Necessary Fractures

Perhaps it would be best to start sometime before the beginning and tell you a little about a particular friend of mine. He's a good friend, a bosom chum, an inseparable portion of myself. Suffice it to say that if I ever lost him I don't know what I would do. I'm speaking of my closest and most important friend, my second personality: Vincent.

I first met Vincent in third grade. I was on the verge of turning nine. It was late April and three unfriendly little boys were attacking me. Two of them held me down while a third one rubbed a variety of garbage in my face. Crying, more for a reason why then any sort of mercy, I blubbered and howled while a mixture of discarded orange rinds and dog shit was smashed into my mouth and across my forehead and into my eyes.

The recess bell rang and my tormentors abandoned me to whimper and twitch in the grass. I slowly struggled to my feet. I was dizzy, sore, bleeding and nauseous; but more than all of that was an overwhelming feeling of distance. I began to see myself from the outside like an establishing shot for a character in a movie. I walked past my classroom where I could see the teacher Mrs. Littlefield was calling my name. I walked past the playground and past the fence and unthinkable for a third grader, I left the school grounds and walked the 1.5 miles home.

My mother was surprised initially when I walked into the small shop in the garage
that housed her pet grooming business. Only vaguely paying attention to my presence, as she was working on a cocker-spaniel, the bane of all groomers, she asked me if school was out early for the day for some reason. I blubbered something, half crazed, wild eyed and reeking of the remains of 20 minutes of walking home covered in shit and garbage. This caught her full attention and she began asking rapid detailed questions about what had happened to me. The details are sketchy from here but at some point I was taken back to school and refused to give the names of my tormentors, I take care of things in house.

With no names to go on the principal scolded me for leaving school and I was sent home for the remainder of the day. That night I had a certain recurring dream.

It began as such things usually do. I brushed my teeth, I flossed, and I put check marks on my dental hygiene calendar. I put on some pajamas. I got into the top bunk of the bunk beds which had ceased by that time to serve their original purpose as my younger brother now had his own room and the bottom bunk was only occasionally used to transform the beds into the cockpit of an exotic blanket-spaceship that always managed to crash after flying through an asteroid belt or meteor shower of some kind.

And then I fell asleep.

As I lay in the warm and comforting silence/darkness of sleep I began to see the red mist. I struggled against it. Turning my head and blinking rapidly, willing it to leave and finding my efforts fruitless. It grew thicker and thicker until the entirety of the darkness was covered in a waist height thick red carpet. And I was in a room, the light of the room was ambient, source unknown, but I knew where I was. I was lost amongst the bleak stone structures of the world I visited when I slept. Random edifices of a smooth, fractured, gray stone dotted a large room with a low, indefinite ceiling. Though I knew where I was everything was as different as it was the same. The world of my dream was ever changing but maintained a familiarity both terrible and satisfying.

I ran.

Not that there was anywhere to run, sometimes the walls were very close and only a 10x10 space existed to move around in, other times it was vast, with walls that could be seen but never reached and sounds that would echo in the way colossal cavernous batholiths turned on their side would sound. I would run, breath fogging or moving the dusty air, leaving what I feared was a visible trail behind. I would scurry, dodging around stone abutments and under overhangs trying to stop them from tracking me, stop them from finding me if only for a few extra seconds, because they always did find me and when they did they would take me to the door and beyond the door to the hallway and then to the chamber. And in the chamber lay the table. And a few seconds away from the table was worth any effort.

They would start looking for me soon. The precise time it took them to start was made obvious by the sounds of the first and possibly least horrific of the four things that stalked me in my dreams. I dubbed him the Imp, a short, stubby entity that smelled always of vomit and fish. His legs were uneven, the left longer than the right, and his arms were often twisted, though where the joints hinged wrong changed from night to night. He was green in color and danced about on his crooked legs to some horrific rhythm that pulsed through the room and around the rocks and rattled through me. His heart was firmly attached to the outside of his body and it lubbed and dubbed a thick dark material into his body that could be seen swimming in his eyes. He wore knickerbockers and a watch fob tucked into his waistcoat. His shirt was pristine white and his head was covered in only tatters of hair. He didn't talk, never spoke, only danced and hopped about smiling that horrible smile and pumping his octopus ink blood.

