Marcus: An Old Friend Returns
Marcus woke with a jolt. He was surrounded by darkness, shrouded in it. He tried to move but couldn’t. He was restrained.
“Hello?” he called out, his voice strained and distant; sounding like the final repetition of an echo before it fades away.
His mind was blank; he couldn’t remember anything. A few images fluttered in his mind; a woman holding a baby—his wife? The idea sprang into his mind and connected with the picture. The baby was his first daughter. Marcus remembered the day; the entire labor had taken five hours, which everybody told them was incredible for a first baby. Then, like the memories of a drunken night out, various events that surrounded his demise filtered back into his conscious mind. He remembered the shopping arcade. The woman and the man; it was still hazy. He couldn’t remember what had happened. Only that he had fallen –tripped? Marcus didn’t think so. He could hear a baby crying; constant, and at a tone which suggested more than a simply case of hunger or a dirty nappy.
Marcus was hot. Sweat covered his body and soaked his clothes. He tried to move, but only managed to pull his bonds tighter, forcing his body against the wall behind him. It felt like rock – sharp and unforgiving. Marcus steadied himself and managed to work his bonds a little looser when a cramp hit his left leg. Just behind the knee, a knot of pain exploded. It felt as though his knee was going to twist right off. The lack of visual stimuli coupled with the solitude of his dark world made it seem worse than it was, or so Marcus told himself over and over, repeating it like a mantra. He tried to focus his attention to the external situation instead. Something had been placed over his head. It wasn’t dark: his face was simply covered.
Have they taken me somewhere?
“What happened?” Marcus asked aloud. His thoughts stumbled around like a drunk on Friday night.
His body ached. That dull rusty ache you get while fighting off the flu. His joints swollen with fluid, the skin stretched taut over them.
Marcus heard something moving. He felt it, no...not it, but them. Something crawled over the exposed skin of his forearms. Something tickled his scalp beneath the mask. Marcus threw his head around as panic started to tighten its grip on him.
“Get off me!” Marcus called out. The light-cancelling cloth that covered his head stuck to his mouth like surround wrap clinging to warm leftovers before you put them in the fridge.
He felt a breeze against his chest, and Marcus became startlingly aware of his nudity. Something slid down his chest, descending like a lover’s kiss, caressing his skin to just below his navel.
Marcus’s stomach felt as if it were on fire.
That was when it came back to him. The darkness lit up and Marcus was back in the shopping arcade. A small crowd of elderly people and a handful of store employees had gathered. Marcus looked at them, their faces pale, mouths motionless circles, like unwanted fish left on a boat’s deck to rot in the sun.
The scene changed again, another flash of light; Marcus was on the floor; his hands were raised before his eyes. They were covered in blood. Another snapshot. Standing again, he saw a man and a woman – God, she looks like a whore, – arguing. The scene changed again. Marcus now looked down on it. He saw his own body surrounded by a pool of blood. Not far away lay a woman – My God, she looks like a whore. She was bleeding. Her face was also missing: someone had crushed it. What remained was a bubbling bloody mess. Her body twitched, and beneath her was a child. Marcus could see its arms flying around in blind, panicked movements. He also saw bloody footprints leading away from them all, the stride getting longer with each print as whoever it was picked up the pace of their escape. Another flash, this one followed by darkness.
“Get this off!” Marcus roared, not in fear or panic, but in anger.
“Now, now, baby. Play nice,” a voice said. It cut through the silence, bringing sounds of life and hope into his world of endless night. It was a slimy voice; the vocal chords sounded as though they were drowning – yet there was something familiar about it.
“Who’s there? Who said that?” Marcus called, trying to get a bearing on the sound. It wasn’t in front of him, no, off the side, his left.
“Just an old friend.”
Marcus moved his head so that he faced the direction from which he was sure the voice came.
“You’re no friend of mine. Take this thing off now. Let me see who you are,” he said with confidence, defiant to the end. The simple knowledge that there was someone there, good intentions or bad, gave him a focus and grounding point for his anger.
