Emperor of the Dark - Chapter 1: Hometown
Where’re we goin'? Where’re we goin'?
Home again, we’re home again, we’re home
- Oingo Boingo, "Home Again"
Warnings: It's not quite gory, but there is a relatively gross picture. And language, of course. Lots of that.
“I’m here. Uh huh."
"Disgusting. I can actually feel my will to live decreasing.”
“Are you alright?”
“Fine.”
“Are you sure? You still look a little...”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“You really shouldn’t have --”
“Would you stop hounding me? I’m fine.”
“You can’t be serious? It’s not even nine o’clock, yet!”
“I haven't seen an iota of intelligent life since I left the house."
“Just give me another minute to rest. Then we can go.”
"Let's do it again."
"I don't want to."
"Aw, come on. Don't be such a baby."
"Don't call me a baby!"
"But you are one. A fussy little whiny baby."
"I am not a baby!"
"Prove it, then. Close your eyes and hold still."
“Stick ten needles in your sides, let the blood drip down..."
"...let the blood drip down.”
“Stick ten needles in Angela's eyes, let the blood drip down..."
"...let the blood drip down.”
No. Please, no.
“Concentrate, concentrate."
"Concentrate on what I’m saying.”
“People are dying, children are crying."
"Concentrate, concentrate.”
“Concentrate on what I’m saying.”
"Are you sure you're --"
"Yes, Nina."
"Because you don't --"
"You're making it worse."
"What color did you get?"
"Red again."
"You're definitely gonna get stabbed, then."
"What? Sorry. Some girl just freaked out and ran off."
"I have no idea. Probably just realized where she was. I kind of feel like doing the same, to be honest. You should see this place. If herpes was a destination, this would be it."
* * *
Son of a bitch.
She couldn’t believe that she hadn't taken the late hour into consideration when she'd first decided to come here; this was exactly the kind of thing that her husband used to give her such shit about - her pathetic inability to plan ahead, her childlike impulsiveness. Always doing, never thinking.
Now here she was, alone in a train station at night, out of luck, and worse yet, out of change.
Soon to be out of her mind if she didn't get her situation sorted.
God, this can't get any worse.
She had no car, no way to obtain a rental, no one to call to come get her. She’d been counting on a taxi, but she hadn't taken into consideration that it might be too late to have one sent - she'd assumed all taxi companies offered twenty-four hour service.
Come to think of it - belatedly, as usual - she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to procure a motel room for the night. What if they, too, were all closed to guests by now? Why in the blue hell hadn’t she checked these things before leaving Veronaville? It would have been so easy to verify. She could have taken an earlier train into town and avoided this debacle.
Because that's how little ol' hare-brained Lyla operates, she thought to herself with a sneer. It's just like they used to say back home: almost as dumb as she is easy.
Oh, come on, honey; you're not that dumb, a familiar voice in her head said. The voice she’d simultaneously loved and despised, that had offered comfort and contempt from sentence to sentence. The voice that she relied on to come to her when she was scared, depressed, lonely. The phenomenon she had come to think of as Having a Buzz.
Or a tumor.
A tumor, Buzz repeated. Is that all I am to you?
"And here I thought my night couldn't get any worse," Lyla replied, slinking over to one of the rickety wooden benches that lined the platform. Seeing no point in dragging her suitcases with her, she left them where they were beside the phone booth.
Even if they had been worth stealing, there was no one around to have a go at it. Everyone else had dispersed shortly after the red-haired girl had taken off, until she was the only one left with nowhere else to go.
The bench, which had creaked and groaned as if though some enormous weight had been flung upon it when she sat down, made no such ruckus when Buzz selected a seat behind her. Without turning around, she imagined him sitting in that way that had always irritated her, with his ankles crossed and his legs spread, and for one fleeting moment, she was able to conjure up the scent of his terrible cologne - a gift from their youngest he received every Christmas.
He applied it every morning after his shower. Wincing at the smell. Performing his fatherly duties as he performed all of his various duties.
Dutifully. Some things just had to be done.
She wondered if he still wore it - if Buck even still bought it without her there to take him to the mall to buy "Daddy's perfume".
Sensing her distraction, that little crack in the concrete she’d poured over the memories to seal them away, Buzz seized upon that tiny weakened opening. You could always come home, you know, he offered. He always offered. Nobody's stopping you but you.
Lyla looked around the desolate station, felt the frozen air scrape across her skin and penetrate her clothes, and thought of how warm it would be back at the house, how soft the mattress on her bed was.
How small the lock on her door was.
