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Send to FriendBut no, it wasn't strep throat, for when he removed his hand he saw that his palm was slick with blood. He could feel the warm life fluid sluicing down his hairy chest, dripping upon the plush beige carpet as the air that he struggled to suck into his lungs escaped from a widening crevice along his throat. He took a staggering step forward, his head swaying back and forth, the sudden motion tearing the crevice in his throat even wider and more blood poured from the wound. Up ahead, he could see a figure, standing no more than a few feet away whose features were completely masked by the morning shadows. Or perhaps his mind had forbidden him to lay witness to his murderer. In the silhouette's hand was the knife, which Strauss could see clearly, the blood dripping from the blade, gleaming in the dim light cast from the ceiling...a kitchen ceiling.
No longer was Strauss in his bedroom, he realized, but now in a mysterious kitchen, where his blood spilled not on a plush beige carpet, but on an orange and black checkerboard linoleum floor. The image of his murderer swam in and out of focus as his field of vision took a darkening, syrupy view. Staggering almost drunkenly, Strauss doubled over and was now resting his elbows against the ugly yellow counter by the stove, slowly falling to his knees, his elbows and forearms slipping from the counter as his face brushed up against the wooden cupboard doors below.
Sparing one final, leering glance behind, toward his killer, he saw through the murky shadows a warm smile over his hidden countenance, a sadistic affection within a pair of radiant, loving eyes. Strauss could have sworn that he had seen the sick son of a bitch mouth the words I love you before the syrupy darkness swallowed him into oblivion.
Through the darkness, from a distance he could hear the buzzing clock, faint at first, but growing louder, coming closer until the drone was pounding in his head, making his temples throb more from shear irritation. The sound was now deafening and infuriatingly impossible to ignore. Strauss's eyes fluttered open and he saw that it had been his black Sony alarm clock, demanding that he wake, refusing to be silenced lest he hit the snoozer for another seven minutes of blissful silence and slumber, or to turn the wretched thing off altogether. Strauss did the latter, standing barefoot and once more in the peace and security of his bedroom, basking in the forgiving serenity of his four bedroom walls. As he stood there now, naked save for the pair of Hanes briefs, the nightmare still lingered, still making him tremble slightly as his heart finally began to slow to its normal pace. For a nightmare was all it had been, despite it seeming so eerily familiar. He took a deep breathe and swallowed, experiencing not even the slightest prick in the back of his throat. With a sigh of relief that he was perfectly healthy and alive after all, he looked down upon the carpet, just to make sure, relieved that it had not a trace of blood.
As he stretched and yawned and scratched his scrotum, fiddling around with his morning erection, the reality of his situation dawned on him once more that he was getting older. No longer was he the rebellious teenager that could abuse his body all he wanted and remain almost unscathed, nor was he even a twenty-something college or graduate student. As of today, he was officially thirty years old, an age that seemed almost decrepit to him when he was twenty, yet here he was at long last. He supposed he should at least be thankful that he wasn't old enough yet to have to get up three times a night to take a piss. Still, here he was at thirty, and he had yet to get married; he wasn't even in a serious relationship at the moment. He could actually hear echoing in his head his parent's nagging voices, interrogating him as to why he had yet to settle down and give them eight or nine grandchildren by now. He could almost hear them condemning his decision to drop out of college ten years ago and demanding that he go back so he could get a real job rather than being a retail whore for the rest of his life (something he fully intended on doing someday when he finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life). He could just see the birthday cards his friends and family sent to him, joking about how old he was getting, even if he still felt young, still felt perfectly healthy and hadn't had even one gray strand on his full head of hair as of yet.
After taking a Listerine strip to kill his morning breath and walking to the bathroom to urinate once his morning erection had softened enough to make the task easier, Strauss hopped into the shower, feeling relaxed at first as the hot water sprayed against his naked body. He lathered the bar of soap against his body, trying to forget everything: the dream, the fact that he was turning thirty. It was otherwise just another morning, the beginning of yet another year in his life.
