. Iw ould like to say thanks to especially Waitingforlife for being like my personal editor for this book: reading it, and helping me with the grammar mistakes I and the computer missed and giving suggestions, Huge help Fear
Intro:
The Japanese word “fear” is written as a demon wielding a whip. For what would incite more fear in people than that which promises a truly painful end?
See are your sins, bare and raw across the dirt, the brown mud in front of you. A slash for each sin, says the oni. A slash for each wrong, a scream for each inflicted agony for your pain is my food, your joy my hunger and your screams my lullaby.
Fear me. Fear my being, my very essence that fills the souls of your kin, family, friends, and your mind. Have all shrouded, hope forgotten, and let no pair of eyes look at the sky with happiness or prayer. Let blood be spilled in my name, let war wage after I have gone, let sickness ravage, let mountains crumble, empires be destroyed. All who bow for me shall be forgotten, pain! Pain! I say!
Alas, lowly you are, squirm like a worm, laughter is my foe and tears are my wine.
Death! It follows me where I go, pain is inflicted by my words, war is waged because of me, weapons and temples built in my name. All loose hope in front of the demon with a whip! The oni called Fear.
It’s just a Dream.
He ran.
He did not know what he was running from, but he ran. His feet stamping the ground in clear rhythm. Like a bass drum, his feet hit the hollow surface under him, and made it beat.
Thump, thump.
The rhythm went on. Sweat prickled down his neck, a wet, red-dark vein coloured across his shirt front. Smell of his feelings rose around him, they were pungent, despicable.
There was nothing after him, clearly, and yet he ran with all his might, as if something had lingered, no, as if something had stuck to him.
Was he running from himself?
No! That was preposterous. His feet slowed down; there was nothing to fear… clearly.
It was all clear wasn’t it?
He spun around; he saw only white blackness, a start of oblivion, an end of a beginning.
His fingers were restless, as if they were too horrified to stay put, raping on his sides. Eyelashes shut and close as fast as lightning, for the fear that in the split-second that they closed something might appear.
“What is this?” asked a voice.
The man, the boy… just him, recognized the voice as his own.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
He spun around again, fast and clumsy. He almost fell.
He took a step, the feeling was back, and he took another. He ran.
“What do you run from?” asked another voice.
And then there was a slash.
The boy, the man, woke up screaming. He screamed sweaty, fearsome, high pitched, and then when he had ran out of breath, he inhaled and sobbed.
Quickly, gathering himself, the tears were wiped away by a fast swoop from his sleeve, leaving only a glistening trail of moistness on his pale skin.
There was a swampy, kind of lingering, ooze of sweat smell floating in the air. It stank of terror.
The man, the boy, shook, threw his legs to the side of the bed and held onto his knees. His pillow had long ago fallen to the floor as he had slept restlessly, spinning, and turning.
Gazing around, with a memento of the dream still floating in his memory, he noticed that the walls seemed to move inwards, closing in on him, his breath started speeding up, and the door to his bedroom was closed. He didn’t remember closing it. There was no recolection of how the door had closed, the window was not open; there was not a breath of air in the box of a bedroom.
Walls moved inwards.
He bounced off the bed, grasped the handle and threw the door open.
A sigh of relief, the walls settled back, retreated to their designated spots. Light spilled into the room, illuminating the bed with its richness. The moist shone in the light; the bed was like a clear sea. The bed robes settled on it like waves.
The fear was gone. It had hurried out of the room when the doorway had opened.
The man, the boy, sighed.
The alarm clock rang, three times.
Ring, ring, ring.
The boy, the man, jumped. He had been startled.
“It was just a dream,” he repeated to himself in all but a whisper, “Just a dream, nothing else.”
The clock was stopped, and winded again, for it to be ready for the next time it needed to alarm the man, the boy.
His breathing calmed, and shadows in the house started reclining; the way to the bathroom seemed more open.
The water ran; it ran in an ongoing stream, like a waterfall.
It seemed as if it cleansed him, he looked eyes wide, at the fall of the water, as the droplets hit his face, in a spray, as if from a machine gun.
The tears were washed away, hands scrubbed the remains of the sweat off his skin. The essence of fear vanished. Then the shower stopped in its tracks, as if an unseen force had put an invisible barrier to stop the flow, and he took his towel from the rack, it was the colour of dandelions, yellow, it made the man, the boy, think of himself as a brave lion when he scrubbed his hair dry, it was as if he had grown a main magnificent like the ones in the wilderness. A smirk started forming onto his bleak face. He tied the towel around his waist and went on to make himself a cuppa.
