by Glen Krisch
"Thanks, Pete. I'll make sure you guys get more singles. Just make sure your people get their breaks. I want to make sure they come back tomorrow."
"Oh, I will." Peter turned to take someone's order, and Gage slipped away, making a mental note to bring them more singles. Needing more singles was a good sign for a business. It meant people were turning over big bills and only getting small bills in return. So far, it was the best opening of any of his businesses.
Gage floated through the crowd, simply observing. He watched for people's expressions, watched their body language. This was how he did business. Through body language he could reasonably tell if a business model was going to work, even this early into the ballgame. The customers' voices filled the open foyer as they shared their thoughts on the displayed dreams. They held hands, or tapped each other on the shoulder to grab their attention. Lucidity had its fill of the take a look at this quotient. People were laughing in awe. People looked terrified.
"I don't know how we pulled this off," someone said from behind Gage. When he turned, he saw Maury Bennett, wearing a new tailored suit (a suit that Gage had happily paid for), and his omnipresent Cubs baseball cap. For some reason, the hat didn't look out of place at all.
"I've been meaning to thank you, Maury." Gage offered his hand. In mid-shake Gage drew Maury in for a back-patting man hug. When he looked at Maury, his dream catcher looked entirely uncomfortable.
"Oh, it was going to work. All of these people, I bet it's the tip of the iceberg," Maury said, shifting from foot to foot. "No way this wasn't going to work."
"That's not what I meant. All of this," Gage said waving his hand over his head, "This is just the icing. I'm talking about Nika. What you've done so far has been remarkable, and I have a feeling it's going to happen any day. You will bring me back my daughter." He could feel tears forming in his eyes, but he wasn't sad at all. He couldn't remember a happier time since before Michelle left him so long ago.
"Mr. Gage… it's my job."
Maury didn't take praise well, but Gage had to let him know how he felt. "Your job stems from your powerful gift. Without your gift, there would be none of this. Or any hope for my daughter. I feel I owe you more than the money I've given you. I just wanted to let you know that if it's in your heart to leave your practice, you will always have a job with me. Even if you want to sit on the side of the road and count cars all day, I owe it to you to let you do what you wish," Gage said.
"But..." Maury said, stammering. He too had tears in his eyes, and all he could do was clench his lips and nod. "Okay. I'd like that."
"Excellent! We have an agreement. Just let me know what your intentions are. I'll get you whatever you need."
Maury kept on nodding, his face bunched like he had swallowed something unsavory. He kept nodding, even after Gage turned and left.
Gage had expected such a reaction from Maury. Most people thought he was an odd sort, but Gage was starting to figure out what made him tick.
The line leading to the Nightmare Wing hadn't slowed one bit, and he could hear cries coming from the patrons upstairs. He thought of the possibility of having a Nightmare-only themed attraction, and took a mental note to investigate the potential of such a business. While taking his mental note, he remembered that Peter from concessions needed singles. Gage meandered through the crowd to the elevator at the back of the foyer. He pushed the button for the basement, where he had his vault--a vault he knew would be full by night's end.
For the first hour, when the humans entered the Nightmare Wing to gawped at Mr. Freakshow, he gave them what they expected. He slit his stomach with a claw and snaked his intestines through the narrow opening, his face contorted in misery. He masticated his own flesh, and then carved himself with rusty dream-blades. He tore off his jawbone and used it to gouge his eyes. The filthy humans ooh'd and aah'd. He was delighted to see one young woman brace herself from vomiting as she hurried away. But everyone else stayed right where they stood. They only pressed closer to his confining cage, fighting for position to get a better look at him. He obviously couldn't shock these pests into leaving him be.
Then he came up with an idea to get rid of them. The idea was simple, but he would need time to observe his quarry. The thought made him sick, but he would need to look into the minds of these insidious beasts and learn what dark thoughts lurked inside. He created a throne on which to sit and observe--a replica of the throne he would assemble once free of this infernal containment. He ran his hand over the curves and nooks of his creation. A thin slime of blood coated the stacked skulls that made up the throne. As he sat down, the bones accepted his weight and he couldn't imagine a more luxurious place to observe. He sat in an arrogant pose with one leg draped over an armrest. He rubbed his chin contemplatively, starting to probe the minds of these sick fucks.