“I don’t think you’re ready for that yet,” the voice laughed.
“Take this off now. I’m a police officer. There will be people looking for me. Trust me. We look after our own, with an old-fashioned view on justice,” Marcus threatened, hoping the slight wobble in his voice wouldn’t give him away. His stomach throbbed, but he felt calm.
“Poor baby, you still don’t have any idea, do you?” the voice said with kindness. “You adulterous cock whore, you’ll get what you deserve down here. Oh yes,” it snapped, spitting venom-filled words that burnt Marcus’ chest.
His skin was on fire. Drops of something seared his flesh, something other than words. Marcus winced in pain but couldn’t move more than a few inches at most. “What the hell is going on?” Marcus called out to the darkness, when, without warning, the cloth was pulled from his face. It didn’t take long for Marcus’ eyes to adjust as the darkness was more dusk than midnight.
The first thing Marcus noticed was the discarded sack that had covered his face wasn’t a mere hemp sack, but rather a sack of a different nature. Scrotums. They had been split open then sewed together, creating what looked like a magnified version of what they were.
Unsure of how long his captors would give him before plunging his world back into darkness, Marcus looked around trying to gauge his location, absorbing as much information about his whereabouts as he could. He was in a small windowless room. Despite the lack of illumination, the dusk never threatened to darken further. It was the walls; they seemed to cast such an eerie glow. They were red; a shade so deep that in places it looked black. Their surface seemed to be moving... flowing. The ground and roof were separated by a gap of about three meters, the latter of which had the same flowing appearance as the wall. The way they swirled was hypnotic, and after a while Marcus began to feel nauseous.
I’m in a cave, Marcus thought deductively. The way out would be up.
“No you’re not, lover boy.” The voice read his thoughts. It sent chill up Marcus’ spine; an avalanche in reverse. With it came a dawn of realization. The final pieces of the memory puzzle he had been working on during his time in the dark fell into place.
“I’m not dead,” he said under his breath – although, as he spoke, his mind showed him everything he needed to see. The churchyard, the mourners dressed in either black or formal police dress. He saw his wife and kids standing on the edge of the grave. He saw a coffin...his coffin...being lowered into the ground. He saw his wife sink to her knees, where she remained until his son picked her up and held her.
“Oh, poor baby. So confused. Sure, it may end with a box buried in the ground, a quiet neighborhood, too, no troublemakers, no noise.” The voice paused.
Marcus had been looking at the floor in a trance of disbelief, struggling to make his way over to acceptance. As his captor talked, Marcus raised his head, determined to look them in the eye, whoever they were. He saw nothing: the cave (or whatever it was) was empty.
“That is merely the physical world,” the voice continued. “That body you had was little more than a transportation system. A shell – some outer husk you call a body. But, dear...dear, dear, dear, your soul, the life that filled that festering pile of cells you called your home for over forty years, that will live on forever.” The voice trailed off, but Marcus knew the owner was close. His captor was there with him, hiding.
“Who are you?” he asked. A standard question made even more pertinent given his recognition of the voice.
“Kiss me, my knight and I will be yours forever,” the voice answered, and the small chamber was filled with wind, a hot acrid wind that felt abrasive against Marcus’s skin. With it came a wet, damp odor like a rotten log in the middle of the forest. As if appearing out of thin air (which it did) a figure appeared. Nothing but a shadow at first, it was large; that was all Marcus could fathom. It was at least nine feet tall, wider than a normal man and straight, no clear widening for appendages like arms of legs. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a...
It’s a giant talking shit, Marcus thought, his mind conjuring up an image of a large brown turd holding a cane, top hat perched on its head and a monocle against one dark brown eye with long, feminine eyelashes.
Slowly, the thing revealed itself. It was covered by wet, glistening skin. No, not skin, but a shell.
It’s a roach. The answer dawned in Marcus’s mind long before the creature had fully appeared.
