This House Known Not to Me

“How do you like your tea?”

I shifted, not knowing what he was expecting for an answer.  I’m not a tea drinker and even if I was, I couldn’t give him an answer.  The fabric gagging my mouth made sure of that.

“Oh that’s right,” the torturer threw back his head and gave a half-hearted laugh, “you can’t really talk right now.  Well, you look like a black tea kind of guy, let’s go with that.”

I sagged my shoulders.  I hated black tea, I’ve always been more of an herbal tea guy.  I couldn’t really complain, at least it was something to drink.  I had woken up exhausted, already gagged and tied up.  I was panting, feeling like I had just run a marathon.  A drink was definitely needed.  

The man finished up with the tea and turned to me, bringing the steaming drink.  Hot black tea, even worse.  He had a somewhat lean build but, with the way his open blazer was hugging his arms, I could tell he had an impressive physique.  His face looked weathered; probably the result of age and many years of frowning.  His black hair, streaked with many layers of grey, was disheveled.  

The man knelt down, knees cracking, to meet my gaze.  I was tied up on my knees and could not make a move to avoid his approach.  He reached out to me with the cup, removing the gag from my mouth with his other hand, “Here, drink up.”

He went to raise the cup to my mouth but didn’t raise it to my lips.  Instead, he whipped his hand forward and splashed the scolding hot drink on my face.  

The pain that engulfed my face was unlike anything I had ever experienced.  My face exploded with pain, as if I had been thrown into a pit of fire.  I could feel my face singe and my skin blister.  I attempted to move my arm to wipe my face before remembering that my arms were tied behind my back at the wrists.  

“Why the fuck were you in my house?  What were you looking for?” The man shouted, spitting in my face as he did so.  

Despite my personal reservations against showing too much emotion, I noticed that I had started crying.  This yelling only made it worse.  He had been interrogating me for at least an hour, asking the same two questions over and over.  Every time, he had gotten the same response.

“I don’t know!  I don’t know how I got here!  I don’t know!” I pouted.  

And I didn’t.  That was the strangest part about this whole day.  Not the fact that I was being brutally beaten and tortured by this man I didn’t know, not that I had been tied up like some hog.  Rather, the strangest part was that I genuinely had no clue how I got there or why.  The last thing that I remember, I was walking down Updike Street, heading back to my house after finishing up at the gym.  The next thing I knew, I was waking up in this house, foreign to me like the rope tying my ankles and wrists together and the gag in my mouth.  

The man said that what had caused him to bind my limbs was not only the fact that I had broken into his house, but also the claw marks that had ravaged his house.  These were no mere scrapes, the claws had gouged holes in the walls, cupboards, desks, and more.  How they got there, he wasn’t sure.  The thought of me letting a bear into the house had crossed his mind, according to him, but he had no clue, and neither did I.  Naturally, however, this made him hungrier for answers.  

The tears kept on falling, I couldn’t help it.  I had been framed; that must have been what it was.  The thought of someone trying to ruin my life was absurd.  I had no enemies, at least not that I was aware of.  I lived a fairly quiet life, working as a security guard at a little museum showcasing local art.  Who would have taken issue with that?  The occasional drunk, stumbling past the museum who I would wave to?  No one ever tried breaking into the museum; there was nothing worth stealing.  While the art was beautiful, the artists were local, not having much of an audience beyond the community.  I had no enemies.

The man sighed and backed up, standing up straight again, “Of course you don’t.  That would just be too easy, wouldn’t it?” He paced, running his hand through his graying hair, as if trying to stop his hands from going elsewhere.

I finally got the courage to speak, stuttering a bit at first; “S-sir, I’m sorry t-t-that this has all happened to you but I–”

An explosion on my right cheek.  This one was not made of heat, but rather pure force.  His right fist cracked into my cheek so suddenly I didn’t even know it was coming.  I felt the newly formed blisters on my face burst, spewing a mixture of blood and puss.  Before I could even react, the second punch landed, making contact square on my left temple.  This one made my vision go blurry.  My head bobbed like a lewer in the water, bouncing in wait for consciousness to latch onto it. 

A few seconds later, the fish bit.  I opened my eyes and returned to that world of terror.  The taste of iron had filled my mouth, a taste that I hadn’t had since I bit my tongue falling from the climbing wall in high school.  

The man was at the kitchen island, pouring himself a glass of whiskey.  He poured a small amount and swallowed it before pouring another glass.  

“By the way, you smell like shit.  You smell like you shower with your dog,” the man said, scowling.  

To be fair, I was not in the best shape.  I had been sweating and the pits of my shirt were now stained.  I’m not sure if I would go so far as to say that I smelled like a dog but I definitely smelled.  

The man massaged the space between his eyebrows with his thumb and pointer finger.  Seeming genuinely curious, he asked himself: “What to do with you, what to do with you.”  He started pacing again, glass of whiskey in hand.  

I had accepted the fact that I was going to die here.  The man was crazy, truly crazy.  The fact that he looked so calm now, pacing and pondering, only served to make me hate him more.  A man as evil as this shouldn’t be able to look any other way.  At that moment, however, I looked at him and wondered if he wasn’t a good guy.  I hated myself for the thought.  

As he turned back to me, the ‘nice guy’ act diminished.  His eyes were the same cold, heartless ones that I had come to fear over the time that he had been interrogating me.  “If I were a betting man, I would say that you are exactly who I think you are.  I’m not, though, so I think I’m just going to have to make sure.”

