Chapter Text
When you watch a true-crime documentary or even a re-run of some police procedural, there’s always a lot of exclamation about blood being splattered across the walls and ceiling. Every character comments, with absolute horror and no exception, how extraordinarily violent the crime must have been to get blood on the ceiling. There must have been great swings of a machete, axes cleaving body parts left and right. In some particularly gory horror movies, a wood chipper might even be involved.
But to be brutally honest, when you’re peeling your own skin off with a scalpel and a half-baked plan to become immortal, it’s rather difficult to not get blood everywhere.
Everything is cast in red. When Gerry steps into the room, his first thought is that Mary has changed the bulbs, has started leaning full-tilt into her Disney villain aesthetic. But it’s just blood. When his boots hit the carpet, it feels like stepping in a puddle with socks on or squelching over a flooded bathroom after you’ve left your towels on the floor.
Mary is in the centre of it all, scalpel dangling from her tiring fingers as she threads a sheet of skin onto the fishing wire that crisscrosses the room. The book she plans to sew herself into is sitting unblemished on her desk, hungry for the imminent addition to its pages. She turns when he enters, and through dreamy pants, asks her son to help her.
It’s almost begging. There’s pleading in her voice and askance in her face, and as she takes a shaky step toward Gerry she stumbles and crashes to her knees. And now it is begging. Begging for Gerry to peel the skin from her flesh and help her complete her biggest achievement. Her final ritual. Gerry wants to cry, or scream, or disintegrate or… just, not be here, but his throat is closed, his feet are rooted to the spot, and his eyes will not blink, however hard he tries.
She struggles further, inching across the soaking carpet with obscene wet thuds. Gerry wobbles. One boot stutters backwards to catch his fall, but he succeeds only in slipping through his mother’s mess. He goes down, elbows sending what feels like a tidal wave of blood surging down the stairs behind him. He can feel it seeping through his pants, creeping up his arms and legs.
He is at eye level with Mary now. Her gaze is clear and focused. There’s no haze of outside influence or internal instability. She is in control. She knows what she’s doing. This is what she wants, and this is what she will get.
Gerry turns and crawls. He gets to the top of the stairs and slips, falling hard on his shoulder at the first landing. He scrambles to his feet, panting, sweating, crying, and reaches the bottom floor. The door out into the street from Pinhole Books is right there under his fingers, but it won’t open- why won’t it fucking open? His hands are too slippery, his vision too blurred. Mary is still upstairs, screaming for him to come back, to finish what she started. There’s silence for a single second before Gerry hears her descent begin.
There’s an eternity of that: rattling at the knob while his dying mother approaches from behind. He never lets himself turn around. He can’t see her like that again. Just when Gerry starts to feel the cold breath on the nape of his neck, the drip of blood down the back of his jacket, the door swings open, and he tumbles out into wakefulness.
He’s as drenched as he was in the dream, though with sweat instead of blood. His heart rate starts to settle as he realizes that it wasn’t real, and he relaxes back into his cot.
His… cot. Not his bed. Fuck, it was real. A nightmare, yes, but a memory, too. Mary had killed herself trying to bind her skin into that book, and Gerry had been pinned with the murder. Now he’s in jail, awaiting trial.
He groans, rolls onto his side to face the opposite wall of his cell, and screams. Mary is sitting there, on the vacant cot beside his own, a deceptively placid smile cracking her face in two.
Fuck, he’d forgotten she’d succeeded.
“Oh, come now,” she says, her voice sickly sweet with the knowledge that her presence is torturing him, “You didn’t really forget, did you?”
“And what if I did?” he asks through his hands over his face. “Would it be so terrible if I wanted to delude myself into a moment’s peace?”
“Gerard, you have to be stronger than this. You are in jail, accept it. Hiding from reality never did you any favours before, why would it start now?”
Gerry turns over, finding some small comfort in not looking at his dead mother.
She’d first appeared on his second night in this cell, fresh tattoos scrolling across her skin that was, thankfully, fully attached. She’d been a constant of the décor in here for about three days before she’d faded into non-existence. Gerry had thought his troubles over. Maybe she’d done it just well enough to manifest for a few days, but not well enough to maintain it. He had settled into the relief of her absence for a couple days, then he’d woken up, much like today, and found her watching him as if she’d never been gone at all.
