Theater Macabre (16 page)

Outside the Theater

"Please everyone, I'm only asking for a moment of your time. A moment to impart a warning before it's too late."

The young man with the feverish eyes and bone-white face tried to look at everyone at once, but the restaurant was packed. His gaze fell on me and I squirmed, relieved when it moved on to the elderly man seated to the left of our table.

Kristin slid her hand across the smooth white tablecloth and gripped my fingers. "What's this about?"

I shook my head, looking from the frightened and probably delirious young man to the rapt faces of the dining crowd.

From everywhere I heard the clank of cutlery being returned to the table as meals were interrupted and faces were turned toward the speaker.

"I don't know," I told my wife, "but I'm wondering how he got past the front door."

The answer came a few moments later when the maître' d staggered into view behind the trembling man standing and pleading for our undivided attention. The maître' d had a hand to his nose, something dark running from between his fingers.

"Maybe there's a fire or something." There was no conviction in Kristin's voice and I assumed she was feeling the very same crawling dread making the hair prickle on the back of my neck. "Maybe."

The young man, apparently satisfied he had drawn the attention of the room, continued. "Thank you," he breathed. "Thank you so very much for listening."

Somebody closer to him than I muttered something and the young man nodded somberly. "Last night, our world ended."

Great
, I thought.
Our first night out alone in months and a nut-job becomes the evening entertainment
.

There were groans of derision, hands batting away the absurdity of the guy's claims and the clattering of cutlery against dinnerware resumed. It appeared the ten seconds the crowd had granted him to start making sense of his interruption were up.

"No, no. Wait!" he spluttered and began to remove his shirt. The shadow of the maître' d behind him became a trio as the staff conspired to remove their intruder. Somewhere beyond the veiled white walls and high windows, I heard sirens.

"No, you
have
to listen. Last night we ceased being free. Last night they started to recall us, to pull us out of this theater in which we live and breathe. Look!"

He dropped his shirt to the floor and spun in a lazy circle, his back proffered to the gawping diners, who stopped, forks in hand, food forgotten, to let their eyes rove over the puckered pink swellings in the man's skin. There were four of them, roughly the size of dimes and they looked as if someone had been pinching them non-stop for weeks, perhaps months.

"Jesus," I whispered, wincing. Whoever was responsible for the tented skin hadn't been worried about the procedure being painless. It was almost as if someone had grabbed the skin on his shoulders and tried to pull it off.

Kristin looked back at me and grimaced. "I think dinner is over."

"There are more!" the young man howled and began to roll up the leg of his trousers.

"I think you're right," I said and dropped the fork I didn't realize I'd been holding until now. I was in the process of working out how much we owed plus tips when the young man shrieked, making my hand jerk, sending a wine glass to the floor.

"While we slept they decided to end it, to end everything we know! They're tired of this game we call our reality. They've decided to pull their puppets out of the theater!"

Kristin gave a sad shake of her head. "Poor guy."

The three shadows in the hallway suddenly bustled into the room, barreling into the young man who squawked in surprise and went down. Amidst the madness, I realized they were blocking our exit and muttering a curse, I took Kristin by the elbow and led her away from the melee.

"Check your wrists…urgh…" the young man said, cut off by a punch to the nose. The maître' d looked up at me and grinned with bloodstained teeth. In that moment, he looked almost as mad as the man he subdued.

"Check your skin, your wrists and feet!"

In a second they had him in a brace of human limbs and were carrying him out the door. I watched, sickened and reached out a hand to grab Kristin's. She didn't catch it.

"Honey?"

I turned to find nothing but my confusion mirrored on the faces of some of the other patrons who were looking around as if they'd been slapped. "Kristin?"

People were getting to their feet.

I looked down at my wrist, still held out to receive a hand that should have been there. On my wrist was a single pink knot of skin, angry and peaked like a pimple. I quickly turned over my other hand. Marks there too. "Kristin?"

