‘I= life* n(others + me)’ by Richard David Lawman

It felt like there was more darkness than the room could hold. Like a battle against the light was being lost.  Gall slumped in his chair in front of the glowing computer screens, watching dust particles illuminated by the screen light rise and fall on the convectional currents.  The air was thick. He could feel himself getting full from just breathing it in.  Gall sat and stared at the screens, as he always did.

In the corner, an orchid strained for the light and optimistically bulked it’s flower head ready to bloom and fill the room with colour.  Gall sat and stared and watched the screens – just as he always did.

A greasy pizza, crushed into its cardboard coffin, rammed through the letterbox.  Gall heard the clunk of the lid shutting as the delivery boy took his payment which waited for him.  Gall shuffled across the room on his swivel chair, re-tracing the familiar groves in the dust on the floor as he fetched his meal, and never taking his eyes off the screens.

Gall heard the ripples of rain against the window. The sound still got through the blind, curtains and board he had in front of it.  He never took his bulging eyes off the screen.  Always watching them.  No one watching him.

And then Gall woke up.  Bright lights, moving images, unfamiliar sounds.  He was in a hospital bed.  After taking a few minutes to adjust, he turned onto his side and found her sat by his bed.

“How…?” he murmured in her direction.

“You had a heart attack, Dad. You’re going to be ok, thought…” She softly said.

He shut his eyes again, forcing himself down as deeper as he could go, closing off everything around him.  After a few seconds he opened them again.

He was back in his room.  The darkness felt even heavier.  Light crushed in on all sides.  He smiled, for the first time in months, he could do it – he could live any life he wanted – vicariously – without the risk of death, pain, heartbreak.  He clicked off the page of the father in his hospital bed with his daughter at his side and clicked onto a new page.  The letterbox rattled as his next meal crushed through.  He shuffled over to retrieve it, never taking his eyes off the screens, and looking for his next experience.

“Why live one life when you can live many?” he said to himself, hot, greasy pizza slopping onto his chin.  But then it stuck him – who would want to live his?  He ushered that thought away and returned to staring at the screens, concentrating on his next trip and eventually, his next victim.

‘SAY HELLO TO THE MONSTER’ by Richard David Lawman

When they finally caught me – trying to dissect my seventeenth victim – they knew that the standard punishment protocol wouldn’t be enough. For I was special and I needed something special.  They kept me caged for most of the time, with usually two or three guards staring at me from behind the criss-cross window, and fantasising about all the things they would want to do to me.  Nothing was painful enough. Nothing would last long enough.

I heard the state judge actually wretched as he was read a list of my crimes – to each one I had confessed, supplying every detail I could remember – which was all of them.  When he took the case to his seniors in the Department for Justice, they agreed that I wasn’t fit to stand trial and I should be sentenced immediately.  The truth was it was they who weren’t fit to stand the trial – I had been rehearsing my performances in my cell, practicing and labouring over each and every word.  They had even given the guards ear plugs to stop them from hearing the disgusting details. 

After three weeks I got word from my lawyer – via letter, I might add – that they had turned to an “outside consultant” to find an appropriate way of dealing with me.  They didn’t want to execute me, they wanted me to experience hell on earth.  This consultant was a horror writer, unpublished, relatively unknown, but whose imagination was left to find a solution to this predicament.

Eventually, the keys jangled and the heavy door lock snapped open and in stepped a gaggle of riot guards and the prison warden.  They chained me, cloaked and bagged me up and carried me on a stretcher out into the long hallway and into a waiting prison van outside.  I felt the undulations and vibrations of the rough tarmac as I was rolled outside.  I inhaled violently against inside of the body bag to suck in the fresh air one last time.  I was sure they were going to torture me, maybe even crucify me. 

We drove for nine hours straight. 

It was dark when we arrived, the cool night air smelled sweet and the insects triumphantly announced my arrival – filling the darkness with a hiss of excitement.  I was known throughout all species.  I was the devil on earth.

They laid me down on the muddy ground and unzipped the body bag, hauled off my hood and unblocked my chains before stepping away.  “What is this?” I asked.

“Hell.  You’re in Hell.  A Hell we have created just for you,” snarled the warden. 

I clambered to my feet and arched my back to take into view the house.  A decrepit, old wooden house shrouded in dying oak trees which pre-dated the industrial revolution.  The paint was peeling off the walls, panels of wood splintered open here and there.  I laughed and stepped inside.

“What’s in here?” I asked as they followed me – going nowhere further than the porch.  The warden looked anxiously at the ground and then the horror writer – whom I presumed was the older guy with the beard and the glasses. 

“A monster.” He answered.  And with that they shut the door.

I gazed across the darkened hallway, allowing my eyes to adjust to the poor light.  I saw dozens of darkened figures staring back at me.  I stumbled over to the wall and groped for a light switch and found none.  Eventually, I found an oil lamp with matches and brought light to the room.  I held it up to see the dark figures staring back at me were mine.  I laughed.  I was the monster they were referring to.  I broke every mirror in the house.  Punching, kicking and head-butting with grotesque delight.  When I was done I slept, giddy from the rage, on the floor in the back room.

The next morning I awoke to find every mirror had been replaced.  I shouted out insults to the men watching outside.  And once again I broke every mirror in the house.

They promised me that the monster would come, and with time, it did.  After four nights I began to go insane.  My bloodied, scab-crusted, evil reflection found me in every room, round every corner.  I smashed and begged them to stop.  Each of my seventeen victims tortured me with eyes each day.

But not their eyes. Mine.

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Richard David Lawman is the chief Writer/ Director/ Producer of ‘The Putty In Your Hands’ production company. He can be found and contacted at  http://richarddavidlawman.com/ and http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/richard-lawman/24/966/182