The Hat-Stand Men (Voice chapter 3)

The third chapter in my book 'Voice'. I introduce a new and (hopefully) interesting character, and further set the stage for the novel. Enjoy!!

Chapter Three- The Hat-Stand Men

The Words dropped from her lips, hovered for a second in the static air, then plummeted to the ground where they shattered into a thousand shards. Azey watched them for a second; wide eyes tracing their journey from the floor to the ears then the minds of the Doctors. The faces of the Doctors were immediately contorted; some transformed into visages of fear, others into disbelief. One Doctor actually brought her wicked pleasure by immediately clutching at his ears with grimy hands, slowly sinking to his knees in defeat.

She watched him coolly, eyes observing but not betraying any sense of emotion. Seeing him writhe like that, something somewhere deep, deep down, below carefully erected layers that served as Azey’s only walls between her and the world, fluttered. A feeling that caused her to question what she had just done. A feeling that caused her insides to squirm and bile to rise in reaction to the terror she was causing. But the thought was fleeting, flying over her head just as quickly and easily as the clumsy grenades the Doctors tried to throw at her.

Fancy Words. They thought they knew fancy Words.

“Ha.” She’d laughed, not really with humour but more with contempt, when the first doctor had launched his first Word-grenade at her. And again, after he’d missed.

“Ha!” She’d said after she’d shown him what a real Word-grenade was, sending him sprawling in shock against the thin card-board walls of her house. Empty wells stared back at her for a second, then rolled up to rest beneath the safe cover of his eye-lids.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Three more Doctors suffered the same fate as their predecessor, angry faces wiped away by her Words and instead replaced by a blank slate.

That’s when she assumed the Doctors began to lose their cool. That’s when she assumed they were tired of playing her games, by her rules.

That’s when they brought in the real weapons.

Knives, ropes, guns, bullets. Words- tricky, fickle, tiny things- were no match for them. They approached her, surrounded her, trapped her. Like an animal. Like a filthy, disgusting, animal that had to be locked away.

She’d searched the eyes of the doctors for something- anything really- to prove to her that they weren’t the glass-eyed, slack-jawed, empty, empty puppets she knew they were.  

She’d stared, intently, eyes narrowing into ever-tightening slits that barely allowed any white to show. She felt more than imagined her irises turning to ice, likening them to a frozen lake in the winter, and the pupil a yawning maw threatening to swallow anything or any soul into its dark and frozen depths.  No man- or Doctor for that matter- could hope to conceal anything from her in that moment.

Greedily she sucked their memories and thoughts and personalities into her dark pupils, rifling through them with such efficiency and speed that would rival that of the local Record-Keeper.

And within those memories, she found… nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. No thoughts; no emotions; no feelings. No Words. The emptiness threatened to overwhelm her; a cascading force exploding through her pupils and slinking up to her brain, where it dislodged words and ideas and set them adrift within a sea of black.

Immediately, she recoiled. The thought of losing her Words was unquestionably unbearable. Without them, she would lose her humanity, her only companions, herself.

Without them, she would be like the Doctors;

Empty,

Puppet-like,

And Wordless.

And that thought alone was what gave her the fight to continue on. She pushed and kicked and shoved and screamed; long, drawn out, terrible screams that rang on in the Doctor’s ears long after she’d been silenced.

Eventually her kicks turned feeble and punches weak. The Doctors capitalized on her vulnerability and swarmed her; a cloud of greedy ants thronging around a sweet piece of fruit. They’d hooked their arms under her own and lifted her roughly up, up, up above the ground. She’d hated that ground; black and white tiles arranged in haphazard patterns, with bothersome cracks snaking their way around at random.

Of course, aesthetic taste was not why she hated that ground. She was above judging things based solely on their appearance, though the Doctors were beginning to give her a run for her money. In truth, she rather liked it. Black and white; wrong and right; yin and yang.

That, and the fact that those were the same colours as the pages of her beloved books.

She also liked the cracks. In an odd way, they were just like her. Meandering this way and that; with no real direction or idea where to go next. Rebellious too: always turning left when supposed to turn right. Going crooked as opposed to go straight.

No. Instead, she hated the ground for one simple reason:

It was always there.

