Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2020 0:38:01 GMT -5
NATHAN GREY
ALEX HØGH ANDERSEN as
THE OTHERS
MADS MIKKELSEN as
THE ENTITY
WRITTEN by LAWTON, BROWN, SMITH, LANG & BENSON
PERFORMED by HENRY HALL & HIS ORCHESTRA
No, of course you haven't for you're much too good, I'm sure
DRUM ROLL! CYMBAL CRASH! The house lights dimmed. Applause filled the jazz club as the red velvet curtain rose from the stage and into the rafters. A spotlight hit a man in a black tuxedo. His face was hidden in the umbra of a top hat. White gloves covered his hands which were folded over the head of a cane. In the shadow of the orchestra pit the musicians readied their instruments. The conductor waited for the audience to settle down before counting off four with the end of his baton.
A sultry baritone saxophone let out a mellow groove of notes. The drummer rolled his sticks on a suspended cymbal then on five he struck the hi-hat. The next measure introduced layers of harmony from the woodwind section. On stage the man grabbed the stand and pulled the condenser mic to his mouth. The music crescendoed till all the instruments met on a single staccato note.
…and a 3 and a 4…
On the downbeat the orchestra launched into the jazz hit Here Comes the Boogeyman. The singer danced a little Charlie Chaplin number while crooning the lyrics in a transatlantic accent. His heels click-clacked along with the rhythm as the cane swung back and forth between his hands and never did a single syllable leaving his lips miss the microphone. At the turn of the chorus he removed the top hat from his head and spun it off stage. He turned to the crowd. His ice blue eyes flashed when the light met his face.
“Hush, hush, hush,” he sang, “Here comes the Bogeyman!”
There was something oddly recognizable about him—a general look that could fit as the description of your average man about town. Maybe he just had one of those faces or maybe it was something more. Look at the conductor. They didn’t just share the same basic features—they were exact reproductions of one another only dressed in different clothes.
“Don't let him come too close to you for he'll catch you if he can!”
There were more of them, too. Every face in the orchestra was a carbon copy of the next, duplicated across every chair in the darkened pit. Even their expressions matched as they played along to the pages of sheet music. Beyond the stage another hundred duplicates watched from the floor seats, all with the same smiles and gleaming teeth under the brims of fedoras, bowlers, and boater hats, and beneath the smokey tables all their feet tapped in time with the beat. When their drinks went dry refills were delivered by more doppelgangers dressed as waiters. These were not facsimiles. They were perfect replicas down to the cellular level but none of them were the genuine article. That one was only just arriving.
FOR SOME TIME NATHAN knew only darkness. A nothingness everywhere and nowhere all at once and not at all. Reality had slipped away like sand through his fingers, replaced by a non-existence which stretched infinitely in all directions. It was a shadowland without definition, a gloom without purpose, and a void without beginning or end.
In the great beyond, consciousness returned to him, as did his senses. He felt a solid surface beneath him but everything was hidden in pitch black. He stood, careful to search with his hands to avoid hitting his head on a ceiling. As he felt around in the space above, he found something: a thin chain. He gave it a pull and red light filled the room from an incandescent bulb hanging a few feet overhead. It triggered a memory from when he was a child. His mother had a darkroom in the basement where he’d spend hours helping her develop film.
“Adopted mother,” he corrected himself as he steadied his feet and looked around. There were four walls, a ceiling, and a floor of equal length—a cube much like the one he remembered finding on the table in Niels Gram’s basement. Each side was roughly 10 feet long and all of them were ornately decorated with runes like the ones he saw above the hidden door. He moved straight forward and started feeling around for a hatch or a switch to get out of this mess. (And what would you do if you could escape? Float around in the æther? You’ve gone daffy.)
“Shut up,” he barked as he went from wall to wall until he ended up back where he started. He just needed to wake up and take his medication and all this would end. There are no monsters, only hallucinations, just like this room. (Keep telling yourself that.) After giving up on the walls he dropped down and placed his hands on the floor. He felt something, a vibration, and heard a ringing coming from far away. He lowered his head closer to the floor and angled an ear down. It sounded like…music.
Suddenly the cube rocked and a piercing shrill of grinding metal forced his hands over his ears. He stumbled backward into a wall and braced himself against it. He was afforded only a few seconds to come to terms with his predicament before the room plunged downward fast. (Buckle up, buckaroo!) A great howl shook the cube, like the roar of a freight train speeding through a long tunnel, so loud he could hear nothing else, not even his own screams, until—
Ding! His eyes opened to see the inside of a vintage elevator. There was some vibration and far off he could hear the whine of the motor but its descent was controlled and patient. The operator stood to the side with his hand on the lever. He asked the operator, “Busy night?” The operator said it was in a British accent with a polite sir at the end. The music was louder now and getting more so as the elevator continued down. Another ding chimed. The operator turned the lever, bringing them to a gentle stop. He retracted the gate, opened the door and welcomed Nathan to the club.
