Scraping

What happens when one is left to face his obsessions alone?

There was a smile on his face, fueled by memories of childhood. Glen Pollard, a man of thirty-one years, slouched cheerfully in a metal lawn chair in the overgrown front yard, facing his house of thirty years. For thirty years, he had taken refuge from the vexations of the world, and aged in it. He continued to smile at the fancy of the wooden horse head he would pretend to gallop about on in his childhood. This memory had succeeded his initial fixation with the stare of the beady eyes of that very horse head, which lay on its side on the porch.

            That smile would never leave his face, even now as he watched his home burn away in an intense display of flames that swallowed it. His smile was not only the result of happy memories alone, but also relief. The police and fire department would arrive in minutes, and he was awaiting them, eager. Tonight was the night that he finally faced the things he had done, the path of depravity he had leapt into, and take safety from the horrors his existence had manifested.

***

            One could claim that there were in fact two different men named Glen Pollard that merely shared one body; the one that existed from birth until being succeeded by the current Glen Pollard after his demise. To pinpoint the demise of the first Glen Pollard, it was in the middle days of his boyhood, that he had a near-death experience after falling and cracking his skull on the corner of a doorframe. Remembering nothing of the incident, save for visions of vivid displays of color, he would be the same nevermore. Inclinations towards all things morbid took hold at the age of nine years.  He began collecting peculiar items such as the bones of animals; drawings and journal entries detailed the guaranteed safety felt amongst anything associated with death; dreams were dreams of his blood remaining frozen in his veins; the stench of decay in his room was not only smelt, but could be felt by any that passed through, with Glen of course feigning ignorance to its source. Despite the shamelessness Glen was occasioned with over the years of living this way, the fear of having what he based his existence on exposed to the world, kept him confined within himself, never to utter one word or committing one act that would betray himself.

            His already bizarre behavior was distorted even further on the day of his high school graduation. Glen knew that there lay a Great Void awaiting him the minute he walked through the doors of the school. Having been so inclined towards the morbid, he never gave a thought as to how that Great Void could be navigated. A vortex of self-enslavement and uncertainty of the future was not what he ever dared face. Upon ascending to the stage, before the valedictorian, before all of his peers, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Upon collapsing into a tearful heap on the floor, whatever had remained of Glen Pollard of old had all but drained away with every tear.

            This is when the collections, and when the Glen Pollard of the present day began. All that could be associated with the life of the common man repulsed him. Thus, he dedicated himself to living in extremes, surrounding himself by the strange and disturbing. Beauty, to him, was a fantasy associated with the delusion of the “regulars.” Naturally his family - two sisters, one brother, and parents - met his behavior (for it had become far more apparent) with much revulsion.

            Glen’s life doctrine kept him restricted to the home he had dwelt already for the greater part of his life. When he was twenty-five, his siblings had all relocated to various parts of the country, and his parents moved away into assisted living. Care for the house was left to him, and as he had not even received his high school diploma, he had very little options for employment. Not only did he eventually accept employment with the town’s waste management department because it was one of few opportunities available to him, but also because it gave him a chance to freely surround himself in the purely revolting.

            Very little income came his way; however he hardly spent any money (money was useless in acquiring whatever morbidities he desired) and he barely used utilities in his household. Over time, the collections grew to such disgusting volumes that the basement had been given the sole purpose to house the articles of the collections.

***

            The events of prime focus here began on a late July’s eve, one week prior to the final destruction of his home. Glen Pollard treaded on the blanket of weeds that had overgrown the stone walkway leading from the garage to the front porch. Glen had a grim smirk of satisfaction on his face, dragging his latest find behind him. He took the utmost care in making sure that no part would suffer any sudden imperfections due to being heaved up the three ivy-ridden steps leading to the front door.

            Returning home always left him with a sense of accomplishment, not only due to whatever find he had brought with him, but at the fact that locating his home was still possible. Vegetation strangled the house, nearly in its entirety, almost as if it attempted to claim it for the Earth itself. Anyone who would be occasioned a glance at the household, assuming they were able to identify it as such, would immediately conclude that no soul could survive inhabiting it.