It was too much for her. She's gone to the restroom
.

Of course. I felt the spikes of unease withdraw from my skin a little and I sat down where Kristin had been seated before the man with the bizarre injuries ruined our evening.

Bizarre injuries
you
have too
. I pulled back the cuff of my jacket and studied the welt on my left wrist. Without knowing why I was doing it, I moved my fingers about an inch above the sore.

And felt my gorge rise as my fingers met resistance.

I jumped to my feet and moaned but whatever horror I was preparing myself to absorb was distracted by a sudden scream from my left. I turned toward the sound and saw a woman being dragged through the window backwards, her arms and legs sticking out before her as she flew five feet above the air straight through the mullioned window, shattering it as surely and completely as a bomb might have done.

It was that fast. In an instant she was gone, the scream vanquished, the silence heavy. Those who remained stood frozen and staring toward the window, no doubt paralyzed by the insanity of what we believed had just happened. A lassoed dog pulled by a speeding truck was the comparison that pulsed in flickering images in my head, compensating for a reality that must surely have been an illusion.

As a flood of realization washed over the diners and a song of panic rang in the air, I broke towards the restrooms with a whimpering, trembling cry of my own. My wife's name spilled through my clenched teeth in a stuttered mantra as I elbowed aside clambering hands and crushing bodies. From the corner of my eye, I saw someone fly backward, crashing into and through the far wall inspiring a cutlery stand to vomit a stack of silverware and send napkins fluttering to the plush carpeting like wounded doves.

"Kristin," I cried, terrified by the sound of encroaching hysteria in my own voice. Another scream abruptly cut off by the sound of shattered plaster. Another, pulverized glass. Another…

With a triumphant cry, I leapt over the prone body of the maître 'd, lying in a pool of what could only be blood, rapidly making the cream carpet blush beneath his own scarlet face. The lights flickered. Someone shrieked. A wall exploded.

I staggered to a halt in the small corridor off the dining area where hazy yellow light gathered in pools above frosted crystal orbs set high in the wall. There were three doors, the middle one a janitor's closet, the other two clearly marked by impassive gender icons. Without hesitation, I burst into the women's restroom, startling a lady and her reflection, both apparently oblivious to the insanity in the dining room. Lipstick poised before her lips, her face reddened and drew into a scornful scowl. "Excuse me," she began before I pushed past her and began calling for Kristin. The stalls were empty. With a frightened moan, I headed back out in to the corridor, ignoring the derisive comments at my back and the sudden startled cry as the mirror imploded.

In the corridor, I danced with indecision as all around me the screams and sounds of destruction continued. The lights went out, immediately accompanied by a raised level of hysteria from the dining area as attempts to escape reached suicidal urgency.

"They've decided to pull their puppets out of the theater!"
the young man had said and at the time we had felt pity for him. Obviously crazy, a lunatic, a madman…but was he? If he was insane then what words could be used to describe what was happening in the restaurant?

Again, I looked at my wrist.

Kristin, where are you?

I took my lighter from the inside pocket of my jacket and sparked it into life. The flame sputtered, illuminating the haze of plaster dust and cloying my nostrils with the acrid smell of lighter fluid.

I shrugged back the cuff of my jacket and steadied myself as another scream was guillotined in mid-air in the other room. The floor trembled making the job of bringing the lighter to my wrist all that more difficult. The flame wavered sending my shadow leaping toward the ceiling and I struggled to ignore it for at any moment, it might be doing it again but this time with me preceding it through the plaster.

I thought of Kristin, of what had certainly happened but could not have happened in any rational world. I thought too how the term rational had been torn from the air as efficiently and suddenly as the people in the next room. I thought of my wife, her smile, our happiness and how that too had been neatly severed.

