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winterscream4 · 4 years

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No Works and No Days (Part 2)

Mountains of green…moving, crashing into black ravines.

Marlowe found something soothing about watching the cardiograph while he kept slipping in and out of consciousness. Always intrigued by all things weird and eerie, Marlowe had recently heard a radio transmission from Saturn, purportedly captured by NASA’s Cassini-Huygens probe. The caption on the UFOlogists’ website wrote: Aliens having a conversation on Enceladus. The machine’s recurrent beeping reminded him of that, although it did not so much sound like a discussion. More like, an alien mother’s lullaby.

Marlowe’s eyes, still twitching from the anesthesia scanned the hospital room’s environs. Medical tubes, tangling like jungle tendrils above him. Intravenous liquids travelling from translucent vales into Marlowe’s veins below. Pistachio green walls began to appear, beyond the post-surgery compression stockings that covered his feet. Thinking back to Quentin Tarantino’s first “Kill Bill” movie, Marlowe instinctively made an effort to move his toes, then his heels and ultimately to bend his legs. Between his knees, a strange shape started assuming form. It was the painting of a tree, shaded in the colors of the evening dusk, as its expanding branches multiplied into smudges and birds, fluttering towards the grey melancholy sky stretching above them. Marlowe’s eyes narrowed as the inkblots below, merged into letters. Titled “Return of the Fieldfares”, the painting, lodged inside a dark grey frame, was attributed to Devon landscape artist Stewart Edmondson. Devon…home to Katelyn Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who got him out of his seclusion right before Martin entered his life once more. It was a shame, things never worked out with her, but then again, how could they have? Marlowe’s only desire at the time was intrigue and excitement, a life worth of a classic detective mystery. And Holmes, well, a rose by any other name might have been sweeter. She was too deliberate, too eager…too easy to spread her legs and let him plug jumper cables on her vaginal lips just to get her and himself going. But Marlowe didn’t enjoy it one bit. Bondage, torture and domination may have worked in the moments when people like Roderick Prospero or Alexander Driskull mixed their personal and professional lives, but despite superficial urgings Marlowe always held deep feelings of repulsion against exerting control over another human being. After all, he had been the butt of that joke all too many times himself.

But maybe all that was a load of horseshit. After all, how could someone feel that degree of attraction for men like Martin without seeing a little of himself in there? Funny wasn’t it?

How after Martin injected him with the serum and tossed him in the ocean, his mind blended images of himself with those of Hyde? How, as he was being tossed around by the waves, memories and dreams merged into constellations of murder and insanity, pushing, compelling, forcing, beckoning him to…

“You’re up.”

The interjecting voice was soft but a little croaky. A woman, probably one, going through the flue. Marlowe moved his gaze to the direction of the voice, like a blind bat, navigating its cage through echolocation.

“I…”

Words were difficult. His throat was dry. He hadn’t smoked in a while, but the sensation was familiar, albeit taken to the extreme. Something soft and wet touched his lips. Velvet…nay…cotton…bandage strip dipped in water.

��Careful…” the voice instructed…directed, as tanned hands pushed his head forward. Marlowe’s body obeyed, although his eyes still blurring a bit, needed to verify its origins.

“There….There, we go…”

Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return sprang in Marlowe’s mind. This had happened before…back in 2013, when his nearly dead body was cast ashore a small island, a few miles away from the coast of Midvintersville. A man there, whispered the same thing as he had him sip drops from herbal tea. It tasted like dung mixed with vomit. But it saved his life. Still…that was his name. A man who faced the Black Glove in the past and ended up resigning from life, choosing to dwell as a hermit in an abandoned lighthouse.

The man Marlowe came to know as Still, even though he was certain this wasn’t his real name, had attempted to train him in combat, teach him the art of murder by the sword. He thought it was the only way to take down the four fingers of the Black Glove. He was wrong. The hand, beneath the Glove ended up strangling its own throat. Marlowe felt guilt surging through him, for not visiting Still since the day he left the isle…since the two men watched the clouds gather in the distance as the Storm of the Century was approaching. Lightening…

Light.

