The dark interior of the human psyche had long ago become his home. Long before this current nightmare. How long had he traversed those pestilential places in the mind of the sick? How long had he walked those dark halls? Before Mister, even before the FBI. His home was in the disjointed and diseased folds of that curious grey-jelly organ in the skull. He was a god damn apostle of psychosis and anyone else would be devoured by this animal. And he had maimed him, to be sure, but Mister would not win. Jeremy had solved the sickness-puzzle in Mister's mind.
The early hours of the afternoon was passed in a dead zone. His sore and shrivelled eye balls staring at the floor or at the wall as his mind swam through a vastness of despair. Images of dead women and children. Translucent flashes of carnage superimposed over top of each other, creating with their intricacies a bigger picture; the picture that expressed Mister's perception and purpose.
The costume was a tool. A tool to cause fear. Causing fear isn't the final goal. In and of itself it is meaningless. The fear served a purpose. Fear was a tool. A tool to set himself free.
He wouldn't have came to it if it wasn't for Chris' death. When his brother died he felt it. Before he was told he knew it as surely as he had ever known anything. Despite his pragmatism, despite the scientific default of his mind, he glimpsed a connectedness when his brother passed. A mystical connectedness, a great secret, perhaps the great secret. An arcane knowledge that oracles and seers of forgotten millennium may have taught in secret circles. We are all connected. How else could he have known Chris was gone? He felt it. Just as we feel all our true connections in our hearts or our minds or whatever part of us that houses our souls. Those who were weak and scared, as he had been, closed themselves to the awareness of those connections because of the price of it. Only attachment brings suffering.
Mister was using connections to bring pain. Jeremy's connection to Charlie. Mary's connection to Cindy, Victor's connection to Danielle. Mister saw the connectedness. Saw the one-ness of all of it, and hated it. He was afflicted with a concept first theorized by Descartes. The evil demon, or the Cartesian demon. The notion that a deceptive God has created the perfect illusion of an external world, including others in it, but in fact, it's all just a prison. A prison for one. A perfect hell in that you wouldn't even realize you were in hell.
Mister's references to Maya and the placing of the eyes under the feet symbolizing that the un-real men's- the no-men’s perceptions were beneath him. It all clicked into place. He see’s the world as manifestation of the ‘evil demon’ only the evil demon was him. The world was all a projection of his God-mind. It was a dream he was stuck in. Perhaps as a test, or a judgment and he wanted more than anything to wake up from it. He wanted to be free. And he believed if he caused enough fear and suffering and pain, he would break the illusion.
It was an insidious delusion. Every reaction from the environment to keep him from achieving his goal was just the ‘illusion’ reinforcing the great lie, countering his efforts. Though if that's the case, the closer Mister got to his mark, the more he would expect the illusion might break down. Jeremy needed to break down the false world illusion for him and once he did that, not only would Jeremy be permitted inside the delusion, Mister would insist on it. And that's where he could kill him.
He had removed the battery from his phone knowing that the FBI could track it even if it was off. He had to risk it for a few moments though. He inserted the batter, waited for it to start up and dialled through to his voice mail. Costa had left four messages in increasing frantic tones, Katie three. It was as he feared. Mary went to them. The truth was out. It was liberating in a strange way to know that one way or another it was going to end. That he didn’t have to carry this with him for the rest of his life. And when it came to it, he wasn’t going to let them lock him up.
He took a long hot shower in the tiny pastel green tub and enjoyed the feeling of the hot water on his back and face knowing that it was possibly his last. Once dressed he peaked out the windows to make sure there was no sign of the police, retrieved a couple bags of chips from the lobby vending machine for his breakfast and hit the road.
Jeremy drove for hours, until he had to stop to fill his tank and then continued on for several more into the direction of the setting sun.
He divined himself to a middle class neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Mojave desert and circled it like a vulture for a half an hour before he found a house which seemed suitable. No lights on or in either of the neighbours. Was this how Mister selected his victims? Perusing the rows of houses like one would shuffle through a rack of t-shirt in the store until one spoke to you or felt right?
He parked the car on the side of the road in such a way that concealed his license plates from either side of the street. He realized that he didn’t have to wear the Mister costume for what he was about to do. Mister wasn’t watching and he didn’t intend to leave anyone alive to tell the tale but he couldn’t deny the power the Mister mask held. Not only in the way it petrified his victims to see the infamous white ghostly image they had grown to fear in their homes, but it also had the power to separate what he was doing from his sense of self. It helped compartmentalize his identity in way from this horrible action. It wasn’t Jeremy, it was Mister.
He began the ritual of applying the white paint and clothes. His hand gripped on the interior latch of the door but he couldn't open it. Something inside of him pleading with him not to do this. Whatever was left of him, the real him, he knew would die right along with the poor sons of bitches in the house. But this was the only way now. If he just did what he had to do, and if Mister's reaction to that was what Jeremy was counting on, than this would be the last time. One more family dies for the sake of many more. These type of moral trade offs and justifications were becoming easier and easier. He recalled his meeting with Costa when this had all started. There is no outcome here which will be considered a success.
