Mercy

Billie Joe’s closet was, surprisingly, much smaller than the one Elliot held me hostage in for four days. I didn’t think it possible to find myself in an area more cramped than those filthy quarters, but there I was, walls pressing against me from every direction, as I ineffectively attempted to draw my knees in closer to my chest. I wanted to move, wanted to leave through the door which I primarily assumed contained a bathroom behind its wooden posterior, but the lack of space made it difficult to stand. Even if I managed to hoist myself up without striking an elbow or my head against any of the walls which surrounded me, it wasn’t as if the knob on the door would turn. As deeply as I wished to forget the unmistakable click! of a lock being turned almost the second after my body had folded in upon itself against the cruelly uncarpeted closet floor, I knew I couldn’t possibly erase the haunting way in which that goddamn click! reverberated from wall to wall with a casual effortlessness from my already deteriorating mental state. For the second time in less than a week, I was helpless and trapped within the closet of a madman.

I couldn’t tell you how swiftly my stay at the hospital and escape to the old bastard’s woodland home were fleetingly erased from my memory. Perhaps it was within a second after the last intimidating echo of the lock being turned evaporated into extinction, overwhelming me in a silence and solitude about as comfortable as the cold, hard surfaces pressing against my body from all angles. It may have been the moment I felt myself wondering whether or not a sandwich would be lying on the floor if I moved my foot enough to make contact with that particular corner of the closet. Either way, sense of time and existence disappeared so fast that I found myself clawing at a phantom burning sensation beneath the bandages which encased my blistered neck, for a necklace of gauze felt much like a dog’s training collar to one whose sense of touch was hindered by recent injury and binding…to one whose mind had been broken through a sadist’s restoration of his sense of control through his own horrific infliction of the Stockholm Syndrome. I could practically feel the shockwaves pulsating through my body from the collar Elliot had clasped around my neck, and at once I felt certain that my ticket to freedom was to remain silent.

Make one fucking sound, Slut, and I’ll do it again, cautioned an inhuman, frigid voice belonging to one whose vice-like paw held a small, plastic remote that donned a single fatal button. One fucking sound…

Well, you jackass, I didn’t plan on making any fucking sounds. I played your game once and learned the painfully electric way in which you punish disobedience, so why the fuck would I bother crying out for help? It wasn’t as if I had any chance at freedom until you’d grown bored of my suffering, anyways. I just had to tough it out, be a good little Slut, and maybe the boogeyman would be merciful enough to let me go. But wait. Wait just a goddamned minute. Which boogeyman was holding me hostage this time around? I could vaguely see myself clawing at a hospital room’s bathroom door, shrieking and screaming and pleading with whoever was on the other side. DON’T USE THE COLLAR! I’LL BE A GOOD BOY, I SWEAR! The promise was ridiculous. I was no more capable of being a good boy than I was of controlling Billie Joe’s presence within my mind, though the pledge to remain good presented me with a new predicament entirely. Was the boogeyman, the sadist, the bastard who locked me in here the one who mocked me to silence or the one who persuaded me into boisterous insanity?

I couldn’t fucking remember, and the more I pressed the issue, the greater a sense of being shocked and burned by that collar became. It was as if my own subconscious resented the idea of allowing me to remember.

Soon enough, I felt the traces of madness crawling back into my head at the mere prospect of spending another four days as the helpless, writhing plaything of either an old man or one much younger and far more arrogant. I heard the door rattling about in its frame as someone on the other side frantically attempted to turn the handle. The sudden disturbance of my unsettling silence was forceful enough to be felt as prominently as it was heard while the walls trembled and quaked around me. I pressed myself against one in vain, madly clinging to the idea that my clamorous intruder would either leave me be or learn how to unlock a fucking door, for whatever genius was trying to bail me out of my unanticipated brush with confinement was making damn sure that his seemingly heroic efforts would not go unnoticed. Once the din was reduced to nothing but a psychological aftershock of static ringing within my ravaged eardrums, a sound so entirely paradoxical to the one I’d previously been subjected to met my ears in a softly melodious whisper that sent all rational thoughts reeling straight down on their asses.

“Fairy?” it asked. Gentle. Loving, even, but the sugar-coated hesitance was capable of little more than sending me spiraling into a subconscious pit of misgivings when it came to the not-so-newfangled idea of selfless concern. I wondered whether it was a charade. Voices soft and sweet as candy and lace still cooed when they came all over my bloodied face, after all.

The morbid rhyme might have brought a spitefully tasteless chuckle to bubble up from the defiled spirit within my gut, but conflicting demons which romped about my mind refused to let the feigned mirth escaped my parched lips. With bandaged fingertips still grasping at the gauze wrapped around my neck, a voice cried out, Not a word, Slut! while another barked, Don’t you be silent, boy, I wanna hear you scream! They were so loud, so fucking vivid, that a pained whimper gurgled from my unprepared throat and altered itself into a more-than-audible, squeaky groan. A combination of my futile attempts to suppress the noise from disturbing Elliot’s precious hush and the suddenness of its birth into the hollow depths of that closet compelled it into growing louder than planned. The boogeyman from the outside world sharply drew in a breath as my garbled cry reached his finely-tuned ears.

“Fairy, how’n the hell you lock yourself in from the outside?” he questioned, incredulity dripping from each southern-fried syllable.

One fucking sound…

I wanna hear you scream!

Ultimately, I decided upon the latter command, for the voice speaking to me from behind the door was identical to one which insisted upon hearing my voice.