The creature had its back to him, and Marcus noticed that the walls around him were no longer wet but had become tacky. He turned around to look and saw the walls were bleeding. He could taste it: a heavy coppery flavor like a mouthful of old pennies. Marcus gagged, yet at the same time it brought along a sweet undertone which made him want to swallow.
The giant body oozed a thick opaque slime, which fell to the floor and congealed instantly. The creature was shuddering, quivering, with a respiration rate faster than a dog in the heat of summer. The brown, scaled body was bald save for a thatch of thick, wavy, black hair, which flowed from what Marcus hoped was the creature’s head.
“What...what the f-fuck,” Marcus stammered as his brain tried to get a grip on everything that had happened. “Let me go.” The simplicity and the meek sound of the request made him feel ashamed.
“I will, don’t worry, my dark champion. It’s no fun without the chase,” the voice said.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but if you think I’m gonna crack, you’re wrong. I don’t know what you want and I wouldn’t tell you if I did so just get it over with.” Marcus’s voice was strong and defiant.
The creature laughed at him; a mocking, belittling laugh that made Marcus angry. The same sort of laugh generated in a classroom when a student stands up and says something he doesn’t mean. Marcus remembered a moment from his childhood where he stood up in a biology lesson to give a presentation and kept saying orgasm instead of organism. The reddening wave of heat that had washed over him then stroked his cheeks once more.
“You’re dead, Marcus, and I’m your judge, jury and executioner. It doesn’t matter what you say. None of it matters. Not down here.” The beast turned, revealing itself to Marcus, who felt his skin tighten as if it had shrunk two sizes.
When Marcus was twelve years old, his family had rented a cottage in the middle of the woods. They spent the vacation hiking, cycling, swimming and kayaking from sunrise until sunset, and had slept long and hard each night. However, one night towards the end, something wrenched Marcus from his sleep. A strange scuttling sound, as something scurried over the wooden floor. Marcus had ignored it as best he could; telling himself that, bugs are a part of nature, and the strange itching feeling on my legs comes from the cheap blankets, and the buzzing in his ears nothing more than the sound of mosquitoes, awake and thirsty for blood. The excuses kept him in a quasi-sleep for a while, but the excuses ran out around the time something crawled over his closed eyelids. They moved fast, like a sudden chill on a warm night. Something forced its way through Marcus’s semi-parted lips. It choked him. Legs probed his tongue, and antennae brushed the roof of his mouth, while a hard shell clacked against his teeth. Marcus sat upright, choked and unable to breath. He tried to call out. To scream for his parents, his sister, anybody, it didn’t matter. Marcus threw back the bed covers and that was when they descended on him.
Marcus retched from the memory, while the sight of the thousands of pairs of tiny legs that jutted from creature’s black pulsating underbelly was too much for him, and he vomited. The roach’s legs seemed to wave at him; they beckoned him towards them... hug me, they screamed.
Young Marcus felt the bug trying to crawl down his throat: his mouth was closed, so there was no other way for the creature to go. Coughing and spitting, Marcus tried to empty his mouth, but the roach held firm. Marcus threw the bedcovers aside. The bed was infested with roaches, ranging in size from that of a ladybug to the size of a grown man’s fist. They charged towards him like a flood, covering Marcus’s legs in a rolling sea of hazel brown bodies and black antennae. He thrashed with his legs, and while bugs fell to the floor, the covering never seemed to lessen; it was as though his lower body was in fact comprised of them. He began to hyperventilate, and in doing so he managed to suck four or five – he wasn’t sure of the exact number – roaches into his mouth before they were subsequently swallowed. Marcus had heard the stories of cockroaches being able to survive a nuclear blast, and for months afterwards he couldn’t help but wonder: had they died or merely found a warm place to sleep?
His screams had woken his parents, and they came running. His mother had fainted when she caught sight of all the bugs, while his father, ever the calm and deliberate man, had swept Marcus up and charged out of the house with him. They drove home that night and never went back to those woods again. The nightmares haunted Marcus the rest of his life. At least once a month he would wake up, his skin soaked with sweat, his legs and mouth itching from the delicate patter of their feet, acid burning in the pit of his stomach. A small part of him always believed those swallowed beasts had survived.