He settled down into his small kitchen, and drank from his cup while idly watching the news from an old television set.
“-Four people found buried dead at the memorial park. The police have no clues at the moment of the identity of the serial killer,” stated the newswoman, in a monotone. The man, the boy didn’t care to listen to the names of the victims. They weren’t anyone he knew anyways, so who cares?
He changed the channel, there were cartoons and he settled the remote down. He poured himself some more coffee and took a plate and filled it with cereals. The cartoons were re-runs of old Tom & Jerry’s. He dug into his cereals, and in large mouthfuls he swallowed the food.
By the time that his food was gone he had come to the conclusion that the cartoons were boring, baring in mind that he had seen all of them at least a hundred times before, he changed the channel back to news, and threw his dishes into the sink, they hit the other week’s worth of dishes with a clang. One glass broke… He stood there lazily staring at the broken glass, mind and face blank, like the worlds best poker face.
Empty, impassive.
He began gathering the pieces of glass with his hands.
One, two, three pieces, each laid on his hand, larger than the others.
Four-five-six-seven….. ten-eleven-twenty….
He yelped and pulled his hand out. A crimson red river ran down the length of his palm.
Dripping to the floor, a puddle of life lost.
Sticky of an irony quality. He looked at his life juice flowing away from the small wound on his hand and stuck it into his mouth.
“Salty,” he mumbled half-heartedly. He threw the remaining pieces to the dustbin by the bathroom door.
The man, the boy, glanced at the time; he was going to be late from work if he continued to loiter around home. Quickly he hurried into his old brown leather jacket. The jacket looked older than the boy, the man -which it most probably was- torn it was. There were holes in all the pockets and scratches scattered across the whole of the leather.
His shoes were black, general, dull of nothing to mention about, a working man’s shoes, they did not shine, they went well with his black trousers.
The trousers were small, and uncomfortable, but he hadn’t bothered to buy new ones, there was no real need for it. Was there?
There were gloves too, they had maybe once been brown, but now they were dusty and dirty. Their colour had left them long past. Faded, vanished.
He pulled them all on, tucked his shirt under his belt and left the house.
Ice glittered; the shine of the sun blinded the man, the boy. His breath turned to a cloud, and it flew up into the sky. One breath after another they all vanished to the sky. He pulled his work bag closer to his body, startled by the merciless cold wind. It slashed at him, tendrils like knives whipping at his bare skin of the face. He began walking, one step at a time, and one slash of a knife at a time. Breath in, breath out. His shoes left prints into the icy moist ground. The blood on his finger had dried, though it had left stains on all of his clothes, he sighed; he’d have to clean them all again. It hadn’t been more than two months that he’d washed them last.
His armour against was flawed, insufficient against the razors of the breeze.
At least it wasn’t raining snow, he thought.
Now that would’ve been a bitch, came the afterthought.
He was quite an optimist, or so he liked to think. “Realistic optimist” he called himself.
Life could treat you wrong, he would say, and you knew that it might always get worse, it always did, but there was always a silver lining for the cloud, there had to be.
Right?
But then again… Every silver lining had an ornament made out of crap!
His, mood was a grey. Impassive, as he always was.
The pedestrian street opened in front of him, and a lone bus stop was revealed. A yellow sign, ice had conquered the tip of it. The man, the boy picked up his speed after glancing at his watch again.
He heard the sound of a motor behind him, and spared it a look, as he turned his head the bus drove past him, pulling a helpless cry out of his throat: “Wait!” he ran after it, he saw that the bus driver’s eyes caught a glimpse him, but then the motor run louder and the bus drove away… Far away.
He slowly decelerated his speed as he got to the bus stop; his eyes were dim, shone of no smile. He settled his bottom on the cold, red bench inside the glass walls of the stop.
Alas, will there be no good omen, or fortune in this godforsaken world, or will it all end in a tempest of lost emotions, the drip from a knife that surfs through the air, cutting and slashing like fangs?
He used to have things well, he remembered. Things hadn’t always been this way he recollected. There had been a loving mother and a strict, but equally loving father. He smiled at the memory. A home without roaches, and a new jacket when he needed one. He felt oddly warm in this created illusion of reality, as if he was not of this world anymore, but the man, the boy woke up from his half real of a dream to the mechanic roar of the new age dragon. He saw the headlights of the next bus and signalled it to stop.
