TWELVE
When the car pulled up, I jolted awake. It was the car belonging to the dentists. One of the headlights was smashed. I stood up and looked down at Vincent, who was frozen in place. Inside the service station, the attendant at the kiosk, who I could see through the window, was paused mid-yawn. Snowflakes hung in mid-air. The only evidence that time hadn't ground to a complete standstill was the low purr of the engine. I walked toward the car and climbed in through the passenger side door.
Newmaker wasn't what I was expecting. There was no need to pretend in ambiguity anymore: I knew it was him. The parts I remembered from my other dreams made complete sense. He was just a normal man. Thin, grey hair. An extremely receding hairline, in fact. Skinny and wrinkled. Someone's grandfather. In reading glasses and a comfortable cardigan. Still, he had a sly look about him. He looked like he could be quick on his feet, if he wanted to be- a spry old man. Without a word, he put the car in gear with a gnarled hand and started us further down the lonely road to nowhere. I looked back- we had left Vincent, still sitting rigid on the stoop, a fixed expression on his face. There were no stars in the sky.
"Did you bring it?" Newmaker asked me. He was well-spoken. A posh accent.
"Bring what?" I kept my eyes fixed on the road.
"The camera."
"Why would I give it to you?"
"I thought you would be one to help me."
"You almost killed Garth."
"The young vampire? Well, I can't say I'm too upset about that, but it truly was an accident. An impulse, even- it wasn't him I was aiming for, but I forgot my place. He'll live, I take it?"
Newmaker looked at me and feigned apology with an exaggeratedly polite face. I glared at him, so he sighed.
"Oh, I suppose that means the camera is back with him as well, isn't it. Damn. Well, that's my luck, and you spell it: B-A-D. I didn't mean to turn your loyalties, sweetheart, put the nail in the coffin, so to speak. But you have joined me here tonight. Perhaps you'll hear me out anyway?"
"Why would I help you?"
"Well, we're both victims of her, of course."
"He hasn't victimised me."
"She will, you mark my words- you don't know what she has planned for you. My dear, this may be a shock, but I know it to be true. I've had first-hand dealings with her. She orchestrates deaths just to film them. She'll set you up and knock you down, murder you for her filmmaking. She has associates- maybe you've met them- they'll distribute this film. You'll be nothing but entertainment to them. It's a sick enterprise-"
"I know what he wants to do. He's never once lied about that. But he doesn't kill- he found me because I'm gonna kill myself."
"Oh, you poor dear," he tutted. "Well then you need help."
How to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, that I didn't need help because I was beyond it. He irritated me because he seemed like someone who thought they could sum up the whole breadth of human experience based on things he already knew, or was familiar with. I hoped I had never come across like that. I remained silent and seethed, content to know that Newmaker was wrong.
"Maybe I can help you?" Newmaker offered.
"I don't think so."
"Oh, but I want to. Before you do something that you'll regret. Before you fall in too deep with her and you end up stuck."
"His name is Vincent."
"Vincent to some, yes. Victor to others. Victoria to even fewer. I sometimes wonder if I was damned simply because I knew her when she was Victoria, and not any other names she's gone by. There are a few I'll never know, more she's probably never told anyone. If I had been offered help, like I'm offering it to you- I would have taken it. If I had been given a chance, or if I had been told the evil that she would bring, I don't know what I would have done."
"How long have you known him?"
"Too long: all the way back when she was a child. She tried many times to extricate herself from the world. I tried to stop her, more fool me. I then went on to think that that was the last human action she had in herself- to commit suicide and spare us all. No. She always had a taste for death- but we experiment on ourselves before going into the arms of others, don't we? That rotten... Well, here I am losing my temper again, after so long. She preys on that, you know. It makes good material. I've met the grim reaper, and she didn't come with scythe, but with camera."
"You're wrong about him."
"Wrong?" The road stretched on for miles and miles. "I'm not wrong. She was there on the eve of my death. She watched with her camera as the whole house went up in flames and I shouted for help. I begged for my life and for the lives of my family. I barely recognised her at first: it made it worse, I think, when I realised who she was and that she still would not help me. My wife, my daughter- they both died. I suppose I was meant to die that night to. I lay there wondering what I had ever done to her, what I had ever done to deserve it, and the fire ate parts of my bedroom wall. A picture fell down. Me and my wife on our wedding day. It started to burn from the inside and I crawled forward as the fire carved a hole in it. And the hole was suddenly wide enough to crawl through, even though this photo had been no more than fifteen or fourteen centimetres tall. I pulled myself through. Through to hell I'd expect.
"When I woke up, I was different. Tainted. That's what she does. She taints. She takes things for her own. She makes them abnormal, supernatural. I see these small pockets of sub-normality in the world now, where there weren't any before, and all she does is make more- conjuring ghosts with those video tapes of hers. She is the cruel and unusual. She's made me cruel and unusual."
"Where are we going?" I asked.
He glanced at me from behind the wheel, and then back at the road. "The destination is your deciding. It's your dream, after all."
"You can only appear in dreams, right?"
"No, no. I could appear before you quite real, if I wanted. But I prefer dreams. They're easier to forget. Perfect for my needs."
But I'd never forgotten, I thought to myself then. The same way that I could see Vincent when he was following me, when Auggie couldn't.
