Painted

Danny slumps on a park bench and watches the world go by. It’s an October morning, but the weather hasn’t yet made its mind up as to whether it wants to tip a nod towards the approach of Winter. The sun shines and conveys a lacklustre warmth. The breeze gently ruffles his unruly hair and licks his face.

There are regretful leaves on the ground. There has been no frost and no winds to speak of. They missed their cue and fell anyway. Falling to the concrete with no safety net. There was no need for this. But then there is never a need. Not for any of it.

Soon enough, there will be mists and a chill in the air that speaks of dread. A worsening state of affairs, with no prospect of better days. Death stalks this land and Danny senses its presence. It peers at him from the wings and grins in anticipation of their meeting. Knowing it is there makes everything around him feel temporary. An act that isn’t even meant for him. The runners escape the coming death of the year. They are the leaping deer fleeing the burning forest. Loping after them are the slower and bulkier animals. All of them are transitory.

Often, Danny has felt that it was him that did not belong, but now he is the only one that fits the bill. He is here and there is nowhere else for him to be. There is no escape for Danny, he must await his fate like the pathetic creature he has always been.

He closes his eyes and composes himself, regretting this choice of his as soon as the curtains of skin cover his vision. He would rather see the world on the eve of its death than what lies behind his eyes. His mind is not a pleasant room. He wanted it to be, but never felt able to furnish it with the love it deserved. Never found the time to occupy it as fully as he might. There was something there already and it has always held sway.

Danny is haunted by a past that was inflicted upon him. But then, fear haunts us all. It’s a part of our DNA. Without fear there would be no movement and we would stagnate. Either that or die before we ever had a chance at living. Danny blames this on the size of his head. The helplessness he was born into. The terrifying vulnerability of the new born. Such trauma leaves its mark, and Danny is a marked man.

The passers-by will fail to recall the unremarkable person sitting on the bench minding his own business. That is testament to his being outside their world. They see him well enough and they fear his otherness. Their fear conveniently deletes his presence from their experience of this day. He is a logical error that should be cast aside in order for the program of life to run effectively.

He knows they are coming. 

He has always known that they are coming. There is an inevitability to their return. They are the boomerang of fate that was thrown from his life, arcing out and away and for so long looking for all the world like they would keep going until they dropped away out of sight and out of mind.

They have never been out of Danny’s mind though. They are etched indelibly there. Painted onto the inside of his eyelids. Staring into him and laughing their grating and painful laugh. A childhood fear that he failed to grow out of. Instead the fear grew within him like a malignant tumour. A freakish aberration awaiting its moment in the light of a jaundiced full moon.  

Danny has tried to shake this fear of his. Fear is an irrational apparition. Fear never killed anyone. The stress related to fear has killed plenty though. Danny knows the score. He’s investigated enough belief systems, all intent upon freeing him from the cages in his mind. His suffering is supposedly imagined. In the cool light of this October day, he is safe. Somewhere, there are people who love him. Danny is worthy. Always has been.

If only this were true.

He saw a therapist once. He wanted to speak his truth, but try as he might, the words died and were so much ash before they ever reached his lips. In their place was a dire warning. A threat of contagion. If he were ever to tell? Well, that would not go well for him, or anyone who heard his treacherous words.

Danny lasted three sessions. Three being the magic number. He figured that if he couldn’t say what was needed by the third session then his money was better used elsewhere. At fifty quid a pop, his dancing around what was really eating him was too expensive to justify. And so he spent a modest proportion of that fee in the pub instead. Imbibing alcohol was supposedly an alternative to therapy. The social lubricant should have loosened his tongue and let slip his terrible and shameful secret. But no matter how drunk he became, he never once unlocked his tongue. In fact, the more he drank, the darker his silence. His fate was sealed within him. Always had been.

His plight was a joke. It should have been funny, only there was something oh so pathetic about it. He bullied himself over this weakness of his. It saved anyone else the effort of laying into him. He wasn’t worth it. He really wasn’t.

