Organ - Chapter 25
ORGAN
Chapter Twenty Five
Searching for the hidden spare key on the underside of the kitchen window ledge, Oscar felt about at the underside of the wooden ledge dislodging spiders and insects of various sizes before finally landing on the small hook that secured it in place, he thought for a moment about which of his parents installed this fail safe and agreed with his inner monologue that this had his mother’s finger prints all over it as the careful planner of the two.
He slid the brass key gently into the lock and assumed the noise was going to be bringing his mother inside thundering towards the door, whether she would be showering him with love or subduing him as the murderous criminal son was yet to be seen as he crossed the threshold still leaving the key in the lock to keep the noise from growing, taking it back out and potentially dropping it or scrapping it against the metal was an unnecessary risk. No lights appeared to be illuminating the home, his mother’s car was in the driveway, but it broke down so often he was used to coming home to see her wandering around the house moaning about the garage having to pick the “piece of junk” up from the side of the road. He knew she could just as likely be home right that moment.
Oscar tiptoed up the stairs and avoided the floor boards that he knew creaked and crackled under the weight of human use, the door to her bedroom was closed and so was his own old room at the end of the hallway, he investigated the bottom of the doors and saw no lights yet again. Risking it all for his final safety check of the perimeter the young man who now felt like some run of the mill home invader gentle twisted his mother’s door handle until it popped open, pushed it aside and saw the empty room blackened by the evening light and closed drapes, it was a mess, but he assumed she was just stressed from everything going on and had not had the mind to tidy,
“What for?” he remarked to himself in the dark of his own hallway.
Home alone he stepped back into his room, losing his sense of timidness after returning as an unwanted guest, his room was cold, he felt it in his bones.
Oscar rocked in his favourite desk chair, the same that his mother helped him squeeze and cram into her car when they found it at the market, back at his desk that he once did his homework on now instead trying desperately to convince himself that he was welcome here in the place he took his first steps. His eyes came across the clock on the desk and the evening rolling through into early night, with his mother not home it was clear she had taken some extra shifts to help out as usual.
“I guess you need the distraction from your monster of a son” he mumbled staring at the photo of the two of them that sat on his desk from a beach trip they took five or six years ago.
He could not remember, those good clean memories of happy times seem somehow darker, tainted by his actions whether he was at the wheel or locked in the boot of the car driving his life off the cliff. Staring over at his bed he fought the desire to slide under his familiar bed sheets and drift off for what could hopefully become some relaxing hours of restful sleep in his own room, but the hour was late, and his mother would be home at some point before he would likely have awoken, if she was still looking to help him in the same way as previous he would likely wake up with officers at his feet with the handcuffs or straitjacket waiting for him. While staring at his bed with lusting eyes it dawn on him that his hands and clothes still remained soaked in blood and sewage filth, in a flustering panic he ripped and kicked off the clothes from his body, slamming his top and bottom down against the hardwood flooring that shined in the glow of the evening light leaking through his window. The smell was overpowering as he stirred up the dormant molecules of human fluids from his belongings, it was too much, he scooped up the messy pile and threw it into the shower that he shared with his mother in the middle of their landing space, Oscar ran the tap and drowning his clothes in the downing rains of the shiny shower head and watching the fluids of brown and dark red leak out flowing down the drain, ironically seeping their way back into the sewers in which he had inhabited earlier that day.
“Wet” the voice called out watching the waters from inside him somehow.
“Yes we are going to get wet” Oscar replied stepping into the warm waters and enjoying a moment of peace in a world of absolute anarchy, his face stung from the roughness of the days foul voyage.
Hours still fell off the clock with no sign of his mother, it was concerning if not for the nature of events lessening the severity of all things human to the murderous Rubens child. Oscar was drifting off, sleep filling his eyelids with heavy fatigue and the world falling away from his worries for just an evening back at home in his familiar family nest.
“Don’t sleep” it called out to him, causing him to jerk himself awake in that terrifying flinching fashion, “Not safe” it added seeking confirmation that its fleshy avatar was not going to try and nod off once again.
Oscar gave into the commands of his interior minister and pulled himself further up the couch in the living room, observing that no lights appeared on the street outside the home from a car dropping off his returning mother.
“Walk it off” he whispered to himself getting up to his feet and going to the kitchen for water.
Along his walk the mirror panels that stuck fixed to the wall of the hallway caught his attention, his image was ghastly to witness, the once spritely handsome lad was now a pale sunken skeleton haunting the places his family sought to fill with love and happy memories. Stepping closer to the mirrors wanting to better examine the roughness and jagged bone lines of his face that had replaced his familiar content mug in his memory, his mouth reflecting back in the mirror moved on its own accord, another spell of this never-ending nightmare was about to begin.
