A Taste

Scene 3

Wally took off blindly through the house, running straight for the kitchen where the light still managed to hold the darkness at bay. The bathroom door was shut, giving Wally a short-lived burst of relief. 

“Emily, stay put. Okay hon?” He said as he picked up the tenderizer. It felt tacky, like nearly dried paint. “Whatever you hear, don’t come out until I say so.”

There was no time to wait for a response. He hurried back to the foyer with the tenderizer gripped firmly in his hand.

The foyer’s lights were already ablaze. To his horror someone was standing inside the doorway. But it wasn’t Arthur. The intruder was stout and smelled of the road. A worn out blue baseball cap sat on his head and red hair pushed out from beneath its sides. Covering his chin was a fire red goatee. Wally’s first thought was that he was looking into a mirror--a trick mirror like he used to see in funhouses, where the reflection was ‘off’, a little more than a twisted inverse of real life.

But his second thought told him differently. It warned him that there was more magic to this reflection than the simple bending of light.

The man looked right back at Wally, startled by his brash sprint from the kitchen. “Arthur?” the man asked, puzzled.

Wally turned around quickly, thinking that Arthur had somehow managed to sneak up from behind. No one was there.

The man had already discovered the tenderizer and was focused on it with wide, fearful eyes. His face had turned a deathly shade of white. Wally looked down, following the man’s gaze. The tenderizer protruded proudly from his white-knuckled fist just as he knew it would. What he didn’t expect to see was that it was tinted red from the handle to the mallet. Ensnared in its rows of teeth were bits of flesh and a single strand of long, black hair.

“Arthur, what are you doing here? Where’s Emily?” The man creaked in a shaky voice. Wally stood motionless, confused. The intruder’s questions didn’t just mingle with his own but birthed new ones that he just couldn’t tolerate. The anger within him flared once again, only this time it was stronger than his self-control would allow. He knew what had to be done.

Mirrors break.

Without warning, he jumped at the man and brought his magic wand down hard. Wally felt the thud as much as he heard it. Even above the screaming, he heard it. It reminded him of Emily. It reminded him of the dog.

The man crumbled before him, rather than breaking into the shards Wally had anticipated. He kept swinging. Until the screams stopped, until there was nothing to be heard but the squishy thuds of the tenderizer as its voice rang true, Wally continued. When he did finally stop, his breaths were heaving. His arms screamed with pain--just like before.

At last the mirror was broken. The reflection couldn’t haunt him anymore. Wally let the tenderizer slip to the floor as he took in the macabre scene. The man lay in a heap in front of him, his head nothing more than a red, gritty mess, his hat shredded and dyed black with blood.

The feeling of being watched was still upon him though. He could see the pictures staring from the living room. The eyes of their occupants peered at him devilishly as if privy to something he wasn’t. It was the biggest frame, the golden one that held his wedding photograph that stared at him the hardest. It made him think of the intruder...of the fun-house mirrors. He looked below Emily’s wedding veil, to her soft, lovely face.

She never heard you coming...never heard the dog yelping for mercy...too busy blow drying that beautiful, black hair.

He looked back to his face in the same photograph, to his fire-red goatee. A prayer escape his lips as he slowly brought his hand to his face. Nausea overwhelmed him when he felt nothing but a smooth, clean-shaven chin.

The foyer’s bright lights had easily burned away every ounce of the room’s darkness, and at once the mirror across the room let him in on what the rest of the house already knew. He ran to it to be certain and was greeted by a young man with black stringy hair and a pale complexion.

Scattered upon his cheeks like droplets of rain…were crimson tears. Real tears flooded his eyes as he remembered the mess he made of Emily in the bathroom. Tears blurred the view of his real reflection--Arthur’s reflection. He wasn’t sure what emotion was stronger, the horror of what he had done or the fact that he was only Arthur. Lonely, friendless, ugly-both-inside-and-out, Arthur.

The anger that ruled him so often once again took the reins, forcing his sanity to let go for good. One after the other, he threw his fists into the mirror. The glass webbed and his knuckles shredded as he hoped the pain would be enough. Enough to rip him from this nightmare and leave him back in his cold bed--hoping that all this was as unreal as the funhouse and its ungodly mirrors.

END.