Strauss closed his eyes as he rinsed the soap off his body, and suddenly, it wasn't his entire body that was wet, but his face, submerged beneath water while his hands gripped tightly against a porcelain rim, struggling to lift his head as someone else gripped his hair tightly, holding him down. His eyes tore open and widened in horror as he saw that his face was being pushed into a toilet. A few large bubbles burst from his lips in a sudden exhalation of air. He moaned as his entire body shuttered and trembled. For just a minute, he was able to lift his head above the toilet, gasping as cold water dripped from his hair and face. He coughed, breathing heavily, and was pushed down again, feeling the rush of water entering his nose and mouth from the sudden intake of air he had taken just a moment ago, feeling heavy fluids filling his lungs. Panic seized control, wracking tremulous spasms throughout his entire body in his struggle to be free, to breathe fresh air again. His head jerked to the side—
And with a frightened sob, Strauss was thrown to the side, tearing the shower curtain and tripping over the tub as his legs frantically carried him off, away from the danger. He threw out his hands to stop the forward momentum, grabbing the wash basin of his sink as well as the rim of his toilet, so that he was now on his knees, his back arched slightly, his body still trembling, but back, safely in his own bathroom once more. As his heart continued to thump in his chest, he shivered as the toilet water chilled his knuckles, but at least it was no longer his face being held down. He looked down at the torn shower curtain laying below his body, as well as listening to the showerhead continuing to spray water against the shower wall, and sighed dismally, wondering what was going on and why any of this had been happening to him.
As he sat down for his breakfast of Eggo waffles drenched in melting butter and maple syrup, Strauss continued to ponder the morning's events and their potential meaning or cause. Although he felt as though he might be going insane, it seemed incredible, for there was no discernable cause, external or internal, for such insanity. He had had no previous history of mental or emotional disorders, or of any drug use, and had never suffered any major trauma.
Perhaps upon turning thirty, at least on a subconscious level, he had finally realized his own mortality. But that made little sense either, for while thirty might have been over-the-hill by MTV standards, it was still otherwise fairly young. Hell, even seventy wasn't considered that old, by today's standards. Beside the point, when one died from old age, it wasn't a violent affair, but one in which you might slowly rot away from cancer, or simply go peacefully in your sleep.
So why was all of this happening to him? Could it be some kind of warning or psychic premonition of things to come? Strauss had never believed in that bullshit, but in his present state he was more than willing to at least entertain the possibility and plausibility of such a disturbing notion.
As he continued to sit and eat, he wondered what other kinds of nightmarish hallucinations he might suffer through. The waffles were circular, so he wondered if they might morph into a circular saw and be used by some phantom to slit his throat with or to cut open his chest. He could almost see himself as the victim of some dumb exploitation film, in which he was lying on some dark platform. Psychotic cannibals would the circular saws that had once been his waffles in their hands. They would cut into him again and again, slicing off both arms and legs. And he would lie there, crying and screaming in terror and agony as blood oozed from his stumps and sluiced down the platform he lay upon. Perhaps the fork he held might be passed to someone else, who might jamb it into his eye.
Strauss shuddered in revulsion, disturbed now both by his previous hallucinations as well as by the thoughts and images that filled his head. His thoughts were never this morbid and he had always loathed excessive blood and gore, whether real or make-believe.
After finishing his waffles, he stepped out of his apartment, and into the parking lot, watching as the sun shone brightly in the sky, proclaiming the start of a brand new day, as well as a brand new decade in Howard Strauss's life. Not all new beginnings were good, of course (just as not all endings were necessarily bad); he supposed that the beginning of a sentence in a concentration camp would be very scary indeed. (And there he went with those morbid thoughts again that made him shudder. And the most ironic thing of all was that he generally shunned others who openly displayed ideas or interest in things of a macabre nature, for they surely must be touched in the head.) But being a thirty-something instead of a twenty-something couldn't have been that bad, for age meant greater maturity and greater wisdom. And it wasn't like being thirty was considered that damned old, he kept reminding himself.
As he pulled out the keys to his car, using his forearms to shield his eyes from the piercing rays of the sun, Strauss heard footsteps slowly creeping from behind and wondered if this would be yet another nightmare, waking or otherwise. The footsteps grew closer, and already Strauss's chest tightened as he tried to prepare himself for the next hallucination, whatever it might be, knowing that it most likely wouldn't be enough to stave off the shock and panic that would fill his soul. Preparation for an oncoming hallucination seemed like preparing for a punch in the stomach, and then at the last minute he'd get a kick in the nuts instead, for whatever he expected, it could always be a lot worse than he could possibly imagine.
As Strauss turned to look behind, to see if the footsteps were real or if they were all in his head, preparing for the next hallucination, he felt a sudden weight slap and press down against his back as a moist cloth smothered his nose and mouth. He gasped and the stench of chloroform filled his nostrils, making him drowsy. For the third time today, panic had seized control as he flailed his arms frantically in a vain attempt to shake his assailant off, while his legs staggered forward, then backward a few steps. Yet instead of tensing, his muscles seemed to relax, to stiffen as the fatigue set in and his eyelids grew heavy. He took another deep, frantic breath, as more chloroform filled his body, and then fell forward, feeling his knee scrape against the concrete surface of the parking lot before his face slapped hard against ground.
