Dance Floor Demon

Anthia purchased a Ginger Ale at the service station, the fridge blasted her with cold air as she retrieved the chilled can, she opened it with urgency, her, thirst overtook her, she took three large gulps, it satisfied her dry mouth and replenished her constitution. She got back in the car, Gloria was in the driving seat, they would drive four hours away from Seattle. Anthia had wanted to go to Deep Cove in Vancouver, to see her cousin Betty, who had lived there for a little over 8 months. It was a strange wooded cottage, they had been renovating it. Betty was a dance teacher from LA. She had decided to move closer to her father’s family so that she could have children and also continue teaching dance locally.  She was 32, and had retired from performing. Gloria had welcomed a change in scenery, she asked Anthia if she had ever taken dance lessons. Anthia responded that she did not enjoy being a vision or spectacle to gaze upon, her cousin however was different, Betty had seen it as a way of striving for physical and mental perfection, Anthia was more athletic in ways sports that were typically male oriented.

In a nearby town, Burnaby, Vancouver, Glenn inhaled the foul night air, the corpses had been reduced to mouldy dust and water laden sacks of flesh, about to explode, falling apart upon touching, the bodies with his shovel, becoming part of the soil. He dug around the grave, the dirt had been absorbed into the remains, rich with micro-organism’s. The stretches laid there, they needed plastic to collect the decomposing flesh up and deliver them to the local morgue, they had not been there too long, possibly only six weeks and whilst they had changed, each needed an autopsy, they hadn’t all been women, they quite possibly had been a small family. When more evidence became available, the story mulled over in Glenn’s mind, the DNA and coronary report had been completed, in his office in the police station in Downtown Vancouver, he saw her, a picture of the dead adult woman and members of her small family had been identified, in the photo, she was a plain woman who worked at night. She was now a dead woman, poor family, all dead now, her family, brutally murdered by an intruder, they did not know the identification of the murderer. He asked a question about the victim’s sexual activity and someone yelled at Glenn and told him very sternly to have some respect, it was a woman detective in his office she sounded really offended, he knew his thinking was part of the problem, he had tried not to judge the victim on her sexuality. He knew it shouldn’t matter, she was dead. He thought to himself that he would try do his job better. When Glenn left his office, there was a commotion outside, the story released to the media, the culprit was unclear. She had been a dancer at night.

Anthia and Gloria had heard the news about the murders on the radio in the car, they found it unnerving and just so happened to be travelling in that direction. Gloria reflected on the tragedy she spoke about how you could never be sure how the world worked, even supposedly sane men of good standing in the world, could sometimes commit violence to groups of people and that crimes like these were sometimes impersonal and executed methodically, for political and religious reasons. She said “My father and his friends would meet in a quiet room, I wondered what they would talk about, they would drink and talk sometimes at the bowls club. It was some kind of discussion on war game and religion. The things he told me, he was disturbingly extreme, he would warn me against the “vanities of the world”, he was Roman Catholic and would often say that fame and the life of socialites were preoccupations were for piglets, “poor piglets” he would exclaim and that they just did what their hearts content, never thinking just indulging, creating mess wherever they went. He believed that hard work cured a lot of ailments in a person’s life and constitution, he also believed that the family was important as everyone outside this was dispensable, people were equal, but less protected without their families, immunity was an illusion, your personal integrity and a belief in god was the only thing that could save you. He was Catholic, Anthia said she was too, just in a different way. Her cousin Betty was different, she wasn’t allowed to see Betty growing up, because Betty’s father, was the strange brother of his dead wife he was morally liberal and possibly repugnant, Anthias father possessed a twinge of envy, that almost sobered Betty’s father at times. Gloria asked Anthia if she had felt trapped as a child, she exclaimed that she always had to some degree, and that she admire her cousin for dancing even though she was thoroughly unacceptable to my father, she can never win in my father’s eyes, to me she wins every day, because she has freedom, well she has to a certain extent.” Gloria, was yet to meet Betty, but she liked her a lot a lot from the sounds of her even though she might be considered as a bit of a controversy to Anthias father.

Gloria and Anthia arrived and enjoyed their time in Deep Cove, they stayed there with Betty and her husband for two days, it was August, the weather was mild and warm, they lived in amongst the forests of Douglas fir and Western Red Cedar, the dappled sunlight would shine through the branches of the trees and through to the clearing where their small home was located, their block was across the road from a lake. Betty had treated Anthia and Gloria as though they were home and mostly there was talk of self-sustainable living and maybe buying a sustainable farm, perhaps they could all buy a property, where all of them could live.

Back home and something unexpectedly tragic had happened, it was only four months later on a chilly October morning, when Gloria tells her husband, Alfred, a psychiatrist, that she feels sick, defiantly, she is aware her mental health has been declining since Anthia was unexpectedly struck by a car and died.

She finds it difficult process how quick this has been. Gloria woke up in the living room, after falling asleep to the television, she was feeling dazed, she went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror to find that she looked like a beast, her eyes looked strange and she looked like she had come straight from hell, she was not believing her eyes, how come this was happening and the mystery of it all was that she knew the same things had happened to Anthia, in fact Anthia had told Gloria before she died that she had a mild case of psychosis and that because of her religion, she saw herself and others as a beast sometimes, she has a problem with “worldliness” and “materialism”, she also told Gloria that she was upset about it because she was aware that extremism might breed an intention to kill her, or anyone else who could see they looked like beasts, she had been concerned about the story behind the murders they had heard on the radio, since then there had been a few more. I missed her, she was a bit of a free spirit besides her paranoia, it was only 2 months ago that she died, Anthia at 44 was still so young, she wondered whether her husband had come across such a psychosis before she was left with an awareness of an undercurrent to events that had not been there before. Gloria had become paranoid about murder and wasn’t sure she would recover, her world view had been tainted to the backdrop to the television and radio, telling about the causalities, random or not, she had been effected.