Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. VIII – The Darling Dreamscape
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[The Past – Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA, Summer 2003]
DeLune felt like he might drown if he took too deep a breath, accidentally condensing that thick blanket of humid air hanging over the town into a torrent of water poured straight down the throat. It slid over everything; prickling the skin and leaving a fine sheen where differential temperatures brought it out of suspension. The metal handle of the door leading into Bayou Blue’s local branch of First State Bank was wet to the touch, making him grimace as he gripped it tight and hauled it open. Corroded hinges creaked, and he could feel roughness where too many sweaty hands had worn away the protective topcoat.
The carpet was threadbare and brown, stained patches caught in weak light from overhead fluorescent tubes – their white plastic collars turned a sickly yellow with exposure to ultraviolet. Posters printed in colour and turned sepia by age unenthusiastically offered mortgage and savings products nobody was interested in.
But the old woman sat behind the teller’s desk smiled bright and wide and for just a second, the whole bank seemed brand new and vibrant again.
“Good Mornin’ Sir, Ma’am, Young Lady,” She said as she looked over the trio. “Welcome right here to First State Bank! My name is Merryl, what gives me the pleasure of meeting y’all here today?”
Setting his briefcase down onto the countertop, DeLune snapped open the clasps, pulled free a dog-eared envelope and pushed the lid shut. He stared at the brown paper for a few moments, before sliding it across the desk.
“It’s a little sensitive …” He said, voice lowered. “I’d appreciate discretion.”
The smile on Merryl’s face wavered for a moment but only in its intensity, not sincerity. She carefully reached over and pulled free the contents, scanning over the red-ink marked FINAL DEMAND and NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF DEED.
Her face softened, and she nodded. “Oh, ah completely understand Mister DeLune, but ah must ask … Do you have any ability to pay what’s due?”
Beside him, Esmarelda pressed her lips together, her eyes looking away from the older woman to the details of the varnished wooden trim framing each window. The height of interior design style thirty years ago. Sunlight spilled through from vertical blinds stirred by the air conditioning’s wheezing effort, picking out white stripes of dust.
“I can write a cheque …” DeLune offered, reaching back into his briefcase.
The smile changed. This one was sad. “Ah’m so terribly sorry Sir, but after previous … Issues surrounding clearing of funds, the bank is unable to take any further payments by cheque.”
His fingers pressed down into the scuffed leather of the briefcase, and the skin around his nails flushed white. Merryl looked back down at the creased letter in her wrinkled hands, then over her shoulder.
“Ah wish there was something ah could offer …” She drawled, chewing on a cherry-red painted lip. Her gaze shifted over to Abigayle. “Perhaps ah could speak to the manager … Ask him to consider giving y’all more time?”
DeLune sighed, blowing his cheeks out. He nodded. “I’d certainly appreciate anything you can do.”
The Teller put the overhead lights to shame again with a multi-megawatt smile, pushed her creaking chair back and disappeared into the wider office behind.
“What good is more time going to do us? Makes starvation a possibility over just dying from exposure.”
Marcus drummed his fingers on the top of his case, deliberately keeping his focus forward. “More time for work. I can–”
“More time to patch up the addicts and whores making up your little commune?!” Esmarelda snapped, face twisting into something getting intimately familiar with a snarl before decorum, slipping out from some recess of her mind, intervened and forced her to drop her head and voice and avoid the additional attention. “ … You can’t even do that without making a loss. Only you could decide to start a charity when we’ve got nothing left and give even that away.”
He sighed again. “I wish you wouldn’t use that word. Most of them don’t have a choice. It’s the right thing to do …”
Esmarelda laughed, but without a shred of joy or good humour in her scratched voice. “You’ll drill a hole in her head,” She began with a gesture down to the younger woman, “But you’ll draw the line at billing for putting those wasters back together and back onto the streets of this tin-hut town to wind up back under your care the next morning?”
“It’s fulfilling work. Don’t you feel like you’re helping to–”
“If you don’t do something,” She cut him off again with a voice nine-tenths sibilant hiss; a high-pressure gas piercing the shuddering walls of its storage tank and threatening to blow. “I’m going to end up turning tricks along with the rest of your new pet project and maybe your old one too.”
