Sardis admired the man’s aura, which blended nicely with the glow of the fire. It was a vibrant red: powerful, energetic, competitive, sexual, and passionate.
A dated movie was showing, one that Sardis did not recognise. It was something about a circus. A woman sat with her legs intertwined around a man’s shoulders, both on a high wire, both holding balancing poles that arched out like the wings of giant birds flying above one another in unison. The man’s feet edged in inches along the cable with hugging toes. The scene looked tense. They could fall at any moment. There was no net below. Sardis wanted to see if they would make it across the wire, but her gaze fell back to the nape of the man’s neck.
“Hey, babe, you’re missing a good bit,” the man said in a voice that was barely audible above the sound of the television. “Do you really think they got them to do that? There was no CGI in those days, you know, and it looks so real. They are really crossing the wire. Amazing, they must be.” He made no effort to turn his head but instead lifted his arm from the back of the couch, sat slightly forward and gulped down half the glass of red wine. “Ah, this is great,” he said.
The blue glove came up over the woman’s duct-taped mouth. The point of the blade pricked a dimple in her cheek. A groan escaped out her nose at the same time when the acrobat nearly lost his footing. A collective gasp from the spectators coincided with the woman’s warning moan. The man remained oblivious to the drama now only feet behind him.
“Here, I’ll rewind, come and get that robe off you, babe, and get back down here to me.” He bent closer for a remote that rested on the centre of a coffee table made from a recycled Moroccan-style door inset with glass. Dancing shadows emanating from the glow of the fire defined a back taut with muscle, and the detailed curvature of the spine showed itself in a translucent glow of bumps that tucked into the band of his white briefs.
A tinkle of bells sounded.
“What’s that you got there, girl? Should I close my eyes while you bitch-slap my bottom and go all kinky on me again? Woo, girl, you got some fire in your belly.” His head shook with a smile and he showed intent to turn around but his eyes remained fixed on the remote, now inches from his reach.
Sardis’ vision coasted over the edge of the sofa and fixed between the shoulder blades where the spine looked prominent. The red glove flashed past her right side and the blade of the knife wedged into the man’s back at the point of her focus with speedy precision. The sheer force of the stabbing left the handle quivering. The man’s red aura parted like slapped smoke while his head danced and dithered upon ice-cold shoulders.
It struck Sardis as odd that he did not scream, or shout, or plead in any way. There was no reaction other than his hands lost all ability to operate. The glass fell to the floor, snapping the stem and spilling the dregs of wine onto the white rug. The remote remained untouched on the table. Both arms flopped by his sides and it was only the red and blue gloves holding him back by the shoulders that prevented the man from following the glass to the floor.
And when the knife snapped free from the man’s back he still showed no reaction. It was as if he had been placed in the hands of a master hypnotist and made to sleep, sleep, sleep, and just relax on the couch in a state of trance. The only contradiction was in the man’s eyes—which Sardis could see when her host moved around the left side of the couch—which were still open and in a state of flux, helplessly and hysterically looking for clues as to what had just happened.
Sardis’ attention moved to the trembling woman, who had been forced beneath a foot she knew not to be her own. The hulking legs were garbed in tights of the same gaudy colours of red and blue with alternate red and blue boots that split both sides of bulging ankles. They looked akin to the green garb Peter Pan wore on his feet. Sardis thought they might look funky in black with her tight black jeans tucked in and her favourite black woollen jumper. The yellow stitching around the brim might look okay then.
The blue Peter Pan shoe stood upon the woman’s cheek, her face sandwiched to the floor. It only peeled from her face when the woman promised with her eyes that she would not move and his full weight stepped off and over her.
The woman did not move.
She looked nothing like minutes ago when dragged up off the floor and made to sit on one of the white chairs taken from the dining area. Her face swelled over the tape that held her mouth shut. Her cheeks puffed and shimmered with tears. Mucus strung in two spaghetti strands from her chin. Duct tape bound her ankles to the legs of the chair. More tape strapped her wrists to her thighs and lapped underneath to fix her to the seat. The robe lay discarded on the floor. The woman sat naked.
The chair had been positioned at the left end of the oversized coffee table and facing the disabled man to ensure he had the front row seat. There he remained propped up with pillows and his head was positioned to face his partner. Saturated skin demonstrated his profound discomfort. The man’s vibrant red aura had turned to grey as the residue of fear accumulated about his body and melted over him like candle wax.
The woman’s aura looked darker still, charred to a crisp.
Sardis now found herself up against the large, gold-rimmed mirror over the fireplace but the reflection staring back at her was not her own. This was not a face that belonged in the real world. It was a face suited to a comic book or the big screen, depicting a villain in a superhero movie. The grotty red and blue outfit now made sense. Her host had dressed as a Jester this time, a clown of the Middle Ages, complete with red cap and bells. His skin was white, his face a caricature with an elongated, squared chin and eyebrows dark and peaked to accentuate the movement of a Neanderthal’s brow, his eyes socketed in shadow. Out of the shadow, the eyelids were circled in dark blue, and opaque, red make up shaped extensive lips into an upturned smile, small creases in the cheeks added to the menace. The look fashioned a smile to envy the Joker of a Batman movie.
