The Enigma’s Anomaly

Surely I’m unconscious if the images floating around my eyes are anything to go by. I think it’s a mixture of reality and dream though. There’s Gerard sleeping in the space next to me and he looks like an angel. I pull him closer to my body, but when I reach for him he’s not there. There’s nothing there and this is what pulls me into some variety of consciousness, but it’s hazy. There’s the grey interior of a van, but no seats in the back where I think I’m lying. There’s a person in the driver’s seat in front of me, but I can’t see him clearly. He’s not wearing a seat belt though. Shame on him.

As soon as I get that glimpse of reality I’m back in a dream. An unmasked man laughing evilly at something, who has tied me to a large pillar with my hands bending uncomfortably around it. I recognize him from somewhere, but I don’t know where just yet. His hair is brown, but greying and his face shows very little sign of any laugh lines. If he smiles a lot then his face hasn’t gotten the memo because he’s definitely an older craggy guy, but the missing lines lead me to believe that he’s not a fun person to be around. I don’t like the way he stands there looking all jaunty.

His eyes catch mine and a cold heartless brown, deeper than any color I’ve ever seen, meets my own. There’s even a hint of ruby in his eyes like a demon. They’re terra-cotta and thirsty for death. His eyes aren’t beautiful in the slightest. There isn’t a heart in those eyes. The soul is missing and it feels cold. Some part of me understands that he doesn’t have a soul at all. It’s not something you can see it’s something you have to feel. This man is remorseless and evil to the core. He doesn’t have a solid shape other than the simplistic etching of him in front of me.

I fight against the bindings, but all it does is give me a real pain in my wrist that pulls me back to some sort of veracity.

I’m in a car again. The sky outside isn’t visible because clots of rain flood the window. There’s a small little trail of drops that are falling into the van because the door isn’t completely insulated. There’s a figure but I can’t quite understand his form because my head is throbbing. I do think that this is real though. I think this is actually happening around me, but I just can’t hold onto it. My eyes roll up back into my head and I’m drowning.

I actually feel water filling my lungs. The water is black and cold. There’s no light at all. I feel like light itself is a myth. There is nothing but this blackness and I’m scrambling at the water around me. Searching for something. I’m searching for something to bring me some sort of refuge or something to clue me into what’s going on. I’m resisting the urge to just let myself give up and drown. The water is starting to burn but I keep taking breaths hoping that one of them will be filled with air. None of them are, and all I can do is flail in my liquid prison scrambling for some relief. I need air.

My hand finds flesh and I grab at it. Someone’s hand is in mine and it’s tugging me upward toward the surface. Farther and farther I’m pulled all the while holding my breath. The arm is pulling me farther then it could possibly have reached so I know that this can’t be real and yet it feels so genuine.

My head breaks the surface and I take a long breath. I’ve never been this hungry for oxygen before but my chest is aching and my entire existence is relying on these sallow little huffs.

I look around my surrounding to see where I am and I don’t understand how I got here. I was just underwater but now I’m in a park, with the smell of grass flooding my prying heaves. Its night and I can’t see anything through natural light because the sky is blank. It’s not just New York City blank from air pollution, it’s completely void. There isn’t a twinkle of a star or a moon, it’s just oblivion. The only thing that allows me to see is a lamppost in front of me giving of buttery light and illuminating only my immediate backdrop.

All I see is grass, but it’s so dark that it looks black. I know somehow that I’m in Central Park though there’s nothing telling me of this. It could be any old park but it’s not. I know where I am, I just don’t know how I know.

I turn to look for whoever saved me and I see him.

It’s Gerard, pallid skinned and bruised. He looks like he just got in a fight with, cuts across his face and arms. He’s breathing even harder than I am, but he’s not wet. I’m still wet from my little swim in existential obscurity, but he’s completely dry apart from mangled sweaty hair on his head. The red seems to be dripping from his hair like its rain and it’s terrifying. It’s like red paint falling off the strands of his locks and soaking into the earth below us.

“Gerard?” I ask and his head darts up, but he’s not looking at me.

Instead he’s looking at something behind me like there’s a monster there. My head turns slowly to look at it, and I get a feeling in my gut like the one in a horror movie. I know there’s something bad there, but I can’t help but to look anyway.

