Bloodeye by Craig Saunders Read Free Book Online

side, unsure for a moment why he hurt so much, or why he could not move his arms or legs. In rolling, he put his face into something wet. Slightly tacky.
    What?
    Had he puked? Drank too much? Passed out somewhere?
    So dark. So fucking dark.
    His neck burned and his throat was raw. Felt like he’d been gargling glass. A strep infection, maybe. His head pounded.
    Why can’t I move, and why is it so dark?
    Blind?
    No.
    He tried to shake his head a little, tried to clear his thinking, but it hurt so much he rested his head right there in whatever that tacky substance was.
    Slowly, thought began to return. First, he remembered the photograph.
    Click.
    Toes.
    Three and two.
    Some small part of Keane broke, then, and he tried to close his eyes, but he was in absolute darkness and the things he saw, the things he remembered, lived in him, in his mind and his memory. They did not need the light for him to see them.
    Going to cut…
    Won’t feel a thing…
    You can’t move because you tied yourself up.
    How did you tie yourself up?
    You didn’t. Teresa helped.
    Teresa’s here?
    And, another part snapped.
    Shades and shadows, he thought. The shadow came to life. Came to fucking life.
    Won’t feel a thing.
    Click.
    What are you lying in, Keane? What’s that smell you’re breathing in? What is that clotting on your cheek?
    Click.
    Keane screamed. His throat burned but he did not notice. He screamed and imagined what he was laying in. Who was next to him, here, in the dark.
    Bound next to her.
    Did she know? Had she known? Had she suffered?
    And, like that, Keane broke. Simple as a man taking photographs.
    Clickclickclick …images flashed in his mind, thought slowed until it finally switched off, ran down.
    There in the darkness, the small light on his watch utterly forgotten, Keane gnawed at his ropes. He had no idea how long it took because Keane wasn’t strictly sane while he chewed through his bonds. Not entirely insane, either, because if he’d been cold, uncaring…that would have been insane.
    Shutting down in the face of your dead wife, bound in the blackness of a cold, hard cave…that’s the utmost sanity.
    But maybe Keane was somewhere in between. Not in the abyss, not in the void. Just in the dark, with his memories and his fear and the knowledge that somehow his shadow, something he should own, something that belonged to him surely as his receding hair or his weak ankles, that something from inside him was out and free.

 
     
     
    V. Click; ’07
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Cognition.
    Simplicity, for the sane. For the insane, a winding road. For you, a path with endless forks and no sign as to which way you should travel. An endless road you run and run hurried, but with no idea where you hope to get. A dirt track in places, in others, overgrown with hawthorn and brambles, or strewn with sharp flint and shingles under bare feet, or fluid and cold, like glacial shifts, fluid and hot like lava flowing and splitting around a boulder. To the left, a road, as to the right. Take the left, take the right, moderate interest in the outcome but ultimately, time after time, you go nowhere but to the next road.
    Eventually, faced by the endless chase for answers and solid ground, you grow tired and lose interest. Yet still you run, awake and asleep.
    Hounded.
    While you sleep alone in your bed (because she’s dead dead dead) your feet peddle under the covers, scrunching up between your legs so you feel that you’re bound (in rope) and you bite down on your tongue, trying to break free or keep the screams inside.
    You’re not sure which it is—freedom or screams. Not sure which is the more frightening. Not sure it matters, or if you even care.
    Insanity is tortuous, cyclic, endless. A mandala drawn in blood with a brush of bone.
    You are broken.
    Can a broken thing ever be mended?
    Can a man mend himself, without a crutch of love or medication? Can you?
    Can you?
    You ask yourself again, until, maybe, you are