He got out of the car, retrieved the hatchet and gun from the trunk and quickly walked into the backyard. The sliding back door was locked. Though he new a trick from his childhood he had learnt after being locked out of the house. If you pushed really hard upwards on over you could take these doors right off their tracks and when he tried it, it worked as well as it had when he was a teen. Surely they had figured out how to design these doors to be more secure by now. But these people, he guessed, had cheaped out for the krappy door and because of it they were now all going to die.
He entered their space and as always the first thing he noticed was the smell. Every home had a very distinct one. This one was air freshener and paint. Perhaps they had just finished some renovations.
The main floor was dark and quite. The furniture ikea-esque. The fridge was covered in pictures of crayon scribble which only the child or children who drew them could ever truly interpret.
Two rooms upstairs were visible from the base of the stairs but a hallway stretching past where he could see suggested more. He began to take the steps one at a time. He step-stopped, step stopped, each tiny creak sounding to him like the peal of thunder. Even his breathing and the mad thumping of his heart seemed loud to his own ears but trying to slow them only did the opposite.
What he really wanted to do was run upstairs, kick the closest door open and eviscerate whomever he found. Fast and vicious was preferable to slow and methodical. Or at least it would be easier on his nerves.
He couldn't deny the level of aggression he felt inside of himself. He was going to fucking kill these people. And if they tried to fight back he was going to fucking kill them the hard way. But he supposed that was the kind of hostility which was necessary to carry him through the act to the gory end. And when that feeling of aggression he needed so badly waned he thought of Charlie and his mutilated face and that put him right back to where he needed to be.
The first two doors at the top of the stairs were open. One was a bathroom and thee other a bedroom, which he discovered after taking several painfully slow steps
onto the second floor, belonged to a teenage boy. An electric fan oscillated warm air back and forth over his skin and bones which were concealed only by a small corner of sheet which he had pulled across his crotch area.
He cycled through the possible ways to push him out of this existence with the least amount of fuss. The gun was out. Suffocation also out. He was scrawny but large enough to at least thrash and wake the others. If only there was some way to poison him. Inject him with cleaning products maybe? A dose of Mr. Clean straight to the jugular? Place something on his lips which would just drag him down to his death. But that wasn't in the job description was it? He had to execute this family just as Mister would for this mad gamble to even have a chance of paying off in the end.
The brain. It had to be the brain. But he had learned just how strong the shell around the body's computer was. Jeremy stepped into the room and leaned over the boy, his hatchet at the ready.
A second swing of course would be possible but not silently. If this kid screamed for help or struggled, well then it would be an all out berserk ax murderer job and that's not what he wanted.
The spine, he thought. The spine is the brains connection to the body so he could forgo trying to hack through the skull in one swing and go straight for the spine which was weakest in the neck.
He took a deep breath and looked around at the room. A skateboard leaned in the corner. A collection of video games displayed prominently on a rack above a small mounted flat screen. He reminded him of Charlie’s room. This was someone’s boy… but not his.
He lifted the hatchet up above his head and took a moment to steady himself. The moonlight caught the blade dramatically and for a moment he felt the intensity of the moment so acutely that something like a nervous laugh began to build in his stomach and there was a sudden and unwelcomed flash of primal excitement for the coming violence. The feeling was soon enveloped by a swelling of anger. A dark and filthy loathing that threatened to choke him to death right then and there.The axe came down bearing all that anger behind it in one vicious chop.
As the blade made contact with the boy’s Adam’s apple, Jeremy thought for a split second he cried out but then the hunk of metal hewed through the vocal cords and tore through his spine with a soft wet crunch, wedging itself into the foam of the mattress behind him.
The boy's severed head lay there like a movie prop but not as convincing and before he knew it he was picking it up by its hair and staring in its dead-boy face.
This person was here and now he's gone, he marvelled lifting it up. This wrapping, this vehicle of meat, the means through which something more him, more... truthful was projected to the world seemed archaic, outdated. How fragile the body is. Was there not a better way?
The stump of flesh jutting out from the boy’s shoulders pumped gooey black blood until the entire mattress was darkly coloured with it. Jeremy placed the head back where he found it and crept back out into hall, floating towards what he guessed was the master bedroom.
In it he found husband and wife sound asleep. This was the worst of what he was doing, what Mister was doing. Invading these people’s homes like this. Intruding in the dwelling where they share their intimate moments together, making love and fighting and talking about their children's future. Living life; taking their lives in the very place they felt the safest.
As always he would take the father first. Eliminate the biggest threat. No fuss, no muss. They were covered under a cacophony of white linen. The woman's breast hung exposed, the large nipple staring at him like an unblinking, accusing eye.
The floor must of creaked or chance had just worked against him because the man suddenly opened his eyes just as Jeremy came around to his side of the bed. He yelled, shocked, instantly wide awake as was the woman too who ran before Jeremy had time to process and react.