The Jester appeared pleased.
Sardis recognised her host’s aura to be the same as on previous outings, only the costume and character had changed. The unforgiving black cloud still surrounded him, pulling energy into it like a black hole, capturing the light and consuming it like a starving savage. Steady pulses of shimmering orange pulsed beneath what could only be described as the thin black stomach lining of a pig, evidence of stamina, creativity, and wicked excitement.
The Jester opened his mouth, showing his teeth into the face of the mirror. The teeth looked ominous: snow white, and unnaturally large, like the broad blades of welded shovels. He brought the tip of the knife to his mouth and picked between the broad white blades. After a moment of pretence the Jester took the knife from his mouth, looked at the chipped tip of the blade and sighed.
“Hm, shame,” he said, and allowed the knife to drop from a height with two fingers. It dived straight into the opening of the doctor’s bag as if disposing of rubbish.
The Jester turned his attention to the man and spoke with hideous gentleness. “Do me a favour like the good man I’m sure you are.” His head twitched upward as if to say, “Go on, do me a favour.” “Turn that down while I go and get something nice? I can hardly hear myself think.”
The Jester skipped around the table, between the couch and the chair with the woman, and pranced toward the kitchen in fairy-like fashion. He knew his audience watched his every eccentric move as he skipped past.
(the bells on the cap sang a merry tune as they jingled and bounced across the open room)
He was back in a moment, standing in front of the man.
“Lookie here what I found. Recognise it?” he asked, smugly swiping his thumb across the blade of a cook’s knife he’d retrieved from a black block on the kitchen counter. He tilted his head down to his right shoulder, mostly for effect, and studied the man for a few seconds. His head turned to the attention of the television, then back again to address the man.
The Jester bent over the elaborate table and took the remote with the finesse of a naughty house-maid dusting. He studied it in his hand until he found the volume and pointed it at the television.
To his utter joy, “Entry of the Gladiators, Circus Clown Theme” burst into life. Four clowns broke through a velvet red curtain and entered the circus ring. One of the clowns drove a miniature, battery-operated fire engine. The surround sound enveloped the Jester’s stage and rather than turn the volume down he turned it up, way up.
His steady smile broadened with the rise of both eyebrows as he flamboyantly tossed the remote to one side and began to hum along with a sequence of repetitive “dits” and “diddles” to the opening of the symphony. “Dit dit diddle, diddle, dit dit de de. . . .”
The clowns circled the circumference of the ring, acknowledging the cheers and laughter of the crowd. The Jester mimicked them, dancing and skipping in a tight circle around the woman and waved to her partner on every approach. The cook’s knife idly twirled about his head like a majorette twirling a baton. His attempt at demonstrating madness did not go unnoticed by his audience.
“Watch me,” the Jester called out to the man above the noise of the symphony. “This is the best part.”
The knife came down from above his head and stabbed the woman on her left shoulder. Her muffled scream was barely audible above the symphony and the Jester’s diddles.
The Jester carried on his merry dance around the woman’s distress.
The knife rained down with indiscriminate strikes about her head and torso.
The orange glow of the room turned the blood black as it seeped and sprayed from open slits. Spots of black peppered the Jester’s white face. Some reached as far as the woman’s lover, evidenced by the black specks on the white of his underwear. The Jester’s diddles ended when he wagged his tongue wildly in an attempt to catch a taste of the good stuff. To show his appreciation for audience participation, his next lap included a pirouette.
The woman’s lover did all he could to thwart the brutal stabbing, but his mumbling mouth of froth was no match.
Round and round the merry Jester goes, when the stabbing stops nobody knows.
43:
“Mirror, mirror on the bathroom wall,
“Is it me I see at all?”
Sardis awoke with a muffled gasp from another restless night terror. The terrors had come along once, sometimes twice a year since the age of thirteen. About as often as the dreaded cold sores spoiled her bottom lip. She didn’t like either; she accepted that both were part of her life.
Each outing was as vivid as the last with every detail clear as any memory from any experience. There was always carnage while feeding on the fear of a sorry soul or two.
The relief when awake and finding herself back in her room after so many was nothing like the first time. Then she had awoken to find her nails had shredded the sheets and ripped into the mattress. She had sought solace in her parents’ bed, and Alex got used to moving out to accommodate his daughter’s evident distress.
The next morning when her mum quizzed her about what had upset her so much, Sardis had been embarrassed by her childish behaviour and pretended she couldn’t remember. She wasn’t sure if her mum ever believed her, but how do you describe human slaughter to your mother as a thirteen year old?
Now, at the age of eighteen, and nine outings later, her sheets were barely rumpled.
Learning to manage the aftermath of the dreams had been difficult. No one should have seen the things she did, certainly not a thirteen-year-old girl. Not even in their worst nightmares.
