I leave the room, my bare skin soaked in blood. Other people’s, and my own. At the stairs I’m faced with two options, and one of them is drawing me a lot stronger than the other. I can go downstairs and end the lives of every single man down there. It’s not real, after all. I can go and satiate my bloodlust. Or. Or I can go upstairs. I can find Dr Bracha, and end this once for all. End him. A buzz draws my attention above my head. A camera. The lens constricts. Zooms in. On me. This fucking place.
Before I know it I’m upstairs. I don’t remember climbing the stairs, but I barely even remember pounding Darren Sant’s face to a pulp either, so I don’t worry about it. The door opens before I even touch it, and I’m in the corridor. It’s even cleaner still here. Like the whole building is filled with shit, and the higher you go the cleaner and more clinical it gets. The first door I see bears his name. Dr Ryan Bracha. Darren Sant was talking shit about it being upstairs in my head. I’m standing right in front of physical evidence that he was talking bullshit. My hand moves as if to knock, but I overrule it this time. This bloke is getting fuck all by the way of etiquette. I want answers.
The door swings open to reveal an empty room. A desk with nobody behind it. A couch with nobody on it. And bed with nobody in it.
“Hello?” I call out to nobody. There’s no answer. Of course there isn’t. “Dr Bracha?”
I glide into the room, and take my time to look around. There’s a white book case, filled with row upon row of paperbacks by people whose names I know, but they shouldn’t be there. I scan my eyes across the books arranged in alphabetical order. I see Guns of Brixton by Paul D Brazill, through Fireproof by Gerard Brennan, and Mr Glamour by Richard Godwin on to dEaDINBURGH by Mark Wilson. On the desk is The Eagle’s Shadow by Keith Nixon. I don’t get it.
“I see you found his collection,” says a voice which startles me into spinning around on my heels. Benny.
“You?” I say, but it’s all I’ve got left in me, I have no other words.
“No mate,” he says, “you.”
“…”
“We’re all you,” he says, “or, I suppose more specifically, we’re all Ryan Bracha. You’re just one of us. The latest in a long line of fucked up characters he invents.”
I don’t say anything, but I feel the atmosphere in the room thicken, and suffocate me. An overwhelming nausea rides into my body like on the crest of a wave. The lights go dark, and I’m falling.
The First Sign
By Ryan Bracha
Madness is a funny thing. To those who do not suffer it, it is an aspirational condition, in the social sense. I don’t need any drugs to have a good time, somebody might declare, I’m mad enough as it is! The man who is the life and soul of the party will forever be dubbed as mad as a term of endearment. The eccentric old woman in the run down house at the end of the street deemed mad as a bag of snakes/box of frogs, delete as appropriate. Madness is bandied about by idiots in a throwaway fashion because they’ll never know true madness. Not like the men in here. Inside my head. Upstairs with Dr Bracha. The various manifestations of insanity. Like Brazill and his casual cannibalism. Furchtenicht’s latent psychosis brought on by a sex mad dog. Godwin and his porcupines and rapist clones. Nixon and the case of the murdered woman. Wilson. Or Mary. Whatever you want to call them. Allen Miles’ psychotic hatred of all things banal. Les Edgerton who sees fictional characters that guide him through life. Gerard Brennan, the dope smoking paranoid fitness freak. Spark, and his hallucinations. Stanley, the alien. And Sant. The neighbour from hell, depending on your viewpoint. Madness. It manifests itself in many ways. What’s the worst? Me. Ryan Bracha.
I displayed the first signs of madness when I was fifteen. Aggression, emotional instability, paranoia. My parents, bless them, they put it down to a delayed response to a puberty I first hit at the age of ten. Sideburns at the age of twelve. A beard and six feet tall by fourteen. They pretended my behaviour was normal. The hallucinations came soon after. One time, I saw flames shoot out of my cock. That’s the only explanation I have for why my grandfather’s house burned to the ground, with him in it. I only just survived myself. It was the flames from my cock. I saw them, but I couldn’t tell anybody. I told them I was asleep when the fire started. The police didn’t believe me, I know they didn’t. They sniffed around, asking questions, laying the blame of my grandfather’s death at my door. It wasn’t my fault. It was the cock-flames. How are you supposed to control them?
When I hit twenty I regularly got into fights, just for fun. I intentionally picked them with men twice my size. I enjoyed the feeling of my torso being pummelled for just the right amount of time before my anger would swell to uncontrollable levels and I would pulp their faces with my fists. I took their teeth as mementoes. One man I remember I punched so hard his eyeball burst against my knuckles as the socket cracked down the middle. That felt nice, it truly did. In those days we weren’t monitored twenty four seven by the men in their CCTV control rooms. As long as you made a hasty enough getaway then you were okay. Just wash your fists. Your clothes. Hide the teeth. The evidence.
At twenty two I killed my first girlfriend. She’s wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first one I killed. She’d been seeing people behind my back. I’d heard the rumours. There was the most prominent one in my mind about the time she went back to a party with five of my mates, and she took her time to go around and fuck each and every one of them in various rooms, including two of them at the same time. I smashed her face in with an iron. The appliance, not the golf club. I hid her corpse in the attic, bound up nice and tight with bubble wrap. She was a common slut. The five friends also went the same way over time. One in front of a train, another over a bridge into the swirling unforgiving frothy water of the river below. I have a good memory. I never forget.
