The Depraved Undoing of Donald McDentan

The Depraved Undoing of Donald McDentan

1. The Door

I was standing by an open door one bitterly cold, winter day.
I had wandered from my comfort zone.
My bored thoughts limping as far from home,
As they could possibly roam,
With the god-forsaken domestic drone,
That drove its bitter claws into my skull, at every opportunity.
It injected my soul with a solution of dry routine; ritual dullness.
The sales pitched by parasites,
The relentless nagging of my loathsome wife,
Of bedroom flies and babies cries,
Sanctimonious lullabies.
It was that very drone, those disparaging moans,
That drove me so far, that day, from home.

It was the open door that captured my eager attention.
And ultimately led to my undoing.
But we will delve into that pit, at a later stage.
When you hear the wood split, turn the page.

It was immediately apparent to me.
My every sense seized with a crippling apprehension.
Those nagging repercussions began to leak into my mind,
Like the faint smell of formaldehyde.
I arched my neck and tried to find,
A reason for my insatiable desire,
To wander through that door that day, so blatantly left ajar.
In a city plagued with violence and robbery.
Wealthy sycophants and elitist snobbery.
I watched a roaring car pass with a deadline fueled ferocity,
That was the last atrocity, that stoked my animosity.
It broke down my capacity to distract my curiosity...

It took just a singular step into the hauntingly empty room,
That lost for me my very connection to humanity.
I lost the part of the soul that remonstrates with us about life and death.
And I will never again wander, the sullen grains of this wilted earth,
Unencumbered by the consequences of my voyeuristic purge.

When the door slammed behind me,
My skin began to burn.
I felt it blister, crack and bleed.
In a spasm of pain, I turned.
I blindly grabbed for the doorknob,
As I staggered to the floor.
My eyes were drenched in blood red tears,
I could not see the door.
The bones in my fingers shattered.
My muscles seized and tore.
I coughed and wept and screamed in vein.
My senses were at war.


I dragged my helpless body,
Into the middle of the room.
My fingers brushed past stone and wood,
I pissed, I bled, I shit, I spewed.
My mind retracted, as the agony took hold.
I yearned to be back in my mother’s womb.
I begged for death, with pure absolution.
I projected myself, wilfully, into my darkened tomb.

But the lights went out,
And I found that my broken body had been spared.
For a purpose we may come to know at a later stage.
When you hear the wood split, turn the page.

When the lights were restored,
My facilities were suddenly in tact once more.
The stone and wood that had brushed against my hand,
Was a sparkling new axe next to a muddy, old tomb stone.
I turned in the direction where there had previously been the door.
That door had disappeared, though a different door,
Was now on the opposite wall.
A gothic, metal frame surrounded by an evil, fiery glow.
I found my feet and began to wait,
I was absolutely assured,
That what would, next, confront me,
Would be profoundly perverse, sadistically debauched.
I reached for the axe, and focused on the door.

First foots steps, creaking. Ominous moans.
Eerily reverberated xylophones,
Played a morbid melody that strangled my thoughts and drove needles into my consciousness.
I twitched and itched.
My feet were fixed,
To the cold, white floor beneath me.
I heard the rustic doorknob creak.
And a rapidly intensifying, domineering screech.
I trembled as the door slowly opened and my fate stepped into the room....

A ragged, pale witch stood before me.
Her gaze drove itself into the pit of my stomach.
Her eyes a maze,
A blinding haze.
She completely drained,
My fickle brain.
Of every ambition, every dream and every hope.
I fell to the floor and begged her to let my distant life source take its leave.
But it would seem that her very worst fury was, in fact, yet to have been received.

She lifted her arms slowly and her lips began to curl.
Her grey skin pulsated and her vile tongue swirled.
She dribbled a greenish, thickened fluid, that trickled down her chin.
My eyes could not begin,
To thin,
The sickening anguish that froze my limbs.

I could make out none but a hum, like an unexpected tear.
A slowly building static spreading its wings inside my ears.
It spread like a virus,
Enveloping its surroundings.
My stomach churned.
My head, pounding,
I took my temples in my hand.
In agony, I screamed, I gagged.
I drew blood with my fingernails.
The static grew and so too, did my rage.
My rage, swelling, like a broken finger.

As the static grew to an intensity, that I could bare no longer,
I heard these words from a distance, over the xylophone; most sombre.

"You're not my wife!
You're not my bloody wife!"

As I heard the words, my arms were driven by a bitter rage within,
And I brought the axe down; split her skull from her forehead to her chin.

