HOME | DD

Description
--
Reality’s Monster
--

Thin lips twisted into a derisive grin, as he watched the woodlouse scuttle around the ever narrowing pen; its tiny brain barely comprehending that the limits of its world were closing in and its exoskeleton couldn’t compete with the mindless destructive power of plastic cookware. Seconds before the unknowing woodlouse would meet its grizzly fate, a lilting voice called to him, flitting about the wooden beams of his laboratory, the voice was little more than a ghostly breath of an appeal, but it was enough to draw his attention from his procrastination. Aiken sighed despairingly as he dropped the icing spatulas he’d been maneuvering to push himself up from his chair; watching as the little insect escaped its doom and scurried out of sight behind a half-full beaker of herbaceously produced ooze.

He pulled closed the door behind him, ignoring the mocking snag of the frayed edges of his tailcoat in the door-crack; whist a trite overplay of cliché, Aiken had long ago found that in wearing the attire of garden-variety-evil, he’d found a strange inspiration with it. As though he’d somehow found the right place to be, an ethereal, metaphysical space that silently encouraged his evils and cried out for more, to be ever scarier and more horrifying than he had in his past. The house he’d now found himself living in only helped, even as Aiken walked down the corridor, it creaked and groaned, hinting at mayhem and wicked things to incite only fear and hopelessness.

And yet…all of his works of late had been dissatisfying – all of his casts, possessions and spells felt more and more like badly timed smoke and mirrors. For want of a better phrase: he’d lost his mojo.

Not even spending time in his beloved house, full of twisted angles and darkened corridors that held a presence all of its own and its doors happily slammed themselves shut on any unsuspecting visitor that found themselves unwelcome, kept up the devilsh gleam in the dust-tinted windows. And apparently the house was beginning to turn on its beloved servant, it stuck out its nails to scratch at his fraying coat, and it’s innards began to protest at the selfish neediness of its parasites – demanding hot water and crackling electricity around its tubes, denying the power its access and starving those human-lookalikes from as much of their lifeblood as it could.

The man’s moniker of a monster stamped down the long, narrow staircase, doing his best to ignore the increasing slant on the failing old case;

“Nel?” Coming to lean on the doorframe, his arms folded over his chest whilst he queried his friend’s call, feeling uncomfortably old,

“There you are! Come look at the new poster,” Her eternally patient and carefree nature was a delightful edge of highlighting which ensured the household lived in three dimensons, instead of the dull grey rut that all evil seemed to have trouble branching out of.

“What’s this?” Aiken queried, stepping into the room, looking down to avoid stepping on a roll of duct-tape lounging on the floorboards – and simultaneously frowning at his unpolished and rather scuffed shoes. How unbecoming a man to have dirty footwear.

“It’s our poster – you suggested we needed to get more help to our cause last night, right?” He stepped up next to her, his eyes falling over the…‘poster’,

“I didn’t suggest it, I ordered it,”

“Oh, sweetheart, we’re all in this together, you can’t order us,” She spoke deceptively gently for all her self-assurance whist she rubbed a comforting hand over his tricep, “But I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, after you made those children laugh last week–”

“Don’t.” He cut across, not wanting to remember his humiliation, time for a change of subject, he supposed; “Isn’t it a bit…cutsey?” He looked over to Nel, who stood with her hands on her hips, beaming lightly at her efforts; as amusing as it was seeing such a woman talented in the ways of wrong-doing covered in strips of tape and small paper snippets caught in her long hair, he bit back his own smile.

An evil man takes no pleasure in innocuous things, damnit.

“Aiken, we might be evil bastards, but can we refrain from such disgusting words?” The former man spared only a slight glance to the other at the doorway of the anteroom, at the other end of the lounge; the old house had so many rooms and doors added-on every which way, that corridors had almost become pointless. “But you know we need some extra help, it’d getting too much for the three of us…and with the extra revenue we can finally get this house sorted out – it’s leaning over so much the damn thing looks like it’s had a pint of gin too many,” Aiken breathed a huff of bitten irritation,

“Elmar, you are an enduring fountain of malicious genius,”

“You know he’s right, Aiken, it might not be glamorous, but we can’t unleash the twisted until the house is straight,” Aiken could only roll his eyes in frustration as he stalked away, maybe food would help his unsatisfied mood. There were a ton of general chores and miscellaneous tasks he really needed to do – he might enjoy mayhem, but only the kind of mayhem he could dump on others and leave behind when he chose to…and not have it follow him, stealing away his creativity and peace of mind by cluttering every thought and glance.

The fridge was full of food, but his stomach growled at none of it.

--

“We’ve gotta do something about him – Halloween isn’t far off and he doesn’t get himself together we’ll have to sell this place,” Nel began, frowning at her poster; the youngest of their group was right, it was a little bit cute,

“I don’t see why you don’t just explain to him about how we run our business,” Elmar replied without looking up from his paper this time,

“I know, but he gets so absorbed in all the mischief, even from the beginning – do you remember how he was when he first turned up? He looked so young and was so keen to scare the crap out of everything left, right and centre…I guess, I just thought it would ruin his focus if he knew that we actually do live in the real world,”

“I understand the importance of maintaining the façade, but for god’s sake, he can’t even tell a children’s party or a theme-park spooky house from Hannibal’s basement,” Nel grinned and nodded her head in agreement with Elmar’s statement whilst she began to pull down the poster, covered in little cut out spiders, ghouls and bubble letters. Damn, it really was cute…and bland – the empty background and a handful of crêtê-paper spiders was only going to attract mold – much less customers or even potential employees.

But how to start again? Their poster couldn’t look too scary, but it needed to be taken seriously – but how can ‘scary’ be serious, without coming across as a little bit too abandoned-house-finds-owner-in-knife-wielding-psycho?