After awhile, a good long while, a small segment of the crowd had dispersed, apparently bored. But Mr. Freakshow was ready to perform. The crowd stirred as he rose from his throne. He waved his hand from floor to ceiling to floor again, and as he moved, a partition formed, separating him from his onlookers. He could see through the partition in a gray tint, and seeing the humans, he found them slightly more palatable to the eye. The gray, gauzy obstruction made them seem like dead things. The Freak smiled.
While the Freak could see them, the humans couldn't see beyond the partition. What they were looking at, or into rather, was the silvery sheen of a full-length mirror. Mr. Freakshow had turned the tables on these sick fucks. As they turned to look at one another, confused, and then back to the mysterious mirror, they had no idea the fun was about to begin.
"I talked to Maury like I said I would," Gage said to Nika while holding and stroking her hand. He had the habit of talking to his daughter as if she could hear him. When he first started doing it, he was self-conscious and couldn't stand to hear his own voice holding down a one-sided conversation. It sounded hollow, false. But he became accustomed to it and soon he was pausing intermittently during his rambling, as if she would respond. He kept thinking, maybe this time, maybe right now she's going to speak, to wake up. This very instant. Of course, she never acknowledged her father, but after awhile, he found he needed his one sided conversations. They solidified his sense of hope. As he lost his self-consciousness, he opened up to Nika for the first time. If only she could hear. He talked to her about his life and his hopes and aspirations. His views on politics and religion. He had to believe that somewhere deep inside she heard his voice. Otherwise, he was just a crazy old man speaking to himself, and he didn't want to concede that as fact.
"Maury accepted my offer like I figured he would. I could always tell he never enjoyed his practice. You need to have a certain amount of self-confidence in order to listen to other people's problems, and then even more self-confidence to offer suggestions on how to fix them. You need to project security, and I'm afraid, Maury projects a solid wall of insecurity even to people he knows fairly well."
Tonight, he didn't bring out her dreams. He wasn't in the mood to see the playful, energetic dream-throng. All he wanted was to be right here, right now, holding his daughter's hand, telling her everything about his life. He wanted her all to himself.
"I think the museum is going to work. We still have lines outside the door, and it's a younger crowd than I envisioned. But you know what they say--target that young demo. You hook them now, you have them for life. And it's all because of you, my sweet daughter." Gage leaned forward and gently kissed her forehead.
As soon as his lips left her skin, he felt a discernible twitch from her hand. Initially, he didn't realize what had just happened. He could only look down at her hand in amazement. Yes, he had definitely felt a twitch. A twitch coming from his daughter's hand.
"Nika… can you hear me? Nika!" he said, patting her hand, trying to get her to repeat that slightest movement that he had almost dismissed as nothing. But if she did it again… If only… if only.
"Please, Nika, move… do the slightes
t little... anything. Do something to let me know I'm not going crazy," he pleaded. As the seconds ticked away, he began to doubt what he had felt. It could have been a phantom twitch amounting to nothing. "Nika, please… I'm so lonely. I have nobody…" he said, pulling her hands to his lips and kissing them as tears filled his eyes and spilled down through his beard. At her bedside, he collapsed to a kneeling position, as if in prayer. Resting his head on his daughter's withered stomach, still clutching her hand, Nolan Gage sobbed. "Please…"
Through his anguish and tears, through the memories of his once happy family saturating his mind, Nika's hand flexed, squeezing Gage's hand in a fierce grip. As quickly as his tears appeared, they halted their advance as he lifted his head to look at her. Her face was unchanged, but oh dear God his daughter squeezed his hand! As if in confirmation, she did it again, her grip so strong it would have normally buckled his knees.
