Alex and The Gruff (A Tale of Horror)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Room four was dark, very dark. Alex placed The Gruff neatly on the floor. He didn’t just dump him like a ragged doll. He placed him carefully so that his head wouldn’t rattle and his back wouldn’t hurt even if he was in his dream.

  Alex stretched his hands out wide. He didn’t know where the walls were and more so, where the light switch was. He leaned down to the ground and closed his eyes kind of, just so he didn’t accidentally poke them into anything as he moved slowly round the room. He had that feeling, like when he would go through his father’s wallet, that at any second something was about to happen, either a judging voice would clear its throat and ask what the hell was going on or he’d walk into something pointy that was sticking out of somewhere and he’d bruise his head.

  Eventually, he found himself running his hand against a wall. It didn’t feel like the others, though. This was covered in paper. Maybe wallpaper but if it was, they did a really bad job because it was all sticking up and flopping about and there were a lot of dog ears, folded back and poking out.

  Alex moved his hand gently along the wall, careful not to tear any of the wallpaper. He ran his left hand along, waving it up and down and trying to imagine where a switch might be, all the while, shielding his face with his elbow and arm, certain that there was something there always about to bump into him.

  He could hear The Gruff still breathing heavy. He was still trapped in his slumber but his body was stirring and he wouldn’t be asleep for long. Alex moved about the room thinking that he was floating through a galaxy, just a lone planet spinning through the vast black emptiness, looking for the sun to make his home.

  All of a sudden, it seemed like the things he was afraid of was infinitely miniscule and infinitely far from his spinning self. He could throw himself in any direction and he would still only find more empty space between him and where it was he imagined himself being.

  And that it just what he did. Alex stepped away from the wall. He let go of his concern. He stretched his arms out wide, as wide as they could. And then he turned. He turned so fast that all of the air in the room and some of the dust swept up by it, it turned with him, it turned around him.

  Alex spun in wild magnificent circles around the black empty space. As he spun, he bent his knees and he leapt into the air and when he crashed back down, he almost lost his footing. He almost tripped over his twisting feet and crashed face first into the ground. He almost did, but he didn’t.

  He twisted and he turned and he spun on his toes and he tipped to one side and then he tipped unto the other and he jumped and he danced and he twisted and he turned and spun around the universe and the universe, it spun around him.

  And when he stopped, his head was spinning. It was spinning faster than his body had. His thoughts were a whirlpool turning over themselves and sinking into his stomach. He felt sick and dizzy and so he threw his hand out to brace himself and then the sun opened her eye. She burst her radiance through the black empty space and colored his skin.

  Alex looked up. It was so beautiful. She was so alive. He reached upwards, up towards her gleaming eye and he held her in the palm of his hand. She was so near. She had never been this near. She had never felt her so warm against his skin. She had never shone so bright in his eye. His hand was clasped around her. He had one eye closed and the other watching his scrunching fingers. Slowly, he lifted finger by finger, peeling them back into the open space until his hand left her restraint and it drifted free by the side of his planetary body.

  Alex closed his eyes. He squinted as tight as he could. He could see her in her form. She glowed inside the darkness of his mind. And her colors they changed so wonderfully and wherever he looked, she was always right there, lighting up the furthest and most desolate corners of space.

  He opened his eyes again and this time he saw faces. They were everywhere. There were hundreds of them, maybe more. What he thought was wallpaper were many pictures cut from newspapers and taped on top of and next to each other, all along the wall. He turned his body. He followed every wall. And on every wall, there was not a lick of paint to be seen, only hundreds or maybe thousands of children’s faces.

  His heart was beating fast. He neared closer to see the pictures up close. All of the children looked somewhat the same. Their pictures were all proper like they’d been told to sit and hold that position and it looked neither comfortable nor real. It looked like his picture on the front page in room seven.

  Alex ran his hands along the papered wall. All of them, they all were cut from newspapers; clippings of missing children that were collaged into a private nursery dressing. Some of the papers looked newish. The whites were still very white and the blacks were still bold and very black. Some of them, though, they looked very old. The whites were more like yellow and the blacks were eroding themselves off of the page.

  Alex looked at the pictures of the boys. They all looked so similar. Their hair was pulled and tied back behind their ears. Neither of them was smiling. Not a real smile anyway. It looked as if some invisible wire were dug into the corners of their mouths and some invisible hands, somewhere out of shot, were pulling on those wires and forcing the boy’s mouth to pull and then pin them into a content and affective stare.