For weeks, maybe months- Gerry’s all but lost track of time in here- it had continued like that. She would come and go, as steady and reliable as the sun. He’d figured it out. Then she left for a week. Maybe they’d moved the book, maybe she was gone for good, or maybe she was just fucking with him. In any case, Gerry felt free. Well, as free as one can be while they await the murder trial of their own mother in a four-by-three jail cell. Then Mary had come back, laughing at the heartbreak on his face at her return and the subsequent flipping of his dinner tray. They hadn’t even gotten him any more food- the guards had assumed, given his enraged scream, that he was just throwing a tantrum. So Gerry had gone to sleep hungry. Bed, not sleep. Sleep is all but an illusion at this point.
The first night she’d appeared, Gerry was sure she’d been a figment of his imagination. He almost got up the nerve to ask the guard to ring his lawyer, so that Gerry could change his plea to not guilty by way of insanity. He’d been just about to shout down that cold empty corridor when he remembered the book. That ugly, misshapen mound of stolen skin that allowed his mother to continue abusing him, post-mortem. Gerry almost shouted anyway. If he told the truth, there’d be no way they could see it as anything but insanity, right? He’d decided against it, in the end, not caring much for being locked away in a mental institution.
When Mary is here, he rolls over and studies the wall. When she isn’t, he paces around the cell and taps a rhythm out on the bars until someone yells at him to shut up. As far as he can tell, there’s no one else in this cell block. Of course, they hadn’t put him in with the rest of the jailed. After all, he did peel his own mother’s skin off, didn’t he?
They won’t give him any books or even pamphlets to read, too afraid he’ll fold it into a knife to skin them with. They hadn’t allowed him any time outside this tiny room either, save for the occasional shower and even less occasional meeting with his lawyer in another drab room scattered with documents and lit with blinding fluorescents.
It’s become routine now. Gerry wiles away the hours until he slumps into an exhaustion-based unconscious, rather than sleep, and when he wakes up, sometimes Mary is there, and sometimes she isn’t. She sticks to her 3-days-on-3-days-off schedule most of the time, until she deems Gerry too comfortable, and switches it around. Just routine. Unnatural, boring, traumatizing routine. It’s little different from his life when Mary was still alive. Except now he can’t go get shit-faced at a pub to forget it all for a night.
And Mary’s still talking. Whispering vagaries at him about their life ahead. She always speaks like that about the future, using words like ‘our’ and ‘we’ when she referred to what they’d be doing once Gerry got out. He tunes it out now. Not wanting to dwell in that stinking premonition of freedom. Gerry glares at the painted white brick of the cell wall. He should have known it would take more than death to get away from her.
He jolts into a sitting position as a guard raps on his door, yelling at him to wake up. A hasty glance to the right reveals an empty cot. Gerry’s sure one day she’ll slip up and reveal herself to someone else, but today is not that day.
When Gerry doesn’t answer, the guard bangs again-
-And Gerry is in one of many hotel rooms they’d stayed in over the years. He’s 15, and Mary is trying her damnedest to get through the door he’d just locked. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this, nor the last, but Gerry will cower in the ensuite until she breaks through or gives up. There’s a loud cracking sound, and Gerry knows she isn’t going for the whole please-can-you-open-my-room-I’m-afraid-my-son’s-going-to-hurt-himself approach this time-
The officer grunts and slides a tray of food through the slot in the door. “You’ve got a meeting in one hour. I’ll be back to escort you. And stop staring at that bunk like there’s someone there, it’s creeping me out.”
Mary chuckles once he leaves. Gerry would give anything not to hear that sound again.
*
Ninety minutes of attempted ignorance later, Gerry is yanked into a blank room. There’s nothing in it save for a door, a security camera, a table, and two chairs. His attendant shoves Gerry into one of them, checks that the chains around his wrists and ankles are secure, and retreats to the corner.
“Hey, you know it’d be great to know why I’m here,” Gerry directs up at the camera above the door. “My lawyer isn’t usually this late, so what-.”
“Quiet.”
Gerry looks at the hulking figure in the corner, hands clasped in front of him, awaiting orders or insubordinate movement, and sighs. It’s a lost cause. He scratches at the back of his head and grimaces at the grease in his hair. Maybe he should stop refusing to shower.