Attended by the screech of rusted parts the bus, old and faded blue, halts in front of the boy, the man. The double doors open and reveal the face of a man at least as old as the vehicle itself.
In no case is a person supposed to have a beard such as the one the driver owned. It looked as if a wild beast might jump out of it and ravage your face any second.
The man, the boy took out his wallet, hands trembling with cold, he dropped the coins; the driver sighed and closed the doors behind the man, the boy with a movement of his finger on a button. Scrambling for his coins his face turned red from embarrassment, he gathered his wealth from the floor and moved it along to the driver, who took them with a grizzly hand, hand shaking not of cold but of age, shrivelled pale grasp that closed its claws around the coins.
“One ticket, please.”
The driver stayed silent, and with movements slow as a gravedigger’s shovel he clicked in the digits and soon, the man’s, the boy’s ticket came out of the machine.
His old fingers ripped it off the machine, and with a grunt he passed it to the man, the boy.
“Thank you,” he said as he took his ticket and pushed it into his back pocket.
His steps wavering slightly, feet still recovering from the cold air outside, he made his way for an empty seat… Preferably by a window.
Each seat he saw was occupied by someone or became occupied by a bag or carriage of some kind as he walked by, on the faces of people he only saw the ice cold looks of indifference and the solidarity radiated from their being.
Finally at the back of the bus he found two empty seats, he sat next to the window and set his suitcase next to him, battered and black it was; the seat was nearly as battered and of unexplainable colour that must’ve at some point in time been brown or yellow.
He watched as the bus began to move; his vision was blurred by the dirty glass. The world looked bleak, not much bleaker than normal, but dirtier, through the glass. The all consuming greyness of the asphalt, and the clouds seemed to fuse into a solid mush that made up the world outside the buss. It was cold outside, he remembered. Knives and whips it was out there.
The brief spots of green, the last of the dying plants, still fighting the unforgiving cold, went past very fast and soon the boy, the man was beginning to feel his eyelids close, although he had just awoken he felt tired, so very tired.
The bus rattled on the street, the man, the boy, felt like an infant inside a cradle, roughly but lovingly being helped to sleep with the jumps and bumps of the vehicle.
A warm feeling spread around him, he tried to fight the loving caress of sleepiness, but his will could not cope with the temptation of the misleading force.
Slowly but firmly he dowsed off into the hug.
He opened his eyes, abruptly, his view was blurry. It seemed to the man, the boy, as if he was seeing the world from both third person and his own eyes. He saw the world all around him but at the same times he only saw from his own eyes… It was, abstract.
Looking around from his double perspective he noticed that his back was touching a floor. There was no depth in his surrounding, no images, no wind or breeze.
With creaking knees he heaved himself up, face facing a wall, it hadn’t been there before. Up, down. Left, right. Walls everywhere.
He was closed, he was trapped.
His heart beat sped up!
Locked away. His hands were pressing against each other, like cleansing themselves without water. He was trapped.
“Anyone there!?” he shouted.
“Anyone?”
He fell to his knees, his breathing became heavy. He heaved, not breathed.
Huff, huff.
Eyes darting, to and fro. It was dark, even though the walls were white and there was an unseen light illuminating the room.
Nails scratched against cloth. He didn’t notice when but suddenly he was naked, his nails bloody.
Puddles of vermilion blood flickered on the floor, he was spinning hysterically.
Pain inside a closed room.
Hands kept scratching him, more life juice ran, hard, the wound healed instantly just to be replaced by new ones.
Suddenly!
He had clothes on and the walls were away, instead the man, the boy stood on a dark road, something was after the boy, the man.
The bass of his feet was there again, and once again he ran from the unseen menace.
“Just a dream! Just a dream!” he chanted.
As he ran he didn’t notice that the road ended, he hit his face onto a dark tree. It wasn’t only dark, it was black. A black oak.
He heard a whisper next to him, “This is the end of the road,” it whispered.
Abruptly, the man the boy opened his eyes and woke up, startling even the old bus driver that looked at him weary eyed.
“This is the end of the road,” he repeated monotonously.
Quickly collecting himself the boy, the man, nodded fast and took his suitcase and hurried out of the buss.
The last stop wasn’t too far from his work place so he could just walk. His steps were brisk and fast. He sobbed once and twice and then decided to stop before people would start wondering what was wrong with him.
Hastily wiping his eyes and hastening steps he made his way to an ugly concrete office building.
The thud of feet hitting the ground, quickly, faded away, leaving only echoes after them.