  Under each picture was a name. One boy, his name was Steven and another was called Graham. They looked like they could have been brothers. They were almost the same age when they were taken, but they’d been taken from different cities. Alex could see this by the names of each of the papers that were printed below each picture.

  Steven was six and Graham was seven. One was taken from outside his school, the other, from an open window that hanged over his warm bed. Graham was supposed to take the bus home. He was an only child of a single mother. His father left him when he was just young. His mother was a nurse and she worked long shifts so that they could pay their bills. She was never there to see him off in the morning and she was never there to tuck him in at night. He was last seen playing tag by the back of the bus.

  Steven had both a mother and a father. They worked a lot too but not so much that they couldn’t see him off every morning or chase away the ghosts that spooked him under his bed every night.

  But Steven’s mother and father, they worried like all good mothers and fathers. They worried about traffic accidents and report cards and whether or not they could put him through college, even though he was still just six. And like most parents, they looked to insure their worry, to pay someone to look over it and take it out their hands and out their minds so that when they saw their son, they were free to think about what color was the brightest, what star was the farthest away, which ball they could kick the longest and whether or not he wanted to be a race car driver or an astronaut.

  They bought health insurance and life insurance and income insurance and car insurance. They insured their house, they insured their money, they insured their debt and they even insured their two cats and their kittens. But the one thing they couldn’t insure was their six year old son and on a warm balmy night with his window wide open, he was taken from the comfort of his bed, never brought back alive. And all that insurance meant nothing.

  And there were hundreds more boys like Steven and Graham and they all had the same unfortunate story to tell and they were taken from their beds or on their way home while their mothers were working or busy on the phone.

  When no one was watching or even around, they were taken without warning, without even a sound.

  Alex ran his finger lightly along the wall from picture to picture and some of the older ones; the real older ones, their takings, they happened over fifty or sixty or seventy years ago and one of them was even longer. This had been happening for so long. All of these boys had been taken from their homes and kept here, in this room, on this wall.

  He wanted to rip it all apart, to dig his nails into the folded edges and tear them into a thousand billion trillion pieces, so small that nobody would ever be able to see their faces again at
least nobody that would celebrate their taking.

  “Don’t be scared.”

  Alex froze. The Gruff was awake. He was standing beside him and he had his tiny arm locked around his right leg and his little hand was massaging his knee.

  “Do you like it?” asked The Gruff.

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re my friends, all of them.”

  “You knew them all? Every one?’

  “They all lived here, every one of them. We had so much fun” said The Gruff, looking around at all of the faces, remembering all of the embraces and the great times they had shared but oh, how they all grew so very big and how their ages got so very old.

  Alex turned away from all the children’s faces and looked down at The Gruff who looked so proud of all the children he had saved.

  “Why?” asked Alex.

  He had no other idea what to say or what to ask. There were a thousand ideas that needed to be understood and he couldn’t catch a single one to put at the end of that question. So all he could say was that one word, why?

  The Gruff moved over to the wall and he rested his palm against a very old picture. It was so old that the whites had changed from yellow to brown and the picture of the boy had faded so his eyes looked like two black dots and his polite smile, merely a fold across scratched and etched ink.

  But for The Gruff, his face etched not on the wrinkling paper, but in the recess and horror of his mind. His was the face of the young boy that wept every night. Even when he was given as a gift to quieten the boy by his captors, still, as the child ran his little hands through The Gruff’s funny looking hair, the boy wept continuously.

  The Gruff started to cry himself.

  “He was my friend, my first friend. His name was Alexander, like you, but he didn’t cut it short. He pronounced it Alexander and I did too. I don’t know why names were always cut so short when it was so dear to be allowed to say them at all. People are stupid.”

  “Did you take him too?”

  The Gruff pulled the picture close to his heart. He squinted his eyes, scrunched his face and swallowed the lump in his throat.

  “No. I couldn’t save Alexander.”

  He saw the boy’s face in his mind. He tried to close his eyes, but it only made it worse. And like those bright sun spots in Alex’s playful mind, The Gruff was haunted by lustrous doldrums with the bright luminescent face of a young boy floating about the void in his cerebral eye and the child bore; like Saturn’s rings, a cavernous red mark around his neck which captured the tears that licked free from his eyes.

  “Who was he?” asked Alex.

  The Gruff squeezed his hand against his face, so tight that his nails scratched against his plastic skin and the short stabbing pain cut the image in his mind like a broken circuit. He was looking again at Alex and he felt still like he was inside that box.