He couldn't let her escape. He circled around the bed and got in arms reach of her just outside of the bedroom. He swung the hatchet wildly and caught her slender frame just above the hip. Not a kill but enough to incapacitate her while he dealt with dad.
Though only a few moments passed dad had collected himself and had the good sense to grab a weapon. A baseball bat produced from God knows where. Mister had everyone in the state taking home security more seriously but if this was this man's idea of protecting his loved ones he had no clue what real danger was.
Jeremy pulled out the gun and pointed it at the man's face. From where the man stood he could see his wife, whimpering in the hallway, mumbling something about the ocean, overwhelmed by shock.
“Run William, run” She yelled.
Jeremy cocked the gun. It was clear the man was considering going kamikaze. He had axed his wife, most likely killed his son, it was pretty obvious what would happen if he dropped the bat. But Jeremy knew he would. In all his killings, Mister, the real Mister had never had to resort to the gun. Even when faced with utter annihilation most people couldn't put their life on the line. Truly on the line. Most people didn't have inside of them what Jeremy had learnt was inside of him. Though maybe this man did. He lifted the bat high and charged.
Jeremy stepped to the side just as the man swung for his head. He put everything he had into it but the panic made his attack uncontrolled. He missed and toppled over, pulled by his own momentum and then Jeremy was on him. The first hack hewed a gory canyon in the man's chest. The second hack struck the same spot tearing the wound open even further. By the third, fourth, eight swing his mid section was man-burger.
With warm blood stripped across his white face like war paint he made his way out into the hall where the woman had already passed out from blood loss. He hacked her in the middle of her back and felt her spine splinter like a chicken bone. He hit her several times with the hatchet for good measure. It was until she was dead for sure that a debilitating panic filled him like a demonic possession, clogging his mind, filling him with dread.
“I'm so sorry,” he told the dead woman and scooped her up in his arms and looking into her murdered face, and wept on her shoulder and cried for her and her family and for them all.
Shaking like a leaf, he pulled out the pocket knife to make Mister’s signature.
He left the house too dead inside to consider his appearance: a ghost covered in blood.
Once back inside the leathery comfort of his car he removed a packet of wet wipes he purchased for this very reason and began the task of transforming back into Jeremy.
He found a pay phone and called 911.
“This is Mister. This is not a joke. I have killed three more of your no-men. Twenty-seven High street east.”
It was four in the morning when he found another no-questions-asked motel and checked in under a fake name. He sat and waited on the edge of the bed, praying silently to God or the Devil or whoever would listen that it had worked, though he wouldn’t know until he checked his phone again in the morning.
CHAPTER 26
“We are all so sorry for your loss,” The Head Honcho had said over the phone. Take as long as you need Richard.”
“I'm Done... I'm retired.”
“Look. You shouldn't make decisions like that right now. Deal with this. Take your time and then we will talk.”
“No, listen to me Tim. I'm done. I've been done for a while.”
“I understand Rich.”
“I just want to do it properly. Say good bye on the air. Thank the network and the viewers.”
“Sure, Richard. Sure. Just let me know when you're ready to come back and we will set that all up.”
“No. Tomorrow. I want to do it tomorrow. I don't want to go and come back. I just want to put a lid on this.”
“Well, look uh Rich. Maybe when you've dealt with all this, you come back and we will set it up then.”
“God damn it Tim! Listen to me! I didn’t want to do the fucking series! You made me fucking do it! Now you owe me this! You fucking owe me Tim. My best years I gave to you and this God damn network! The best ones! My wife’s best! I owe a pr
oper farewell to the viewers. Jesus Christ you owe me at least this one dignity!”
“Okay, okay. Calm down... You're right. I do. We all do. When do you want to do it?”
“Tomorrow morning. AM Rise and Shine Live.”
“Done. We will see you at the studio.”
Richard showed up at the studio the next morning and endured the condolences and outpouring of pity and sat for the last time as make up was applied for camera. He had been up all night trying to place a word that described all this. His life, as it was, as it had been. There was a word he knew it. It was on the tip of his tongue and it gnawed at him that he couldn't get it out. After all he was, if nothing else, a man of words. But what that word was remained agonizingly elusive.
“All ready,” The make up artist said and he made his way out to the anchor chair.
The line producer counted down to live camera and the teleprompter flashed on.
“Good morning and welcome to AM News Live. I'm Richard Lansdown. You're regular host Julie Parson will be joining us momentarily. I asked to speak to you today, the loyal viewers who have met with me here, on this network for the better part of twenty years, so I could say farewell. This will be my last broadcast, here or anywhere else. As we all must do in life, it's time that I move on. My reasons for leaving are my own and they in no way suggest any discord between myself and ANN. This network and myself have enjoyed a strong and respectful partnership and I am saddened that it has now come to an end. Though nothing truly ends as the end of every chapter is simply the beginning of a new one. It has been a pleasure and an honour to report the news to you all these years. I have watched with great fascination as the mono-logical nature of the news has evolved and turned into a conversation in which the viewer via the technological connectedness of our time has been empowered with a louder voice than ever before.
Horror Becomes Me Page 12