That made DeLune break his deliberate stare and look back at Abigayle. The young woman hadn’t moved from her vantage point studying one of the faded posters offering credit facilities nobody had used in more than two decades. She had a forefinger pressed against the paper, disturbing the dust and sending it spinning in swirls that dipped in and out of the fluorescent light.
There was nothing he could do. Even out here, with sweltering swamp to their backs, nestled between single-storey houses stood up high on thick piles and pillars, there was no escape from bureaucracy. No reputable medical establishment employed physicians with “registration problems”, and even the disreputable ones still checked the electronic records which followed everyone relentlessly, unforgivably. Eternally. They weren’t stupid and while gaps were tolerated – after all, reputable folk don’t go looking for work in festering townships like Bayou Blue – evidence, however alleged, of malpractice and incompetence was not.
It didn’t matter that those entries were lies. Well, the incompetence certainly was. Malpractice was down to individual interpretation. One he staunchly denied. It wasn’t so crass as simply drilling a hole in the girl’s head. It was rational, planned, careful psychosurgery–
None of those circumstances mattered. All that did was imminent repossession of their tin shack; his inability to provide for his pseudo-family. The risk he might not be able to continue his work. There had to be another way …
Lost in his musing, DeLune didn’t see Merryl as she made her way back from the office spaces, lowered her hunched frame back down into the chair and scooted forward. Equally so, the Doctor wasn’t tracking Abigayle as she completed a wide and lazy circuit of the reception area, casually flicking the latch on the metal-framed doors of the main entrance closed as she passed until she stood by DeLune’s side, next to the countertop.
“Ah’ve spoken to the manager, Mister DeLune …” She leaned forwards, beginning to rise up from her seat. “Sir? Are you alright?”
Her eyes flicked over to the younger woman and the Teller smiled warmly, checking a name on the form below. “You must be–”
He stirred from his reverie about the same time Abigayle reached over the counter, took a rough handful of Merryl’s silver-grey hair and drove her forehead down hard on the edge of the raised desk. The old woman gasped and dropped back down, elbows banging against the armrests of the chair that squeaked in protest at sudden loading. Autonomic reflexes brought her head halfway up, before consciousness drained away and she slumped forwards, murmuring.
Abigayle smeared something hot and slick out from underneath her nose as she smoothly vaulted over the counter, landing softly on worn carpet. Esmarelda pushed forwards urgently, but DeLune’s forearm cut across and held her back. He just shook his head even as she looked at him, wide-eyed.
The young woman fished a chain out from the folds of Merryl’s blouse, hooking it over her slumped head and holding a small silver key up to shine in the striplight.
“Hey!” A voice called from somewhere behind. “Just what do you think you’re doing!”
Twisting the lock open and pulling the drawer free, Abigayle emptied the neatly packaged bundles of hundred-dollar bills all over the countertop and squeezed the empty metal box in the palm of one hand. “Collect them and follow me.”
And then she turned, drawer still in hand, and launched forwards.
The owner of the voice dropped down to his knees, swaying as his fractured jaw clicked and cracked, unable to make words or do anything beyond wheeze in pain. The commotion drew in another face to peek out from an office off to the side and Abigayle delivered the dented drawer into his shoulder, forcing him to stumble backwards and crash against a filing cabinet. The crumpled metal box in her hand fell apart into bent panels and tumbled to the floor, unable to keep up with her tally.
Desperately knocking aside trays, pens and photocopied pamphlets offering savings advice, DeLune filled his briefcase with the bundles, forced the bent latches closed and scrambled over the countertop. Reaching back he roughly hauled Esmarelda – who was still still stuck watching the spiralling scene play out – forward by the hand; unable to process. Unable to grasp the enormity of what had just happened and what it meant for all of them.
Another crack, the unmistakable soft thump of a body hitting the floor and Esmarelda looked up to see Abigayle force open a fire exit with the flat of her shoe. The young woman stepped over a prone body still shifting in relative unconsciousness, before once again wiping at the trickle of blood splashing down the front of her shirt.
Bright blue eyes found Esmarelda from underneath a platinum-blonde frame and bore straight into her. Through her. “We must leave.”
