The Wants of Clover

The Briar Patch is taller than it is wide, and digs deep beneath the soil as well. Its multiple towers reach into the sky as broken fingers, rising and falling while the days pass. Cells will build and crumble, shifting to maintain a level of slight, vague, unending discomfort for those within. Its walls are gray stone, veined with the blue and red like a living entity. The roofs are wicked spikes, and its subterranean chambers crawl underfoot in a tangled web of roots. The gates of the cells inside are barbed by the stingers of strange ants and its never warm. What you sleep on was once a miserable beast, thin and underfed, now just rotting skins. What you eat is inedible, a lumpy, unidentifiable gruel. Its thrown at you, you have to cup your hands to catch it. The thing in the cell next to you walks about at night, scratching at the walls but never speaking. The Warden is not your friend. This is the penal system of Arcadia, the Briar Patch.

Surrounding the Briar Patch, far as the eye can see, are its orchards. The trees are gnarled and stooped, and shade the daylight with their canopy. They grow the ripest, juiciest apples you would ever want to sample. More red than a prick of blood on the end of your thumb. The trees don’t allow a single piece of fruit to drop, and they never rot. The fog will ebb and flow, and the wind changes degrees from slight to unmanageable. One could hide here, if one were to escape the Briar Patch. But it wouldn’t be advisable to taste the apples.

There’s a man named Joseph Weber from Vienna, and like a few other unfortunate souls, by some strange will he ended up here. He wasn’t worth much to society; in fact you could say he was a financial and emotional vacuum for all his loved ones. Love and money, he’d shoot in his arm. A cute habit he picked up in art school, though it eventually turned Joseph into a pariah. The kind you call ‘junkie’. The kind that forces your father to disown you, and your mother never speak your name again. So this sorry failure of an artist turned his life over to heroin and started a dark spiral downwards in his early twenties.

It was when Joseph found himself in jail, that things got weird. He was busted for a small time purchase; he was always too paranoid to move anything heavy. But he got cuffed and taken to a jail anyways. By the time they got him in lock-down, he was a feverish sweaty mess. They thought about putting him in a medical unit, but when he later calmed down Joseph was allowed to ride it out.

He went cold turkey the next morning, the pains of abuse knotting up his insides. As night came upon him again, he was informed what he was being charged with and when his court date was. The bail was set at a modest amount, though he couldn’t pay it himself. The last human to speak with Joseph before he left for Arcadia was his father. And his words were so filled with disappointment and disgust, it haunted the young man for fourteen years.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re not my son.” *click*

Joseph’s father didn’t bail him out; tomorrow he’d investigate a bail bonds company. Tonight, he looked at the modern cell and jail structure built around him. A sterile, organized home. Even organized in its violence. Stabbings occur in a warded off area on the yard, between 1^st and 2^nd break. Pretty easy to follow. Joseph would not be around to further examine the minutia of the modern penal system, he was bound elsewhere.

He was convulsing on the bed, cramped and uncomfortable, when he spied something by the grating. Not just any something, a needle. He perked. A needle? Shit, is that some tar someone snuck in here? Sliding off his damp sheets he crawled over to the corner to investigate it. Only when he got closer, the needle rolled into the grating. It took him thirty minutes and two fingernails to pry that thing open. And when he stuck his bleeding finger into the vent hole, he fancied he could almost reach that shiny metal prick of the needle’s tip. And then, as if the gods were cursing him, it rolled just out of reach again. To fit his whole body in there was not going to be an easy task, and more than likely he’d get discovered half stuck in the vent-way. If it were human accessible, someone would have escaped through these already. To his complete surprise though, he tried, and successfully peeled the grating back far enough to stick his upper body in the vent. When he still couldn’t reach it, out of a junkie’s desperation, he crawled fully in the shaft.

He was suddenly sliding, as though someone tilted the vent on him. Its surface was slimy with some ooze. And ahead was only dark. Sliding and landing into a stone cell to break his fall. Dimly lit, he could still vaguely make out the needle on the cell floor, tied crudely with rusted wire. It skittered across the uneven stone, tugged by something beyond black, barbed bars. It was a great hunched figure, grinning in the shadows, its folds of molted fat busting out of a gray uniform. Across its leather belt was a huge ring of keys, each key wildly different from the ones in front and behind. Joseph looked back to see the vent he had slid down, he found none.