There’s a rumble of anticipation in his gut. His lawyer sucks- he doesn’t pay attention to what Gerry says, and he doesn’t care. He takes far too many sips- often followed by telling grimaces- from his Styrofoam take-out cup of “coffee”. But there’s just something about talking to someone who knows life outside of this building. Someone who isn’t the same two rotating guards or his fucking mother.
It’s just the loneliness of sitting in the same room, he thinks, the soul-sucking tedium of talking to the same spectres and eventual ghosts as the day before and the day before that, that makes him keen to see this aging alcoholic. As overcrowded as these places tend to be, Gerry’s never felt more lonely or less human in his life.
The door clangs open, interrupting his internal monologue and revealing a tall blond man. He’s well over six feet, yet inexplicably trying to hide the fact by bending himself down to fill less space. His hair’s been hastily tied back, and he’s wearing a sweater of all things. A lawyer. Not Gerry’s lawyer, though, Gerry’s never seen him before in his life. He says so.
“You’re not my lawyer.”
The man looks up, juggling a load of files and papers over to the table. He’s taken aback, an expression on his face like he’s offended but he’s trying his damnedest not to be. The result is a confused sort of affront. His face is young and pink in the cheeks. He’s not necessarily handsome but there is a gentle yet striking something about him that might be his bright grey eyes or the slope of his freckled nose. He arranges, or rather- spills, his armful across the table and fumbles himself into the opposite chair, swiping a wayward blond curl from his forehead and chuckling nervously.
“No, well, yes, actually, I am. You see, I’m your replacement, your lawyer’s replacement. Let me explain,” he talks like he’s running out of time, like just one word could fix all of his problems but he doesn’t know which so he just tries every one he can think of over and over and over, “Mr. Wyatt was involved in a rather nasty traffic accident. He’ll be fine, don’t you worry, but he’s going to be bed ridden for at least a month. The firm they fetched him from isn’t the largest, really, so I was the only available replacement for this case. I don’t mind honestly; I need the experience-.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Gerry starts to cross his arms before the clasps bite into his wrists and he aborts. The annoyance surging up his spine bubbles over into a brief tantrum, “Some arsehole ran a red light and now I’m going to prison for it?”
“Uh, well, it’s not a forgone conclusion, or anything,” he says, frowning at his hands as he fixes random piles of paper. “In fact, that red-light-running arse- person, was Mr. Wyatt, so he won’t be available for… a while.”
Gerry crams a lid on the frustration threatening to spill over, exhaling harshly through his nose, and rubbing his face. “Look…?”
The lawyer blinks. He is quite young. Gerry would wager that he’s about the same age as him if you ignore the extra years Mary has stacked on Gerry for his troubles- the scars and trauma that weigh him down beyond his age. Then he straightens, tucking a lock of hair away behind his ear, “Oh. Michael, Michael Shelley.”
“Look, Michael, you are fresher than my dye job. I’m not sure you’ve even seen a court house since your parents’ divorce when you were twelve.” Gerry does cross his arms this time, despite the pain, just to prove a point.
His frown deepens and he holds his hands up like he’s trying to stay a rabid dog. “Mr. Keay…”
“Don’t,” Gerry tastes a hint of bile at the back of his throat.
“Sorry, don’t…?”
“Call me that. Literally anything else would be better.” Gerry swallows and grinds his teeth, desperate to dam the tears scraping at the backs of his eyes. The last thing he needs is to start crying in front of this stupid rookie and garner his pity.
The lawyer chuckles again, bordering on frantic. “Mr… Gerard. I have a perfect record.”
“Zero out of Zero doesn’t count as perfect.” He is ignored.
“And I know I’m inexperienced, but Mr. Wyatt was hardly top of the field either,” he says. “I’d say you actually have less to worry about now, given that I know what notes are and how to stay sober an- sorry. Sorry. Why don’t we start over? I’m Michael Shelley, your lawyer. It’s nice to meet you. Why don’t you tell me everything you remember?”
Gerry’s head spins with a sudden sense of Deja vu. Hundreds of hours of stating and explaining and reiterating every last non-supernatural detail of that fucking night and countless more leading up to it. Through the spots dancing in his vision, he’s almost convinced the spirals got him and he’s trapped in an endless loop of imprisonment and new lawyers. And Mary’s here as well. Fuck. He wonders if they give out the Nobel prize for discovering literal hell on earth.
