Kirt knew where this was going and felt his face heat in a blush of anger. His customer had switched from easy-going to grade-A asshole in seconds. He had to repair his rapport with the customers before it was beyond salvaging.
“At least let me tell you. . .”
A sharp pain along his inner thigh forestalled his words. He felt something pinching him—pinching hard. He pushed his chair away from his desk and looked down to his lap.
What the hell is that?
There was motion in his pocket. In dawning horror and disbelief he saw the fabric of his thin, brown slacks moving. However, it was the intense pain he felt cutting into his inner right leg that set off the shrieking cacophony in his head.
“What’s the matter?”
Kirt barely heard Brian’s words.
The baby in Tina’s arms suddenly emptied his lungs in a piercing wail that bounced around Kirt’s tiny office like an ambulance siren in an echo chamber.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Startled, wide-eyed, and mouth agape, Tina held her infant son in front of her, grasping him under both of his armpits.
The baby screamed and peddled it legs, trying to run from something, but instead only kicked the air helpless and panicked.
Kirt rocketed out of his chair, which careened backwards on its rollers and collided with the credenza behind him in a loud Thwump Bang! The credenza wobbled from the impact and a Buick golf clock, given him by the General Motors rep, fell from its perch atop the credenza to the floor by Kirt’s foot, shattering its plastic frame and faceplate upon the thin carpet.
“You’re scaring my baby.” Brian shot to his feet with balled fists and such immediacy that Kirt thought he was going to take a poke at him. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
But even this was not enough to distract Kirt from the red hot needling pain hammering at his senses—from down there where the baby’s “toy” was.
“I’ll be back,” Kirt hissed through clenched teeth; he had to get somewhere private and extricate the stuffed animal from his pocket. It was the only thing he could think of that could be causing the stabbing agony so uncomfortably close to his groin.
Oh my God! What’s going on?
He maintained enough reason to realize if he pulled the thing out here, in his office, he’d have difficult questions to answer. He tore out of his office awkwardly contorted, hand clamped over the still moving lump in his pocket. Out of the corner of his vision he glimpsed Brian snatch the baby out of Tina’s hands and caught snippets of angry words and more of the baby’s wailing; but his brain couldn’t translate these sounds into anything coherent. He had to get to the restroom and stop whatever was causing the terrible stinging hurt along his right inner-thigh. It was more than just the pain now; it was also Kirt’s fear of the unknown—what was causing the pain—that drove him to panic.
“Hey, you ok, Kirt?” Isaac asked, turning the corner toward Kirt’s office and unwittingly blocking Kirt’s path to the sanctuary of the restroom. “I heard some yelling.”
“Can’t...talk...now.”
Words were difficult and felt like a wheelbarrow of rocks to be pushed up a mountain. Kirt’s vision narrowed, but his purpose was clear and burning. Oh, did it burn. All he saw was Isaac’s chest. He had to go through him; a detour around him was unthinkable, because he had to know what was happening and right NOW!
“Move!” Kirt put his arms forward, intending them to move Isaac aside, but instead, with his momentum, he ended up body-slamming the salesman. Isaac’s body fell to Kirt’s left and out of his sight. Kirt saw the opening to the bathroom door and he bolted for it; bent at an angle and hobbling, he reached it. With his free hand he pawed at the door handle and pushed it down and thrust the door open and flung his body into the bathroom.
Once inside, Kirt spun around and locked the door. Now, at last, he plunged his hand into his pocket and wrapped it around the pliable stuffed toy, yanked it from his pocket and held it at arm’s length in front of him.
In a surreal moment of disbelief he saw it had again transformed into the hideous prophet doll. He stared aghast at the thing gripped in his fist. It moved; its mouth opened and closed. Kirt smelled a terrible odor and realized it was the thing’s breath, rancid and existing in a measure beyond any sane proportion of what should be able to issue from an orifice as small as that of the plastic prophet’s mouth. He gawked at what he guessed had caused his pain. The prophet’s staff had transformed into a wriggling serpent.
