly towards Mason’s midsection. Suspending the point teasingly over the taut flesh of the abdomen he lowered the blade and relished the plucking sound it made as it pierced the skin. Mason screamed as arterial plumes shot out in crimson fountains, spattering the pictured wall, the bar-lighting and the floor. The pain was so severe, he could feel the darkness returning, pulling him slowly away from the clown and his heinous instruments.
***
The Bible made no sense however many times Mason read over the highlighted passages of John’s gospel. Mrs Bachlom had appointed herself adjudicator and was walking silently between the desks, checking no one was cheating on this weeks’ theology test. Mason knew that another blank page or childish doodle would have him re-scrubbing the lavatories and yet, right now, this was an inviting thought like water after a long run. He waited until she was within eyeshot and began to scrawl the extended oval of a large scrotum complete with bulbous balls. He began to add a tracery of veins and spouts of pubic hair before scribbling an overarching line of dots to represent the ejaculate.
He could hear Mrs Bachlom’s heeled approach. She grabbed the sheet, took one cursory look and screwed the whole thing up. Before Mason could object, having wished he could have completed the shading along the shaft. She grabbed him, once again by the earlobe directing him towards the door. The others in the class watched with enraptured awe. Paulie retracted his gaze and stared at his answer sheet, last week’s office debacle was enough for now.
Mason was once again in the boy’s room, the lemony smell of the urinals overpowering. A fresh track of muddy markings had been trekked through in a deliberate line to the nearest stall and back out again like footprints in the snow. The dirt appeared to bubble and froth as if it were acidic. Suddenly Mason’s measly looking toothbrush didn’t look adequate, like asking to pick up the fallen pine needles of a Christmas tree with a toothpick. No sooner had he knelt down to scrub did he wake up, the leering moon-white face of the clown leaning over him.
***
The clown’s mouth was agape and something was emerging from his maw. First a set of long furry legs like art shop-craft straws, then a hairy oval topped by multiple eyes and mandibles. No sooner had the large arachnid freed itself from the clown’s mouth, it dropped onto Mason’s face with an audible clonk. The legs were light and ticklish like stray eyelashes. It scuttled from chin to septum, feeling out the nose as an unwanted obstruction. At the same time, the ribbed body of giant worm slithered over the clown’s rouge lips and onto Mason’s face. Unlike the spider, it remained still, coiled into a tight ball just atop the lips, tasting both bitter and earthy.
Mason tried not to scream, not to let the worm slither in but he had to gasp for air and as he did so, the slick body eased itself passed his teeth onto his tongue triggering the gagging reflex. In the brief struggle, Mason hadn’t noticed that the clown had gone and his restraints though still tight had been loosened slightly. With renewed hope he struggled with the clasps, forcibly retracting his wrists and ankles until they popped free. With his unfettered hand, he swatted away the creatures taking residence on his face and sat up. The pictures on the walls had stopped moving, with little evidence they ever had. The clown was nowhere to be seen, just the model skeleton hung like a cheap Halloween prop in the corner.
Despite everything, there were no marks on his feet or abdomen. The pain had vanished leaving only the vivid memories of the clown wielding his tools maniacally. A door led out of the Dentist’s office but to what, he didn’t know. Fighting with the new restraints of fear-induced inertia Mason stole towards the exit. A long passage stretched out before him with curtained doorways on either side. Strips of translucent plastic formed a clouded window into the rooms beyond. Mason could hear screams cut off abruptly and then suddenly reignited. He crept cautiously passed the first plastic partition, chancing a sideways glance through the misted runners.
There was a man, stripped of his clothes suspended by the back of his head on a dangling meat hook. At his feet were bearded men, the size of children each thrusting a sharp implement into the man’s abdomen and laughing raucously. They continued to do this even after he had ceased struggling and the rivulets of blood had ceased flowing. As seconds passed the man’s wounds disappeared much to the figure’s delight as they continued to stab, opening up fresh lesions in the man’s exposed flesh. The blood had hardly time to congeal before the wounds vanished and the process began afresh.
