Tell Me a Story

The Truth

As the world swam around him, and the humming persisted all around – filling the room and their heads, slowly driving them both crazy – he had indeed stared up at the hole through which he had fallen – seeing it now as a hole to hell – and he had wondered if Mary could perhaps make it back up there.

Unlike in his story, however, she had never got the chance to try. The monster who was a monster only in mind, and not in vision, had appeared through a man made tunnel that ran away from the entrance to the well, down into an unseen cavern somewhere below.

The sound of the man’s footsteps was enough to catch Mary’s attention and she spun around to see his balaclava clad face and the glinting metal of a gun shining in his hand. Now he held the gun up and Mary could do nothing but raise her hands and try desperately to hold back the tears in her eyes. This was all her fault, and she knew it, and there was nothing left to be done.

“Well hello there,” said the man, addressing Mary in a rather jovial tone of voice, “looks like your friend has suffered quite a nasty fall. From quite some height too. That has got to smart.”

“What are you doing down here,” Mary demanded, and even through his pain, Martin was impressed at how confident she managed to sound. “This is my property and I demand you leave at once.”

“Oh your highness, you don’t want to get bossy with me,” said the gunman, and, although that part of his face was covered, his voice conveyed the smile hidden behind the black fabric. “I ought to warn you that I have a thing for bossy women, especially the younger ones.”

“Don’t try and play games with me… you” Mary said, the tremble in her voice growing as the man she faced took several steps forward.

“You can call me Killer,” he said with a snarl, “and I have to say I think you are quite mistaken. This is not your land, and this is not your well, it belongs to someone else does it not? As does your house.”

Mary’s cheeks flushed with colour. Even through her fear she felt a great embarrassment at his words. It was true that the nice house she lived in, the house she bragged about to all her friends, had only been leant to them by a kindly man, and old friend of her mothers, completely free of charge when they had been thrown out of their last place. It was something she had never admitted to anyone, and now she could see why it had been free. They had been sitting on Mr Margert’s dirty little secret the whole time.

“What are you doing down here?” She asked.

“What were we doing down here,” Killer said. “You’ve actually been very unfortunate because we’re just packing up the equipment. The sound you can here is it shutting down. I won’t go into any specifics but it high tech drug gear. You know you really should have stayed away.”

“We’ll go,” Martin said as loud as he could without feeling as though his pained throat would explode. “We’ll leave and pretend none of this ever happened. We promise.”

“Young man, you ain’t going anywhere, whether I choose to spare you or not. How exactly do you expect to lug yourself out of the hole with all your various injuries?”

“Fine, you’re right, but please let Mary go. She hasn’t done anything wrong, this was all a big mistake.”

A long pause then: “I might have been inclined to do that, what with yous two being only kids and all, but this young Madame doesn’t seem like the type to let things go. I feel as though she’d be a trouble maker for us, isn’t that right little lady?”

“It isn’t,” Martin said desperately, “tell him Mary.” But she only stayed silent, and that silence sounded like a judge’s gavel, pounding down and sentencing her to the worst of all sentences.  

Killer pushed his gun into his belt and moved quickly across the stone floor. Mary stayed in total silence and did not move a muscle as he came towards her, his fist lashing out and punching her in the stomach. Still she managed not to make a sound as she doubled over in pain, or as Killer grabbed her hair and shoved her to her knees, facing away from him, right over Martin, so that she was staring straight down at him.

“I’m guessing it was your idea to come down here, wasn’t it little miss?” Still she didn’t speak. “I’ll take that as a yes, and in that case you will watch what you have done to your little boyfriend before I deal with you.” He raised his gun over her shoulder as he spoke and pulled the trigger, releasing a deafening bang and a bullet that rocketed straight into Martin’s chest.

The pain was instantaneous but rocked him all over his body so that, if he hadn’t been watching the gun, he would probably not have known where he the bullet had entered him. At the end of the day, though, it was one more pain to add to the broken bones and torn muscles. His whole body screamed out again but, if anything, he was growing used to the constant agony and his body was growing numb to it.

If he could take the pain then what killed him were Mary’s eyes which held his solidly. Both of the teenagers wanted to turn away – to look at anything else – and neither of them could. Martin was transfixed by the beauty he saw in those eyes, even as tears brimmed up within them and ran away down Mary’s cheeks towards the ground. He could see the guilt there and he wished he could make it go away. He wished he could make things right.

More than anything he wished he were already dead.

Killer was speaking again but Martin realised that the bullet must have done as much damage to his ears as his chest. All he could hear was a muffled echo of a voice that made no sense to him.

He could see fine though, and finally his eyes were torn away from Mary’s in time to see the gun pointed at the back of her head, and her lips make the two words that would hurt him more than anything else that had happened to him that day or any other.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

Then the trigger was pulled – the sound as muffled as Killer’s words to Martin’s destroyed ears – and Mary fell forward, dead in an instant, landing on Martin’s chest and staying there, blood spilling out of the wound in the back of her head, running through her once beautiful hair and onto Martin’s chest, mixing with his own that continued to pour out of his own bullet wound.

All of his physical pain seemed to vanish in a second, replaced only with heartbreak and rage. All he wanted to do was get up and rip out Killer’s throat and tear his body into a million pieces. He wanted to gain some recognition for the girl who had given him his first kiss – his perfect Mary.

But he had nothing left and, as Killer turned to walk away, the whole world seemed to fade quickly in on itself, rushing in towards Martin and disappearing into blackness, taking his consciousness with him, and, the last thing he was able to think before disappearing into darkness was:

Please don’t let me wake again.