Nodding dumbly, she stumbled over the outstretched legs of the man nursing a broken jaw as DeLune pulled her on. Oppressive, choking humidity assaulted her as soon as she cleared the air-conditioned threshold …
… Except it wasn’t the water content in the air that made her feel like she was drowning with every breath. It was the calm, cool and collected face that stared at her with bright blue eyes. Through her with cold, calculating eyes. She looked up at Marcus but could tell he was a million miles away, thinking about what comes next, not what had just come to pass. He couldn’t grasp the truth that was making her skin prickle quite independently of the stifling humidity.
They had both made a terrible mistake getting involved with this girl. Should have left her to rot back at North Palladium.
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[The Rapture]
The Darling of SCW, My Darling … You have endured such a torrid time, delivered and inflicted across all the mediums this modern world can bring to bear; to supplement the more traditional agonies honed through centuries of so-called civilised society. They caw at catering tables still being tipped upright and set into place, pecking at processed foods while guffawing and whooping, denigrating you as the lighting trusses are erected and thick rubber bundles of electrical cabling are pulled through their stainless steel conduits.
Speaker stacks twice your height are wheeled into position to crackle and boom with the screech and thump of feedback, but they cannot drown out the sound of their judgement. Another arena on another night wakes up in its new role as host to people hurting people for money, accolades, accoutrements or all three combined, but they do not look to that future. They are looking at your past.
2.17 Seconds.
0-4 in 2022.
Some laugh in your face, others at your back as you pass. Game hens scratching their hooked toes across backstage concrete. In the gouges they make you would happily nestle down, pulling at the crumbling edges in the hopes they will cave in; bury you under a sense of scale in keeping with how small you feel.
The miracle of technology supplements such a traditional vehicle for humiliation with newfound digital despair. Your so-called online experts have generously and virtually weighed in on your performances and found them wanting, despite the fact that not a single one could hope to be given the opportunity to fail, let alone do so. These truckstop service assessments of your ability, comparable in their subtlety and richness with the fitness of those struggling to fit behind a Big Rig wheel, are no more worthy of consideration versus the clucking and scratching of jealous peers at catering.
But, My Darling, how it scores and wears on you. A blunt, flattened wedge that planes millimetres – slivers – of the soul with each weighty pass, grinding down the psyche and fashioning it into an ugly, final form devoid of the potential of all the shapes it could have taken. They split and savage you with words, and then you turn your unvarnished, unprotected face to their cutting disc and present it for fresh wounding.
When they get tired of hurting you so deeply, flicking the sweat-stained switch OFF to let the psychosomatic wheel spin down on inertia, you look at the fresh cuts and abrasions and then you look for sympathy. Compassion.
Instead of cutting them even more deeply in return, down and through the bone, you ask for sad songs. You ask for pity.
And when they give it, because some in their ignorance and need to do something know not what they really do, you drink in that heady cocktail of equal parts self-flagellation and imposter syndrome until your blood is turned to molasses. Made sludge and poison as it squelches and tumbles through your veins. In that stupor of sweet melancholy, you look inside and cry instead of looking out and distilling that cocktail into something devastating. Hydrazine to slough the skin from their pointing, mocking fingers; noxious Nitrogen Tetroxide that melts the lungs providing air to pour scorn on you, making them stick fast to the inside of their rib cages.
You could make such pretty vengeance. Instead, you mewl and pull your knees up to your chest and weep, wasting precious neural peptides on the opinions of Dave Meltzer. Oh, My Darling – I will break this cycle on your behalf and build you anew. But firstly, it is necessary to break you.
Cut you.
Firstly, it is necessary to unequivocally understand that there will be no sympathy from me. No compassion, no pity. I will not acknowledge your weakness. or compliment you for carrying the weary weight of a neurosis you could instead have used to crush untold enemies with. I will simply correct it. Show you how to bludgeon them swiftly. That is what you want, is it not?
Strength. Vigour. Power. Assuredness, confidence. Presence. I will give you all these things after rebuilding and with them, My Darling Chloe, you will stop that cutting disc as it squeals millimetres from your face and when they go wide-eyed as you start to force it back, twisting the plastic between sweat-slick fingers, drink greedily and deep of those precious few moments of the purest of all feelings – revenge.
Oh, they will beg you to stop. Then they will screech to compete with the edge of the wheel as it meets metal and sparks. But, of course, there is only flesh, bone and blood and they will deserve to lose all three in copious amounts for what they have done to you.
