Back in Business XVII (Jul '23).

Originally posted by Tommy.



“It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me.”
-Lynda Barry

“Good morning, old friend.”

The voice woke Tommy out of a dead sleep. He sat up in bed and looked over at the clock on the nightstand. It was 5:15 AM. The Sweetwater sun had yet to rise, and the bedroom was pitch dark. He glanced over to make sure that his sudden jolt hadn’t awakened Randi who was still soundly asleep.

Maybe it was a bad dream. Tommy laid back down, but just as he closed his eyes…

“It’s been a while, Tommy.”

Goddammit. There was the voice again. He hadn’t heard it in months. He knew that there was no getting back to sleep, so he slipped quietly out of bed, grabbed his jeans and a t-shirt from the chair that sat at the edge of the small bedroom and slipped into the bathroom.

As Tommy took his morning piss, his mind was already racing. It had been doing that since the last episode of Fallout. After Shawn Summers threw down the gauntlet for a Three Stages of Hell match, Tommy dragged Rupert Watkins, the only person on earth who could stand Summers, to the ring to announce his acceptance.

When he threw Watkins over the back of a horse, his face completely shrouded by a hood, he had every intention of beating the old man to death. He had spent the last week angry at himself for not getting to Rocco in time before Summers had time to choke him out. But something inside Tommy stopped him. The force that made him stop short of kicking Watkins’ head off his shoulders certainly wasn’t the same voice that he had just heard.

Tommy stepped over to the sink, filled his hands with cold water, and splashed it onto his face. Deep down, he was hoping that he was going to come out of some sort of dream-like haze to find out that he hadn’t heard the voice. Unfortunately, both he and the source of the voice knew that this wasn’t a dream. As he raised his face slowly, the ambient glow of the small plug-in air freshener, the only light in the room, he saw it. There, staring back at him was the face of The Monster.

Tommy stood there, paralyzed for what felt like hours but was actually only seconds. The reflection in the mirror almost looked like Tommy, but it wasn’t truly his face staring back at him. As Tommy frowned into the mirror, a devilish grin came across the face of The Monster.

“We need to talk.”

Tommy frantically looked over his shoulder. He knew that if Randi woke up and found him standing there talking to a creature that appeared to embody evil, she’d flip her shit. He quickly pushed the bathroom door closed.

“Don’t worry. You know she can’t see me. She can’t even hear any of this.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to help.”

Tommy knew the monster was right and that Randi couldn’t see or hear any of this. Still, he couldn’t help himself from slipping into an increased state of paranoia. He pulled the bathroom door open, and there she was, still sleeping. The moonlight coming through the window gently kissed her skin as she lay there, completely unaware of the fact that her fiancé the father of her child, was out of bed and having a conversation with something eviler than anything she’d ever seen before, even eviler than Shawn Summers.

When Tommy turned back around, The Monster was gone. There, in the mirror, Tommy saw himself. Pale, mouth agape, and eyes the size of saucers.

He quietly slid out of the bathroom and down the hallway. He turned the coffee pot on and sat down on the couch. Rocco had promised to send him a series of X-Title matches to watch in preparation for his title shot at Back in Business. As he opened the laptop, he saw The Monster once again. If eyes are truly a window to the soul, the hollow eyes of the creature who was staring back at Tommy indicated that it was a soulless beast. Then again, it always had been.

Tommy and The Monster (he never knew if it had a name, so he had assigned it that moniker after he saw it for the first time) had a long history. Sometimes, The Monster prompted Tommy to do horrible things that he later regretted, but he didn’t always feel like he had control. Still, other times, The Monster prompted Tommy to do the right thing, even if the “right thing” created a certain amount of chaos.

Tommy’s first interaction with The Monster came when he was only eight years old. It wasn’t a “monster under the bed” type of situation. Instead, Tommy vividly remembered seeing The Monster on the playground at Tom Landry Grade School. There was a boy in Tommy’s class named Edwin who was always “different.” The teachers didn’t really know what to do with him, so they left Edwin to himself, which didn’t seem to bother the boy. He spent lunch sitting alone at the end of the table and spent recess walking around the perimeter of the playground seemingly talking to himself as he stared at his feet.

Every school has a bully, and TLGS was no different. One day during recess, Clark Peters, the most feared boy on the playground, set his evil gaze on Edwin. Tommy saw Clark push Edwin to the ground before he stood over his fallen prey launching into a tirade of insults. As Edwin curled into the fetal position, bursting into tears, Tommy saw someone on the playground that he had never seen before. It was a little boy, around his age. In fact, the unknown student looked a lot like Tommy. The two locked eyes, and he told Tommy, “Go ahead."

