The Moonstruck

I awoke with the sun in my face; a brilliant swatch of white-yellow that suggested neither sunrise nor dusk. It was simply…light. I could feel my cold, dead skin opening to it, greedily drinking it in. Heat. Energy. Life.

There were flickers of shadow, a blurred figure moving about, stumbling in and out of the picture. Familiar and slight and alive. I’d seen it before. Smelt it, felt it near me when I was drifting, slipping. I hadn’t the strength to get up and follow it then, even though I’d heard it talking to me. Low murmurings, nonsense and jokes and serious business.

But now…

Blinking blearily, I twisted about, turning from the light as I took in my surroundings. I was lying in a small bed in an equally meager room. The walls were bare save for a few yellowing photographs of unfamiliar faces. A graying boudoir sat in the corner, its mirror powdered with fine dust. There were little clues dotting the place, evidence that the room had once had another tenant. Fingerprints fading on the mirror, stains of breath on the walls, an old shoe idling in the corner of the room. I was alone. But Jack had been here. I could smell him.

The pain rolled through with my new found consciousness. My skin felt tight, my insides bloated and black. My very bones were sore, as though I’d been shook up like a bag of marbles. Groaning, I inched myself up, slowly swinging my legs from beneath the thin sheet.

It took me a moment, but I managed to get to my feet. Smacking my lips dryly, I caught a taste of sour milk on the back of my tongue. I shuddered. What I could remember came in slow, blinking flashes. Much like the shadow.

I didn’t exactly forgive him for what he’d done – I understood. Killing me was our escape route. A choice. And he’d done it in a way I knew was the most delicate. In his way anyway.

It hit me. We were free. We were back. No more bitter medication, no more early mornings, no more screaming fits, no more metal. No, I had freedom now. I had him and I had-

Four…four lives left…

Feeling sick, I pushed those thoughts away. I didn’t want to worry…I’d just have to be careful…

HA! He killed you, without warning, as a means to an end. He’d do it again…but then he won’t need a reason…he’ll just-

“No!” I hissed, clutching my head in my hands. My fingers caught in the knots in my hair and I tugged them loose, sighing heavily. “He wouldn’t…he promised…”

I jumped startled as a loud clang reached my ears from some other nearby room. That sounded like...

(COLONEL CRAZY IN THE KITCHEN WITH A FRYING PAN)

I shambled from the room, leaving my quieted miseries and my fears to fester in the bed clothes. This wasn’t the warehouse – I’d already figured that much but I wandered anyway. A brief hallway, more empty walls, hung with wires and nails waiting to rip into my elbows. I caught the familiar aroma of eggs and followed my nose.

The kitchen was simple and pale pink. That same yellow light was spilling in from the grimy window on a door tucked into the corner of the room. The cabinets had been thrown open in a frantic search only to reveal their hollow insides. As a solution to the blankness, the small island in the center of the room was cluttered with paper grocery bags; a few of them were torn open. Empty room, empty walls, empty kitchen. Where the fuck were we?
Jack was hunched over at the stove, humming stupidly, his head snapping left and then right like a metronome. The whole scene reminded me of the morning after the first time he’d taken me to bed…Maniac. Always, always messing.

“If I, uh….woke you,” he said suddenly, sprinkling a bit of something into the frying pan, “I’m not sorry.” He turned then, smiling greasily at me, twirling a spatula on one chalky finger.

I had to keep myself from pouncing on him, feeling that familiar heat creep into me like poison. We were alone now, without the cameras, without anyone to watch our every move…

Unless we wanted it that way…

I sniggered at my own lewd thoughts, striding further into the room; his eyes followed me to the little door. Peering through the window, I spied a ripe garden and a small swimming pool, its green water crowded with a bounty of flowers, dripping down from the hanging vine plants. Yellow trumpets, morning glories, black-eyed Susans, sweet peas…their sickly sweet aroma teased my nose; I could smell them through the glass.

My “hyper-abilities” always came back ten times stronger after I died. As if every taste of fatality thrust me further beyond the line of the feline; it worried me and thrilled me simultaneously.

“Where are we?” I wondered aloud, tapping my nails absently on the window.

There was a clatter as he threw the spatula he was using into the sink. “Neverland!” he exclaimed and after a moment’s pause added quietly, “I grew up here.”

Turning abruptly, I caught the distant look on his face, the bitter ghost of smirk on his scarred lips and knew he was off someplace else, in the past, mucking in his memories. His eyes snapped to my face after a moment, reading the disbelief plainly printed there.

“What?” he sniffed, cocking his head at me, “Don’t tell me you’re disappointed.” His voice hitched “No dilapidated shit-hole? No blood on the walls? No bodies under the beds?”

I blinked. “It’s pleasant. It fits.”

He grunted, sneering meanly. “Well, don’t worry…the monsters are in the walls; I promise.”

I recalled my own home then. The liquor cabinet, mother’s jewelry box, and the shiny silver lighter she’d kept on her bedside table, gleaming against the leather of my father’s Bible…I tore myself away, giving myself a brief shake.

