#dylanmarsh

“Hello, hello is this thing on?”

“Yes, you are coming through beautifully.”

“Excellent I never know how to work these damn machines, I mean honestly I can disprove newton’s turd law and I can’t do this, honestly.”

“Well Ma’am we are just looking for the report on what is going on at your outpost.”

“Well I can’t complain but I am going to anyway, let me start with the list of complaints I compiled, ah-hem, the lifts don’t work, the heating is broken, the soundproofing on the test chambers is faulty, the walls to section 2-3 leak, if there is a power outage then all the cell doors open and we have had three escape attempts this week alone.” (Deep intake of breath)

“I see do you have any proposed solutions to these problems?”

“You know what I am so glad you asked, can you tell the chairman, if you can find him in his ivory tower, that if he wants me to keep this place running and too keep with the quota then I need more resources.”

“Anything specific we should tell him ma’am?”

“Well first we have been going through pris- I mean test subjects a lot faster than we originally thought we would. This is a big problem for me because if I can’t test the things he wants me to build on human test subjects then production is going to grind to a halt. Also, the workers he is sending me are too high maintenance and they keep asking questions. I will not be held accountable if one has to be vanished to stop them blabbing. So, tell him that I want de-classified class-g workers that means that no one will worry if they go missing.”

“Ma’am you do realise that this project is meant to be hidden from the council if too many workers are diverted to you they may start asking questions?”

“Do not tell me what I do and do not know commander, I may only be science division but I am a higher rank than you will ever be.”

“Moving on ma’am I heard you mention escapes, have they been dealt with?”

“Who do you think I am?  Don’t let things slip through my fingers. Yes, there were three escape attempts but only one of them managed to exit the facility.”

“What happened to them?”

“Well the two who attempted to help the third escape have been fitted with trackers and were processed the following day.”

“And the third?”

“Well let’s just say that he had an unfortunate accident.”

“I do need to know ma’am, for the record.”

“Well I will send you the bits of him that are left if you want, but I promise you this you won’t be able to determine the cause of death trust me I was the one that pushe- I mean saw him fall, and even I don’t know.”

“Well then ma’am I will send this onto the chairman and report back to you with the results.”

“You make sure you do; the chairman is asking me to do miracles here and I am providing but if he doesn’t keep up his end of the bargain there may be an accident waiting around the corner for him too.”           

“Are you threatening the chairman ma’am I must warn you that is a clad 3-offence.”

“I am not threatening I am waning him, and I would watch your tone with me because I may look friendly but I assure you underneath this mask I will stop at nothing, Absentia out.

(Feed terminates)

“Good lord is she always so intense?”

“Yes, she is sir, are you going to relay her instructions to the chairman?”

“Well I have to but some of the things she is suggesting are preposterous.”

Lockwood paced around the tiny room which was for the moment his entire world. Things were not supposed to go like this. For god’s sake he had worked his skin off getting all the correct qualifications and PHDs and this is where he ended up. He looked around at the small rented apartment brutally aware of the cracked and peeling wallpaper, the large patch of damp on the wall and the loud and focus breaking thuds coming from the room above.

How long had it been a year, two maybe since he had made his first breakthrough. Being a self-employed inventor had its benefits for instance his first and only breakthrough had been a new type of low power lamp which was both stylish and functional. He had been rolling in cash for a few short weeks and then thud. The metaphorical toast had landed jam side down and he was a nobody again. the money had run out everyone had forgotten about him and the dream of making something that would one day help the world had been shattered into a million tiny shards and swept under the carpet.

The small electric heater at his feet was doing its dam nest to try and keep the intolerable place warm but it was fighting a losing battle there. As he watched the softly glowing filament he was reminded in some sort of way of his own situation. The heater was also in a hopeless situation with no friends and nowhere to turn too. Well that wasn’t strictly true in Lockwood’s case he did have his father but the trouble was that when someone you loved had cancer you were supposed to help them, it was not supposed to be the other way around.  