            The wood of the porch was rotting and splintering. Glen could hear the wood splitting from the planks and sending little spears in through the cloth of the burlap sack .He shrugged off the piercing sounds, noting to tend to the splinters later on. Twisting the knob of the front door, Glen pushed it open, and proceeded to drag the cumbersome lump behind him. There was a brief pause, as the mass was caught on the doorframe by some appendage awkwardly jutting out, but little effort was needed to wrench it free at the sound of a snap.

            Through the hallways, Glen continued to drag his precious cargo. He intended to bring it to the basement, where he had reserved a special place for it. Now at the door leading to the basement, Glen took a breath, and then opened it. As always, the necrotic stench of his collections greeted him. As the thing was dragged down each step behind him, there was a rather unpleasant crack with something else being broken or torn. Minor imperfections these were, but nothing that would bear down on Pollard’s spirit.

            At the base of the steps, Glen turned and bent down to reveal his latest and to him greatest treasure of revulsion. With the slash of a blade, it fell free from the sack. He had collected bones, or other various parts of corpses before, but never one in its entirety.

            Glen stared at it with the utmost satisfaction. Although the thing was freshly dead, it was just as foul as he had hoped. The goat-like facial structure, the greedy-looking mouth, and the glazed-over eyes; it was all the more satisfying knowing the thing was as hideous in life as it was in death. In minutes, the body had taken its seat in an improvised throne, crudely implemented with a rusting lawn chair, set aside especially for it on the far side of the basement. Poor thing needs a rest, Glen thought. After all, one would surely be most weary after attempting to murder his lover over jealousy. Apparently, in the last moments of his life, the man �"a Mr. G�"�" �" attempted an effort to drive a pick axe into the skull of his fiancée after learning of her love for another man. He took a misstep though, and wound up falling and splitting his spine on an uprooted tree. A tragedy indeed, ended by clumsiness.

            The corpse sat and stared the perpetual stare of the dead, seated upon its corroding throne, ruling over nothing but jars of filth, the likenesses of eyes (Glen had a fascination for them) painted with unutterable fluids on the walls, organs, carcasses, unidentifiable things in a state of decay, masks made of any material capable of decomposition, rusted metal, broken toys, all of it fastened to the wall or resting on metal shelves. And most hideously of all, was Glen’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, the eyes of animals and humans (acquired whence they were deceased, it must be noted), all fastened with needles on one long strand of copper wiring that formed a terrible network that ran throughout the basement.

            Glen stopped as always upon leaving to let the putrid air crawl friendlily up his nostrils and into his brain. Once his sense of smell had mingled enough with the scent, he was always reminded of this life he lived opposite to the aesthete. He lived in an existence of constant contradiction; content with living, but always in the throes of unmanageable fear. Though, it could at least be made as painless as possible by wallowing in all things foul. In his mind, a “normal” life would mean a slow death and to escape it he had to defy any association with normalcy.

            Such fears stemmed from the collections, and indeed he always feared that they would be discovered someday and the truth would be put on as an unforgiveable display to the world. On this night though, the world still remained oblivious, and he could at least sleep through the night with that in mind. Before exiting the west half of the basement, Glen stopped. He glanced once to the left, and just barely, he thought something on the wall stirred. Straining his eyes, he found that there was nothing. Glen could live with nothing.

            As he rested on his bed - a mattress ripped from an old pull-out couch he found while at the garbage yard, draped over by a bedspread that once doubled as a makeshift funeral shroud for an unfortunate cat from across the town - Glen wondered if he was really suited to live in this world. Inevitably, self-doubt always crept its way into Glen’s mind before he slumbered.