Marcus looked around, desperate to avoid any eye contact with the large cockroach beast, yet he was drawn to it like a moth to the flame. The beast seemed to recognize this and stood still. Even its legs seeming to have frozen, allowing Marcus to get a good look.
“Are you ready to be judged, maggot?” the creature asked. All the previous niceties – and it was a stretch to call the previous voice that – were gone.
Marcus’s eyes reached the head and he shut them just before the image hit his brain. When he opened them, he didn’t see a hideous half-insect creature like something out of a David Cronenburg movie, but something much worse. The image developed like a Polaroid picture: it took a few seconds for Marcus’s brain to assemble everything to create the image. It wasn’t a bug’s face, but a human’s. A woman’s, with creamy white skin and long black hair, and eyes a sparkling emerald green, shielded by long eyelashes, with a delicate nose, albeit one refined by a surgeon’s hand rather than that of God.
“Melanie,” Marcus croaked, his voice a broken whisper.
“Oh, how sweet, you remember me. How are you, Marcus? It’s been a while,” the once athletic-bodied college student said.
“What are you doing? Just let me go,” Marcus demanded, seeming to find his strength now that he knew his captor.
“You still don’t get it, do you? Still the same stubborn old Marcus. You’re dead, champ. Died on the streets, don’t you remember? You couldn’t save the girl either. Such a shame.” The roach creature shook its human head. With every flicked lock there was a whip-like crack followed by a bright orange flame which erupted from the tip.
Marcus looked down and saw blood flowing from his stomach. A wound glowed a bright orange like the embers of a dying fire. Everything then fell into place. The events appeared before his eyes, playing out in his head like a silent movie, only every line of text that came onto the screen was the same phonetically spelt cry. The words (Young Infant) in brackets each time told Marcus all he needed to know.
“So once again you are the Devil that comes into my life, hey, Mel?” He looked at the beast puzzlingly, eyes searching for something. He fought the rather absurd notion to smile and won.
“Don’t be foolish. I’m no Devil. I am what you want to see, what your soul has deemed to be your punisher. In actuality I am just a humble chamber guardian here to ensure that you see your past and are ready for judgment.”
The creature took a scuttling step to one side.
A hole appeared in the solid rock. Blood swirled in the opening. A whirling crimson vortex, suspended as if awaiting a command to move. It began to separate, beginning with a small circle in the center, which expanded, the blood not falling away or lessening, but merely pulling back like a curtain to reveal a play already in motion.
“You have sinned, my shadow warrior. You have known the carnal pleasures of a woman outside of your matrimonial bed. Sinners must face their punishment. Stand up for their crimes, face their victims, and let them know the truth. Let them know exactly what has happened. Only then can you hope to avoid punishment.” The voice grew in volume and lowered in pitch until every trace of femininity was gone.
“I don’t understand,” Marcus said, his head beginning to spin. He felt woozy, as if someone had spiked his drink. His eyes were drawn to the opening; it held him in a trance with a silent promise of knowledge, of answers.
The roach continued to speak as if it hadn’t heard him. “Sinners will be punished, not before God, but before the Justice Courts of the Netherworld. The kings will decide your fate. So look upon your carnage. Look as the damage your loins have caused is brought forth. Your time is at hand. How much blood do you wish to shed to hide who you are?”
Beyond the creature, the doorway or portal, for that was how Marcus saw it, had opened completely. He looked through and into another time, another place, but one he remembered as if it was only yesterday. He had just finished training, a particularly grueling session that had seen him knock out two sparring partners in successive rounds.
On the other side of the blood window Marcus was busy training for the Whitmore fight, a seasoned fighter who had only ever been beaten once, early on in his career when, much like Marcus, he had been bullheaded and cocksure. It was the fight that was to put Marcus’s name on the map. He was still somewhat of an unknown, and in the eyes of the Whitmore camp Marcus was nothing but a moving target for their man.
Marcus had had other ideas.