The snake was dark and marked with virulent green patches. It sprang at Kirt’s hand, but was unable to strike him due to his fierce grip about the prophet doll’s lower half. If the prophet let go of its own grip on the serpent’s scaly thickness, the snake would have been able to strike downward and sink its thumbtack-sized fangs into his hand; but some law of reality appeared to still apply. The prophet doll, it seemed, could not move anything but its mouth. Kirt felt the reptile’s lower half trying to slither from his fist. Its touch was wet and revolting; it felt more earthworm than snake, the cold slimy feel of something that fed in the damp, beneath fetid and rotting corpses.
I’ll squeeze the shit out of you, you son-of-a-bitch!
He contracted his grip and squeezed until the muscles in his arm ached and the tendons in his wrist stood out like steel cables beneath the skin. He bared his teeth and a primitive grunt escaped his strained wild-eyed face. When he could take no more of the intense exertion, after he thought there was not another ounce of grip pressure left to him, he raised the doll above his head and hurled it to the floor with such force that it leapt off the hard ceramic tile and almost landed in the commode, before bouncing off the toilet’s rim and coming to rest upon the bathroom’s tiled floor.
Now only a doll lay there on the floor. A doll made of plastic, cloth and white fibrous stuffing. No blood spewed, no bones protruded from torn flesh.
Unsatisfied with the lack of gore he needed to see and still caught in the survival-mode panic of a person who opts to fight rather than to take flight, Kirt raised his right foot and aimed the heel of his polished, brown leather Doc Martin shoe at the prophet doll’s head. When his raised leg had reached its apex, just before he began the downward thrust of his foot to smash the horrid thing, he froze and stared incomprehensibly at the doll. The doll’s mouth had moved as he had wound his leg up to stomp it. He’d heard its voice, soft, yet menacing, a whisper of cockroach legs scuttling behind derelict walls. Icicles formed in Kirt’s shriveling testicles and he could taste his fear. The doll’s speech invoked an elemental dread in him, an unfamiliar primitive and jagged trepidation generated by an atrophied part of his brain that evolution had softened after humans had become ‘civilized’ and no longer had to fear being ripped apart, chewed, and eaten on a daily basis.
Kirt lowered his leg. In opposition to his brain’s command that he should now take flight, that horrible danger was present—that he was food—he knelt next to the thing, ready to spring away the instant the doll moved anything more than its mouth. Its smell swelled around him and infected his palate, which caused him to gag dryly. He swallowed and stopped breathing to avoid its reeking stench. Now that he was closer, he could make out its whispery words:
“Come near to hear and hearken: Let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it. The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made fat with fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats.”
Something else there was there, too. Beneath the words that Kirt distinctly heard spoken, another voice spoke in his head at the same time. This voice was not, however, a part of his catalog of internal voices that he’d become familiar with of late. This was utterly different, independent of his routine self-bashing and the reliving of the trauma of his Divorce or his Depression.
This was not him remembering the cold exactness of Beverley’s words, when she’d sat on the edge of the bed, prior to them turning in for the evening, and said in a matter-of-fact tone:
“I’ve got something to tell you: I don’t want to be married anymore.”
As if ending their fifteen years together was on par with the news that she needed to go to the grocery store in the morning to buy milk. No. Nor was this the constant rehashing of her words and rationales behind the Divorce—most he never knew existed, but she drove home with fierce, hurtful intensity—and her need to be free from him; to reject him.
It wasn’t the usual replay of that particularly dastardly internal tape; the really bad one.
“I have thought about coming back to you—but I don’t want to settle.”
Kirt was well familiar with his own internal hell-alogue and the constant berating drone in his head. What he heard now was not the product of his thoughts. That much was crystal clear. In this instance Kirt couldn’t push away, nor diminish this occupation of his mind by simply yell-thinking:
“Get out of my head! Leave me alone! Just chill, Bill.”