            Two days more passed, and all it took was for there to be more stirring in the dark and the scraping of a thin and wiry appendage, to forbid him from venturing beyond the basement door and into the depths below his house. Since he had acquired his latest treasure, the articles of his collections seemed to quiver, as if attempting motions associated with the living. Initially, these sightings were disavowed by Glen as mere trickery on the eyes and ears. Two days prior to his cowardice of entering the basement, while he sat scribbling nonsensical verses in a deteriorating notebook, he first noticed the stirring in the darkness and heard the demented metallic scrape snaking from the far shadows of the basement to his eardrums. The pencil clutched in his hand paused, but did not leave the paper. It resumed, whence there was found no further stirring or scraping.

            It was the day that followed that sent him fleeing the basement, with no existing way of convincing him to enter it. With a crayon, he was scribbling a rather odd drawing of a father and son joined together at the eye sockets, forming one eye between their conjoined heads, when he heard that awful metallic scraping against the concrete.

            Glen stopped, unnerved, slowly looked up, and peered into the darkness in the room across from him. There was what appeared to be a slithering partnered with the scraping, but now in correspondence, he could just make out what appeared to be an entire mass of the darkness lumber about briefly. In seconds, he dropped the paper and crayon, sprinted forth, stumbled several times falling to the concrete, and ascended the stairs screaming, maniacal. Since that moment of spotting the great mass of darkness shifting, Glen remained seated, staring again with straining and terrified eyes at the top of the staircase, never figuring what horror he had witnessed.

             The hours dragged on, filled with nothing but Glen’s unwavering gaze and fearful wondering. So soon as the malevolent silence had claimed dominion, the scraping raged violently again. Glen sprung to his feet, frightened, but did not move quickly enough. For at the very second he did attempt to flee, he saw what caused the scraping come slithering toward him from the shadow.

            In the throes of the dreadful sight, he was made intelligent again the fact that the network of eyes he had created that ran through the basement, had all but vanished entirely. Now, he saw them, the culprit of the stirs and scraping, come slink their way up the stairs. The eyes, all held on to the wire with needles, stared at him, as they now moved with a sickening limb-like volition.

            Desperately seeking to escape the abomination, Glen turned and sprinted from the house. As soon he made it through the front door though, he was suddenly stopped at the ankles and fell forward, sending his face and palms into the wooden patio.

            Recovery did not have enough time. Glen screamed as he was dragged back across the patio, sinking splinters of wood into his skin. He saw he was back in the house, then at the door leading to the basement, then flying down the stairs, his screams skipping as he went down each step. At the final step, Glen ceased his screams. There was no final step to be felt, all he felt was himself sink into an inches-deep layer of black and gelatinous ooze. Disturbance sent him into a numb silence.

            He was dragged further into the collection room; the lights had been turned on. With the light cast down upon the collections, more vivid and bright than ever before, the grotesque writhing of the morbid articles was confirmed as a reality. Organs, decomposing small creatures, insects, and things decayed beyond any recognition, moved about in their jar confinements, possessed by unknown life. The lawn chair at the end of the room was empty. Still in the numbness that defended his sanity (assuming such a term applied to him), Glen whirled his head left and right, trying to keep from sinking further into the ooze and to find the corpse. Few seconds passed before his eyes fell upon it. The corpse lay partially enclosed in the unnamable ooze, flailing its arms about. The thing was surely dead, Glen thought in his struggle, but still the damn thing flails around!

            Glen stayed silent, and further sunk into the defending numbness as more appendages from the network of eyes reached out from all directions to maneuver him into the lawn chair. With him now seated, they began to snake around his arms, legs, and around his torso to keep him fastened to the chair. All while this occurred, the eyes, hundreds, thousands, continued to stare at him. He remained transfixed -struck dumb and rendered defenseless by his feeble mind- by the thousands of stares, until a booming dissonance brought his eyes forward.

            At the other end of the room was the gateway to the opposing room. Beyond the gateway, light did not show. The wire appendages seemed to originate from there, as did the ooze, running almost perpetually in a vile river. Further straining his eyes to see beyond the shadow, Glen nearly fled from consciousness. Not only did the vile river originate from there, but also the buzzing dissonance. It was a thing capable of speech, but what horrendous speech it was! From the outline it gave in the dark, there seemed to be no form. No texture, no shape; only an unnamable mass of death. Again, in the same hoarse, dissonant, and layered grunt, it beckoned to Glen.

