Trollheart

Been a while since I last spoke to you, and man have things taken a turn for the worse. The last two were damned hard to put down, and I took a lot of damage myself. Not quite sure I'm ready to face another one. But I see one approaching now. It's weird: up to now, as I think I told you last time we conversed, it's always been me hunting them. Now for the first time I'm being stalked. I tell you, it's not a nice feeling. Jumping at shadows, never sure when you can rest (not that I seem to need that physically, but emotionally it's important I think), always on your guard. Suppose, when I think about it, that's how they must have felt when I was hunting them. Well now I know, and it ain't good. It's one thing when you can set your traps, plan your strategy, scope out your victim, quite another when you're taken completely off guard and they get the drop on you.

They're getting stronger too. I don't know what it is, but they seem not only more resistant to my attacks but able to press their own now. They've found weapons, yeah, from somewhere I don't know – where do I find mine? They just, you know, appear as I need them. Maybe it's the same for them now. Maybe whoever wrote this video game or whoever is controlling this experiment is trying to level out the field? Maybe my own diseased mind is rebelling, turning against itself, and giving me harder obstacles to surmount. Hey, what do I know? Don't look at me for answers. You probably have them, but aren't prepared to show your hand just yet.

Fuck! One just came at me while I was talking to you. Have to excuse me for a moment. This one looks...

Tough. By Christ she was. How many hours have I been away? Right. So you're not saying. Or you don't know? Well it seems like it took a hell of a long time to win that battle. I'm bleeding in several places, and if you can die in here, I'm starting to think I'm heading that way. Hard to concentrate these days – nights? - and my strength is rapidly fading. Hard to even stand up straight. Hard to... oh fuck. Another one.

You know... it's... funny but I... thought that one looked... familiar... somehow. Like I... Jesus fucking Christ that hurts! Like I... recognised her... though I knew... I had never... seen... ah fuckfuckfuckityFUCK! Can't be... oohhhhhh! Can't be... long... now....

Thought that... was... it. Just... aaarrrrgghh! Just blacked... out. But you know... now that I... look... at you... you... look familaARRRGGHHH! Oh fuck! You look familiar... too...

Oh... my head's... my head's swimming. I think I'm... I think I'm hal-hal-hallUCINATING OH CHRIST! You... look... just like... the one I just... fought. Didn't.. I....?

Aw... ****. You're... one... of them... too... aren't you?
You're... all of them. I... recognise you... now.
I recognise... me.
****.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Oh... so now... you're gonna... talk to me? I can... see your mouth... moving... I can... I can hear... the words...
I can... hear your... voice.
Are... are you... are you God?

No, Jennifer, I'm not God, and neither are you. You had many theories about this place, about where you were, who you were, why you were here. The one about the nightmare was the right one, technically. You are – were – in a nightmare.

But there's one important point you weren't able to consider, as it never occurred to you.

It wasn't – isn't – your nightmare.
It's mine.

You're a part of me, Jennifer, a part I've always allowed to control me, and a part which, had I not fought back, would have killed me, or kept me here, which amounts to the same thing.

I know you're dying. I can't say I feel any sympathy for you. I want you to die, Jennifer. I need you to die. If you don't die, I can't live. This is one of the universal truths you were dimly aware of while you fought in here. If you didn't defeat me, all this would be taken from you.
And it will be.

But you won't care, because you'll be dead. Though really that's not a true statement, as you were never alive in the first place.

Let me try to explain it to you, Jennifer, before I leave you to die. Seems only fair you should know why you're dying, why you have to die. A long time ago – a year, they tell me, though I have no way at the moment of confirming this, so have to take them at their word – I had an accident. A bad one. Let me go a little further back though, to put this in perspective. Sorry, I know you're hurting. I don't wish you pain. I don't hate you. But you have to die, and there's just no way around that, and after all, you chose the method of attacking me so it's only fair and appropriate that you die in the same way as all your victims died.

Anyway, I was not – am not – a good person. Nobody could call me that, at least, not without lying through their teeth. I was a wife and a mother, and I sucked at both. I was lazy, arrogant, weak. I was bored with my life, with my perfect husband (though I now realise he was far from perfect, for who is?) and had no time for my three little children, seeing them as more an annoyance, a distraction, an unnecessary drain on my finances, rather than the blessing they are, or were. My husband made – makes – good money, and he gave me all the money I needed, happy to do it because he loved me, and he trusted me. Big mistake. Rather than spend the money on shopping trips I got into drugs, first relatively innocuously. I would go to parties – without my husband – and meet dubious people. I eventually became a cliche, selling my body for heroin when the money ran out and Danny refused to, or was unable to give me more.