The words he heard the doll utter, the sword of the lord and all that, and the words he heard in his mind but did not own, overlapped and intertwined, but he could understand them nonetheless and the underlying message was:
“Enemy of God! You must pay for your Godmaking sin. Your death and unending torment will please God. You cannot defeat Him!”
“Nooo!” Kirt yelled. “WHAT…ARE…YOU?”
He surged to his feet to distance himself from the prophet’s ghoulish double sermon. Now he did bring his foot down upon the thing. He worked his leg like a piston and stomped the horrid toy, which transformed into a walrus again somewhere between the fourth and fifth blow of his heel, until the jarring action of his stomps made his shin scream in protest and demanded he stop. Panting, he left the doll there and stared with disbelief at its torn, shredded and misshapen form. It was no longer something a child should play with, if ever it had been. Now it was silent and still.
What the hell did I just kill?
Keeping one eye on the thing, Kirt undid his belt and fumbled with the button and zipper of his slacks until he had them undone as well. He lowered his slacks and inspected the area of his thigh that continued to sting, though the pain had abated since he’d fled his office. He gasped when he saw that a large, purplish blotch covered the affected quarter-sized area like a bad grape juice stain. At the center of the discolored skin he poked his index finger gingerly at two tiny puncture marks. The holes oozed a small amount of blood mixed with some clear fluid he could not identify. He winced and pulled his finger back.
Damned thing bit me!
Kirt’s head began to spin. He steadied himself with his left hand on the sink’s white porcelain coolness and with the other turned on the faucet. The hiss and burble of flowing water comforted Kirt in a strange way; the simple, everyday sound brought normalcy to his senses. He ran his fingers under the tap. Cupping his hands, he filled them—almost prayerfully—with cold water and bent forward to splash his face and wash away something he couldn’t define.
Face dripping, he looked up and into the mirror.
Kirt didn’t see the familiar self that greeted him every morning when he shaved. He didn’t see the small scar under his full bottom lip he’d acquired when at ten–years old he’d fallen out of the old oak tree his dad had told him not to climb, and for which he received the strappin’ he’d been told he’d get if he disobeyed.
His bottom lip wasn’t full now either; it was thinner, stronger.
Kirt’s nose now appeared a little wider than it should be, no longer bent at that familiar soft angle in the middle where a Marine had clocked him years ago in the Navy, when Kirt had defended a guy from one of the Marine’s drunken buddies.
His complexion now appeared in the mirror to be tanned, rough, weathered. Kirt burned in the sun, he did not tan. And, his face didn’t have the mileage that was reflecting back…on his face! And the beard—that coarse, bristling, black thickness hadn’t been there this morning when he’d looked in the mirror wishing he was headed anywhere except to work. Kirt’s red tie was also transformed, now a red design of some sort, familiar, yet unremembered, a shape splayed across a. . .
. . .tunic?
. . .covering some type of chain mail that, Kirt noticed with not a little anxiety, appeared to have actually been used at some point for what it had been fashioned for: Armor.
But, it was the eyes that stared back at him that sent his mind reeling. Those eyes were his eyes: Blue-gray, familiar, self-reflecting, they didn’t belong to the face of the man in the mirror. Kirt Tucker’s eyes shouldn’t be in someone else’s face. That was fundamentally wrong.
Yes, there was something definitely wrong with the Universe.
Kirt’s mental circuitry chose that moment to protect him and blew a breaker: His world began to turn into gray speckling. Before he fell and his head hit the rim of the toilet, on his way down into the darkness, Kirt heard a voice. It was at once his voice, but not his voice. The authoritative voice spoke to him in accent-cloaked words that Kirt heard, but did not understand:
“Min' me; min' ye.”
Then the world turned at a right angle and there was a blinding flash of light.
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Gator will be published February 25th. Here's a taste of my new standalone romance...