Most people would call her crazy; insane, even, but Azey had three perfectly good explanations:

1.       It was predictable, just like the Doctors.

2.       Gravity pulled her down to it, keeping her feet firmly rooted on it at all times.

3.       If her feet weren’t firmly rooted on it at all times, Azey was quite convinced she could fly.

In fact, Azey had written her own list very much like this one. Of course, it was slightly more emphatic and detailed, but the point was much the same. She’d written it a few days ago on a scrap piece of paper she’d found fluttering by in the wind. She remembered the scene vividly, recalling how she’d likened it to a lone dancer caught up in a frenzied ballet. She may even have even written a poem about it. But of course, she couldn’t be sure, not without checking, and Azey was certainly in no mood to rifle through dust-ridden mountains of papers to find it.

Back to the list. Azey herself was quite keen on them. If there was one thing she’d learned over the years, it was to never underestimate the calming power of a list. This particular idea for a list came to her one dusty October morning, a few days after she’d found the Lone Dancer Paper. She’d been lying on her back, toes pointed to the ceiling and palms facing up, ready to receive anything this world had to offer. Her breathing was calm and shallow, her eyes mercifully closed, and face a mask of serenity. This was a sort of ritual for her; every day, after long hours of frantic writing, she’d lie down on the cool checkered tile floor and rest. She’d let the Words- things she’d channeled every last bit of her energy for the past few hours towards shaping and forming and arranging into poetry- float free in her head. She liked to imagine them drifting by overhead in her mind’s eye, like those lazy clouds she would stare at for hours on end as a child.

“Look! A frog!” she’d cry out, pointing up at one that to her mother was clearly a cat. They’d have a long and heated discussion over it, but in the end, Azey would win. Azey always won. Physical fights, not so much, but when it came to intellectual battles, Azey reigned supreme. No one, and she meant no one, could triumph over her.

But this time, as she was lying down on the cool checkered tile floor, words and clouds and cats and frogs all gliding by overhead, she felt something. Something weighing down on her. It wasn’t so much physical as it was mental. It was pushing her, pushing her deeper and deeper into the floor, and she could feel her freedom being snuffed out of her along with the air out of her lungs. She’d sprung up without delay, as if the cold tile floor had suddenly turned into a searing hot surface that burned her back and set her clothes ablaze. Cautiously she strode to her desk, each step harder to make than the last. She eyes the floor warily, with hatred, realizing for the first time how much of a prison it had been to her. Upon reaching her desk- a crooked wooden thing barely standing- she snatched the Lone Dancer Paper up and a black pen. Leaning against the wall, she attacked the paper fiercely, scrawling out a long and emphatic list with jagged hand movements and jerky letters. The whole thing took her no more than five minutes, and when she was done, she held it to the dim light and inspected her handiwork. It written with passion- Azey never gave anything less- and gave a lengthy and detailed explanation as to why the landlord should remove the floor from Azey’s room. Content, she folded it up neatly into three equal rectangles, pocketed it, and opened her door with grim determination.

***

Ms. Shemer’s eyes flicked nervously, looking from Azey’s enthusiastic face to the sheet of paper she had unceremoniously shoved into her hand, then back again. Her face was taut; neck muscles tense and eyes bulging, and every so often she would uneasily bite her lip before checking the time on her watch. The movement bothered Azey. In fact, it bothered her a great deal. Azey was a girl to be admired and taken seriously, and right now Ms. Shemer was doing neither.   

“I’m, sorry, Ms. Shemer,” Azey took a small pause in her speech. “Am I keeping you from something?” The words were sweet and innocent, but infused with contempt and anger.

Flustered, Ms. Shemer hastily pulled the sleeve of her nightgown over her watch, stealing an apprehensive glance at Azey’s impassive face. “No, no, no. Nothing at all. Continue.”

Azey let a hint of a smile seize her lips. Good. Ms. Shemer was afraid. Obviously the rumour bug had reached its way to her ears too. Azey could deal with not being admired or taken seriously, but being feared was a must.

