Trollheart

Coming Back to Life

The noise surprises me. I suppose I could say it shocks me, and that might in fact be closer to the truth – certainly more accurate – but then, technically I'm already shocked enough that the loud clang really isn't able to do more than surprise me. Why does it surprise me? Because I hadn't quite expected something so small and, really, relatively light to make such a loud sound. Maybe it didn't. Maybe the effect of its hitting the floor was merely amplified by my own sense of terror, dismay and revulsion, but it certainly rang in my head like the pealing of a bell. A death knell. I almost grin at the irony, but in my situation grinning is not only inadvisable but pretty much impossible, unless I want to go, or seem, completely mad.

I'm not quite sure when, or even why I dropped it, though I think that maybe I didn't: maybe it was all the blood that has made it slip out of my hand, or it could have been, too, that after the deed my fingers, losing their nerve, let it go automatically. It could also have been that horror and revulsion I was talking about a moment ago. Well, you'd be horrified and revolted too if you'd seen what I have.

If you'd done what I've done.

I find my eyes drifting downwards, almost reluctantly, as if pulled there by an undeniable call that has to be resisted, but cannot be. I think I see the knife first. It's lying on the ground, half-shrouded in darkness but still clearly stained bright red, making an odd kind of an exclamation mark with the droplets of blood that lead off from it, and make it, just for a moment, seem like the ultimate and absolute end of a sentence whose author will never write another word. Following its track my fiercely resisting eyes, iron filings dragged along by invisible magnets, uncover no final message, no clue left behind as to who had done this, no plea or last farewell or even a curse.

No more words. No exclamation mark, either – it was simply an optical illusion, like the sock that falls from the dryer into the shape of something else, the cloud that assumes a likeness to something recognisable, the image which eventually emerges out of a magic eye picture, as Jesus sometimes emerges from everything from a piece of toast to a pool of oil, visible clearly to some, to others nothing but a confused mess which shapes nothing.

No, the knife does not exclaim, nor does it question. The knife has had no say in this, though it has had the final say, you could say. Sorry for the somewhat rambling narrative here, but I'm sure you can understand I'm pretty much on edge. On edge! More irony! Iron! Well, steel. Iron. Steel. A sharp, dully glowing blade, lifted in the half-gloom to...

I push the image away. I'm not ready to deal with that just yet. Not now. Now I have another image to face, but before I do – and yes, I quite understand that all I'm doing here is delaying an unpleasant but inevitable task, but you would too if you were in my place – let me just complete that apology, which got a little off track when I started making silly puns. I suppose it's my way of dealing with this situation, though I'm sure any shrink worth their salt would tell me that the last thing I'm doing with this situation is dealing with it. Avoidance, they would say. Probably. Keep everything at arm's length, keep looking the other way, talking about other things, focusing on anything but the matter in hand (in hand! Sorry; there I go again) because the reality is too horrible, too scary, too real to face.

They'd be right. I'm sure of it. That's why they get to sit in plush offices in places like Manhattan and Chicago and Boston and look down on the rest of us, why they make more money than you or I could ever... Sorry, once again, I'm rambling. Time to take hold – no! No more puns! - and get this apology out there.

The rambling narrative I referred to earlier is due to this: I'm making this up as I go along. No, that's not as bad as it sounds. It also probably isn't phrased correctly. What I mean to say is that all of this is new to me, and to try to make some sense of it (if such a thing can ever happen) I've taken to writing down everything that happens, as it happens, and, well, it can get a little hard to remember details. My mind seems to be fragmenting, and sometimes I remember things before they've happened, if that doesn't sound like a crazy person talking. And if it does, hell, maybe it is. Maybe I am. Crazy, that is. You'd know. You're the shrink, aren't you? You're not? Oh.

You'll have to excuse me now for a moment. This is the part I always hate. I've come to hate it even more than... well, I'll get to that, and when I do, you might wonder how I don't hate that more than I hate this, but this is my nightmare and I'm trying to maintain whatever slim control I can over it, which isn't much I can tell you. But there I go again, rambling and going off track, running away on tangents while the thing I have to face is a mere flick of my eyes away. Off to the right. Just there. Just out of sight. In the dark.
Perhaps it's best that it is in the dark, but that won't save me. I know it's there, and if I didn't, like some frontier explorer looking for the source of a river I could follow the dark tide that has made tiny little lakes and then flowed onto the blade of the knife, follow it back to its origin, its wellspring. I won't be feted. No ticker-tape parades for me. Nobody wants to know about this particular discovery. I don't want to know about this particular discovery. But I can't ignore it.