"Nika! You can hear me, can't you? You know it's me, your father. I can't believe this. I have to call the doctor, I have to tell someone--"
The shrill cry of the fire alarm temporarily dulled his excitement.
Of all the things… why now?
He looked at the door and then back at his daughter and realized, that even if it was the apocalypse, if the ceiling should collapse in a heap of burning cinders, he couldn't imagine being anywhere else. With the excitement of the crowd upstairs, it was probably a false alarm. Some punk kid showing off to his friends. If the alarm didn't stop soon, he would leave to investigate, but not yet. Not when Nika had just squeezed his hand. As the fire alarm continued to blare, he held his daughter's hand, waiting for that pristine and magical moment when Nika would open her eyes and look into his.
At first, the mirror images amused the crowd outside the Freak's enclosure. Once they understood that Mr. Freakshow was playing a trick on them, they actually seemed to enjoy themselves. Some acted as if they were looking at a funhouse mirror. A middle-aged man made a googlie-eyed face, laughing spasmodically, and then flattened his face against the enclosure glass. Good.
Mr. Freakshow had his first volunteer. And what a volunteer this maggot would be!
From his observance, Mr. Freakshow learned his volunteer's name, Graham. He was married, and had gained five pounds a year every year of his twelve-year marriage. Unsatisfied in his marriage, he found solace during late night runs for bags of fast food burgers. The added pounds stressed his inherently weak heart, and made his wife even less interested in him physically. The Freak slowly changed Graham's reflection, incrementally, until the image the human was looking at represented his wildest indiscretion, a fantasy that he could never act out in real life:
The replica-Graham approached a woman wearing only a leather thong and two straps holding back her overly large dream-breasts. A formal nun's habit held back her hair, and her eyes were like ice glaring out from under the black fabric. She didn't say a word but lunged at him, ruthlessly grabbing him by the tongue, yanking it hard enough to send Graham to his hands and knees. She brandished a well-used school paddle, reminiscent of the discipline paddle used by his fourth grade teacher, some dried up cunt of a nun (Graham's description, not Mr. Freakshow's). The replica-Graham hid his face from the woman, hid his perked smile when he saw the paddle. This hard-as-nails, cold-hearted bitch, so unlike the feeble old cunt that used to paddle him at least once a week when he was a child, went to town on the replica-Graham. She pulled back, and without holding back an ounce of force, slammed the paddle against his ass. The snap of wood on flesh was so loud that people in the foyer could hear the impact, unaware of what was happening upstairs.
She didn't let up. This dream woman, Graham's darkest inner-most thought, pummeled him viciously. The replica-Graham couldn't hide his pleasure. He fell to his stomach, groaning, wincing at every slap of the paddle, but welcoming more, wanting more, acting as freely as if he had his eyes closed and no one else could see his thoughts.
But the real Graham, the clown who had pressed his face against the glass of the Freak's enclosure, shied away, his face red with embarrassment. The other onlookers had no clue that the image in the mirror had come from Graham's mind.
Mr. Freakshow was only starting.
His onlookers were once again entertained by Mr. Freakshow, and they would draw blood soon enough to get a closer glimpse of his mirror. He could see it in their eyes and smell the thickness of their desperation even through the glass. These sick fucks would get what they deserved.
In the front row, two men sandwiched a woman protectively, one her boyfriend of three years, the other, named Paul, a friend she had grown up with. They were crammed together against the glass, unable to move away even if they wanted to. Would the Freak make them want to move away?
He took hold of their reflections and molded them, taking the darkest thoughts of each of them, and letting their reflections roll with it. The boyfriend-replica smiled over his shoulder at his girlfriend, a snake's smile. He took hold of the girlfriend-replica and pinched the skin of her arm until she winced, until she cried out in pain. But the Paul-replica, the friend who would always be just a friend, had pressed his hand against the girl's exposed thigh, just below the fabric of her skirt. He slid his fingers into the dark recesses, sneaking ever so higher on the tease-replica's tanned thigh, even as she tried to resist her boyfriend's torment. Her boyfriend now used his other hand to slap her face, first with his palm, and then backhanding her. Unable to move away from her boyfriend, the girl-replica leaned against Paul's insistent pressure, inviting him closer, making him pleasure her to take away her pain.
