63.

  I plunged headfirst into the river of ash.

  I screamed, and my mouth filled with it, ash clogged my nose and eyes. All I could smell and taste was smoke and fire. My body had gone limp. It was all too much. The whirlwind tour of my own trauma had left me feeling empty. That's the problem with burying the past so deep, if it gets dug up, you find a stinking, rotting corpse that fouls everything it touches.

  I felt like I had disappeared from my own body. I had somehow disassociated from within my own mind. I was floating on the river of ash, being swept away in the current. So many of those memories I had forgotten, or at least thought I'd forgotten. All that pain, all that terror of being a small weak child at the mercy of the cruelest realities of the world. And yet, there they were, still as vivid as the day they happened.

  Was this what the Pigeon King meant about becoming lost in your own mind? And what did it say about us human beings that we could simply compartmentalize and package away the horrors of our own lives and just carry on day to day? Did those memories affect us silently, even though we chose not to reflect on them, not to think about them? Did they still dictate our behaviours, our thoughts, and our actions? Was the trauma that I thought I had buried been driving me this whole time?

  I looked to my left listlessly and saw picture frames, ragged posters from my old childhood bedroom, and torn letters floating by. The river was full of the detritus of a broken childhood. I just wanted it to flow to oblivion, back to the inky darkness where I didn't have hands or eyes, where I didn't breathe, and I didn't think or feel anymore. I wanted to go there, to sink into the darkness and disappear. That's where people like me belong, in the nothingness. Not out in the world with whole people, but in the darkness with the broken and forgotten things.

  I stared up at the sky, my limbs stretched out like a starfish, too mentally exhausted to care anymore. As I swept by a bridge, I saw a figure standing there. She was beautiful. She radiated a sense of warmth, with hair the blonde of summer sun and a smile as warm and comforting as your favourite blanket. She looked over the bridge at me as I floated by on the turgid ash current. As I stared at her, I realised she had a face! She had eyes, a nose, a mouth, and ears, and she was familiar. I recognised her but didn’t at the same time. It was only as I came closer that I felt my guts twist as I realised who she was. She was my mother, but not as I knew her. It was who she was before life had broken her, before I was born. She was such a sweet-looking person, hardly anything like the woman I remembered at the end. Perhaps she had been like this once; perhaps she had been kind and sweet. I only remembered her as that wretched thing, covered in bruises and scabs, underfed, with wiry, dirty hair, and paranoid, haunted eyes.

  I swept past under the bridge, and as I came out the other side, she reached a hand out to me. There was no possible way she should have been able to reach me, but there she was, fingertips away. She looked concerned. Was she worried about me? She reached out further and further. All I had to do was raise my hand. I noticed she had painted fingernails. I’d never seen her with painted fingernails.

  She shouldn’t bother with me. She looked healthy and young, she should stay away and save herself. I opened my mouth to tell her to go away, to protect herself, to not worry about me, but my mouth filled with ash. And then I heard her calling my name:

  "Gutter Mage. Gutter Mage."

  What? I thought. That’s not my name. It’s Alex; you gave me that name. The image wavered and disappeared before my eyes. My mother vanished in wisps of smoke and there was the Gutter Mage.

  He was dressed in his full gear, Tank Beetle carapace plate carrier, leather jacket, black combat trousers and boots, mangled blue mma gloves, Grandad’s bat on his back, and his black hood pulled up so his face was bathed in shadow. He gripped my hand and pulled me from the river of ash. The second his hand touched mine, the world slowed. He pulled me, shivering, onto the bridge. The whole world had slowed and turned to muted greys and whites, the river crept sluggishly by and the horror parade moved in slow motion.

  “Damn it Alex,” the Gutter Mage growled at me with a voice that sounded almost like mine but was too harsh and weathered.

  I crawled on my hands and knees, my limbs quivering, until I felt the Gutter Mage’s rough hand grab me and drag me to my feet.

  “What are you doing?” he snarled at me.