Of course, the police would sniff around, asking their questions, making their insinuations. How could so many people I knew just disappear? At the time I made a pretty convincing show of being shit scared that I’d be next. I almost believed myself. They’d go away, content with my act, but then they’d be back. Where were you between the hours of whenever and whenever? Can anybody back you up to that effect? You do not have to say anything but if you do we’re going to use it against you in court. But they had no evidence. Nothing. They had assumption, and they had a gut feeling. The assumptions and gut feelings were right, but hey ho, they had no evidence. They watched me. They had me under twenty four hour surveillance, but then they’d get bored of watching me live my normal life, and they’d go. And then I’d kill again.
My second girlfriend that I killed, well she wasn’t exactly my girlfriend. She was somebody else’s wife. She came to me through loneliness in a loveless marriage. That was fine by me. You see, another sign of madness is that detachment from reality, a distinct lack of emotional connection. She could flit in and out of my life, back to her cold bed, when we were done fucking each other’s brains out. But, the thing was that her husband found out. He came to my door. Shouting his mouth off. Prodding my chest. Twice, I allowed him to prod, before I ripped off his finger, and jammed the thing into his ocular cavity. Of course, he cried and he screamed, until I dragged him into the house and strangled him dead. The girlfriend, whose name- despite my claims of a good memory -eludes me, showed up. She was worried that he’d done something stupid. She hadn’t seen him in days. I confessed my crime to her, under some delusion that she would thank me for it. She didn’t. In her eyes I could see fear, and terror. Her last word to me, beneath the cloud of fear, and with my fingers snaking around her neck, was psycho.
That was back, maybe seven or eight years ago. Before I came here. St David’s. I’ll get to the hows and whys soon. I just want you to see what I am.
Queuing for things. It was the very bane of my existence. Waiting. Wasting my life. Not a day would pass where I didn’t bore holes into the backs of the heads of the people in front of me. Not literally, just with my eyes. Okay, so just once I literally did i
t, and I did at least show the initiative of waiting until I was out of the queue for the cash machine before I did it. But that’s beside the point. My point, is that when I queued, I could feel myself drifting up out of my body, my itching fingers just slightly too eager to wrap themselves around a throat. That detachment again. That lack of concern for the well-being of others. As long as I was okay, then to hell with everybody else. I’m much the same now, but I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to become a better person. That’s why I’m here.
There was a point in my life, at around the age of twenty nine, that I took stock. I’d murdered countless people throughout my time on Earth. People who I’d made claims to have loved at various junctures, but no sooner than I’d killed them I’d moved on, emotionally speaking. I couldn’t form relationships that meant anything. My approach to people was definitely more Out of sight, out of mind, than Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If you died tomorrow, I would forget you existed by the day after. It’s just how I’m made, I can’t fix that, but I’m trying. I promise you. I digress.
When I took that aforementioned stock of my life, I realised that time was the only thing between the present, and my inevitable incarceration. There was no if, only when. So I made a plan. I needed to get away from people. I needed to get out of society, because not only would I continue to slowly chip away at the population, but it would also slowly chip away at my mask. My public persona of somebody normal. But that age old question would rear its ugly head. What’s normal? How do you become it? Does it even exist? All the people claiming to be mad, that they didn’t needs drugs because they were mad enough as it was. They were the normal ones clamouring to be anything but, and I just had this voice inside me. Not the one that told me to kill people, that one was a booming loudspeaker. No, I mean the small voice that would sometimes creak through the cacophony of death, the one you could maybe stamp with the label of guilt, that one would beg me to become normal. To stop with the murder. The violence.
Eventually that voice grew stronger. With time. It learned to stand on its own two feet and halt me in my actions.
When I was twenty nine, I found myself standing over the unconscious body of a man. He had been in the process of burgling my house. Or at least trying to. I came downstairs to find him hanging into the open window of my kitchen. His legs on the outside, his torso in. I dragged him into my house and I beat him senseless, and as I looked down at his broken body, I felt something. I couldn’t truly say what it was, but it stunned me. This piece of shit that wanted to take what was mine for his own profit, he broke me. I sat on my sofa next to his gently breathing unconscious body, and I began to cry. That voice soothed me, and held off the screaming banshee that demanded I take his life.
I left the house that same night, and I walked. I walked until my feet bled, until my body gave in. I slept in a soft, and cold bed of heather along the Yorkshire moors. It wasn’t a deep sleep, far from it. It was more a fitful and broken bout of nightmares, and half sleep. The boy from my house walked with me to Hell. At the gates of Hell he asked me a question. Who are you? I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t know. I was still a child. A lost and confused child, awaiting the time where I would awake from whatever nightmare I was living and I would be a fully functioning, normal, adult. That time never came.
In the morning I continued to walk along the road in the moors. Cars would scream by me , horns blazing out, warning me from the road. But they never stopped. Would you? A man covered in the dried blood of somebody else, in the road along the barren wilderness of the moorlands? I doubt it.