He looked out of the grimy window and into the carpark just beyond to see three hooded teenagers huddle together suspiciously and pass something around. He cursed and flung himself at the depressed and depressing sofa in the corner of the room. It sagged even under his meagre weight and let out the sigh of a dying man. He grabbed the bottle of amber whisky on the table not to be muddled up with the amber bottle of whiskey next to it and pored himself a generous helping.

He felt something brush against his leg and looked down to see Schrödinger his cat brush against his leg. “Go on get out of it” he snapped pushing the cat away irritably, he was not in a good mood and he didn’t fancy getting trampled by a cat which was only using him for warmth. Schrödinger yowled and began to saunter off while Lockwood sat back on the sofa and let his mind relax into a gentle sleep.

He was awoken only three meagre hours later by a buzzing that seemed to be stabbing him right in the hangover. He waved his hands around his head as if he was swatting flies before finally reaching out into the semi-darkness and grabbing his phone. “Hello this is Lockwood how many I help you” he said in his best receptionist voice, he wasn’t sure why.

It was Lizzy a nurse from his dad’s hospital. “Oh hi Mr Lockwood just checking in to see how you are doing.” There was a tone to her voice which didn’t bode well. “How is Schrödinger?” she asked after a moment’s pause astounding Lockwood yet again with her uncanny knowledge of things he had probably mentioned once in passing.

He glanced around the small hovel to try and find the cat in amongst all the spare parts and takeaway boxes but he failed. “I don’t know he could be alive or he could be dead I won’t know until I find him in all this mess.”  

“Well I know it is a bit sudden to spring this on you” here is comes he thought. “But your dad’s condition had deteriorated severely over the last few hours and… well… if there is anything you wanted to say to him you should probably come over now.

Before he knew it Lockwood was flying out the front door and jamming his arms into the wrong sleeves of his jacket. His father had had cancer for two and a half years now and he was going to leave behind a big inheritance when he died, enough to get Lockwood out of the poor house and maybe enough to start the company he had always dreamed of owning. And yet his father seemed to always be teetering on the edge of the abyss never slipping into it but never coming out of it long enough to do anything meaningful.

What felt like eons later Lockwood finally made it to the hospital and started elbowing his way up to his father’s room. He didn’t like the fact that he was already thinking of what to do with the inheritance money but he was probably going to last as long as his father if his current financial state was anything to go by. He was just planning out several new designs in his head and totting up how much each of them would cost when he finally breached the door to his father’s room.

His hopes died.

His dreams died.

And now his father was dying. And that moment of realization hit him like a freight train going at full tilt. 

He looked down at the emaciated carcass before him and a realization struck him. This was his father, it didn’t matter how much money he left behind when he went or how little money Lockwood had at the moment he could not wish for this man to die just for that.

I remember you walking in that day, complaining about the icy cold outside, and dragging a brown hemp sack after you. I remember you passing the rooms you had once told me about. The kitchen where you used to help the cooks prepare lavish meals for the family. The study area where your father had told you stories of castles and dragons while looking at pages which bore different words. The library containing its arcane knowledge which you had always sought to unlock. And the other rooms to the bedroom of your grandmother with her dark curtains still hanging there, motheaten, dreary denying the light any opportunity to see what she was doing. Your parents room where the family jewels were still locked in that silver case. Then there was the room you never let me go in. If I ever got too close to that door you would call out “Let it alone old woes die faster when left alone.”  The room for your child the one you could never have but the one you had always dreamed of.

Though few were there to see, the few who were always thought it strange how many people stayed in the ruins of your family home, your rotten heirloom. They had lived next to the rotting building far longer than you ever did and its high towers and grand gate were the talk of the town that surrounded the building. They referred to it as the old house but how old they had never known. Most of them also remember you returning to your ancestral home back to the nest from which you had fled so many years ago. How you had patched the walls and boarded up the windows but still never let any of the villagers help you. They had just sat and watched as you came back in out of the wilds and began squatting in the ruins of this once great house like a king living in the ruins of his palace.

You remember it differently you simply tell me that you had come back one day and started patching and fixing and stitching, no one had ever offered help or been told to go away. Not like how I remember it. You always tell me that it was no effort to waterproof the roof and how the villagers story of watching you fall of the roof multiple times before finally throwing down your hammer and walking away cursing. You remember a lot of things differently I am beginning to think it is the medication or maybe how many times you fell of the roof.

