The Art of the Lie

imasmeasmecanbe

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The time had come to take action, the time had come to put things right once more. This menagerie of the mind had gone on far too long for me to account for, me the dreamer of dreams and the teller of tales had let my takes get the best of me and overshadow the man. What had started off as a once innocent, white lie had now grown so big I couldn’t see the forest for the darkening black clouds hanging over my head.
I was born to lie; if god didn’t want me to lie he wouldn’t have made me so good at it. I lie accidentally, I lie for personal gain, and sometimes I lie just to see if people will believe me or not. And that my friends is how this story of mine began, nothing more than an overly ambitious and grotesquely overblown story of a night on the town, surely no one would believe me, how could they?
A deceitful tale of bloodlust in bars and a woman with a glass eye and rainbow hair, not even I believed it as I spread the word of an unholy alliance of men and women dead inside, but dancing out. Have you seen the old folks crying as dying days go by?
Well rumor has it that there on that hallowed heath of a graveyard a woman stands morning, night and every hour in between. A woman with a glass eye and rainbow hair, an unholy screeching voice that sounds like the ghost of a thousand tom-cats. She stands eight foot tall and she towers over the grave stones, so the story goes. She has strength beyond imagining and once when she was younger and her heart, though frail could still be heard pounding out its daily melody she was one of them.
She sat on the same porch as the young folk of yesteryear do now; she ate the same mashed up meals that the home slops out daily. She rocked in a chair now hidden forever behind locked doors lest the same thing happen again, but now every night, she emerges from her shallow grave, she casts off the frozen dirt that lies above her and she walks through the town. Down to the hardware store, she looks in the frozen windows and mimes words to some other spirit. She gravely goes where many a men has been before and follows in the footsteps of the living. When the hour of witching has come she can be seen in the top window of the old folk’s home, seated triumphantly in her rocking chair once more. Betrayed lover by her side ropes in hand. Every night these spirits re-enact their final scene together the humiliation of a reputed witch with rainbow hair and a glass eye is played like a stuck record over and over and over again.
First she sits and stares out the window without a care in the world, then he comes creeping up behind her eyes full of mischief and arms full of rope. He creeps up and she mimes something back at him, she starts to scream noiseless screeches break the silence of winter nights. He ties her up nightly. Nightly she screams in agony as he engraves his name all over her body. Nightly people hide their faces as he pops her eyeball out with a screwdriver “You took my heart now I take your eye”, (the villains in ghost stories always have to have a cheesy line like that, it makes it more believable). The lover’s tragedy takes but an hour, an hour every night of the week. And when the hour is up she can be seen once again walking through the streets, rainbow hair aflame and glass eye bloodied once more.
Then comes the tricky part, people always ask where she came from? What was the name of the town? A bit of quick thinking is needed here. The town has to be close enough for you to have witnessed the events, far enough away so as to put a distance between my audience of the damned and the falsehoods that I weave. You have to pick a town with an ordinary sounding name, names like Newtown City will just lead to more questioning about the particulars of the place and that is exactly what is to be avoided if you want the story to be believed. Something like New Haverbrook always works well; it’s just past the state line I tell them all. I have cousins out there.
Then of course there are always some particulars one can not ignore. The name of the town being one, the name of the parties involved –Betty Bostwick and Francis Lebowski are the names I usually use however I have reams of other names as backups, just in case someone knows a Betty Bostwick. These names of people and places are ready on command they are my very stock and store. You must also have a story prepared about how you came in contact with this half-truth of yours.
It was about three months ago during the Christmas break and I was spending a few days with my cousins it snows up their like you wouldn’t believe and we had been planning to go snowboarding since the last time I’d been up there. The snow was at least two foot thick and packed tighter than anything I had ever seen before. Well we left their house via the back gate and were trekking up through the snowstorm to a place called “Devil’s Peak”, it’s the best place in the area if you like snowboarding. Well we were all up there having the time of our lives, when we heard a scream. I turned to look but my cousins ignored it. It came from a small graveyard, the scream was fenced in buy hip-high railings of gold and I could just make out the snowy silhouette of a tree behind one of the gravestones. The tree was swaying in the wind and with each movement it made it shook more and more snow on to the grave beneath it. I was drawn to that grave and I could never tell you why it was just haunting and I knew I had to see it. I started to walk towards the cemetery but was held back by my cousin. He told me that terrible things happen within the confines of the grave that the living should never have to see. At the time I wasn’t too sure what it meant but it was starting to get dark and we started to head home.
Are you scared yet? Yeah neither was I. We went out for dinner that night and after dinner my cousins and I went on to a night club. The night progressed with little drama, it was nice to meet all their friends again and being the small town that it was the bar was quite cheap, I wasn’t complaining. As I said the night was uneventful, just like being at home until one O’clock. The bar went quiet. The music stopped and no one spoke. A large crowd gathered by the club’s only window. I was pretty tanked up by this stage and my cousin’s friends helped me to the window. Then the fear hit me. I tried to ask someone what was going on but my pleas were met only with an index finger being pushed to my lips and a whispering in my ear “Remember the scream you heard? And the snow laden tree hanging over the graves?” They told me there was never any tree in the graveyard, they told me a story of bloodlust and deceit, of two lovers who fell from grace with god, and a woman with rainbow hair and a glass eye.
And as I stared out the window I saw it all, I saw the woman with the hair, I saw the man with the ropes and screwdriver and I saw him as he mimed his cheesy catchphrase that had now, after years and years of nightly shows had become his earthy lot.
Sometimes I wonder if humanity is as gullible as it seems or if it is only some who are gifted with the ability to fall for such trickery. As god has blessed me with the ability to lie through my teeth so to it is possible that for those who haven’t got the looks or the money, the brains or the personality god blessed them with an uncanny knack to believe in the unbelievable and take the story of “Betty Bones and her Menagerie of the Mind” to heart or perhaps there is those people who in life believed in Betty and in death become her, another lost spirit, and a thousand more yarns for me to spin.

Matt Holck

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