Not a lunatic

(A small Lovecraftian piece I Wrote some time ago, definitely flawed but I thought someone here might enjoy it)

“I am not a lunatic!

The closet is!”

And as I utter those words I realise my strategic mistake, underlined by my opponent’s surprised and bewildered laughter. He, that most horrible of angels, most fierce of cowards and most smart of idiots. That humanisation of the damnation.

My supervisor.

Who stands in the kitchen of the disgusting cliché of wood that is my temporary home.

“William, come on. Please.

We sent you here for a report about naval exercises happening near this boring, foggy coastal town. And yet, all you sent us are letters of imaginary things I partly don’t even understand.”

“How limited is your intellect please? In my two weeks here, I swear that I saw all of these things and more!” My fine vest restrains my movement but I remain on the fly, pointing at the ugly truth and at his even uglier face, filled up by a nose and a moustache so powerful, all the hair on his head had decided to evacuate.

His face becomes increasingly amused as his right hand withdraws to the pocket of his coat, drawing out both his and my evidence. I find myself wandering around the kitchen, looking outside of the flat, onto the city that somehow manages to give an individual like me the feeling that we do not find ourselves in the 1920s but in the 1870s.

“Oh well you started off with what you get paid for: Interviews with sailors, descriptions of ships and the city but then, well, you confuse a U-boat with a whale but that’s okay.”

“Neither U-boats nor whales randomly split in two and reunite during swimming, Sir.”

“Neither does something like that exist.”

Of course there is a heavy fog that drowns the city in pity and turns silent streets into the hubs of silent watchers.

There they stand and wait. Unseen. Shall they! Shall they!

“So you wrote you are being watched every time you leave your home and that they even stalk you back to your flat here?”

“Exactly.”

“But why would they?”

“Because they are them, but I agree with you on one thing, I do not know yet why they are them.”

I am losing him or he already is but the bickering unfortunately tells me the second is more likely but maybe, bickering is not a trustworthy source, maybe it is corrupt or has its own agenda.

“William, don’t you want to go back to your girlfriend?”

Lisa.

If I look into her eyes I smile like a pathetic puppy, if I cower in her arms I cry like a joke of a man. I love that demon so much and she makes me so weak. So naive, so loving, she would only hinder me while I write the piece that could make me rich enough to buy her a thousand houses and a million dresses. We change rotation as I walk to the back of the room and my supervisor to the window, unsurprisingly he doesn’t see what I don’t see either.

“Sir, let me show you the reason for my delays and my letters and maybe you can understand.”

He nods and we walk to my bedroom where you can find table, typewriter, bed and that closet out of hell.

A great bundle of papers emerges as his eyes widen and I realise that I have lost this battle already.

“What in God’s name is that?”

“Put simply, these are my observations, theories and recordings of what is going on here. All the villagers here are more or less polite, more or less busy and more or less ugly but they truly feel like a herd, whose brains were molten into a collective of boringness. And I can feel it as well, this place is killing off my brain cells.”

“At least we can agree somewhere.”

My desperation serves his satisfaction.

“It’s something even the sailors and officers acknowledge, I’ve got the interviews on page 28. But here are my own observations.”

The paper travels and after vivid reading also is the target of mockery and disapproval, he calls it fiction and absurd but in a more polite way and then he politely orders me to pack my things to go back to London but a phone call impolitely disrupts his politeness.

My feet find the phone, my arm the handset and my ear the voice of my girlfriend, incidentally also begging me to return to London.

I get weak and soft and feel longing and thereby pathetic.

A portal is near this city and it unleashes horrors of the physical and mental variety and I want to return to my love instead of finishing the piece that could change the world?

And so the handpiece finds its way back like I do to my room.

I could also finish it from London and not lose my job.

My step halters as my thought continues.

It would naturally be weaker and I could not conduct my research properly anymore as well as my ability to describe the power of the gate firsthand but it would be a price worth paying.

Oh Lisa.

But as I enter my bedroom again I find a most curious sight.

My supervisor leans into my hated closet and I can hear a quite clear dialogue emerge.

“We will get him to leave soon. You did well, we know all of his thoughts, his girlfriend will be enough for him to return.”

While I struggle to enter the room calmly, he struggles to lean out of my closet calmly.

We look at each other in mutual horrifiedness, neither daring to state the most obvious, most ridiculous truth and while I feel a great terror rising in me, I also feel comfort in being proven right. A comfort that is quickly ended as he slowly stumbles into my direction wordlessly and the wooden floor creaks while my supposed death nears my planless, foolish self.

He, both un- and surprisingly draws a knife which declares a queer arms race which he instantly wins. Even though I possess a firearm, it waits in one of the drawers of my table, a revolver with only one bullet.

A great array of options all go on to bewilder me. I could sprint to the kitchen, take a knife and hope for reflexes to take over.

Running outside was a bad idea as I integrated the idea of him being part of that collective unintelligence.

To surrender now was the same as dashing into his blade, even though the latter would probably mean a faster death.

I had scheduled a meeting with a navy officer at my flat for later in the day and that annoyance suddenly turned into my revenge. If I killed myself, my former supervisor would never be finished quickly enough with cleaning to not be noticed by the officer.

And so I dash forward, eagerly awaiting a sharp pain in my chest but to my surprise, my killer may is part of something greater but certainly not a fighter.

He steps beside me and only tries a stab after I have already passed him and now suddenly finds me sprinting to my table as his mass walks to his doom.

I pull out this theatrical method of killing and aim at his head, an action that is rewarded with his body dropping to the floor.

A great silence creeps out of his corpse and into the air. I did it. I ruined my future but I found out the truth.

My head filling with plans of corpse removal and a new motivation to finish my piece, the telephone rings once again and the door knocks.

With a hasty step I see the police through the door agent and chose not to open just yet and instead answer the phone.

“A few seconds slower and we would have to do a lot less cleaning today.”