Chereads / Eye of the Needle: Into the Reikai / Chapter 5 - Avery I: Introduction

Chapter 5 - Avery I: Introduction

What would you do to take the power you seek?

Avery stumbled along the stairs with the old man who reeked of cheap cologne and deodorant. He was fading in and out of consciousness, his legs working of their own accord while he was guided to his bedroom. Unceremoniously, Avery felt himself hit the comfort of a mattress and sheets and he began to drift away. 

The door closed and locked, and he assumed himself safe to fall asleep for good. Then it began. 

He felt first an intruding hand making its way along his beltline, quickly fumbling around his crotch to unbutton his pants for easy access. Avery knew what was happening, it had happened before. He could tear up, or cry, or scream, but it wouldn't do anything other than get him hurt more. He wasn't strong enough to fight back either, he never had been. 

Avery sat in the cool confines of a basement, clutching his knees close for warmth while his body ached with bruises and intrusions. He wished for nothing more than to disappear entirely, or join the mice that snuck in and out of uncovered holes without a care in the world. Food had been left for him in a tray, but he couldn't stomach his own feelings to eat anything. He couldn't now if he wanted to anyhow. The mice and the maggots had gotten to it first. Even in their mindless, animalistic hunger, they refused to touch him. He didn't even deserve to be wanted by scavengers and bottom feeders. Trash, living and useless. 

"No different from the maggots." Avery thought to himself. 

In a fit of anger he slapped the tray aside, where it skittered to the stone wall before coming to a loud halt. The maggots crawled over his hand, disturbed from their meal. He didn't care to pick them off. He hoped they'd eat him too, the rotten meat he was. Spoiled, rotten meat. 

The hose of the shower hit his back. His mother said nothing, only paying attention to covering up the bruises and the welts with clothes she'd made sure to pick out. Avery wished he wasn't so 'pretty'. He wished he wasn't so thin and weak, so feminine. But he couldn't grow much of any body hair, a beard, muscle mass. Not that he could, he was barely old enough to start. 

The basement was cold today, and Avery couldn't stop shivering. Even if he pulled his body close to himself it was still too much, and he feared he would die. 

…No. Feared was the wrong word. He didn't care if he died. He hadn't for a long time. Avery just wished he'd… he'd… 

"I wish for anything but this. Maybe next time." He thought to himself, unable to shed a tear with all that he had in his life. 

Avery laid back against the cool concrete, placing his hands over his chest. The cold would take him, he knew, but there was no point in fighting it. His shivering stopped, and gradually he felt the maggots convene over his soon-to-be corpse. At least something would miss him. 

"I did not give you permission to die." Avery heard an ancient and crawling tone that demanded nothing but his attention. 

He'd closed his eyes, accepting that he'd lost the game of life. Now, of all times, someone had decided to give him more orders. Avery's eyes remained closed and he frowned, concentrating on death. 

Something stung on the surface of his hand, and he was shaken from his inevitable death as he shook it free of the pain. Avery's eyes shot open, and he saw that a mouse had decided to gnaw on his skin prematurely. But it was not all that he saw. 

In front of him, a figure kneeled. It had to, it was impossibly tall to fit in the basement if it were to stand at full. Its skin was stretched taut, rotten over its lengthy limbs that pooled around its limp figure like putrid snakes. Its torso was coated mostly in sores and wounds, festering. That which wasn't revealed was wrapped tightly in a rotten, yellowed fabric, stained from time and tribulation with permanent discoloration. The figure's skull (as it lacked the form to call a face) was horribly misshapen. Teeth prowled out of its mouth like fingers curling over and around one another, gnashing together like the meshes of gears more than the lines of a smile. From the hollowed nose up, its skull had grown straight upwards in a sheet of bone and split down the middle, no brain or eyes to speak of. Avery would have been horrified, but somehow he was comforted that anything, even this, would reach out to him. It spoke, its voice now fully audible to his unwitting ears. 

"You wish to be reborn." 

It wasn't a question, Avery couldn't refute or answer it. The figure was telling him something he already knew. Avery only nodded meekly, barely mustering the energy to do so. The figure extended a skeletal hand, and with it came a flood of mice that surrounded Avery. His heart leapt as much as it could, but the mice did nothing besides crowd around and provide him with warmth in the cold basement. He was going insane, he knew it, but he didn't deserve anything better. 

"I will save you, and in turn, you will save your kind when the world will not." 

Avery couldn't accept, but he knew it wasn't an exchange. It was a deal unfolding without his say. The mice began to drag over the salvageable bits of meat from his tray, pushing them inside his mouth while the figure watched wordlessly. Avery wanted to hate it, but on his shriveled stomach anything tasted like heaven. Even the gristle. 

Avery closed his eyes and propped his hands in front of him, regaining only the dignity of being able to feed himself. It was too late he noticed he wasn't eating the shriveled cabbages that were raw brussel sprouts, but other seeds and herbs he'd never seen before. They looked and tasted awful, but his refusal to eat them was met only with more mice forcing them past his teeth. The foul mixture of saliva and chlorophyll was enough to make him gag, but he was not given the chance to spit any of it away. 

"You will descend into Hell as you know it." 

Avery had finished the last of the bits and pods that'd been force fed to him, realizing only now that the mice, maggots, and the strange figure had all gone. The creeping loneliness he was so accustomed to came crawling back, drenching him in a cold, detrimented existence. 

His stomach turned, aching as it took in the poor food and the poisonous herbs. Fever overtook him, coinciding with cold shivers that ran down his body. Avery wasn't sure he wanted this as an alternative to death, with such intense sensations making him feel worse than when he was literally freezing. The words of the figure echoed in his mind, but he could barely make them out over the anguish his body was in. 

