Alex and The Gruff (A Tale of Horror)

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Put this on and come with me.”

  The Man handed Alex a plastic apron. He threw it on his lap and then he walked back out the door. He flicked on all of the lights as he walked along the corridor. It was so bright that his shadow stretched all the way back to room seven’s open door. Alex looked at The Gruff who nodded his head and he gave Alex a sly wink.

  “Any chance you get,” he said.

  Alex held the apron up to the light. There was a picture of a mouse on the front. It had a big knife in its hands and it was about to cut through a giant slab of cheese. It was licking its lips and it had a big chef’s hat on but the end of its tail had been scratched off. Probably the apron was really old or someone here didn’t like mice.

  He put it around his neck and it flopped all the way down to his feet. It must have looked pretty silly. He tried tying off the two pieces of string, but he didn’t know how to do knots properly. He’d seen people doing it all the time and it was something that looked so easy but when he’d watched them in the past, he always just kind of drifted off and thought about other things while watching their hands twist around. It wasn’t because he was bored or anything. It was the opposite actually. Whenever he was amazed, the world became like a television and he’d stare manically but his brain would start thinking and talking about other things altogether.

  So when he took the ends of the string, his mind had no idea what to do. Really it was just two or three little moves of his hands but to his brain, it was so complex that it was stupid of him for even thinking he could try and his brain got mad at him and it made his blood really warm and his face felt like a hot bath and he just wanted to take off the stupid apron and throw it in the bin.

  The Gruff saw his frustration. There were a lot of things that he couldn’t do either, things that other people did so easily that he thought would be just the same for him. But when he’d go to do them, his brain would seize up as well and then he’d go all crazy and shout and want to break the thing in his hands and then shout at everyone else that didn’t have to think about what they were doing.

  And though The Gruff could never stop himself from feeling this way most of the time, he could see it in other people and he could step in a help them to not make a mess of themselves and whatever was in their hands.

  “Let me,” he said, taking the strings from Alex’ hands.

  The Gruff pulled the strings tight around Alex’s back and he tucked them under one another and then he pulled tight again. Alex was shocked. He jumped and pulled his belly in and The Gruff pulled tighter, his hands making an ‘x’ with the string and pulling them tight like he was about to chop Alex in half.

  “You remember what you have to do? You have to save us both. He’s going to hurt you. Then he’s gonna hurt me. And he’ll go to your home and he’ll hurt your family.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I am too. But that’s why we have to do this. The fear, it’s like this because he’s dangerous. But when he goes away, so will the fear. It’s hard at first I know. You just wanna stop and hope it goes away. But it’s just an alarm, that’s all. It’s ok to be scared. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna die. It just means you gotta do something, so you don’t.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Alex, you have to do this on your own.”

  “But I don’t think I can.”

  “If you don’t do this, you’ll always be a victim. You need to learn how to speak. You have to find your voice.”

  “I know how to speak.’

  “You know how to talk, but not how to speak. That voice you have, it’s not your own. It’s your mother’s. It’s your father’s. It’s your auntie’s. It’s your teacher’s. It’s everyone’s, but it’s not yours. It sounds like all those people who made you say what they wanted to hear. Your voice, it’s somewhere in there, but you never learned how to use it. You did, when you were a baby. You shouted what you felt but your mum and dad, they quickly shut you up. They hid you in another room. You shouted all night long and they never listened. They’d shake you. They’d rock you. They’d shove a bottle in your mouth. But they’d never listen. And soon, they just left you there until your voice gave in to exhaustion and you fell asleep. Then, when you were quiet, when you couldn’t speak, they snuck in and they smiled and they adored themselves at how cute and quaint you were when you were without your voice. And every day and every night, they locked you away and they left you speaking and screaming to the walls until you learned that no matter how much or how loud you screamed, you would never be heard and no matter how deep was the hole that your fear dug for you, they would never pull you out. And then your voice went somewhere and it never came back. When you got older, you felt that feeling. I know you did, we all do. That funny feeling in your belly like there’s worms or rockets ready to burst out. You didn’t know, but that feeling, the one you called being scared, that’s your voice, the one your mum and dad put in a box. Just like the box you were in when you came here. But I helped you out of that box, didn’t I?”