The Tall Man normally followed Imp, talking in an obtuse dead accent in rhymed couplets. He was easily seven feet tall but in my childhood he seemed closer to nine or ten. He wore a Victorian coat with long tails and had those sort of straight stove pipe trousers that made his knees seem so knobbly. He was missing his left eye, the socket just an empty housing and his remaining eye looked as if it had a crack through it from upper right to lower left. He had four arms that ended in barbed hooks and he walked in an incomprehensible slow lope. Every step he took seemed to take minutes to lift and shift and land but despite that I could never run from him fast enough.

I saw them coming through the red mist loping and hopping in tune to the distant, omnipresent, beat of the room. I peeked around the rock I was hiding behind and saw them. I froze in fear, wanting to run, wanting to stay hidden, wanting to not be here, wanting to find a way to wake up, and wanting a way for this to be the last time, to simply have them capture me and kill me and be done with it, to be away from the fear and torment and dread. The Imp must have seen me because he danced more frantically and did a little twirl on his stumpy left leg.

The Tall Man nodded. “Desperate do I seek the leaf/pain and death upon the waif.”

The Imp began running forward, head low and body writhing with the effort of dancing and coordinating his mismatched limbs. The Tall Man strode forward with his singular dedication one step at a time always just behind The Imp despite how slowly he took each step.

I jumped from my hiding place and ran, trying to stay low, hidden in the mist. “Streaking, bounding through the heather/the hare rattles into lather,” I heard distantly behind. As I ran I could feel the floor getting uneven, sloping downward. I stopped abruptly and ducked under an overhang of rock with a decent sidewall to it. I was protected from view from 5 directions from there. I sat and held my breath. My head must have hurt and for some reason my left hand was bleeding so I held it to my chest.

Too soon I heard them outside of my rock. “The prey I hoped to gather/I have lost to an other.” And with that they were gone.

I sat where I was, slowly breathing until I felt like I could move again. The pain in my left hand began to subside and I couldn't see the blood anymore. I rested my head on the rock and tried to sleep, sleep myself awake. As I closed my eyes I heard the clack clack of the fourth and most horrific of my tormentors. He who Had No Name, He who commanded the other three with gestures and glares and who was ever watchful, ever watchful of all things. He had no eyes in his head, rather, every one of his fingers ended in an ocular organ of some sort. Human eyes, cat eyes, lizard eyes, fish eyes. Eyes that were slit horizontally and vertically, eyes that twitched and twisted and saw. He walked about with one hand in the air in front of him wiggling his fingers as they gazed and probed. He wore a very smart pinstripe suit with no shirt and his shirtless chest was sunken and seemed to wriggle with things beneath the skin. He smelled of bad books, the stink that books that were bound in linseed or flax oil smell like. His feet (whether they were boots or actually the make of his feet) were redder than the mist and the heel and toes were separated by a slit that ran halfway up his calf. It was this that gave him the click as he walked.

The click click of his walk grew louder and closer. I knew that I could not hide from him and his horrible eyes so I ran from cover, back the way I had come, back towards where I appeared in the room. No sooner had I stepped out of then I saw He who Had No Name, and with him was the third of my tormentors, Stick. Wrapped in the remains of bandages and oilskins he was barely more than a mummified dog. But his legs were jointed wrong, his shoulder to his elbow/thigh to his knee were horizontal and then split straight down to his hands/feet. He moved like a water bug, drifting and sliding forward. He who Had No Name held onto Stick by a strand of cloth which he let go. And Stick moved forward at me, impossible fast, effortless, with a blank in his expressionless face. I took fewer than three steps when he pounced on me. I was knocked flat under the mist. The Imp and The Tall Man were right next to me giggling and smiling. They had known where I was.

They had always known.

He who Had No Name gathered me in his arms, his eyeball fingers clutching at my arms and staring into my face and wriggling as he walked across the room of mist.

Toward the door.

During the first year in which I had this dream this is where I would wake up, the point at which we reached the door. I would wake up, safe in my room and too cognizant of what I had just went through. I told my parents what I had seen and felt and they would tell me that “satan” was after me and that if I prayed everything would be fine. I spent a lot of time praying before bed, hands fixed before me securely on my knees before I went to sleep and still the dream would come.

The second year of the dream I would cross through the door. A simple wooden thing, no ornamentation, no symbols or made of human bone or anything, just a door like you might walk through any day in your own home. It was a door that could lead anywhere, but it always led to the hallway, and the hallway led to the chamber, and inside the chamber laid the table.