Odd. I thought a few knocks to the skull would have banished those memories…

“Hey.”

I flinched, a small ball of crumpled paper, presumably a receipt, hitting me between the eyes. Snapping back into the reality of the small kitchen, I found the Joker staring at me.

“You’re here with me now,” he mumbled, narrowing his eyes as if he was searching for something in my face, “Just me. And I’ll have you all to my self if I have to, uh…personally drain those ghosts from that pretty head of yours.”

The blip of an image flashed through my mind; the handle of a knife sticking from the front of my skull like some horrible horn, blue memories leaking from my ears…

I began to laugh. Everything shook and everything hurt as the laughter rolled through me, but I kept on, catching my wicked reflection in his eyes. Good God, those eyes…

With a sigh, my mirth rolled into silence. We stared at each other, me smiling, him just…watching. Waiting. For that instant…

3.2.1.

We went for each other then, with the ferocity that only solitude could breed. I’d forgotten how wonderful his hands felt, hurrying across my skin, tearing through my hair, tugging me along with rough impatience. Sliding against each other, gasping, laughing, snarling, throwing each other away only to hold tighter, closer, closer still; we were wicked and frenzied and needy, relentless, and hungry.

We were home.

~~~

“This was my parent’s room.” He shifted beside me, sliding down and holding me round the middle. He rested his head on my belly and his warm breath made me shiver. “I can still smell them in the sheets.”

Stale liquor and cigarettes, pomade and cheap perfume…I could smell it too, lingering under the scent of our sweat. I scratched lightly at the same sheets I’d woken up in hours before, eyeing a fading red stain. It wasn’t blood - it was lipstick. A quiet smile slipped over my face.
“My mother was crazy. Crazy and beautiful…like you,” he rambled, drumming his fingers lazily, “She used to sit at that stupid table for hours, putting on her lipstick, covering up the bruises…” There was quiet for a moment and I wallowed sleepily in the muggy silence.

“She was up and down…one of those uh, manic-depressives you know?” he went on, mumbling over a yawn, “For a week or so she’d just sleep and cry and smack me around, wouldn’t cook, would let everything fall apart…and then she’d start smiling, start painting her face. She’d go on and on about how handsome I was going to be and all the great things I’d do…”

Just like you, Jack…I mused, running my fingers idly through his curls, always building me up to knock me back down.

Or kill me, rather.

My stomach turned and I frowned up at the ceiling, scowling at the rotting plaster. The bed whined as he twisted about, turning his face to me. I glanced back at him. “Don’t talk anymore, Jack…you make me sad.”

To my surprise, he smiled; not the maniacal grin I was so used to, but the rare one, the sane one. He slunk over to me, planting a wet kiss on my mouth. “I can fix that.”

And he did.

But some time later, when the light had fallen away from the windows, when night came down like velvet on this little house, his touch and his presence, the safety of his sleeping sounds were undone. Nightmares have a way of fooling us into fear.

We know full well that our fiends could never take us without a fight -

(Caution: demons in mirror are closer than they appear)

We know that the ones we love will be there in the morning, to tell us just how silly our terrors really are, to show us how pathetic, how plastic they look in the daylight. But our mind can be our greatest enemy. It can kill us a thousand times, keep us anchored as we watch our friends and lovers burn, and stain faces into our memories that even sunshine cannot remove.

And so, in the shadows, I played the fool.

I was walking through an alley, the sky beneath my feet, slick with rain and red as blood. Wading through the black clouds misting my ankles, I happened upon a door and recognized it even then as the entrance to the old hideout. But as I stepped through the doorway, I found myself in a different place entirely: flat nine.

The faded pink walls were overgrown with thick cobwebs, which shook and quivered as though within its hazy depth lay numbers of unfortunate prey. A thought of Jeannie passed my mind and I inhaled, searching the air for the stench of cigarettes. My attention was captured, however, by something far more unsettling.

A horrible, yowling cry was emanating from the down the hall. From the bathroom. The disturbed shrieking faded in and out and between every howl, there was a wet slapping sound, like a fish smacking about on wet ground. It was a sickening noise. And it drew me forward.

As I floated down the hallway, I saw the black handprints, streaking the walls; tar, it looked like, gleaming iridescently in the low light. I ignored the pleas of caution ringing in the back of my head like church bells – and in an instant I was standing in the doorway, peering in at the bathroom, decrepit and ugly as I would always remember it.

The fiendish screaming had reached a sonic pitch, a needlepoint death rattle, a razor’s edge running over the folds of my mind and across the veins winding through my spine.

He was there. Jack. His back to me. He was crouched over the bathtub. And I saw what he was doing, finally saw what was making that horrible noise.

He was trying to drown a cat. Had his chalky fingers wrapped around the animals neck. It was yowling and spitting and screaming, thrashing about in his grip even as he plunged it into the water again. And again. And again. His hand was growing bloody with scratches but he wouldn’t stop.

Shriek. Splash. Hiss. Splash.