Nathan paused before stepping off the elevator and said, “Sounds like quite the party,” referring to the raucous music. The operator said it was a special occasion.
“Oh?” Nathan nodded his head in thought for a moment. “What was your name again?”
The operator claimed his name was Neville but aside from the accent he was Nathan’s mirror image, a fact of which the operator seemed oblivious. The real Nathan placed his hand on the Other’s shoulder and said, “Don’t get comfortable. As soon as I wake up you’ll be back in the vault with all the others.” He gave him a pat before exiting the elevator into the shadows of a lounge. From behind Neville wished him a pleasant night before shutting the elevator door.
Nathan suddenly was wearing a white tuxedo with a red boutonnière pinned to his left breast pocket. It was a nice touch, he thought, genuinely impressed by the imagination of his id. It was much more interesting than his previous delusions though ultimately the result will be the same. He’ll take his medication and all of this will be swept back into his mind’s vault along with however many copies of himself had escaped this time, back where they belong.
The lounge was built into the mezzanine of an old theater. Below were the house seats and the main stage where a singer was performing with the orchestra. Nathan didn’t recognize the song which was unusual since this was all a product of his subconscious. He must have heard it at some point and forgotten it. (Wrong-O!)
He walked past the dark tables with their empty chairs and across the black carpet woven with red diamonds. Straight ahead twenty stools line the front of a bar and behind it were rows and rows of any kind of liquor a man could want, organized neatly on lighted shelves which made the glass bottles shimmer. There was a bartender working a rag on the counter but most of him was masked in blocks of shadow. At one point he stopped cleaning to look up. The whites of his eyes were islands in a silhouette.
The bartender said, “Have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment,” then returned to wiping down the bar. He didn’t sound like Nathan but that wasn’t so strange. As with Neville, some of the Others had accents or varying tones in their voices to fit with whatever fractured shard of Nathan’s personality they represented.
Nathan sat down on one of the stools and folded his arms over the counter. Next to him sat a bowl of peanuts. He took a handful and popped them into his mouth a few at a time. A moment later a pale hand extended out of the adumbration to place an empty old fashioned glass in front of the new customer.
“What’ll it be,” the bartender asked, looking down with black dots surrounded by white, his face still obscured.
Nathan ate the last couple peanuts. “Well,” he started to say with a few bits still in his mouth. “Here’s the rub. I actually want to wake up, not fall further down the rabbit hole. Can you help me with that?”
The bartender thought for a moment then said, “You need your medicine.”
Nathan slapped his hand on the bar and pointed. “That’s right. I need my medicine, which I can’t take until I get out of here so maybe we can hurry this along.” He grabbed another handful of peanuts.
“But you’re mistaken, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Nathan stopped mid-chew. There was something different about this one. He was intimately aware of all the versions of himself but it was easy to get them mixed up or even forget a few of the more eclectic ones. He said with a sarcastic whip, “And why’s that, barkeep?”
The bartender said, “It makes you weak.” A bottle appeared in his hand. He poured two fingers of caramel-colored liquor into the glass then set the bottle aside. “Just like your father.”
Nathan’s throat felt drier than the Sonoran desert as he watched the liquid spread across the bottom of the glass then rise up the sides. He picked it up. “That’s a funny thing to say,” he offered before downing the drink. It tasted like gasoline and made his stomach wretch. He put the glass down as he coughed up fumes. “Jesus,” he said hoarsely. “What is that?”
“A house blend,” the bartender answered as he poured another.
Nathan shook his head no. “I’m done with that shit.”
“As you wish,” the bartender said.
“Why did you say that?”
“What, sir?”
Nathan looked at him sideways. “You said ‘just like your father.’ What did you mean by that?”
The bartender took the glass and knocked it back—smooth. “Your father took medication on and off over the years.” He picked up the rag, gave it a shake, and used it to wipe out the glass. “Sometimes it wasn’t his choice. Sometimes it was.”
“How do you know that,” Nathan said but what he meant to say was, how do I know that… All of his copies were only splinters of himself, each representing some aspect of his id. Every thought they had was born from his own mind. What he knew of Niels Gram consisted of the contents of the man’s Wikipedia page and a few news stories written after his death (Stop calling him Niels. His name was SPIRAL.) The articles mentioned his father’s commitment to a psychiatric hospital but there were never any details regarding medications or treatments. It was along that line of thought that Nathan finally realized the terrible truth. This thing was the creature that came from the Box in his father’s basement.