Gerry opens his eyes- when had he closed them?- and finds the new guy, Michael peering at him, expectant, hopeful. Fuck him. This is bullshit. Gerry’s been rotting away in here for weeks. Months, even. They throw out all of his progress because one cunt couldn’t stop confusing his liver for a liquor cabinet? That doesn’t sound like a Gerry problem, it sounds like a justice system problem that he is not going to lift a single finger to help with. He says nothing.
Shelley’s face falls in slow motion. Gerry watches it crumble and forces himself not to look away. He sighs and scratches at his ear, “You need to talk if you want me to help you.”
So he’s getting cocky now? Who does this entitled little prick think he is? Gerry fails to contain a growl, “Shouldn’t you already know this? I went over it hundreds of times with what’s-his-face.”
“Again,” he mutters through pursed lips, “his notes were not the most… comprehensive. If it helps, let’s just start with the basics. Where were you the night of Mary Keay’s murder?”
Gerry’s blood quickens in anger. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was steam spilling from his ears. Months of torture, for nothing. Not even for nothing; less than nothing. Because now, he has to do it all over again. You know what? Gerry thinks he’s discovered a new power coming into its own: Tedium. The fear of boredom, of doing over and over and getting absolutely nothing out of it. Fear that nothing will ever happen, important or otherwise. Fear of this endless cycle of redundancy and paperwork.
But then again, what he feels is not fear. However close the two might be, it isn’t fear. It’s anger. He closes his eyes, the empty room with empty guards and empty lawyers melting away under the forced image of what Gerry sardonically refers to as his ‘happy place.’ He’s not quite sure he knows what true happiness is, but he figures 'comfortable' is a close enough approximation. Today, it’s a queer-owned bar in Oxford, with loud female vocals thrumming through the speakers and obnoxiously named cocktails that he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. It’s a small beach with a chip shop on the corner, rolling grey clouds overhead, and a bracing wind that cuts through his hangover. It’s sharing a cigarette with someone he’d slept with who didn’t care that he was trans. It’s being anywhere but here.
Gerry had felt comfortable in those places because his mum had left town without him. He’d been old enough to leave her, but not to escape her. He’ll never be that old. Old enough to defy her, but never to disobey. So he’d snatch a few days of freedom wherever he could. He lingered in comfortable anonymity in a too-sweet-smelling underground hideaway. Places that no one would notice him, places where people only looked at him because they were doing their job. Places where he would look and only then would they look back.
He cracks his eyes open at the sound of shuffling and finds Shelley gathering as many stacks and files as he can fit into his briefcase and piling the rest on top. He stands and heads to the door.
Gerry snorts to himself as he relaxes back into his chair. Fucking pushover. Gerry refuses to answer a couple of questions and already this soft pup is sticking his tail between his legs and crying his way back to whatever stupid law firm he crawled out of. He opens his eyes once more, just to get a peek at the expression on his face. He’s expecting defeat or sadness or even anger. Perhaps a pouted- or! Even better- quivering lip. But that isn’t what he gets. Shelley meets his gaze with grey eyes gone hard as steel.
He looks concerned. Not upset, and not quite pissed, but too close to either for comfort. “You know,” he says, studying Gerry, “They’ve got a pretty solid case against you. They aren’t done with the forensics yet, but that inheritance that Ms. Keay had set aside for you is a rather hefty motive.”
Gerry stutters and bites his lip to keep from saying anything stupid, put off by his change in demeanour. He squares his shoulders, determined not to back down. “Please. If I was the kind of person to be motivated by money, I wouldn’t be settling for a public defendant.” He spits that last part, intending it to be one final shove out the door so he can go back to wasting away in his cell, pretending to ignore his past literally haunting him from the other side of the room.
The lawyer looks hurt, but not surprised. “That’s rude,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Gerard.”
Gerry’s shoulders droop, just a fraction, as the door clicks shut behind the retreating blond. He doesn’t feel bad, though. And if he does, it’s because Shelley had been the first scrap of human contact he’d had in a week and he’d cut it short. But not because anyone’s feelings got hurt. Least of all Shelley’s.
*
“Music to my ears,” Gerry mutters as the cell judders closed.