But I cannot make right in the end using what was so very wrong to begin with. You – such as you exist now – are woefully insufficient. It is pointless to smelt pig iron and waste so much resource extracting the impurities of sulphur and excess carbon. Instead, leave it too cool on misshapen slag heaps, forgotten scrap, and start again. Return to the base components and consider each independently. Separate My Darling into the physical and moral. Real and imagined; mass and meta. Are you ready? Let us begin on the inside …
You have endured such a torrid time that it is only natural you would retreat inwards, to walk the silver-metal streets of your very own imagination; a Darling Dreamscape to call your own and shape with absolute control and clarity of purpose. Raise your colourful megaphone on-high and proclaim loudly like angelic trumpets heralding some primordial, omniscient truth. Invite all your wonderful friends to watch you succeed; watch you win. Play the high-stakes game and negotiate your way to stunning victory.
تصحبك السلامة or, ሰላም ለናንተ ይሁን in the Amharic tongue of your Ethiopian Uber driver. Peace be upon you.
I would so very much like to visit you there and walk those glittering streets, swinging in lazy loop-de-loops around gold-gilt lamp posts that suffuse the starry sky with their yellow glow. There are so many people I could meet, subtle-cut facets of those known before, rotated in that soft light to present something shimmering and new.
My Resplendent Hurricane lives in your Darling Dreamscape, Ms. Amber – restored to her violent, enthusiastic best and cured of the cancer of obsession that first made her heart dark and, then, excised it completely from her chest to rest on her shoulder. On display and necrotic, instead of the terrible tumour that should have taken its place taken out. I would very much like to meet this Redhead-That-Never-Was: what a remarkable road not taken.
Would you like to walk the waking world with her, a supplemental conscience to a living weapon, instead of dreaming? Once rebuilt and remade, I would be so pleased for you to join us. We could do such wonderful things together. I think it is time to start on just that very beautiful transition, take our first step in-sync on such a long and winding yellow-brick road.
I would so very much like to visit your metaphysical. Perhaps I can. All you have to do is accept my thorn-painted hand, and I will make your Darling Dreamscape a reality.
Welcome to the Rapture. Let me share it with you.
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[ERROR – Las Vegas, The Darling Dreamscape, ERROR 1903]
I watch rain streak the white marble frontage in blotchy ribbons, splashed across towering columns and wide buttresses topped with tittering gargoyles; all buoyed by a gentle breeze. It cannot rain here – not like this at the height of an arid summer, not now, but the Dreamscape my Darling has crafted for herself is so malleable, so agile that it shifts and warps at every conscious and base whim. It was made for her, after all, but now it has welcomed me too.
The Sun stretches out from behind fat banks of cloud, smearing the storm with dirty orange and ruddy yellow. It shines directly overhead, burning through the puffy daggers trying to pierce its brilliant disc. The rain, which has continued to fall, begins to crystallise. Flurries of snow twist and spin in the beaming sunlight and start to line the steps leading up ahead. That is also impossible, but the Dreamscape is confused. It did not expect someone else.
Perhaps it is not so welcoming at all.
They spill down the steps towards me and one slips on the bizarre snowfall, tumbling past to present no further threat. All white spatterdashes over shiny black shoe leather and sharp-brimmed fedoras, their tailored suits bunch and crumple as they swing. I sidestep, pull back, evading their clumsy fists but even in this strange place – ironic given what the Vegas Strip will one day be home to – the numbers game cannot be ignored. One of the men catches me on the side of the chin and I feel the indentation of a ring press painfully in hard against my skin.
My skin. This is surprising …
The pain is relatively tolerable, and as my skull snaps back I allow the momentum to continue to carry me so that his follow-through swing misses overhead. Rearing up, I drive the flat of my prosthetic between his eyes and transform his nose into an internal organ. I feel the hot, unmistakable slickness of blood smear between my fingers.
There is no prosthetic. It is flesh-and-his-blood. Quickly, those pale fingertips rise up to probe the side of my chin, gingerly pressing hot, angry skin already beginning to swell.
There is no mask in here. Remarkable.
It takes only a few more moments to dispatch the rest of the dapper-dressed immune responses. Climbing the steps to the whip-snap clap of my heels on cut sandstone, I glance over my shoulder at the top and let the soft breeze tickle my bruising face.