  Alex looked at The Gruff. Nobody had spoken to him like this before. Nobody had dared treat him as if he might understand.

  “I’ve done all I can. Now I need you to do the rest. You need to find that box and smash it into a billion pieces. Free your voice. Scream as loud as you can. Save yourself. And you might just save us all.”

  Alex didn’t feel scared anymore. He felt his body tingle all over. It was like he had stepped into his skin for the first time. He felt taller and abler.

  “Alex” shouted The Man from the hallway.

  He sounded impatient, but he didn’t sound mad, just like he’d wished that he would hurry up. His brother sounded like this when they played video games. He’d shout at Alex to hurry up and catch up to him, to finish killing the enemies so that he could move on to the next level. Alex would get so caught up in a moment that he would forget how long that moment felt for another person when their hands were tied with boredom and expectation. He’d never be really mad. Raising his voice was just his way of hurrying him up.

  Alex looked at The Gruff again. This time, it was he that nodded his head and winked his eye. He turned and he walked out the door and into the hallway. The Man was waiting by door number three. It was open and there was a bright light buzzing away. The Man walked into the room and Alex followed him.

  When he entered the room, Alex saw a table prepared with knives. There were seven of them and they were lined up side by side. Next to the knives were three slabs of marble and they looked really heavy. There was a large green plastic bag on the floor that was empty, but it had been pulled apart and was opened, ready to have left overs or off cuts dumped into it.

  The Man picked up one of the knives. It looked really sharp but for whatever it was that he wanted to cut, it obviously wasn’t sharp enough. He stood there in the middle of the room with a long metal rod in one hand and a really big knife in the other and the knife, it screeched and it scratched as The Man grazed it slowly and forcefully along the metal rod, back and forth.

  The Man laid the knife down on the table next to the others. He stood with his back to Alex, moving the handles so that the sharp points were all sticking straight up and none of them were crooked or uneven.

  “Do you know how to cook?” The Man asked.

  Alex looked a bit confused. He thought for a second there that he was going to be lunch. It did seem like that. Know how to cook? He didn’t know how to tie off an apron, let alone crack an egg. So he shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Mum always made the food.”

  “Come here then. You have to learn some time.”

  Alex moved slowly towards The Man. He wasn’t sure. All things that ended up hurting him in the past, they always came across as being so kind at first. And as he took each step and as he edged ever closer, he felt the hidden box inside his stomach shaking and rattling and something inside of it, trying to break free.

  “Your fear is
in a cage,” he thought. “Break it out.”

  Alex stood beside The Man. The table was higher than he was. Everything was, really. Even the step that he had to stand on to reach the table, it was so big that he needed The Man to help him up.

  Alex looked at the knives spread across the table. They all glistened under the fluorescent light. They looked so sharp. If he could get one quick enough then he could stab The Man, over and over until he went away. But he needed to find his voice before he could do anything else.

  What good was a saw without teeth?

  The Man set up two silver bowls on the table and beside them, he placed a mound of vegetables, some eggs and a clump of chicken meat which had been thawing on a table in the far corner.

  “You want to be careful with the knives, so you don’t cut your finger. It’s real easy. I’ve done it to myself a couple of times. A small cut is ok, we got some bandages for that, but a big cut can be real bad. Remember we aint got no doctors round here so safety first. The trick is to press your fingers into the meat like this” The Man said, pressing his hands into the bloodied meat and then digging away with the large knife.

  “You see the way the knife is scratching against my nail? Better that than cutting off my finger right?” he said laughing.

  Alex didn’t know if he was supposed to laugh or not. He didn’t know how he was supposed to react. He watched the knife slicing through the chicken meat. It didn’t catch or anything. It just went through like it was butter.

  Then he looked at the other knives. They were all sitting so nice on the table and they were still within reach. He’d have to stretch a bit, but he’d be able to get one. He wouldn’t be able to do it now, though. He’d have to lean past The Man who was cutting the chicken. And if he did that, The Man would just take his knife out of the chicken breast and stab it in the back of his head. It’d be stupid to try now. It didn’t stop him, though, not from thinking about it.