As he walked toward the living room from the kitchen (it was all open, so I could see everything), I thought; who is it that he thinks I am?  I was Levi, just Levi.  I doubted if this guy was a local artist who we had turned down for a display piece.  He was way too rough and aggressive to meet the criteria for an artist.  Plus, if he was an artist and one of his pieces were turned down, I’m sure I would have heard about his frustrations far before now.

But if he wasn’t an artist, who could he be?  That was the only reason I could think of for someone to be mad at me.  I didn’t do much outside of work; I stayed in my house the majority of the time.  He must’ve had the wrong guy.

As the man reached his destination in the living room, I picked up on what it was he was headed for.  It was a gun, a long, wood-barrelled shotgun that looked like the typical gun that you see propped above fireplaces in the movies.  That was, until he grabbed it off of the stand.  As the light from the living room hit the gun, it reflected back into my eyes with a bright flash.  A slight change in the angle and I could see why; the gun had silver plating.  As he dropped it to his side and started for the bullets, I could see three large gashes on the stock of the gun.  

The bullets themselves were also silver, covered completely in the material on the outside, as opposed to the gun.  They glinted in the reflection as the man grabbed two bullets out of the case, chambering one of them and pocketing the other.  Loading the gun, he turned towards me, holding it across his chest.

“Now, let’s see if I was right.”

I pleaded to the man, wanting to tell him how insane this was, how I was innocent, how he had the wrong guy, but all that came out was senseless babbling.  I racked my brain, trying to come up with an explanation for what the hell was going on.  It all was so strange, there seemed to be no reason for all of the things that I was seeing.  I was tied up, gagged, there was a crazy man beating and interrogating me, there were claw marks all over, my head hurt and was burned, silver guns and bullets.  None of it made sense, this wasn’t my fault, it couldn’t have been my doing.  

I looked down to the floor, planning on praying to whichever god was listening to help me make it out of here.  As I dropped my head I noticed how ripped my clothes were.  I must have been too delirious or preoccupied to notice beforehand.  I was confused, the man hadn’t cut me, I wasn’t bleeding, other than my face.  So why were my clothes ripped?  As strange as it was, this had happened before.  A few years ago, I was knocked unconscious and when I woke up (that time, I woke up in my house), my clothes were torn. 

 After waking up, I had checked my security cameras to see if anyone had broken into my house, only to find that no one had really entered my house, unwelcome.  No, it was more of a thing that I had seen on my cameras, a thing that looked strangely familiar, despite its claws and fur.  A thing that was bleeding from multiple wounds, appearing to me to be gunshots.  After a brief moment I realized that those were precisely what seemed familiar.  The wounds, that’s what it was. 

As I continued looking downward, the circular, pink scars that peeked through the tatters in my clothes showed me all I needed.  It all clicked, I remembered.  I had been afraid of what the man was about to do to me, but that fear was no longer.  I knew what he was about to do and I was okay with it, I welcomed it. 

I looked up from the ground to see the man heading for the curtain covers in the kitchen, just as I thought he would.  This was it, this is why I was here.  I wasn’t trying to find something in his house, he didn’t target me, I came here for him.  I would make him pay for the scars that he had left me, I would make him hurt.  As the man pulled back the curtains, revealing the full moon, I had only one thing to say.

“Bring it on.”

*****

I woke up two days later, opening my eyes to what looked like a completely unfamiliar house to me.  I had never seen this place, I thought.  I rolled over, my face landing in a pool of my own sweat.  I smelled like shit, like a wet dog.  My body ached and I had a wound in my shoulder.  

Is that a gunshot?

At this point, I had become extremely concerned.  I must have gone out to the bar and gotten hammered.  The bar wasn’t a frequent place for me but I went every once in a while when I felt I really needed to relax.  But for me to wake up in a stranger’s house with a possible gunshot wound on my shoulder, wow, it must have been one hell of a night.  I just hoped that I knew the guy whose house I was in.

As I pulled myself up from the cold tile floor, using the kitchen island to assist me, my eyes caught deep slashes on the cupboards.  Three deep lines across the white cupboards.  They were far too wide to be from a knife.  No, they looked more like… like claws.  

My heart stopped as I looked out at what I assumed was supposed to be the living room.  The white walls were covered in a deep, dark red color, so much so that you could safely get away with calling them red walls with white patches.  

Before I could come up with a reasonable excuse for this, I saw the arm.  One mangled limb hung off the end of the living room table, covered in the red liquid, covered in blood.  The pallid arm hung like some sort of macabre decoration, with the fingers dropping like they were trying their best to return to the Earth.  As my eyes tried to cower away from the sight, I saw the rest of the scene.  A huge chunk of bloody meat, laying on the living room carpet.  Attached to that body was a face.

I crept closer, needing to know who it was.  As I looked closer at the face, I couldn’t make out who it was.  The face rang no bells in my head.  He had a rough face that looked like it had seen its fair share of frowns throughout his life.  His black hair was layered with grey.  The features were unfamiliar to me. 

Tears began to fall from my eyes.  At first, they came slowly but they quickly picked up.  The shock of what I was seeing overtook my body.  Before long I was hysterical.  I knelt down, gazing at the dismembered corpse before me and dreading learning about what had happened in my stupor.  I couldn’t help the tears, I was mortified.  Yet there was some part of me, somewhere, that felt different.  Some part of me that, through my sobs, made me crack a smile.  Some part of me that, without realizing it, made me whisper:

“Finally got ya.”