“Oh my God. I am so sorry!”

Marlowe grunted in irritation as he pushed his body away from the flash.

“I just needed to check your pupils, but we can do that later. Is that okay with you, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Mr. Marlowe”…There was a weird ring to it. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy the formality but with the last person who called him that, the interaction concluded with him getting shoveled on the back of his skull.

Several nonsense words ending in “y” were muttered before he finally got it right.

“Stanley…”

“Okay…Stanley.”

“Thhstanley!”…There was a pronounced lisp in her voice. Not that it took much away from its charm, but Marlowe couldn’t help but poke fun at it in his head. Little did he realize that, all those drugs had put his mind where his mouth was.

“Okay…bit of a dick move bro!”

“I’m…I’m sorry.”

The woman chuckled.

“I am kidding!” she exclaimed almost as if it was a plot twist. “After I had my appendix removed, I called my mother an Ugly Bitch! Can you believe that? So yeah, I get it, it’s the meds talking.”

Marlowe was too dizzy to respond. His stomach was churning but the usual acidic taste reaching the gullet before vomiting, wasn’t there just yet.

“I feel…”

“Yeah, I just put an antiemetic in your I.V. Give it a few minutes. Meanwhile, I wanted to give you this.”

Marlowe observed a hand entering his visual field. It was not as dark in complexion as he originally thought but had a golden tint to it instead. The fingers were long and hairless, the nails short and undyed but evidently manicured recently. As the fog began to clear from his eyes, he gazed upwards. The voice was revealed to have a face and a strange one at that. She was clearly far more tanned than most Canadians he’d encountered the previous two years; Latina but not exactly. Her nose bore that distinct feature of Golden Age illustrations, symmetrical but slightly pointing downwards. The lips, smiling gently at him, were unusually large. Little bit of lipstick, maybe, rotten apple in color. Her hair was cut short, reaching down a little below her shoulders. A very nineties style, reminiscent of Willow Rosenberg’s from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And the eyes, almost uncanny compared with her complexion. Almond shaped, hazel in color, purplish kind of, under the cold hospital lighting. There she stood, a petrol shirt tucked under her blank medical robe, formal trousers held together by a brown belt, visible just above the hospital’s mattress.

A weight was pushing down his chest. Marlowe glanced below. Henry David Thoreau’s greyscale portrait was starring right at him.

“The paramedics found it laying by your side in the woods.”

“Have you read it?” Marlowe toiled to speak as his lips had started to turn dry again.

“I am more of a “Civil Disobedience” kind of gal. But yeah, it’s a beautiful book.”

Most of, Whitman’s, Emmerson’s and Thoreau’s works were in a prominent place at the Winter Manor’s library. Marlowe had leafed through “Civil Disobedience” although by that point he scarcely remembered what it was about, lest for a few catchy quotes.

“The true place for a just man is the prison…or maybe the hospital…”

“Well” the woman replied as she adjusted the flow of his I.V. “Next time you want to play Socrates, you stick to wine and opium. Cause that Destroying Angel the doctors found in your system; man, was it a hustle to remove!”

Marlowe froze, flabbergasted. How could he have been that stupid? He’d read the books! The Destroying Angel mushroom had well-earned its name. It was rumored to be the most common source of fungi-ingested deaths in the Northern hemisphere, going for your kidneys and liver first before entering the blood. Then it starts fucking up the rest of you all the same. But then Marlowe’s mind harked back to another thing the woman had just mentioned. “The Doctors…?”. Wasn’t she one of them?

“You are not…a doctor?” he quizzed in a tone concealing hints of suspicion.

The woman smiled. Her lips grew weirded but strangely more compelling also.

“Mary Schwann. Neuropsychology PhD, from Berkley’s, specializing on the viral counter-myelination of neuronal tissue and neurodynamic psychotherapy.”

“I will need to see a C.V. on that…”

“Screw you.” The woman smiled again. “You are in good hands.”

“Was my brain…”

“Oh no, no! You are no worse off that you used to be. We did an fMRI just in case. But I do have some bad news.”

