The Pressure - From The Madness Of The Number Man

Previous Part

Part Four

The universe always seems to have a plan. When things happen or certain things are meant to collide at a certain point in time, there is no force in the world that can stop it from happening. That being said, it would be very sad to say that Richard Menkin’s father had to be eaten by something in his kitchen in order to bring Richard and Petunia together as friends in order to do what they were destined to do with what little time they had in their lives to do it, and indeed if one were to step back and look at the bigger picture, one would have to be thankful that Richard Menkin’s father was indeed a midnight snack for an evil force, but it’s an uncomfortable truth.

Likewise, Richard was on a collision course with someone else that very same night that would change his life forever. Pressure after all is what draws out whatever is inside of a person, be it something good or something bad, and as Richard was putting on his jacket that Agatha Gip had made for him a month ago, he believed he was under a great deal of pressure, and had he known what was waiting for him downstairs, he may very well have just stayed home that night instead of pushing forward.

Richard had heard the voices coming from the den as he quietly moved down the stairs, and as he rounded the corner on his way to the front door, he was greeted by fifteen faces staring back at him from the uncomfortable metal chairs that his parents kept out in the garden shed just an arm’s reach from a large bag of birdseed. His mother had told him three days ago that it was her turn to host a support group for grieving family members that night, which of course didn’t surprise him at all. His mother had always been a very outgoing person who had played a very active role in many social organizations and charities around town including the community theatre in Wicker Bush.

Richard recognized two of the sad faces that were forcing smiles in his direction as he awkwardly stepped into the room. His mother, Patty, raised her eyebrows and smiled in his direction, and Richard knew what the expression was supposed to convey; it was of the, “I asked you to stay in your room or go to a friend’s house, remember?”

Indeed, his mother had asked him to make himself scarce during the group, and Richard nodded back to his mother silently and turned toward the kitchen so that he could leave the house through the back door. He heard his mother apologize to the group for the slight intrusion as he walked past the downstairs bathroom door, which was closed. Richard heard the toilet flush just as he passed the door and walked straight to the backdoor without missing a step. As his hand touched the knob and began to turn, he heard the bathroom door open, and for some reason, most likely one of those things that has been orchestrated by the universe, Richard decided to look behind him before he opened the kitchen door.

Despite the odd choice in clothing and the rather unkempt facial hair, Richard instantly recognized the man who emerged from his downstairs bathroom.

“Hello Richard.” Gene was smiling, and Richard was not. Richard was paying attention to the details; the ratty sweatpants and the oversized hooded sweatshirt gave a more lazy look to the man who had preferred wearing loud zoot suits and brightly colored ties. He was wearing a pair of dirty white sneakers and a baseball cap that had a badge and the words W.B.P.D. on it, but what interested and terrified Richard the most was the metal cane he was leaning on that looked like something Gene himself had put together, which meant that it could very well have a dual purpose that he had to be conscious of. Gene walked slowly to within five steps of Richard and spoke in a hushed tone.

“How have you been? Is your dad still dead?” Richard took two steps to his left and snatched a butcher knife out of a block that sat on top of the black and white tiled counter. He held the knife in front of him and breathed heavily through his nose. “Oh come on now Rich, are we really going to do this now?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for group.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I lost some friends in a fire who were very close to me. You were there.”

“You get out of my house.”

“Or what Richard? What are you going to do? You and Petunia chose to play this game, there’s no going back now.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“Here’s the deal Rich, investigators found this hunk of metal in their search through the ashes, and they can’t figure out what the hell it is or where the hell it came from. But I know what it is, it’s Petunia’s “dad”. Suppose I let them know that I suspected that little girl and her friend of burning down my building. What happens when they find things in her house that they can match up with what’s left of her “father”. Rules don’t apply anymore kid. If you’re going to beat me in this game, you’re going to have to do a lot better than, “I’m going to call the cops.”

Richard tried to think of something else to say, but before the words even formed in his brain, he could clearly hear the sound of his mother’s footsteps coming towards the kitchen. He jammed the butcher knife back into the block just as his mother appeared on the other side of Gene.

“Richard? I think I asked for a little privacy tonight, didn’t I?”

“It’s OK Patty, Richard and I know each other.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. He and his friend Petunia had been to my restaurant a couple of times to watch my show. They both stayed afterwards to ask me how I did my illusions.”

“Oh!”

“Well, I don’t know how well you know Petunia, but when the two of them get together, they just seem to have lots of questions.” Gene gave off the faintest hint of a chuckle. Richard’s mother, Patty, seemed a little too comfortable with Gene as far as Richard was concerned, and watching Gene act like a normal person was almost enough to make Richard scream. The two adults were both smiling at him.

“I...uh...I’m going over to Petunia’s for a little bit.”

“Okay, but I’d like you back here by no later than 9:30, understood?”

“Okay.”