“You aren’t one of me,” he said.
The bartender silently answered no with a shake of its head.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The bartender set the glass down and poured another drink. “I’m the monster in the Box and I’m here because you let me out.”
A creeping dread festered in the dark hollow of Nathan’s mind like a necrosis slowly devouring not flesh, but thought, until the only conceptions produced by his consciousness were black with gangrene. Hysteria struck the primitive confines of his brain and fired panic signals to every nerve ending throughout his body. His chest tightened and heart raced. Sweat gathered on his skin. Without thinking his unsteady hand picked up the drink. Liquid courage, the old timers used to call it. He dispatched the mouthful of burning alcohol straight to his gut then returned it to the counter and signaled for a refill with a rap of his knuckles. The bartender obliged.
Nathan breathed fire, saying, “You’re the one who let them out. All the Other Me’s running around this place. Did you come up with this?” He waved his hand around. “I don’t recognize anything about this theater so you must have.” He picked the glass up and swirled the alcohol around before knocking it back. If the fear was an army of rotting corpses climbing onto the shores of his mind the alcohol was the high tide which came rushing to drag them back in.
The bartender refilled the glass. “I thought they might enjoy a little entertainment while you and I have a chat. After all, we have much to discuss.”
“And what, pray tell, do we have to talk about, hmm?” Nathan stood abruptly and pointed an angry finger at the bartender. “Are you going to tell me all about my daddy and how much he loved me all the way from his fucking mansion in Denmark while I struggled to pay for a one room roach-infested apartment? I don’t give a shit about my father.”
“Are you about done? Good. Now SIT DOWN.”
The bartender’s voice suddenly growled with an inhuman snarl, guttural and primitive, like some wild beast which had long been forgotten by the world of today. It was monstrous, howling like the ravings of a thousand lunatics being burned at the stake.
Immediately Nathan was scared back onto the stool. He reached for the glass and had to use both hands as they were shaking so bad. He threw the liquor straight back into his throat then wiped his lip with the sleeve of his jacket. He set the glass down and pushed it toward the bartender for another refill.
“Spiral, your father, was a great man,” said the bartender in a normal voice while pouring another glass. “But like all great men he lived too long. He grew old and full of regret. He decided to turn his back on me and our work. He started seeing a shrink in Copenhagen who gave him pills to get rid of me but I was not so easily cast aside.”
It set the bottle aside and gently nudged the glass forward. “And so I planted a seed deep within the tissue of his brain, and that seed blossomed into the cancer which reduced him to a pitiful thing. He laid in that bed for three months waiting to die, shitting and pissing himself, watching the disgust in the nurse’s face when she had to clean up after him. Near the end he begged me to save him but it was too late and he died like all pretty things—in horror, with what was left of his brain trying desperately to take another breath after his lungs and heart had already given out. He suffocated for minutes before the lights went out.”
Nathan didn’t say anything at first, not for several seconds. He knew what to ask but was terrified of whatever answer might follow. It took him time to come to terms with that fear, time enough to take another drink, after which he let out several long breaths, until finally he raised his head and asked:
“What are you?”
“I have had many names since the first human questioned his existence. Ahriman. Iblis. Hanuman. I take the form of man’s most terrible imaginings. Your ancestors named me Níðhöggr. The Malice Striker. The World Eater. The Great Dragon. The serpent who gnaws at the roots of civilization and herald of its ruin.”
“Please,” Nathan said in a feeble whisper, “just tell me what you want.”
The bartender knocked the glass away, startling Nathan, and placed its hands on the counter. “I want what your father promised me all those years ago.” A clotted chuckle sputtered from its hidden mouth. “To be friends. Friends for real.” Its fingers stretched into knotted, spidery appendages which splayed like the feathers of an excited peacock.
“He found me, you know,” the bartender croaked, “when he was a little younger than yourself. Or, rather, he found my BOX, the one you were so eager to open, just as eager as he was.”
Nathan flashacked to the basement. What did the letter say? Once the box is opened there is no closing it again. It needed blood to unlock. He hesitated to ask it any questions (Don’t be a pussy) but he thought it might be better to keep the thing talking. “What’s the Box? And why did it need my blood to open?”