  “You always want to cut your meat on a different surface to your vegetables. And use a different knife. You don’t want to get blood or nothing on the different foods. I use a knife with a straight edge for the carrots. It cuts real easy and you can chop them up real fine. I don’t know about you, but I love my carrots chopped up really tiny. The Gruff likes em that way too so you’d better pay attention.”

  Alex took his attention away from the knives for a second and watched the way The Man cut the carrots into tiny little pieces. He put his fingers the same way so he was only grazing his nails and he cut the carrot long ways so there were about twenty or thirty little round chunks. Then he piled them together and he rested the palm of his left hand over the top of the blade while his right hand went crazy pushing up and down real fast over the chucks of carrot so that they cut small and smaller and even smaller still and The Man, his face scrunched up and his eyes squinted real small and he was grimacing like what he was doing was real hard or that he didn’t like it at all.

  Alex watched the way The Man cut and he practiced not the movements of his hands, but the expressions on his face. He scrunched up his lip and his nose and he strained his face so that it went all red and then when he looked really silly, he started pretending to cut at imaginary carrots like The Man was doing.

  “The Gruff doesn’t like squashy tomatoes so you have to be careful ok?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Here, I use one of these small knives. They’re butter knives, but they are real good for cutting through tomatoes. They don’t push or nothing, and it means the tomato doesn’t squash.”

  The Man went through all the vegetables on the table. He showed how to slice and dice each one and why he did it in each certain way. And he always started by saying he preferred it this way, but he always followed that by saying it was the only way that The Gruff would eat that particular food and that if he did it any different, The Gruff would get angry.

  “Are you paying attention?”

  Alex snapped out of his dream.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said.

  “He’s not all he says he is you know.”

  “Who?”

  “The Gruff. He acts like he knows the answer for everything, but he doesn’t you know. You’ll figure this out soon.”

  “Are you going to hurt me?”

  “Is that what he said?”

  Alex felt flushed. He didn’t want to say anything bad about The Gruff. He didn’t want to get him in trouble. He looked at the knives. It wasn’t the right time. Not now.

  “No,” Alex said. “It’s just… Why did you take me?”

  He was cutting vegetables into tiny little pieces and then brushing them into round piles with the palm of his hand. It looked like he enjoyed making perfect circles out the vegetables and they looked like small colored planets all sitting side by side.

  “You haven’t figured this out yet?” asked The Man.

  Alex looked confused.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” The Man said.

  “Then what? Why am I here? Why did you take me?” pleaded Alex.

  “You’re here to kill me,” said The Man.

  The Man continued cutting the vegetables into tiny little pieces. The Gruff loved them that way. He liked everything diced and sliced into tiny little portions. He was a small doll and he had a tiny little mouth and he demanded that everyone eat from the same plate so what he loved, whoever dined with him must also love too. And if he fell out of love with something than that whoever would fall out of love with it too and if he fell out of love with someone than that someone would fall out of love with themselves too.

  It seemed as if The Man hadn’t even heard or understood the sound of his own words or maybe he had and he just assumed what great joke it was that Alex would be brought here to kill him. How could he? He was so small. His hands could barely warp themselves around his own wrist let alone the neck of a grown man. And if he did manage to get a knife in his hands, would he have the strength to push it through a grown man’s chest.

  “Remember to rinse your hands and rinse the knife after each use. After this, I’ll show you how to use the washing machine. You probably never used one before right?”

  Alex shook his head.

  “It’s real easy. There’s lots of buttons and things, but you only need to use one or two. Grown up stuff is like that. There’s all these machines and stuff and they all have heaps of buttons and numbers and words and options and it all looks so confusing. But in the end you only ever need to use one or two buttons and the rest is just nonsense. It’s like the fridge. Do you see all those buttons?” he asked, pointing to the bright blue buttons.

  There were a lot of them. Three rows of buttons. And there were numbers and there were pictures of different things and there were words that he had never seen or heard anyone say before.

