The House With the Broken Heart [Pt.2]
[Being Chapter 11 in the Tale, The Only Way Was East.]
I’m lying here, choking on this black grime as if an ink pen skewered my wrist. It’s contents creeping up my arteries where the dark liquid has filled me up entire. Leaking out from my mouth and my ears. Even from the whites of my eyes that have gone grey now, completely covered with goo.
All those monsters I found in the tower have converged on me now. The orgy of ghouls fucking themselves limbless has crawled up en masse to torture me in propinquity as I lay there dying at the top of the stairs. So close. I always get so close, but I can never fucking seem to finish anything I do. I’m such a half baked artist. A half baked friend. A half baked everything. Soft. Unsatisfying. Useless.
Lying there like a tincture bottle almost entirely waxed with black ink, waiting for the last drop to kill me, I wail out in pain. It looks like I’m laughing. I’m crying the same kind of tears I usually do when I’ve bottled them up for so long that nothing seems to come out. It would feel good to cry if it didn’t hurt so fucking much. If I couldn’t imagine how pathetic I looked, lying there, my face wet like a piece of raw steak whispering out a little cry because I can’t even do that properly.
I hear Calluna and Stacey’s voice from far above me, but I don’t see them. It’s just this empty room at the top of the tower overlooking the Rosarito coast. It sounds like they are miles above me, screaming down. Like my ears have suffered the noise of a gunshot. I cannot hear their words. Only the tones of their voices serve to identify them.
I know that in “reality” Calluna and Stacey are standing right above me, watching me cry like a fucking baby, wishing I would get up and put the stone back on its altar at the center of the room so that they could get on with the rest of their fucking night. Instead, they’re watching me lay on the floor three inches from the finish line whispering and crying to myself like the worthless piece of shit I am.
One arm is clutching the stone and the other is missing. It’s been ripped off by a few of the prickly-pear cacti monsters with sinister faces who are laughing as they munch on it. That’s fine, it’s not like I’m bleeding anymore. My heart had to have stopped working fifteen minutes ago. It’s been completely taken over by the stone now, I can feel it. Hardening and cooling to the black firmness of obsidian.
So I’m lying there with no arm, covered in black blood, an army of ghosts screaming in pleasure to torture me, just waiting to die. It’s not the peace you might imagine after having violently lost a duel. It was excruciating pain and every time I could stop sobbing like a three-year-old I would cry out “pleasepleasepleaseplease kill me I want to die, I don’t like this, I don’t like myself, I’m pathetic I’m worthless and I don’t deserve to be here.” It’s a way I’ve felt before.
Then it seemed like the Big Green Eye came to grant my wish. Half of the room was completely dark, and I could see it quietly floating there, watching me writhe like a fish who keeps getting water splashed in its gills just before it suffocates on air. I watched as the eye moved back and forth, whatever body it was connected to was swaying or swimming in the shadowy air. I couldn't see much more of it than what I saw when I looked into the stone. That eye in the ocean of darkness. It had teeth. Sharp teeth. Claws and horns, too. It seemed to be sizing me up, waiting like a vulture to feast on my flesh.
It was only then that I realized how completely fucked I was. That there was no way around it, I was going to die. And maybe all this hating myself held with it a sick kind of optimism. Maybe I was trying to be so hard on myself because deep within me I believed that I could scream at myself enough to stand up. But I couldn't. It was done. I was going to die.
I figured I might as well just forgive myself for how pathetic I thought I was. There had to be people more pathetic and worthless than I was, surely. So I would die knowing that at the very least I would not be the most pathetic person who ever lived, and that thought made me smile.
Having made peace with my own mortality I began to sing as the tree branch claws of the green-eyed monster reached out of the shadows to clutch me.
“How darkly the dark hand met his end. He was withered and bony, exposed for a phony, but we— ”
YEAEETHEEEEEEEEEETHAAAAAAAAA
It was the sound of a thousand speeding corvets all careening to a halt. It was the sound of mirrors breaking and babies screaming and a fork dropped in the garbage disposal. A bright green light shone over me as the beast let out its roar and my dry sobs were replaced with a warm and steady flow of tears. I felt fear. Real, true fear. Not whatever I had felt before that kept me frozen. When I saw that hideous thing entire, it’s mangled body standing there in the moonlight I did not want to lay down and die. I wanted to run as fast as I fucking could.
Was it an ash-black tree with a screaming mouth? Was it a behemoth, a dark megalodon floating in the ocean of shadow? A sea serpent? The devil itself? Maybe it was all of those things for a moment, flashing and changing in form so quickly that my brain raced to understand what it was looking at, shuffling through my small collection of archetypes to try and find something to call this unnamable thing. All in vain, though.
But then it became something else. Something entirely different that I don’t really want to talk about right now…
We left the tower. I’d done it. I’d put the asking stone back on its freaky little altar at the center of the room where it soaked up the moonlight and monsters with it. A little black magnet for all the nightmares. It was over.
Walking out of the red castle’s white gates, Calluna and Stacey were all smiles. they tried to get me to laugh with them, to celebrate, but I wasn’t having it. I was in no mood for smiles. All I could think about was what I had seen, what the green-eyed monster really looked like when it showed its true face to me.
Calluna kept asking me what it was like in the tower, her morbid curiosity getting the best of her. She wasn’t satisfied with the vague answers I’d given thus far. She was swept up in her own adrenaline and she pushed too far for my exhausted heart to handle. On top of almost dying, I was still very drunk, and very sad.
“Listen, Calluna, I don’t ever want to fucking think about this again, much less tell anybody about it. I’m going to bed, OK?”
“Oh. Okay. I mean, don’t you want to celebrate? I mean we did just save your life?”
“No I don’t want to fucking celebrate, I want to go to sleep,” I mumbled quietly as I pushed myself up the stairs.
“Ok, Fuegito,” Stacey said, crossing her arms and tapping her foot. “You can sleep if you want, but realize this: tonight I’m taking my scissors and going into your memories and your dreams. Neither you nor Calluna will remember the tower or the ghost or most of what you’ve seen here por nada. I’m cutting all of those memories out. I’ve kept my magic a secret too long for you to blow it now.” She stood there, looking me up and down, trying to figure me out. “You’ve just beaten a ghost AND an asking stone,” … a pair of big green eyes, too, I thought, “So why not enjoy tonight and celebrate while you can? You will regret it if you don't.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said, a little too harshly. I wanted to get to bed. I wanted to sleep and sleep forever. I wanted to forget as quickly as I could the face that was wearing those terrible green eyes.
Calluna came into the bedroom a few minutes later after talking with Stacey for a while. I was balled up on my side of the bed, wrapped in a blanket with my eyes wide open and awake, an angry expression on my face. Calluna mirrored me, bawling up on her own side of the bed. I could tell from her breathing that she did not fall asleep for several hours. If there was ever a thought that we might sleep together again, that seemed to be out of the question now. We never touched that night, not even our asses rubbed against each other we were so frozen in fear of the other. I lay there awake as long as I could. Angry, sad, afraid, staring at the ocean. Then finally, drunk and exhausted, I fell asleep.
[END OF CHAPTER 11]