Mason’s concentration was cut off by piercing, disembodied laughter. It invoked images of the clown breaking his own code of silence and taunting him as he selected more of the tools of torture, those gloved fingers dancing over the shining instruments. More and more of the curtained doorways appeared on the left and the right but Mason didn’t slow to see what lay beyond. His eyes were instead set on what he assumed to be the exit directly ahead.
A pair of double doors swung open with barely a touch. He was outside, gulping in fresh mouthfuls of air. He was aware of a coolness to his surroundings but it was somehow comforting compared to the stifling interior heat which had once enveloped him. He looked back expecting to see some kind of building from which he had left but there was no such sight. Instead, stood ominously from a nest of roots, was a large oak. Its leafless branches formed a spidery network of limbs, its rough bark glistened with sap oozing from nodules in the wood. Its broad bough was accompanied by a battalion of other trees all equally spaced like the vegetation of a secondary forest. The floor was littered in the parchment wraps of dead leaves and mud sodden twigs. Gullies and ruts scarred the ground. Unmanaged briar and undergrowth in the form of barbed thistles and spiked holly seemed to sprout from the pores of the earth and in themselves created a naturalistic pathway through the woodland.
4
There was a noticeable absence of birdsong as if the volume had been muted, leaving only his exasperated breaths and the crunching of the brush underfoot. With no immediate destination and driven by only dread, Mason moved between the pillared trunks and over the undulating ground. He had vague memories of the gardens outside his boarding school. How he and Paulie would often hide out and avoid lectures pouring instead over glossy adult mags stolen from the confiscated-items drawer in Mrs Bachlom’s office. It was a time before he knew the touch of a woman and saw the unshaven ‘goddesses’ as just that, heavenly, unattainable deities, there to tease and entice. The articles depicted them as lovers of foreplay and kinky sex games but at this point, they were just words, presently indefinable. He could remember wondering why his own mother didn’t look like the women on the sticky pages, their legs splayed open, their hands supporting pleasingly disproportionate boobs.
These strange feelings had only ever resurfaced in intense therapy sessions as Psychologists tried to combine childhood memories with intricate Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to address his obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It had been years of unearthing repressed memories and taking Vicoden to repress them once again. Now, under the leafless canopy, he could recall all those unwanted, twisted sexual thoughts. As he remembered once doing, they presented themselves in an intrusive manner, like Demons rising out of the subconscious and attacking the lucid areas of the brain. He shook his head violently until every last remnant of those thoughts had dissipated. Instead, his mind was occupied with obsessive thoughts of germs, of airborne, virulent bacteria inadvertently penetrating his pores.
There was a reason why he had stopped visiting the forested gardens of his boarding school, a reason why he no longer sought comfort in the glades or the copses away from the other students. It was like another sense had been granted to him. It was as if, through some supernatural vision, he could now see the bacterial world, the microscopic menaces inhabiting every corner of existence. The slow slithering microbes, the dancing creatures, the foreign bodies that - though invisible to everyone else - were now parading in front of him as clear as the nude models in the pornographic magazines. He saw those same dancing Demons now emerging silently from the briar crawling in droves over the aged bark of the oaks and the cedars.
He broke into a run, his feet dodging the millipede monsters, his arms flaying against the winged adversaries. The forest was alive with germs; from every angle, they encroached with malicious intent. This was worse than the moon-faced clown than the searching pronged fingers or the tiny bearded dwarves poking and prodding incessantly, this was so much worse. There was a relentlessness to his pursuers, like swarms of angry hornets dominating the skyline.
It was a painful stitch in his intercostal muscle which bought him to a halt. He gasped for air, wincing as lactic acid engulfed his quads and calves. He was aware of goosebumps on his flesh as a coldness much more intense than the previous diurnal chill enveloped him. He would, and this was an unwanted realisation, have to set up camp for the night and find some way of protecting himself from the organic threat.