It's nothing special as a story, happens all the time. Danny and I drifted apart, I spent time in jail, he held on for as long as he could then finally I forced him to file for divorce. I actually told him I wanted it, because I knew I'd get a very generous settlement which I could then plough into my addiction. Heroin was all: I no longer cared about Danny, I had never cared about the kids. All I wanted was my smack, and I didn't give a toss who I hurt in order to get it. Danny didn't want to divorce me – the poor fool still loved me, thought he could change me – but the decision was taken out of his hands when, fleeing from the cops with a key of the stuff in my trunk I slammed into a wall and they had to cut me out of the car.

I've been in a coma, they tell me, since then. I don't remember any of it. Little flashes: the pain of a sharp object across my throat, a kick in the head, the buzzing of a chainsaw? Faces floating in front of me, the faces of my family, and your face, always yours, grinning, looming, leering, hating. I knew your face. I knew it was my face. But I didn't know that I knew. I just had this terrible feeling of recognition every time you attacked me, like being slaughtered by your twin sister.

Oh yeah. It's been me – you – us you've been killing all this time. Every victim, every murder you've committed has been a part of me. I don't quite understand it, but Danny has, apparently, been coming to the hospital every day since I was admitted, sitting by my bed and telling me what was going on, keeping me updated in the hope that I might come out of it, come back to him.

It wasn't working, because I didn't want to.
But I do now.

But those victims I was talking about? The ones that never fought back? Well, until now that is. All aspects, I'm told, of my personality. You went for the weaker ones first of course. There was my sense of self-worth – easy pickings there, no resistance and a quick kill. Then my ambition, also weak, easily murdered. Others, too: again I don't understand it but it has something to do, I believe, with how my brain was perceiving my coma, and how it was deciding whether or not to fight back, whether to remain here and give up or try to get back to the real world, try to wake up, try to come back to life.

Hope. Guilt. Self-loathing. All little defenceless prom queens to be stalked and destroyed by the night slasher, all easy prey for the monster who walked among them. Me. Us. Whatever. Frail, fragile little weaklings who fainted away dead at the sound of the steel sliding into flesh, who closed their horrified eyes and passed away at the first spurt of blood from the artery. No match for you, those cutouts, those losers, those quitters. Because I was a quitter. I wanted to lose. I wanted to stay here. It's easier, of course it is. But nothing worth doing is ever easy. The good things demand sacrifice, the triumphs in our lives are only achieved through self-denial and backbreaking labour, through determination and acceptance of loss, acceptance of our fallibility, the recognition and realisation that we are not perfect, never can be, and probably never should be.

To slightly paraphrase the Beastie Boys: you gotta fight for your right to life.
And I didn't want to fight. Not back then. What had I to live for, Jennifer? My husband was leaving me (yes I know I said I wanted the divorce, but that was the heroin talking, not me) and taking my children. And he was right to. I couldn't look after them. I couldn't give them the nurturing love they needed. No safe haven in this harbour, kids. They'd be better off without me. So would he. I knew it, and he knew it. And then that small part of me that still realised that there even was an outside world, a reality beyond the one I found myself in, remembered that even if things had been peachy with my home life, I had crashed in possession of a kilo of horse. I was going down, if I ever woke up.

I had nothing to look forward to but a long stretch inside, a lonely life that would be even lonelier when I got released, assuming I didn't top myself or get on the wrong side of a shank while incarcerated. Outside, if I made it, I would be as alone as I would be inside. Nobody left to care for or about me, no chance of a job, and in all likelihood the craving would not only still be there but would have increased, as only the very foolish and naive think that you can't get drugs in prison.

So what else to do but slide down into welcome darkness, hide in the anonymous protection of the coma I was in? Why come out? Why not stay there? It was safe, it was quiet, and nobody could hurt me there. More importantly, I couldn't hurt anybody. I was better off where I was. My husband and kids were better off where I was. Everyone was better off if I just remained where I was and never troubled the world with my sorry presence again.

Which is, I believe, Jennifer, where you came in.