  “He was my going to be my friend. And we would have been best friends too. If it wasn’t for those god damn….”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “I was given to Alexander for his birthday. I was his special present. I was supposed to make him happy and I guess, make him forget about all the horrible things they had done.”

  “Who?”

  “The Lady and The Man.”

  “Who were they?”

  “The Lady was his mum. She wasn’t very nice. But I never saw her. I just heard her voice. She never came into his room, not once. She didn’t ask how he was. She didn’t kiss him goodnight. She didn’t check on him while he was pretending to sleep. She didn’t care if he was ok and she did nothing to stop those things that happened.”

  “And The Man?”

  “He came in every night. Sometimes four, five times a day. He had hollow eyes and a salivating tongue, like a hungry lion picking on a wounded calf. He always had that same look, like he knew just what was best. I’ll never forget it. But Alexander, he had no voice. He was real polite, really nice even when The Man took off his belt. He said nothing. He smiled as if he thought it was fun. But I could see, though, this was just something he learned how to do because he never smiled when he was around me, not like he did with him, not when we were alone. And I was his friend. And I didn’t want to do those kinds of things to him.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “It’s the things that grown-ups and animals do. You don’t want to know. It’s not for kids. Not for you.”

  “Is he ok?”

  “He died Alex. A long time ago. He died.”

  “How did he die?”

  Alex asked him the question, but he had no idea of what it meant. The Gruff took the picture of the boy and he sat down cross legged. He held the picture in his hands between his lap. He looked up and he saw Alex staring at him with his big kind cat-like eyes and he didn’t feel so frightened to look at the boy’s face anymore.

  “The first time I met him, everything was black. I woke up with hands and my legs tied inside of a box.”

  Alex rubbed with his own hands, the marks around his ankles. He still had small splinters dug into his skin from where he was scratching at the box that he himself had woken to. He still had the marks on his legs where something hard and heavy had punctured through the box and smacked against him.

  “I guess I assumed that I was going to see his fingers; like knives, stabbing through the paper and ripping it to pieces, desperate to get at whatever was presented under that wrapping and inside that box. They didn’t though. I was carried out of a car and everything was already black. The box I was in had been packaged and wrapped long before The Man came to take me home. I remember he was rough. I had to grip the sides and push my legs out, just so I wouldn’t bounce around. I couldn’t see what was happening and everything was shaking and bouncing and I could tell that he didn’t care if anything happened to me. I remember being brought into the house and he must have sat me down on the sofa or something cause I could hear him talking to Alex’s mum. It was his birthday. She didn’t know, though. She couldn’t remember. She kept arguing with The Man that it wasn’t, that his birthday was in September. He kept calling her a stupid whore. He said that it was her birthday that was in September and Alexander’s was in April. That’s when I first guessed that something was wrong, that this wasn’t gonna be a happy birthday, not like I imagined anyway. The Man, he said real nice things about Alexander, he called him his boy, even though there was no relation. The Lady, though, she was mean. She talked about him like he was a disease or a cyst or something. Like he was something they cut out of her and that she had kept, growing in a jar. She called him a thing, can you believe that?” asked The Gruff, looking at Alex with disbelieving eyes.

  Alex returned the same wretched stare. He couldn’t believe that anyone would have that kind of life. It was hard to imagine that a mother could ever be so foreign to her heart, to the things that loved and needed her so much. It sounded like The Gruff was just making it all up.

  Alex thought of his own mother. She could be a pain sometimes and though her patience was more often tried and worn thin, she was taken to giving him a forgiving hug, a look of assurance or a kiss goodnight. For regardless of what devil he had been that day, at night he was always her angel. And it was hard, almost impossible, to imagine a mother being anything but what a mother was supposed to be.

  “The Man, he picked me up and he took me downstairs to where they kept Alexander. He gave me to Alexander as a present. I honestly thought he was gonna tear through that paper. I thought I’d see these scavenging fingers ripping it to shreds, but he didn’t. The Man, he said happy birthday and he put me down on the floor beside Alexander’s bed. But he didn’t take me out right away. I stayed there in the dark and I heard so many horrible things. That was when I realized how sorry I felt for this boy. A toy is supposed to bring joy to a child. All that I brought was insult. I was his reward for keeping his mouth shut, for having no voice, for being polite, for being a good little boy, for doing what was expected of him.”