“I didn’t! I ran in here, collapsed on the floor, and the next thing I know the fucking door locks behind me! Why’d you do it, Armstrong? Why the fuck did you lock me in here?” I bawled, not quite cognizant of just hot hysterical my own voice had become.

The lock clicked! a final time before the door swung open, revealing a disheveled old man with bloodshot eyes who peered cautiously into the closet as if he assumed I would jump him the instant the door provided a wide enough gap for my body to leap out from. I refrained from the notion of attacking him despite how attractive the scenario appeared to be when drawn out in detail in my mind. That was…until I remembered how close I’d gotten to raping that poor old bastard. I remained coiled on the ground in fear of repeating that very atrocity.

“You think I did this?” he marveled, waiting for me to exit the closet, but I failed to move. I did not blink, I couldn’t breathe, and I found myself suffocating in his presence. He should be terrified of me for what I was apparently capable of committing, yet there he stood with balls of brass waiting for his destructive little Fairy to come out of the closet…pun almost intended.

“Well…yeah. Who else would have? Jakob?” I retorted, refusing to meet that skeptical stare.

“Nah, Jake’s been feedin’ the baby. He ain’t been on this side o’ the house for a while now,” Billie Joe relayed, tap-dancing around a truth he would not speak unless it was directly asked of him. With brows furrowed in frustration, I did just that.

“Then who locked the fucking door? A ghost?”

Though I appeared adamant at evading eye contact at all costs, I stole a glance at the descending corners of his mouth and witnessed as a frown dominated his features completely. I was mocking him and he knew it, derision cold and superfluous regardless of how pleasant he’d been with me prior to unlocking me from my claustrophobic nightmare. Before he could feel my eyes soaking in the sorrow that emanated from the practically snarling edges of his lips, I lowered my gaze to the jeans which clung to his skeletal body and found myself marveling over how they managed to keep themselves from pooling around his ankles without a belt for assistance. My eyes traveled to two nearly undetectable protrusions that jutted from the sides just below his waist and it suddenly became clear.

Billie Joe had the hips of a teenage girl. Not quite wide enough for child bearing, but not exactly the tapering nonexistence of a man’s pelvis.

“It probably was,” he stated after his pained lapse into silence. I felt a dangerously uncontrollable urge to laugh in that moment, but by some stroke of incredible fortune, I managed to quell the absurd compulsion because it would do nothing more than ridicule the old bastard even more than I already had in such a short period of time. Besides, the laughter was simply a mask for something darker, something that petrified me beyond the point of comprehension.

There may or may not have been a spirit residing within the old bastard’s house that had it in for me.

With eyes still keenly focused upon a certain grace and femininity about Billie Joe I hadn’t quite perceived before, I noticed he began to draw nearer to me until his body was inches from mine. He held out a quivering hand, a peace offering wrapped in faded ink, which I reluctantly took and permitted for him to assist my body into a standing position. Without letting go, he pulled me from the closet and paused just outside the door. His frown broadened as he slammed it shut, locking it behind us.

“Show me which pills I need to take ’fore bed, Fairy. I’m ‘bout dead on my feet ‘n’ I still need to make myself a little nest on the couch to sleep in,” he sighed, tearing his eyes from the door to take me into the kitchen with him.

“Why do you need to sleep on the couch? What’s wrong with your bed?” I questioned, feeling the blood in my veins turn to ice at the absence of one simple bag of prescriptions which should have been resting nicely on the counter.

“‘Cause you’re sleepin’ there,” he muttered, eyes gazing at the exact empty space on the counter as I was. “Son of a bitch!” he whimpered, eyes misting with tears I knew he wasn’t keen on allowing to fall from his ashen cheeks.

“Joey stole your morphine,” I observed, wide-eyed in outright horror.

“Fuck,” Billie Joe murmured, voice not much more than a deflated whisper. “He took your crazy pills, too.”

“I know.”

“Fairy I can’t…I dunno if I can make it ‘til they d’liver the other shit. It hurts,” he mewled, folding himself into my chest in admitted defeat as his body racked with noiseless sobs which turned not so silent once his ailing lungs settled upon putting a premature end to his tearful outlet of grief with a swift but effective coughing attack. I let him hack right into my torn t-shirt until the irritation subsided and the physical agony was too much for him to bear.

“It’s ok, Old Man. You’ll make it. Now lead me to your bed because there’s no way in hell I’m letting you sleep on a fucking couch in this condition,” I commanded.

Billie Joe turned away from me on legs that had grown increasingly unsteady with fatigue and commenced in hobbling down the main hallway into a room that was far too familiar for my liking with its broken guitar fragments strewn about the floor and the ominously motionless rocking chair which occupied the corner. When I looked away, it seemed as if the chair had begun to rock, but as soon as my eyes flitted back to the elusive movement, the chair had stilled once more. The old bastard’s grip on my hand had tightened the second I thought I saw the chair move, yet the two instances could have been simple coincidences. He was, after all, eager to allow the best painkiller of them all to overcome him so profoundly that he might successfully survive the few excruciatingly long days before the IV medication would be delivered to his secluded home.

With how aggressive insomnia was with ensnaring his mind in an almost-constant state of consciousness, however, the basic escape to slumber would be more likely to elude him than not.

“Stay with me,” he whispered into my ear as I eased him into his bed. “Fuck the damn couch ‘n’ stay with me t’night.”

Anxiously chewing my lip, I couldn’t come up with a plausible reason to deny his request.