DAYS have collapsed and elapsed, the shock still outlines me in chalk. My silvery scalped fox, my silent stained foe; my slight slithery supporter strikes at my room's stoppage. All I know is he is my book bringer, my conversation giver, my gossip monger, it's Daniel. My chess piece I will move in honour of you Doc, this means war; after this, it'll be your move.
"What have you brought me today, Danny?"
His saint voice is faint and hard to perceive.
"The Great Gatsby, the Bourne Identity and Treasure Island; they're three of my favourites. So, I know you'd like um'."
"Thanks man." I kill my pens thought and push from my desks death grip, clammy soles slap with each step.
"Here you go." I still cannot get use to his broad pure Yorkshire accent. He slots through the books one by one.
"Thanks again for this, Danny."
"It's my pleasure, for all the years I have worked here; you're probably the only one who treats me like an equal... It's the least I could do, kidda'."
"Yeah and how long will it be after this new system gets up and running? It's fucked up what they're about to do to you; you're my only friend here too."
I've hooked him, now reel. The door latch goes up and locks.
"What? What do you mean?" I break a brazen smile to his question.
"You don't know, do you? At breakfast, I heard Doctor McKay and Greg the Pleb, talking about this new Hi-Tech security system, which is about, to turn this box into a vault... Anyway, they were talking about you, dude. Once this lock-thingy gets the green light tomorrow night, this whole place will not need keys, you will no longer be needed here. I'm sorry, I thought you knew." His pause is my applause.
"I have given this building forty-three years of my life, I am practically furniture, and they are just gonna' kick me out? No... No... I won't go, I was here when this place was a maternity hospital after the war, I got married to my late wife on these very grounds and I am still here; and they think I will walk away with a handshake and a pension? When I go home, I go home to nothing. This place is my real home and all I interact with are me children we weren't never able to have. I know Doctor McKay; once he has his mind set on something, he won't change it. They're going to take everything from this old lock and key and I bet you they won't care."
"Daniel, hey, Daniel... I am right here, mate. I am sure there's something else you can do with your life. What is it you always tell me? When there is no way out, keep looking for that door because we all have the key inside of ourselves. Use your own words."
"Kyle, I am not as spry as you, the only thing I am good for now is dying. At least if I do that, it'll be something I can control myself."
"Heed your tongue. Fuck suicide, what is that gonna' prove? All that proves is they won your life from you. You could always do what all of us did and truly become one of us; I mean we already look at you like one of us, like a dad, so why not?" Making one friend could be your greatest of weapons, saying that, on the opposite side of the spectrum, best friends make for the best enemies; they know all your plans.
"You mean kill people? I don't think I can, I just don't have the stomach for that sort'a stuff."
"That's cool, that's cool. There's another way but it's really far out there. Forget about it though."
"Kyle, you are my friend, I know you're only thinking of me." Am I? ...Sure. Clench that jaw and do not laugh.
"I don't think you'd be up for it, when I say it's really far out there, I mean it'll be like Mars planet far out there, it's stupid and dumb. Maybe you should go talk to the Doctor. He might give you another shitty job or refer you to another hospital miles and miles away."
"Kyle, please tell me your plan."
Hesitate for effect.
"How about let me and everyone else out to do it for you?"
"I am assigned cell keys on the specific days and they are kept in a safe and I don't know the code to it."
Pull faces, he can't see you making fun of him.
"I don't mean just yet. I am good at thinking up plans, so hear me out. Tomorrow the new system gets introduced completely throughout here, so tonight they will be testing the system for weaknesses while we are all sleep-drugged, yeah. I saw from my window they lowered a huge control panel from a truck, which must oversee every door and every camera, are you keeping up? If someone were to perhaps sabotage that control panel after locking all outside doors to the world and opening all inside doors to them, there would be your revenge."
"Won't people just phone for help or go online?"
