The Tapestry (18 page)

    I
t reached out one of its long midnight black legs towards him and flexed its razor sharp claws which the light from the chandelier bounced off, as if they were made of steel. The hiss that followed made Craig’s legs give under him. He had never known the meaning of being terrified until this very moment in time... right now,
this was terrified.
If it hadn’t been for
The Freak
holding him up, he would have been on the floor unable to move, like a rabbit in the headlights. He could still see the beast writhing around the metal chain connecting the chandelier to the ceiling. There were all sorts of demonic beasts above him, some with red eyes and some with spittle drooling from their jaws. They were all watching...and waiting. They were like a pack of wild hyenas circling their prey but the pack leaders were on the ground, holding him.

    “Please let this be a nightmare... please god, please god
” he whimpered to himself. He could feel the hot liquid trickle down his legs before he knew he had even soiled himself.

    Gavin turned him around and slammed him against a
pillar with such force that for a moment he thought his back had been broken. His legs were dangling above the floor as Gavin held him against the pillar, he looked into his eyes and saw the redness staring back at him, his face pulled up in a twisted grimace of hate and knew this was no dream. This was too real to be a dream. By now if he was having a nightmare, he would have woken up in a cold sweat and sparked up a Lambert, but there was no waking up from this. There was something behind
The Freak
but he couldn’t make out what it was. The shape was constantly changing from what looked like what he could only describe as an angel with wings to a large dog like beast of mammoth proportions with wings attached to its back, the only constant were the purple eyes that seemed to remain the same. And the fact that it didn’t seem to move, it was just silently watching
The Freak
as he had him pinioned against the pillar like some old schoolmaster, making sure the job was done efficiently.

    Gavin dropped him to the floor so that he fell in a heap against the pillar smashing the back of his head against the marble.

    Craig was more than a little confused... he was scared... shit scared and confused, not a good combination, but somehow he gathered up the balls to say what he was thinking.

    ‘
Y...you’re dead. Aren’t you? I fucking burnt you, you bastard.’ He tried to scrabble away on the floor like a frightened mouse as the words left his mouth but he could go nowhere. He was too scared of what he might find in the shadows.

    ‘
Technically...Yes I am, you did kill me’ Gavin replied very matter of factly. ‘And for that I should thank you, because otherwise I would still be that snivelling little shit you used to call
“The Freak”,
and rightly so I guess’ he mused. ‘Thing is... you didn’t just leave it there did you? Remember Michelle, do you remember what you did to her, because I do. I can’t ever forget what you did to her. Right in front of my face, she couldn’t defend herself and you tied me up so that I couldn’t defend her either. Well that day, you did kill Gavin, you did kill Michelle, but you only made
The Freak
stronger.’

   
He arched his back as he screamed the words
The Freak
up into the writhing mass of demonic creatures above him and lifted his hands towards the living ceiling. A wall of flames appeared like a crown around his head and illuminated his face making his red eyes look like bowls of molten lava. From his hands shot brilliant but dark green balls of swirling gas as he lifted his face towards the ceiling and cackled the most maniacal laugh.

  
Craig daren’t move, he tried not to breathe. He wanted to close his eyes and then reopen them and then this would all vanish, The Freak, the demons...everything, but the pain at the back of his head and the blood running down his cheek, told him that wasn’t going to be.

    There were a number of choked screams as whatever it was that
The Freak
had let loose from his hands connected with the monsters on the ceiling.

    One of
the things
landed right in front of him. It looked like it had taken a direct hit as it still had the green light crawling all over it, although it was beginning to fade. He instinctively pulled his feet closer in towards him and then stupidly decided it was time to make a run for the door. Even though he knew in his own head that he didn’t know where the door was and there were things in those shadows that he was running towards that could be much worse than trying to reason with this
fucking dead freak.
His body took over though, he couldn’t help himself and the next thing he knew, he was on his toes running towards the blackness screaming a futile war cry into the living fog of darkness.

    ‘Let him go, let the darkness have its fun’ said Saul as Gavin went to grab for him.

     Craig ran and he ran for what seemed like hours, but he knew he could only have been running for a matter of minutes as he wasn’t as fit as he used to be. All around him it was just darkness. He was sure he would have come across a wall or a door by now as when he was sat at the pillar he knew he had seen the outline of the building.

    He slowed to a walk as he could no longer run but he didn’t want to stop, the further away he could get from that
Freakish
little bastard, the better. He kept on walking, hoping to see a chink of light somewhere, no matter how far in the distance but there was nothing, just darkness all around him. And it was cold...deathly cold. He held his hand up in front of him, in front of his face, just in front of his nose but he couldn’t see it. He turned back to see if he could see where he had ran from, but there was nothing... just the unforgiving darkness.

    The fear began to build up inside of
him; he walked with his hands brought up close across his chest, his chin resting on his hands.

For some reason he couldn’t understand but it made him feel a little more secure, he began to
very slowly and deliberately whisper a nursery rhyme out aloud from his childhood, drawing each word out as he took each careful step.

                                                 Ring.... a ring...... o’ roses

                           
                     A .....pocket... full of..... posies

                        
                        A-tishoo,....... a-tishoo

                         
                      We all....... fall...... down.