I heard the cat’s skull crash against the bottom of the basin with a dull thud. My throat opened and out rolled a cry of horror. He turned to me, hoisting the cat in mid-air above the water. And his eyes…they were white. Glowing pale and ghostly in the shadow, their irises wiped clean away with madness. They were the eyes of a beast, gleaming like new dimes, raw and cold as cut marble.

His eyes were the moon.

It was then, tearing myself from those terrible eyes, that I found we weren’t alone. There was a woman standing in the corner. Or nearly a woman. There was youth in the face she had turned to the window; youth and something…sinister. She tilted her white-blonde head slightly to look at me and there were those eyes again, just like his, void of color and reason and humanity.

“The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hands,” she said, her voice like the toll of a sweet bell, like the scream of the dead, like the crack of a bullet, “She rolled it into her sling…and she struck them all….she took no prisoners…she struck them all…”

And her moonlit eyes began to leak, black. Ink it looked like. Or tar…

“That’s right,” came another voice, taunting and cold and impish and all too familiar…

Jeannie seemed to materialize out of thin air, or smoke rather. It was seeping from her skin, from the tips of her fingers, from the ends of her dusty hair.

“Hiya,” she chirped, plucking a cigarette from behind her ear and lighting it with a snap of her yellow skeletal fingers. She blew a plume of smoke at me, smiling. “How yah been girly?”

I felt my lip curl in a sneer of suspicion. “You’re rather chipper for a dead woman.”

She shrugged, taking another slow drag. “I could say the same for you.”

“How do you mean?” I returned, squinting as her smoldering stung my eyes.

“Oh honey, how much more of a warning do you need?” she cried, phony pity in her voice as she flung out her arm to point a finger at Jack. My eyes flickered to him; he was petting the animal now, stroking it tenderly, smearing its fur with white paint. His eyes were still gleaming white with apathy but they were far off, somewhere else.

“Yes, he looks rather tender now, doesn’t he?” Jeannie drawled, her voice crawling up my spine, “He seems...fond. But how much longer can you convince yourself that him murdering you was all “a part of the plan”? And the million dollar question, how much longer can you convince yourself that he won’t do it again?”

“Shut up,” I spat, glaring back at her, “You’re only trying to scare me off because you know it’d kill him. And you’d have him all to yourself…to haunt, to torment.”

“You keep telling yourself that, darling,” she winked, licking her cracked lips, “But I’ll show you. Time and I will tell. He’ll kill you sooner or later. Beat you down until you’re on your last leg. And you’ll have done it to yourself. You’ll push him and you’ll ignore the little things, the warnings. And well…” she smirked, “We both know how excited he can get.”

To my immense disgust, she opened her mouth and extinguished her cigarette, grinding it into her tongue. It left a horrible plot of ash, which she lapped up like sugar, laughing wickedly.

Jack’s eyes seemed to turn then, as though something in him were set aflame by the discord of his dead wife’s cackling. He stopped his petting and his fingers clenched around the animal’s neck once more. The cat began to screech again, hissing, spitting. The noise rang in the my head, the echoes of Jeannie’s laughter and the sloshing of the bathwater as my lover, my partner, my enemy, thrust the animal under the surface once more…

I awoke with a shudder, gasping in a pool of my sweat and tears. Lying there, blinking in the dark, my heart hammering away in my chest and my stomach turning sickly, I could smell my fear. It was an alien stench; I wasn’t used to it rising from my skin.

Throwing the sheets aside, I hurried from the room, wandering blindly down the hall until I found the small bathroom. I entered with some unease, stumbling to the sink quickly, but I saw no traces of my nightmares lingering in the moonlight to haunt my reality.

The faucet stuck for a moment but then there was water. Cold water. Resuscitation. I cupped my hands beneath the spurge and splashed my face once or twice, paying no mind to the droplets running down my arms and spattering sharply against my bare chest.

I groaned, cooling the heat of my face with my damp hands. I could still hear that awful screaming, the violent thrash of the water, that baleful woman, and Jeannie… I could still hear her say-

“Bijou?”

My name came with rough fingers, touching at the back of my neck, wrapping along its curve…I shuddered, skittering away and whirling around. And there was Jack, standing in the white glow of the moon, looking rather confused. And almost hurt at my reaction to his touch.

But there was something there nonetheless, in those eyes. Not even the moonlight could wash them clean.

“What’s the matter, huh?” he murmured, moving for me, into the shadows. I let him touch me now, let him pull me into him. I couldn’t care to be bothered by his tenderness. Couldn’t bring myself to doubt him or snap at him and push him away. I was scared. And although I knew all too well how foolish it sounded, he sedated me. If only for a moment.

Perhaps that was what he wanted. Maybe it was his cheap amusement, lulling me into false security, tricking me into loving him…Maybe that was what had driven me crazy. That he could do both. And mean it.

He could be kind and just as easily, hold me to the razor’s edge. He could laugh with me and then spit in my face. He could hold me and he could kick me away. He could love me. And he could hate me.

But standing in that rust-caked bathroom, the moon smiling down on our backs, I refused to over-think or jest with the indiscernible. I just let him hold me.