“Shit…”

“Your insurance mandates four hours of psychotherapy. Hence, you are going be stuck with me for a while. But first, we’re going to get you all better. The poison is now out of your system, so if my predictions are correct, you’ll be home by tomorrow.”

“And the therapy…?”

“Yeah. I’ll call you in my office by the end of the week.”

The woman checked her watch.

“Well, I have a few errands to run now, but I’ll be back to check in on you in the morning. It was very nice meeting you, Mister Walden.”

“It was nice meeting you…Civil Disobedience kind of gal.”

Even though Marlowe retained his suspicions after getting discharged, he spent many days and nights wishing she had called. A peculiar kind of sorrow surged through him as the months passed and the fear of getting sick from food poisoning again thrusted him into passing his days back under the sheets or in front of a laptop screen. Being a man, with a strong proclivity for the extremes, Marlowe turned his diet 180 degrees to the opposite direction. Wild weeds and nuts were replaced by beef and cheesesteak, forest greens by potato fritters, sumac and rose-dog beverages by Coke and Dr. Pepper and his sautéed mushroom meals were usurped by the Marlowe sub. Gaining pound upon pound, misery upon misery, Marlowe watched the seasons pass from the Winter Manor’s second floor balcony as 2019 came to a close and a virus, born as some say in an industrial town of China, crossed the Atlantic and forced Midvintersville and the entire western world into a seemingly endless lockdown.

As the news only spoke of ever-increasing case numbers, Marlowe found some solace, or perhaps willful self-numbing, in the digital world. Besides using the wi-fi to play video games like: Doom Eternal, Fortnite and Subnatica Below Zero on ps4 and for performing his seven-times-per-day log in to his Pornhub account, Marlowe occasionally used the internet to muse over facets of his old detective life. Since the last days of 2019, he had made accounts to various websites dealing with strange incidents taking place across the globe. Most of them were either hot spots for the kind of lunatics and disgruntled males that conspiracy businesses like QAnon thrived upon, or just plain second-rate creepy pasta. Then again, Marlowe thought about resorting to some law-enforcement websites he knew from his Criminology years at Cambridge, but in those days, police had become more fond of committing the crimes rather than solving them.

Almost by accident, Marlowe encountered an obscure blog titled “Curiosities and Monstrosities” which, at least in appearance, seemed a little more valid than the rest. The authors had recorded all known activities of the New York Ripper from 2011, some of which even Marlowe didn’t know about. They had also listed hundreds of cases, solved, unsolved and classified alike, from marginal misdemeanors to federal crimes, marked by unusual or inexplicable details.

Marlowe had made his own list of those that intrigued him most. A double homicide in Sleepy Hollows, Illinois, apparently committed by a drug-mule even though witnesses swore to have seen a black pumpkin engulfed in green flames, leaving the scene. Then there was that neighboring feud, turning ugly, with a nearby tenant claiming that both members involved possessed occult powers, with the man turning into a reptilian and the woman producing red, energy orbs out of her hands. And last, came the discovery of three bodies after a fire in a field, somewhere in the great out there of Texas, with one of them preserving a contorted face, as if it was still laughing, the other restrained against a sanguinello tree and the third being toothless, while having grown root like structures on the back of its head, as if it had just become one with the tree before burning to a crisp.

But all of that paled in comparison to the sheer numbers of deaths, committed by a smaller and far less theatrical assassin. The virus had already claimed the lives of almost 30 million people across the world. At the same time, politicians ignored or underestimated the virus, some claiming it a fraud while others recommending bleach as a potent cure against it. Sometimes, Marlowe pondered if an idiot in a position power could be more dangerous than the Black Glove, since at the very least they had a plan before inflicting their repertoires of corruption and atrocity.

Yet, by November 2020 things were getting a little more hopeful in Midvintersville. Even though the rest of Canada was still in peril, the summer-lasting lockdown imposed by Walter Greene, the town’s newly elected mayor, somehow seemed to work. A day before his birthday, as Marlowe browsed his computer for lockdown lifting news, he was all too astounded to find an unread email from the night before, marked with a familiar name at the top.