My ears were suddenly filled with an unnerving silence.
Something made me turn to the tombstone.
I wiped away the mud.
In the distance, I heard the thud,
Of the witches life, that I had taken.
It was the sound of morals, that I'd forsaken.
And the tombstones inscription locked my cage.
When you hear the wood split, turn the page.

Here lies the body Gina Sally-Anne McDentan.
Beloved wife of Donald McDentan.

For a moment I stood, drenched, in disgust.
But then an odd sense of weightlessness came over me.
An unexpected sense of calmness, flowed gently though my veins.
Then the room was cloaked in darkness...
And so too was cloaked, my consciousness.


2. The Vulgar Stench of Reality

When I awoke I found myself in the company of pumping cylinders and ever repeating, jagged, green lines.
Threadbare sheets, starched, white.
The faint smell of formaldehyde.
A man in a white coat took my eye.
He leaned over me, inquisitively, as though he'd discovered the empty shell of a previously unidentified sea-creature.
"Can you hear me, Mr McDentan?"
He reeked of disinfectant.

My mouth could hardly function, though I had not a comment to offer him.
I may have asked him of my wife but my muddled phrases were lost on him.
I expected him to spit on me,
Convinced of myself, a murderous fiend.
Then he touched my arm with a gentle sympathy,
Like a quiet dance to a warm, melodic symphony.
He spoke slowly, though his words were lost to me.
My mind a haze.
A pharmaceutical daze.
His lips moved like a butterfly,
Floating above me in a clear blue sky.
I began to cry...
I began to imagine that my grave affair,
Had been nothing more than a vivid nightmare.

The doctor left my bedside for a time and I reflected on my pittance.
I watched, beneath the blanket of diazepam,
A baby giggling; a carefully guarded pram.
And for the first that I could remember,
From what seemed a lifetime of discontent,
I yearned to feel my wife's warm breath,
Upon the back of my neck.
I begged forgiveness for the thoughts that had infected,
My mind, during that time,
When the bells of murder chimed.
And I cherished that moment when I imagined,
That my poor wife had survived.

As I drifted into slumber again, my dreams were quiet once more.
But when I woke, I found that my relief had been a short phase.
When you hear the wood split, turn the page.

Once awake, a man in a blue uniform,
Awaited my awakening, by the side of my bed.
He reacted almost immediately, called in the doctor,
Who shuffled my bed notes and felt my forehead.
My mind was still empty but the haze had somewhat lifted.
We were joined by another in blue,
Who’s jagged gaze, I drew,
Into the pit of my stomach,
Where it twisted and turned.
My relief had been returned,
To me, in a wooden box overshadowed by guilt.
I knew, then, that my wife had truly been killed.

The doctor asked me a range of trivial questions,
Presumably to prove my state of awareness.
My shocked awareness; it ate away at my soul.
It gripped my feet, with fingers, so cold,
That I shivered quite madly for a moment and then I knew.
I turned to the police, two,
Consumed by what I had to do.
And from my mouth this flock, of blackened crows flew.

“I’ve killed my wife. Oh God, I split her head in two!”

Then a look of perplexity met the brows of the police beside the bed.
They turned to the doctor and exchanged concurrences.
Their words private.
My mind bore a riot.
After a moment, a policeman return to my bed.
He leaned over gently and so this was said.

“Mr McDentan, I regret to inform you that your wife has been murdered.
You’re knowledge of this may be due to many factors.
The unconscious mind is capable of many things that we cannot explain.
But the fact is, that your wife passed, three weeks from today.
And you’ve been in coma these last four weeks and two days.
So, you see, your guilt can be not possibly held in our regard.
We should tell you, Mr McDentan, that the killer is still at large.

The doctor pounced upon me as my arms began to react.
I dragged the policeman toward me. “Did he do it with an axe?”
Two nurses approached to restrain me and the policemen backed away.
“Did he do it with an axe?” I yelled. “I did it! Take me away.”
And then I felt a needle prick,
And a buckle against my wrist.
My mind began to fade and all that I heard was this.

“You’re knowledge of this crime, I cannot explain,
But this much, we know to be true.
You’re wife was murdered while you lay in this bed,
So it could not have been you.
She was buried soon afterwards.
It was dignified farewell.
The service, I’m told, was one of great cost.
Our sincere condolences for you’re loss,
Mr McDentan.”

Then I heard their footsteps shuffle out the door,
The turn of a key,
And then silence....