He had trained harder for that fight that he did for any other fight. Brutal training sessions, late night runs; midnight runs and protein shakes, early morning runs and full-time training sessions on top of that. It was all back in the days before sports nutrition became a topic studied by the masses. He had won the fight inside of three rounds, knocking his opponent out with a series of powerful body shots followed by a big right hook to an unguarded chin. By current standards the fight would have been stopped in the second round after Marcus split open Whitmore’s left eyebrow.
Silence filled both worlds. Marcus watched on, his emotions drained because he knew what came next. He realized then what he was meant to see. It was her: the woman whose head was now stuck on the body of a cockroach.
Marcus looked around. The referee stood between him and his slain opponent. The crowd was on their feet. All of them roaring for the upset that none had even contemplated. All around them flashbulbs exploded in dizzying stars of bright white light, forever capturing a piece of sporting history no matter how trivial in the grand history of the chosen sport. The sound came back to his world and with it so she entered. Rising into the ring as if summoned, called out as an offering to him, the barbarian warrior – as became his boxing name.
“Melanie,” Marcus said from within the chamber, and was rewarded with a blow across the back which felt as though it had been delivered by a baseball bat. Marcus grunted. His mouth clamped shut to hold back the scream.
Meanwhile, the picture played on. Marcus saw his hand raised in victory. And there it was: the moment that began it all. Melanie, who at the time had been a college student who looked to earn some extra cash being a ring girl at any local fight, held his other hand aloft and whispered in his ear, “Congratulations. I wonder, do you fuck as hard as you fight?” The words had been coarse and raw, unexpected given her sweet face. Melanie had had the kind of face a thousand men had fallen in love with at first glance. She was tall, her skin was tanned, and she couldn’t have been more than twenty; the same age as Marcus, who even then looked older than he was.
Marcus turned his head to look at her. She wore a pink bikini, the top of which pushed up her chest, maximizing her cleavage, and her nipples were a teasing swell beneath the fabric, while the bottoms showed her natural curves and smooth skin. Yet above it all, her emerald green eyes were what held Marcus captive.
“Why are you showing me this? It was a long time ago, come on Mela- whoever you are.”
Marcus was ashamed of his past, but then again he didn’t know anybody who wasn’t ashamed of something. Everybody has a skeleton hanging in their closet somewhere.
“Where were your wife and kids here?” the voice asked. “Where were they and what did you tell me?” the Melanie-roach asked, ignoring Marcus’s query.
“I wasn’t married back then. If you were Melanie you would have known that.” He paused.
“Where was your soon-to-be wife? Where was she that night? What was so important that she couldn’t come to your fight?” the beast asked. Marcus knew that it already knew the answer as well as he knew it himself and so he answered, refusing to get drawn into mind games.
“She was at home, pregnant with...” He paused, unable to find the right words. His breath caught in his chest.
“With your son,” it answered for him, completing the sentence Marcus took too long to answer. “It was a boy, right? That baby, the one she lost, the one that drove you to my bed night after night?” The roach smiled.
“Yeah.” Marcus looked at the floor. A sudden pain caused his chest to tighten.
The image cleared. They were in the cheap bedroom of the motel than they had driven to straight from the fight. Their passion erupted as they drove: Melanie had straddled Marcus as he drove, forcing him to make the last few turns blind. Her breasts filled his mouth, her skin pressed hard against his face as he devoured her.
“Stop,” Marcus called out. He wanted to look away, willed it with every inch of his being but just couldn’t. He turned his head as far as the bonds would allow, but the scene moved with him, as if he himself was the projector.
“What did you tell me? Where were they when you fucked me that night and the nights after that?” the Melanie in the image screamed out the questions. Digging her nails into Marcus’s back, drawing blood as she scraped deep gouges down his spine. In the chamber Marcus winced, as he felt his blood begin to flow.
“Enough, I made a mistake, I offered my penance!” he shouted, noticing then that the chamber had gotten hotter.