            “Wallow…in your fear. Indulge in the vile. Remain seated on your throne of filth.”

Glen remained unmoving, still feeling hopeless and in the throes of shock. This was not a nightmare. Nightmares provided the luxury of an exit. The thing continued its speech of terror.

            “Or… escape. Face the world you have built from all things unclean. Only then, will you allow yourself to escape, and spare the pain of others.”

            Glen finally broke from his fear to reflect on his life. He remembered the looks of horror on the faces of his family members and the disappointment in their eyes as they took off and never returned. He remembered the fright he caused when seen removing the eyes of families’ loved ones or the way that children lamented over finding that their previously buried pet had been exhumed. Then he remembered the pain he had caused himself, when he thought he was relieving it by rejecting the beautiful.

            Having realized his defeat, anger overrode terror. With a scream that came from within the darkest areas of his mind, he broke free of the numbness and ripped away of eye-appendages that held him. As he made way for the stairs, he heard the thing unleash a dissonance, an unforgettable cacophony that temporarily deafened him. Glen sprinted towards safety, leaping over steps. The eye-appendages only barely missed him in initial pursuit.

            He scoured the house, frantic, dodging any eye-appendage that spiraled from the dark. At last, he found the can of gasoline located in a neglected corner of the house. Glen opened it, and proceeded to sprint throughout the house leaving trails of gasoline behind him. As soon as he ran out, he threw the can down, and removed the matches he had procured in his frenzied search for the gasoline.

            With each failed striking of match after match, he could just discern the rearing eye-appendages in his peripherals. Only several matches remained. There was a horrible army converging upon him; an army of dread that shared one mind and sought to imprison him for all time in the vile chamber of his own creation. Two matches remained. Thousands of little glints stared at him, verging to constrict him. Glen had the final match pinched between his thumb of index finger, and with a shriek -as the wiry appendages sprung from the shadows, thousands of perpetually staring eyes snaking down upon him- he lit the final match. Before it could go out, he let it fall onto the gasoline trail, and sprinted to the back door. With the demented orchestra of the metallic scraping of the eye network just behind him, Glen threw the door open and continued into the open air.

            He kept running, into the forest beyond his home, never looking back, even when his knees buckled, ready to allow his body to collapse. Minutes later at the outskirts of the forest though, he stopped and turned around to find that the hellish abomination from within the house was following him. Observing that the flames from within the house could be seen from afar, Glen smiled to himself in relief, and proceeded to walk back to it. When he was in proximity, finding himself loving the smell of the ivy that choked the house burning, he walked around to the front yard. He knew the fire department and the police would arrive soon. He would tell them everything. And in waiting for their arrival, Glen produced a metal lawn chair from beneath a blanket of weeds, and sat down facing the fiery display.

***

            Since that night, Glen confessed all of the things he had done. It had landed him in a prison cell, awaiting psychiatric evaluation, but he felt free. He was hoping that maybe he would hear from his family, but he heard nothing. As soon as his face and name were on a news broadcast, he was bound never to hear from them again. No links to family would be established for the public. Glen Pollard, to the world, was but a solitary freak in a slew of solitary freaks that were oft of interest to the curious before they grew tired of them.

             Thinking such thoughts was inescapable, but it did not trouble Glen in the slightest. Feeling as though recovering from a decades-long ailment, no negative pondering could drag him down. No more wallowing in all things vile in order to feel safe. How could he have ever thought he was? As he sat on the floor, resting back against the wall, Glen closed his eyes and let his head fall back. Smiling, he breathed in, and breathed out. The air never felt more pure to him. He promised himself he would never take it for granted.

            His eyes snapped open. Dreading that he was not trapped within a nightmare, he ceased all breathing and listened. Across the way, there echoed a metallic scraping. Shaking, Glen turned his head to find his gaze met by several perpetually staring eyes.