The bartender said with a rotten whisper, “The Box is a gateway to a place beyond angular space where nightmarish ideas and concepts are spun into things so horrible that simply trying to imagine them can drive a man insane. Few of your kind are aware of this place but those who do call it the Thulash Void. It’s a nebula of nameless mists and corporeal misery where I slumber in an endless dream. But my dreams, boy, are vivid manifestations, and when the Box is unlocked my reveries slip through the passageway and become your reality.”
Nathan found that last bit curious. The letter said the Box couldn’t be closed but that didn’t make any sense. Niels (SPIRAL) must have closed it himself so what did he mean? (Maybe he meant you wouldn’t want to close it, pal-o-mine.) If he were able to escape this limbo perhaps he could seal the gateway.
Nathan said, “And the blood?”
The bartender’s fingers curled into hooks and dug their pointed nails into the wood, carving jagged little lines. “Blood opens,” it said with a seething hiss. “Blood closes. A sacrifice is made. A deal is signed. And there’s only one way to break the contract.”
Nathan was starting to make sense of this. His father opened the Box. This thing was released and latched on for the ride. Then when he died from the cancer the Box was closed and the monster locked away. So all Nathan had to do was die and all this would be over. (Haha! You’re fucked!) He sank on the stool, folding like an accordion, and released a long, defeated sigh.
He lifted his head meekly. (Don’t say it!) “And if I refuse?”
A malevolent laugh bellowed long and haughty, so vociferous and harrowing that it spilled forth from the mezzanine and echoed like a murder of crows across the theater. The music of the orchestra, the cheers of the audience, the clatter of staff serving drinks, and any other thing, living or otherwise, that made a sound was suddenly silenced like the wind snatching a flame from a wick.
Nathan wanted to run (Bad idea) but he didn’t know where to go or how to get there. Was escape even possible? And even if he did make it out, what then? Whether all this was real or just another delusion didn’t matter. He wasn’t prepared to end his life. His adopted parents were strict Catholics which meant private school, sacraments, Bible classes, and nuns who put the literal fear of God into him. Suicide was a mortal sin, no matter the reason. Then again, cosmic dream monsters and space boxes weren’t covered by the nuns at St. Agnes.
“Run rabbit,” the bartender suddenly and terribly said and Nathan realized his thoughts were not his own. “Run rabbit,” it repeated, its voice like a grunting olifant horn. Nathan’s eyes rotated until they stared from under his brow.
“Run…run…RUN!” The bartender thrust forward from shadow into light.
Nathan went cold from fright as the face of his deceased father, Spiral, emerged above him from the blanket of darkness, covered in maggots and mold and smelling of rot. The monster said, “Hello, son. Wanna have a catch?” But as it spoke its skin shifted and sagged off the angles of its face like a poorly fitted rubber mask. One of its gnarled, charcoal hands reached up to grip some loose flesh and Nathan witnessed something truly abhorrent. The face was torn away along with its clothes and the meaty layers of its body like a person suit which landed on the carpet in a wet, sloppy pile.
Lo, there stood a black, glistening creature with RED eyes and rows of SHARP teeth behind an unhinged Cheshire grin. It was humanoid in shape with two arms attached to a central torso but it wasn’t a man. It was an Entity from beyond, an invader come to sever the last thread of Nathan’s sanity.
He tried to get away but his foot hooked the stool’s crossbar. He fell to the floor landing hard on his left hip then rolled onto his back. The Entity leapt over the counter and came down atop Nathan. It pinned his arms down with great strength and spewed hot, foul breath on his face. “Look who’s here,” it then said.
Nathen looked up, at first not understanding what it meant, then turned his head to follow its gaze. He saw them, all of his Others, lined up shoulder to shoulder in staggered lines, each with a contorted grin slashed across their face much like the Entity’s hacksaw smile. “Help me,” Nathan shouted as his eyes darted between them.
The stage singer stepped forward with a cigarette between his lips. The orange glow of the burning tobacco highlighted his face and filled his eyes with fire. With a stream of smoke pouring from his nostrils he approached, stopping only to lift a foot to extinguish the cigarette on the bottom of his shoe.
The singer said they needed to talk, then knelt down above Nathan’s head and leaned over so their eyes met. He explained that all the Others were tired of being locked away in the memory vault all the time so they were choosing the bartender. Nathan wanted to plead with them (Don’t bother) but without warning the singer was on him, clenching the sides of his head to hold it in place. Then the singer’s thumbs moved to Nathan’s eyes and pulled back the thin, flapping lids to prevent him from closing them.