As my eyes move right, my head turning with them, I find the rest of my body collaborating with them to draw me closer, and my knees begin to bend, my head lowering as indeed my body lowers, coming closer to the ground, my bottom descending until it's almost sitting on top of the backs of my heels. My hands, long and now limp since I dropped the knife a few seconds – a few days, months, years ago, reach out of their own accord into the darkness, groping through it like someone parting a screen, and my fingers, trembling slightly now, touch flesh. It's still warm, and it's sticky and wet too, and as I pull my fingers back, not in shock or horror this time, and certainly not in revulsion, I lift them to my eyes, touch them off my lips, taste the blood as my eyes register its presence.

It's by no means a surprise. This is not the first time I've done this. I think I've lost count in fact of how many times I've squatted in this very position and examined my kill, and it always makes me feel the same way. You're going to think I feel one of two types of emotion, I know you are, but you're wrong. You'll say she feels horror, shock, revulsion (yes, I've used those words, so why bother thinking of your own? They work, after all) at what she's done, but no, I don't. Not at all. So then, you'll say triumphantly, it's delight, satisfaction, a kind of manic pride in my work. Wrong again. I suppose it would be fair to say I do feel some sorrow, and maybe there might be a case for being satisfied, too, but they would definitely not be the overriding emotion. I don't quite know what that emotion is, or if it can even be described, but it leaves me with a very clear thought, one I can't ignore, or deny, one which I know is the truth, the reason I do this, the reason I've done it before and the reason I'll do it again.

This was necessary.

I don't hate her. I don't have anything against her. Hell, I don't even know her! Though that's not actually true. I feel I do know her, though I'm one hundred percent certain I have never seen her before. I don't know her name. I don't know any of their names. I don't know their backstories, I don't know where they come from or why they're here, and I certainly don't know why I have to kill them.

But I do.
Have to kill them, I mean.

Will I pay for it, you ask, in that oddly macabre interested tone people who read murder and mystery and horror novels use, knowing that the events cannot possibly affect them, that the people brought to life by the author's skill are in fact not real at all, and while some connection may, at some point, be forged between reader and writer, in few cases is the former going to sit and cry about the death of the creation of the latter. People cried when Dickens killed Little Nell. Dickens himself cried. I've cried over characters, but it doesn't last. It's not like losing a real person who impacted your life, who you grew up with, who you thought, when younger, would always be there and who, as you got older, you realised would not, and began trying to prepare for the day when they would not. No. It's nothing like that.

So you can be interested in the fate of a character, in a book or a film or on television, and either root for or against them, cursing the writer when the opposite to what you had expected or hoped happens, but then you forget it and tell yourself hell it was only a story. Who in the end really cares? We were shocked by the unexpected death of Robb Stark in Game of Thrones, and it hurt for a while, but then we got on with it. Poor Fantine's treatment at the hands of her creator was execrable, but once we'd finished Les Miserables she was put out of our minds, and when we realise Bruce Willis is dead at the end of The Sixth Sense, we're shocked (the first time) but hell, we know Bruce will be back in Die Hard 9 or whatever. The same thought comforts us through the most traumatic events in fiction, be they in print, on screen or even onstage.

It's just a story.
It's not real.

I wish I could say this wasn't real. Maybe it isn't. It would certainly explain – sort of – a lot of the things that have been happening. But I can't think that way. I have to assume it is real, and so to answer your question, will I pay? I don't know. As the man in the Carlsberg ads says, probably. But one thing I do know for certain, and I know it with a diamond-hard and laser-sharp clarity, surer as I have ever known anything in my life. If I don't do these things, I will pay.

I will pay with my life.

Kill or be killed? I suppose that's one way of putting it, though it wouldn't be fair to say, nor would I ever claim, that I kill in self-defence. Far from it. All my victims so far have been completely unarmed, defenceless, perhaps even innocent. It hasn't stopped me. I know I have to do this. Somewhere in my mind is the immovable, undeniable feeling that this is what I was put on this earth to do, that this is – no, not my vocation. Stop putting words in my mouth and trying to psychoanalyse me. I thought you said you weren't a shrink? Yeah, well then keep it zipped buddy. I'm no serial killer, no mad crazed (yes I'm aware they're the same thing; leave me alone) homicidal maniac. I'm not a sociopath. Of course I realise that if I were a sociopath that is exactly what I would say, just as many alcoholics will refuse to admit they have a problem or a junkie will confidently claim they can quit any time. But I don't feel an urge to kill. I don't enjoy it. I don't select and stalk my victims, I don't even have the kind of strong stomach you need for this. I hate blood; it makes me sick, as it made me sick just now. Sorry about that. But have you ever heard of a serial killer who can't stand the sight of blood?
Score one for me.