Mary hums from behind him, “Mmhm, to mine as well. Just you and mummy, now.”
Gerry doesn’t bother to suppress a shiver at the words. Instead, he turns, keeping his back to his mother’s ghost and slumps down onto his own cot. The fabric of the thin blanket they’d provided is so scratchy he can feel it through the coarse seat of his pants. He lies down anyway, pulling it up around his shoulders as he curls into himself against the wall.
Mary’s talking again. It’s tinny like she’s whispering to him through an overhead loudspeaker on half volume. He can still make out what she’s saying- not that he wants that- but it’s clear her current cycle of terror is nearly over. He shuts his eyes against the wave of gratitude that accompanies the thought. It’s the beginning of two or three days of peace and Gerry is going to savour every last moment of it.
At least she hadn’t shown up in the meeting. Gerry doesn’t know if she can manifest in front of others or if she just chooses not to or if that room is simply outside of her radius of control. He allows himself a grain of amusement at the thought of this new lawyer’s reaction to Mary’s hideous ghost. He’d probably scream, jump- definitely. He imagines the gasping and stammering that might spill from him had she appeared. He might even faint. Gerry chuckles.
“What’s so fun-.” Mary starts to say, annoyed huff cut off by a series of thudding footsteps heading towards the cell.
Gerry rolls over in time to see the same guard approach with another tray of food. He looks to the opposite cot and Mary is no longer there. As with every other instance of her disappearance, there’s a split second of hope- maybe she’d never been there. Maybe Gerry’s subconscious has just been torturing him for not saving her, however terrible and selfish she’d been. Or maybe he is just crazy. Those thoughts never last for long. Logic overpowers them far sooner than Gerry would like. The insane never think themselves so. It’s an idea that he wishes he’d never learnt.
“Dinner,” the officer deposits the bland meal.
When Gerry turns with the tray in hand, Mary is back. He doesn’t start- not this time. He averts his gaze and settles down. Gerry’s had a lot of time to ponder this wall since he got here. Since Mary put him here. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about a bunch of bricks plastered together with peeling white primer. The divot in the left corner, the uneven patch by the door, the scrapes and cracks by the bed from where he and his predecessors had picked at it or the metal cot rocked against it too hard. But each day he spends glaring at it, he notices something new. Today it’s a spider inching its way down from the corner.
It’s not the worst way to kill time. He’s had years to practice, after all. Sometimes, when he was very young, Mary would lock him in a closet with no light and no sound. He’d been too small then to retain the reasoning behind it if she’d had any. Maybe it was just outdone by the fear he’d wallowed in on those dark nights. The shadows clawed at him with inky fingers that wrapped and prodded and curled in all the wrong places. The first few times he’s sure he would’ve screamed- the memory of his throat scraped raw had stuck with him- but he’d soon learnt that making noise prolonged the torture- if he were loud, Mary would ignore him for even longer. So he learned to stifle his cries and whimpers as best he could.
He grew out of his fear of the dark after a couple of years. By that time, Gerry had taken to convincing himself that she had put him in there to get him out of the way. It was easier to think that than any alternative. Easier to think that she was just tired. That she couldn’t deal with him sometimes because she was toiling so hard on their important work.
When he’d stopped finding fear in the dark space and instead found momentary rest and comfort without her, she became livid. The hours in the closet stopped and instead she found new ways to torture him. It was harder to convince himself she was just tired of him after that. But he persevered. And he believed, despite everything, that maybe he could earn his mother’s love.
So, no. Staring at the wall is not the worst way to kill time. No- it’s the second-worst. The first is listening to, looking at, or in any way acknowledging Mary’s rotting existence.
“Shame,” she croons, “I would’ve thought you’d learn some respect for me by now. After all, I did choose to keep you around for 27 years.”
“I’m trying to fucking eat, you old fuck,” he grumbles, picking at the foil lid of his pudding cup. He hates when he rips the little tab off, now he has to pick at the edges until he can work a nail under there- or maybe he can just stab through the middle with his plastic fork. Nope, it’s too blunt.
“I wonder how you can even stomach that when you were so rude to that sweet boy back there.”
Gerry pauses, speaking of pudding, “You were there?”
“No,” she simpers. “But I saw.”