On the fourth outing, when Sardis was fifteen, her hand had opted to turn on the bedroom light rather than open the bedroom door for the sanctuary of her parents’ cotton sheets. That time the nightmare didn’t feel as bad, though she felt it should have been, given what had happened in it.
There was something different about that outing. In a disturbing and ironic way Sardis had felt an attachment toward her host, the way hostages often felt toward their captors, she supposed. Stockholm Syndrome or capture-bonding is what the psychologists called it. Always in flamboyant costume and disguise, there were enough shared peculiarities to see part of her within him. Even though harm and death would come to others, part of her felt empathy and sympathy toward him and more of her felt safe, cocooned within him, similar to the solace of her parents’ bed.
Sometimes her host spoke out loud to her when looking in the mirror, like one friend to another. He’d ask what she thought of the show and, it seemed, he thought he had her approval when he smiled back. Then he would ask what he should do next. “Any ideas?” And listen for an answer. But he always thought of something before she could plead a case in his head for the victims’ safety. A couple of times he spoke the answers out loud or praised himself in the third person, referring to himself—or her?—as Mickey Boy, which surprised her at first. Then she got used to that, too.
She knew when another dream loomed. Like the tingle before an impending cold sore, a subtle feeling grew inside of her and increased with intensity over a fixed time. It would start two or three days before when a warm buzz formed deep within her gut. It felt artificial, as if she’d swallowed a pill to generate the feeling. She hadn’t connected the two until recently and believed the sensation must belong to her imaginary host, that she was licensed to look after his plan until it ripened into anxious excitement. Only then could she give it back, and that very night she would fly once more.
They were bad dreams, nightmares or night terrors, nothing more than that. No one had teeth like her. Even the teeth of her host changed from time to time, when he proudly admired his attire in someone else’s mirror, or in the blacks of their eyes. The things she sighted could only happen in dreams that mocked her. What did frighten her most, though, was that she no longer considered them nightmares or terrors. Too much exposure to the terrible things that happened in her sleep had nipped and numbed her senses. It scared her that she was no longer scared.
But those were not the only bad dreams she experienced. Not all of them included her host. There was a recurring one with a big dog—or something similar—licking and biting between her bleeding thighs and howling below her. She never saw the dog in her dreams. Maybe on those nights a big dog came and sat under the bedroom window. It was a relief not to find excitement in those dreams.
Sardis sat up in the bed and gently bit the tip of her tongue. Not to draw blood (easily done), but to generate a flush of saliva to rinse out the familiar metallic resin that coated her mouth and gums. It was a common side-effect upon re-entry. Probably a trick of the mind, that she could taste the same as her host when he went on his feeding frenzy. Biting and sucking up the blood.
The ill-measured cleaning practice did little to kill the metallic taste but it did help loosen her cottonmouth before brushing her teeth.
It wasn’t a nasty taste; it was akin to the aftertaste of the shakes Mum made and kept for her in the fridge. She remembered Mum giving her one that first night when she came in, terrified, to share their bed, shaking and full of tears. She couldn’t recall falling back to sleep after having drunk it.
She drank them twice, sometimes three times a day. No one else drank them. They were for her teeth and nails, Mum had told her years ago, and she never wondered why. They were just for her and always had been. She wasn’t even sure if she liked them. There was nothing special about the taste other than satisfying, but she knew if she didn’t have one for a while she’d miss them and begin to feel irritable. They were always there, in the fridge.
Mum always told her to keep them to herself, never to shar
e them; it might make others feel sick. Three of her best friends in school got curious to try it while on a lunch break because she couldn’t tell them specifically what was in it, and because the beaker was a familiar sight in her hand. Unbeknown to Sardis, Suzanne added food colouring to disguise the colour, but not the taste. Sometimes it ended up blood orange when she added yellow and other times purple when adding blue. She stayed away from adding the green, the colour of muck, for fear some would dribble down her chin and stain her clothes. Sardis did let each of them try it. No one asked to try it again.
Sardis went to the bathroom, washed her hands and face and brushed her teeth. She spit the white foam into the sink, ran her mouth under the tap, swashed, spat, and raised her face up to the mirror. She noticed another blemish. A new spot, set to fester for a few days; how frustrating. She was tired without a good night’s sleep and was thankful for the respite from school. The only good thing she supposed was that she had woken up to a Sunday morning.
Sunday again, always a day off school. Saturday, Sunday, mostly Sunday, but surely that couldn’t be. Dreams like these don’t pick and choose their days, she thought.
The thought abruptly consumed her. She forgot where she was and when her reflection came back to focus she had the back end of the toothbrush pressed hard into her mouth by her own hand. Without time to consider the oddity, the Jester’s face flashed in her image. The toothbrush became the knife and her hand was wearing the red glove, prodding at her incumbent teeth.
The image vanished.
Sardis jerked from the blunt pain to her gums. The toothbrush dropped from her hand and caught in the sink.
The Ice Scream Man Page 32