The three real life people could barely look each other in the eye, unwilling to see the truth they found there. They struggled against the crowd, all three of them separately, trying to get away from the awful reflection.
The Freak was starting on the next sick fuck gaper, some stew-brain numb fuck pedophile, and oh boy would this one set the crowd afire!
But he hadn't planned on the real life girlfriend pulling out a can of pepper spray. Or for her to use it on someone behind her, someone she couldn't actually see for all the clamoring onlookers. This unseen bastard was trying to replicate the reflection and had his hand creeping up her thigh, had the tips of his fingers pressed against the curve of her buttocks. She greeted this violation with several sprays from the can. The pepper spray cut a fine path through the air, and would have been dead on target, hitting this unseen pervert square in the face, but a circulation vent was just overhead. A small vent grate so innocuous that no one noticed the gentle breeze brushing their skin. Not until the thin stream of pepper spray hit the tiny fan's invisible jet stream and showered out over the crowd like particulate matter in a dust storm.
All hell broke loose.
Some woman--who the Freak learned through his mental probing, had won a small lottery and hadn't told her husband--had her pert little nose smashed up against the glass by the build up of pressure from the mob. Her blood smeared against the glass, the cartilage of her nose ground to pulp. The crowd drowned out her cries.
Even as the crowd dispersed, with the excruciating pain attacking their nasal and sinus passages, the reflections carried on their performances. The darkest lurking thoughts from the gray matter of these sick fucks. While not able to use all of the choice information from his observances, Mr. Freakshow was happy with the results.
While the reflections continued to grunt, paddle, lick, and abuse, the humans screamed and stumbled away from his enclosure. Within a couple minutes, the foyer below was also flowing with screams and the sounds of fists striking muscle and bone. The fire alarm blared, an angry noise that the Freak found intolerably annoying.
Mr. Freakshow rose from his throne of human skulls and gave the mayhem he had orchestrated a standing ovation.
Chapter 13
Kevin hesitated to open his eyes. When he did, he took in his bedroom through squinting eyes, expecting to see his mom next to his bed, as if she had woken him.
His room was empty.
He felt violated and somehow cut off from his family. The full moon was high in the sky, a bright blue disc painting everything it touched with its cool glow. An ink spot of murky shadow first constricted, then dilated, near his dresser in the corner of the room. He strained against his body, against some unknown force that held him motionless. He could control his eyes, but was too afraid to close them, and yet he didn't want to see what was lurking in the corner, either. His heart pounded and the harder he struggled to move an arm, or a mere finger or toe, the more adrenaline churned through his system. He was paralyzed, undeniably, maddeningly paralyzed. His breath shuttered through his lungs as he struggled against blacking out.
The shadow shifted in front of his dresser and seemed to absorb the profuse moonlight. That was when Kevin smelled a nauseating and all-too-familiar smell. Dog shit in a baker's oven. The septic ooze of a backed up sewer. The kind of smell that lingers even under held breath. Mr. Freakshow.
The Freak hadn't disturbed his sleep since Maury transmuted the dream from his mind almost a week ago. This time he didn't bother with a disguise for his visit. During Kevin's countless nightmares the monster's appearance would always change, but what he now saw was without a doubt his full-blown freak self. Knuckles as big as a man's kneecaps, shoulders hunched so his hands nearly touched the floor. Ratty long black hair dripping grease and carrying debris that looked like chicken bones. A network of crisscrossing gray scars covering his forearms.
"Hello, Kevin," Mr. Freakshow whispered. "It's been so long. We need to catch up like old friends. What you and your mom did wasn't very nice, so rudely removing me from your mind like that. But things are better now. I didn't understand at first, but things are so much better than just roosting up in your little kid head. The world is so much larger, and a lot less limiting, and Dr. Bennett, my so-called keeper, is a blithering idiot."