  “It looks real confusing and real scary but it’s not. It’s a fridge. It can only do one thing, make things cold. Those buttons, at first I had no idea what they were. The Gruff likes all this high tech stuff. He made me get that one. I didn’t know what they did at first then after a long time I realized that all they do is make things cold or colder or colder and when you press a different button, it has a different alarm, that’s all. Grown-ups just like to have all these buttons that they’ll never use. It makes them think they’re smart or rich or something. But really, all they use is the on and off button. All the machines are kind of like that. But don’t let The Gruff know. He likes to think we use them and that they’re really important. And he’ll tell you what they mean and what they do. All you have to do is nod, smile and say ‘wow’. It’s real easy, though. You don’t have to do it you know?”

  Alex looked confused again. There was so much information.

  “I don’t have to press the buttons?”

  “Nothing. Don’t worry” said The Man.

  The Man stopped slicing. He turned to Alex with this knife still in his hand. It was pointed towards Alex’s hear
t. Alex looked at the tip and it was looking at him. His heart was beating so fast. He felt his stomach rising up to his throat. But he couldn’t look away. He feared that if he did, if he turned to run or to reach for his own weapon, The Man would slip the knife into his side and then throw him on the table and - like the chicken and the carrots and the tomato - he’d cut him up into a hundred thousand tiny pieces and the small choking bones that he carved away from his tingling white skin, he’d brush off into the green plastic bag, sitting open beside the table.

  “You don’t have to do it Alex. I know he talked to you before you came in here. I know that he told you that this had to be done. I know what you talked about last night. I know all the things he’s said to you.”

  “What?” said Alex, playing dumb, obviously caught.

  “I know, because a long time ago, he said them to me. Did he tell you that I was going to hurt you?”

  “Yeah.”

  He felt like he was cheating a friend.

  “He said the same to me too. We’re the same Alex, me and you. I came here the same way you know?”

  Alex said nothing. He couldn’t comprehend how he was feeling. But he did feel a moment of release knowing that at least that he might not have to fight anyone.

  “When I was your age, I had a mum and dad too. I had a brother as well. He wasn’t older, though. He was younger than me. But I loved him. I’m sure I did. I can’t really remember cause it was so long ago, but I bet I would have. I don’t really remember my family. You forget a lot of things. I forget what my favorite ice-cream was. Now I love choc chip but I wonder if I ever preferred Napolitano or something more traditional like mango or strawberry.”

  Alex immediately thought of an ice-cream parlor that he had gone to with his brother. He used to mix a whole bunch of flavors together; mango and strawberry and cherry and bubblegum and choc mint and passion fruit. And he’d mix them all up. And he didn’t have a name for it. He just remembered what flavors needed to go into the bowl.

  “Do you still remember them?” asked The Man.

  He didn’t sound so big anymore.

  “Who?”

  “Your mum and dad. Your brother. Your sisters. Do you still remember them?”

  “Of course I do. That’s a silly question. Don’t you?”

  “No. Well, kind of. I remember kind of what they looked like. I remember their outline, like when I think about them, I always see them from a distance. It’s like I’m looking at them through someone else’s glasses. But I can’t remember what color their eyes are. I can’t remember what their voices sounded like. I know my mum she probably called my name a thousand times, but I can’t recall a single one. In my mind, I see that she’s moving her lips; that she’s calling out to me, but she’s not saying anything. There’s just this squealing and gurgling sound escaping from her mouth.”

  “Did someone take you too?”

  “There was a man. I didn’t know his name. He didn’t say it and The Gruff, he didn’t use it either but that man, he knew my name. He knew a lot about me.”

  “But why did he take you?”

  “For the same reason I took you. It’s what he had to do, it wasn’t what he wanted to do. But he took me and he scared me at first. And he did all of these things to The Gruff. He hurt him. He scratched him. He pulled him apart. And The Gruff, he helped me. He helped me find my voice, the one he said my mum and dad had locked away.”

  “What did you do?” asked Alex.

  He was looking at The Man like he would have his brother, lapping upon a new truth or some fantastic news. He hadn’t even noticed that The Man was speaking with empty hands and that this could have been his chance.

