The Man and the Boy

I had a very creepy dream last night that seemed such a metaphor to my life that I decided to include it here. The dream was very surreal, with lots of dark, haunting imagery and ominous symbols. It begins:

---/---

A man walks down the street. Taped to a light pole is a rectangle of paper covered with the drawings and handwriting of a small child. The drawings are in various colors of crayon, but they seem to be dark and hopeless, almost as if the color had been sucked out of them by the bleaching of some hateful sun.

As he goes about his day, he comes across more crayon images drawn by the same hand. These are posted on a bulletin board at the market, on the side of someone's fridge. Sometimes, they come delivered in the post to the man.

Each was drawn by the same lost child. A little boy. A missing little boy.

The man was an innocent to the events, but once long ago, one of his actions led to the boy being abducted. Now, the boy's captor would send the man these drawings as a way to further torment the man and highlight his assumed guilt in the child's abduction. These efforts succeeded and the man was tormented, regardless of however innocent his actions initially were.

And so this poor man goes through his life, forever coming across these pictures drawn by the hand of the lost boy.

---/---

A child stands at the broken window of a small, dark, room of a broken down house standing desolate and alone on the edge of a broken and abandoned ghost town.

The boy can't leave the room. He can only stand at the window.

His only visitor is his captor, who appears at the window to torment and frighten the boy. The captor forces the boy to draw images for him, using crayons and the large lined paper used in kindergarten to teach children the alphabet. When the captor leaves, he takes the crayons and paper with him so the boy doesn't even have these in his long hours of loneliness.

The boy stands at the window of the broken house. The days turn to years. The vines and foliage grow dark and sinister up the side of the house, framing the broken window.

And the boy grows…

The boy grows to an age somewhere between that of a child and an adult, but he grows no further. And then one day the boy takes hold of the broken window frame and he starts to test it.

At first his attempts are tentative. But as he feels the old and rotted wood slightly yield, he grows more confident. Soon, the boy has torn apart the window frame and stands free beside his old prison. His hands are hurt and he is bleeding, but there is a small smile on his face.

The boy looks around and finds a long metal rod laying in the trash beside the house. He picks up this rod, turns, and re-enters the house through the front door. He has never seen this part of the house. He has only seen the small locked room that he has occupied for so many years. But he walks in through the door with confidence. And still, that small smile remains.

The boy finds himself in a small, broken down entryway. To his right is the locked door leading to the room. Not his room. It was never his room. It was always only just the room.

He has no interest in going back there.

Ahead is a damaged door, hanging open on one hinge, the other long rusted and cracked apart. The boy walks to this room, expectantly looking for something, for someone.

He steps down into the fallen wreckage of this second room. At first he sees nothing. Then, looking on the wall beside him, he sees the scorpion.

In all his years, the boy never interacted with any other living thing beside his malevolent captor and the scorpion. And these could barely be described as living. Instead, these two dark beings were better described as animated by some hidden evil that occupied the space where a soul lives in the rest of us.

The giant scorpion, huge by any rational measure, would sometimes skitter by the boy's window as it chased and captured small helpless prey. The scorpion would slowly kill its catch, but it would never devour it. Instead, it would leave it laying on the dirt outside the boy's window, to rot under the dingy, lonesome sky.

Now, the scorpion was waiting for the boy.

It lunged at him. The boy was ready for this. As he side stepped the attack, the boy silently drove his rod into the thing's shelled back. The scorpion was pinned to the floor by the rod, but it did not die. Instead, it took its long segmented tail and tried to stab the boy with its poisoned tip.

Once again, the boy stepped aside. As the tail flashed by, the boy grabbed it. He held on with all of his strength. And then, slowly, the boy pushed the stinger down. Down and then into the back of the beast pinned there on the floor.

Pierced with it's own poison, the creature finally died.

The boy stood up and surveyed the room. There was only one other door in the room. This one stood slightly open, and a dark red glow shown from behind. The boy could tell that the passage behind the door lead down toward his destination. The boy knew that the only way that he could ever be free was to confront the evil that lurked behind that door. Confront it, and destroy it.

The small smile still on his face, the boy retrieved his metal rod and headed for the door…


-Jessica