“Well have a good night, Rich. Tell Petunia that I said hi.” Richard gritted his teeth, and he almost spilled the beans to his mother right then and there, but Gene was right, the rules didn’t apply anymore. For all Richard knew, Gene could put his mother under some kind of hypnotic trance and make her his devoted follower.

He couldn’t. At least, not at present.

So Richard turned and walked out his back door saying words that he had learned at school but was never allowed to use in front of his mother.

Pressure. Richard had never been under so much stress all at once in his young life, and the only person he wanted to talk to about all of it was someone who had barely even given him the time of day. He promised himself as he stomped over to Petunia’s house, that he would do whatever it took to make Petunia talk to him, and that would be a promise that he was soon about to regret, because with that promise would come more pressure, weighing down on a boy who was about ready to explode under the weight of it all.

Richard had observed Petunia pick locks on four separate occasions, and although he had not remembered the particulars of the first two times, he had been paying attention while she worked on the last two. He had a picture of her little metal tools in his mind when he had attempted to make his own from a small scrap of sheet metal that he had found in his father’s garden shed, and from what he could remember, the tools that he had cut out of that metal had closely resembled the ones that Petunia had in a little pouch that she kept in her ratty backpack.

Richard crept around the back of Petunia’s house and up to the door. Luckily, the porch light was not on, meaning he probably wouldn’t be seen, but it was also unfortunate because he could not see what he was doing, so he had to move his hands using the images in his mind of Petunia opening the door to Hocus Pizza. He was determined to make his way in, and perhaps it was that drive and belief that aided him in opening the door in only a few seconds with the crude little tools that he had made. He was quite surprised and generally happy with the result, as it was faster than he had ever seen Petunia accomplish it, but sadly, this was the only time that night where Richard would feel as if he had any sort of control over anything in his life.

He opened the door as quietly as he could and he slowly walked into the darkness of the Gip kitchen. Everything inside was as it always looked; Agatha Gip ran a tight ship as his new Principal would say. Richard was only aware that Petunia’s real parents had passed away some time ago, but that was as far as his knowledge of her past went, and as far as that little detail goes, Petunia Gip was nothing special; everyone at some point will lose their parents.

What made Petunia special was that she was ten years old and she had constructed replacements that looked and sounded like her actual parents. Agatha Gip was a machine made with precision, and she was, as far as Richard could tell, the definition of a supermom. She made everything in Petunia’s life run smoothly in order for Petunia to focus on the things that she felt were more important than anything else. What those things were at the moment was something Richard was going to draw out of her whether she wanted to share them or not.

Richard slowly walked into the front room and found it dark and empty. He couldn’t believe that Agatha had not been able to tell that he had broken into the house; she was after all the perfect alarm system, but as he looked over toward the window that faced across the street to his home, he had not yet been accosted. It was at that window that the chubby Mr. Gip had stood for hours one night watching over Richard’s house and waiting for a signal from Richard that he was in trouble from something underneath the floorboards of his bedroom.

Richard had grown fond of Petunia’s parents in the very short time he had known them, and the loss of Mr. Gip in the explosion hurt Richard far more than he thought it would. As he broke his gaze from the window across the room, he began to wonder if Petunia was asleep upstairs somewhere. Richard had never been upstairs, and he figured that now was as good of a time as any to go exploring, but before he could take another step, someone placed their hand over his mouth from behind.

The owner of the hand spun Richard around before the terror of what was happening even registered in his brain. As he turned, he saw that it was Agatha Gip standing behind him, and after he was facing her, she put a finger up to her mouth to signal him to be silent. She took her other hand from over Richard’s mouth and pointed to the door to the basement. She leaned down close to Richard and smiled while she spoke very softly.

“I’m sorry if I scared you, sweetie. You need to go down into the basement and look at what she’s doing, but be very quiet. She’s in quite the mood.”

“Ok.”

Richard walked over to the door which led to the basement which he had known as “The Lab”. The door was slightly ajar in the first place, so he made no sound as he pushed it open even farther and began to walk down the stairs. When he made it to the bottom of the stairs, most of the work benches were just as they had been the last time he had been welcomed down there; full of odd contraptions in all states of construction, whose uses were a mystery known only to Petunia. The walls were still covered in schematics of various buildings and torn pages of magazines with stories and pictures that most people would find disturbing or ridiculous, but there was one wall, the south wall, that was different.

The last time he had been in the lab, there had been a sheet strung up in front of the wall where an image of his father was projected upon it, but now there was a picture of building plans on it that stretched over the entire wall. As Richard walked closer to the wall, he realized that it was a giant picture made up from single pieces of paper that had been taped together, and in front of this huge map of the interior of a building was a single chair. Richard’s eyes adjusted to the light and as he sat down in the chair and looked at the building plan, his blood froze in his veins. It was a hand drawn building plan of the Wicker Bush Community Theatre; a place that Richard feared even more than the tunnels that ran underneath it.