So began Joseph’s hard time in the Briar Patch. Lured here by his weaknesses, tempted by a Fae jailer, Joseph scrambled his hardest to wiggle into Arcadia. The jailer found that funny. He wore two mouths, and both laughed equally hard at Joseph’s horror. Joseph shrank into a fetal position upon seeing the jailer’s face, screaming questions and rambling on the edge of sanity. Its hard to say when he actually came to some kind of stable mental state, there was no natural light to filter into the cell, and there was no telling night from day. Torturous screams wafted down the halls from other cells, only to be followed by hideous laughter. Across from Joseph, something with tentacles lurked in an unlit cell. It was never fed. The only way to mark time was by the jailer’s appearance. The squat, obese thing that fed the inmates would arrive regularly. One mouth grinned more than the other, but Joseph liked neither of them. He would try and ask it questions more coherently. To Joseph’s surprise, it spoke German well.

“Needy, are we, meh?” One mouth said, snapping together like a trap.

“So needy he decided to join us for a while, meh.” The other mouth said with more inflection.

“Think it’ll last long?” Asked the first mouth, and licked its lips.

“We hope so, meh.” Said the second.

It was an unhelpful exchange, and when Joseph grew more courage, and had the audacity to demand to know where he was, he got a jab in the ribs with a wooden pole for his troubles. This would be indicative of Joseph and the Jailer’s future relations.

Who knows how long a man can survive in a prison full of monsters. How long he mired in his cell is unknowable. His sanity was frail in the first few weeks, soon to be followed by a deteriorating health. It was hard to survive on the gruel. The first time he was taken from his cell, he was a shell of his former self. Bearded, scrawny, weak, atrophied, malnourished. The jailer strapped Joseph to a metal bed with a chain made of knuckle bones. Something in a mask was aiding him. When they clamped Joseph’s head down so that he could only look up, he started to get really frightened.

The Warden was the Keeper of every human soul caught in the Briar Patch, and lord of every Fae contained within. He dressed in a double breasted military jacket with shoulder tassels and large cuffs. He was a short Fae, making his oafish underlings and jailers appear that much larger. An older, balding man with reflective spectacles. Though those features were impossible to see beyond the square steel cage that imprisoned his face. His ears were long and gray, and sprouted out from between bars on either side. He always carried a baton, and was generous in its use.

“I likes you, poppet.” The Warden says to Joseph, grabbing his chin. He smashes a few teeth out with the butt end of his baton. “I likes you. We’ll keeps you, poppet. We’ll keeps you till you rot and grow your ears.” His second smash breaks Joseph’s nose. “And a poppet behaves.” The third smash fractured Joseph’s eye orbital bone. Blood filled his eyes, and he remembered little else from his first visit with the Warden.

Those were few and far between, most that were sent to the Warden never returned to their cells. Some things kicked and clung to the stone to avoid seeing him, but the two mouthed jailer was always stronger. And when he wasn’t, guards of straw and sticks in uniforms would aid. The women faeries were often the most abused by the Warden, plucked from all over Arcadia for various incompressible reasons. Several times they tried to ply their magic seductions through the bars of their cells, arousing Joseph and compelling him to flail at the bars with wanton abandon. To smash with his fists, to bang with his skull, anything to escape and free them. The stingers imbedded in his flesh from the bars kept him bed sick for three visits from jailer. It felt like a month.

One of the few activities the human prisoners were allowed was Pit-Fighting. It was debatable whether or not this was reward or punishment, many matches took mortal toles on their combatants. Though those that won fights sometime earned favors from the jailers. After enough time in the Briar Patch, some minds would break and choose any release. The pits at least offered a final conclusion to the torturous stories of these captives. The prospect of ending his suffering by a violent death in a trench did not entice Joseph, nor did spending an unknown future at the mercy of strange entities.

Time passed and slowly tore at Joseph's humanity. He started forgetting the high he used to crave, the streets he used to the walk, the family he shamed. Instead his mind wandered and because to lose tough with what those of the waking world would call reality. Scrawling intricate paintings on his cell walls out of excrement, blood and gruel upon the stone cells of his wall. He'd make peculiar arrangements of the lost artifacts he collected from prison life. Old socks, letters pleading for rescue, and prison tags of inmates that came to their end in the Briar Patch. All the while, he thought of escape.