"You've had the visions as well. You know what must be done," a shrill, whiny, yet somewhat masculine voice echoed through the syrupy, but thinning darkness. Strauss groaned and coughed as his head ached dully, his entire body trembling as he felt cold metal laced around his left wrist and heard the rattle and jangle of a chain. As the world slowly swam back into focus, he found himself sitting in the passenger seat of a Dodge Neon, still in the same parking lot where he had been assaulted, still in broad daylight. He found himself linked by handcuff to his assailant, a man with dark but thinning hair, who had been about the same age he had been, with a wiry frame and thick glasses. He wore a white short-sleeved button-down shirt with a yellow and white striped tie, along with black dress pants. Even with his meek, timid appearance, the way his small mouth hung open and how he seemed not to be able to grow a halfway decent beard--the few small fibers hanging from his chin indicated that he'd tried—there was something...not intimidating about him, but creepy all the same that made Strauss shudder in deep revulsion.
"Who are you?" Strauss croaked and cleared his throat.
"The name's Randy Duke," the man replied, and Strauss couldn't help but chuckle at himself at the irony of a meek nerd such as this with a name that seemed appropriate for a badass, someone who would appear and behave a lot tougher and manlier than the man sitting next to him now. "And we belong together, Mr. Strauss, together for eternity." Duke directed Strauss's attention toward the box below the glove compartment, whose sharp metal corners—Strauss just noticed—had been poking into his lap. Upon that box had been a timer, counting down the seconds in red digital numerals:
5:00.
4:59.
4:58.
"We belong together, Mr. Strauss, or should I call you Howard, after all, we should be on a first-name basis, shouldn't we?"
"You can call me whatever the fuck you want, just please, let me go."
"I've experienced a bleak emptiness all my life, and I never knew why," Randy Duke went on, seemingly oblivious to Strauss's terrified pleas. "I had a loving family growing up, I have a loving wife and beautiful daughter now, but none of that fills the void, and I think I know why.
"Two Days ago, when I turned thirty, I started having these...visions, the same ones as you, I think. At first I was greatly disturbed by it, wondering how I could possibly do such horrible things to another human being, slitting his throat, drowning him in a toilet. Worst was how I enjoyed it, the love I felt for my victim, the way I did it out of affection rather than hatred. I felt like some kind of deranged serial killer. But at the same time it felt right and now I know why. Because it's you, Howard Strauss, you're my victim, again and again."
3:45.
"I killed you twice, and then I killed myself, hoping that we would spend eternity together. We're soul mates, you and I. Fate means for us to be together, but something always gets in the way. And now I know what it is. We're supposed to die together, the same second, the same instant, or we'll be born again apart, and have to spend yet another thirty years empty, alone, and utterly miserable.
"I'll always love my wife in a way, but the spark between us died long ago. It's no one's fault, really; we're just not meant to be together. It's not the same, not the everlasting romance that I must share with you. You see, you have to be with me, just as I have to be with you, or neither one of us will ever be happy."
Strauss shook his head frantically as cold sweat soaked his face, dripping down the rest of his body. His chest tightened as his heart thumped madly against his rib cage. He breathed heavily as his entire body trembled and in desperation, he tried to vainly to squeeze his hand through the cuff. "Look, I don't want this, okay?" he said, trying to be firm, yet his stuttering betrayed the sense of utter terror and panic that had overtaken him for the forth time today.
Duke rested his free hand against the cuff that restrained Strauss, trying to soothe him with an eerie, almost lewd moaning sigh. "Just relax, okay. I know you're afraid now, but in the end you will thank me for this. Trust me."
2:37.
"Look, I-I'm not into that, okay?" Strauss stammered, trying not to sob, trying to hold back the tears of terror that threatened to spring forth. "I mean...not that there's anything wrong with it, if that's what makes you happy, I don't care. But...it's just not me."
2:20.
"I didn't think I was either, but the visions...the memories, don't lie."
As much as the thought sickened him, Strauss supposed that there was a perverse logic to what Randy Duke had said. As incredible as it seemed, perhaps there was a force at work, bringing them both back to life, demanding that they die at the same instant so they could live on for eternity, happily ever after in some bizarre homosexual fairy tale.