The boy, the man, found himself standing in front of glass and brass double doors alone. Not a soul moved behind him, nor did he see anyone inside.
Sigh, was the only thought that his mind carried inside its all too empty knapsack.
Glowering at the doors as if hating them would make them disappear, ideas of just going back home were springing into his mind. How pleasurable would it be just to have a day of leisure? He thought, but he knew that he couldn’t, since it was a fairly new company and people needed to work hard to make it big, as their CEO said: “This small company will, without a doubt, in a few years be on the top, if everyone works hard ‘till they can’t work no more.”
Time flew, and the man, the boy, had not budged, he stood there like a statue, inanimate.
The wind blew cold, and the warmth of the bus was wearing off of him. The breeze felt like a breath of a person on his neck.
“I wait for you in the dark,” The boy, the man, heard a voice say behind him. Hastily he jerked his whole body forward, away from the origin of the voice, and pivoted around to see who had spoken, he saw no one… The street was silent; the only sound present was the sound of passing vehicles and the worsening blow of the unwavering cold.
With shaking hands he pushed a door open and walked inside the office building.
He was met by a smell of mould, that had the habit of loitering around in every hallway in the building, the CEO told them to think of it as: “A substitute for the normal, boring office smell.”
Apparently their heating system was still working poorly, since it was still quite chilly inside the building. The heating system consisted of a broiler in the cellar of the building, it had been built somewhere in the seventies, the fact that it was still “working” meant that the CEO had no responsibility to change it.
The walls were a dull brownish colour, yellowed by age and browned by critters that could not be seen at that particular moment. Each corner owned and harnessed its own pungent and revolting stink, which could bring a full grown man to his knees with tears of torture in his eyes.
The man, the boy, didn’t wish to remove his jacket just yet, and decided to wait till he got into his cubicle.
Rushing up the stairs, after he had noticed that he was going to be late soon because of his loitering in front of the doors, he took long steps, jumping two steps at a time, until he finally reached the second floor and he sprang into the “cubicle complex”, as he had baptised it.
Manoeuvring through the rows of work places, where people went on with their work, tapping with vigorous speed on the buttons of their computers, he prayed silently in his mind that he would not meet John Carson that day. He truly and deeply wished for that. Sighing in relief for not meeting the man as he reached his own cubicle, he took of his jacket. It wasn’t as chilly there as it had been in the hallway, due to the amount of people inside the room. He walked into his cubicle only to groan in distaste as he noticed a familiar figure sitting on his chair, fiddling with a rubber band.
John looked up his face lighting up as he noticed the boy, the man.
“Oh there you are!” his voice was full of jovial cruelty.
“I’ve been waiting for you for at least half an hour.”
The man, the boy, grunted, trying to avoid a conversation. He set his carrions onto his desk, trying not to even look at Carson.
A sharp stinging pain hit the back of his head, his hand shot up to rub the spot.
“Ow!” he yelped.
He turned around, just to find John grinning; the rubber band had vanished from his hands.
“You could even say hello.”
The boy, the man, grimaced, but he swallowed his pride and told him his hellos.
After opening his suitcase he turned around to face John, who was still comfortably seated in, the man’s, the boy’s, uncomfortable chair.
“Could you, leave?”
John seemed preoccupied by some invisible stimulus on the work table, and the man, the boy had to repeat his question. This time Carson did lift his head, there was a faint twitch by the side of his lips, as if he was repressing a laugh, and it was almost as if he was saying: “Made you ask it twice.” Laughter played across his eyes.
The man, the boy, was now, exceedingly, visibly annoyed; he started having hallucinations of grabbing John and smashing his face on the computer screen, by the means of repeating and harshening blows, possibly twisting the man’s neck at the same time.
His waves of aggressive thoughts were not even cut by the enraging snicker that momentarily escaped John. His waking dreams of smashing a pickaxe into the man’s balls were a long time ambition of the boy, the man.
“Just kidding, just kidding!” Carson said, and tapped the man’s, the boy’s, shoulder benevolently, as if talking to a long time friend.
In the whim of the moment, the man, grabbed John’s hand by the wrist and threw it away.
John looked at him, deviousness replacing the benevolent intentions on his face, as if he had thrown away a mask. He took a threatening step towards the boy, smile slowly turning into a grin his eyes shining with malice, red light glinting from them, though the redness could have been anything, reasoned the man, the boy.
