By Anonymous
Nikolas is a giant fuelled by homophobia, who murders old people and wraps them in toilet paper. D.I. Seymour, a vicar from Pretoria, knows she has to stop him. Seymour remembers that she actually killed the villain ten years previous and is suffering from flashbacks. (auto-generated prompt)
“GAY!!!!”
It barely sounds like human speech, more a grotesque combination of vowel sounds and wet consonants, but Seymour knows exactly what created the noise before she even registers the word. Papers fly as she stands up, an ink bottle smashing on the floor, but she’s already out the door of her small office. She sees it as soon as she steps out of the church: a small cardboard tube, strewn carelessly onto the sidewalk and unmistakably Charmin-brand. “Lord give me strength,” she whispers under her breath.
“GAY!!!!!!!!!!”
The grunt is louder now and even uglier—he must be getting closer. Seymour stops and listens closely, trying to detect where it might be coming from, but it doesn’t come again. Worrying her lip, she looks around wildly for anything resembling a clue—there. Three more naked toilet paper rolls, forming a loosely defined path in the direction of the senior home—of course. The senior home. Lord give me strength. She jogs to the bus stop, but gives up waiting after two minutes—the buses probably aren’t running anyway, not with Nikolas abound—and sprints in the opposite direction, following the cardboard tubes. One more lies nestled in a gutter next to a cat, another in someone’s planter box, reassuring reminders that she’s going the right way. She could do this in her sleep, even after ten years. She just wonders why Nikolas has chosen now of all times to return to Pretoria.
Ten years. Ten long, sleepless years of wondering if the next night is the one when Nikolas will return and praying to God that he never does. Ten years of God answering her prayers and holding him off for another day—until this one. Why this one? Seymour runs through the motions of yesterday in her mind: morning mass, hearing confessions, lunch, answering letters, supper, Bible study, bed. Nothing unusual for a Tuesday. No especially interesting or outrageous confessions, not compared to what she heard during the Stewart family scandal last month. No sins on Seymour’s part (that she can think of) that would prompt the Lord to send Nikolas back to Pretoria from whichever circle of hell he’d been living in, just to torture her one more time.
“GAY!!!!!!!!!!!”
The shout, almost louder than her eardrums can take, startles her out of her thoughts and before she knows it she’s on her knees on the sidewalk. Breathing heavily, heart in her throat, she looks up slowly. The senior home lies a block ahead, elderly patients stampeding out as fast as they can with their wheelchairs and walkers, dispersing behind buildings and down back alleys. A lone woman stands on the lawn, leaning on her cane and screaming Bloody Mary. The building is, unsurprisingly, accessorized with a few (tastefully-placed, if a little garish, in Seymour’s opinion) strands of toilet paper.
Seymour doesn’t want to look up into the sky above the senior home. She really doesn’t. She knows what terrible view is there waiting for her. But she also knows that she has to be the one to meet it. “Lord give me strength,” she whispers through trembling lips, and then steels herself. She has no choice.
Breathing in deeply, only slightly wincing at the putrid stench, she sets her jaw and forces herself to look up. There it is. Forty, fifty feet in the air is Nikolas’ massive, rotted, ugly face—if it can be called a face. To Seymour, it looks more like a mass of flesh with two deep-sunken depressions where eyes might be on a human, a mound that could be a nose, and—sending chills down her spine—a wide, gaping mouth without teeth. Seymour swallows. He’s even uglier, even less human, than the last time she saw him. But there’s no time to think of the past right now. Right now, Nikolas is clutching an elderly man in his right hand and a six-pack of toilet paper in his left. The man, suspended twenty feet in the air, is shouting something about witnesses and pressing charges. Seymour’s lips crack into half a smile; she admires his unending optimism. Most of the senior citizens Nikolas targets share his mindset: the mindset of someone who has been offended, horribly and unforgivably injusticed, but certainly not about to be dead. Seymour, who knows better than all of these old farts, is well-acquainted with death. From Nikolas’ first rampage a decade ago to speaking at funerals to the tragic incident involving last year’s earthquake and the church’s beta fish tank, she’s come to accept it as a fact of life. Part of the Lord’s plan. Still, she can’t help but wish some of these old people would die a little quicker. She’s not young either. Her eardrums are only so strong.
A white flash catches Seymour’s eye: in an impressive move of the wrist, Nikolas has flicked the plastic wrapping off the toilet paper six-pack and shot six strands of paper (three-ply, no doubt; Nikolas was never one to be cheap) toward the old man in his other hand. Another deft movement, and the man’s face has disappeared behind two layers of toilet paper, incredulous rants finally muffled. Seymour lets out a breath and then is on her feet and sprinting toward Nikolas with all the strength her arthritis allows her calves to have. But it’s not fast enough; the man looks completely mummified by the time she’s directly underneath him. Craning her head straight up, she narrowly dodges a discarded toilet paper tube. Suddenly, another wave of the rotten smell hits her, followed by what could be very loud breathing or a very broken air conditioner. “Gay,” says a deep, mangled voice. Seymour can hear the flecks of spit. One, the volume of a bucket and not quite clear, hits the ground far too close to her for comfort. Disgusting. Lord give her strength.
“Gay!” the voice says, again, louder but somehow still not as loud as the first few shouts. It almost sounds calm. Caring? I’ll figure that out later. Right, now I need to kill him…oh, god, Jesus forgive me. Seymour takes a deep breath (and then immediately regrets it; the smell hasn’t subsided) and takes off running again. Reaching Nikolas’ massive foot, she pulls out the dagger she keeps in her boot. Take that, Mom. Told you it would come in handy.
Steeling herself (Lord give me strength) one last time, Seymour prepares herself for what she’s about to do. She would rather die than touch Nikolas’ flesh, but there’s nothing else around she could plausibly climb; the roof of the senior home only reaches his waist. Okay. I’ll use my words, one time, and then I’ll go for the heart. “Put him down!” she screams at the sky. To her surprise, the movement in the tree trunk that is his leg stops. “Huh?” Nikolas says, grotesquely but unmistakably.
“Put him down!!!” Seymour shouts again. Huh. Didn’t think that would work.
“Gay, what?”
Before Seymour can process this reasonably-intelligible speech, something she can’t remember ever hearing from Nikolas before, the world goes dark. Shit, Seymour thinks, and then immediately regrets it; she’s not dead quite yet, so her sins probably still count against her. Unsure, she makes a mental note to ask the priest about it when she gets home. If she gets home. Seymour blinks, not convinced she’s still alive. The world remains dark.
Hm. Maybe she is dead, then. That’s disappointing.
Suddenly, the world is bright again. Strangely bright. Almost…fluorescent. Weird. I never knew heaven looked so much like an…office building. “Gaye?” a voice says. A voice she recognizes. Seymour blinks again, and a dark shape appears in the corner of her vision. Another blink, and it resolves itself into the face of Reverend Gretchen.
“Oh, good, you’re awake.”
Seymour groans.
“You’ve been having nightmares again, dearie. Nikolas again?”
Unable to process this, Seymour only nods.
“He’s gone, dearie. He’s been gone for ten years. I saw his body myself, you standing on his chest with your dagger in his heart and all. You don’t need to worry about him anymore.”
Huh, Seymour thinks. Nightmares. Well, at least I’m not dead yet.
“It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”
And with that thought on her tongue like the elderly on Nikolas’ ten years ago, Seymour goes back to sleep.
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