The city shines in smooth marble, polished steel and silver veins of immaculately sculpted metal. Towers clad in chrome, their four-spired upper floors held aloft by concrete-crafted angels in repose, stretch in exquisite detail as far as the heat haze allows before its shimmering distortions make everything blur. This is impossible too. Las Vegas should be a tinpot holdover stop in 1903; a gaggle of dirt-scraped farms and water bowsers offering thirsty wagon trains the opportunity to stop nowhere on the way to somewhere.
The eponymous Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering works of all time, will not even begin construction for another twenty seven years and its associated thousands of workers and their families that would balloon Las Vegas into something deserving as a destination, decades away from calling this place home. The President who would give his name to its titanic, curved face – if this really was the turn of the century – found himself mired deep in controversy as his business dealings unravelled in fraud and controversy. A far cry from the Oval Office he would eventually occupy.
But of course, it really was not. Is not. Invaded by something foreign, inflaming, the Dreamscape reacts like a living organism; warping and changing to expel the invader. Me. Paradoxes are birthed where impossibilities collide, making a metaphysical soup of architectures, cultures and realities. Some are from the real-world made make-believe and merged together. Others have never existed at all.
I can see why Chloe adores this place and why she spends so much time here. Still, it has become seriously disrupted and twisted after my visit. Reaching forward for spiral-wrought iron handles I pull the heavyset doors apart, stepping inside and away from the snowing sunlight.
Trumpets whoop and trombones whine against the slap of snare drums and crashing cymbals; a swinging wall of sound that rolls around vaulted ceilings too high to fit the structure of the building I stood outside just a moment before. The melody of a Big Band groove shakes and shimmies its way through the air, off-beat snaps and trills sometimes complimentary, sometimes discordant as only a child of jazz music could possibly be.
But this child has arrived prematurely; decades before the sound of Dixieland will come to define every happening joint and cool-cat hangout. Another impossibility.
The black-and-white lacquered tiles, which make up a vast and empty monochrome dance floor, reflect brilliant bright spotlights hanging high above. Instruments sit idle on a raised stage and if I turn my head away, the music thumps and blares from some new direction. Perched on silver-gilt stools arranged around a sweeping bar lined with mahogany, two women sit with their backs to me and these phantom musicians.
One is slight, hunched so that the windbreaker she wears marked FBI creases its yellow lettering. The other woman is taller, powerful. Lean muscle traces subtle bulges in her shoulders and upper arms where the nightshade-black material of her dress hints and suggests. Of course I do not need to see her face to recognise my Resplendent Hurricane – or at least the Darling Dreamscape’s version of her.
“Ms Amber?” I call out, and the yellow lettering abruptly smooths out as its wearer sits up straight. The other woman turns her head and looks over a sinewy shoulder, an unmistakable smirk peeking out from between flowing, spiral red locks. Slowly she levers herself up from the stool, but a shaking hand reaching out to grasp her bicep brings this Alternate Amber to a halt mid-stride.
The pair exchange words I should not be close enough to hear over the crashing and jubilant music but somehow, I do.
“D-d-d-don’t,” The smaller woman trembles and as she angles her head I can see she is very young. Eighteen, perhaps twenty years old, pensive features framed by twirls of brown hair. “S-s-she’s just S-s-slenderman’s wife … S-s-s-stay with me.”
This distorted guardian angel of sorts stops for a longer moment, and something that has rarely so obviously graced the face of the real redhead – hesitation – finds a home. It is only a temporary residence, of course, because when Ms. Amber looks back to me, she is Resplendent once more and the Dreamscape loses control. She shakes free Chloe’s weak grasp and pulls away.
This is not Genevive Benton, of course. This is a proxy produced by me, of her. My replica of My Darling. Realisation is beginning to dawn on where I am and what this is, but that is not enough. Certainty is required.
Amber moves with surprising fluidness, given the restrictions of her dress as it clings around her thighs and billows in a tumble of blue-hued fabric and she closes the distance in seconds. Her first blow is proximate to the dapper-delivered first earlier, doubling-down the pain from hot ache to teeth-grinding agony. All the resistive force to being pushed back and Newton’s clear direction on the consequence, channelled through a stiletto point, causes my cobalt-coloured heel to crack the white tile underneath.