  “I- I… Where’s mum gone?” I asked numbly.

  “She’s dead,” the Gutter Mage said bluntly. “Dad too. And Grandad. They’re all dead.”

  I felt my lip quiver, tears blurring my vision… and then he struck me. It was a rough blow across the cheekbone. I staggered backwards.

  “Stop it!” the Gutter Mage snarled at me. “Stop it right fucking now!”

  I raised a hand to my cheek and looked at him.

  “You’re not that anymore! You’re not some frightened pathetic little kid anymore! Don’t stand there fucking crying!”

  The blow had stymied my tears but I felt a raw lump of emotion aching my throat.

  “Look at this, Alex!” he yelled, throwing his arms wide. “This is you! This is what goes on in your fucking head!” He jabbed me hard in the side of my head with a finger and I flinched. “You’re letting some fucking monster run riot in your head and it’s easy because of all this shit you hold on to! You’re so fucking scared and full of self loathing that you made me! You made a whole fucking alter ego because you’re a pathetic, whining, soft headed, little…!”

  “Stop it!” I practically begged him. “Please… I can’t take anymore… it’s all… please just stop.” I fell to the ground and curled up, my hands instinctively crossing over my head to protect myself from the inevitable blows.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The Gutter Mage’s face screwed up in disgust. It was strange, he should have looked like me, but he didn’t. His face was harder, rougher, with more lines and sharp edges than mine.

  “This was your idea!” he snarled at me. “You wanted to take to the streets and fight evil! You wanted to punish the bad guys and save innocents!”

  “I know,” I muttered meekly, looking down at my bare feet. “That’s not me. I wanted to be the hero… but I’m not. I’m just… I’m just…”

  “Fuckin’ useless.” The Gutter Mage finished for me.

  The words sent a visceral pain through my body. That was always what he called me when he beat me. It hurt the most when mum began calling me it too.

  “It’s true,” I whispered, tears filling my eyes.

  “Fuck you!” The Gutter Mage snarled, grabbing me by my wrists and hauling me to my feet. “That’s fucking weakness! It’s because of shit like that, that we’re trapped in your head going round and round this miserable fucking merry go round of self pity!”

  “This isn’t because of me!” I wailed piteously as he shook me. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to…”

  “Mean to what?” The Gutter Mage barked.

  “It wasn’t my fault…”

  “No, it’s that monster Somnix,” the Gutter Mage said, poking me hard in the side of the head again. “He’s in here. He’s messing with us. Torturing you with your fucked up traumatic past and you’re letting him! Is this how we go out? Babbling and fucking crying because mummy and daddy were a pair of fucking junkies who didn’t love us enough?”

  I didn’t remember swinging the punch, but I caught the Gutter Mage across the side of the head. He fell back and I was on him. We punched and kicked at each other like feral cats fighting in an alleyway.

  “Don’t talk about them like that!” I snarled through clenched teeth.

  “Why not?” The Gutter Mage spat back at me. “It’s what they were! All those years of kids making fun of us coz mum would turn up to school in her filthy pyjamas looking strung out! Parents wouldn’t let us come over to play because we was dirty and had lice! Having to steal our clothes out of charity shops! Scrounging for food in supermarket bins! Sleeping in the middle of fucking winter with no heat or no electric in some rat infested fucking shit hole!” The Gutter Mage’s voice had risen to a roar. “All because they loved that fucking junk more than us! Fuck them!”

  I had lost my words. I snarled like an animal and tried to headbutt him in the teeth and shut his fucking mouth. But it didn’t work. He kept going.

  “And what about you? Scared little Alex, crying in his closet while daddy smacked mummy around! You fucking weakling, you didn’t go in there and stop him! You just prayed that he didn’t come for you next! That he would get tired beating on her and he would leave you alone! You fucking, snivelling, whining, little coward!”

  That broke me. That was the truth and it shattered me. I went slack, held up only by the Gutter Mage’s strength, and I wept.