I was carried through the door and down the hallway, it was infinitely long and I never could see the end of it, all I felt was the pressure of being carried and all I could see and hear and smell was the presence of my tormentors. Some nights this portion of the dream would last for hours once it seemed nearly a day long. Tonight it lasted for what seemed like three. The second year the dream would end here, somewhere inside a vast tunnel where I was surrounded by visages of terror and nothing outside or inside of myself but terror. Terror of what would happen, dread of what was to come.

And the hallway led to the chamber, and inside the chamber laid the table.

The third year I began to reach the end of the tunnel, time would pass and I would be brought into the chamber. It was a large structure like an operation theatre hewn out of a black, sooty rock. Five rows of what could be seats were lined with torches set into the floor and in the center under a great glass skylight was a stone table that rose from the center of the room. Shaped roughly like a crucifix it featured four straps, one for the legs, one for each arm, and one for my head. The tormenters would strap me down, each taking a place around me. Stick at my feet, The Imp at my left, The Tall Man at my right, and He who Had No Name at my head. They would hold me down and place the brown leather straps through he loops and pull and I would wake up.

And on the table I was made to lay.

It was not until the fourth year of the dream that the strapping would not awaken me. No, in the fourth year they began to enact a ritual of some sort. The Tall Man would shove a hook into my neck and split me down to my groin. Several of He who Had No Name's fingers would detach, grow legs from the stalk and crawl inside my chest cavity like scorpions, finger/tails held high and crooked above their heads. They would emerge some amount of time later carrying my organs inside their finger/tails. The Imp would jump on my chest and dance and hop and bob lub-dubbing inky blackness into my chest and onto my face. Sometimes my organs were eaten other times they were merely shown to me and then discarded. He who Had No Name would speak to me in these times, telling me what was being done and how, but never why, not once. As they removed my eyes and tongue and teeth he would tell me how it was they were pulled out, would tell me how they had cut me or broken me.

I would wake up somewhere in there, not ever at a specific point or a particular organ removal – just somewhere along the way. I began reading every night in the fourth year. About half the time I would dream I was in the book and would not find myself in the room of mist. I began reading late into the night, sometimes four or five in the morning, usually in my closet where my parents would not see the light and know I was still up. Even now I can barely sleep without music to occupy portions of my mind.

And on the table I was laid open and pulled apart.

But tonight things were ever so slightly different in the dream. Tonight as they carried me into the chamber and strapped me to the table something changed. Tonight as I struggled to fight against my horrific tormentors, desperate to free myself from the bonds of the esoteric operating table, something happened. The skylight that looked out upon a non-Euclidean cyclopean landscape burst open and a man that looked like an older version of myself came crashing in. He wore a large floppy black hat and a combination of black wool and leather clothing. He was strapped with: two pistols, a shotgun, double barreled, sawed off; a rapier; two tonfas; a nodachi; a knife; two hand axes; and a leather satchel. He talked in a deep, even, monotone the simple word “Enough.”

He who Had No Name screamed/hissed a sound that shook the room. Stick scuttled forward and was split in twain by a massive stroke of the nodachi. The Imp was blasted from my chest by multiple rounds of the pistols. The Tall Man fared better against the newcomer. Striking with his abundance of limbs he momentarily held off his destruction. But the newcomer was faster and stronger, ripping each hook from its socket with deft twists of the rapier and finally running The Tall Man through. This only left He who Had No Name. He hissed and spat and howled into the depths of the chamber. The newcomer strode forward with a singular purpose and hacked off both of He who Had No Name's hands. The fingers fell, transmuting to little scurrying scorpions as they hit the floor. Again the nodachi split the tormentor in two and hundreds of eyeballs scurried to the floor.

The newcomer sliced the straps and picked me up from the table. I lay limply in his arms as he walked out to the hallway and woke up. Since that time I have not had the dream, though I have met other characters such as the tormentors, and I have seen more than one eyeball-scorpion.

After that I have been in and won nearly 200 fist fights, jumped 7 feet vertically on two separate occasions saved five peoples lives and kicked the hell out of three muggers.

I would later learn that the man who saved me in my dream that night calls himself Vincent and claims to be an angel bound to the earth since 600 A.D. for reasons he isn't talking about. I'm not overtly superstitious and though I may spend a lot of time researching, reading about, and writing stories about angels I am too cynical to suppose that his tale may be true.

But I do know this, I was once given to a horrific repetitive nightmare that all of my advanced intellect cannot place where or how I would have come up with so many of the details of and it did stop one night when a strange man broke in and saved me. Since then I have preformed amazing feats of strength and skill and can fence and sword fight like few others. I may not be possessed or occupied by an earth bound angel, but I certainly do have a second voice that says so.