She remembered lying awake in that warm house on that soft mattress for hours, waiting for Buzz to come home, so she could finally fall asleep, uneasy and ashamed.
Lyla shook her head. "We both know I can't do that, and we both know why. Even if you won't admit it."
There was no reaction from Buzz. His real life counterpart may have argued, might have suggested that she speak to someone better qualified than he in matters of the addled brain, but the Buzz her addled brain had created remained docile and even tempered; he only wanted to help her sort her thoughts, not tangle and maim them until she couldn't think straight.
She didn’t want to have to worry about getting a headache when she was Having a Buzz.
This Buzz relented, as he always did. He would try again later when she was lying wherever she ended up, when she called him back to stay with her until she fell asleep.
For now his job was to begin sorting through the clutter and debris of her tangled mind, looking for the little hidey-hole where she kept The Solutions; much like the physical realm where she resided, the mental one where the likeness of her ex-husband dwelt was difficult to navigate - things were never where they should be.
What does she need now?
When Buzz finally spoke again, it was to ask if she had any single bills with her. She thought of the crumpled bills she’d stuffed into her pocket at the Veronaville train station after she’d purchased her ticket to bring her to this tribulation.
She threw her hands up in frustration as she realized that Buzz’s grand solution to her problem was to get more change for the phone.
“And who do you propose that I call?”
Another taxi company might be a good start. It seems this town has a few.
* * *
It was eerily quiet upstairs in the dusty corner of the largely forgotten coffee shop where Angela had sought refuge, so much so that she thought she could actually hear her head throbbing.
It had been a mistake to come back; she'd known that the second she'd stepped off the train and the blistering cold had hit her like a fist, staggering her momentarily so that she'd bumped into the man behind her, who had brushed roughly past with a snide remark about "peasants".
And it had only gotten worse from there.
The hot chocolate she'd purchased as an excuse to linger in the shop sat untouched on the table in front of her as she rubbed wearily at her eyes and willed herself not to cry.
It had happened again. After all this time, after she'd finally let herself believe that she had been "cured", they'd found her.
Those children and their creepy game. The one her sister had been making her play when she'd had the first episode, the first "fugue" as she'd come to call them. It wasn't quite right, but it was close enough. She'd never told anyone about them, anyway, so there was no one to call her out on the proper definition.
She didn't know what happened to her in the physical world during the "fugues", although her parents had reprimanded her profusely for being rude and ignoring them, and her sister had accused her of going into trances. Inside of the vast emptiness of the fugue world, where her guilt collided with her nightmares, she encountered horrific imagery; she was tormented and plagued and harassed until abruptly, she was released.
Back into the physical world, where she found her heart beating so violently that she thought it might shatter itself against the inside of her ribs, and her head a jumbled circus of tiny knives stabbing merrily at the backs of her eyes.
So much time had passed since the last "fugue" that she'd allowed - needed, perhaps - to believe that finally, for whatever reason, she'd been "cured". That the issue, whatever it had been, had resolved itself, and freed her. Eventually, as time crept by and she remained unassaulted, she'd even begun to feel safe again. To find herself back on that desolate carousel all these years later made her feel sick with fear and defeat.
She hadn't been "cured" at all; it had merely entered a dormant state.
And isn't it a strange coincidence, she thought bitterly, glaring miserably down at her hot chocolate, which had begun to shimmer and ripple in the watery veil that had built up over her eyes, that they just started again when I stepped off the train?
As if though it had been waiting.
Pleasantview had welcomed her home, all open arms and gnashing teeth.
“Pardon me."
Chancing a quick, tear drenched glance in the direction the voice had come from, she was surprised to find the irritated pay phone user from downstairs smiling kindly down at her. "Are you alright?"
She attempted to shift her focus back to the present, keeping her face turned slightly away to hide the tell-tale wetness on her cheeks. She had always loathed public blubbering, and was less than impressed at having found herself caught in such an advanced position of snivelling. The woman waited beside the table, hovering nervously as she waited for Angela to compose herself.
No, she thought, finally regaining enough control of herself to look up. 'Alright' is just about the polar opposite of how I would describe me right about now.
"I'm fine," she said automatically. She never had been able to fathom why people still asked that question; nobody that asked ever wanted the real answer. I'm absolutely fucking terrible, thanks for asking! "How are you?"
The woman seemed surprised, which frankly, Angela didn't blame her for - it was a perfectly stupid and awkward thing to ask, and she, in particular, was ill-equipped to handle anything more than the industry standard, "I'm Fine". Still somewhat stupefied by the incident downstairs, she'd gone into social autopilot, and made herself look like even more of an inept basement dweller than usual.