What I see isn’t as terrifying as I was expecting. It’s just a man. The same man who’d been laughing at me. The one without laugh lines. The only practice with humor that could cross his face is when he’s laughing at causing someone’s pain. He’s looking at Gerard with venom in his eyes.

There wasn’t a gun in his hand a minute ago, but the man pulls a gun into my eye sight and panic floods me. I don’t recognize the model but it’s larger than a pistol and smaller than a shotgun. He aims it right at me and I feel dread wash over me. I’m about to die. He’s going to kill me.

I close my eyes and wait for the impact. With any luck it’ll be a head shot so that I don’t have to feel anything and I’ll just be gone.

A bang fills the empty room and I flinch, but no pain comes over me. Maybe I’m still numb from the icy water, but I don’t think so. I blink my eyes open and the man isn’t there so I turn and that’s when I see Gerard lying in the grass, bleeding.

He’s hemmed into a pool of his own blood, but it’s far too bright to be natural blood. It’s the same color of the dye in his hair. Far too red, almost vermillion. It practically glows, but it is Gerard’s blood and he is dying.

He’s gasping for air, with the heaves of his chest looking painful. I crawl over to him quickly and look down at his discoloring body. All the light from him is fading at a record speed, until I wrap my body around his and his breathing stops altogether.

“No,” I whisper into his neck, “you’re not dead, Gerard.”

I tell him that simple plea, but his heart doesn’t start beating and his eyes don’t gain any life. I don’t even care that I’m swathed in a tarn of his blood, because my body feels worse than it had when I was drowning. My eyes blink out tears by the dozen and I can’t feel anything other than the briskly cooling body in my arms.

When I do manage to make some sense of my vision I see two shoes facing toward me. They’re wading in the redness so my eyes venture slowly up to look at the person inside them who’s above me, but I already know who’s there. It’s the man again.

When my eyes finally reach his face I see a grin. It’s like raw malevolence personified into this one man. This man is evil.

Behind him I see another body. I can’t make out more than a foot and the leg it’s attached to which has been left limply jutting out in the dirt. The leg is thin and long. It’s Mikey’s foot. No longer twitching, and no longer linked to a living person.

I’m looking at the corpses of both the Way’s with their murderer standing above me.

“Go on then,” I tell him, “kill me too.”

He doesn’t say anything but he holds the same gun up to my head and I feel the barrel against my forehead. I want it to be over, but he doesn’t shoot.

My hand grabs ahold of the weapon and presses it harder against my head, but before I can do anything more to make this all go away, the gun falls between my fingers as if it’s transparent. It clatters to the ground with a soft thud and I reach for it, but my hand goes right through it like a ghost.

He chuckles above me and bends down to look me straight in the eye. I hear his words in my head even though he says nothing.

“Not personal enough,” a snakelike voice says. It suits him. The sound chills my body and my heart pounds against my chest looking for an escape that it’s not going to find.

My eyes stay down so that I don’t have to look at this heartless man. The only thing I see are his bent knees and fancy shoes. He must be some caliber of rich person if he has such extravagant footwear.

His arms fall into my frame of view and I see him remove leather gloves from his spindly fingers.

Those cold hands, that are like a skeletons grab my neck and squeeze. He forces my head up so that he can look at me and he’s enjoying the sight of watching my eyes die.

I can tell for sure this time that I’m dying. There’s no turning back now. Those bony fingers digging into my skin and manually pulling my life away. It’s so much more personal than any other form of execution.

Before everything leaves me I realize why he looks familiar. The formless figure of the enemy is Gerard’s super villain. This is the man that he draws in the pages of his comic book. How ironic that I’m being killed by such a faceless enemy.

~*~*~*~

I wake up in a workshop type place. It looks old, and unused. There’s stacks of cabinets with nails and bolts. There’s a bench with a wooden table in front of it, but there’s a severe lack of tools. I hope the tools are going to stay lacking.

The room isn’t very large and it’s brightly lit. There’s a door in front of me that’s closed tightly and I bet it’s locked as well.

I jolt upright when I remember what happened and I feel a metallic clink as my arms feel like they’re being violently pulled. I shift my head to look behind me at my hands. They’re tied behind my back with silver chains. Not the kinky kind, the business kind. The ground below me is a freezing concrete.

From the subtle noise in the room I’m able to tell that I’m still in New York, but it sounds like I’m nowhere near a window.

