Funhouse (29 page)

I kicked out with my free foot and caught him in the face, but it barely seemed to register. He was up and so was I, and we faced off in that tiny, stinking room, a boy and his crazy, naked murderer of a father. He was laughing as we circled, round and round the stinking dead girl in the middle of the room.  He feigned charging at me, laughing all the time. I had seen this before. He was toying with me the way he toyed with them. I heard myself pleading with him in my head, begging for forgiveness but I knew from my observations that to do that would only increase his excitement, and so I kept my mouth closed. He grabbed at me and I wasn’t ready. I tried to rear back but he got a good handful of my t-shirt and pulled me towards him. I squirmed and twisted, and was free of him again.

He charged at me, but this time I was ready and avoided him, and made for the kitchen. He was right behind me and just as we reached the dividing curtain, I made my move, throwing aside the filthy covering and dropping to my knees.

He was going too fast to stop and clattered into me, his knees hit me painfully in the ribs, and he pitched forwards, and this time the sound of the trap going off was not only real, but also loud, echoing in the tiny room with a sharp
ker-chuck
as it closed on his face. His scream was raw and agonising, and much more convincing than the fake one that first drew me to the house.

I stood, holding a hand to my injured ribs and looked at him. The mask had come off as he fell and I looked at him. It’s funny, because for all my fear, as I stared at him, face down on the floor with blood pooling out around him and without the mask, I wasn’t scared anymore. I couldn’t decide for sure what it was that I felt at that moment. I wondered if it was fear, triumph, or relief. The truth is, that I felt nothing at all. He twitched, and his leg shook involuntarily but even seeing him in such obvious distress didn’t bother me. I put my foot under him and rolled him over onto his back, ignoring his groans as he took the rusty steel-toothed trap with him. I looked down on him then, and our eyes met.  Blood was streaming down his face and I could see that one of his eyes had been pushed partially out of its socket by the force of the trap. He smiled at me then and I could hear him trying to speak. I ignored it though. Instead, I made good on my promise. I took the huge lump hammer from the table and stood above him. I think I even managed a smile. He weakly beckoned me close, and I obliged, letting him whisper in my ear whatever it was that he was so desperate to tell me.

Three words.

Three words can sometimes be all it takes to flick someone’s inner switch from sane to bat shit crazy. And I think I was halfway there anyway before he said it and gave me that stupid, crushed, bloody toothed grin. It only wavered when I flashed it right back at him, then I adjusted my grip on the hammer and went to work.

Why I put the mask on to do it I still don’t know.

Inside it felt sweaty and itchy, but somehow empowering. The first blow would have been enough I think to finish him, but I continued to rein blows on his face until it was barely recognisable pulp. I cried and screamed all the way though, and I honestly think that all of my emotions left me that day.

When it was done, I put the second phase of my original plan into place. I took the large can of gasoline from where I had hidden it in the bushes and poured it all around the cabin, then used the matches that I had taken from the kitchen drawer to ignite it. The place burned fierce and fast, and with it went my father and his legacy of terror. I watched it burn, and was shocked to find that I felt no emotion. All I could think about were those three words that were whispered by a dying murderer, a habitual liar and a psychopath, but three words that I believed nonetheless. I didn’t realise until I looked down that I still had the latex mask and hammer clutched in my hands. I walked back to the house, thinking over the enormity of what I had done, and for the first time wondering what may become of me. Still those three words reverberated around my head, as infectious and poisonous as the man who uttered them. The house loomed large, and I could see her silhouette in the window of the kitchen.

Three words.

I pulled on the mask, and took a firm hold of the lump hammer, ignoring the matted hair and skin that clung to its head.

Three words.

Enough to change a life. 

I opened the door and went inside, those three words singing a crescendo in my brain.

Three words.

Your mother
knows!

She never saw it coming, and I took no pleasure from it, but like him, she had to be taught a lesson, and wearing the mask made it easier. I wondered every day since then why I believed him without question. Could it have been the last sadistic play of a sick man? Or did he want to make sure that I understood that it wasn’t just him to blame?

Either way, I reacted, and after it was done, I sat on the floor cross-legged, exhausted and covered with the blood and viscera of my parents. The house seemed very large and quiet, and I knew that it wasn’t something that I could deal with on my own. I picked up the phone and called the police, and told them what I had done. Then I sat on the floor and waited for them to arrive. They were never able to prove my father’s guilt. I had inadvertently destroyed the evidence, and all they had were two murders committed by a twelve-year-old boy. They had circumstantial stuff of course. D.N.A from the transit van and from his clothes were enough to suggest that what I told them was true, but there was never quite enough to prove anything. A detective called Petrov and I talked a lot on those weeks after, but I could never bring myself to tell the story. It’s hard to explain, but I felt like a passenger riding along in my own body, and that somewhere in my head, the real me, was sitting there with his eyes squeezed closed and his fingers in his ears shouting
lalalalalalalalala
so that he wouldn’t have to face up to what he had done.  I was passed from care home to care home, and then when that didn’t work, I was put into a mental health institute to see if they could repair whatever had broken in my mind. I accepted it. I have always been an honest man, and for every day I glance in the mirror and see the genetic mix of my parents in my own reflection, I feel equal amounts of anguish, pain, and vindication. Deep down I know I was right, and that I had to do what I did in order to stop a monster.

I started to have nightmares.