Gathering himself, his breath no longer the sharp intakes of air, his heart no more the pounding fist inside his chest cavity, he began to rationalise his situation. It was at first a mere exercise in remembering ‘The Survivalists’ programs on TV. The presenter, his name escaping him presently, lecturing on the importance of building some semblance of shelter. Creating warmth by producing fire and eventually, if required, locating a drinkable freshwater source. It harked back to the lessons taught in therapy about Maslow’s Hierarchy, the essentials to survival, to existence itself.
There was no obvious material for a shelter. No large palm leaves or ferns or vines to tie branches together. Even digging a latrine seemed to be an impossible task, the earth hard and impenetrable. All the time the darkness continued to descend, a curtain drawing over the scene concluding the day and ushering in the night. Eventually, Mason had managed a crude teepee, the larger twigs from the lower sections of the oaks dug in like tent pegs. Mathematically speaking or geometrically speaking, right now he wasn’t sure which, the triangle was the strongest structure in existence but Mason was uncertain that the integrity of his makeshift tent would hold against a harsh wind. Still, as the cold increased, he was glad to sit under the branches, upright like a Buddhist monk in cross-legged meditation.
Sleep came in fits and starts and never without the vivid dreams of his childhood exploits. A few times during the night he was aware of a rustling in the undergrowth or a snapping of twigs but each time the source was unclear and tiredness won out.
Morning came with spears of muted sunlight lancing the latticed canopy. Surprisingly Mason was feeling neither thirsty nor hungry. He stood up, stretched out his limbs and gathered the sticks of his tent. He would carry as much as he could in case he needed to assemble a second shelter. He was determined to make decent progress today but progress to what? He was unsure. Right now, he felt an overwhelming vulnerability, which if he let it would consume his entire being.
The surrounding tree limbs were no longer a harmless forest but an army of sentient beings, at least in his mind. Rising from the ground like a resurrected army of the dead and so his musings continued. Often his creative mind conjured up one thing and then moved with it. Before the moon-faced clown had become a startling reality, a clear and present danger, it had been his greatest antagonist. It met the characteristics of the masked killer in the eighties ‘Slasher’ movies, the surreal feel of the nineties psychological thriller and most of all, it spoke to a collective fear. Now as the forest enveloped him, it took little or no imagination to turn the towering boughs into otherworldly beings and the shadows into a cloak from which a thousand eyes peered silently.
He marked the transition of time by the angling of the shadows, the lengthening of the crisscrossing lines as the oaks gave way to pines and formed a thick coniferous forest. Now the ground instead of being carpeted by scroll-like leaves was a thick layer of needles and pine cones. The air was fragrant with a deep rich scent like the soil-smell of the worm which had coiled around his lips. He shook the memory away and looked on towards what appeared to be a large glade.
The lights emanating from the open expanse were not natural. For starters, they were perfectly conical and moved elliptically. Instead of sunlight hues, they strobed in vibrant primary colours. Music, faint at first but increasing in volume as he approached. A jaunty tune, carnival-like played on a perpetual loop from some hidden speakers. The upbeat notes varied in tempo, dipping on occasion into a discordant chorus, no longer melodic but haunting in its disharmony. It conjured up malign images, it evoked the clown in all his heavy rouge and thick mascara.
His powdered pallor like the waxen moon, his crooked smile...
No sooner had the vivid image of the clown appeared, it vanished leaving Mason to look out at what could only be described as an abandoned fairground. A static carousel stood in the centre, dismembered porcelain wooden horses, their saddles wrapped in runners of ivy, their painted manes mottled in moss stood speared by their golden, anchoring restraints. The vibrancy of their decorative coats had faded. Once displaying a spectrum of colours now merely a piebald pelt of grey and deep red.
