Number 23

When she moved to number 23 I should have known. What am I saying? I did know. Not at first. That’s not how these things work. There’s a time delay on the bad things in this life. You don’t know they’re bad until well after they’ve done their thing. That’s not to say that they cease their nonsense at the point that you get wise to them. The worst times are what I’ve taken to calling Onion Shit. There’s layer after layer of the stinking stuff and you sure do cry. Mostly inside. Tears are bad employees. They don’t always turn up for work.

They call it the discard. That terrible moment that you walk into an empty house and you know they’re gone. You understand this at a deep level. Right at the bottom of the well of you. But the surface is a stupid thing. I refused to believe what I already knew. That refusal can last a long time. Hell, it can last a lifetime and get passed along bloodlines. Forever and forever. Ah Man! 

Belief’s an asshole. People rant and rave about religion. Religion’s an obvious candidate for assholery. At least you’ve got an idea of the brand of crap you’re dealing with if a person shows you their religious credentials. Problem is that everyone’s a believer but the kicker is that they don’t know what they believe. There’s these strings that guide everyone’s actions via a set of beliefs few of us ever take the time to define. So we’re secretly defined and in being defined we’re paralysed when it comes to the simple matter of being ourselves.

I pieced together her belief system as the emptiness of my life haunted me. I bet you didn’t know that there’s something far worse than ghosts did you? The Empty’s a bleak companion. You’ve never experienced loneliness until you’ve sat with The Empty. Now the bad stories I heard in my youth make sense to me at long last. At least I don’t have kids. There was a guy at school. Craig his name was. One day, his dear, sainted mother did a moonlight flit. Woke his brother John up. Took him with her. Left Craig and his dad to it. That was that. They never heard from mother or John ever again. 

It was as if they never existed, but Craig was haunted all the same. The proverbial ghost of his former self. His eyes told a story that would never be translated into words. His skin changed too. He wasn’t quite grey. But somehow he lost his glow. He died in a car accident just before his twenty second birthday. I doubt it was an accident. I sometimes wonder about Craig. Does his mother visit his grave in the dead of night? Does his brother commemorate the boy he grew up with. Maybe he called his own son Craig. Mostly I think about what I could have said to bridge the gap that his mother cursed him with. I ask myself whether anyone can undo that sort of damage. Exorcise a past rewritten in despair. The loss of all the good that lay waiting in futures that suddenly become unobtainable. I don’t think I could have made a difference. Turns out that it was Craig that never existed. His mother took everything real and meaningful with her. Left him with The Empty and a breed of doubt that eats the scraps that remain after such betrayal.

The sad reality of this life is that no one’s coming to save any of us. We get sold a series of duff belief systems. They’re the silent soundtrack of our broken lives. One such belief is that our tailormade prince will come and complete our lives with a fanfare of romance and dirty sex. But that’s horseshit. Or whore shit as I’ve taken to calling it. There are some big lies out there. For what it’s worth, my theory is that these lies are someone’s idea of a joke because the opposite of the lie is where dark truths reside. In the case of our search for the one? That lobster who will bond with us for life? The truth is that there’s also that one who has the capacity and the intent to right royally fuck us up whilst masquerading as our lobster. They come to worship at the altar of our dreams when really they are gathering intel for the dirtiest of campaigns against us. The extent of their fuck uppery’s incredible. They are napalm with a smile. Would you like fries with that? They burn you away. Clean you out. Or rather, they dirty you out. They take far more than you ever knew you had. But that’s no surprise. Another belief we all share is our lack of worth. So we sell our wares at a discount and wonder why we struggle to get by on the scraps we receive.

In my case I received less than nothing, conveyed in flamboyant gift wrapping scented with my own desperate hope. I had my own personalised banking crisis. The merchant banker I married emptied the account of me. Left me under a mountain of unpayable debt. And just like those bankers, she gave no shits and zero fucks. Would I mind as much if she had anything to show for her daylight robbery? I’ll never get to find out. Because in common with all criminals, the loot slipped through her fingers and was gone before I noticed the theft.

You have some pretty dark thoughts when you’re left with nothing but The Empty for company. I could blame The Empty for how things ended up. I won’t blame her though. There’s nothing to blame. She was never there.