“You need help?” he said to himself watching as this mirror world Oscar spoke to him, a voice unrecognisable but the face seemingly his own wretched vision.
“I don’t need help” he answered.
“We are dying son” his reflection replied, it was his father speaking through him or at least an imagination once more play acting as the possessed spectre of his deceased dad. “I’ve been dying for a long time; this isn’t any different. This thing won’t let me die” Oscar snapped at the reflection that looked like him but moved with alien twitches back at him.
“They are keeping us alive” it said with a lingering breath as though exhaling their last exhale.
“How are they keeping me alive?” he asked back fiercely bubbling with anger as the redness replaced the shallow grey paleness in his cheeks and beneath his eyes.
“They are dying, we are dying with them. If they die, we die” it explained but the riddle only infuriated him more.
“Fuck you!” Oscar screamed punching a square of glass smashing one of these small mirror squares into pieces that hurtled through the passageway.
His hand dripping with blood and glittered with fragments of broken mirror.
“Call her, call the nurse” it answered ignoring his outburst.
Oscar could have sworn this reflection was staring at the blood cascading down his digits and painting the floor. The nurse was the last person he wanted to call, Oscar assumed she was dead, but this creature before him mocking his image was somehow in the loop, or perhaps he had buried the exact happenings of the hotel encounter that he shamefully attempted to forget,
“The nurse is dead, they killed her” Oscar said prompting the creature to slither back into his mind or gut and away from the waking world.
“You know she is alive; you felt her pulse, did it feel like the hotel man, did it feel like the body we ate? No, Get the nurse before they die. Before you die” the fractured face in the mirror asked him.
Sincerity could be mistaken for insanity here, but Oscar was lost at the whirlwind of it all bouncing around between his ears.
“Call the nurse or we die” it asked again only louder.
“No” he mumbled back in reply setting of a burst of rage from the phantoms that shattered the mirrors and sent him reeling backwards crashing to the floor to protect his eyes from flying fragments of glass.
When he looked up from the floor, when the dust settled and the noise ceased, he saw the mirror still intact in its separated squares bar the unfortunate select that he had punched.
“Stop, just fucking stop!” he screamed out followed by a deep roaring cry of anger and pain.
“Pain” it whispered.
“Stop” he replied.
“Pain now” it answered as Oscars stomach throbbed in the usual way it had developed.
The boy at home rolled onto his side as the being inside throbbed, crawled and climbed through his frame, making its way seemingly to its old spot below his ribs and above his hip, the soft space becoming engorged once again with purple reddish cyst like bulge.
“Call the nurse” it called out to him now emanated blistering hot scars up his body and into the back of his throat that choked for words, “before we die.”
Oscar finished the sentence for the creature as the misery continued to seep into his nerve endings all across his body like a living breathing wildlife.
“How do I call her, I don’t have her number” he shouted into the solitary air, nobody around to bounce this vocalised bargain off for help but it was fruitless.
The only company Oscar entertained were the illusive creatures both in his mind and in his flesh that speak to him and summon up these living breathing apparitions to torture him. Before his victorious last word had finished echoing through the hallway the reflection still living in the mirrors launched forward pressing itself against the inside of the wall from beyond the edges of whatever hell dimension it existed in, Oscar let out a gasp and crawled back in fear as this uncanny copy of himself stared down at him with wide frightened eyes and a mouth that spoke slowly and out of sync with its vocalised words.
“You saw it, on the fridge” the words from behind the mirror read.
Confused Oscar looked over at the fridge visible from his position down on the floor of the passageway and saw a yellow sticky note affixed to the black door of the refrigerator, baffled why his mother had her number at all Oscar crawled on his hands and knees to pull it down, it read ‘Katie – Nurse’ and below it her phone number that he was unsure why his mother would even need. Unless of course, they had been in contact regarding the escapee they both shared an interest in.
“She was working against me the whole time” Oscar angrily ground his teeth as the realisation seeped through his soul.
The phone rang for an age, Oscar stared out the window from the living room that he truthfully felt unwelcome in searching the drive and the approaching road for headlights indicating his mother’s arrival, or perhaps even sirens colouring blue and red cutting apart the shadows in search of the boy criminal. Her voice sounded sore when Katie finally answered.
“Hello, Mary?” she asked as Oscar lingered to respond.
“Katie, Its Oscar” he said with a cocktail of shame and resentment seeping through the handset.
No doubt this hatred in his tone pinging on the radar of his former nurse at the other end of the line.
“Why are you calling me?” she asked nervously.
“I need your help” he said without a shred of dignity for what the nurse had gone through the last time she attempted to help the unwell individual.
“Are you serious? Oscar you left me for dead. You killed someone, I hope they find you and I hope they lock you away in a prison cell for the rest of your life” the words landed like acid rain on a singular sheet of paper but how much more wounded could his soul become.