"Not if that certain someone we keep talking about, steals all the employee's phones from their lockers and I am like eighty-eight per cent sure the control panel runs the computers and the phone hard-lines too, so once it gets destroyed and the phones go missing, we will be out and they will be locked in. Easy as pie, right? And don't worry about the siren company coming to check out a triggered alarm, they know tonight is only an easing in process, no one will be coming until dayshift and by then it will look like one big accident, a fault with the wiring or something and you were the only sane survivor. How does that sound? You may even get a movie deal about your ordeal. Think about the retirement package. Kerching!"
"Kye, do you honestly think it will work?"
"Would I open my trap if I didn't? Daniel, all you have to ask yourself, who is more trust worthy than your friends? You go away and think about it, if you would like me to do all the work, come find me after dinner and wish me a good night's sleep; that way I will know the plan is a go-ahead."
"I... I don't know; I will have to think about this, Kyle." His voice degenerates as he walks away with his burdens. Flyaway little birdie, fly away from me, just not too far. I will be here, waiting.
I will unfold history with my untold stories. This time my pride will be a bad-dream, which has been clamped around all their fucking mouths. It's all in the math; you plus me equals me. Clack my knuckles and exact revenge on the exact people who have acted to extract an exact skeleton they did not wish to erect.
Tonight, I shall leave my legacy in shambles, before I swipe my slate clean, I shall deliver the truest form of writing to my readers, there's a part of me which believes it could all end tonight for me. I want to leave a little something.
Choke that pencil, hatch your mind from this planet and born an idea. Pick their names from the air and murder them into aeons.
I know while you sit here and read this, you are searching for some semblance of pretend, an unreality, if you will. Your secrets make you, your darkest of secrets bait you, and you know it. Yes, those one. The ones you replay and repeat and recreate different in your mind. Tell me your secrets, I know you want too, you can't tell the people you love, can you? They are eating at you from beneath and slowly working their way to the surface and all you want to do is sing out all of your badness within. Bequeath it to me. Are you still portraying yourself as normal?
Still telling people, you're fine?
Still hiding in plain sight?
How do you sleep at night know there are people out there just like you?
If they knew the truth about you, the jig would be up. So, you keep smiling at the behaviours and fit in, keep believing your own fiction you tell yourself. Keep thinking you're one of them, when in fact you are one of us. Truth. I'll be seeing you real soon.
Cut from the same cloth as barrelled sanity, a paralleled amenity is not long a chipped-off choice. You shark my voices but still swim in my watery thoughts; I'm the one who gets chastised in ponds of chased chronicles, tell me, do you continue fishing for the second biggest fish after I have been harpooned?
Since an idyllic birth, my moralities walk hand in hand with my mortality; be true to your truth, do not dare bullet or ballet over those lucid lines society has amassed; what if inside of yourself a destiny was to be greater than the vessel it walks within? And, to walk, means to step over these lines you have so kindly drawn for my feet. A stroll for the unknown destination, pocketed fears, bottled tears, trod on, trod on, trod on; become an astronaut they say, get the space I need.
I sign my name, date and draw my trademark smiley face with devil horns. I feel good about, planting seeds in my reader's minds so they will explode over my pages. Spare your demons Kyle, you only get a few.
Proficient Preparations have been primed, a half-cocked egg-timed smile on my face as all I have is orthodox time. If dying in time is my curse tonight, the blight will be a fine memory to add to the scrapbook of scraps and stamp albums of stampeding stomps and stapled stamps. My cold feet knead one another under these covers, I'm fighting sleep, my drug dealer has visited, closing these eyes is all I can think about, I want to, well, the meds do. Hang in there with me brain, not long now, you and I know as soon as we have the go ahead, the adrenaline will kick in and kick our ass out this fucking bed, stay opened a little longer for me, I beg. This will not be rage, rage can be conquered, this will be serenity; a family are not killed by someone who screams and shouts in the garden before they get into the house, the cops will be called in seconds; they are butchered by the person already asleep inside.