&n
bsp; The Gruff wiped away a tear that was running down his face. Alex had seen him mad and bored and frustrated and all types of moody but he hadn’t really seen him sad, not like this. Alex sat down cross legged in front of him and he stared with The Gruff at the picture of the boy.

  “You know what I remember the most?”

  Alex’s stare was spent upon the picture of the boy.

  He offered no response.

  “I remember the sound that his belt made when he took it off; the clanking sound of the buckle. And then the sound of leather stretching as he wrapped the belt around his clenched fist. And then the thumping. It was horrible, just, thump, thump, thump. You know, the sound of someone being punched in real life, it’s so different to the movies. It’s hard to explain. It sounds flat. And then after every thump, Alexander made these sounds that I guess was like air escaping or something. But he didn’t cry, not once. I think it was a day or two later. I can’t be sure. Down here it’s hard to tell. There’s no day and there’s no night. But it was a while anyway. And Alexander he never really slept. I could tell even though I couldn’t see outside of my box. I could tell by the way he breathed. It would change a lot. One minute it would be heavy and then a second later it would be real calm and light. Just as if he were thinking about something the whole time. But a couple of days later, Alexander picked me up and he put me down beside him on the bed. He was real slow at picking off the tape. He peeled it real slow and I saw later that he took each piece and he carefully rolled it back into a ball and kept it on the floor where his hand hanged over the bed when he slept. Then he took off the wrapping and that’s when I saw him. He didn’t look anything like his picture. Not like he does here. His eyes were like a swimming pool. It was hard to look into them and see straight through. They were different to your eyes” he said, looking up at Alex.

  “He doesn’t look very happy there either,” said Alex.

  “I know. No one ever does” said The Gruff looking around at the hundreds of photos around the room.

  “What happened to the boy?”

  “I’m getting to that. Don’t… don’t rush me.”

  The Gruff ran his thumbs along the picture.

  He caressed the boy’s unsmiling face.

  “He never took me out of the box. He looked at me and he smiled. It was a weird kind of smile like he was uncomfortable and the muscles in his mouth reflexed or something. It wasn’t a happy smile, but it wasn’t a sad one either. It just looked like he had decided something. That night, The Man came back. He put my box on the ground by the door. I could see everything. He asked Alexander why he hadn’t opened the box, but he didn’t say anything. That made The Man angry. He punched him in the face. All the other times he’d been punching him in his belly and on his legs and on his back but this time, he punched Alexander in the eye and it swelled up real fast. Still, he didn’t shout, he didn’t scream, he didn’t make a sound. Then The Man took off his belt. I tried, I really tried. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get out of that box, not in time to help him. I had to sit there and watch. I tried lifting my arms, but I couldn’t. They were tied at the wrists and my legs, they were tied at the ankles. And the box I was in, it rolled back and forth but it wouldn’t roll over and from it, I couldn’t break out. When he was done, The Man pulled up his pants and he walked out and locked the door. Alexander was bleeding. He sat up on the edge of his bed and he looked at me. He whispered, “I wish I was you” and then he started laughing. But it wasn’t joyful. It was pained. It was tortured. He had blood running down the insides of his legs. And his toes were all red. They squished when he patted them against the ground. His face was black and bruised. I couldn’t see his eyes at all. And his mouth, it was split open and there were holes where his teeth should have been. I guess I must have had an honest face or something because he stopped laughing and for a second there was nothing. Nothing except for the squishing sound of his toes slapping against the wet floor wet from the trickles of blood that streamed from down his legs and cascaded from cuts on his body, his hands and his face. But then, he gave me that smile again, that smile that was neither happy nor sad. It was a decided smile. One that says, ‘I give up’. And then he started to cry. I tried to break free. I tried to shout. I couldn’t. I was just a doll. I had no voice. Not then. But I watched him and I said nothing as he took The Man’s belt and he made a loop with it, big enough to poke his head through. And he was so calm, like all those times when he pretended to be asleep. I guess all those other times when all those bad things were happening, he was actually thinking about this moment and what he would do and how he would do it. He tied off the other end to a pipe that ran across the ceiling.”

  The Gruff looked up and Alex followed his stare. And above them, that very pipe ran over their heads just below the line of the ceiling.

  “He didn’t die straight away. He hanged there for a long time. I remember that he didn’t fight, not once. His last breath wasn’t anything special either. It didn’t look like he held any vigil or final thoughts. He didn’t take any deep breath either. He just slipped his head through the loop in the belt and he stepped off the bed. He was so quiet that I thought he died straight away. He didn’t though. I saw him blink a couple of times and he was staring right at me like he was trying to put himself inside my body. But there was nothing I could do. I just stayed there, stupid, while he hanged there and died.”