Mary Schwann. PhD.

Closing all google chrome windows on the side, Marlowe rushed to open the email, reading its contents aloud with a smile beaming across his face.

“U still owe me 4 hours of therapy. Lockdown’s lifted next week. U available?”

“PS: I hate the U’s but your file said you were born in 1979. I am a 1978. Need to appear younger. Lol.”

“PS: Hate the lols’ too.”

Marlowe did not need to ponder much. Thoughts of Mary Schwann being some sort of Black Glove assassin or a friend of Boisette’s aching for vengeance for the pulp of guts and bones that was left of him, crossed his mind but he was such an easy target to begin with, that all that trouble seemed counter-productive.

“Took you a while.” he typed, while trying to come up with some ridiculous piece of millennial slang to throw into his email.

“When we get our moment of exodus, I’ll be there. Care to meet at the old aqueducts, near the cemetery? Imao.”

“PS: I don’t know what Imao means. But it sounds a lot like a lost pygmy race from the Pacific archipelago.”

I ‘ve missed y…delete.

Marlowe jumped off his office chair, pacing towards the second floor’s ornate windowpanes. He pulled the burgundy curtains embroidered with golden floral patterns aside and gazed at the city looming beyond a vast stretch of black firs and daunting pines. The drizzle, descending in full strength across the day had ceased, and parting skies revealed the romantic glory of the solar star, disappearing beneath the Atlantic. A pal mal inevitably found itself between Marlowe’s lips. He huffed and he puffed and even though the taste was the same, it felt different for Marlowe had rarely ever smoked while feeling something akin to joy.

All the toy soldiers he was playing with before lay motionless against the dining table, next to a half-eaten Marlowe sub. James’ Bonsai was still there, facing the sunset while shading over the ruined faces of Marlowe’s long dead adversaries.

This will have to suffice. Marlowe thought. For now.

***********************************************************

Crooked rays of red light glimmered through the stained glass, as Vesper beckoned above the Opera House.

The floorboards creaked ominously, as if the night herself had dismounted from her celestial mare and was striding down the Opera’s archaic oaken panels. Streams of accumulated water from the day’s persistent drizzle were crossing through the underground tubing almost muffling the yelps and sobs, echoing from beneath the black hood.

A woman, or what was left of her. Her face covered by a crudely sewn ebony fabric, like the prisoners of Abu Ghraib; her body sealed in concrete. Her palms and legs below the calf, bruised by the cold and the damp and the beatings, extending from the dark grey surface, like the clay appendages used in ancient Rome as offerings to heal the ailing limps of the sufferers.

She was suffering. He had made sure of that.

Her left foot dangled in the air; the pain made worse by the itching. A single strip of gaze, wrapped around the bleeding blotch where her middle toe used to be, held together by a threadbare string of manilla rope. The marble floor below her had turned green and wet, from moisture and the saliva that had been trickling from her mouth for the past week, as the ball-gag more often than not inhibited her from swallowing properly. The gagging reflex made her head shake neurotically back and forth. Time had disappeared the moment she was captured, and days and nights had blended into a single pit of agony and fear of impending pain.

The noises issuing from her lips and body were those of a fox, whose foot had been lodged in a beartrap and her mouth had been muzzled so that she won’t be able to chew it off even if she wanted to. Only occasionally, they were interrupted, after passing out, when her brain allowed her a few moments of rest in unconsciousness.

But this was not one of those moments.

For right across her, the flickering light of a desk lamp that signaled his arrival had been turned back on again. And with it, returned the methodical, calculated almost, squeaking sound of his armchair as it resounded across the abandoned halls. Gradually, as the lamplight flared into existence, his torn linen cowl revealed itself; once a mask whole marked with a quarter note, symbolizing a man’s inner journey into music, art and childhood dreams, now a derelict mockery of its past significance. With the darkness dissipating, revealing the canvas of his art once more, his bronze teeth hummed an infernal melody while grinding through the flesh and nail and bone of the woman’s toe and ultimately swallowing it along with the few remaining hopes of her nightmare ever coming to an end.

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