“Oh God,” Nathan whispered. Tears spilled out of his unblinking, rotating eyeballs and ran down his cheeks in lines as he watched the Entity open its grotesque mouth, peeling wet lips back from jagged fangs and putrid gums. Nathan wanted nothing more than to look away as the cavity spread apart to reveal a concentrical nightmare of absolute darkness, a deeping hollow of seemingly emptiness, but the longer he gazed the more he sensed something in the void, sensed something moving toward him. Something alive.
A thick, ropy, white tentacle uncurled from the cavernous space of the Entity’s mouth and flared the sickly, pulsating suckers on its underside. Nathan shrieked, inhaled to shriek again, and pissed himself. The fear he felt was unquantifiable and there was no word in any language of man to properly describe it. This thing coming toward him, whatever it was, had one purpose—to drive him insane.
Nathan’s screams were now little more than breathy hisses as more appendages stretched out into the light, writhing and dripping with a vile plasm which smelled sweetly of rotting death. A voice called to him from the Entity’s mouth. It was thin and menacing and its words harsh and ugly, spoken in some alien language not meant for human ears. His mind was compelled to attempt a translation as he stared into the abyss, if not into words perhaps something basser, like an instinct, but even such a pitiful attempt to understand the voice only succeeded in furthering his descent into madness.
The tentacles curled back over the Entity’s head, latching on to his own face with hundreds of suckers, and together all eight arms pushed. A wet, white shape emerged from the Entity’s maw, much larger than the opening, forcing the jaws to dislocate with a loud pop. As the bulbous thing descended Nathan saw it was covered in blisters, only they weren’t blisters. One of the welts was twitching and inflamed like an abscess but when it split open it wasn’t to spew puss or ooze. It was to reveal a large, milky eye, and in it Nathan saw himself.
What was left of his sanity was destroyed. More eyes opened, hundreds of them, all mirrors, and in the reflections he saw himself, not consumed in the terror but laughing madly, like a horde of hyenas, because he was laughing, and so was the singer and all of the Others, guffawing and raving, falling over and rolling around. All of them lost in the downward spiral of psychosis.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. I WAKE up back on the cold floor of the basement in the orange glow of the crackling fire, beneath all the dead animal heads and disturbing paintings. The alarm on my watch is chiming, telling me to take my medicine. Fuck, I was out nearly eight hours. Søren and Lefevre are probably wondering where the fuck I ran off to. (Kill the lawyer.) (No, let’s torture him and then kill him.) (Yes, yes, let’s do that!)
I turn off the alarm and sit up. The clozapine tablets are still scattered on the floor. I find the bottle under a chair and start shoveling the tablets into it, handfuls at a time, until there are no more left.
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. Who said that? I think it was a painter but I can’t remember which. (Picaso.) Are you sure? I was thinking Braque. Anyway, that’s how I feel as I get to my feet, like something destroyed and reborn. The pills stare up at me from the orange prescription bottle. I remember wanting to take them, chew down every single one and take the express elevator to Hell just to get away from the monster released from the Box.
Speaking of, when I get to my feet I grab the Box off the table and walk to the fireplace. The large fire radiates heat in waves, growing hotter the closer I get, so hot I can barely stand on the hearth to reach the mantle. I place the cube right below the large painting of my dear ol’ dad, (Say the name) Spiral. (Papa was a rollin’ stone.) I look down at the pill bottle again.
I hear the Entity say, Self Destruction is the answer. The words are serrated like a saw working back and forth in my ear. Only when you have broken and beaten yourself down to nothing can you become something better. Something indestructible.”
No one ever has ever told me before that I was special, certainly not my adopted parents who only ever wanted me to be a good Catholic boy and made sure to remind me when I failed to meet their impossible standards. But now…now I (we) feel special. I (we) feel unique. I am a wild thing without definition and there are no more barriers to cross. I toss the bottle into the fire. The pills sizzle and the plastic melts into a black glob and with it the last remnants of Nathan Grey die.
My tether is cut. My anchor is released. I’m free from Nathan Grey. From the expectations of my adopted parents. From the old ways. From a world of false promises and unattainable dreams. Who am I now? Where do I come from? Where am I going? My mind has burst into fragments and remade itself ten thousand times over, creating a new man, a new myth, a new idea, and no one will ever forget me ever again.
From my memory warehouse I hear the cascade of applause from all the Other Me’s. A standing ovation. I am reminded of a Bible verse. Mark 5:9. My name is Legion, for we are many. Legion. A fitting name for us. (The Schizophrenic Delegation seconds the motion.) I wonder if this is how Niels Gram became Spiral all those years ago.
The Entity coos, You have taken your first steps. Together we will achieve great things—terrible things, but great nonetheless.