In my dreams, I am tied naked to a chair, and my parents are dancing around me wearing latex masks and gibbering and laughing. I don’t always wake up screaming anymore, but it still frightens me each and every time it happens. The institution that I have lived in for the best part of my life has become my home, and I like the routine. I like knowing when to eat, when to sleep, when to take my meds and when to shit.

They are releasing me tomorrow. 

A washed up old man who they think is too ancient and broken to cause any problem for society. They are probably right, but the thought of being out there and responsible for myself scares me. I have never lived without some kind of supervision, and I don’t know quite what to expect. It’s ok though, because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go buy a good length of strong rope and use it to hang myself.  I don’t fear my death, but I do worry about what comes after. Will I see the forgiving and smiling face of my innocent mother? Or will I join the two mask wearing gibbering monsters in hell? I suppose time will tell and whatever the outcome, I’m just glad it’s over. I stand by what I did and wouldn’t change a thing.

I have to go now as it’s getting late, and it’s almost time for me to go to sleep for the last time in this room that has become my home.

This book will remain my legacy, my confession of a boy trying to do the right thing who became a man shunned by society. I bid you farewell, and hope that in reading this you might at least understand.

Your friend,

James Michael Godswall.

I
wasn’t certain at first, but now I’m pretty convinced that the old guy at the homeless shelter is who I think he is. As impossible as it seems, I can’t help but buy into the fact that that scruffy old toothless hobo with the deformed cheek is me, or what I will become at least.

I have been working over there at the shelter for the last seven months, on community service for screwing over a drugstore. Don’t judge me, I get it. I’m a bad seed, one of those people shaped by society to be a degenerate fuckup. All of that, however is beside the point. I want to get back to talking about the old man.

He calls himself Langton, which freaked me out, because that was the name of my imaginary friend when I was a kid. Nobody knows about that, and although it could be a coincidence, I doubt it.

Although Langton has skin like old leather and tired, watery eyes which say they have had enough of living in this shitty world, I really can’t deny it.

He does kinda  look like me, or how I might look after fifty years addicted to crack and moonshine.

Anyhow, this all started when I caught him staring at me, his cocky, half smug grin as familiar as the one I see in the mirror every day. I thought he might have had a cleft lip, or something else wrong with his face, as the left side of his face was sunk inwards, and his top lip overhung his bottom, making him slur as he spoke. Despite his appearance, I held his gaze, because at that point I was still trying to portray the bad ass, to make sure everyone knew I wasn’t to be messed with. But Langton didn’t seem in the least bit intimidated, and he waved me over. Now normally, I would tell a guy like this to go screw himself. I wasn’t there to help the homeless like Jason and the rest of the asshole staff who worked there. My presence was required by law, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it.

Anyway, I had intended to give the old man some verbal, just enough to maybe frighten him off and make sure he kept his nose out of my business, but before I could do anything, he held up a grubby hand and stopped me in my tracks.

“Save it Monty.” He said, watching me with that shit eating, knowing look on his face that I would grow to hate.

Now I’ll admit, I was freaked out. Nobody calls me Monty anymore. Not since I was a kid, and although I had never seen the old bum before, he knew, and it knocked the wind right out of me.

I forgot about trying to frighten him off then. In fact, I forgot about trying to be the big man altogether. Instead, I sat down opposite him, and as he began to talk, I listened, and the more he talked, the more convinced I became that I was in conversation with a version of myself from some alternate reality or something. The funny thing is that all the things he told me were things that
only
I could know.

He told me about things that would happen. Things that had already happened and he had no reason to know.

He was crafty with it too. He told me all about how his brother had been put into a Young Offenders Institute for taking part in a botched armed robbery of a pharmacy, and then had his sentence uplifted to murder when one of the other kids tried to touch him up and got himself beaten to death.

The story was familiar of course because it was
my
brother that had been institutionalised and
my
brother who had been convicted of murder, only my brother had tried to hold up a petrol station, not a pharmacy.

I was numb as he recounted experiences of my life as if they were his own, always making them just different enough to give the benefit of the doubt.

His father died of a stroke, mine of a brain tumour.

His mother had Parkinson’s disease and lived out the rest of her years in a nursing home; mine had just been diagnosed with the disease.

Days melted into weeks, but I could never find it in myself to outright ask him if my suspicions were true. I kept hoping that he would come out and say it, but it became the big old elephant in the room, the unspeakable conundrum, so we both skirted around it.

For as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t mention it, not without sounding as crazy as he was, and that got me thinking if maybe that’s how I ended up like him, by being branded as crazy and starting on that slippery slope towards the warm embrace of smack, meth and cheap booze.

I knew I shouldn’t meddle, but I needed to know, and I asked him what happened to him, what went wrong in his life to make him become like he was. He gave me one of those looks, like he knew what I was asking, but wasn’t prepared to say it outright. It was like on those movies where the actors acknowledge the camera and give it a goofy look or a wink. We both knew what we were talking about, but we were in character, and went on with the lie.

The story of his life mirrored mine almost exactly, but by then I had grown accustomed to the weirdness and wanted to know what came later.

He told me about how he had been shunned by his family, and had spent his early twenties going in and out of prisons for petty offences. It was then that his mood changed. He didn’t seem quite so keen to talk, and I had to threaten to have him tossed from the shelter and go hungry. He must have known I would do it, because he told me.

“
I killed some people.” He said as he slurped down his soup.

My heart was racing, but I needed to know. I needed to know what was going to happen.