As the morning slipped quickly by and evolved into the afternoon I came across a derelict building. It hinted at a grand past. The huge architecture, once beautiful and revered, now gone to shit. The sign from the narrow dirt track which led up to the gates of the building, said St. David’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane. At the time I saw it as in some way ironic, given that my own head was a minefield of disease. Now, at this time, after five years, I know it was fate.
The electricity supply was long gone, but the water supply remained. How long the building had been derelict I couldn’t say, but it was, and that was important. I couldn’t live in the society that began mere miles from the building. I couldn’t bring myself to walk amongst civilisation. I was too dangerous for it. I would suffocate it one victim at a time.
Days, and weeks passed, and I busied my mind with small renovation tasks. Things like starting a vegetable patch. Or cleaning down the walls. Occasionally my mind would create the ghosts of lunatics from days gone by, but ghosts don’t exist. I know this. You know this. It was my fucked up head trying to play tricks on me, but I was way too smart for that. I let the ghosts wander through me. I ignored them. I continued my life alone. But I was lonely. I began to create alter egos. People who could take over the shell that I’d become for a while, to allow my busy mind some sort of respite. I would give them back stories. I created Paul Brazill first. In my head he was an ex pat living in Poland, teaching English as a foreign language. He entertained himself by writing. That’s what all of my alter egos had in common. They wrote. They had imaginations. They knew how to use them. I was so conceited that I wouldn’t allow any of my others to be idiots. Then there was the Yank, Craig Furchtenicht. Then Godwin. They all lived in some degree of harmony amongst one another up in the prison that was my illness. Until I created Martin Stanley. He upset everything. He was a northerner, a graphic designer by trade, and he swept in, claiming to be an alien, and he wanted to take me away from the comfort of St David’s. He wanted us to go into the nearest village and have us murder again. It affected the balance in my head. Upstairs. From then I had to lock them away. I was Benny, and Gary. Strolling the halls, harassing my others. They needed to be controlled.
And now my latest one. The new guard. He’s tenacious, I’ll give him that. But he needs to be controlled like the rest of them. He needs to know his place. He refuses to accept his role in this whole game. Already he’s killed three of my others. Admittedly, Martin Stanley is no big loss. He is a liability, the nurses he removed from the bigger picture were no great loss, I can dream up more, but Darren and Gareth, I had really grown to like them. They entertained me. If this goes on there will be only me, and him. And I can promise you, if it comes to that, then, well, there will be only one outcome. And if I find myself alone again, after all this time, I cannot be held responsible for my actions.
Fourteen
I wake up. The room around me is small. The mattress beneath me is thin and stinks of piss. My piss? I don’t feel any kind of cold around my crotch, but my hand reaches down regardless. Or at least it tries to reach down. I won’t budge. I’m chained to the bed.
“What the fuck?” I ask of nobody, “what’s happening?”
“Fuckin’ dog!” a voice calls out. Furchtenicht.
“Craig?” I shout.
“Hey, fuck you newbie!” he replies.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“They moved Brazill upstairs and gave you his fuckin’ room, asshole!” He then mutters something but he’s too far away for me to make out.
Keith screams.
“Hey, Fruity Farts!” shouts a Scottish voice, Wilson, “stop yer greetin’ ye wee fanny, ye’ll see yer wee boyfriend again at dinner time!”
“Fuck you Wilson!”
Wilson, or Paul, laughs harshly into the corridor.
Keith screams.
“Shut the fuck up Keith!”
“Benny?” I call out to the heavy footsteps that clack along the hall. They pause, then clack my way. Stopping behind the door. A jangle. A click. The door opens.
“Alright there?” he smirks.
“What’s happening? I don’t belong here!” I cry.
“Neither do any of us!” laughs Allen Miles from his own prison.
“Boss’ orders I’m afraid, you can’t be trusted,” he says, “you can’t just go around killing his creations.”
“What?”
/>
“He needs them. To stay sane.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, I reckon if you don’t get it by now, you probably never will.”
And he steps backwards, out of the room. Closing the darkness, and my screams, away, until another time.
Afterword and Acknowledgements
So it’s finished. I can’t believe that twelve weeks ago I asked eleven extremely talented chaps to get involved in this project, and we did it with ease.
Thanks must go then, to the eleven other mad men. You know their names but I’ll name them again. Thanks to Paul Brazill, Gerard Brennan, Les Edgerton, Craig Furchtenicht, Richard Godwin, Allen Miles, Keith Nixon, Darren Sant, Gareth Spark, Martin Stanley and Mark Wilson. You made me really proud to be an indie writer.
Thanks again go to my wife Rebecca, for listening to me harp on about this project for the last three months. Thanks also for carrying our first and brand new daughter for the last nine months. I can’t wait to meet her.
Thanks to the people that read and review not just my stuff, but the stuff of every indie writer out there. This book is a love letter to every other author out there that’s trying to do something different with their work. Those of us that are willing to take a risk and put something new out there, you are my heroes, each and every one of you.
Twelve Mad Men Page 19