“Elm, do you have any thoughts on how we can make a better advert? I’m not sure how we can get across who we want, without making it look….”

“Childish?”

“Yea,” She breathed, folding her arms across her chest, looking up to the ceiling, irritated by all of the dustmotes and cracked plaster along the ceiling; there was little Nel wanted more than just to be able to clean up the god forsaken house. But it added to the charm and reinforced the ethos behing their trade, and getting rid of the atmosphere was little more good for them than knocking down the house, moving to a new town and pretending to be a shop assistants.

“I wouldn’t worry, Nel, you just need to put in the important information, then just a short paragraph detailing who we are and who we’re looking for. Then slap it on some old parchment paper and throw on a few realistic, goulish stuff,” Nel didn’t need to look at Emlar to know he was talking into his newspaper and shrugging as though he’d just explained the meaning of life with his trademark nonchalance; appropriate for the Great Fiend. In theory.

His words made sense and Nel could see it working, but it bothered her that it still seemed to be lacking a certain…oomph; recruitment was tricky and an utter pain-in-the-ass when trying to find the right person for the job; god some people took less care in choosing their husbands. It could wait until later, Nel, decided, she needed a change of scenery. This task had been buzzing about her head all day, and the longer the half-formed idea had been lodged in her brain, the less able she was to think creatively about it. They’d been on the losing side in recent weeks, and an infusion of fresh blood might just help them.

She looked cautiously over the edge of her bathtub – when’s she’d happened to glance over it the previous earlier that morning there’d been a spider trapped in the gutted-core of the creation; the damn thing was so big she could have saddled it up and taken it with them to shows, pretending it was an extra act. Now, the spider was gone. Nel hated it when this happened – to her assumption, once a spider had fallen into an empty tub, it was trapped there…so where had it gone? Were the spiders in this house masters at being sleeper-spies? They ‘pretend’ to fall into the bath so they can watch and observe your movements for a few days until they flee back, reporting to their matriarch.

One of these days, Nel would meet her fate at the millions of tiny feet of all the spiders she’d heartlessly left in the tub, who only pretended they couldn’t escape. God.

Still, she really needed the bathroom for its intended function (and lording it over trapped spiders, then feeling the paranoia when they escape, wasn’t an intended function) she tried to hurry up; tried to – peeing under pressure is tricky at best. Let alone when that pressure was possibly a vengeance-bent spider eyeing you up, waiting for the time to strike…like when her pants were down.

--

It took a moment for Aiken’s vision to clear and his brain to comprehend what, exactly, he was reading – a bank statement. A fictional bank-statement for Dreaded House Parties Ltd – who were they? Aiken lived in Dreaded House…(at least the house was in character, unfortunately, the street was significantly less frightful, it being called Upturn Road, though compromise was key in the more general aspects of life, he reasoned), but where did the business come from? Or rather, what business?

“Aik, what are you doing?” Elmar queried lightly, his suspicion growing at he eyed the paper in the other man’s hand,

“What the hell is Dreaded House Parties Ltd?”

“That’s who we are,” Aiken’s eyebrow knitted dangerously, “How else do you think we can afford to buy food? To pay for this house? All of our equipment?”

“Why would we need to pay...”

“Elmar, what do you think you’re doing?” Nel’s voice cut through, her offended impatience cutting through the thick confusion, “Aiken, come with me, dear,” She looped an arm through the crook of his elbow and lead him away to their parlour, but streams of dust, webs and plaster were beginning to fall from the ceiling; why did the walls suddenly seem so cracked and faded – everything struck him as suddenly being depressing and ill-cared for, rather than a physical representation of his inner urges to cast demonic misfortune on unsuspecting people around him?

Nel led him to a seat at the round table – the chair creaked uneasily, and for the first time, it struck Aiken that there was a real danger of a leg or two snapping off, something he had previously ignored. Why did the pictures look so modern? Why did the lines seem so sharp?

“Aiken, you saw the bank statement that Elmar must have left out, didn’t you?” His eyes met hers as Nel’s voice suddenly lost all of its kindness and gentility that he so normally associated with her – and to the man’s ears, suddenly the words and syllables became derisive, holding an edge Aiken hadn’t heard since he was a boy.

“Nel, don’t speak to me like I’m a child; you’re…not really evil, are you?” She inched a little closer to him on her seat, until the arms were touching,

“No, sweetie, why would you think we were? How could we live together if we were truly evil?” His cheek twitched as his budding realisation, the plaster kept falling and the greyed colours of his brain began to bleed out, revealing the twisted old house in which he dwelled was becoming disturbingly more surburban with each and every moment – the fast fading colours of his world dashed away until it was little more than a bloodstream chasing lines away from his dreams. Reality was something he’d done so well to ignore over the past eighteen months, that the hollow it left behind was a great rent in his mind’s heart and what replaced it was a burning rage that cared only for the restoration of what had been and nothing for a fresh start.

Snarling his retaliation he jerked himself out of his seat, the force from his hands on the rests uncontrolled and he ended up capsizing both of the chairs, and Nel along with them; he ignored her squeak of surprise – and Elmar’s rush to help her the right way up. He stamped himself away smashing his fist into the walls of the still-crumbling house, only quickening the lumps of paint and brick that were falling around him like that lingering debris of some twisted mortar-blast. The colours were still coming in thick and fast – as quickly as the house could tear itself down and before he knew it, the once-devil found himself looking down at his reflection in a cracked and fallen mirror – his bitter expression mocked by the symbol of their ghoulish past times busied itself stringing a precarious web between the shaky inverted pyramid of the ceiling above.

Aiken’s evil was no more…nothing of what the man recognised to be himself resided in that mirror, and the great terrors of Dread House were done. Nothing more…Finished.
..
.