That night I drifted in and out of consciousness.
I wandered from reality to the surreal.
It was an unnerving, ominous place.
A vast unchartered space,
Filled with unfamiliar faces.
And yet unspoken social disgraces.
I was left then with a question that I knew would decay my mind,
If I couldn’t find, the line.
The line, between myself and my wife,
Who now lay, deep beneath the soil.
Buried with a secret that would forever in my mind toil.
I could feel my feeble mind state slowly rotting away.
I knew exactly where the answer lay.
I forbid myself to pray.
For the door that guarded the hospital room, I knew I required a key.
But between reality and unreality, the door was open.
I was free.

So once again I walked through a door and found myself at the entrance of the graveyard, where my murdered, wife’s body lay.


3. The Voyeur that Killed the Cat

As I wandered through the graveyard, a craven shadow sprawled across my path.
I breathed the rancid stench of the dead.
My haggard soul was filled with dread.
The trees were cloaked in stillness as though silenced by a powerful beast.
The fog was thick upon the ground. The birds were mute.
The only sound;
The cold, cold air that passed my lips,
The jagged crack of brittle sticks,
That found themselves beneath my feet.
I hurried to make my task complete.
Armed only with a shovel and cryptic question,
That may be answered at a later stage.
When you hear the wood split, turn the page.

There was something deranged, in my attempts, that night, at restoring my willingness to walk into the gauntlet.
What could I hope to find below the stagnant soil?
Could I ever know?
Alone I wandered past a thousand holes,
That housed a thousand battered souls.
A thousand tombstones, chipped, decaying,
That had long since forgotten their heart felt messages.
The tombstones had lost their direction.
The bygone reflections, the comforting affections,
Were hidden beneath a blanket of moss.
All that was left was the sign of the cross.
They'd become stagnant reminders of appointments that were never met.
Tables that were never set.
Twisted corpses in a bent car wreck.

That night I noticed the soil shift in a most unnatural way.
The tombstones shifted from left to right.
Their warning filtered through the night.
My mind was violated by an unholy exhibition;
Of severed lips and fingertips,
Of leering eyes and brutal smiles,
Of rusted, twisted wire mesh,
Of festering, putrid rotting flesh.
All at once I was filled with a horror that I had never known before.
But I was compelled to appease,
That snarling, voyeuristic beast,
That dragged me, lifelessly, through the graveyard that cold, cold night.

When, finally I found myself before the plot that held my answer,
I saw a desperate, urgency in the soil.
It pulsated,
It gyrated with a sickening perversity.
It defiled my senses and tortured my soul.
It swallowed my capacity for happiness whole.

Then, my dementia opened a different door.
This door, I boldly stepped through and spat upon the floor.
The floor was covered almost completely by a scavenging hoard of rats.
Their filthy, sharp, teeth clambered,
They argumentatively stammered.
And in a perfectly co-ordinated strike, they unleashed their murderous fury.
A savage surge, they purged their violent urge.
All at once the riot was over and the bloodied corpses lay,
In scattered heaps across the floor.
Horrified, I shut the door,
And I was once again standing by the tombstone the erked me to the core.

A warm trickle touched my skin.
It dribbled down my trembling chin.
The bitter taste of my very own blood.
I'd gnawed away my wretched tongue!
I gurgled, wretched and gagged in vein.
My body twisted, writhed in pain.
The door flew open and the rats called me in.
I took up my shovel and I began to dig....

The soil groaned as I pierced its grainy flesh.
It gravely moaned, as I shifted its muddy entrails.
It bombarded me with its perverse secrets.
My ears rang and my eyeballs bled.
Gasping for air.
Cloaked in despair.
The earth filled my soul with its putrid gore.
The famine, the plague, the violence, the war.
A small child, attempting to feed an old grey corpse.
A spiky demon on a beaten, broken horse.
A bloodied spear,
The rage filled cheers,
Of the mob of hate filled murderous beasts.
That would soon devour their human feast.
I covered my face and begged for relief.
I screamed and tore the hair from my scalp.
My shovel struck again and again,
It gouged away the earthy skin.
Until finally from beneath me there came a crack!
The sound of the wood splitting....

An eerie calm fell across the graveyard at that time;
And for a moment I was able to reflect on what I was trying to find.
Just how much of my mind had resigned itself to pursuing the question;
The question that I'd read over and over and over again.
I'd refined the words and analysed the metaphors.
I'd folded the pages. Studied it in stages.
And I wondered in that short moment of reflection,
If the path I'd pursued had simply been set,
To fill my soul with dark regret.

I broke away the ragged shell.
The rotting wood,
That housed the answer to the question that I had never understood.
The coffin was empty.....