I have a calmed temper niggling away within every shammed action, these people are supposed to be professionals and I am supposed to be under observation, good-job. Dr. McKay, you have played games with me for last time, you dulled my brain and whittled your way in with your wicked words; here's me thinking, manipulation was my occupation.
Did you hear that? Was that the knell of keys? All hand on deck, thinker at full power, eyes widen and ears focus. It was; it is. In choice, all I have to do now is pick a psychopath and walk it without complaint. Honestly my honesty horrors and bothers me.
My methods are measured in his silence; hurry the fuck up, I am tired here. Run heart, run heart, one more beat to be beaten. Blitz me in your guilty conscious, your glitzy nonsense until I am standing in cities so monstrous, no one can find me and I can slip away into the backgrounds entourage.
Wait for it – Wait for it, here it comes.
"...Good night, Kyle, Have a nice sleep, my son..."
...What a fucking fool; humans fall so easy, they are not made from the same metal as me.
My energy levels try their hardest to counteract my circulatory drugs; sleep is the last thing on my mind but I don't think getting angry is the best course of action. Will my door be opened momentarily? Will it take an hour? Two? Will he even do it? He'd fucking better, if I get my hopes up and he lets me down, I will plough through this fort with a single thought, I am on top form from this funny-farmed forced unfazed faced farce. Where have, my eyes gone too? Sleep.
In a spotlight, I stood. Made to watch; whatever it was, I was already scared. The darkness that surrounds the light, I was safe in; it was rather intimidating to look into or think about stepping forth towards. All I know is I must stand and stay, good dog.
My living room, the fear begins to strip away and then the wallpaper does, my defences go straight up, stand still, Tyrannosaurus-Rex rules. Under my living room wallpaper is the skin and bones of everyone I love, slabs of meat flop from the mush wall. Opened eyes stare, the droplets of blood sprinkle like hundreds and thousands. His name is Kass, my evil side stands at the other side of the darkness within a lukewarm-green light, hovering there in a black trench coat and some sunglasses on, he turns up his coolness to maximum, his head on a tilt as he smiles. He holds up his cupped hands of hearts.
My safety light expands to reveal my street. Mounds of cocaine and hills of marijuana are stacked on street corners. I fall to my knees; somehow, I have beaten within an inch of my life and I am made to watch all the people that have let me down.
The policemen have no eyes; their picket sign said 'KILL ON SIGHT' The people who bullied me huddle in a group, their picket sign states. 'DO IT AGAIN, HE'S A PUSSY' And behind, everyone else who have let me down somehow for stepped over me for their benefit or gain through life, hurting me and not batting an eyelid. Their arrays of picket signs scream 'MONSTER!' 'BURN THE BASTARD!' 'HE DOESN'T FEEL, SO WHAT'S ONE MORE BEATING?' and 'HE LOVES ME, BUT I LOVE HIM'
There were some more but my eyes become heavy with tears, I had to close them and think.
I think of myself as a monster or more evil, reflecting within my thoughts I have watched and only one name rung out. Kass.... my evil side.
I open my eyes; I see black boots. I tick my sight upwards, there he stands; a hand out, smile stretched and frown as a crown. The sun is giving the moon the finger over his shoulder.
Time to fight; Kass stands in front of me, protecting me. He raises his hand to the sky and with a snap of his fingers, the moon swallows the sun. All of my enemies look to the sky in an awful amazement. Monsters crawl from the gutters, behind shadows; all different species. One is a hairy wolf/lion beast with a snake face, jerky movements, lowers his head in a sign of pet obedience. Another looks to be a gorilla covered in spikes, kneeling to me on a car roof. And, the rest are just a blurs and shadow creatures. They all form a line in front of me, my unnatural army. Kass unravels his huge blacken wings.
Roaring's and screeches ting the ear. They show foot and head for battle with the naturals.