WafflesMgee - The Handyman
Shock.WAV - Penny Dreadful
Spoiler (Click to Show)
ingle chair, the single table, the single bed, the single set of drawers and wardrobe. It even had a single window, giving a view of blackened buildings with cloudy night skies above.
One of the few guards of the block made his last round, peeking in through each window to check up on the inmates. When he came upon Penny’s room, he merely glanced at the lump scrunched up under the bed’s sheet, a mess of light brown hair stuck out the top, barely on the single pillow. He aimed his torch at the window and scanned the room a bit, but after a few seconds he decided it was enough. He was tired and just wanted to go home.
By the time the hallway lights had went out, Penelope was already out there. In a grimey and seldom-travelled alleyway, her machete lodged neatly between the fifth and sixth vertebrae of some poor man’s spine. It was really stuck in there. She had to firmly grab the handle and shove the man’s body away with her foot, the blade breaking free with a gristle-filled squelch.
This moment was peace for her, it was pleasure. Eventually, like she knew it would, rain started to spittle down in miniscule drops. It wouldn’t get any harder than that, it was just enough to chill her heated skin down, flushed with adrenaline-fuelled blood that pumped through her veins. At this time of night it was all but silent, save for the white noise of the rain, the peeling of rubber car tyres on tarmac, the clicking of insects and bugs and last, but not least, the distant sounds of sirens.
Penny looked down at the fear-stricken corpse with disgust. How dare he call for the bobbies and cut her joy short? He knew he wasn’t going to live, so what was the point? He could have let her have her fun.
A sigh left her lips and hit the white porcelain mask obscuring her face. She adjusted it a bit, letting some cool air breeze in before she made her way back.
-----
The base of the HQ building was lined with bushes and the occasional flower bed. It gave some life to the boring brick walls and constantly shuttered windows. One of the bushes down the left side was unique, though. If you managed to sneak in behind it you’d notice that a good portion of it was gone, revealing a grate in the wall.
Of course, the grate was too small for anyone to fit through, so guards didn’t care for it, but it held a secret. If you pressed against it, it would open up like a cat flap, and you could reach for a lever. The secret was that this patch of wall acted like a secret door.You pushed in, and section big enough to fit through hinged open, like a jigsaw piece sliding free, revealing secret tunnels inside.
Penny adored these tunnels, they let her sneak in and out without detection. There was a similar door mechanism in her room too. It seemed like whoever lived in the room before her made these tunnels; though with how long she has lived in there, the previous inhabitant was certainly long gone. She liked that. Dead comrades couldn’t sell you out.
The tunnels were lined with mementos of the previous cellmate. A few empty brown bottles, some words and tally marks carved into walls, etcetera. Penny didn’t care for them. She just went straight to her room’s hatch.
It was certainly midnight at this point. She met a square hatch in the wall, locked in place by a curious mechanism designed for stealthy opening. There was a bolt lock, except it moved up and down freely. Gravity always kept it in the ground’s hole so that the door was always locked when shut, though the top of the bolt had a pretty strong magnet on it.
Penny cleaned up her weapons and tidied them away in her stash, where she kept various back-up masks and wigs made up from hair stolen from the haircutters. She then opened the hatch, pushed her room’s drawers away, tidied away the decoy from under the bed’s sheets into the tunnels and then shut the hatch, using a lump of metal against the wall as a makeshift handle. When closed, she pulled the handle away and the bolt on the other slide slid down, locking the door. She moved the drawers back, snuggled into bed and slept soundly.
-----
The following day contained the routine of visiting the good Dr. Hartley. There were only two people in the world Penny could talk to, and he was half of them.
“Hello again, Penelope.” The Doctor relaxed in his chair, clipboard and pencil in hand. He peered over the coffee table to see Penelope sitting straight up in her chair, as if she was trying to be taller than him.
“H-hello.” Her voice stuttered. Nobody could blame her, she hardly used it.
“Right, so…” Dr. Hartley lifted a page up, peered underneath, and let the page fall. “Last time, we were making progress on some past recollections.” His voice was calm and kind, the kind of voice that lured information out from whatever dark places the listeners tried to hide it. “A time at your primary school, I believe.
“Y-yes. The f-fight. I was in year- year eight. S-secondary school.”
“I remember. You had a fight against a boy. What was his name?”
“T-Timothy.” She scratched at her arms slightly. She tried to hide it, but the sound of nails over scars was loud. She was a horrible liar.
“What was his name, Penelope?”
“I told you. It’s- It’s not import-important.” She knew who Timothy was, and it wasn’t the boy she was talking about. Timmy was the name of an imaginary friend she used to have, something the doctor didn’t know about.