He wouldn't need to plan, or scheme, or plot in the end, he need only wait. Joseph got caught up in a prison riot started by Stare-Shine, and made a mass dash from the cold walls of the Briar Patch during the fray. Though the the riot which allowed Joseph's escape had appeared to destroy the Warden, this mighty Fae wasn't that easy to dispose of. Laws of mortality and destruction didn't particularly apply, and though the escape truly ate at his power, it wouldn't be very long before the Warden had reconstituted himself and his stronghold.

After the escape, the fogs of the orchard were unforgiving. Weakened by the event and still malnourished, Joseph lost his way from the handful of Lost he fled with. The first few hours he held out hope he’d find them again. When night came, with stinging rain and sentient winds, Joseph crawled into the hallow of an old tree to seek shelter. He resigned to the fact that he was now lost. And most likely being hunted. He could’ve just stayed and enjoyed the gruel. If he was just a better son, he never would’ve been here to begin with. He was so cold, such a worthless man, disowned and shunned. And cold, sleeping in this hallowed tree. So cold. He thought that if he gave into the cold he’d die a peaceful death. The cold, sensing this, eased up in the middle of the night so that Joseph could wake with the pangs of thirst and hunger. And so he did.

Starving, thirsty, weak, he tried to gain his bearings in the orchards. Then he reached up and plucked an apple from a tree. It was so good. It was a rush, a high, so close to tar, better than tar, and just one bite. It tingled every fiber of his being. It was the junkie’s high, the Dragon, only he’d caught it finally!

Joseph collapsed and writhed in pleasure. He puked up some gruel, too high to care, rolling on the dirt floor. That was good shit.

For some time, Joseph halfheartedly looked for an exit. Then he stopped. The apples, they sustained him. He didn’t have to leave, and the Warden never set his straw men after him.

A complete diet of Faerie apples has noticeable effects. It sped up the mutations Joseph was slowly being subjected to. In a matter of three weeks, Joseph was unrecognizable. He crawled from branch to branch at night, hair matted with mud and wild. His nose was a long hooked thing, and his ears curled and uncurled depending on his mood. He grew tall and lanky, though hunched as well. His skin turned wrinkled and sickly, pulling his face into a distorted grimace. Joseph the human, was now Clover the Scarecrow, and completely detached from sanity. Quite simply; he became addicted to poison apples, a vice to match his own in a life near forgotten.

This is where things are hazy for Clover. He knows he spent some time here, eating and guarding his horde in a primal way. Clover didn’t know it, but the Warden knew what would happened if one gets lost in the orchards, he knew Clover would become its scare-crow. If any of the rest get ideas to escape the Briar Patch, they’ll find themselves in the scare-crow’s fields. Another incentive for the prisoners to remain placid.

He did the Warden’s dirty work, running down escapees at night for fear they’d touch /his/ apples. A long wooden scythe was his tool, and he was dressed in furs, and bits of the original prison uniform he was issued in Vienna. There’s no telling how many escaping souls he hacked down out of addiction derangement, but he’d grown into a powerful Darkling by then and those few human souls who were lucky or clever enough to escape fell into his clutches. The Scare-Crow and the Briar Patch coexisted for a while. Successfully even. But all good things come to an end.

One night Clover sat in a gnarled tree, the juice of countless apples smeared over his jagged smile. He grips his scythe and uncurls his ears. Humans running, he thinks. And sees them. And then is horrified. They’re not escaping, they’re running away with bunches of his apples! He leaps down to cut one of the three in half, leaving him to spill his poison prize on the soil. He was a fat man, slow, and he bled a lot. The next was a child. Clover ran her down with ease, hooking his blade between her shoulders and flipping her overhead. The last one though, an adult male, he had the edge. And he was running as if he knew where he was going. And oh look, he’s got goats legs.

Clover caught up to him, just barely, and received a shiv in the stomach for his efforts. Still, his crazed addiction to those poison apples would not allow him to let a thief get away with this. The Darkling was gripped by a narcotic frenzy, desperate. Then there was falling, and thorns and branches. There was blades and teeth and rage and confusion, and Austria rushed up to greet them.

Clover crawled out of an alley with blood in his mouth, four inches of his lower intestine sliced from his belly, and his apples. He took a bite and summoned the strength to distance himself from the would be thief dieing by a recycling bin. The gray of dusk was creeping over the city, Clover tucked his fruit away and gazed with foreign eyes upon the landscape of his lost home. And then he turned back and sucked the last of the dieing man's soul.