Tommy sped across the playground and threw all of his weight into the larger Clark Peters, knocking him to the ground. By the time Coach Tackett, the PE teacher who was supposed to be watching the kids, threw down his cigarette and came running to break up the fight, Clark was battered, bloodied, and bruised. Tommy had never been in a fight before that moment. As Coach Tackett dragged Tommy across the playground by his arm, Tommy looked for the little boy who told him to go help Edwin. He was nowhere to be seen.

“Help?”

“The X-Title. It requires a special brand of violence. A brand that I represent well.”

The Monster certainly seemed to be an expert on violence. After what became known as “The Clark Peters Incident,” Tommy didn’t see the face or hear the voice for eight years. Unfortunately, every day that made up those eight years included at least one passing thought about his experience that day on the playground. All of that changed when he was 16, just after his mother sold the struggling Bennet Family Ranch to Neuman Hill.

Tommy was in the bathroom at school when some upper-classmen walked in behind him. One of them, Tim Robinson, was the only kid in school whose parents ran a “successful” ranch. He had more money than everyone else, and he made sure that everyone knew it.

As Tommy stood at one of the three sinks washing his hands, Tim decided to rub salt in a gaping wound.

“Hey, boys! It’s Tommy Bennett! Y’all hear the family ranch failed and his mama sold out? Guess being a whore isn’t the worst thing she’s ever done.”

That was the first time that Tommy ever saw The Monster’s face in the mirror. It didn’t speak. Instead, Tommy saw the distorted reflection of himself more clearly than he had seen it years before. A devilish grin spread across The Monster’s face, and Tommy simply heard a soft, but evil chuckle.

With no warning and even less thought, Tommy grabbed Tim by the shirt and threw him into one of the stall doors. Once again, Tommy felt himself endued with a supernatural strength that he hadn’t felt since that day on the playground. As Tim scratched and clawed, scrambling to get away, Tommy grabbed him and bounced his head off the toilet seat. The blood flowed freely, soaking Tim’s white Polo brand shirt almost instantaneously. After delivering a couple of kicks to the ribs, Tommy took a step back and looked at the other upper-classmen who were watching in astonishment. Neither of them dared say a word as Tommy sent himself to the principal’s office.

He knew the school had a zero-tolerance policy on violence, so a suspension was coming. He didn’t care. When the principal asked him what made him do what he did, he had no answers. He couldn’t exactly tell Mr. Williamson about the face in the mirror. When he got home, he offered his mother the same number of answers. However, he spent every day of his five-day suspension reliving the fight. He struggled to sleep over the course of that week, as every time he closed his eyes, he saw that face again. As the nights went by, it stopped scaring him. In fact, The Monster became more of a friend than a mysterious foe.

Another year went by. For almost a year, Tommy didn’t see or hear The Monster. Then, the two of them had their first-midnight interaction. It was the first time that The Monster woke Tommy up as it had earlier.

Tommy’s mother developed a pattern around his 17th birthday. The pattern involved working a shift at a local bar, getting sweet-talked by one of the patrons, and then bringing his drunk ass home for the night. If Tommy was awake when she came stumbling in, he tried to pretend he didn’t hear anything. Most nights, he made it a point to be asleep.

The same voice that jarred him out of his sleep nearly an hour earlier did the same thing on a steamy July night in 1997.

“She needs you.”

The voice snapped Tommy out of his sleep and onto his feet before he had time to fully process what it had said. Initially, the sound of his own heart beating in his ears made it difficult to hear the commotion taking place downstairs. He heard a man mumbling and slurring, which wasn’t unusual. But this time, something was different. His mother wasn’t playfully flirting with her flavor of the night. Tommy could hear her declining the man’s advances, and then he heard the tussle. Something, presumably a lamp fell to the floor and crashed. That’s when Tommy grabbed the baseball from his closet and charged downstairs.

He got to the bottom of the stairs just as the man, who had a knife in one hand, started attempting to unbutton his pants with the other. As he clumsily fumbled with the button on his ill-fitting Wrangler jeans, Tommy drew closer, completely unseen. 16 years later, he could still see the look on his mother’s face as the sound of a loud PING filled the living room when the bat bounced off the man’s skull. As was always the case when The Monster spoke, there was blood.

Tommy stood there, hands shaking, heart pounding, as his mother jumped to her feet. She never thanked him for what he did. Instead, she simply got her would-be one-night stand to the door, shoved him out, and told him to never return.

That was perhaps the most interesting thing about The Monster. The first time Tommy heard him, he busted Clark Peters’ nose. The second time, He bounced Tim Robinson’s head off a toilet. The third time, he cracked a man’s skull with a baseball bat. Each interaction with The Monster resulted in more bloodshed than the time before it.