Her outburst did not hurt like she had hoped as she simply replied in a cold uncaring voice,
“We are dying Katie,” silence lingered on the line but for their breathing assuring each other that they are indeed still connected.
“Call an ambulance” she suggested refusing the call to duty that she felt welling up in her chest.
“You know I can’t do that” he murmured into the receiver letting out a short sigh.
“Are you alone?” Katie asked now searching for answers that could remove her from this leech of a situation that refused to disengage from her bloody life force.
“Yes, we need help” Oscar moaned attempting to lure her into his web like the arachnid his mind had become.
“Oscar you left me for dead” she repeated running out of reasons not to attend and help a citizen in distress, even if it was a murderous abusive piece of darkness that she wished had never crept into her life. “Tell me where you are?” she knew it was worth getting this location confirmed, despite the number on the phone reading “Rubens Home” if only to pass onto the police or the boy’s mother.
“I’m with Dad again Katie” he muttered in reply losing his grip on reality as the world began to twirl in his mind, “I really think I am dying” he whimpered the words out of his wobbling lips with a voice that sounded unlike the others, it was almost normal, it was almost truly Oscar.
The line went dead as he dropped the phone to the floor and marched back the house seeking a place to comfort himself as the pains grew in his body, mind altering stabs at his person and mind roared with wave like rhythm that started urging him to find a safe space to hide. Across the town Katie ruminated on the call, the abrupt end, his words, the sound of his voice and the decision she was left with was really something she hated to admit, it was time to end this.
“I’m with Dad” she repeated looking for its meaning, “Why did he go home” she mouthed to herself and began packing her bag one last time.
Katie included this time around a scalpel formally used for practising stitching, how could it have turned into her last line of defence against a patient she was unfortunately tangled up with in his ill-fated ghoulish story. When Katie arrived the Rubens house she saw Marys car in the driveway, it gave her some comfort that Oscar was being controlled – if he could – by the only person left on this insane planet that could vouch for mercy in his name, although the lack of lights on in the house gave her a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“What the hell are you doing Katie” she asked herself aloud to comfort herself alone on the walk up to the Rubens front door, it was unlocked, unlatched when she arrived. “Hello?” she called out stepping carefully through the gateway to their home. “Mary?” she asked again without answer.
Scrapping sounds echoed through the house, her nerves fired up with goosepimples screaming for her to leave and retreat outside to the safety of the streets.
“Oscar is that you?” the question again drifting away in the breeze without as much as a grunt in acknowledgement. “Look I will leave if you don’t answer me” she said summing up all the fake bravado her chest could find.
For a second she wondered if it was still closed off for investigation by the police or if some unaware person slept in that bed, comforting distraction but the lack of life breathing through the walls of the Rubens home had her terrified. Scrapping noises started up again.
“Who is that?” she screamed down the hallway into the black of the shadows covering the furniture.
“Katie” his voice called out before she saw it, Oscars arm reaching out across the floors of the kitchen, pulling himself across the ground creating that bone rattling scrapping noise as she dragged his weak body along the wood.
“Shit, what happened” she asked reaching down to the fallen boy and pulling him up to her side.
Supporting his body with his arm resting over her shoulders and around her neck. He was lighter than she remembered. Katie looked around the house still carrying the limp suffering body over her shoulder, she dragged him towards the kitchen table to drop him down in a chair, Oscar had other plans. As they reached the table Oscar reached around with his free hand that dangled at his side and plunged a short cooking knife into her stomach, in a blur Katie released him and fell to the ground crawling backwards and screaming at the wound that pumped blood rapidly onto her shirt that quickly changed from white to dark red. Her screams filled the house, Oscar stood over her unmoving blade still in hand and a blank lifeless hollow look painted across his face, eyes unmoving but for the occasional twitch that shock across his entire body.
“Please, Please don’t do this Oscar” she begged finding the wall behind.
Katies face began to drain white as the blood leaked from her stomach and onto the floor as her shirt could hold back no more of the spill, a sinister sponge needing ringing, Oscar still frozen in place with the weapon gripped tight.
“Breed” a voice called out to her, his lips did not move and that she saw for sure, this time she saw without doubt that the voice she heard was not from his mouth.
Before she could rationalise or contain the leak sprung in her body, he lunged at her a second time grabbing for her head in careless chaotic clutch, Oscar dragged her across the kitchen floor by her hair and pulled her up onto the kitchen table, she landed on her back across the place they once ate family meals and cried out in agony with the landing, the poor girl feeling for her hair that destroyed her with pain.
“Oscar stop! Please!” she begged seeing his shell move around her as she lay helplessly on the hard table.