Still, I daydreamed of revenge. Of how I would meet her fire with my own. But what do you give the person who has already taken everything from you so that you’re left with the square root of fuck all? Some people really are difficult to buy for.

I fantasised about haunting the bitch. That’s where I ended up. Only that was a beginning, not an end. I played with that thought. Got off on evening the score. Because that’s what she’d done to me. The format of her revenge on the cruel world was she replaced love with this revolting absence that eats away at you. She was a grinning parasite. The poster girl recruiting you into a conflict against yourself. A sausage machine that destroyed humanity. Leaving a wrinkled skin filled with the dirt of anger and hate.

I should have left well alone. Started again. Thing is, I had no idea as to how I could start again and one thing we find hard to do is let go. Maybe there’s a powerful belief right down in the bottom of that well of ours. A silent voice that bids us hold on for all we’re worth until we’re worth nothing at all. Magpies stealing shiny molten mercury that hastens our beautiful end. Drinking the coveted treasure down quickly and greedily when we think no one’s watching. Glorious idiots living in the shadow of our own shame. I sometimes think that The Empty was my reward, not the curse I saw it as at the time.

Let me tell you something about haunting. The most popular form of haunting is via the medium of ghost. The only exception to this that I’ve encountered is her. And one sensible limit I imposed upon myself was never to be like her. Besides, what kind of revenge would it be if I stooped to her level and met her fire with an imitation of those hateful flames. I had to own this shit. I was going to use my fire and she was going to burn, baby! 

I never thought beyond that. We seldom do. We bow our heads. Stare at those next few steps. Leave the rest to others. Hopeful that we can kick the can of worms into a future that doesn’t concern us. So there I was with the intent to become a dragon so I could breathe cleansing fire upon the harbinger of my doom. After that, what would I do in this dragon form of mine? Such a transformation’s a one way ticket. Hers was.

The limbo of The Empty does something to a man. I’m not qualified to say what it does to a woman. But I know this much, women are built differently. I guess it hurts just as much. It just finds another route to the eventuality of a pain that shatters bones and lives. Where I found myself at was that I didn’t much like the life she’d left me with. I didn’t recognise myself anymore. I’d been press ganged into another existence. I was as lost as could be. Flying in clouds of confusion with no idea whether I was the right way up, let alone in which direction my salvation lay. 

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to top myself. Fact of the matter was that for all intents and purposes I was already dead. She’d taken everything worth having. Left me a hollowed out husk. Only I wasn’t empty. And I had The Empty as well as this giant Onion Shit that I’d have to slice and dice if I was going to make it out of this mess. 

In such dire circumstances, it doesn’t hurt to fact check. So I did that thing that sick people do. I used Google to diagnose my ailments. Then I headed on out into the wild lands of social media for good measure in an attempt to know mine enemy, because in all the time we’d been together it turned out that I had no idea who she was. Turns out that she didn’t either.

One thing I looked up was suicidal ideation. I knew I wasn’t suicidal, I just didn’t want to live this life of mine anymore. You may think that’s splitting hairs, but it isn’t. It was just the way it was. For instance, no one noticing if I didn’t wake up the next morning? That was a fact of my life, not a fancifully grim thought I was indulging. I had nothing left to lose. She’d taken the lot and pawned it in a cess pet.

That there’s another one of those lies. I had plenty to lose. I had all the pain and misery I woke up to each and every day. I had the despair and the strange longing for her. Yeah, did I not mention that? I still wanted her. Not the shit bestowing thief she’d turned out to be. I wanted the promise of her. She’d really leaned into that one. The Future Her was going to be the best thing since sliced bread. She gave me sneak previews. I was as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve. Then she permanently assigned me to the naughty list and cancelled all my future Christmases. All I got was Krampus.

So there you have a sniff and a sip of the flavour of me prior to my making a wish and actually having a dream come true. I wasn’t at all careful with this wish of mine. Funny isn’t it? I have all these corrupted and broken belief systems and yet I got to a point in my life when I stopped believing that a dream could actually come true. I certainly didn’t believe in magic. But there we go once more. The sugar coated variety’s whore shit, but the dark shit? Oh, that’s real. Same as there’s drugs that take you places you never wanted to go because you thought anywhere was better than where you are right now. That’s how this world is built. The odds are stacked. One way or another, The House always wins.

