The Mask of Avalor

The night is still, no sounds to be heard; no animal, no insects. A storm is on the horizon; lightning flashes and thunder suddenly roars in the distance. A body lays on the ground. Completely torn to shreds, it is unrecognizable. A hole is beside the body which is soon filled with the unknown corpse.

I see everything from my point of view. The kill. Dragging him to the woods. Burying him. Sending his car into the river with the machete used to remove his organs. Anything that could link me to the kill.

His girlfriend, Rebecca, will have no idea what happened to him. I’ll tell her that he must have just picked up and left. Maybe the pressure here was too much for him. I’ll console her. His best friend, Stanley, will be the toughest to convince. He won’t believe that Jeremy just ran out on everyone here, not without telling him. Not without telling Rebecca.

Jeremy loves Rebecca. He wanted to marry her. They were going to have a family. Everything was going great for them. He had just landed a new job as a commercial actor. He was going to be in a line of commercials for some new cologne. A three-year contract to do their commercials. He was excited…

Now he is in the ground in the woods behind the local saw mill. Everything he had… gone in an instant. He didn’t see it coming. His new car is in the river. Most of his blood is on the ground in the woods. I need to clean that up. No links to me. This can’t come back to me.

Do you have any idea what I just did? It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. We weren’t supposed to end like that. We were supposed to do great things. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the great thing were supposed to do. I was supposed to kill him. Maybe it was destiny. I can’t help but feel that this was going to happen. This is only the beginning of something greater.

It was all for the greater good. My brother is in the ground and I feel a sense of relief... a sense of pride. I was supposed to do this. This was for the future. Something else is happening. What is that? What is that light in the distance…? Is that lightning? No, someone else is here with me. I hear something. It sounds like a name but I can’t make it out. Like… someone is calling to me. It doesn’t matter. This part is over. Time to move on.

My name is Ryan and I just murdered my brother, Jeremy, because my dreams told me to. What is that sound? It’s a song... a song I recognize. It’s the opening of Tom Sawyer… Wait… Am I dreaming again?

A cell phone is ringing the opening strums of Tom Sawyer. Ryan jerks awake and looks around. He sees his phone on the night stand. It's vibrating and ringing away. He is still stuck in the woods at night. He can’t tell if it was real and this is the next morning. Still trying to wake up, he picks up the cell phone on the night stand and looks at it. “Jeremy” is what it reads on the phone. For a brief moment, Ryan thinks he is calling from beyond the grave. Then he realizes it was another dream. He has these too often.

The phone stops ringing; then a few seconds later it rings again. Jeremy is calling back. What do I do? He ignores the phone and goes into the bathroom. He feels dirty. Even though it wasn’t real… it felt real. He can feel the blood and the dirt on him. He has to take a shower.

He looks at himself in the mirror. His eyes are black. Have they always been black? Ryan can’t remember anymore. He has been so alone the last few months. It wasn’t always this way. He used to do everything with Jeremy and Stanley. Jeremy was sometimes with Rebecca, though. The love of his life.

Since these dreams started, it has pulled Ryan away from reality. He sometimes doesn’t know what is real. Sometimes he loses entire days. Jeremy calls and Ryan can’t bring himself to answer the phone. He kills Jeremy every night in his dreams.

Surprising that his phone still rings. When is the last time he paid for his phone? When is the last time he paid for anything? He has barely been out of his house. He doesn’t even pay for that. Does anyone? Why hasn’t his asshole landlord, Joe, been over to yell at him? He hasn’t seen him in at least two months. Not that he is missing anything. Joe’s stained white shirts and ripped jeans. How does a man like that even get a house to rent? Probably left to him by his mother and he uses the rent money to buy beer and drugs.

Yes, a shower. He is about to get in the shower when actually notices something red on his hand. “Is that blood?” he says to himself. He rubs his fingers on it and it is still slightly wet. He quickly jumps in the shower and as he is showering, he feels a pain on his back. Something red, blood most likely, streams down his legs and on to the tub floor. He is now curious about the pain on his back, a stinging pain when the water hits it.

He finishes washing and gets out. He turns and he can see what looks to be small cut on his back. About an inch long, not too deep. Deep enough to probably need stiches. He won’t go to the hospital because this isn’t the first time. He has woken up from these dreams before with cuts, scrapes, bruises. You name it, Ryan has had it.

What do you do when you feel like God himself is telling you to kill your little brother? God, no that can’t be right. It’s something more intimate, more personal. God wouldn’t tell you to kill your little brother, or would he? He sent his only begotten son to die for all the sinners of Earth. No, it’s not God. Not Jesus. Not Zeus. It is someone, or something else. Who is it? I can almost make out the name. The name… Aval… something.