Fear Itself

His hunger never ceases. It is fear he craves, and his palate is broad. The frightened shrieks of young children. The final wave of terror that stops an old man’s heart. A mother’s fear as she sees her son playing with the power outlet. The general constant fear of the paranoid. Every phobia in the dictionary. He feeds off of them all. It is fear from which he draws his strength, through which he exerts power over others. Fear is his fuel.

And no one fears him. Not anymore

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, this being, this fearmonger was once quite powerful. He visited children in their sleep and they awoke drenched in cold sweat. His very memory evoked a shudder… no one met him once who was not forever scarred by the experience. Bedwetting, stuttering, panic attacks, these and more were his calling cards. He was truly the image of fear.

Until Jim Henson came along and all of a sudden ridiculously formed beasts ceased to be frightening.

Three eyes, green skin, horns protruding from strange angles; these things no longer inspired the fear of death. They could be seen on cheerful, happy things that sang songs about friendship and grammar and why a certain number is cool. No more were the days of nightmares and screams. Out of the feast’s shadow a famine came. People had become impossible for him to scare. However, never having been truly alive, the fearmonger could not die. Instead, he lingered on; walking the earth clinging to the hope that he might turn a corner and someone would emit even the merest gasp at the sight of him. Day and night, he traveled. Through cities and towns, and across the wilderness, growing weaker and weaker until he became little more than a lingering shadow, shrugged off as a trick of the light on the rare occasion that he was noticed by anything or anyone. It was pure luck that he ran into me when he did or else even I’d have missed him.

An idol of mine had taken his own life, and as my way of honoring his memory I was imagining myself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. I saw, heard, and felt lots of strange, alien things that I was certain weren’t real. Why I suspected that he might have been more than merely a result of my chemical-induced state is beyond me. But for whatever reason, I called out to him, and the creature, ecstatic at the prospect of actually having been acknowledged for the first time in over a decade. He told me of his troubles, of his sorry state, and how he was in desperate need of help. He also told me his name, but I couldn’t for the life of me repeat it back; too many consonants, and in all the wrong places. I called him Kizzit for no apparent reason. Whatever the name was, it hadn’t sounded anything like that.

What this wayward monster needed was someone to invent ways for him to be scary. He was willing to pay; up until he began fading he had taken advantage of the fame those imposters who had pulled the rug out from underneath him enjoyed. There was a lot of money in looking like a Muppet, and he had hoped that maybe he’d be able to make use of the money to fix his situation. Hopefully he’d just found a way. I took the job, not knowing what I’d signed on for. I started taking notes on his voice, his shape, size, mannerisms, and then I started writing.

Writing concepts.

It is hardly an excuse, but I need to preface this. When I wrote these terrible things, these scare tactics, they were ideas to me. There was some level at which I simply didn’t believe that there was going to be any action taken on them. Part of me thought that none of this was real, but that sentiment was silenced by the large numbers that greeted me at the ATM. I guess it was just rationalization. In the prospect of large cash payments I let myself believe that it was all a game. He was a TV executive or something, working on a pilot. Or maybe he was writing a book and needed contributions. Anything but the truth to let me sleep at night knowing that I was profiting from these terrible deeds.

Perhaps it could have lasted. Maybe I could have kept my illusion. But chance held that I didn’t. One night I was in a toy store with my niece. It was her birthday, and I had promised her she could have anything she wanted. And she saw this fuzzy green stuffed animal. She instantly fell in love. I tried to stop her, but there was no holding her back, not distraction that could draw her from that terrible beast. She held it close to her. My heart stood still.

The fiend opened its mouth. There was a fluffy white bunny in it. I was frozen in my place. I knew how this ended, and I knew I needed to get Michelle away, but my arms wouldn’t move. It was as if Juliet could have seen Romeo standing over her lifeless body with the vial of poison. There was nothing I could do.

Michelle picked up the bunny.

Its intestines fell to the floor.

She stood there in shock. She stared down at the bloody mass on the linoleum floor. She looked at her hands, which dripped red, and up at that bastard Kizzit, whose mouth did the same. She looked into his bright eyes and saw the dementia behind them.

