Drew Goffrey, AKA the Community Crusader, moaned as his vision cleared and the last vestiges of darkness slipped away like mist in the wind. Sleep vanished, and he grudgingly opened his eyes. As the room in which he sat came into focus, a congealed, icy feeling settled into his stomach.
‘Where am I?’ he asked aloud, not much caring for the waver in his voice as it echoed around the large room, off the dull surfaces of what appeared to be washing machines and refrigerators turned on their sides and piled up in one far corner. The air smelled musty, like old dust and rusting things, but most of the vast warehouse seemed empty. And dark. A single lightbulb dangled on a length of wire high above his head, illuminating the chair to which he was tightly tied and a small circle around him. A few metres away and facing him sat another washing machine, this one with a camera set up on top of it. Its little red light stared unblinkingly at him. A laptop sat on the floor next to the machine, its screen simply displaying a counter set at ‘00000048’. As he stared at it, the panic within him fluttering higher and higher like a bird trying to escape his body, the counter clicked to 00000049. In spite of himself, he felt a bizarre rush of relief at the thought that if it was a bomb, then it had a long way to go.
On the heels of that panic-induced thought he lost control and began to scream.
He shouted for help until his stomach clenched and his muscles ached, the sound of his voice echoing back at him across the dark expanse of the warehouse serving only to increase his panic. Eventually he collapsed against the metal chair, his throat raw and his chest heaving. He could feel blood pounding through his veins. On the laptop screen, the counter had now reached 163 and was rising.
‘Well well,’ a high, reedy voice chuckled from the shadows behind him, ‘if it isn’t the Community Crusader. So good to meet you finally, hero, I’m quite a fan.’ The sneering way the voice lengthened the word ‘hero’ told Drew everything he needed to know. He’d finally gone too far, and he’d attracted the attention of a maniac.
‘Look man,’ he said, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of his captor. The dim shadow behind him slunk back into the darkness, with a hunched, scuttling movement. ‘I just try to make a difference, ok? I’m not a hero, I’m not trying to hurt anyone. Do you work for one of the companies? Is that it? Then I’m doing it for you too bro! You deserve to know that they’re acting ethically and –’
‘Spare me, Crusader,’ the voice sneered, ‘I’ve seen the tweets. Read the blogs. Seen your endless, interminable videos. You don’t need to preach to me. Or to the hundreds watching.’
The counter clicked to 487. It was rising fast now.
Drew fell silent and looked around, noting as he did so that he was still wearing his costume. Essentially a pair of red pyjamas on which he’d sewn a cartoonish ‘CC’, some wellington boots and a Halloween cape. He’d lost his mask somewhere between leaving the photo-shoot last night and waking up.
I remember a van, a parked van. I turned the corner, not far from home. It was dark, no one around the streets. And then…
‘You have a problem with the Crusader, man? No problem. I’ll stop. I promise. I only do it to help out, I swear. Just let me go.’
He’d created the character mainly as a way to highlight social issues; the homeless and the greed of large corporations. Harmless stuff. He’d turn up at swanky corporate dinners, disrupt parties, attend the homeless shelters in his costume. It was only meant to be a bit of fun, to spread a message of social change and make people laugh…
‘You’d leave the job half-done?’ the unseen voice asked in mock-outrage, ‘on the verge of making a real difference?’
‘I have a family to think about, please just let me –’
‘At least you admit it. Oh I am pleased’ the hidden figure chuckled, ‘I did worry you might think you were making a difference.’
‘I…’
‘No,’ the voice hissed, ‘I mean a real difference. A generational change. A genuine mobilisation of voices and thoughts and hearts and minds. Something beyond tweets about the environment and social justice sent to people who think exactly the same. Beyond selfies at corporate events and sanctimonious statements heard only by those who already agree...’
‘You’re insane! I’m just one man and I’m trying to help–’
‘Help?!’ his tormenter shrieked, his nasal voice turning the word into little more than a screech.
‘You are symptomatic of a generation of people who consider themselves enlightened because they know what needs to be done but won’t lift a finger to make it happen!’ The voice was rising into a shout, the unseen owner of the reedy voice spiralling into a full-fledged rage.
‘You and those like you do nothing but allow good people to become smug, self-satisfied, ineffective fools! Disconnected to the reality of the world through their connection to you and your disingenuous, half-hearted, self-serving concern! You keep them blind to the true evil they think they oppose but in fact do nothing to stop!’ This tirade delivered, the screaming maniac leapt into the circle of light with the acrobatic flexibility of a ballet dancer.
Drew gaped at the man, his mouth moving soundlessly. Temporarily he forgot where he was, the sight was too bizarre. The tall, lanky figure wore a domino mask, made of gnarled and twisted material like old leather and sporting a very long nose. Horns rose from the top of it above a mop of stark white hair which must have been a wig. The face beneath the mask was painted in red and white diamonds, and the mouth that grinned from within it gleamed with very white teeth. The apparition wore a grey motley tunic and tight black-and-white checked stockings. The figure froze, like a player on stage, and then exploded into a flourishing bow, chuckling wildly all the while.
