Parareality Induced By Trauma : Episode 4

And there I was, standing in an unfamiliar house, beaten, hurting, and with a corpse sitting at my feet. The reality of what is going on hits me harder than the thrown bottle. You never see this part in the movies, you never see the avenging angel with a look of confusion and trepidation on its face, wondering if what it thinks is the right thing to do, is actually just some kind of psychotic break.
I feel less like an avenging angel, and more like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Getting caught seems a noble cross to bear , but once it starts staring you in the face, it is a bit harder to keep up the moral fortitude.
Out of the corner of my eye, which is rapidly starting to swell, I catch something, a movement down the hall. My vision blurry, the hall lit only by the faint glow coming from the computer room, I can’t make out who it is.
Something flies by my head, and I hear a smashing noise behind me, the form in the hallway begins to run. This is the point where any plan I may have had goes straight out the window. My best guess is that it is not the kid, the wife , maybe, or maybe someone completely different, a random factor that I couldn’t possibly have known about.
In a few strides I catch up to this shadowy figure, slamming my knee off a small table in the process. My hand grabs a shoulder and spins this unknown person around, I am staring down at the mans wife. That same woman I saw earlier, and the same person that I had made the decision to kill long before I came.
My hand snaps out to her throat, and she hit’s the wall. Suddenly I feel a pit in my stomach, that sound, the sound of head striking wall, throws me off, breaks through this half drunk rage, and makes me realize that what I am dealing with is a human being. I open my mouth, not knowing what to say. I mean, what is there to say? “ Hello, just offed your husband, maybe we can talk this out?”
Something clicks in my head , and before I utter a word, I take a deep inhale from the device. Not helium, a high squeak probably wouldn’t do me any good in this situation, but a deep breath of “ The heavy” as its called in performing circles. My voice comes out as an exaggerated deep rumble, my nerves making the voice sound like a combination of Barry White and Mic Jagger.

“ Did you know?” I ask, trying my damndest to sound calm. She has a reaction, that is for sure, fear, she starts to scream, but no answer is forthcoming.

“ Did , you , know!” I scream, the sound unnerving me a bit, beyond feeling like I am losing my grip, I can hear it in my tone.

“ Know what god damn you!” she screams in my face, her rage, matching my own, but sans the confusion.

And then it dawns on me.

How do I know she is telling the truth? I didn’t think this far ahead, actually I assumed, somehow it would be obvious. That there would be a kind of sixth sense, or something, inspired by my newfound altrusim, that would guide me. But no, I find myself thinking she is lying, but in no way shape or form do I “know”. And a gut feeling, is not really acceptable, when it is lives on the line.
Rage and confusion, the two most powerful emotions , the two states of mind that have fueled, so many of humanities best inventions. We were confused as to what was out in the dark, so we made a torch. We were angry at the neighbour in the next cave, so we invented the spear. Millions of years later, Confusion and rage have given us streetlights and handguns, GPS and ICBM, the scalpel and the bayonet.
What it is giving me, is a headache, and a sense of dread. So many factors are starting to close in on me, the police could be coming, I could have been taped, she might have already pressed a silent alarm….
I grab her by the hair, and drag her to the computer room, her screams do not fall on deaf ears. Far from it, actually, with every shriek, every grab at my wrist, every cell in my body is telling me to let her go. Asking what the fuck I am doing, why am I not simply walking down to a psychiatric ward and checking myself in. But I just can’t, not because of rage, far from it, but because the second I do that, I drop this façade that I have erected , it is over. I am just some lunatic in a clown suit splattered with blood, not….what am I? Vigilante? Psycho? Thief? Clown? All of the above? None of the answers stated?
I throw her into a heap on the floor. She is crying, and trying her best to make it seem like she is overcome with emotion. I know better.
I may not be a lie detector, but in my profession, one has to know how to read people. To tell the kid who is scared of clowns ( avoid at all costs) from the kid who is just entirely too happy to have a clown there. To tell the father who can take a spritzing with a good natured laugh , from the guy who will have no problems punching you in the face if he gets wet. All essential in being a performance artist, of my stripe.
And this woman, is not overcome with anything. She is biding her time, maybe trying to wait it out until I come to my senses. And in all honesty, good call on her part. How much longer can I keep this up?
I jam the thumb drive into the computer, currently displaying a blue password screen, with a flicker and an unpleasant noise, the desktop , in all its glory, is back. I pull her to her feet, pushing her head inches from the screen.

