Horror Vacui
The moonlight descended on the east side of the Wagner Tower like an ancestral bone dust. The ectoplasm of a vague awareness crossed a tenant’s mind seeking for oblivion: finally, the dull blows coming from God knows what remote corner of the old building had decided to quit and he would have slept. However, between the seventy-fifth and seventy-fourth floor, a particularly fine ear could have still seized an intermittent, stifled counterpoint of voices.
"I feel that this unusual condition is helping us bring out some interesting perspectives, Mendo." In breaking the silence, the psychotherapist's voice had soon lost its initial momentum.
"..."
"I want you to know that this time won’t be billed, go ahead if you feel like it." She tried to assume a playful expression. Hidden underneath her short suit jacket, Dr. Wallace's fingers were nervously playing with a fluorescent orange rubber bracelet.
"No-one is ever suspended, not even now with seventy-four floors of nothing underfoot..."
"Well, this is certainly a positive observation..."
"Shut up, you don’t know a shit." An almost calm remark, pronounced with a firmness that hit Dr. Wallace like a bucket of frozen water.
"Have you ever thought, doctor," Mendo continued, sharply spelling out his last word, "that the fear of emptiness, the horror vacui as they defined it in the Middle Ages, is nothing but the unconscious and desperate attempt to look away from the ultimate truth?"
Since the elevator had blocked its descent, the patient had confined himself to a corner on the opposite side of the entrance. His left leg was now dancing grotesquely, animated like it had a life of its own and in contrast with the cadaveric stiffness of his other body parts.
"I never thought of that." Dr. Wallace wisely responded in brief, observing for the umpteenth time the assistance number carved on the elevator control panel.
"Mmmm...” A growing moan on the other side of the narrow cabin.
The doctor instinctively thought of her daughter that night, when the wind had hit the fixtures of the old house in the mountains so intensely that it produced an endless banshee howl. The little girl had made a sound of compressed horror, just like that.
If only she had known, she would have never asked Mr. Anatoliy “Mendoza” Volkov, an extraordinarily subtle personality, to follow her downstairs after that emergency therapy session in her office. On the other hand, he was one of her first and most challenging patients. Furthermore, he used to pay awesomely.
"Because the void swarms." Now his eyes were on the doctor, sunken out and bugging out at the same time.
"Soon they'll free us, do you think you'll keep writing that song you were talking about?" Dr. Wallace ventured. She realized that the silk shirt was soaking with her acrid sweat.
"It's the Yellow King's dominion, he comes from the void, it's him who made me do those things. I did not want to." His whine ripped open in a sinister vocal of terror.
"Mendo .." She did not know what to add. Now the doctor's hand, behind her sweating back, was pressing the assistance button convulsively.
His wide open eyes. They had stopped staring at her and now they were pointing up, right behind her shoulders.
"Mendo, what's up?"
"The Yellow King. He's here."
Dr. Wallace was close to losing control.
But then she looked down on Mendoza. Compelled to really look. What she saw and felt reminded her of a sick dog she had once seen on the side of the road in Mumbai.
Everything she had said at the meeting and just now ... who was she? Herself?
She took a deep breath once.
And then again.
Her arm, which had already hurt, relaxed. Instead of letting Mendoza fall further into the realm of madness and endangering everything, Dr. Wallace now made the first honest eye contact this evening.
At first his gaze wandered past her, but then her inner authority spoke: "Mendo, the yellow king, I think I know him." She met him. For a short moment there was recognition. "You are right, it is the desperate attempt to deny the ultimate truth that makes him so powerful. I'd be angry, too."
"He's here! He wants me. Oh, I can't escape him anymore," Mendoza shouted, immediately drifting off again and forming his hands into a stranglehold, still dancing his leg. Dr. Wallace took another breath and now sat down next to the suffering one. She took his restless hand. First he made preparations to forcibly shake her off, but then - after she let mental calmness win - he let her stay.
"Tell me, Mendo, what does the yellow king do when he has to pee?"
"What?" Using Mendozas irritation, Doctor Wallace repeated: "You understood me. Where's he going to take a leak?"
Mendoza stagnated for a short moment: "The king must not... pee! What... what kind of silly question is that!" Wallace laughed, finding the situation seriously funny. Which renewed her intention to stop fearing and, if need be, to welcome the King. Wasn't therapy a test not also for the well off?
"Let us assume that now would be such a moment when even a king urgently needs to go. Just hypothetically speaking. Where would we have to go from here? The King will get what he wants. He always does, doesn't he?" Wallace squeezed Mendoza's hand very gently.
"Indeed, indeed. There is no escape," Mendoza agreed. He now breathed visibly calmer and the hand holding Wallace's no longer hurt her.
"Up," Mendoza said. "Up where the seats are comfortable." Which was her practice. When the elevator door finally opened and a stranger entered the scene, irritated as they were still sitting on the floor, Wallace pressed the button 82. Mendoza ignored the man. After he got out and they had reached the right storey, they entered Wallace's premises. It remained a stormy night. Mendoza tried twice more to kill her in those hours. He almost whacked her with Adlers hardcover Menschenkenntnis, but each time Wallace could surprise him. As the morning dawned, Mendoza fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. Wallace did the same.
Who knows when her end would come? The yellow king was real in any case.
end
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I am late again. But hey, time is not always on my side. :)
picture source: https://giphy.com/gifs/art-falling-down-xUn3C73gqd7Ak4GNu8/links