It had been months since Tommy had last heard that voice. The last time was perhaps the most jarring evening of his life. From his couch, with the laptop still in his lap, The Monster’s face still smiling at him from the screen, Tommy looked out the small living room window that overlooked the street. There wasn’t a day when he passed by that window without thinking about hearing Randi’s screams on the night that Bobby Ray Gallimore attacked her.

The Monster’s voice didn’t prompt him to go outside that night. If The Monster had spoken at that point, Tommy couldn’t hear him. No, he didn’t hear the voice until he picked Randi up and carried her back inside. It was then, just as he saw Bobby Ray’s taillights fade into the Texas night, The Monster spoke.

“Go get him.”

Typically, The Monster only spoke in short, concise sentences. That night, everything was different. It was The Monster that reminded him to grab his Glock when he was heading out the door. It was The Monster that reminded Tommy of his friend, Scotty’s propensity for blowing shit up. It was The Monster that guided him through creating an alibi with Larry. And, it was The Monster who told him exactly what to do when he got to Bobby Ray’s meth lab.

When Tommy kicked in the door of Bobby Ray’s trailer, he was filled with a plethora of emotions. He was enraged that a man like Bobby Ray would put his hands on a woman as perfect as Randi. He regretted not walking her to her car like he had every other time that she had been to his place. And somehow, he was sure that he felt love for the woman whom he was there to avenge. Through all of those emotions, The Monster was there, talking him through the entire process. And just like before, the fourth interaction brought more bloodshed than the third. If nothing else, this other-worldly creature was consistent with his patterns of violence.

Tommy vividly remembered The Monster telling him where Bobby Ray’s baseball bat was. Tommy certainly had no understanding of the human anatomy, but somehow, he knew exactly where to swing.

Suddenly, Tommy’s laptop flashed a bright white light that hurt his eyes. Then, it was as if something else had taken over control of the computer. The file that Rocco had sent him containing a series of 7 X-Title matches opened on its own, and the cursor clicked on an option marked “Beldam/Summers BiB 2023.”

Tommy sat there and watched the second stage of the Three Stages of Hell match unfold. There was no audio, no commentary, no crowd noise. Silence filled the room. Well, it did for a moment. As the referee motioned for the bell to sound, Tommy could hear The Monster dictating everything that he was to do.

After a series of “traditional” wrestling holds, the voice became clearer.

“Go get the chair. Smash his skull.”

“Put his ass through the table.”

“There’s a barbed wire bat under the nearside ring skirt. Get it. You know how to use a bat.”

Tommy somehow sat by as a spectator watching a match that hadn’t happened yet. There were moments where Summers got some offense in, including a moment similar to their Grand March match when Shawn smacked him in the face with the TV title. This time, it was the X-Title, but the match continued. Tommy watched on in awestruck silence as he saw his own mouth fill with blood; blood that he spit on the mat as he laughed in the face of Der Basterd, and go in for more. After delivering “The Bullseye'' onto a steel chair, Tommy rolled on top of Summers for the pin.

1…
2…
3….

The screen went back to black, and Tommy saw The Monster once again.

“I’ll make you what you need to be to beat Summers.”

Tommy had heard those words before. He was sure of it. His mind raced, and suddenly he remembered. That’s the same thing that Lucien said to him just before he signed the contract. Tommy struggled to catch his breath. He felt like someone had just kicked him in the gut.

He was fully aware that Lucien was Satan incarnate. He knew that when he signed his deal with the devil. Was it possible that Lucien had been one of the only stable forces in his life dating back to his youth? Had Satan spotted Tommy at conception and decided that there was something about him that he liked?

“Wait, so you work for Lucien?”

The monster let out a demented, guttural laugh.

“Oh, Tommy. You’ve got it all wrong. Lucien works for me.”



“Wake up, sleepy head. It’s almost noon. We’ve slept all day.”

Tommy opened his eyes and quickly shut them back. The glaring Texas sun was bursting into his bedroom window. He looked over at the clock on his nightstand as he felt Randi’s soft hands rub up and down his bare back. It was 11:36 AM.

He rolled over and leaned in for a kiss, but Randi pulled away.

“What’s wrong with your mouth? Your lip’s bleeding.”

Tommy put his hand to his bottom lip and immediately felt the same warm blood that he had just watched flow from his mouth in his match from the future pool into his hand.

“Must have bit my lip in my sleep. I had some weird dreams last night.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Nah. I’m good. How ‘bout some breakfast?”

Randi hopped out of bed, looking as wonderful as ever in Tommy’s favorite Texas Longhorns t-shirt, and headed down the hallway. Tommy stepped into the bathroom, filled his hands with some cold water, and sloshed it around in his mouth. As he spit into the sink, he watched as the blood slowly swirled around the drain. Once he was sure that the blood had stopped, he grabbed a towel, wiped his face, and looked into the mirror.

“Good morning, Champ.”