  The Gruff sniffed and Alex rubbed away the tears from his eyes.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Alex.

  “I couldn’t save him,” said The Gruff. “But I promised that I would.”

  “Would what?”

  “That I would save another boy. Another boy just like him. If I could save just one, then it wouldn’t be so bad” he said.

  “Me?”

  “There were others before you,” The Gruff said, looking at the hundreds of children’s polite faces.

  “It started with one. The Man and The Lady, they took another boy. They brought him down here. And they did bad things to him just like they did to Alex. But this time I stopped them. When they came down, I snuck up through the trap door and into the kitchen. I came back down. The Man he was doing horrible things and The Lady, she was standing there laughing and taking pictures. I cut the back of her feet and she fell down. She didn’t get back up. The Man didn’t notice, not at first. He didn’t know anything was happening until I had his belt around his throat. I put one foot on his back and I dug the other into the bed and I pulled so tight. He didn’t die right away, though. He just passed out. I pulled him off the boy and I dragged him into the hallway. I got The Lady too and I dragged her out and I lay next to him. She was screaming. She didn’t think it was real. I was a doll and everything. But the pain, it was real. I stabbed The Man first. I cut the tendons in his shoulders just in case he woke and so he couldn’t use his arms. Then I cut off his thing. I broke his teeth and I put his thing in his mouth. Then I stabbed him some more times. A lot more. Everything was dark red - the walls, the floor, the roof and my hands; everything. I think The Lady was saying sorry or something, but I didn’t know. I couldn’t hear much. I just had the sound of Alexander crying in my ears. It was so loud. I stabbed her as well. I stabbed her until she stopped moving and then I stabbed her some more. I don’t know, maybe it was five minutes or so, the whole thing. It felt so long, though. It’s funny how things can happen so fast and at the time, five minutes can feel like half a day. But five minutes was all it took. It was all it took for me to save that boy. It was all it took to drag those fucking monsters outside and put them down. And it was all it took for the boy to hang himself, just like Alexander. When I went back into the room he was just hanging there. He must have struggled a bit cause his neck was marked all over, but he wasn’t breathing. And I didn’t even know his name. That’s him” The Gruff said, pointing to one of the children papering the wall.

  “I couldn’t save him either. And I could hear Alexander crying in my ears and I c
ould see him smiling in my thoughts and he wouldn’t be free until I could free myself. And I couldn’t do that until I saved another child.”

  “All of them? And you couldn’t save any?”

  “Not one,” said The Gruff exhaling in defeat. “You were the only one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re the only one who tried to escape, even though there was no escape. You’re the only one who didn’t give up, who never stopped thinking or dreaming about a way out and way home. You’re the only one who left the belt alone. You didn’t try to fool around with a noose. You put no loops, no nothing. You just left it alone. You’re the only one to last this long. And you’re the only one who knows the truth. You’re the only one who has heard this story. You’re the only one who has seen me cry. And you’re the only one who can help set me free” he said.

  “What happened to all the other boys?”

  “All of them died. One of them grew up.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You know what you have to do Alex. I can’t do it for you. Not anymore. You have to do it yourself. You have to find your voice yourself. You have to say no. You have quarry deep within yourself and find that strength. You gotta dig it out with your finger nails and clump it together with your hands. You gotta mash it into your eyes and rub it all over your skin. And you gotta gnash it between your teeth and spit it on your hands. You gotta fill your soul with it. You fill it until it touches the very ends of your fingers and stretches out your littlest toes. And when you feel that fire burning inside of you, the one that says ‘No, ‘I will not be a victim, not anymore’, when you feel that sun inside of you, you scream. You scream out as loud as you can and you fight. You fight for your freedom. You fight for your life. This is what the universe bestowed upon you. It’s what your mother and father educated out of you. They trained you like a dog. They disciplined you to bark on command to say thank you and please and to sit and parade around when it was appropriate and to be gone when it was not. Day by day, second by fucking second, they cemented a mount of shame and ridicule on top of your will. When your mother pushed you in front of strangers, how did you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alex.

  “Of course you know. How did you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear? How did you feel Alex? How did you feel?”

  “I don’t know” he shouted.

  “Did it feel good, when they touched you when they dragged you into their net? Did you feel thankful?”