Avery's vision faltered, his head throbbing with pain. In the inner sanctum of his mind, his sight was overtaken with intrusive images. A tree with a thousand faces on each of its branches, a glimpse of two lovers through a window, and his own reflection—a facsimile of his former self, filled with worms and maggots with a backdrop of stars. 

"You will never know love, or care." 

Consciousness began to slip away, leaving Avery to his own devices in the basement his mother trapped him in. 

"And for this, I am truly sorry." 

Avery adjusted his clothes back into place, staring without expression at his newfound abuser. He could do any number of things at this moment in time. Take revenge, torture him, beat him to death with the leg of a chair, call the police—but Avery knew the world would leap at an opportunity to get back at him for his crime of being born. He'd rather not invite punishment for the foul deed of killing a 'modest motel owner' or a 'good father' or whatever other titles people so eagerly tacked onto scum. 

Kneeling on the bed as the man hurriedly redressed, Avery cooed. Speaking in a falsely seductive tone, his hands drift down to his side. 

"Leaving so soon?" 

The man stuttered in fear, his eyes practically bulging out of his bulbous head. He didn't have a response. Avery continued. 

"I'm so glad one of you finally got the hint. I've been waiting for a real man to take me for months." 

The motel owner ate it up, smiling as he adjusted his tie to his chest. "Well I uh… I dunno what t' say. Guess I'm a bit of a stud, hehe. You really liked it?" 

His words reeked of insecurity, and Avery latched onto the smell like a leech to fresh skin. What was he, but a lowly bottom feeder anyhow? 

"Oh I loved it. Can't you tell by how I was dressed that I wanted this? I thought it was so obvious, but nobody ever got the hint." 

It broke the man, to hear his desires validated. He began to unbutton the shirt that he was so hurriedly trying to make presentable on his way out. The bed creaked as his overweight frame braced against it, with him awkwardly crawling next to Avery like an obese dog attempting to jump up a set of stairs. He huffed and puffed, but Avery gave the monstrous motel owner no second of relaxation. A single, soft hand was placed against the man's forehead, and all of his worst fears were made real. Avery watched as he drifted off to sleep almost immediately, barely able to blunder out another comment on how pretty Avery was. 

As the motel owner sank deeper into sleep, Avery reached out with his twisted soul to meet the man's own griseous spirit. Simplistic, untainted, and haunted only by the smallest pangs of regret—no, not regret. A fear of consequences. He'd done this before and gotten away with it, but only barely. Avery couldn't stand it, and sank his claws into the man's mind and soul like hot nails through blubber. The man began to shriek, but only in his waking mind. His body was trapped in Avery's bewitching sleep, helpless to stop his own torment. 

Avery had done this before. So often had he done this that tormenting people through their minds had become a second nature. At first he had felt bad for the victims, but he soon realized such methods were his only defense against the world and its awful people. This, and his wrenching operations within the mind only brought forth that which was already present. Fears, regrets, despairs, all locked away behind veils of ignorance, lies, and excuses. Avery was not a powerful witch, he knew this. He was perhaps the weakest between he, Ethel, and DeMain, but Avery's particular skill set was limited only by his morals. The others had the chance to defend themselves and to make changes for the better, but Avery's own abilities required a clear head—something he could never manage to have during intense altercations. 

His question remained: why should awful people get to live in denial of their own actions? Avery merely posed such a question in an irrefutable way so that they couldn't turn away from it. Maybe he couldn't defend himself as well as others, but he could give the very same lessons life had harshly given him. 

The man screamed in his sleep, his voice barely a whisper through the veil of unconsciousness. In the inner sanctum of his mind and his dreams, all of the doors to his darkest worries and deepest fears had been opened one by one. Figures stepped from his past to his present, his brain frantically attempting to deal with such things and only conjuring night terrors in response. Avery walked among them, standing aside as he watched the man suffer. 

Hands tore at the man's skin, peeling it away only for them to replace it with hot tar and needles. In his dreams he was immortal, but pain could still be felt, and pain was the greatest teacher of all. Avery looked deeper into the happenings of the old codger's mind, slinking his hands into a very particular door and focusing for a moment. Avery's own hatred, cold and bitter, warped the man's mental imagery even further. What had once been perhaps a pretty girl the man had forced himself on had been warped into a monstrosity Avery thought comparable to what the man deserved. Her nails had been curled and sharpened into talons, her body stretched and snatched in a foul mockery of what was natural. Avery gave her the reins, for he knew that even in the man's own twisted explanation of his actions, he knew what he'd done deserved recompense. The teenager retreated his reach from the motel owner's mind as the disfigured beauty began to tear into his flesh and eat it, ridiculing how small the portions were. 

Standing by the bedside and listening to the man cry like a lost infant, Avery fished around for his things. They'd be scattered around the room, his phone had been hidden in a drawer so he couldn't even make calls. He scrolled through his miniscule list of contacts, seeing Ethel's name. Up and down the list he went for minutes before he realized he didn't want to talk to anyone at all. What would he even say to anyone? The usual, probably. That he was weak, he'd let it happen again… ugh. He doubted anyone would care enough to put a bullet in his rapist's head for him, but it wasn't worth it just to be accused of cold-blooded murder later on. He guessed if it came down to it he could just put the police to sleep too, but it felt like too much effort for almost no payoff. 

Avery could still hear the man whimpering and crying in his sleep, and he wished for nothing more than for filth to stop stinking. He couldn't stand it, and his empty stomach gave him an excuse to step out of the room and check out the late-night food options along the streets. What do you even eat after something like this? Tacos?