“Fuck,” I say after the situation sinks in. I’ve been kidnapped. That is so demeaning. Why? I guess Gerard was dead on when he said that Mikey and I would cause the most grief for him to lose. Is that what this is? Did they kidnap me to get to Gerard? Must have.

Why am I alive then? I’m not complaining, I just don’t know that I understand why. Wouldn’t it have been easier to shoot me rather than kidnap me? Well, no actually because then it would give doubt to Mikey’s case.

Why didn’t they nab me and then kill me at a different location? Surely if they’ve planned this far ahead then they’ll know how to get rid of a body. Oh god, is that all I am? Just a body? I probably will be soon anyway.

My stomach lurches at the idea of dying. I don’t want to die, I really don’t. It sounds so scary. I’ve never felt the fear of inevitable disaster before, but I bet this is what I put Gerard through. Though, and I don’t mean to demean Gerard’s troubles, I think this is worse. At least he knew where he was, and he knew how to keep himself moderately safe. These chains are painful, and they grind into my flesh leaving red imprints in my skin. They burn and my heart is pounding terribly in fear. I have no escape in sight.

The door in front of me opens a minute later and I raise my head quickly to look at who’s here.

It’s a man with black hair, blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He looks unshaven and scraggly, but not altogether bad looking. He’s got sunglasses on, and his skin is distinctly a tanned white. I already don’t like him, but I guess that has something to do with the current state of affairs.

“Why haven’t you killed me then?” I ask.

“Waiting for the boss’ say so. Shooting you is too messy. Leaves a body. I hope you’re a really good swimmer,” the guy answers. That doesn’t sound fun. Are they going to throw me in the ocean or something? Drown like in my dream?

This is all so terrifying. I don’t know what’s more terrifying though, the fact that I’m going to die or the fact that Gerard won’t know what happened to me. Right now he’s either worrying where the hell I’ve gone or wondering why it’s taking me so long to get coffee.

“Great, so I’m doomed,” I say to myself. I don’t actually know how long it’s been. There’s no sunlight or anything in this room so I don’t know what time it is. My body clock is malfunctioning after having been out cold. I suspect I was out for a little while, but I can’t be positive. It could’ve been ten minutes and it could’ve been a day, or anything in between.

“Is this because of Gerard?” I ask stupidly. I already know my answer, and he laughs darkly at my words.

“You’re never going to see that guy again,” the guy says to me with glee. Right well he’s a sadist.

“Yes I am,” I spit back at him.

“He wouldn’t want to see you again even if you were going to live,” the guy tells me.

“What do you mean?”

He chuckles to himself and says, “That little note you left him, the one about why you left and how you never liked him, wasn’t very nice.”

My stomach drops. What did they do? They forged a goodbye note? What did they write? What’s Gerard going to think of me when he reads those fake words? I would never leave him, but he won’t know that. This is all so wretched. Why is this all happening?

Why did I have to fall in love with Gerard? Why did I have to fall for a dead man like that charismatic fucking dork? They’re taking everything away from him and I don’t even care about myself anymore. I care about how all this is going to affect Gerard. He’s going to think I deserted him! He’s never going to know that I love him.

I feel myself cry for the first time since my imprisonment, but it’s too hard to hide anymore. The guy laughs at me so helpless on the floor. I probably look so childish to him. He must think I’m such a loser.

How can I not cry though? Gerard’s never going to know that I love him. I’m never going to get the chance to tell him. I could die right now and be content if he knew. If he knew that I loved him, and if he knew that I would never hurt him then this would all be okay. He’s never going to know though.

That’s what I want most. For him to know I love him. Why didn’t I say it yesterday? Then I could die happy. I’d die fulfilled.

What kind of a loser am I that I’m crying over his fate rather than my own? I’m not going to hurt though. Not when I’m dead. You can’t be hurt when you’re gone. All he’s ever going to do is hurt though. He’s going to think that his brother tried to kill a man and he’s going to think that his boyfriend was just a filthy manipulator who never liked him. Is he ever going to know that I’m dead? Is he just going to assume that I fled from him?

I wish I knew who it was that’s going to be killing me.

“I’m going to die right? That much is clear to me, so if I am to die would it be too much for me to ask who I have to thank for my death?” I ask.