"I've been better, actually," the woman said.
It took Herculean effort on Angela's part not to dive across the table and run in search of another safe place.
Several moments passed uncomfortably as they each waited for the other to make the next move. Once it became perfectly clear that Angela was going to do little more than sit there and fidget, the woman's tiny smile faltered and faded. She cleared her throat. “Um, well, anyway. I'm sorry to bother you like this, but do you have change for a dollar?”
“No, sorry,” she said, feeling a little indecently relieved that this stranger wasn't going to go into detail about her problems. Eagerly, she felt for the leftover quarters in her pants pocket. “But I do have enough for a phone call, if that’s what you need it for.”
“I guess you saw me having a hard time downstairs." She looked Angela straight in the neck as she spoke.
Angela felt her face grow warm. I guess you saw me, too.
Now that some of the excitement had settled, she felt mortified by her behavior downstairs. And with Pleasantview being what it was, news of her theatrics would spread like wildfire, until every one she passed was staring at her with sympathetic eyes, as their mouths spewed piteous bile about That poor girl, her father's death has left her completely unhinged.
Of course they'd blame her father; there had always been some bizarre and unsubstantiated belief that, because she didn't wear black lipstick and listen to violent music that she was the The Good One, the one her parents preferred, the one who lived for their happiness and approval.
They'd attribute her behavior to despair driven hysterics - her father had, after all, been murdered - and she sure as hell wouldn't correct them.
She'd kept the truth hidden this long, she wasn't about to let some poorly timed kiddy game push her over the edge.
The woman’s short, bitten nails scraped her palm lightly as she collected the three quarters Angela offered her.
It made her itch.
“Thank you,” the woman said, slipping them into her own pocket. “Really, I appreciate it. Getting a ride at this hour is harder than I anticipated.”
“This town is a nightmare to do anything in.”
She didn't realize she'd said it out loud until she caught the woman looking down at her curiously.
“I take it you've been here before?”
“Unfortunately, yeah. I was born here.”
“Unfortunately?”
Angela immediately regretted her wording; she couldn’t possibly explain her contempt for the town to a stranger - a newcomer. Even life-long residents of Pleasantview found her unrelenting hatred of the town weird and off-putting.
Obsessive.
Some of them did just as this woman was doing now - smiled politely until she was done ranting and then tried not to engage her again in the future.
Mostly they just seemed to think that craziness ran in the family.
Her sister was a known lunatic, blaming every minor inconvenience on aliens, or ghosts, or vampires or Bigfoot.
Her father was - had been, rather - a drunken pathological liar who bedded anything he wasn’t married to.
And her mother was... going to be a very valuable contribution to science someday when she passed.
And she saw dead people. So, maybe the assessment wasn't that far off.
The woman was watching her, waiting. Probably worrying, especially if she'd caught Angela's earlier performance. “It's just that I’ve always heard nice things about this place.”
Angela stared at her.
Yes, she thought, with no small measure of disgust, isn’t it quaint when people disappear and are never seen or heard from again? Aren’t unsolved strings of child murders grand?
She didn’t mention any of these things; she didn't think she'd need to. Unless this woman had been living in a mountain cave somewhere completely removed from civilization, she was well aware of the Bella Goth Incident, where a woman went missing after an evening alone with her daughter’s fiance. And while the gruesome slaughtering of Pleasantview's under-tens was decidedly less publicized - thankfully less glamorized - it still got a solid bit of attention in all the media outlets. There was simply no way to be ignorant of it.
Which meant this woman, like so many of the macabre rubberneckers that had traveled here before her, probably considered these "nice things".
“It’s just a weird town,” she replied lamely, looking away from the woman's eyes. The color made Angela think of the blue she had always selected, when, as a child, she’d needed to portray a late night sky.
“I understand. I’m from a strange town myself,” the woman said, her smile faltering a little. Angela watched as the dark sky of her eyes clouded over with some kind of sadness.
Feeling certain that the conversation had run its course, Angela waited for the woman to excuse herself, but still she lingered table side.
“Do you by any chance know whether or not there’s any hotels open this late?”
“I can’t say for certain,” she said hesitantly, “but I think the Pleasantview Inn stays open until one or two in the morning. It used to, at least. It’s kind of old and run down, though, unless they’ve fixed it up since I was a teenager.”
Which they probably hadn’t; if any changes had been made, it had probably been to stop charging a nightly fee in favor of an hourly one.
“The Pleasantview Inn,” the woman repeated, apparently to herself. “That ought to be easy enough to remember.”