I suppose I made a pact with The Empty late one night when I was on the wrong side of the bottom of a whisky bottle. Drinking was an escape of sorts. I could see something like hope through the bottom of my glass.. Drinking was one hobby I could indulge. The hangovers were hell. I was already in hell though. It was as much as I deserved. Self-flagellation. Hurting myself in penance for the sin of being me. Reclaiming space within myself by scourging my remains.

There’s a wrong sort of drunk that’s far away from merry escapism. A sad maudlin state punctuated with mirthless laughter. Lost tears prompted by music that once meant something. I shared that bottle of whisky with The Empty and The Empty shared itself with me. That was our deal. It was the only relationship I had going. The Empty listened as only The Empty can. It took all of my words. Gave nothing back. Stood in for the woman who had been doing that to me for the best part of fifteen years.

That night I got dark and I got angry. I invoked the hatred that I’d convinced myself I was incapable of, in a denial of the dark part of me I was already well acquainted with, but had never thought to at least house train. I cursed her and the earth that she stood upon. She had been my end. I wished that I could be her end. An eye for an eye. Not a swift, merciful affair either. I wanted her to know what it felt like. It didn’t occur to me that she may already have suffered a fate similar to mine. Turns out that was how she was made. These parasites pass the poison legacy on via a desperation of pain and betrayal. It’s a cult. A vampiric belief system that either turns victims or ends them. There is always a bitter end. I don’t think the target has a say in the Dark Choice. This the exception that proves the rule; that we all have a choice. In this case, the vampire tears a hole in their carcass and drowns their victim in a brand of darkness that’s an eternal curse. I hadn’t realised that even in the very depths of my despair I was fortunate. The Empty hadn’t turned me into the thing I despised most in this life even as I went through the trials and tribulations of despising all that I had become.

Waking up dead’s a novel experience. Most people don’t. You can’t deny death. Not unless you have been monumentally idiotic and in a drunken stupor accidentally invoked a powerfully dark spell. What are the chances of that? Pretty high if you’ve been infected by a certain type of parasite and have learnt some of their lingo. Hatred has a language all of its own.

This part may also seem stupid, but then some of us are masters of stupidity. I quickly understood that I was dead, but I failed to appreciate that I was a ghost. It were as though I’d failed to read the job description. The problem was that I had become accustomed to a bleak existence in limbo. So nothing much changed on the occasion of my death. I find this amusing now. You have to laugh don’t you?

Time felt like the love I thought we shared. I knew it existed but its form eluded me. I wasn’t beyond time but it made less and less sense. I was free of those shackles but didn’t know what to do with that freedom.

Then, on a whim, I brought myself to the place that she now resided. It began with thoughts of the house number and the magic that number was fabled to contain. There was certainly an invisible force that thrummed as I neared her dwelling.

I entered her property with no invitation. None was needed. We were bound by the evil she had done to me. As I crossed the threshold, the power I sensed seemed to join with me and I knew what I must do as though I had the contract with The Empty there in front of me and was reading the clause that documented my part in the bargain.

Now I was The Limbo and I visited torture upon her. I delighted in her discomfort and her inability to see me as I stood before her wreaking havoc in her life as she had once done in mine. 

How long this delightful torture went on for I don’t know. All I do know is that I saw the change in her as I laid her low. I took her life force from her and experienced terrible joy as she stumbled and tripped around in her receding existence. 

Unable to find herself victims, she starved before my ghostly eyes. She was a pitiful sight. Living mostly in her squalid house. Shuffling betwixt bedroom, toilet, kitchen and living room. She reminded me of poor Craig. But I wasn’t yet done with her.

As I looked upon her bloated, ugly form I wondered what the extent of the damage really was. There was only one thing for it. I had to take a look for myself. So I breached the last of her defences and entered her as she lay bemoaning her rightful state.

That was when the game ended, for there’s no occupying the void that spiteful harm creates. My companion had been a lie. The Empty was yet another mask. Of her there was no sign, other than an echo of what might have been.

There can be no vacuum in this life. 

What lay in wait was beyond imagining. An ancient being that has followed our fortunes since the dawn of our time. A darkness that occupies darkness. A terrible infinite hunger.

I opened a door with the spell I spitefully cast in pointless vengeance against a soul that was already lost. My soul however…

…there is no victory against such as this.