The flame moved over my wrist, far enough above the skin to avoid burning myself. I held it there for a moment, staggering with the sudden trembling in the floor, blocking out the sounds of horror in the dining room, the screams of pain, of incomprehension as a world we had taken for granted for so long was turned upside down and the puppets were dragged back to their masters. I held the flame and swayed, unsure what I expected to see. And then knew as soon as I saw it.

The flame fizzed and a blue flame ran from my wrist, curling around a milky, transparent filament like a snake winding its way up a pole. I watched, repulsed but obscenely fascinated as the origins of humanity rewrote themselves in my horrified eyes. The cerulean light fluttered and pulsed ever upward through the ceiling until my wrist fell limp, numb and useless to my side.

A wide-eyed man stumbled into my small circle of amber light and began to scream at me. I ignored him and dropped to my knees, seeing his mouth move but hearing nothing.

It didn't matter. A second later he was gone and so was most of the ceiling. I wept in the shower of plaster; wept for my wife and a life controlled by unseen forces that hid beneath the masks we called Fate and Destiny. I wept for the end.

A chunk of plaster toppled, crushing my hand but I felt nothing. There was nothing attached to feed it feeling anymore.

I stayed there for a long time, waiting for the dragging to start but minutes passed and the restaurant fell silent, save for the delayed crashing of damaged walls and still I waited. The sirens I had heard from inside the dining room had ceased.

The Gods had recalled my wife, dragged her back to whatever the world beyond our theater looked like and now I pleaded with them to take me, to bring me there to be with her again, to be with my wife in whatever passed as Heaven.

As tears drew tracks through the dust on my face, I thought of airplanes crashing, falling from the sky and pictured faceless entities severing strings, growing bored, creating tragedies to keep things interesting.

I thought of war, a multitude of creatures gathered around our box, thousands, millions of fingers dancing, granting life and controlling death--fastest finger wins.

I thought of murderers, stalking children, compelled to move on their given paths by the hands hovering unseen above them. Real horror as a form of entertainment.

All these things filled my mind and I rammed my good fist into the floor. How futile our existence had been from the very beginning. How hideous the thought of new life being dragged from the womb by fingers being dragged themselves. Everything was nothing. Our world was a joke, a television show for emotionless deities. I grew angrier still at the thought of them allowing us to feel, allowing us to love and hate and grieve. All a goddamned puppet show.

Some time later, I braved the silence and wandered into the dining room. Dust shifted and swirled in my wake as I took in the disaster area with dead eyes.

Tables lay on their sides, stripped of the pristine white cloths, now gray and red. The carpet peeked through spaces in the jigsaw pieces of the fallen ceiling, severed limbs and crushed bodies the remains of puppets no longer needed. Little of the ceiling remained and the walls continued to crumble as I made my way past them with the callous indifference of a man who has seen the man behind the curtain, who has exposed the great wizard and found him to be nothing at all.

Outside, the streets were dead. I stood there for a short forever, looking up and down, listening to the echoing screams rising in the distance and wondering if the light drizzle was the half-hearted weeping of our masters or if they were pissing down on mankind and laughing. I began to walk, searching for nothing when nothing was all that remained. I shut out the cries of the last of them, ignored the destruction of the city, bowed my head and found a bar with at least some of its stock intact.

On the counter, I found a notebook filled with figures, names of strangers penned in next to them in stylish handwriting. I took a seat at the bar with my bottle of whiskey and began to write this account down. Why, I don't know. There will never be anyone to read it, unless
They
decide they want to play the game all over again. If they do and I suppose they might, then I pity those they thrust into their theater. It'll be fun for a while you see. Ignorance will truly be bliss until they grow bored again and shatter what you have come to think of as reality.

When they drag you out of the theater like rag dolls and rip your loved ones away before your eyes, you can say I told you so. But I hope they never play this kind of game again. Not here. Not with us.

I'm damaged goods now. I tore the string from my wrist, revolted against my owner (and God how sick it makes me to think of it like that) and I guess they're up there right now, shaking their heads and holding the severed string between their fingers, wondering at my insolence.