An Uncanny Villain

After a dream from the past, Capheus finds himself in one of the darkest places in his mind only to find what? A butler.

Curtains swaying in the sunlight, air as fresh as the morning sky, the trees bending with the force of the wind, rays of light creating bright colors through my eyelids, and the endearing warmth of my bedsheets spread across my waist all rejoiced into a single scenery that I awoke to. I followed the rays of sunlight through the window, my eyes adjusting to the new environment, and I immediately recognized the room that I was in. This was my bedroom, though not the one I had left upon the verge of death, but rather the one that I had as a young child.

The walls were still blue and filled with drawings that I had made and comic books that I spent hours a day reading. My school bag was resting against the wall beside my door and as I scanned the rest of the room, I had noticed that my closet was open and inside was my older brother, his back turned to me, and the sounds of him fumbling around threatened my hands with fists. As usual, I was angry and wanted to punch him until his nose bled so much it created a pool around him and swallowed him whole, but as he turned around and revealed what was in his hands, I relaxed and instead just stared in shock.

He spun on his heel and held out my old blanket, one that my father had given me when I was a baby, only that now it had been ripped and taped into a small hat. When I saw what he had done to it, I immediately began to cry, wishing he hadn’t reminded me of my father, and sprung from my bed.

“What did you do?! That’s mine!” I shouted and found my feet at a much faster pace than I wanted them to be. I ended up jumping around him in an attempt to retrieve it, but he only laughed hysterically as he held it high enough so that I couldn’t snatch it from him.

“Stop being such a little p***y! It’s just a stupid blanket! Oh my god! Look at you! You’re such an idiot!” he laughed aloud. That struck the perfect nerve. I climbed onto my desk as fast as I could and with surprise, my brother began to run!

“Give it back or I’ll kill you!” I shouted and jumped down from the dresser before stomping out of the room and skidding to the right where I found him behind his bedroom door, barricading it with his own weight, and I made the usual attempt to break it down. My mother had heard all of the commotion from downstairs and came running up to see what was going on. When she saw me trying to break down my brother’s bedroom door, she took the motherly action of removing me from it.

Despite my mother’s arms wrapped around me, pulling me away from the door, I continued to throw my fists in the air and shout after him.

“I’m gonna get you!” I cried as if I was in a real battle. My mother pulled me into my bedroom and began to scowl at me.

“You need to stop fighting with your brother! I told you that your father is alright and that he will come back soon! If he sees you like this, what do you think will happen?” she was on the brink of shouting, but I ignored her remark and instead, told her what I wanted to say so desperately for a long while now.

“You’re lying! I saw dad get in his car! He’s not coming back and he gave me that blanket to remember him! Now it’s gone! I hate my brother! I hate everyone! I wish dad took me with him and I wish you had never made me stay in his horrible place!” I was screaming now. If I hadn’t been the stubborn little kid that I was, I would have been bawling, but instead the tears only stained my waterlines and that was as close to shedding another tear as I got. I was tired of crying. I wanted to become a man, like the superheroes that I read about, and I wanted to be an even better man than my brother.

My mother looked at me, both in disbelief and in concern, and I finally gave her the last thing I would ever say to her in years.

“I hate you!”

A pause, the sound of her foot stepping forward, the wind passing by, the wave of her arm, the pressure of her fingers against my face, the loud noise of our last contact ever made, the look of fear and blame in her eyes, and the pain.

Oh that pain.

It burst into fragments and then pulled together to create tears and the sensation of my cheek numbing. The shaking of my terrified hands, the fear of my own mother’s violence suddenly kicking in, the dread of the person I once loved becoming my worst ally. This was a very memorable moment that I knew would become the new building block of the course of my life. Whether it really altered it isn’t a question. It really did. I have never felt so alone.

My mother moved in with her drunk a*s boyfriend, left me alone with my uncle, my brother became part of a little gang and started smoking. He would beat me up with his friends from time to time but I never let him get away with it. I’ll get him back eventually. My mother was once so loving towards my brother and I but after my father left, she became more stressed and tense and she would only turn to us to bark orders or shout at us for being tardy. Better than having her gone I suppose.

I blinked, the process of my eyelids fluttering only taking a moment to complete, but when I opened them again, I was in a different room. It was dark, but I recognized the walls and the smell. There was a small shining light weaving through the curtains of the window that glowed on the blue bedsheets across from me. This was my brother’s room, back when he was just a kid. Back before he became my most obnoxious problem out of many. I glanced about, searching for any familiar voices, watching as the shapes of shadows danced along the walls, and that was when one came, but it didn’t belong to my brother.

“This is what we dream of here” it spoke and for some odd reason, I wasn’t startled at all. In fact, I had been expecting it. I turned my head to catch sight of a man wearing a coat and top hat. His gaze was set upon mine. It was the butler. The butler of Satan himself. The butler of a thousand voices and screams and the man of dark abyss who never failed to relieve me of my troubles, even though I had only just met him once.

“We dream of our memories. Beautiful and awful. You’re seeing what you’re thinking but you can only think of what you remember. I watched as your mother gave up hope and as you struggled to thrive in this morbid, toxic, and disgustingly cruel world. You were only a small child when I first glanced at you.” He stretched his arm and caressed the bedsheets as if caressing a baby’s head. He was remembering too, wasn’t he? He remembered watching me? What else could he have known about me that others, not even myself, did not?

“You were so feeble and energetic. Your world evolved around the happiness and joy your father gave you and when he had given that all up and moved somewhere where you could never find him, your heart became too broken and beaten to love any more than you already had.” He turned to me, his eyes becoming dark circles in his head, and his chin lowered until it was hanging just inches from his chest while glaring in my direction.

“You came here for a reason. You’re not like the others.” I felt calm and settled despite the fact that this man was reciting my entire childhood to me as though he was there. I felt a bit weary, the room suddenly growing darker by the ticks of the clock, and the butler moved closer. He stepped forward a few times before stopping and hovering above me like how my father once did when I was too little to look at him in the eye. He leaned in, barely grazing my right cheek with his, and he whispered in my ear. I could already feel the energy vibrating throughout the room like music.

“You are very much alive.”

Author's Note

I decided to add a bit of a strange character to this book who has what you might call a bit of a "villain-ish outlook." Enjoy!