But Strauss wouldn't believe it, for the visions, or memories as Duke had called them, had not a hint of love or affection from his perspective. It was an even greater violation than the common stalker, even scarier than some freak who wanted to sniff his underwear, or search his garbage for anything that reminded the freak of him. For this stalker, the obsession didn't die with death, but instead lived on, throughout the next life, and the next.
"Oh God, I never realized how much I love you," murmured Duke.
1:42.
The fear still lingered, yet it was now secondary to the rage and sickening violation that Strauss had felt, boiling within his veins, because of this disgusting entity. And through the rage, he came to realize that despite what his friends and family might say, thirty wasn't old at all, for it was no age to die, not when he still had so many good years left, so many experiences to live through. The flashbacks he had had of his previous deaths were not visions of his true destiny with this vile abomination, for otherwise they would have been a blissful reverie meant to instill in him a deep longing to join Duke through their simultaneous deaths and live with him in paradise for all eternity. No, they were nightmares, omens, warning him of the horrors to come, of the damnation of having to die again and again at the hands of an eternal psychopath unless he did something to stop this horrendous cycle once and for all.
The chains of the handcuffs rattled loudly as Strauss lifted his left arm and snapped it backward, blindly, yet still striking his target. The back of his hand smashed hard against Duke's nose, and he could feel the throbbing ache surge all the way down his forearm, yet it was a satisfying pain, for he knew that he had hurt his enemy even more. Duke's head snapped back and then rebounded off the headrest of the seat and as he fell forward, tiny droplets of blood sprayed against the steering wheel.
Duke sat now, momentarily stunned, as his glasses, now shattered, hung lopsided from his nose, and then fell to his lap seemingly without his noticing. Duke blinked and his eyes continued to water. He sniffled and snorted and blood spilled like a faucet from his broken nose, soaking deeply into his shirt and pants. For a few minutes his head lolled almost loosely from his shoulders as he shook it, then he looked back up at Strauss with glistening eyes of a desperate parent pleading with a wayward child to trust them, to comply with their desires, to understand that they do what they do for the child's own good.
Strauss lunged to the side and wrapped his hands around Duke's head, clutching tightly as the middle and ring finger of his right hand clawed and pushed deeply into the man's eyes and he could feel the slick blood soaking into his palm. Duke whined shrilly as he began to squirm frantically, struggling to free himself as he shot his hands blindly into the air, grasping for purchases upon Strauss's lapel and cheek. Strauss grimaced and flinched from the sudden pain as Duke's fingernails pinched and dug deep into his flesh just below the eye, but his grip against Duke's head never wavered, only tightened. Strauss growled and gritted his teeth, squinting as his eyes began to water and colors danced along his field of vision.
Strauss pushed forward; thrusting Duke's head through the driver's side window with a thunderous crash, shattering the window into millions of tiny glass cubes that flew outward. Duke stopped moving, stopped struggling, and now simply lay there, the left half of his face now a mask of blood that gushed profusely from his lacerations, soaking into his hair and eyes and staining his once perfectly pressed, perfectly white dress shirt a darkening maroon. His eyes rolled all the way back and his mouth hung open as his head lolled drunkenly upon his shoulders. The only indication that he was even still alive was the soft groan that escaped his throat and the slowing rise and fall of his chest.
0:57.
Strauss latched onto the door handle, squeezing and frantically pushing the door open as he threw himself out of the car. As he turned and started to run, he felt his left arm stretch and strain, felt a sudden weight pulling him back. The weight of the man still cuffed to him, Duke, still sitting upon the driver's seat, yet whose head was now pressed down and bleeding against the passenger side door. Judging by his wiry frame, the man couldn't have weight much more than a hundred thirty, a hundred forty pounds tops, yet even if Strauss could carry his body, it would only slow him down.
0:51.
Strauss looked down upon his cuffed hand. He couldn't squeeze through it, and even if he could, it would take too long, and that son of a bitch Duke had probably tossed the fucking keys into a storm drain somewhere.
0:49.
Strauss took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes tightly shut as his heart hammered even harder and faster than before. His palms were sweating, threatening to slip from his hold against the car door, sliding down ever slowly against the smooth chrome, as if they knew his intention and tried to sneak away. Oh shit, this is gonna hurt bad, he thought as he held his breath and slammed the car door against his left hand. His face contorted as he cried out in shear agony. The throbbing, crushing pain completely swallowed his hand and surged all the way up his forearm as he became nauseous with agony and fresh tears flowed down his cheeks. He grew dizzy and the sharp rays of sunlight danced feverishly before his eyes as his feet fumbled and he nearly lost his footing. Clenching his jaw as tightly as possible, so tightly that his teeth began to ache, he squeezed his teary eyes shut once more and slammed the door against his hand a second, a third, and then a forth time, and each time brought even new waves of throbbing agony as bones cracked and then fractured completely and ground painfully into one another.
