With every stranger he passed he searched their faces for indication that they too heard what he heard it but he failed to find any. It occurred to him that A) he really was going mad. Or B) he was the last person in the neighborhood to learn about the recently implanted monkey habitat.
Though he sensed he was getting close and giraffed his neck up straight at each corner and squinted at the darkness until finally he noticed a filthy bum hunkered over himself, bent unnaturally at a vertebra somewhere mid-spine.
Remy suddenly aware, scanned his surroundings and with the appropriate portion of concern and fear realized he had somehow wandered into the grey zone between not-that-bad to sketch-town.
On the adjacent corner the homeless man stared at him from his aura of dirt. His mad blood-shot eyes burned on him suspiciously as though he was the guardian of the ghetto standing sentinel over this shitty little corner of cracked concrete and piss filled ally ways. The man then reached into his tattered layers of fourth hand clothes and it occurred to Remy that the filthy bastard may be reaching for a gun or a knife but he was just reaching to scratch at a jaundiced portion of flakey skin or swat at a crab.
“Did you hear that?”Remy heard himself ask the man.
The man looked at Remy now, truly looked, suddenly a little more cognizant, the animal dumbness in his eye fading for just a moment. Behind his unruly debris encrusted beard he worked his toothless mouth back and forth as if trying to remember how to talk to someone other than himself again.
Remy baited and breathless waited for the man to speak but just as he thought the man had conjured a word from out the lunacy of his mind he opened his mouth and cackled like a cartoon witch until Remy's blood curdled and he had the childish urge to turn around and run.
Though it had effectively shocked him into seeing the context of the situation. He looked down at his slippers, now blacked with street grime, his baggy pyjama pants, the inside out shirt. And here he was much, much farther from home then he thought, in the late hours of the night, looking for monkeys.
He stared at the homeless man who had now gone about the task of trying to pluck from the air imaginary birds or ferries or who fucking knows what, and wondered if this is how it started for him. With a simple delusion: Hearing animal noises in the night.
Remy turned to make they long journey home and as he did, the bum called out to him.
“Hey!”He yelled hoarsely.“Hey!”
Remy turned around back towards him and the bum said -
“Don't forget the mmmmmarmalade.”
An implosion of the heart; apocalypse of the soul. Remy then watched as the filthy fucker turned and shuffled away to have the last laugh or drink cough syrup, or shoot heroin into his cock, or whatever.
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Horror Becomes Me Page 19