I drop to one knee, the warble of trombones stretching in a trauma-induced version of the Doppler Effect. She takes a step forward and her leg stabs out in an almost-irresistible arc; tearing the hem of her dress as it aims to connect with the side of my head. Learning a lesson at the third time of asking, I make Newton work to my benefit and fall forward chest-to-floor – a lethal instep passing harmlessly overhead. Twisting onto my shoulder I sweep my own leg in an absolutely-irresistible mirror and it takes the redhead off her feet.
Momentum helps me to standing just as she makes it up to her knees, pain making the freckles on her face twist in-line and we both freeze in place. Cocking my head to the side, I watch that smirk reappear even as she dabs at the split in her lip, made by a reflexive tug against sharp incisors as she fell.
“You are no less dangerous when you are metaphysical,” I say.
The figment of my imagination formerly known as Ms Amber shrugs, brushing a handful of thick, coiled red out from her eyes. I think I prefer her hair like this. “You don’t speak any more plainly.”
Extending out a hand that should be made of lightweight osseo-integrated metals, plastic sheathing and lightweight servomotors, she takes it in hers and squeezes hard. I feel every contraction of muscle and the heat from her flushed skin burns and tingles mine as I pull.
My Resplendent Hurricane settles on her feet and looks up at me, still smirking. Her hand still in mind. “Gonna’ need that back unless you plan on dancing.”
This is my Dreamscape now, and so yes. I think I will.
Pulling her further in we press together. The hand that should be missing finds the small of her back, the other its partner. We glide and spin to Big Band chords and Dixieland melodies. Without the mask to act as a barrier, I can feel her breath on my cheek and the subtle hint of a fine malt wafts across mere inches between. The lead moves from me to her and back; interchangeable, fluid. Responsive. I twist, she turns. The tempo of the music increases, our pace quickens and our heartbeats thunder ever-louder to keep up with the strain of this rhythm.
Or is it our hearts pushing everything else faster, harder? For a few moments Amber pulls me in a spiral that leaves my right hand free and in the time it takes for me to spin back to find hers, I drag fingertips across the nape of my neck and down.
No scar bisecting my ribcage. Remarkable.
She pulls me in close now and as I try to fill my lungs with air to drive our dance, instead it is filled with a subtle spice. Something that tingles my nose like a sweet perfume. For just a moment in reality, forever in one conjured up and metaphysical, I think about what could never have been. She is very beautiful …
Inside this corrupted Dreamscape I am restored – resplendent too. The tithes and tolls of all the decisions and omissions made in the real world are paid off or simply expunged from existence, and all that is left behind is pure and virtuous. It is not real, of course, but it is a wonderful glimpse of what could have been and, if it feels real, what is the difference between the perceived and actualised? Belief poured into a mould under such incredible pressures of assuredness that it creates something tangible. Faith generating mass. Imagination shaping reality. At that singular moment as I bring my leg behind hers to provide a brace and gently cradle her waist, so that her back arcs and her chin tips up to watch the spotlights like stars, I realise what this is and where I am. This is no simple corruption.
Except, perhaps, this version of my Hurricane. Freed from the burden of expectation, of triumph and success made so cyclical and baselined that it brings nothing but suffering and misery. This is a corruption of what she is supposed to be; could be. Will be, when she embraces her inevitable destiny as a living weapon. A gift I will give her, a mercy I will grant. This distorted angel moving with such grace before me is a plain reminder of all I have worked to avoid. This cannot be her fate. No.
This is a salvation. The inevitable output of a vast celestial machinery, one I have been painstakingly assembling for so many months. It is time to turn back to the task at hand …
Chloe taps me on the shoulder and I glance around and down. I do not feel Amber pull away but I know instantaneously that she is gone from my grasp, my sight and my conjured world.
“T-t-t-this doesn’t f-f-f-feel right,” The young woman stutters, pulling the folds of a navy-blue windbreaker in tight around herself. “You s-s-s-shouldn’t be h-h-here.”
The spotlights above begin to flicker and in no sequence or order, die. I raise a hand to cup the side of the young woman’s face and when it emerges from the growing shadow, the plastic is hard and white and painted with delicate thorns.
Overhead, the last light threatens to fail and Chloe’s watering eyes fade in and out of sight of mine. “Do you know where you are, Miss Benton?”
She flinches from the cold touch of the plastic on her tear-streaked cheek. “Y-y-yes. T-t-this is m-m-my Dreamscape.”