He’d gotten to a point where he questioned whether he could feel anything other than his fear. And so another fear arose within him. A fear of his deteriorating sanity. A terror that his mind was divesting itself of the emotions necessary to regulate his behaviour. There was a growing cold within him. He wondered whether his dispassionately considering his psychopathy refuted its presence. This armchair psychology was scant comfort to him. Something bad was on the horizon. Where that horizon actually lay was anyone’s guess. Reality was shifting and it had no care for Danny. He was collateral damage at best. Food for a darkness that was forever hungry.

His fear wore a false smile. It always had. That was a part of the joke. And the joke was on Danny. The joke was in Danny. It was coming for him, but in its own sweet time. That smile was so wrong. Always had been. Smile and the whole world smiles with you. Only this smile was not real. It wasn’t a smile at all. They weren’t smiling. They never smiled. They weren’t capable of that. Their mouths were so very wrong. That’s why they painted them. That’s why they pretended to be something else. They dressed up and put on a show and everyone went along with it. They had to. It didn’t do to let on that you knew what lay under all that paint.

But Danny knew. Danny knew, and he couldn’t take that knowing back. He’d seen what they really were and they were never going to let that go. They were never going to let Danny go. He’d known that from the moment his world had changed. Spent every day since steeped in a cauldron of fear. They’d let him stew. Boiled in the juices of his fear. Fermented in terror. A tenderised and appetising morsel for them to come dine on, when they were good and ready.

As the day petered out and lost the will to try anymore, Danny shuffled his way back to the cramped flat from which he eked out his existence. He opened the door to a chill that was as comprehensive as was possible. The heating was lacklustre, but still cost him more than he could afford. The furnishings were both stoic and spartan. The walls bare and uninviting. 

Cooking himself tinned soup occupied him for ten or so minutes. He absently spooned the lukewarm and tasteless liquid into his mouth over the page of a book that he struggled to read. Escape to the world contained within these pages was not an option for the likes of Danny. The words barely related to each other and his passage was barred even as he clumsily persevered with the mechanics of deciphering the words. 

Lowering the book, he looked across at the baleful single eye of the TV. The black and blank look it gave him was far more preferable than anything he may witness were he to fire it up. His only other option was the gaping wound that gave passage to his bedroom. His interpretation of this room was literal. There was a bed and precious little else. His clothes were in a storage cupboard in the hallway. He preferred the bedroom to be as clear and tidy as was possible. Only a lamp on the floor beside a single sized mattress. No bedframe. Danny did not want any space beneath that mattress. Neither did he want any article that the night time shadows could play with. His waking nightmares were bad enough as it was. Fever dreams fuelled by a childhood fear that was as real as could be.

Reluctantly, he left the discomfort of the broken sofa and went to the bathroom. He’d removed the mirror in his first month of occupancy. Mirrors were windows to that other world, and all too often he was afforded glimpses of their approach. Each time, they were that little bit closer. He didn’t care if his refusal to look upon them meant that he was a coward. He’d rather not see it coming. Rather wear the blindfold and anticipate the end than experience it in all its sordid glory.

Cleaning his teeth felt like a travesty. An archaic practice that was long outmoded. Did the prisoners on Death Row bother with such things? What was the point? But then, Danny had ceased to see the point in anything, and perhaps he really was a coward. Too afraid to choose his own end and rob them of their prey.

But then his life had been a life of waiting. This was his destiny. He had no choice but to see this through to the bitter end. He had lived on borrowed time and this was how he would make payment on those borrowed days. 

Besides, despite all the fear and the terrible anticipation of his end, he was curious. He had to know. Knowing would bestow upon him the meaning he required in order to pass on to the next life. And he hoped there would be another life after this wasted one. One free of fear. An existence that transcended the drudgery of this permanence of pain.

Bolting the top, middle and bottom locks on his bedroom door, he knelt painfully to turn on the lamp. His body ached a little more each day and his joints were lubricated with jagged shards of glass. The fear had infected him. He was poisoned by it. His sight was failing, but he was certain in the knowledge that he would see them all too clearly when they made their terminal visit. There was no escaping any of this, it would be broadcast in vivid technicolour. 