“This is all so much bigger than you realize,” the guy says, “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

He’s right about that. If the person who hired these men has that amount of cash then he’s loaded. This is two men and at least two assassins, though the second assassin could be one of these two men. I know it’s two because it’s practically impossible to coordinate a kidnapping with just one. There could be more though. Just how well connected is this guy?

“That’s true, and that’s kind of why I asked. Tell me who’s killing me! I won’t go blabbing, will I? I’ll be hanging out with Nemo,” I say. Typical me, referencing Pixar with my last few moments on earth. An argument could be made for Verne.

“I could tell you...” The guy says, “But wouldn’t it all be so much more fun if you died not knowing. Keep you wondering, so that you feel so defeated and the last thing you ever think will be the fact that you’ve failed.”

“So is everyone here a sadist?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything immediately so I sigh.

“Does your partner on this know you’re a sadist?”

“I don’t have a partner, I work alone,” he answers too quickly which means he’s probably lying to me, but I already know he is.

“Really? So you jumped out of a van on the right side only seconds after you were driving from the left side, and then you grabbed me, pulled me into you van and restrained me while also driving. I’ve got to hand it to you, you’re flexibility is astounding.”

“Fine then,” he says briefly.

“So who are you two working for? Is one of you the assassin trying to kill Gerard? Are you the guy trying to kill him? If so, I want you to know that I will not rest until I make you bleed. I will come for you, either in the afterlife or once I’m free and I will make you understand real pain. I won’t give up until you understand the meaning of hellfire.”

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” the guy repeats.

“And you have no idea who you’re dealing with,” I reply.

He turns around and looks at me with narrowed eyes like he’s unamused.

“You? You’re nothing. You’re no one. No one will even care if you’re gone. No one will even notice. I doubt your little boyfriend is even going to care,” he scolds.

The painful chains around my wrist rattle when I try to jump at him, anger surging through my body furiously. He smirks at me and I want nothing more than to wring his neck. I don’t like hurting people, I never have, but right now that’s all I want. I want to see this guy squirm in agony. Not only for tying me up, but also for hurting Gerard and disrespecting him.

He lowers his neck down to look at me just out of reach from where I can touch him and his lips turn up devilishly.

“No one’s going to care about your little friend once you’re gone. No one will give a second thought about Gerard Way, and no one’s going to give a second thought about you,” he states.

I have a limited number of things I can do right now so I spit right in his face. It’s pretty successful aim too because I get him right in the eye and I feel a little better about myself after that. He slaps me across the cheek, but I don’t care. He walks away a moment later and then the door shuts and I’m left in complete darkness. He turned off the lights on his way out and it’s a signal of impending hell like a bulldozer.

There’s no light in here at all. Not a single light can be seen in this entire room and I feel scared all of a sudden. I’m not afraid of the dark, but it’s so harrowing and thorough that I can’t help but feel wary. My stomach is churning in fear. This is more like the drowning in my dream than actual drowning. It’s the dark that scared me most about it. The fire of asphyxiation was painful but it wasn’t the scariest thing in the world. This, however, is.

There’s no comparison to the feeling of knowing you’re about to die. It’s so unbelievably scary that my whole body feels leaden. My mouth is painfully dry and my head is screaming with all the things I never got to do. I never saw the Eiffel Tower. I never broke a world record. I never swam with the dolphins or skydived. I never learned CPR, and I never rode in a limo. I never told Gerard I love him.

No matter what I do or try to think about I just keep coming back to that. That would be number one on my bucket list right after clearing Mikey’s name.

At least I can be sure about Mikey now. He couldn’t have orchestrated a kidnapping from jail. He wouldn’t have framed himself, and he wouldn’t have hired people to kill me.

I stay in the dark for several minutes. The only way I have of telling time is to count to sixty and then back down to one. One hundred times I count to sixty before the door finally opens again.

It’s not mister-sadist man though. It’s señor balaclava. As far as I can tell there’s only two of them, and señor balaclava seems more worried about keeping his identity hidden from me because I’m a dead man, yet he still has the ski mask. A lot of people in my field do that just in case they get caught by traffic cams or other various securities.

A definitively Slovak accent says two words and my whole body sinks. I knew this was coming, but still, I can’t help but feel complete trepidation and terror.

The words are so simple yet they can only mean one thing.

“It’s time.”