When the spotlight above next flickers, that familiar claustrophobic pressure of something pressed tight against my face settles in. Without any interference or encouragement, the tensioner holding the mask in place begins to ratchet, pulling fabric straps painfully tight.
I do not need to touch my chest to know the scar gnarls and twists my skin again.
“It was,” I reply, my prosthetic dropping down to clamp against her shoulder. Squeezing. She gasps, wriggling under the pressure. “It was … But not anymore. Do you recognise this?”
She shakes her head while staring at the tilework, below. Dropping onto one knee to stare plastic face-to-face with the young woman, I lean to the side. The garish, painted smile stretched from my ear to ear hovers next to hers. Although I cannot feel the sensation directly, because there are no nerves left to do so, the pressure transducers buried inside composite phalanges detect the way Chloe trembles in my electrically-driven grasp. The make-believe recedes, unable to stand up to reality. Inevitability.
“ … Welcome to the Rapture, My Darling.”
The last spotlight dies, and she is mine.
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[The Rapture]
Do not be afraid, although I know you are. To see something that gives you such reassurance, such safety, perverted and corrupted into some new and terrible form must have been very unsettling … But it was so very necessary. To develop, to become better and greater than we are, we must accept inevitable growing pains. This is a relatively simplistic thing when you have nowhere but the real world to turn to. You, however, crafted something quite remarkable and such a comfort blanket had to be ripped away.
The door to the Dreamscape behind you is now locked, the way is barred. A breezeblock wall up against your spine. Forward, now. Do not look back, we cannot go that way. If you are frightened, take my thorn-painted hand and we will go together.
Now that we have curtailed your runaway imagination – pruned back its wandering branches to make a form more easily and pleasingly remade under my sun – it is time to turn our attention to the physical. You do not spend enough time in the real world, My Darling, and it shows. Retreating inside gives you blessed relief from what they say, snide and scorning, but it does not stop them saying it.
And so they will say it again, and again.
You will not or cannot act to stop this sorry cycle, so I shall. It is time to change that. Dreams have their place, to soothe the spirit when sleep finds us and inspire the soul when awake but those are internal portents and wards, designed to defend and preserve. They may slow defeat but they cannot win. What we require are external weapons, what we need are nightmares to visit on those who cut you for the sin of existing, daring to dream those dreams.
And why? Because you have not been poisoned by the fear of losing almost nothing in exchange for something greater? Because you are not bloated by average, swollen by normal. Stuffed to bursting with mediocrity. There are dreams running around your head, and in the bright eyes that shine with potential they see reflected in them their own lapsed potential.
We require weapons to make war with against our enemies. They were forged the day you were born, one to a limb apiece … Or perhaps a composite substitute if the real world we are now committed to chooses a different path. Either way, you must use them without hesitation. Meet words with action. Challenge thoughts with deeds. Look at each pathetic has-been, never-will-be and somewhere-in-between arrayed out in front of you and question their credentials to mock and scorn.
Who are these moral and ethical champions that make you turn your face from daylight towards the dark and dreamlike? Miss Hernandez? Who believes her defeat at my thorn-painted hand and the end of her much-vaunted title reign somehow qualifies her for greater honours and further success? Jessica and her harem of braying birds? Cawing and scratching because they lack the cognitive complexity to give words to their inadequacy. Why then, Chloe, do you listen to them?
Why concern yourself with the opinions of those who have demonstrated their inferiority at every turn? Those that have taken years to amass days of relevancy and transitional moments in the spotlight of any significant achievement? Do you think there are dues to pay?
There are only errors to be corrected. Vengeance to be distributed.
0-4. You have had four opportunities to understand that this hierarchy you have been presented with is a falsehood. There are no tiers here; no membership levels. Did your own beloved Ms Amber take a place in an orderly queue, cocksure smirk on her lips, and wait to become the greatest Bombshells’ World Champion of any reasonable interpretation of a world?
What is the number that signifies your understanding? 0-7? 0-12?
Enough. It is clear an intervention is required. No more reassurance, no gentle nods. The time for listening, tea and sympathy is over. Now it is time to respond.