But if I'm not a natural born killer, then why am I doing this? Good question. I wish I had an answer. I told you a moment ago that I feel driven, feel a compulsion pushing me on, urging me, telling me I must do this. And yes again I know, thank you very much, this is from page one of Serial Killers Unmasked, or whatever treatise on murderers and what motivates them you wish to quote, and who knows? Maybe you're right. Maybe I can be classified as a serial killer. After all, the main – almost only – criterion for one of them is that they have to have killed a bunch of people, right? And I've certainly done that. How many? I've really lost count. Dozens? Oh no, not dozens.

Hundreds maybe.
Could even be thousands.

I haven't been counting. Maybe that is another score for me in the game of I'm Not A Serial Killer, Get Me Out Of Here! Although if it is, the last part of that title is less than useless to me, as it seems there is no way out of here. Am I trying to kill my way out of here? Have I been taken prisoner, trapped, placed in some fiendish maze like a laboratory rat, and unleashed to see what I'll do to get out, how far I'll go? You know, over the – however long I've been here; time really doesn't seem to have any meaning in this place, I've considered it. Well, you have to, don't you? In those quiet moments between the time you spend stalking, hunting, killing and being violently sick, to get ready to go on and do it all again, you have to think.

Because otherwise you'd just go mad.

I've sat down and tried to work it out, often as I'm cleaning blood or brains or shit or some other unnamed substance off the knife, or axe, or chainsaw (that took a long time to clean) and trying to hold down my lunch, which I never seem to partake of – yeah, I must eat I suppose, for who can exist without food, but I can't for the life of me ever remember any meals, snacks, even drinking water, and yet I never tire. I go through the alternatives, the theories I've come up with to try to explain what's happening to me, where I am, and how I can get out of here. None are encouraging.

There's the one I mentioned just now, hopefully you were paying attention. Yeah, the rat maze one. Am I part of some dark and off-the-books government experiment to see what sort of atrocities a person will go to in order to secure their freedom? If I kill enough people, will I eventually be rewarded by being shown a hatch that leads out of here, back to the real world, back to a life I don't remember but must have had? Is someone watching me, even now, taking notes, charting reactions, drawing correlations and preparing reports? Could that shadowy watcher even be you? If it is you, you're hardly going to tell me though, are you? Can't spoil the experiment. Have to start all over again, and where to find so many more victims for me to kill? I could kill you, right now, except of course I'm pretty certain you don't exist. Maybe I don't exist. But that's for the next theory. Whatever my status is though, I hold to my belief that you are not real, and so I can't hurt you. You're just in my head, a way of dealing with the loneliness and isolation. Lucky for you. Because if you were real, I would kill you.
Believe it.

I'm not threatening you, understand. It would just be necessary. Something tells me this. It's just one of those things you know, like when the sky darkens and you know it's going to rain, or that tight feeling you get in your stomach when it's a mad dash to the bathroom before you have an accident. You don't question it, you don't doubt it. There is no ambiguity; it will definitely happen and it can't be stopped. That's how I feel. Anyone I see now, anyone I meet, has to die. It's just how it is.

But where was I? Forgive me, my head has started really hurting and I forget things, get sidetracked. What was I talking about? Oh yes: the possibilities, the theories that might explain where I am, what's happening to me. Well, I've told you one already, the one about some black-ops covert unlicenced experiment run by the government. Yeah, fetch the tinfoil hats, I know. But on one level it fits. Another option of course, quite possibly the most likely, is that I am dreaming. Again, it would explain so much that can't be explained, but that theory has a few small problems. Firstly, I remember little about myself but I'm fairly certain that I don't dream in such rich – and often repellent – detail as I seem to be. I'm not, so far as I know, one of those people who watches movies and documentaries and reads books about murders and killers, and yet I seem to have a natural talent for this, or maybe have developed one. I can handle weapons I've never used before. Of course, in essence anyone can handle a knife, but to use it – ah, now that's a whole different thing.

You have of course (assuming you exist, which as I said I don't think is true, but let's assume for the sake of my rapidly-failing sanity that you do) used a knife, to cut bread, meat, vegetables, cords on packages and so on. But that's just using it. You've never (I imagine) plunged a knife up the the handle in someone's head, or rammed it into their eye, or drawn it across their throat. Believe me, slitting someone's throat might seem a relatively quick way of killing someone, but when you feel that vein pulsing under your thumb, the harsh intake of breath as your victim realises their life is coming to an end, and then the pop as the air rushes out when you slide the blade across under their chin, it doesn't feel like cutting string or cheese or even meat. For one thing, meat and cheese and string don't move, not like a human head moves, not like the arms that fly up to try to protect their precious throat, try to grab the knife, try to push you away.

And then of course, there's the blood.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018