  “I was only a kid,” I sobbed. “I couldn’t stop him…”

  “Exactly,” the Gutter Mage said, the brutal snarl gone from his voice. “You were a helpless little kid Alex. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I couldn't stop him…” Tears fell from my eyes onto the Gutter Mage’s hard face.

  “And that’s on him,” he said softly. “He was a junkie piece of shit. That’s not your fault. We didn’t get to choose who gave birth to us.”

  Before I knew it, I was wrapped in his strong embrace. The Gutter Mage smelled of smoke and blood, but he was warm, and he was strong, and he held me close. I bawled my eyes out. I hadn’t cried like that, maybe ever. I was too used to someone smacking me if I cried that I learned to do it quietly and alone. I poured all the pain and anguish in my soul out, clinging to the Gutter Mage. Finally, I began to quiet and regain some semblance of myself. Pouring out the endless well of my grief finally returned some clarity to my trauma battered mind.

  “It’s time to get out of here, Alex.” The Gutter Mage whispered.

  “I don’t know how,” I whispered back.

  “You do. You’re smarter than you think and you’ve got power. Real power. We can’t stay here. We’ve got work to do still. People to save.”

  We sat up and I wiped tears from my face suddenly remembering the world outside of this nightmare. The Syndicate, Brick, the drug deal, the little girl who had bullets put through her window, Sherbert, the Pigeon King, all the people on the Mulberry Estate, they all needed me. I couldn’t die here. I couldn’t become lost.

  As I wiped my cheek I looked at my palm and saw the Rune of Lucidity. It was faded, like an old wound that had long healed.

  "You've almost completely lost your link with reality,” the Gutter Mage said, looking at my palm.

  I blinked again, looking at my hand, struggling to remember the pattern, struggling to remember anything ever being there.

  "Find your center," he said to me, his voice calm. "Do you remember where you were sitting? Remember the stone?”

  "It was cold," I said to him, my voice sounding small and lost. "It was cold, and it was dark, and there was salt."

  The Gutter Mage nodded and looked over my shoulder, the parade was thundering across the bridge now; they were running at a full sprint, all eyes on us. Only they didn’t have clown masks anymore, they all had goat faces.

  "And why are we here?” he asked me.

  "We…" I said, trying to gather my scattered thoughts. "We're here for nightmares.”

  "And where are we?" the Gutter Mage asked, his voice steady even as we felt the tremors of the pounding boots beneath us.

  "We're in my head," I replied.

  "Good. Find your center, find the Rune in your mind, and get us out of here."

  I stared back down at my palm. Pain was my anchor to reality. Pain was familiar. Pain was the problem; pain was the solution. Without conscious thought, I suddenly found a scalpel in my hand. Without hesitation, I took it to my palm and began tracing the faint outline, digging into my flesh and cutting my palm open. The more it hurt, the more clarity I regained. The parade was almost upon us now. The Gutter Mage silently rose to his feet. He drew Grandad’s bat and electricity crackled through his Zap Knucks as he turned to face the horde. I continued slicing into my flesh and recreating the Rune of Lucid Awareness. Pain burned through my hand and seared away the fog of memory and past trauma.

  I looked up with fire in my eyes and rose slowly from my sitting position. The howling parade was so close I could see the whites of their raging eyes. I pushed the Gutter Mage to one side and raised my palm towards the charging parade.

  “Bind!” I snarled.

  Reality fractured like a shattered mirror, chunks of it falling away and disintegrating into nothingness. The parade broke apart and the world of ash and faceless monstrosities fell apart in front of me.

  “Well done Alex,” the Gutter Mage said as his face splintered into a thousand tiny pieces. “Go kick his ass!”

  Suddenly, I was back in Somnix’s chamber. The organ played, the Pigeon King squawked as he fought against the serpent’s constriction, and Somnix stood over him, my chain wrapped around his wrist, and a look of fear on his face.

  “Get out of my fucking head you goat face fuck!” I roared.