(I'm not there yet, but am working on it ;)
The suspicion took shape and
a man with red hands stepped forth, carrying the severed head of my husband by
the hair, one of its milky eyes focused on me, dead jaw drooping.
The man, the king, the antagonist of
the stage and the play he arranged exclusively for me - if you were seeing him arrive from my perspective - generously awaited an opening move, preferably a purge of all sanity.
I sighed. “Ye, almost-Pennywise, a
loved-one’s severed head isn’t a personal fear, it is absolutely every person’s
nine-kiloton horror; unrealistic and over-the top. But if you want to get
Lovecraftian about it … you don’t think the first thing you teach me, back in
our day, when we hang, is to differentiate a hallucination from an ascetic wakefulness?
Should the blatant overkill not be enough of a giveaway, in case I am drugged
or have a head injury and someone is trying to throw me, using my mind against
me? You think not insanity or dementia a fantasist’s cruelest joke?”
People of the okiya were screaming ever louder, young women hurting, crawling, just
behind the frames, begging me to help them, ripping their limbs from trying to hang onto dear life. The realism of it was testing. I
rolled my eyes before involuntary, compassionate reaction caused me to frown in unease. “Neup. Being unable to save strangers begging you to help them is not a
fear either, it is a concern. Still a generic poke in the blind. Keep going.”
The ground has since become full of
leeches. Cracks, leaves, it all came black and alive. They smelled naught as ever sweet as my blood. They
got all the way up to the feet and higher, straps of my sandals their stepladder, they were very many, but leeches don’t bite hurtfully and
even when they suck, gross as it may be, it’s entirely painless. Messy,
to be sure, itchy further on, annoying. My skin crawled, memories urging
me to stomp and find a chair to climb on, but still it was not as creepy as he
aimed for – he was trying truly hard to find my thing; it will take him another few
seconds to look bigger. This was a battle of wits. I’ve been braced for losing
such since the evening started. I was wide open. He was tired, so tired.
“Warmer. Not a fear either, more … disgust.
Shall we continue down the list of thesaurus, or do we just skip to the part
where I’m not easily nightmared-out?”
The severed head vanished and he awaited
me to finish the sentence politely as regends would. I half expected the next scene will try to tap into every person's father issues, if he had any way of knowing what my parents look like - which he no longer did of awake people. Bracing for the next remark, I pumped more attitude into the air, for no reason other than stalling the inneviable. "You could try a clown--"
The red hand snapped, nigh to grab my face
and I leapt. So panicky in fact, betraying the act in one swell retreat, my back hit the wood-and-paper wall behind us and more light stabbed through, sharpening his frightful features.
He came right back at me for the Stephen King remark, shutting my running mouth, evil as a winter wind: “Beep beep, Richie.”
I shivered and breathed in chokes while his
fingertips scanned the general shape of me; I could feel my own coffee breath coming off
them. He touched not the hairs of my cheek but the hairs on the microscopic things on the skin. This mortal skin. Suppressing a chuckle, he complimented: “Good speech. I’ve heard
better,” in a voice of a childhood fear luring you from the path of a forest; in a tone which only every mocked and belittled all ye little bluffers. “And in case you haven’t
yet put those two on top of your affray with irony: fear of fear is called phobophobia.”