Noise of rummaging sounded out unseen behind her head and to her horror Oscar returned shortly after with her scalpel in hand. Her begging went on as Oscar climbed up onto the table himself, slashing at her hands that came up to defend herself at this approach, blood flicked across the walls and floors, a paint brush of hellish design colouring Marys beloved kitchen. Oscar sat down on her stomach squatting his full weight down on her, knees flat on the table that somehow held them both up under the weight and the movement.
“Oscar” her voice grew faint with the loss of blood and likely her brains attempt to pull her out of the situation before the finale, but Oscar never answered her cries.
“We need your body” he said this time through his own mouth, his eyes black staring straight through her burning holes in the back of her skull.
“Let me help you, please” she cried as the words left her lips knowing it was fruitless in wasted effort.
“You will” he whispered into her ear leaning down across her face, the blade clumsily stabbing in her neck and gradually slicing a small scar that began flowing red down towards the back of her neck, creating a new pool of blood upon the table.
Jumping off with a loud thud, Oscar wobbled unsteady on his feet and barely caught himself from falling over with weakness, Katie could breathe easier without his weight upon her and the flush of easy air filling her lungs only made her injuries that painted her body hurt more and the blood seep just a pip faster. Katie attempted to roll over onto the floor and off the table, a sad reach for safety before Oscars claws came down holding her in place by her arm.
“Please” she pleaded looking up at his face that towered over her.
Seeing the face of a murderer, a creature that contained no essence of humanity, but an empty vessel filled with ghosts and gruesome urges. In the dark of the room, she could have sworn he was smiling with blurry streaks of tears lining his face. Oscar began stripping off his clothes still keeping her in place with a routine placement of his thin bony fingers patting her body back down against the table, his body now naked from the waist up, his skeletal frame now obvious with visible ribs showing when the light caught them in revealing sadness, the only fleshy part left of Oscar was the lump that caused all of this, still bulbous and angry at his side. This was his target, Oscar drove the scalpel into the edges of the growth digging viciously at his own body with the borrowed blade, cutting down he severed a wound so large it gushed with milky puss and clumps of bloody tissue that mirrored watery tissue paper leaking down the drain and onto the floor, the splashing sound was dreadful to her ears, but he paid no mind as he mutilated his own carcass.
“Oscar, stop” she whispered with what energy she had left reaching her hand up to hold his dangling non-knife wielding hand.
Katie squeezed it gently with her strength fading and with reassuring tones whispered out a repeated comfort, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay” as the lost cause she fought so desperately to help carved himself away before her eyes, powerless to stop him.
Oscar unaware or uninterested in her pawing at his hand, or her words of niceness that he was never again going to deserve reached a point of pause, further wet thick splashing noises gurgled out as the host seemingly stopped slicing into his own body. It was not over yet. Oscar dug his hand into the flap he had cut loose and thrust his hand deep into the lump, a guttural scream leaving his body but his hand never leaving the open chasm that was once his sealed abnormality. He felt around for a while inside his own fleshy lumpy satchel at this side, blood and mess escaping out onto the floor with sounds the laid-out Katie wished she had never witnessed, he paused for a moment before knocking her still clutching hand down from his and bringing the knife back up with the free hand that was not lodged inside him and placing it blade first at the soft of Katies belly button.
“You don’t need to do this” she let out one last plea for his sanity or humanity to resurface and possibly save her from the being that stood over her with torturous intent.
“We need your body” Oscar wheezed out; her body turned cold with the reality that she was likely about to die having willingly stepped back into this madman’s world for a second time.
Katies mother’s face flashed before her eyes in comforting efforts of her brain leading her consciousness away from this nightmare. Oscar took his final leap into the final rings of hell, plunging the scalpel into her belly button and pulling towards himself cutting a gouge out of her stomach large enough to fit a hand into, and that’s just what he did. Oscar in one foul motion ripped at his own body pulling free his trapped hand and revealing a cluster of pink screaming flesh locked into his fist and slamming it deep into the opening he had created in her stomach with her own medical knife. Screams rang out from both of them, Katie felt around her stomach with her arms pulsating with slashed knife attacks the sensation of her fingers feeling the monstrous opening in her torso becoming the final bout she could take before her head dropped the table, fading into insentience. Oscar collapsed to the ground, laid out on his back staring up at the ceiling.
It slowly turned to a blue sky in his mind’s eye, planes flew across first one, then two and then hundreds, his father appeared next to him, and the softness of his voice spoke to him one more time “You see that plane up there son?” Oscar attempted to answer but only wheezing death rattle escaped his throat, “We are going on one of those soon” his dad said as Oscar saw a singular plane glow white in the sky, “Its over son, go to the plane” his father whispered as Oscar drifted off one last time into his final resting sleep, dreaming off planes and forgetting this cruel world.