A six year-old girl, innocent, with know concept of malice or evil.

She looked into those eyes and in an instant grasped the horrible truth. Every facet of his sick twisted being flooded her consciousness, and I could see her spirit break in front of my eyes. Her world was shattered; it was her birthday. We were spending the day together for the first time in far too long. Today was supposed to be a good day, a fantastic day that she’d remember for years to come. Now there was no question that she’d never forget.

She tried to scream but found no breath to put behind it. She was shaking uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face and I clung to the hope that the blood in them was only my imagination. Finding my legs, I rushed to her side. I swept her into my arms and told her that everything would be all right. That I was there and would never let anything hurt her. That I loved her.

That I was sorry.

She looked deep into my eyes and I at last grasped the totality of what I had done. That I had not merely committed one horrendous, terrible deed but hundreds. Perhaps thousands. And I had given that bastard power.

It was time for redemption. I could let it go no further. He had to be destroyed.

He had told me he was immortal. The time had come to call his bluff. I brought Michelle home. I told her not to worry, that I was going to make it right. Kizzit would have left the toyshop now, but as it happened we were going to meet tonight. I would be ready.

A knock at my door. I stood to the side and opened it. The creature stepped in. He didn’t see me.

I knocked him to the ground and stepped on his throat. He struggled, but I was ready. I broke off a horn and put it through his heart. He screamed a terrible scream, the amassed sound of every shriek from every child in one terrible voice. The room seemed to shake from its hideous force. It caused a horrendous pain in me to my very core, but neither the fires of hell nor the promise of heaven would stop me. It had to be done. I took his limbs one by one, and his remaining horns. I put each horn through an eye, leaving one to witness the retribution I was handing down, for the fiend lived still

I was counting on that.

I put him on the workbench. Out came a bone dagger and a dark book. It was time to end it. I cut his heart from his torso, his brain from his head. I cut the muscle from the bone of each limb in front of his one remaining eye, and arranged the pieces of his body around the face. I chanted from the book, an incarnation I will not suffer you to witness. The room glowed red. I plunged the knife into his eye.

His life gave out, and he began to fade. I cursed him as he left.

Before he disappeared he whispered, “See how you like it.” What did he mean?

I rapped lightly on Michelle’s bedroom window. She opened it, and screamed.

I was still bloody, I had forgotten to clean.

Or had I forgotten?

Her scream filled me with a twisted ecstasy the like of which I’d never felt. It empowered me. It fed me.

And I laughed. I laughed an awful, terrible laugh, that thrilled me and horrified me.

I was no longer her dear loving uncle. I was now the beast.

Or had I been a beast all along? Here I was, now, high on her fear in a way that nothing in my life had even approached.

It gave me pleasure.

It gave me power.

It gave me life.

But I had been living off of the fear of others since she was born. I was in the employ of the foulest of beasts, and I had known it all along. I could no longer claim innocence.

I had taken pleasure in pain

Gained power from suffering

Life from death.

Worse, this fiendish lust for fear had been in me all along, even before Kizzit appeared to me. I could feel it taking control, but it was a familiar feeling, only more powerful. It enveloped me, and what I thought I knew of myself seemed lost forever. The demon had been lurking under my skin, and the thrill of destroying a life, even one as loathsome as that fiend’s, had brought it to fruition. All was lost.

It took the last of my willpower to bid my niece goodbye one last time before I tore out into the night.

We have a late-breaking story this evening. The PBS studio that produces Sesame Street was destroyed today in an inexplicable act of apparent terrorism. Each and every one of the beloved Muppets was destroyed as the building went up in flames. Police are on the lookout for any leads, as no suspect or motive is forthcoming.

In an unrelated story, investigators are also stumped in what seems to be a suicide. A man estimated to have stood about six feet, five inches tall was found dead in what all evidence suggests were self inflicted wounds, which due to their nature is impossible by any means with which they are familiar. The body was found completely dismembered, with a dagger in the heart and through each eye.

Moving on to sports…