You don’t even seem to remember that night the night where the bell tower had finally lost the will to chime and it had dropped its bell from the ancient tower and sent it crashing down to crush the floors below. It smashed through the store room and finally came to rest mere inches away from the dining room table, while many others would have seen it as a sign to not take up residents in the ruins of an old house you saw it as an opportunity to explore the now slightly less unsafe bell tower, if you were talking in terms of the number of falling objects which had just decreased to 0.

This is a story about a man, a madman or maybe the only sane man in a world of the mad depending on who you asked. It is a story about a house, so ancient and so mysterious that even you its sole inheritor will never uncover them all. It is a story about redemption and exploration into the unknown crevasses of one’s own mind and it is a story about a doctor who only wanted to do good who ended up hurting not just himself but those around him, and those injuries he could not heal.

A deafening cacophony danced through the air like a shrieking song intertwining with the grating of gears and the whine of the machinery all around. Dials whizzed and lights blinked on the central console as it regulated the ebb and flow of the chemicals running through the reservoirs and pipes which permeated the crowded room. Atop it all stood a solitary figure leaning over a cold steel rail surveying the scene with a stare as cold as the metal she was leaning on stood… her.

Her gaze fell on the little slice of heaven and hell which was her domain. This was her station a place where she controlled everything, here she was god.

She stood there with her head held high her gloved hands clasped with a fierce might around the metal. Her head and shoulder were held high not for a moment would you suspect the guilt or the burdens which weighed heavy on those shoulders. But one thing betrayed her the one thing she tried the hardest to hide from anyone who may have seen. There rested the mask.

Many of the workers wore masks too, large respirators to leech out the harmful chemicals in the air until it was near enough breathable. But she wore hers for a different reason. She was hiding something. She was hiding from herself. Hiding all the pain and all the loss behind the white mask which rested on top of the face she didn’t want the world to see.  

The grave sat cold and still in the usually green grass now stained a morose brown. The stone didn’t do her justice the warmth and life which had rested upon her was lost on the grey boulder which nestled on the hillside. The rain ran down Grey’s hat and trickled down his back, the funeral had been weeks ago but he still didn’t feel like leaving. He had a duty to stay beside or at least beside what was left of her.

He watched the seconds tick past on the large brass timepiece clutched in his stark white hand. An hour two he didn’t know staring at the hands seemed to sap at his perception of time instead of enhancing it.

Eventually he began to make his way home past the wilted flowers cradled in the loving arms of the other graves. Back to the house they had once shared. Past the rooms they had planned to fill with children. Then past master bedroom where they had spent many nights in each other’s’ caring arms. Towards the kitchen where he had helped the chef’s beak their wedding cake.

A mask?

The mask?

Your mask?

Why the mask?

You tell me that you love me

You tell me that you care

But all the time behind the mask the truth is resting there

You tell me that you have not guilt, no worries regrets or woes

But behind the mask I knew it was on that day that your heart froze

What are you hiding? Your lust your pride your greed

But when I look behind your mask all I see is need

It rests there still and chilling

I would peek behind it if you were only willing

Your imprisoned eyes behind there tell me all I need to know

As when I saw your eyes I can say I truly knew your foe

Your eyes my dear betray it all

The madness the fear the envy

All hidden behind a layer of porcelain white and paint

A veil for a monster trying to hide the taint

If you have no shame my dear then why imprison your eyes so true

I think it is strange don’t you?

Why a mask?

Why the mask?

The stick you walk with had not always been there.

But now it is there always through weathers foul and fair.

That little bit extra support for your old age.

But you never let it take centre stage.

Your best man, your wing man always there when you are in trouble.

Always there to pull you from the rubble.

It happened one day when you were out.

Someone cycled into you with a massive clout.

But did it stop you? Did it? No.

Instead you let it bring you no woe.

There you stand so tall proud and strong.

The stick not a hindrance but a sign that things can go wrong.

Inspiring, funny and independent you are.