An awkward silence stretched between them as they both sought for a graceful way out of the conversation, and Angela was reminded of why she generally tried to avoid social interaction: It never ended well.
She reached for her hot chocolate, now a lukewarm sludge, and tapped the bottom of the cup against the table, feeling nowhere near brave enough to drink it. The woman scratched the back of her hand with her stubby nails and then examined the pink skin.
Awkward.
“Well,” the woman said finally, looking up but not quite at her. “Thank you, again. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Angela said politely.
The woman walked away, shoulders slumped, her head not quite hanging, but tilted forward as if though the ground beneath her feet was simply too fascinating to look away from.
You're going to need it.
* * *
"Have you discovered anything about Kalma's whereabouts yet?"
"Not yet, but --"
Olive cut him off. "I don't think I need to remind you, Mr. Beaker, that time is of the essence."
"Right now, Kalma is in a weakened state, but if she finds a way to fortify herself, it will make capturing her significantly more difficult, if not impossible."
"I promise you, I will find her. I just need time to look - she could be anywhere."
"She can't have gone too far with the state that she was in. The last time I saw Bella, she barely had the strength to lift her own head. Kalma may or may not be impervious to physical pain, but Bella's body was irrepairably damaged, and I should think even Kalma would find it hard to walk on broken legs."
"I'll do everything humanly possible to find her."
He cast a contemptuous gaze across the furnished building he'd rented; furnished had seemed like a good idea at the time, but looking now at all the pre-selected crap he was going to be living with, he thought he might shit blood. "Believe me, the last thing I want is to be stuck in this cesspool any longer than absolutely necessary."
"Good. I'll expect a much more thorough report next time."
"Wait," Loki cried, causing Olive to wince as his voice flooded her ear canal like screeching tires. "There's something else."
"There's been a rather suspicious murder."
"What murder isn't suspicious, Mr. Beaker?" She paused to finger a leaf of a dying plant - a present from the Beakers in celebration of some holiday. Olive had no patience for such tomfuckery, but she'd maintained the plant for a while until she'd grown tired of its existence.
Then she'd had the pleasure of watching it die.
Loki made a strange, unbecoming noise somewhere between a cough and a laugh. "It's not simply that he was murdered, Olive - it's how he was murdered that should interest you."
Olive waited a long moment for him to continue before realizing that he was waiting for some kind of encouragement. She sighed impatiently and tried to calm herself by thinking how she might kill him when he returned. "Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to Goggle this?"
"Google."
"Pardon?"
Sounding like he was making a sincere effort not to sound so amused, Loki repeated himself. "Google, not Goggle."
She wondered if she still had the physical strength necessary to strangle him. She supposed she could just bludgeon him first.
"Loki..."
"The man was beaten to death --"
Olive rolled her eyes. "I hardly find that impressive."
"And partially eaten. Bones and all."
Olive thought he sounded oddly pleased by this - as if though it had been his own grand idea to dispose of a body by ingesting it.
But then, in her experience, Loki often did think that everything was his idea. It simply amazed her that Circe - another one who considered herself the originator of every half-way intelligent thought - put up with it. Just as it amazed her that she put up with any of them.
"From what information I've gathered, they're completely stumped as to what could have eaten him - all they know is what didn't."
"They've already ruled out all the obvious suspects - bears, dogs, mountain lions. It's a completely foreign beast."
"Hm, fascinating. What if it was guinea pigs?"
"I've always wondered what kind of unspeakable darkness lurked behind that cute facade."
Loki sounded politely bewildered. "I don't think they've thought of guinea pigs, but that's, um, an interesting theory."
"No, it's an inane one. Now is there anything else you wish to tell me?"
"Yes, of course," Loki said, quickly. "The whole murdered/eaten thing isn't even the most interesting part."
"Oh, so there is an interesting part to this anecdote?"
"It seems that the man that was murdered was Daniel Pleasant."
"Now that, Mr. Beaker, is very interesting."
* * *
"Lucy?"
Credits: strange_tomato for Lyla Grunt, and psychosim for the train station.
A/N: I sincerely apologize for how long this took. I've been working on this pretty much since I posted the prologue, but I ended up caught in an endless cycle of writing, deleting, rewriting. Then my game went berserk and I ended up uninstalling and re-installing, which meant recreating almost everything I had done. Perfect. At least it's done now, and in the time it took me to finally get it to this point, I managed to rework a huge portion of the main story, which I'm pretty happy about. Makes much more sense now, and I'm really looking forward to later chapters.
I hope anyone still reading enjoyed it, and as always, I'm glad to have any constructive criticism or suggestions.