“ This, you stupid bitch!” I say, hearing my voice start to raise a few octaves, surprisingly I manage to hold her in this position with one hand, while inhaling a deep blast of the heavy from my other.

She grasps the situation a tad quicker than I did , and stops wailing. Her breathing gets quick, not enraged, per sae, but overwhelmed in the extreme. The odd sob chokes out of her and I let her go. She is telling the truth. At least to the best of my knowledge. Her reaction is just too… real.
But, isn’t that exactly what one would expect from someone who is manipulative enough to keep her son being gangbanged by her husband and his friends, for god knows how long? To be able to put on a normal face, the same way I put on the face of a killer?

A killer.

That thought hammers the point home, that is what I am. Regardless of reason, regardless of intent, I have made the decision to kill. That is who I am.

A wave of panic hits me, I have never been prone to attacks of anxiety, but there is only so much a person can take. Those thoughts come screaming back in, those harbingers of reality that shit on the parade of the self righteous.

“ I killed a man….” I say, the last word being interrupted by a noise from outside of the room. The wife, still shaking and sobbing, is drowning it out.

“ Quiet” I say simply, craning my neck toward the door.

“ He..l…p….” I hear in an almost drunken slur, I waste no time and slide out of the door, backlit by the now red glow from the computer.

I realize two things at the same time ( literally, if you have never had two simultaneous thoughts hit you at once, it is quite the experience.) , the first is, that while terrible, the skull fracture most certainly did not kill the man , though it may be sending him on his way. And second is that I do have a way to see if the wife is lying.
I say nothing , but I let my footfalls hit the floor heavily, I grab an ankle in each hand and begin to drag the husband toward the computer room. He tries to flail about, he tries to grab at the floor, the overturned table, anything to stop whatever I have planned. But his brain is missing too much, his movements are jerky, and almost random , his pleas are unsensical and slurred. While he was my physical superior 15 minutes prior, now , he is just pathetic.
I should be disturbed, but now is not the time for that. Life hangs in the balance, and I am not just worried about taking the wrong life, that is easy enough to fix by leaving, but if this woman is an accomplice , not just an ignorant housewife, I am just as worried about letting her live. It would defeat the entire purpose of this excursion.
The way I see it, if she is in on the act, she is not going to kill him. Or if she is , and cold enough to want to save her own life , she is going to do it quick and clean, or at least as quickly and cleanly as she can. On the other hand, if this is news, I should be seeing the fury of a mother not just protecting her child, but one that has failed to do so , for a long time.
I walk very slowly to the computer room, coming up with a suitably spooky sounding speech to give the woman, kind of Jigsaw esque. My performers hat donned, I lean against the doorframe with one hand, appearing as a black silhouette, I stay silent for a moment, and hooking my foot under the man’s belt I send him on a short flight into the room.

“ You have…” is all I manage to get out, before she is on top of him. Not a question, not a comment, just a flash of late 40’s fury and she is sitting on his stomach. She has, something, my guess is a piece of broken glass, though I didn’t hear any breaking, and she is plunging it repeatedly into the man. Not causing any long open wounds, but spots, and small tears of red with every few jabs.

It takes both forever, and is over in a flash. She doesn’t go for the throat, but just kind of stabs at random, face, chest, stomach ( I am sure if she could hit genitals from where she was sitting she would have.) , and as she starts to hit areas she has before , deeper holes start to emerge. His flailing stops about half way through, the pleas begin to get more garbled, I don’t watch, not in detail at least. Gore has never been my thing, but my guess is that with the stabs to the face, his talking organs are all becoming too damaged to use, even with the bar being set at brain damage.
She sits there, shaking and heaving, and with one final stab, drives the glass ( later found out it was a shattered c.d. case she intended to use to off herself.) through the top of his head, the depressed skull fracture, caused by the well placed bottle. He makes a noise that was a mix of pathetic and disturbing, and with a whiff of shit and piss, dies.

Good enough for me, was my only thought.