Nighttime Dementia

I: Rain

It's been way too long.

He hardly remembered the streets of this town, but still, he found himself walking aimlessly through them.

The sky was a dead grey, but as far as Johnny C. remembered, there were never any clear blue skies in this town. The rain poured miserably over him as he continued walking, his trench coat completely soaked under the downpour.

It's been nearly seven years since he left this town to silence himself from all feeling and desire. After seven years of forcing himself of forgetting how to feel, it was working quite well. He has turned into an emotionless sack of organs (a very skinny emotionless sack of organs), and he liked it. For once in a long time, Johnny liked who he was, even if it was just a little bit.

The icy winds began taking hold of him, and his twig-like legs began to tremble violently. In fact, they were shaking so bad that Johnny couldn't even walk and he had to resort to sit on the closest bench. He felt his arms begin to shake as well and he hugged himself to keep warm. He had to hug gingerly though, because of the knives he kept hidden under his coat.

Johnny didn't change much over the years, except for the fact that his hair grew back to the usual black spiky mop that it was, and he even grew a few inches taller. Other than his height and the re-growth of his hair, he was still the same skinny, troubled minded young adult who killed people simply because he thought they deserved it.

Oftentimes though, when his twisted mind wasn't preoccupied with thoughts of mass murder and genocide, she would pop into his head at the most inconvenient times. It's not like Johnny intended for it to happen, it just did, and he never really wanted it to.

But of course, as all humans do, he couldn't help but cherish that thought whenever it came back to him.

He knew that he swore himself off from all emotion, but he gave up trying to fight this one. Devi was special to Johnny. Although they've gone to a date gone horribly wrong, and even though he tried apologizing over the phone through a tape recorder, only to have her scream at him, he still thought about her. He still liked her. He still wanted her. He still cared. He didn't want to, he really didn't want to, but he did, and by now he figured that there was no use trying to fight it off.

He leaned back on the bench and felt the cool rain fall onto his pale face, closing his eyes as he did so. He basked in the refreshing feeling. It felt as if all of his past feelings were dripping down his face with the rain, as if the stains on the walls of his mind were being washed away.

But there was always that one stain that was just too stubborn to come off, and Johnny hated yet loved it with a fiery compassion.

The rain didn't seem to be stopping any time soon, so Johnny got up and began walking again. He didn't want to go home; he was afraid of running into Reverend Meat again. He didn't like going home much anymore. He had this phobia of his inner voices ever since the doughboys and Nailbunny, and now that Reverend Meat was there he didn't want to go home at all, though he had no other choice sometimes because he needed a place to store his victims.

There wasn't any other place he could possibly go at the moment; he's been to every corner of the city. Johnny didn't want to see the same sights over again, so he turned on his heel and headed back to the dilapidated shack he called home.

--

Classical music echoed through Devi's narrow, empty apartment hallways. The faint tapping on the windows from the rain soothed her as she dipped her paintbrush into her palette, swirling it in a small puddle of navy paint.

Every week for the past seven years, Devi D. only had one subject in mind, and that was to finally complete the painting she's been trying to create ever since the day after that maniac tried taking her life after what seemed to be such a pleasant night out together.

Ever since that day, Devi has been having dreams-actually they were more like nightmares. The events of that night kept replaying in her head, and it has been haunting her since.

There was this one particular image she had in mind whenever she had that nightmare, and it somehow compelled her to it. It was appalling, but at the same time it was beautiful, intriguing, mysteriously satisfying. Whenever Devi had the dream, she'd wake up and paint a little bit of that image, as much as she could remember of it.

Sadly, it's been seven years since the dreams started and she still hasn't finished it. Hell, she wasn't even halfway done. She didn't even take up a quarter of the canvas.

All she had so far was a smother of navy blue and a little bit of a shape painted in black. The thing about her dream is that whenever she had it and woke up right after, she'd forget a lot about it, which frustrated her because she really wanted to paint that certain image, but for some reason whenever she thought of it she'd have sudden amnesia, and she'd have to wait until she fell asleep again to remember what it looked like.

She stopped painting for a minute and clamped her eyes shut, trying to recollect the faint images from her dreams. All she could remember was her and him, sitting together on the grey tattered couch in his dark, creepy, crumbling house. The atmosphere was disastrous but at the moment it seemed perfect. Then came those questions that he asked her that night.

"Why did you ask me out? Why did you want to go out with me?"

Her reply followed soon after.

"It's simple: I like you. I enjoy our talks, when you come visit me at the bookstore. I like you for all those reasons people ask a person out for. There, I said my thing, now I just hope your thoughts run along those same lines. If not, then I'll just get awkward and leave, quietly, after killing you."

Awkward silence. Clashing eyes, chocolate brown and emerald green. Hysterical laughter.

Oh, how wrong of her to say that last sentence…

They found themselves nose to nose. They were so close…

"Yes! Yes! Happiness! I'm happy!"

"Nny? Where are you going? NNY!"

Knives. Two glittering, grinning knives clasped in his bony hands. A tremble of fear. A quivering of the lips.

"Nny? Nny, what are you doing?"

"Immortalizing the moment."

A sudden mind block jams itself into her train of thought and Devi found herself back in reality, staring blankly at her unfinished painting.

Fuck. She couldn't remember that very first image of the memory, the one she was trying to paint, to recreate, to relive. She remembered what happened afterwards. She remembered what happened in the middle, and how she kicked his ass and escaped with her life in the end. She remembered staring at his bloody, twitching body lying helplessly on the floor before making a run for it, but she couldn't remember what happened before. She could only remember the bad parts, not the good ones. She sighed in defeat and cleaned her things up and stowed them away. That was enough reminiscing for one day. It was hard enough digging into that painful, traumatizing memory of that night, the night she thought that would change her life for good.

She would just have to wait until she falls asleep again.

--