“Right. Now. Why did you fight him?”
She looked down at the table and sighed. “He look-looked down o-on me. C-c-called me a freak.”
He scribbled something down. “How did the fight go?”
“I-I punched h-him several ti-times. I knock-knocked him o-out.” She couldn’t stifle the scratching.
It was Dr. Hartley’s time to sigh. The best weapon he had at his disposal was time. it took enough to get Penny to talk about her past, he figured it was enough of a success to get this far. He’d pry more out, eventually.
The rest of the talk was uneventful, full of lies from her side and sighs from his. Eventually she was let back into her room where she proceeded to sit on her bed and await silence before she started to softly hum to herself.
-----
“So, what did you do to Timothy?”
“I-I punched him. Un-until he f-fell.” She scratched at her arms again.
Penny couldn’t help it. She knew the Doctor wanted to wrangle the past out of her, but she was adamant about her position. She wasn’t going to feed him.
That night she stared out of her window and hummed once again. The itch was starting to return.
-----
“At this point I know you aren’t going to talk about Timothy, but I am rendered curious. After you, “he lifted a page, “punched him until he fell, he ceased to show up after.” He made direct eye contact with Penny. “Did you kill him?”
“No,” she said, hands completely still. The Doctor looked to his upper right and nodded slightly.
“Alright, then. For that, I am relieved. I’ll let you leave early today.”
Penny was disturbed at this change of schedule.
“Wh-why?”
“New person in. Far east wing.”
“I th-thought the east wi-wing was f-full?”
“Uh, a previous occupant departed. He started to see things at night.”
“What th-things?”
“Just stuff out his window. Anyway-” someone rapped at the door.
“Right, yes. The guard will escort you back to your room.”
Reluctantly, Penny got up and returned to her room. She felt a bit of temper bubbling up inside of her, but she didn’t let it out.
That afternoon, Penny sat with her back against the drawer, humming a simple melody to herself. If it weren’t for the rain on her window, she would have heard some gentle taps from within the hidden passages behind her, perfectly mimicking her solitary tunes.
By the time she crawled into her bed, she decided that she would kill again tomorrow night.
-----
The ground was darkened by an earlier rainfall. The air was cold once again, inspiring apathy and drowsiness in all to take it in, yet Penny could not feel the chill through her coat, scarf, and the hot exhaling air that cycled within her porcelain mask. Her appearance made her stand out, so she kept to patrolling alleyways for drunken lone-goers fumbling for a way home. Suddenly, she heard a young voice up ahead, and darted behind a few bins and boxes.
“Daddy!” yelled a young kid, tugging at the sleeve of his father’s coat. The child seemed oddly cheerful, especially since his father seemed utterly drunk.
“Yeah, son?” His words slurred and his feet staggered.
“Home’s this way!” The kid pointed with his free hand. It was down the alley that Penny was withdrawn in.
“An’ howd’ya know that?” replied the father, being tugged along by the kid. He was too drunk to do anything else.
“Because fingers said so!”
The father looked around, head flailing in whatever directions. “Fingers? What fingers? I don’t see no fingers,” he chuckled.
“No, my friend!” The kid didn’t seem to notice how his voice echoed and bounced off the wet brick walls around him. But he did notice when he walked past Penny, crouched right next to him, white face staring. He stopped.
“W-who are you?”
The father turned around and laughed.
“Y’sure that ain’t fingers-” A knife flung into his arm, slicing tendons. His grip loosened on his son’s hand and fell limp. The kid screamed, and Penny reacted by a solid hit to the kid’s head, knocking him cold instantly.
Shock flooded the father’s face. He whipped his uninjured arm around to strike Penny, his drunken mood letting him ignore the pain of the knife in the other. She delivered a strike to his inner elbow and dislocated it, before her hand darted to a handle within her coat. Then, with a slash, the father’s guts started to spill onto the floor and over the child.
Suddenly, something felt wrong. Fear sunk down Penny’s neck. The father fell to the floor in a thud, half-choked grunts trying to gurgle out of his filling throat.
She turned to look down the alley. It looked darker than before. And something was terribly off.
There was a wall in the distance, so dark that the mortar between bricks vanished, rendering a patch of tall and smooth shadow.
She swore it stared at her.
-----
The bricks ground against each other as the passageway opened. Penelope hurried her way inside and quickly attempted to close the hatch behind her. Something had seen her. She had managed her fix, but now she needed to hold out until she felt safe.
