Crossing into the Other World [Murder]

[Wanderlost]

While not explicit, this piece of writing does deal with murder and other dark topics. You have been warned.

Have you ever been punched in the gut so hard you forgot how to breathe? You just sucked in your stomach instead of drawing air and panicked, writhing and smacking your ribs until you finally gasped and it clicked and you were so thankful you didn't suffocate right there? Well, he's wheezing like that just happened, but more importantly: Someone is knocking at the door. Two knocks. Hard, loud, and abnormally spaced. And then there's that feeling of fear. When you know you've been caught with something. Something bad, and it grabs at your heart with sharp claws. What will the repercussions be like? The future going forward is daunting, and you don't really have the chance to just run away. But what did he do? What will he do?

"Hello?" The sound of the man on the other side is muffled by the old wooden door.

Firstly, he drops the knife. It clatters to the floor, and it prompts him to look around. At the walls, the furniture, the floor, his hands... Not good. So very not good. It's not the kind of red that you can just wipe off. It spreads, and there's seemingly no less on his hands and just as much on his shirt. Everything is a mess. The back door is one of those fancy sliding glass ones--that's right. It had started in the garden. He'd left the safety and comfort of everything he knew. No more mockery, no more verbal harassment. He had had to put an end to The Braggart of Silly Suburbia.

The man is wiggling the door handle--he isn't the uppity farmer. He wouldn't be known as that. He was a Father and a Friend, but he had been other things. A monster. A bull, throwing the Hateful Headmaster through his own glass door. Where did he get the knife though? A ping of shooting pain in his side answered that. The Headmaster had seen a rodeo before. When did he get so many cuts on his arm though? He never smashed the sofa, he's sure. The radio is playing static. The man is kicking at the door!

"Open the fucking door!" He's yelling so loud. Is he behind him? Is he already through the door--no, but damn is that a loud kick! Snapping, cracking, creaking, and he got his foot stuck for a second. Only a second.

No no, he's going to need that knife. He picks it up in a trembling hand, eyes locked on the door. The man doesn't take the time to peak through the hole. He backs up and shoulders through it, and every feeling The Father has ever known throws him forward. He has to protect what he loves. He has to get back to his life on the other side of the fence where he was before. He has to escape this prison of the mind and body.

He, both Theseus and the Minotaur, approaches unknowingly in the play of the Psycho, though he confuses it with chopping wood. He meets the Hydra as the Victim, he meets the Octopus as the Whale, and somehow, he falls to Hercules as the Lion. Twisted around and subdued, he becomes the Slave. The man, The Man, is shoving his face into the floor.

"What the fuck did you do?!"

Isn't that the point of all of this?

Ow! Lord, it hurts when he throws his weight down on The Friend. It feels like his head is just going to burst. It's all going to end like a watermelon and the kids and the sledge. Lord but no, is that frightening! He cries. Any man would cry. Another heave, and there's an awful crushing sound and more and more pain with his face so hard against the wood floor.

"Answer me!"

"I don't know, I don't know! Please, I have children! I miss my wife, please!" His sniffling and choking and gurgling is as much coughing as swallowing, and none of it happens in the right order. How much is blood, how much is snot?

"He had children too you monster!"

No more crushing. In fact, The Man's weight comes off of his head, blessedly. But he punches him. Not with the fingers. His knuckles lance through his mind. Straight to his eyes. Seeing stars? No--silverfish. Bigger and closer than he'd ever cared to see them and blurry. A crawling, swimming miasma. A dazing dance, deep in delirium. Over the eyes: they are the enemy. Until they're gone. Until the Other World is more important again. Which way is his head rocking? Remember that scene at the beginning of the game where you're pushing yourself up from the floor of the ship? The camera is moving. You're moving. The ship is moving. It's a good illustration, save for the way that all of that seems to slide from one side of his peripheral vision to the other. And there's no more weight on him, so he is pushing himself up from the floor, his stomach swimming much as anything else.

The Man's grumbling echoes. Eons a susurrus, centuries a mutter, and days he speaks, "Come on, come on, come on. Get up. Get up you fucking fuck!" The Man kicks The Slave in the side. In the ribs where it hurts and then hurts. He opens his eyes wider, but that doesn't show him anything more than he'd seen with his face to the floor. From hand he falls to elbow, and his other hand finds the floor behind him. His third hand, the same hand as before, finds the floor in front of him. He only has two hands, but his fourth hand helps push him up further. He gets his knees under him.

"GET UP!"

Where'd his knife go? Here? There? He's standing. It doesn't matter. Too fast though. He stumbles back and everything reels. Another three knuckles pierce through his thoughts. Lots of glass shattering. He holds the wall, the table, the cloth and his mind can't make the shape of it. Everything is shattering. There's dead on the floor here. Beneath him, kind of. Digging into his ribs. The Slave is The Worm, and The Rain is louder than an old man snoring, but The Worm has no hole to crawl to.

"No no no no no.
"No no no no no.
"You're not dying on me yet you monster!"

The Rain is singing a song, much like the waves, only with more flow than ebb. Hands on shoulders doesn't quite fit how the Slave is squirming. It's an effort, and those many arms are back as The Man wrestles to bring him to his feet. A couple things are clear as his eyes roll almost senselessly over the room.

Broken sofa, and a flash of choking his victim through the back of it. At least he seems happy in the picture on the wall. The whole family is smiling, but that's gone now. Glass shines in bits on the red floor. It's sunny outside. Everything happy is out there. He's grasping for it, even as his eyes and head drift down to the horror he doesn't want to see, mangled on the floor at his limp feet, and even that is being pulled away from him. The only thing fixed in the world are his feet. His yard working shoes.

After the hallway, the lights flicker rapidly. Electricity hums. The floor is dusty stone. The shelves are musty wood. He whimpers. "Please. Please. Please." Alissa and Alex were good girls. Lisa was the best wife. He never had to lift a finger after the day's work was done. Everything had been so perfect back home. Which other is Other, and which other is home? Did the act of Other cast him down? The arrogant one, the deviant? Justice isn't evil until evil is made of justice. Or is anything quite so clear as this travesty came to be with the pliers and hot iron?

Who is The Man he'd dragged into this world? What is the source of the rage that burns in the eyes of The Father's Devil? A theme plays in books which touch their fingers to the painfully cold stone cover of that whole ology. The theme where the victim suffers only as they wish to suffer, eternally subjects of their own regret, but there is an end to his torment. Eventually. Reeling, he sees clearly. He'd started to about halfway through, when nails were being hammered into his thighs. Now, The Man is coming back into the room.

Is it heroic, by now, to come up under the weight of all that pain and suffering, brandishing the axe he should have held since he was The Stranger? Finally, he is Hercules and not the Victim! Or is he the monster who fled the scene that later scrunched as a headline in a square on the same page as an ad for Smoky's Gentlemen's Club?

Local Headmaster and Secretary of Saxon High Found Dead in his Home
Families Shattered, Lives Destroyed