   
He had no idea why this little rhyme should comfort him, but it did, so he kept on reciting it faithfully to himself quietly as he searched for a way out.

    He had been walking slowly now
for what seemed like forever in silence and darkness. Only the sound of his own voice to keep him company, his eyes constantly searching the darkness ahead of him and all around him for a glimmer of hope when he saw a shadow, or a shape that was darker than the blackness in front of him. He tensed up and stood still jerking his head to follow the movement, but then it was gone. His body felt like there were pine needles sticking out of it as his nerves sprang to the fore.

   He daren’t take another step and tried not to make a sound as he searched for the movement once again. He looked all around and he saw nothing but blackness. His eyes could not become accustomed to the dark as it seemed there
was no light in here whatsoever,
(but where was here?)
He finally took another tentative step forward. He had thought that if he just kept going forward that he would finally come across a way out, but he was losing faith in that theory and he now believed that if he just kept going forward then he would just die in the void,
and who would know?
maybe there was no end to this darkness.
So what could he do
but
take another step, and then another.

    He began to count his steps in his head as that seemed to help him keep some sort of hold on reality. It was normal...
numbers are normal, numbers will help
he muttered to himself occasionally, when he wasn’t whispering the little rhyme that had so strangely entered his head.

    The concept of time in the void had become strangely twisted, the minutes piled on top of themselves to become hours, and the hours became days, but a day in the void felt like a month of endlessly walking, still seeing nothing, not knowing which direction is forwards or up or down. There were voices that whispered at him as they went by. Sometimes he would feel something just brush against his skin as it went by. There were times when he would hear screams that were not human, screams of pain and sometimes what he thought were screams of ecstasy. The only constant was one foot in front of the other.

   There were days when he would hear a noise in the distance or sometimes it would be closer but he wouldn’t stop. He was just focused on walking forward. He must have slept at some point but didn’t remember when or how, all he knew now was walking, walking forwards. He tried to keep walking forwards as he didn’t want to end up going back on himself although for all he knew, that could be exactly what he was doing.

    The darkness was cold and unrelenting against his skin
becoming colder as the days or months went by, and still he was wearing the strange getup he had found himself in when he had arrived. The white shirt and little waistcoat offered little in the way of warmth, but over time, he had gotten used to it, he didn’t notice the shivering of his whole body which made his voice tremble as he recited the little rhyme over and over again, sometimes he would shout it out into the darkness to see if there was an echo, but there was none, at least it wasn’t his voice that would come back to him. Sometimes he would shout out random words like “Geronimo” or “fuckyamotherwhore” and the words would bounce back at him but not in his voice. This turned into an amusing game as the time went on and he would try to confuse the voices by shouting utter gibberish such as “gobbledywobbledydodaday” or other nonsensical ramblings, but they always came back to him, just in a voice other than his own. As he was trying to decide if there were any other lines to the poem, he realised something that struck him as even stranger than walking for miles on end without a scrap to eat or a drop of water to survive on in this dark limbo land, which is what he had taken to calling it. He couldn’t hear his feet touch the ground.
Why hadn’t he noticed that?
He had been walking and walking singing that stupid little song or counting the stupid steps, but he hadn’t once heard his feet touch the ground.
What the fuck?
He brought his right foot up and stamped it onto the ground....nothing...not even a muffled flump. He knelt down and very carefully laid his hand down on the floor next to his foot. It felt like stone, it was cold and moist,
so surely it should make some sort of noise?
He asked quietly of no one. He slapped the ground and just because the
goddamn laws of physics
told him he should... he expected to hear a sound equivalent to the force he had used to hit the stone with. But no, not here, not in this fucking black vacuum, he stood up and decided that he wasn’t going to stay in here any longer,
(how long had he been in here anyway... days, weeks, or maybe even months. He just didn’t know.)
He was going to begin running and screaming. He would scream at the top of his lungs until someone came to free him, or hopefully he would wake up, turn over and see Jane. Yeah he was now back on the whole, this has to be a nightmare so he began to run and he screamed. He screamed at the top of his lungs because it didn’t matter anymore, no one could hear him.

  
‘Come on then you Freak’
he screamed at the top of his lungs as he ran with his arms waving above his head. Still no response from anyone or anything, and who knows how long he ran for, it could have been days or it could have been months before he finally snapped. There were times when he ran and there were times when he walked, he no longer cared which direction he took. Sometimes he would just sit and mutter to himself about the posies and how they were all going to fall down. He no longer knew why he sung it or even what a posie was, didn’t much care. He would sit in the darkness, searching for an end to it, but it wasn’t there, the only thing he could rely on being there was the never-ending darkness. Eventually even the mocking echoes stopped, so he was just running around, shouting out gibberish, in the hope that a voice not of his own would answer him back, but they never did.

    He had only occasionally
questioned why the hunger or the thirst had never struck him and he had now spiralled down the descent into madness so it wasn’t something he thought about. He didn’t think about anything anymore, he just ran and ran and ran because that’s what he was born to do, thats why he was here, to run in the darkness like a little beetle in the basement.

  
‘Beetle, beetle, beetle’
he repeated to himself over and over in his head and then out loud, liking the feel of the new word on his lips. If you had asked him what a beetle was he wouldn’t know, he just knew the word and he liked it.