The White Knight's Art Show

The White Knight's Art Show AKA The Ice Cream Man

An ice cream truck drove up a winding gravel driveway after a day spent out on the town. There were two unusual things about this particular ice cream truck. First of all, instead of the usual cheery white color overlaid with kid-friendly cartoony designs, this ice cream truck was painted solid black. Second of all, instead of the usual happy sounding songs, this ice cream truck would chime out somber, eerie sounding music that made chills run down the spine of any who heard it. The goal of the driver seemed almost to be to purposely repel rather than attract potential customers. A number of urban legends had grown up around this odd black ice cream truck.

  Neighborhood kids who wanted to frighten younger siblings told stories that the truck was driven by the ghost of a dead pedophile who did some kind of favor for the devil, and in return was allowed to collect as many souls of children as he could to take with him to Hell. Any child stupid enough to try to stop the truck to buy ice cream would be grabbed, pulled inside and driven away too fast for their parents to do anything about it, and their soul would be sucked out and stored in the freezer in the back. Not surprisingly, this truck rarely if ever got any business. It's ominous reputation preceded it, and children would scramble to get indoors as fast as possible when they heard it's mournful tune approaching. Meanwhile, stories that the Black Ice Cream Truck was part of a secret government program circulated among conspiracy theorists on the internet. It was said to be either an experiment to use sound to give mental suggestions to the populace as a form of mass mind control, or one of many such trucks equipped with surveillance equipment to spy on the citizens. This latter idea was actually the closest to the truth of all the tall tales, although the identity of the driver was different, and the surveillance had nothing to do with the government.

Robert Diocletian Johnson stopped the truck at the end of his driveway. His residence was a picturesque two story log cabin style house that stood in the woods about a half mile back from the road. The driveway was known to drivers who frequented the road as the one with the mailbox shaped like a giant banana sticking out of the ground. It was a miniature local landmark. It was assumed that a quirky eccentric lived in the house, and it was usually left well alone. Due to the house being in a sparsely populated rural area, Robert often drove far afield in his ice cream truck, frequently visting the nearest big city forty miles away, and all of the towns in between. Today he had gone to the city, and although, as usual, he didn't sell a single ice cream bar, it was a fantastically fruitful day on the job.

"Well, here we are, gentlemen. I told you there was no need to stop to use the restroom. We were five minutes from the house." he told his passengers, bound and gagged in the back of the truck, in an upbeat tone of voice. They tried to articulate words that were probably curses but the gags made it come out as an incoherent mumble. Robert turned around and smiled at them. He grinned, licked his lips and rubbed his hands together in eager anticipation of what was about to happen. He was a black man with coal colored ebony skin, a thin moustache and a handsome, chiselled face. He was dressed in typical ice cream man attire, a white uniform with a white circular hat on his head. He pressed the button to open the garage door, but when it opened, it revealed a ramp that sloped downward to a place beneath the level of the house. He drove down the five hundred of feet of the ramp, and when he reached a level surface again, he was in a large stone chamber. Tunnels branched off from the main chamber in all directions. It was the central hub of a huge, labyrinthine dungeonlike complex.

"Welcome, honored guests, to the Temple of Love!" he announced grandly to the ten incapacitated prisoners stuffed like sardines in the back of his truck. He grabbed a briefcase that was sitting on the passenger seat and got out of the car. In a flash of a moment he was dressed up in his true uniform: A golden domino mask with pointed winglike edges that covered his eyes and nose, a white wide brimmed hat with a single black feather that stuck out of the brim, a white ankle-length cowl that covered his body, black boots, white gloves and a white cape that shimmered unnaturally as if with the holy light of an hauled each prisoner out of the truck and dumped them roughly on the floor.