She scurried along her tunnels until she came to her home hatch. Exhausted, she allowed herself to relax there for a few moments and rest. She let her eyes wander about the few tunnels around her.
They were tall enough to crawl in, easily. There were a few areas here and there that lead into larger chambers, though she never had any need to head into them. The walls were made of brick, though some of them had copper pipes running down their lengths of varying sizes and numbers. Some of the pipes dripped slowly, repetitively, their drops hitting smooth craters in the ground. They were almost hypnotising to watch.
After a long, slow blink, Penny snapped back to reality. She had to put her weapons away before she reentered her room. She moved to the room to the left and started to unload the throwing knives and her machete, and then she- something caught her eye.
She had a few materials around this room. One or two spare wigs and spare pillows for her escape mannequin. Some first-aid kits for when her regeneration wasn’t strong enough, some porcelain masks for whenever one breaks. She also had a surplus of small throwing knives, some of metal, some carved from chips of stone from the tunnel walls. She had other bits and bobs here too, usually laid about in neat and assorted piles. They weren’t now.
A few pillows were messily thrown in a pile, atop them a porcelain mask set to stare right down the hallway, a wig of light brown hair resting atop it. Locks of hair covered one of the mask’s eye-holes, as if whoever did this was in a hurry. All Penny knew that her tunnels were now compromised.
She held still. The place was silent, save for the quiet drips of water and her breathing. The occasional grunt and snore of someone in a room close by. Then the clink of a glass bottle down the hallways, falling over and rolling into the wall. Tingles flooded her body, warm fear trickling down her spine. Her hands fumbled for the hatch bolt and she fumbled into her bedroom. Penny managed to close the hatch and shove the drawers to the wall without looking down into that long, solitary, dead passageway.
She changed her clothes, hurried to the bed and stuffed the decoy pillows and wig under it, crawling into the sheets herself. The quiet seemed loud that night. Muffled rustle of leaves out the window. Slow creaking of springs in her mattress. The clicking from the hallway repeating that simple melody she hums each day. The air flying in and out of her lungs. When Penelope fell asleep that night, she could only think of one thing, and that was the long passage behind the wall.
-----
Come morning, Penny awoke to a room lit only by the cloudy white skies outside one window, and the flickering hall lights outside another. She slept in another hour before dragging herself out. The place was silent. It had reached the guards’ lunch break and any of the more rowdy people living here were too busy stuffing their faces to make any noise, Penny assumed.
She glanced at a digital clock atop her drawers, sitting neatly next to a digital radio, and blinked her green eyes a few times to get rid of the blur. She needed food.
The smooth floor was cold against her bare feet. She felt a bit drowsy, but was awake enough to press on. As she left the door, she caught Dr. Hartley walking past.
“I-it’s quiet.”
“Ah- yes,” he stopped walking and turned to penny, his left hand half-raising to display hesitation, “there’s been a bit of a, uh, problem.”
“Prob-problem?” Penny stuttered, her arms now crossed.
“Yes. You recall the new person in the east wing? Turns out he’s seeing the same thing the previous occupant did. We’re quietly evacuating the whole wing.”
“What d-did he see?”
“A, uh, a large smiling face outside the window.”
“Isn-isn’t this the s-second floor?”
“Yes. Anyway, I’m on my way to meet with the evacuees, have to keep them calm and what not. Uh, where are you going?” His face turned to a slightly quizzical look. Penny was wearing a plain white pajama shirt with matching trousers.
“C-coffee and f-f-food.”
“Right you are, then. See you later.” Dr. Hartley made his way off.
This wasn’t so bad. The east wing was usually noisy during the day. The people in there weren’t crazy- mostly, anyhow. They were just unique. She contemplated the calm quietness and carried on to the kitchen.
The loudest sound in the hallways right now was her steps, where her soles peeled off the floor just to slap back down. Her arms were still crossed, hands now rubbing up and down her upper arms. Penny didn’t realise why she was doing this, until she felt the curiosity kick in. The sound of her steps slowed to a halt and made a slight screech as she twirled around on the spot, just to stare down the hallway to the east wing. Then the slap, slap, slap of her walking started again gradually speeding up until she was outside the rumour-filled room.
Her mouth opened slightly, her tongue clicked, her brow furrowed and her hand reached for the door handle, fingers draping over its smooth surface. She gave it a twist and peeked inside.
A quiet whistle of wind filled the room. The window was broken from the inside. It was obvious the previous inhabitant threw something. She mulled over the idea of contagious craziness, then left.
-----
“Hey, Penny,” greeted Joe the guard. Penny didn’t actually know his name, she just called him Joe becau