  “I killed him,” said The Man.

  The Man sounded upset as if he were admitting to breaking a vase.

  Alex’s stomach sank.

  “I didn’t want to do it. I was just a boy. I was like you. But he did all these things, at least, I thought he did all these things. The Gruff, he said that he hurt him and that he was going to hurt me too and that only I could stop him. And I did what he said. I didn’t want him to hurt The Gruff anymore. I couldn’t stand to see him that way. And I didn’t want him to hurt me. I just wanted to go home. So I took a knife and I snuck into his room and when he was sleeping, I put my hand over his eyes so he couldn’t see me and I cut his throat from ear to ear. It’s funny. I can’t forget that sound. The sound of him panicking and breathing blood back in through the gash in his neck. I hear it all the time. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”

  “I want to go home,” said Alex, riding a lump in his throat.

  “I can help you Alex. But you have to help me. I want to go home too. I want to see my mum and my dad. I want to see my brother. I want to see him all grown up. I don’t hate grown-ups, not like The Gruff does. He brought you here so you could kill me just like he brought me here so that I would kill the man before me. I don’t know how long he’s been doing this. There’s a room, room four, it’s always locked and only The Gruff keeps a key. I can’t go in. He doesn’t let me. All the other children are in that room. The only room that isn’t locked is mine and yours. I don’t know how many boys have been taken and for how long but Alex, we can be the last. We can stop him.”

  “I don’t know,” said Alex.

  “You have to trust me. Why do think he you’re here now? He has me here teaching you all of this so that you can keep that house all by yourself so that you can cook and clean and then when you are older and less like the boy in your picture, he’ll send you out to find another boy just like you. And you’ll do what he says because you love him. And you’ll do what he says because you need him. And you’ll go out and you’ll find a young boy whose voice cannot be heard, who’s pushed into the hands of polite attention, who shudders whenever his name is called and who comes to you because all they want is to have a friend. I always wanted to be older and now that I am, I wish that I wasn’t.”

  “I don’t want to fight you.”

  “You don’t have to. But believe me, he will make you. And I see you looking at those knives. You can’t imagine picking one up can you? You probably didn’t even cut your own steak did you?”

  Alex shook his head.

  His father always cut his meat.

  “But you will. And you never come back from that. He’ll get inside your head. He’ll pull off his own arms and tell you that it was me. He’ll scratch his own skin and tell you that I’ve lost control. He’ll introduce you to fear and tell you that I am its host. You can’t imagine fighting me. I couldn’t imagine it either. But I did and you will too. You will do something unspeakable and it will haunt you. And then one day when you are much older, you will teach the boy who you bring here to replace you, how to peel and dice vegetables in a particular way so that The Gruff doesn’t get mad. But it doesn’t have to be like this. We can stop him. I’ll help you.”

  Alex exhaled. He tried to escape with his breath, but it didn’t work. He was still there, trapped inside his own skin. He didn’t want any of this. He just wanted to go home.

  “What do I have to do?” he said.

  The Man smiled. He cut thin strips of red meat and he dipped them into some egg and then rolled them in flour. He did it with some chicken too, but Alex didn’t see.

  “I’ve put something in the food. It will make The Gruff go to sleep. You have to make sure he eats it, though. Once he’s asleep, you take that key from around his neck and you bring it to me.”

  “Then what?”

  “We escape. The key on his neck, it opens the door out of here.”

  “The Gruff said you had that key.”

  “He would say that wouldn’t he. He doesn’t want you to leave. Don’t you understand? If you kill me, if you do what he wants, you’ll never go home. You’ll never see your mum and dad again.”

  That’s all Alex wanted. And if The Gruff didn’t have to get hurt, if he didn’t have to fight anyone, then this was the best plan.

&nbs
p; “You can’t let him know that we’ve spoken. He’ll kill us both. Can you do this?”

  Alex thought of his brother. He imagined him riding past on the back of their father’s motorcycle except this time, as the motorbike passed the front of the house, his brother turned his head and he looked at Alex and he smiled and then the motorbike sped off.

  “I can do it,” said Alex.