Drew stared at the harlequin, lost for words. Behind the hunched, cackling figure, the counter was clicking through the high thousands. The red light from the camera continued steadily.
‘I am the Masque Master, the villain for your hero,’ the madman declared in his high-pitched voice, gesturing to his outfit, ‘I thought it fitting to match the conclusion of your fantasy to its overture–’
‘Look, mister I swear I’ll –’
‘Silence!’ the maniac screamed, actually stamping his feet like a petulant child. ‘You will not interrupt my introduction!’
Drew fell silent, wriggling his hands within their bonds as the spindly lunatic drew himself up and stepped delicately to the side, gesturing to the camera with an exaggerated grin.
‘The performance has now entered its final act, hero, and you and I shall rescue it before it concludes. Never fear!’
His hands were sweaty, and as he twisted them, he felt the ropes give a little. He struggled to keep his composure as the masked dancer continued to rave.
‘The audience is displeased!’ the figure in grey cried, crouching low and spreading its long arms wide, ‘the hero cannot triumph if his whole journey was conceited and ineffective! But I have a twist for this tale, to rescue it from itself. The twist is that the hero was the villain all along! A pantomime of good, advancing the cause of evil!’
The figure drew itself up again and crossed its arms, head cocked slightly to the side.
‘And so obviously he has to die,’ he added offhand, making a dismissive gesture towards something off in the darkness.
The counter on the screen was rapidly accelerating into the millions.
Soon, Drew told himself, someone will be coming soon. The authorities would have been alerted. They can trace the computer or something, I’ve seen it on TV…
But somehow, he couldn’t seem to convince himself. His hands shook too badly to pull free of the ropes, and the maniac was watching him so intently he wouldn’t get far even if he managed it.
He’s going to kill me…
The certainty settled into his mind like an icy mist, gentle and inexorable, filling him with cold and draining his strength.
‘Please,’ he whispered through a choked throat, ‘please don’t...’
His captor turned – swirled – around, bending low to his face. Drew could smell the leather of the old mask; his skin crawled at the touch of the loathsome nose against his cheek.
‘But I must,’ the madman crooned in a soft voice, ‘you are the icon for all those who feel good about themselves because of one pithy gesture in the right direction which – far worse than ignoring the root in favour of the branch – merely prunes a dead-head, allowing another to grow.’
‘Please…’ Drew was lost in terror, the grotesque mask swimming before his eyes, the words barely making any sense.
‘For every one of your followers who shares one of your homeless-person-selfies, how many walk by the real homeless person they pass, comforting themselves that they’ve done their part? For every tweet that draws a sincere nod and a re-tweet instead of an action, how many suffer for that lack of action? You are the figurehead of that smug, circular, useless mentality; for those who wonder why the world around them is falling deeper into ruin with each passing day.’
From somewhere within himself, Drew found a kernel of anger and grasped it like a drowning man, shouting at the masked fool and rattling his bonds frantically.
‘I’m doing my part! What else can I do?!’
‘Die, Crusader!’ the ghastly apparition giggled happily, bouncing to its feet and twirling on its toes. The counter was now over five million.
‘And in so doing you shall drive those silent thinkers, bonded to their keyboards, blinded and paralysed by their superiority, out from the dark. Consider this your greatest achievement.’
He moved slowly towards the camera, reaching behind the washing machine and pulling a long handled axe from the shadows. Its wicked blade gleamed in the dull overhead light. The masked creature stared down at it, the nose bobbing gently. It began to giggle.
Drew began to scream, shouting for help, shrieking desperately at those who watched silently through the unblinking red light of the camera.
‘Are you surprised,’ the harlequin asked softly, turning back to Drew, ‘that in a world such as this, where goodness is represented and expressed only in closed communities behind screens, evil can flourish unchecked and unopposed?’
‘In the real world,’ the masked thing said in a sing-song voice, hefting the axe in both hands, ‘bad things happen no matter how many people look on horrified, no matter how many express their outrage or solidarity in tweets and texts and blogs. Just look at that little counter go! Ha! Millions of eyes watching, millions of fingers tapping. But here I stand, giggling with my axe, unopposed.’ It let out a titter of unhinged laughter.
‘And you will finally show them what you should have shown them all along! If they want change, they need to change. The real world exists, and they cannot pretend otherwise. Because this is happening, and they let it happen! Made it happen! I am a product of them! But with your death, they will finally understand their failure. The failure of a whole generation of brilliant and wasted ability. Be glad! Your grand finale may yet unleash the change you claimed all along to desire.’
And before the eyes of countless horrified observers, heedless of the petrified screams, the figure in grey scampered quickly forward and chopped Drew Goffrey into steaming pieces, singing in its ghastly voice all the while.
The counter continued to rise.
Submitted December 08, 2017 at 07:32PM by StevenDJackson http://ift.tt/2jc7UKh shortstories
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