He turned the main light out and clambered into the bed. The act of lowering himself to the floor was cumbersome. Once under the covers, he jiggled about and discarded his trousers and jumper. Stuffing them betwixt the mattress and the mouldy wall. He would sleep in his vest, pants and socks. In the morning, he would consider the need to change them. His average cycle for these garments was three days. That average lengthened as the weather cooled.

Laying in the corner of a small room made large by the tiny bed, he gazed up at the ceiling and wished himself away. This he did every night. Casting a spell of sacrifice to jettison yet another day of waiting. A mental tally carved into his soul. 

There was a time when he would cry silent tears. Perhaps he still did, but was now too numb to feel the tears trickling down his face and plopping onto the stained pillow. He was trapped and had no clue as to how to alter the course of this plight that should have been a life. Instead he added to his prison each night with the corpse of another travesty of a day.

He would not sleep. He fought the infernal dream world with every fibre of his being. There he was terrorised beyond measure. Warped images that purported to be memories. Memories that contained falsehoods. Memories that could not accord with the absence that his past now contained.

Try as he may, his eyes would eventually close and when that occurred, he would wake up to the suggestion of his own screams. His skin coated in a sheen of cold sweat and his head aching from an assault that he refused to recall.

Tonight, as he lay there and wished himself anywhere but here, he glanced across to the curtainless windows. Windows that he’d painted obsessively with black paint. Coat after coat to keep the world at bay and prevent even a hint of reflection. He glanced and his eyes were pinned to the spot as the black windows moved glutinously. The surface roiling and undulating hypnotically with dark promise.

Danny tried to look away, but he could not. His fear locked him in place. He wanted to cry out. Forming two words that he would never say.

Stop it!

He’d had enough. He’d been bullied for too long. He just wanted it to stop! He grit his teeth and mustered all his resolve. Tried for defiance, but knew that was a bridge too far.

Then the lamp beside him flickered and his guts turned to a tepid sludge that threatened to ooze out of him. He could almost feel the shame of it coating his legs and soaking into the mattress. 

Ohgodno!

It came out of him as one word. Breathed as opposed to said.

The light from the lamp flickered again, and this time it came back only half as bright. Somehow Danny knew that the next time it flickered there would be no light at all. Still he could not look away from the black rippling surface of the window. Now the movements were cohering and he could see the shape before it made itself known. As though he were making it. And maybe he was.

The face pressed against the black surface and he knew it for what it was. Recognised it from all those years ago. And the walls of his denial began collapsing one by one. The defences that had kept the last semblances of his sanity intact were crumbling and he was again alone with his greatest fear.

As the light pulsed and winked out, he saw him. He was all that Danny could see. He’d made him into them, but it was only ever him.

“Daddy no!” he whispered.

That was when the clown began laughing. That laughter. That was the only sound on that day when Danny came home from school. The laughter that heralded a horror that had stalked him ever since. The clown leaning over the mess that had so recently been his mother. Danny freezing just the way he was now frozen, and the clown looking up at him. His mouth a smiling mess of blood and gore. A mess of his mother’s life blood. 

And that incessant laughter.

How had his father been laughing even as he bit into his wife’s neck? Laughing and laughing without a pause for breath. The sound of madness piercing Danny’s brain and remaining there as the soundtrack of his ruined life for evermore. His father laughing as he gorged on Danny’s mother. The sound of his madness ringing in his son’s ears. 

They never established why he was dressed as a clown, but Danny knew. He knew alright. His father had ceased to be his father. He’d painted himself just like Danny had painted his bedroom windows. Painted himself again and again until there was nothing of him left. 

Only the paint. 

Only the clown. 

There was only the clown.

And now it had come for Danny.

He felt the weight of it pressing down upon him. 

The weight of the clown against him, like an insistent and clumsy lover.

Coating him.

Suffocating him.

Changing him.

It felt…

He felt different.

Then he realised that he wasn’t afraid anymore. 

The fear was gone! 

Vanished.

All gone.

Everything gone.

Danny couldn’t hear his own unceasing laughter as he painted himself again and again and again.