The Grand Illusion

Chapter 2: A rather Melancholy Shade of Blue

The walk from that desolate hill was one that brought with it the pain of a thousand pins and needles with every step. My nerves were killing me but there was an obvious ecstasy about it. My ebbing guilt and flowing emotion looked to the imminent amelioration that I would soon be consumed with. The night was so distant that I would not see a hint of it for at least twelve hours, yet I could taste everything about it; the pain, the frigidity, the redemption, and the urgency. The urgency!

There is a great problem I seem to always relinquish myself over to. It's name is impulse. And such an evil impulse did come over me. I knew where the Crimson Butcher lived, why could I not just do it now? There would be just as few people functioning at any effective capacity at five in the morning as there would be if I did it under the embrace of midnight. He would almost certainly be asleep right now. I could met out my punishment and be done in time for work. Well it certainly seemed like nothing would change if I did it now, except of course that I would stop hurting with every fiber and molecule of my being just a sunset sooner.

My apartment's barrenness somehow seemed at least tenfold, yet everything was in place. My tool for creating solace was there, undisturbed. A glimmering single-edged sword that I inherited when my father died, it had been awarded to him when he successfully lead an operation that took down a group of rogue military scientists. [Using science to create weapons of any kind is a serious offense in Zeresh. The government had anticipated the threat of nuclear war and had taken legislative action to prevent such a catastrophe.] It seemed so fitting now that my father's blade would be the one to dismantle the Butcher's soul like he dismantled my father.

My pot of dark roast coffee was finished and I couldn't help but laugh a little at the fact that I drank coffee simply because I enjoyed the taste. I had heard that some desperate people actually relied on this elixir to wake and function. I was no such individual. I relied on nothing other than a rather small amount of food and water. I suppose showers had become necessary and possibly perfume as well. At this time it's generally in order that I regret not having slept at all, but instead I just realized that my mind had been visiting every possible thought that didn't include a monkey with cymbals and/or killing the Crimson Butcher.

So without any further meaningless and systematically malapropos delays, I grabbed my blade and my badge and I was off. The walk to his house was a rather short one and the only thing I had time to realize along the way was that it made absolutely no sense that I had brought my badge. What was I going to do with it? “Hello Barry, I'm here with the Zereshian Police Department. Wait, don't run I'm just here to kill you slowly.” There was no situation in which my badge would come in any help at all. But for all the thought I was putting into this, I suppose there wasn't a situation in which it would hinder me either. At any rate, I was here at his modest home and my blade ached for his heart... Or his large intestine, any important internal organ would do really.

I found myself, upon a few rounds circling the building, wondering how the criminals did it. Was it ironic that I was an officer of the law, at least for the time being, yet I was failing to recall how some of the very crimes I was to regulate were even carried out. It took me another round before I realized two things; first, that I was beginning to look extremely suspicious since I didn't have my uniform, and secondly, that there was a small open window near the back of the house that I could squeeze in through if I removed the screen. It was times like these that I wished I had a more girlish frame, although I suppose that it might be possible to argue that my frame was, in fact, a scientifically girlish one. I made my way to the back of the house, almost laughing at the joy to come. The screen was easier to pry off than I had imagined and I was able to crawl into the house, balancing myself on the windowsill until I fell silently on the carpet inside the dark house.

A second before I would have surely considered his security a jape at best. However, upon looking ever so hesitantly around, I realized that this thirty foot squared room was his trash heap of a sleeping quarter. I'd have much rather landed deftly on the carpet to find myself ambushed by thousands of demons, ogres, and horrid monsters with a thirst for blood. But for some reason the knowledge that the butcher was already awake and that everything now seemed so uncertain made me an inexplicably nervous assassin.

As I walked through the doorway into the next room I couldn't help but picture how the blue room might look if it were painted crimson. The man at the coffee table facing away from me, who was previously quite invisible to me, gave an earth-shattering cough that shook my nerves much like an enraged rhinoceros in a room full of delicately pristine china. Twas rather ironic to say the very least that he had gotten some sort of unintentional preempt of a strike on my already unstable focus. However, it seemed quite a inconsequential strike when I considered and thought about how much more of an impact my counterattack would make.

It seemed an immensely quick eternity later when I reached to unsheathe my blade. It found it's way so silently from it's sheathe, lusting for his flesh, his guts, every inch of him. It wanted to slide it's razor edge over his throat 'til it swam in his blood and I swam so ecstatically in his sorrow and pain. My sword pulled itself so carelessly yet so meticulously from it's sheathe, finding it's way silently into the air, perfectly ready to come down like an unstoppable divine force and severe his head like a calamitous fissure upon the earth. My mind had reached a fever-pitch of paranoia and ravishment when my blade began to tremble ever so slightly; like a fish out of water it thirsted and could no longer bear the unimaginably dry lack of blood. From whence that climax of fearfully ecstatic anticipation came so too did a rather quietly thundering utterance when the man spoke one ghastly sentence that threw my nerves like an arrow from the strongest of bows.

“Would that you had more manners, you weren't even going to accost me.”

Although I did not make it in any small way apparent, I felt as though I would curl into a little ball and die; that surely he could not have spoken that with the intent of it falling upon my ears. But I'd learned that it never helps to pretend and so I was left with the solely harrowing option to accept the question and answer it with steel.

“Farewell”, I said shortly, as my eyelids eclipsed my vision and my sword took control, slicing through every ebullient inch of bliss-filled air as the distance between this tension and his death had begun to vanish and dissipate. And although my eyes were hiding behind lids of comfort, fear, and abysmal solitude, I felt when the end had thrust upon his skull. But my twinge of relief and delectation was overcome and shattered by the sudden realization that the sound that emanated from from the expectedly sickening impact was less mushy and far more metallic than I could have hoped to have anticipated.

My eyes jerked so despondently open and it seemed like what they were seeing was some sick, nervous manifestation of my irrational fears. My blade had clashed almost powerlessly against a sharp butcher knife that the man had parried with, still facing away from me. It seemed like it should be funny that his last second choice of weapon was a butcher knife hence, Crimson Butcher, but I was not laughing. It was now that I began to realize that his speed and power were frightening to say the least and I was feeling the full scope of the fear that my parent's must have felt. This man was a monster. Before my mind had the chance to waste anymore time thinking about helpless things and certainly before I had the opportunity to strike once more, his knife found it's gleaming way into my side.

I began to bleed crimson ribbons of sorrow as the room around me began to fade so symbolically to darkness. The onyx abyss stretched across the walls and as it all met and converged at the epicenter of my vision, I found myself thinking one profoundly random and idiotic thought: I found that shade of blue rather melancholy anyway.