The pain was so bad he was barely able to open his eyes. When he did, he scrutinized his mangled hand, which had started to bleed a little, but which mostly appeared disfigured and started to swell. His fingers dangled limply, still in one piece, yet hanging askew from his knuckles and remained stiff, for even the slightest movement would send an even greater surge of crushing agony all the way up his arm than what he experienced now. His thumb, now dislocated, seemed to droop just a little bit lower than what it should have. A few lumps formed against the back of his hand, most likely a few jagged bones threatening to protrude through the skin and veins, and his hand now swayed back and forth, bending toward the middle where the bones shattered.
Once more Strauss squeezed his eyes shut, whimpering softly and stifling a sob as he swallowed deeply. His mangled hand squeezed easily enough through the loop of the cuff, yet not without even more maddening pain from shattered bones, grinding together painfully in protest to this further abuse foisted upon them.
0:23.
Strauss turned and ran frantically from the car, his legs seemingly going of their own accord, running faster than he ever thought possible as his shattered hand whipped back and forth painfully in the wind. He gasped and let out a brief cry.
Twenty feet from the car, thirty feet, and the Earth shook beneath his feet. The sound of the explosion was deafening. Sudden heat pressed against his back as a few tiny glass cubes sprinkled against the nape of his neck. The force of the blast pushed Strauss forward, seemed to take him off his feet, and for a few moments, he felt as though he were gliding in the air as his feet kicked frantically. Strauss's head shot forward with such great force that his neck ached from the sudden strain of movement and he tumbled over, thrown in a half-summersault that left him lying on his back, legs splayed in a view as his arms spread out, unmoving, gazing only at the searing sun that shone above him.
The fingers of his right hand curled inward slightly, while his left hand remained flat and stiff, little more than a disfigured mass of shattered bones over torn, swollen flesh. The pain, briefly forgotten, had now returned in full force in a fiery, swelling, throbbing blaze of shear agony. His legs twitched and wiggled, yet otherwise Strauss remained still, for every movement now seemed overly taxing upon his drained and battered body. His head ached dully. The pain in his neck seemed slightly worse. He coughed and swallowed, feeling an invisible weight pressed over his chest, leaving his breathing shallow and labored. He could feel a jagged end of a fractured rib lightly caressing his right lung and knew that with any sudden movements, that lung would be punctured, further complicating his chances for survival. He was bleeding internally, the blood flowing along the back of his throat and trickling down both nostrils and the corners of his lips. There was not a single inch that wasn't aching madly, yet despite the excruciating agony that had washed over his entire body, Howard Strauss had never been more grateful to be alive than he had been now. Alive and free from Duke's sickening grasp.
As the dizziness began to subside, Strauss's hazy eyes wandered back toward the site of the explosion. Each of the windows had now been blown out and the hood jutted open as the sea of flames continuously swept along the metal frame of the Dodge Neon, completely engulfing what was left of the car as smoke rose thickly into the sky. Even with his entire body aching, Strauss allowed himself a small, weak smile, secure in the knowledge that Duke could not have escaped the inferno.
A part of him wondered, with Duke dead, where would things go from there?
Most likely, Duke was a deranged, delusional, deeply disturbed individual, who had simply imagined all that bullshit about them being meant to die together and to be together for all eternity. Perhaps through his insanity, he had even developed some weird powers that allowed him not only to find Strauss, who he had never met or heard of before previously, but to also instill his delusions upon Strauss himself. The latter portion of the theory seemed implausible, impossible, yet still was better than the alternative.
But what if Duke in some twisted way had been right all along? What would become of the two souls now that Duke had been killed but Strauss remained alive? Would a future incarnation of Duke come back to try again thirty years from now, when Strauss turned sixty? Or was their bond now broken, leaving Strauss free to live his life, and whatever other lives he might lead down the line, free from the burden of a psychotic stalker, who would never give up even through death?
Strauss cringed at the possibility of Duke being right. Now was not the time to even humor such grotesque, twisted thoughts. No, now was the time to simply feel relieved, to stay alive long enough for paramedics to rush him to a hospital and do whatever they had to do to fix him up. From a distance came the welcome warble of sirens: fire engines and ambulances quickly moving closer. He thought confidently with a wan smile that perhaps he was going to be all right after all.
The end
January 03, 2006
January 16, 2006