"Vincent told me. You work from the shadows to make people forget. You want to destroy."
"Rid the world of its abnormalities, one pocket at a time. I wouldn't call that destruction- surgery, maybe. These things aren't meant to exist. They only cause misery. They're aberrations. With what little I am now, it's the least I can do. I can make things right. Don't you want to help me put things back in order. The best we can?"
I was getting sick of staring at that black, endless road, the horizon never getting any closer. "Take us somewhere else," I said. In a heartbeat, we were gone from the car. We were indoors. A nice little house somewhere, with all the curtains drawn. We were in a front room of some sort, with sofas and a coffee table. On the table was a scattering of papers and files. There was a well-looked after bookcase in the corner, full of battered spines. On the wall was a canvas print of a painting that I had seen before. I moved in for a closer look.
"Do you like my home? What's left of it anyway- what I could keep in my mind after it burned." Newmaker said. He shrugged off his coat and folded it over the arm of a chair.
"Ah, a fan of that painting, are you? Do you know it? It's a Blake- 'The Ghost of a Flea'. Quite an interesting story behind it: Blake is theorised to have had schizophrenia, or another form of psychotic illness. Throughout his life, he saw visions of ghosts, demons, and angels. At the time, there were no words to describe his mental illness. People considered him mad, of course, but others though he was a sensitive. One of God's chosen. He had a friend, John Varley, who saw him as such. Varley was obsessed with the supernatural- abnormalities and such. He held a seance with Blake and was only disappointed that Blake could see what he could not, and so Blake drew the creatures that appeared. This painting was a gift, from Blake to Varley. The creature Blake saw, this flea, was horrific- the devil, pure and simple, described as having a murderer's face. A thing of pure evil. Varley thought that Blake had a gift. He envied his sight. But, you see, not all gifts are blessings, when they lead you to truths like this flea."
I had seen this painting before, of course. It all came back to me then. I knew the story Newmaker had told me, but the first time I'd seen the painting, the ugly, monstrous figure among the stars, standing on a stage, I had felt sorry for him. I felt that the painting was about a monster forced to perform. The flea, to me, had been misunderstood, a tragic figure. It was later, of course, that I found out the story, but I couldn't accept it. That was what I had written. That was the character in my last story: "he was the flea."
"He's not evil," I said to Newmaker. "He's just playing a role. He's necessary for the show to go on."
Newmaker pursed his lips. "Did you not hear what I just said? Blake-"
"Yeah, I know. But look at him- he's kind of sad, in a way. Don't you think? Tragic, like. Poised. He knows what he has to do, and he knows that people will think he's evil for it. He doesn't mind. He likes the stage and the part he plays on it."
"That makes no sense. There's a well-documented history behind this painting. An actual story to it. You can't just make up whatever you want."
I walked behind Newmaker and glanced over the papers on his table. They were all handwritten. A red pen lay on the table next to them. Red annotations were all over the papers. He had been marking them in this memory, I realised.
"How typical of a teacher to be so unsupportive," I muttered.
"But I'm not a teacher anymore," Newmaker hissed. "She took that from me!"
"Wait, were you his teacher? When he was a kid?" My mind raced with the possibilities. "What was he like?"
"Enigmatic. A mystery. Sje pulled me under his spell the same way she's captured your imagination now."
"Oh," I said, realising. "That's not..."
"I didn't know. Back then, I didn't know what she would become."
I remained silent, loathing this guy fully.
"You'll help me, or you'll end up just like me," Newmaker wheedled.
"What do you think I am?" I asked Newmaker. "A girl or a boy?"
Newmaker pursed his lips. "I think you need help," he repeated.
I nodded, understanding fully. "I'd like to wake up now," I said. Newmaker lunged. Just like I imagined, he was quick on his feet. He came at me with a fury the likes of which I had never seen, his hands outstretched. I wondered, for a moment, if when he grasped my head and made me disappear, whether my body, lying across Vincent on the stoop outside the service station, would become an empty vessel. Whether there would be no one behind its eyes anymore. I yelped and leapt back. This was my dream, right? That's what he'd been saying. We were co-authoring the space, but perhaps I still had some control. I ducked behind the coffee table and upturned it, trying with all my might to keep Newmaker and his grasping hands away from me. I looked to the flea, in his frame on the wall. What a hypocrite, wanting to destroy alternate memories, hints of peculiarity, and ghosts, and yet keeping a copy of a painting for himself. A sliver of enjoyment, for personal use, a ghost of the real thing. The ghost of the ghost of the flea. The moment the thought had formed in my head, the flea stepped from the frame. He grew in size until he towered over Newmaker, and, just as Newmaker was about to grab me, the flea pulled him back with his scaly, clawed hands and threw Newmaker against the wall.
Newmaker regained compusre quickly and sat up, but the flea approached him. the wall behind him, with nowhere to back away, Newmaker simply raised his hands and cowered. The flea looked back at me and I saw a white glint in its eye, and a hint of a smile on its face. It returned its gaze to Newmaker, and advanced.
I didn't look to see what happened next. All I noticed was that there was now a sizeable hole in the wall where the painting had been hung. I ran past Newmaker and the flea and dived through it, and when I hit the ground, I realised that I had slammed my cheek against Vincent's shoulder, and I woke with a start.