Now I'm no shrink, and I don't believe in God, so I don't have any way to adequately explain it, but you seem to have become the personification of my despair, though you would not of course have recognised yourself as such. You were born, if I may use that term loosely, with a single objective in mind: your survival, and continued existence. Hey, I don't blame you, you know. It's the driving force that impels us all, the instinct that makes us step back when a car nearly runs us over, or stop when we run towards a cliff, or too fast down steps. It's the defence mechanism that has us throw out our arms when we fall, or cover our heads when something heavy – usually something much too heavy for our mere arms to protect us from – falls from the sky. It's the sense of preservation that makes us turn away if we see trouble, refuse to bear witness or pick someone out from an identity parade even though we know who it is. None of us want to die. We all want to live as long as we can, and that desire is inbuilt and hard-coded into our DNA. So how could you not wish to preserve your life?

The only way you could do that, though, was to ensure that I remained in the coma, and to do that, you had to destroy my urge to wake up. Because some part of you knew, instinctively, that if I really wanted to come out of the coma, there was nothing you could do to stop me. You weren't strong enough on your own. The odds and the numbers were against you, but what use are superior numbers if they're made up of chicken**** soldiers who will run at the first sound of a shot? And that's what my – let's call them emotions, though that's not quite right, but it will do – were; cowardly, craven, weak, miserable little excuses for an army.

But not them all.

Because somewhere along the line, don't ask me how, I started to hear things. Maybe it's true what they say about people in comas, that if you talk to them they hear even if they can't respond. I certainly heard Danny talking to me, though for a long time all I could hear was a low mumble, a kind of muttering I couldn't even identify as his voice. But slowly I came to understand that it was him, that he hadn't abandoned me, that he was promising to stand by me, maybe bring the kids to visit me when I was locked up, and afterwards, when I got out... well, to be fair he made no promises, nor would I have expected or really wanted him to, but he gave me the impression that the door – no pun intended – might still be open for us. It was all I needed to start fighting back.

All I needed, except I had no clue how to. I tried to wake up, tried till I felt every blood vessel in my body was bursting with the effort, but nothing. And then one day I heard him talking to the doctor – actually it may have been a priest – and this guy was explaining a theory he had, that the patient in a coma fought a kind of existential battle, where one half of the brain, soul, heart, call it what you will, dug its heels in and wanted to stay asleep. Sleeping was easier than facing what I had done, and as I was already in a coma it would be, this man said, like trying to pull a massive plug that had been sunk into the earth out with my teeth, but that if I didn't manage it I would remain in the coma.

She has to fight, he had said with a tinge of sadness and regret in his voice (or was that the doctor? I couldn't see anyone of course so had no idea who might be talking) and she has to want to wake up. If the part of her that fears coming back, doesn't want to take responsibility for what she has done, wins, then she will never wake up, and she may just slip away.

And that's what you are, Jennifer, or what you were anyway. You're that part of me that tried to keep me asleep, roaming the corridors of my brain like some slasher movie stalker, hunting down my weaker impulses and killing them, destroying me piece by piece, taking my resolve and my determination to break out of here and rejoin my family, weakening my defences and shaking me by the throat like some wolf finishing off its prey.

I was ready to let you win, to just sink down into the mire of my own bad choices and talent for fucking my life up, and that of everyone I knew, until today.

What happened today? I'm glad you asked.

You see, today Danny was back at my bedside, the way he has been for a year now, every day without fail. But today he did something he has never done before.

He brought my kids to see me.

And I heard their voices, heard them crying, whispering to their mummy to come back, please come back, they needed her.

I say this in the most general terms, but after all, you're me, as such, and so I can say it to you. You're a woman. You know the greatest, most indefatigable, most unstoppable force in the world is the love of a mother for her children. You'll give your own life for your kids.
Or take it back.

So, yeah, I feel a little bit sorry for you now, Jennifer, as you lie there bleeding and dying, and finally realising what it is you've been doing, and how, despite your many victories, you were always fated to lose. But I don't feel that sorry. You're a bitch, Jennifer. A selfish bitch who tried to keep me apart from my children, and for that you deserve to die.

I don't know, though: maybe you'll live on when I wake up. You're a part of me, after all, a small, insignificant part now of course. I'm not saying I'll get off dope like that, and I know I have a hard time facing me once I wake up and can be moved to prison. But I can face all that now, because I am no longer alone.

Perhaps you won't be, either.

I really don't know, and to be brutally and frankly honest with you, I don't care either way.

Goodbye Jennifer.

I'm going to open my eyes now.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018