“What’s going on here!?” Shawn Leerie was standing at the gap into the cubicle, his hand lifted to hide his open mouth as he yawned loudly. The breath escaped his throat in a way that seemed somehow very fitting for Shawn’s character, which was quite easygoing and lazy as a hedgehog in the winter. His hair pointed upwards like spikes on a fence, giving him a certain look that reminded people of some kind of a pop singer. His chin wasn’t pointed, but neither was it entirely round, and he had light brown eyes of slightly wet beach sand. He wasn’t exactly heavily built, he was slim and of medium heights, but you could see the muscles tensing under his shirt, and just too short sleeves.
Carson’s body tensed. All expression melted from him, each and every muscle in him seemed to get sprung, like the line in a bow; he looked like he was ready to bounce, but Shawn stood behind him, a relentless, yet quite, passive force.
An angel like smile spread across John’s face as he turned, and with an effort of will he seemed to be able to relax his body.
“Hullo! Leerie, what’s up?” he asked, hardly able to hide the scorn in his voice; red hatred bubbled behind his eyes, a fire only growing stronger as more coal was thrown into it. “Just here chatting with my pal.”
Carson took the boy, the man, by the shoulder as a friend might. The man, the boy hastily broke free of the touch.
Shawn lifted an eyebrow, “John Carson, hasn’t anyone ever told you not to pick on people who are smaller than you?”
He shook his head in false shame, not even trying to camouflage his mischief.
Carson grimaced, fast, almost unnoticeable; he excused himself, mumbling something about someone calling for him.
After he had gone, the man, the boy, slumped into his chair, and sighed in quiet relief.
“Thanks,” he said.
Shawn just beamed at him and said “Don’t mention him, can’t take that fucking bastard anyways!”
He gave the cubicle a passing glance and turned on his heels; he stopped by the gap into the cubicle. “Well I’ll be on my way,” unjustified joy still filling his voice. Cheery character he was, Shawn Leerie.
“Tell me if that fucktard gives you anymore trouble, ‘kay?”
The boy, the man, grunted in agreement.
Leerie stepped out of the cubicle.
The boy, the man, turned around wearily, he seemed tired, and felt like it. He turned his stone aged working computer on and began working.
He had the company’s account and other prosperity businesses to handle, all of which were as interesting as a steaming pile of cow dung.
He began writing; columns after columns of numbers and letters appeared as his fingers soared over the buttons with lightning speed. His eyes intent on the screen, not an ounce of interest was poured into anything else, since if he made a mistake in the wrong place he might not get paid at all before Christmas.
Money here, other money goes there, those thousands went there last month and these hundredths are now here; all this money that he would never ever see anymore of than what was written on his pay check and even from that the tax was taken away from. If only he could just snatch a few thousand from those numbers into his own pocket for Christmas and get that new heater that he wanted.
Hate, depression, a blue-dark air was about him, moving in un-seen waves over his head, his gaze fixated on the computer as if they were affected by witchcraft. His eyes wanted to close, but the pink machine inside his skull would not let them, instead it ushered them, like a dictator. With the enthusiasm of a man pointed with a gun the man, the boy, worked on, and on… and on.
All this time, the hatred and the frustration that he had fused, they mingled with each other. He saw himself strangling John, murdering the man when he was asleep. He saw himself breaking an axe into his computer and stealing the company’s money.
All naught but dreams. All naught but wishes.
In his moment of harbouring revenge a shock of theatricality met him.
“To be or not to be?” he whispered and chuckled.
His chuckle increased to laughter, and his laughter was coloured with scorn. His scorn turned to malice and his laughter to maddened barks.
Of course all silent, otherwise people would think ill of him, of him and the problems that he had.
So the boy, the man, shut his mouth and carried on.
The dark-blue air that was hovering there in the cubicle, was obviously to blame for his madness, what other contraption of man or God could do such a thing to a person, he thought. The fault is on God, the fault is on Man. Hate, death, destruction, an unwavering war of ideals.
Let all of man fight, for land for God. It is all a lie!
No one sees, no one does anything. Those who see are called crazy and dismissed. Why should one care about the death of people? Everyone dies, everyone kills but everyone does not acknowledges the murders they have committed
Why should I care? He thought. It is not my burden to bear.
A hint of air into the lungs, the lungs grow larger, and a breath out. Calmness, the blue-dark air vanishes and so does the confusion of mind, welcome peace, welcome sanity.
The man, the boy, looked at the time, it was lunch hours.
Fast his fingers hit CTRL and S, and he shut the computer with the next press of a button. He hurried out of the square of a working place and jogged towards the cubicle of his friend.
Gender:
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