“No, I don’t think that was what you said. Tell me. Confess your sins, you beggaring maggot,” the voice boomed. The Melanie in the motel room slapped Marcus across the face with the back of her hand, and the real Marcus felt his cheek begin to burn.
“I told you...” He hesitated. He remembered as clear as spring water what he had told her. “That I didn’t have a woman in my life.” He stopped, raising tear reddened eyes towards the Melanie-roach. “I told you that I was single, and that if you were looking for a good time, I could give it to you.”
“Go on, maggot, redeem yourself,” it screamed at him. The multitude of legs rubbed together in sweet anticipation.
Marcus felt the tears sting his cheeks; he could feel the throbbing from the slap his other self had just been dealt. He looked back at the image, wanting to see. Melanie was on all fours, and Marcus had his face buried between her buttocks, and only then did he realize how strange sex looks when you see yourself doing it. Melanie moaned, her questions replaced by the more expected elicitations of pleasure.
As the sweat gathered on his brow, the real Marcus felt the excitement swell from within the confines of his trousers. He saw the gaze of the Melanie-roach drop to his crotch; he didn’t care. His head spun with ideas and voices; crossover exchanges copied and pasted like the adverts on TV, where different shows were taken to create one fluid dialogue.
Marcus had offered penance for his affair, he had atoned for his actions as best he could – everything other than confess to his wife. And deep down inside he knew that she knew. She had always known. Whenever they talked about that first pregnancy, she would make small comments. They sounded innocent, and would be delivered in a light-hearted manner, but there was a look in her eyes that told a different story. Most of the time she kept it hidden, but sometimes, just every now and then, it would come to the surface.
“When I asked you who the pregnant person your manager asked you about was, what did you tell me? What!” the Melanie on the bed quizzed. She bounced and slid further across the mattress with each powerful thrust. She screamed as her hand slipped between her legs, where it began to move with fervor.
“I said it was my sister who was pregnant – my sister. God damn you!” Marcus yelled as tears stung his eyes.
“Why, why did you lie?” Melanie asked as she arched her back. The words came out in a purr of ecstasy.
“Because...” Marcus began. His own breaths came short and shorter as the scene continued to play out.
“Give it to me. Give it to me now. The truth.” Melanie writhed and snaked with her hips. The bed squeaked and the headboard thumped against the wall.
“Because I wanted to fuck you. You pranced around in your bikini, winking at me, flashing me whatever you thought you could get away with, and I wanted to see what you had, to taste you. I wanted to fuck you every way I knew how and then do it all over again. Are you happy? Hey!” Marcus bellowed, as the floodgates in his mind, those erected many years ago, came tumbling down, releasing everything that he had pent up inside himself
“Yes, yes!” Melanie screamed, collapsing onto the bed, and Marcus fell on top of her – while the real Marcus collapsed into his restraints. His penis twitched in his trousers. “Finally we have the truth,” Melanie panted. Her hair was wet and stuck to her flushed face. She rose from the bed and looked directly through the portal; she looked at Marcus. She smiled. “You have been observed and judged, my barbarian lover.” She blew him a kiss and the portal closed. The blood wall reformed before bursting like a blister, showering Marcus with a warm blood mist.
“I never loved you,” he said to the room, to himself. Needing to hear the words. It was true. Maybe at the beginning he thought he did, but at the end he knew better. Melanie was a slut, plain and simple. Melanie had been relentless, an animal in bed, unable to get enough satisfaction, and it had been that craving within her that had grabbed Marcus’s attention. When he called it off, sweat drenching his clothes in fear of her reaction and the consequences it could bring, Melanie had merely stood up, and taken it – as she did other things – like a man. They hugged, she kissed him on the cheek, and left. That had been the last time Marcus had ever seen her.
“It makes no difference, maggot. Besides, the time for apologies has passed. You have been judged, your crimes presented before the Kings. Now you must suffer the fate of all such sinners. The Chamber of Oil Cauldrons awaits you. Now go; get out of my sight!” the Melanie-roach screamed, the words uttered as the mask was dropped and the creature’s true face was reve