Miss Benton, you have arrived here with the mistaken belief that there is something to be proven but that is not the case. You do not need to prove anything to anyone. Instead, you must show them. Educate them in the error of their ways and in that small way, contribute to their own uplifting. Instead, you shrink – less the Darling of SCW and more the Wallflower. Unlike your beloved redhead, that is not unassailable or untouchable. What would she think of such an attitude? It is an invitation to be dismantled, decompiled. Denigrated and forgotten.
My Resplendent Hurricane does not tolerate such distractions or complexities which bring her no closer to her goals. That is the instinct you must develop to stand any chance of survival beyond providing offal for the pantry birds to peck and gnaw at.
Perhaps, if you would like to know more about how Ms Amber achieves such brutal, iron-hard ruthlessness, you should ask her about the Case of a Man who Loved a Hurricane and Got Blown Away …
Those bottomfeeders do not have the right, and if you join my Rapture, I will make such terrible vengeance on them that not even blissful unconsciousness will provide respite. They will suffer for everything they ever said to you in scorn and snide.
These are the things that I will do for you, but there is something that you must do for me.
Firstly, you must suffer. It is important to recollect that you will find no sympathy behind this painted face. No compassion, no pity. These serve no purpose but to provide an insulating layer of delusion, absorbing the harsh lessons of the real world and diffusing out into weak-willed words that cannot break bones or hurt you.
We are not dealing with Sorority Sister social exclusions and Kindergarten-esque tantrums. In the course of what we will do together, many people will be hurt. Emotionally, physically. Some will not recover – because of the things you did, or because of the consequences of the things you did. All of this will revolve around you … But with every passing week you remain soft-shelled. Perpetually new and foal-like.
There is no growth in that, Chloe, only stagnation and repetition. Weakness. You are wounded by their words because of the failure of your deeds, then retreat into fantasy and when you re-emerge it is to their catcalls and shrill laughter. Damaged, you fall short again and the pattern becomes locked in an platinum-forged Mobius Strip. We have come so far in preparing you for more than this – by seizing the Dreamscape and reforging it to less a comfort blanket and more a crucible, all the imaginative tools are laid out on our surgical table ready for your rebuilding and repair. But that is not enough.
I think you know that is not enough.
Severed from your escape into fantasy, the underlying weakness remains in the real world. Your bones are hollow, muscles atrophied and heart strained so we must break, tear and excite them to regrow all the stronger. There is responsibility to take here, too, Miss Benton. You were the supreme commander of and for yourself and with that authority, you did nothing except turn away; recover from wound after wound without striking back. There is a penance to pay for such poor use of the miracle you are, Chloe. On the island of Crete, this Sunday, I will extract that payment.
Do not be frightened – you will find forgiveness. I will show you such beautiful mercy. Salvation, granted through the sweetest suffering … And there will be such suffering, but that is a necessary element of our expedited hardening of your body and soul. We have so much time to make up for, and only one evening in the warm and setting Mediterranean sun to achieve it. So I will hurt you, wound you. It will be very unpleasant My Darling. But afterwards?
Afterwards, you will be saved. A patchwork of bruises, cuts and knots that all stitch a physical representation of new-found faith. A map which leads you to one inexorable destination: the Rapture. Oh, then they will fear you. Broken in the real and imaginary components, remade in both and unleashed. Potential left to turn cantankerous in the bilges of your self-doubt, self-loathing, fished out from the disgusting depths and brought into the bright sun. Such a terrible new tool, to compliment the greatest living weapon of all.
I want you to understand what a rare thing my beautiful mercy is, Chloe. Only one other person has benefitted from its grace. She has many forms, one of which exists in your Dreamscape prior to the arrival of my new management. Curiously, more versions of Amber Ryan seem to exist in the real world than the imagined; a testament to the consequences of trying to bind a hurricane into mortal, constrained form. Regardless, that same offer is extended to you.
Embrace the suffering assigned to you on Sunday, and with it earn my mercy and your salvation. Accept your part in my grand design and I promise you a most selective space in my celestial machinery. Come sit with me and Ms Amber at its heart, where we will direct the vast spiral gears and burnished wheels that spin and swing SCW in whatever direction desired. Perhaps you can bring other friends …
… Perhaps Christian would like to join us?
All you have to do is accept my thorn-painted hand, and I will make your Dreamscape – and mine – a reality. Join me, My Darling.
Welcome to our Rapture.