So Azey continued. She read her list clearly and emphatically, taking short pauses after major points to let the Words slowly settle in Ms. Shemer’s brain. She took the Words and shaped them, making the rotund and fat. Using her tongue she would stretch them, pulling and pulling just like the bakers out in their small shops. She’d let them sit for a while- a few milliseconds, no more- then slowly, carefully, she would deliver them, opening her mouth ever so thinly and marvelling at their finesse and the way they would slowly slide out. It was an art, speaking was, and Azey was by far the best.

As she spoke, her eyes slowly drifted over Ms. Shemer’s figure. At forty-five, Ms. Joanna Shemer wasn’t much to look at. Tall, thin, tired-looking, and always twisting her colourless lips in a way that made Azey wonder as if she’d just eaten a bad clam. She hadn’t known Ms. Shemer well, but well enough to now that the heavy coat of loneliness sprawled on her shoulders was relatively recent. Her face was haggard and empty, a pasty white colour that made her look more ghost than woman.  To Azey, Ms. Shemer seemed insubstantial. A shadow, one might say. Not empty like the Doctors- mindless hooligans acting out of instinct rather than thought. Just… a shadow of what she had once been. As if her husband’s death and immediate departure of her son had greedily sucked the life out of her, leaving her only a tattered heavy coat under which she secreted herself away.

Azey thought of a Word to describe her with. The possibilities ran quickly through her head, the small Word-Clouds caught up in a frenzied breeze. Unnatural; vacant; consumed- all viable candidates, but none truly encompassing Ms. Shemer’s character. In essence, Azey decided, Ms. Shemer was sad. A simple word; composed of three tiny scraggly letters, but large and powerful enough to overwhelm entire cities, bring lives to a close, and herald in despair and despondency.

The last Word rolled of Azey’s tongue, and with a sense of finality, she firmly closed her lips, drawing them into a tight line. Her eyes were cold- when, indeed, where they not- and she used them to regard Ms. Shemer with hope and persuasion. Her face, Azey saw, was coated in a thin film of sweat, and her hands where clasped together so tightly the knuckles showed through her ghost-white skin. The frail pasty red streaks that were her lips were forcibly drawn into an uneasy smile, the skin around them pulled taut by invisible hands. But her grey eyes were the most telling of all; shifty, unfocused, and constantly searching the walls for… something.

In Azey’s mind, there was absolutely no doubt. None at all. The truth was irrevocable and intangible, thicker than blood and as substantial as concrete.

The fact was this:

Ms. Shemer thought Azey crazy.

Azey is crazy, Azey is crazy. Azey could just imagine the Words bouncing through Ms. Shemer’s head at the very moment, underpinned by a growing terror and slowly-shrinking sympathy. For a moment, a dark flash of humour roiled by in Azey’s mind. The fact that her name and crazy rhymed was ironic in a dark and twisted way, and the very thought caused a tiny giggle to surface and crack the strictly composed shell that was Azey’s face, further driving the point home.

At the motion, a wave of fear rolled over Ms. Shemer’s face. Her eyes widened and she stumbled back through the threshold, moving to close the door. Thinking better of it, however, she left it open, but Azey saw her hand slyly wrap around the glass doorknob. Azey waited patiently, casually tapping her foot in an ever-quickening pattern, like a predator closing in on her prey.

“So?” Azey left the question hanging limply in the air.

Ms. Shemer gave a nervous laugh and tightened her grip on the doorknob.

Azey raised her chin and gave Ms. Shemer a pointed look. “I’m waiting.” She stretched the words out, letting her pitch rise and fall as her tongue rolled over the syllables.

“I’ll, I’ll,” tiny beads of sweat started forming on her brow. ‘I’ll see what I can do,” she said with finality, firmly shutting the door in Azey’s face.

In retrospect, Ms. Shemer had done something. Something Azey in truth had been anticipating for a long while now.

The next day, the fake blood-red sun rose above the horizon, dragging along behind it a sense of gloom and despair that settled into Azey’s heart.

The next day, the Hat-Stand Men Came.

Author's Note

For all of you who reviewed- thank you so so so very much! A review- any review- would be so greatly appreciated:)

Reviews

[Schyala]

Really really good job! You're syntax and diction is perfect!
A few fixes:
Ms. Shemer thought Azey crazy.- Ms. Shemer thought Azey was crazy.
None at all.- Fragment, uoi can hook it on the last sentance by a comma.

Otherwise I really like it, good job :)