  “No.”

  “Did you want more?”

  “No.”

  “Well, how did you feel?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alex” The Gruff shouted.

  “Bad,” said Alex.

  “Bad? How did you feel Alex? How did you fucking feel?”

  “Bad. I felt bad ok,” he said.

  “You didn’t feel bad. Tell me the god damn truth Alex. When your mother abandoned your call for help. When she let absolute strangers kneel down and put their hands all over your face and your body and through your hair, tell me, how did you feel? And don’t tell me you felt bad. You did not feel bad. And you didn’t feel fucking shy. How did you feel?”

  “I felt scared,” he said, tears flowing from his eyes.

  And he felt that fear now. He felt a chaos swarming in his belly. He wished he had something to cling to, something that could have him less exposed.

  “That’s ok Alex. You can cry now. Get rid of it. Get rid of the fear.”

  “I felt scared. I’m scared. I’m always scared.”

  “That’s right you were scared. You were like a baby seal, being paraded in front of a fucking polar bear. You tried to hide between her legs. You clung to her legs. You wanted to say, ‘mummy, I’m fucking frightened. Mummy, I’m fucking scared’. But you couldn’t. You looked at her, but she gave you that shit eating grin. She smiled back at you in a way that said ‘shut up, it’ll be over soon’. And she didn’t mean it in a bad way cause she was brought up like that too. She was just being polite. She was just being educated. How did you feel when these strangers touched you?”

  “Scared,” said Alex.

  “How did you feel? Shout it out!”

  “Scared,” he said.

  “How the fuck did you feel Alex?”

  “I was scared” he shouted.

  His voice was shaking. He felt a torrent of energy coming from somewhere in his belly. It felt like he standing on a shaky platform and at any second his feet would come up from under him and he would melt away into the energy that spewed from his repression.

  “When that doctor opened your mouth. When he forced your mouth open with a stick. When he wedged that stick between your teeth and pried your mouth open like locked drawer, how did that make you feel? When he stood over you and he had that stick in his hand. When he stood over you and he had that look in his eye. How did that make you feel Alex?”

  “Scared,” said Alex.

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  “Scared. I felt scared.”

  “Louder. I can’t hear you. He can’t hear you. You cannot hear yourself. Scream!”

  “I was scared” he screamed, his veins bulging. ‘I was scared, I was scared, I was scared.”

  “Were you rude?’

  “I was scared!”

  “Were you polite?”

  “I was scared!”

  “Were you safe?”

  “I was scared!”

  “Were you shy?”

  “No. I was scared.”

  “Were you shy?”

  “No. I was scared.”

  “Were you fucking shy?”

  “I! Was! Fucking! Scared!” he screamed.

  His hands were like two great crushing devices. They curled and cradled the fire that raged within him and met at a point between his two shaking palms. And that energy that was spewing from his repression, it erupted through his entire being and his voice, it cast it out into the room and it lit up magnificently. His arms, his legs, his body, his every vein and every muscle, they all twitched and burned and the energy coursed through every fiber of his being.

  “What is your name” screamed The Gruff.

  “My name is Alex.”

  “Alex, are you scared!”

  “No!”

  “I can’t hear you. Are you scared!”

  “No!”

  “I don’t believe you. What are you scared of, what do you fear?”

  “Nothing and nothing” Alex screamed.

  His voice changed. The look in his eyes changed. The shape of his body changed. He changed.

  “Who are you and what do you fear?”

  “My name is Alex and there’s nothing I fear. My name is Alex, there’s nothing I fear. My name is fucking Alex and there is nothing that I fear” he screamed.

  The Gruff smiled.

  His work was done.

  “That man out there, he hurt those children. He hurt them all. He wants to hurt you. Are you gonna let him hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t hear you. Are you gonna let him hurt you?”

  “No!”

  “Then what the hell are you gonna do?”

  Alex was breathing fire from his eyes. He looked hardly human. He looked anything but domestic and servile. He looked like the animal that he needed to be, the one that could set them both free.

  “I’m gonna kill him” shouted Alex.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him” he screamed. “I’m gonna save you,” he said, sounding calm, as if a storm had receded, but it had not vanished, not entirely. It had merely settled itself better into his muscles and into his skin. He didn’t sound threatening. He sounded convinced.

  Alex looked back at The Gruff. He looked infantile. He looked weak and at threat. Alex unlocked the door and the
shut it behind him. He didn’t want The Gruff to have to see the things that he was about to do.