Gerry does not turn around to look at her. But he can feel his knuckles burn as she makes eye contact with them. He pulls the sleeves of his dull grey sweatshirt over them, bunches his fists in the fabric to completely cover his hands. This stretches the collar away from the back of his neck, which starts to heat up in turn.
“Just leave me the fuck alone!” He shouts, flinging the cup against the bars. It pops, sending a pale brown spurt across the stone floor and halfway up the wall. Fuck. He’d been looking forward to that pudding.
“Come now, there will be time for that later. When we get out of this horrid place.”
Through the bubbling miasma of emotion, Gerry can’t make out her tone, if she even has any. Was she being sarcastic, or does she want him to get out? How would that benefit her? It would give him the freedom to continue hunting Leitners, a passion of hers so fierce, surely something so insignificant as death couldn’t stop her. But is there a limit to how far she can move relative to the book? Gerry knows it’s being kept in the same station as he is, which accounts for her being in his cell at every available opportunity, and would explain why she doesn’t follow him everywhere, unaccompanied, or not.
So then does she want Gerry to stay in jail? Jail has its benefits. Aside from collecting those retched books, making Gerry’s life a living hell was her only other hobby, so it tracks that she would want to keep him within arms’ reach. But jail is not- cannot- be long term. He will either be deemed guilty or not guilty. He will be set free or moved to prison.
What the fuck is she trying to manipulate him into doing?
“What the fuck do you want?” he growls. He’s still facing the wall and even he can’t tell if he’s talking to himself or Mary.
She hums again, satisfied with her handy work. “I don’t know, Gerard. You tell me.”
Gerry shoves the tray off the bed before crawling up to rest his head on the flat pillow. Sleep is far away. Every night has been like this, ignoring Mary until he falls unconscious. It’s not hard to ignore her tonight, her voice pitching and yawing like a ship at sea or a radio too far from its broadcast tower. Yet he is still awake.
It reminds him of the nights where she would act the part instead of hiding from the spotlight. She would tuck him into bed, seeming not to notice the way he shuddered under her touch, and she would open a book. There’s no need to explain what kind of book. And she would read until Gerry fell asleep.
When all the lights have gone off in the hall outside the cell and even Mary’s quieted into silence, he sees something. A flash of hurried movement in the periphery of his vision, enough to startle Gerry into turning over, sitting up to glare wide-eyed into the dark of the room. Mary is gone. Not unexpected but the emptiness still feels off somehow. Unpredictability has been a cornerstone of their relationship since Gerry can remember. He drops back down to the thin mattress, reminded of a night over twenty years ago, at the end of a week-long campaign of since unmatched night terrors.
Mary had tucked him into bed. It wasn’t with a warm smile and a peck on the forehead, though. She’d slammed open the door at the sound of his screams, and instead of comforting him into wakefulness, she’d crossed the room and sat at the edge of his bed until he shot up, drenched in sweat and the harsh yellow light shining in from the hall. She’d urged him back to a lying position and tucked the sheets and comforter in around him. It wasn’t gentle or calming. The sharp jabs and prods of her fingers as she crammed the blankets under and around him felt more like being trapped.
She’d told him that dreams couldn’t hurt him. True enough from any parent, and if left alone, a comforting sentiment to leave him with for the night. But she hadn’t finished there. She’d told him that, although dreams could not hurt him, they could be indicative of things in the real world that certainly could, and definitely would. The monsters under the bed were real. Not always present, perhaps, but real, nonetheless. And that wasn’t all: There are monsters around every corner. In every closet and every box, lurking behind the eyes of the ones we love and trust the most. And one day, the power to control them would be within their grasp. If they just kept working. Kept seeking, studying, finding.
Gerry always thinks of that night when he wakes from a nightmare. She’d been right, about most of it. But just because she’s right, doesn’t mean she should have told him. He wasn’t even ten years old at that point. She had been incorrect about one thing, though.
They would never control the powers. Never have and never will. Mary’s hubris had led to a great many accomplishments. Well, things she deemed accomplishments, anyway. But she never reached that one goal. She never controlled anything. She thinks she controls the end now, but she’s just as trapped as they’d always been. Mary had worked for the institute for years and she’s still too blind to see the situation she’s in. The irony is fitting.
Lying in the dark of his cell, thinking back, thinking ahead, it’s hard to tell what’s gone, what is, and what’s yet to be. All those times he’d run away from Mary over the years, had they even happened? Had he ever grown up? Or is he still a scared teen, hiding behind make-up and a standoffish demeanour to convince himself he’s in control of his life?
If he lies still enough, keeps his eyes shut or fixed on the black ceiling, he can trick himself into being however old he pleases. He’s four, thinking about all the possibilities that the future holds. He’s ten, realizing that there’s not much to the future but this, with Mary. He’s sixteen, thinking fuck that, I’m getting out of this place. He’s seventeen, having just been returned home by the cops. He’s twenty-two, in his own flat, knowing distancing himself is not the same as freedom. He’s twenty-five, lying next to some sated pretty face he’d found in one of his favourite haunts, trying to delude himself into thinking that this could be real. That this could be his new normal.
He lifts his head to see out into the dimly illuminated hallway and the illusion is dispelled. He’s in jail. Mary is dead but not gone. He’s always been trapped. Nothing’s changed.
The scenery makes a singular difference. Grey London streetlight trickling in through broken window slats traded for cracked and peeling walls and metal bars. He hasn’t even made any progress. New lawyer, new start, new time.
It doesn’t help that this new guy is such a fucking pushover. He probably hasn’t even seen the inside of a courtroom save for Judge Judy reruns. Gerry imagines him breaking down in tears as soon as the opposition makes any kind of argument against him, apologizing and fleeing the room with his stacks of unorganized files.
The last guy hadn’t been much better, Gerry’s willing to admit. Old and balding, expanding around the waist as steadily as an hourglass fills with sand, he’d looked one late-night escapade away from wandering into traffic. His being in hospital isn’t a surprise in the slightest.
This new guy, at the very least, is much easier on the eyes. If Gerry’s going to jail, at least he can spend his last few days in society with someone who has a respectable knuckle-hair-to-head-hair ratio. It’s a shame Shelley will be eaten alive in the courtroom. The slacks he’d been wearing were doing him no disservice, and if Gerry was a free man, he might have approached him at a bar.
As it stands, Gerry’s going to trial for the murder of his mother, and this blond strip of an inexperienced lawyer is not going to do anything to change the obvious guilty verdict.
Gerry amuses himself with thoughts of the bumbling wreck of an upcoming trial until he falls asleep.
He finds himself in the same dream as before. Blood, skin, mum, red, dark, slippery, confusion, horror, escape. The first half goes by in a soupy haze of terror and disorientation. He slips and falls and stumbles and he’s at the front door. There’s another eternity of listening to Mary scream and cry for his help from behind while he rattles at the doorknob which is too coated in his mother’s blood to gain any traction.
When the door opens, Gerry falls through onto his hands and knees. It smarts, the rough linoleum against his joints but it is not quite sharp enough to scrape through the skin of his palms. It’s bright outside. Artificially so. He’d been expecting the dark street outside of Pinhole books, but when he looks up, he finds the meeting room from earlier, where he met Shelley. It’s bright enough that Gerry has to squint. He looks behind him to find no door. Only blank budget stucco.
He staggers to his feet and stumbles against the wall. It’s quiet. He can’t hear Mary’s wailing or the fall of her heavy footsteps. Just the harsh pant of his own breaths. He closes his mouth in an attempt to stifle the noise, but it makes it worse- the air whistling through his nose like a howling wind through barren trees.
The new lawyer is there. Sitting in the same chair as he had been earlier- before he’d fled to escape Gerry’s hostility. He’s watching Gerry calmly, seemingly unperturbed by the blood dripping from his jacket sleeves and pooling at his feet.
He knows this is a dream, so he has no reason to be surprised at the clarity with which he sees the lawyer. But even so, the extent of detail is shocking. His hair is smooth where it curls around his ears, downy where it spirals away from the nape of his neck. His eyes are bright and idealistic like he honestly believes he can change the way things are. They’re grey, shot with delicate slivers of green and gold. It reminds him of the sun breaking through a cloudy sky after a storm- bright, late afternoon light shining off of rippling puddles of rain-softened asphalt.
Shelley extends one long leg and pushes out the chair opposite him with his foot. He nods at it, willing Gerry to sit.
Gerry glances behind him once more. Mary is nowhere to be seen. It’s just him and Shelley. He sits.
*