Smoke was spewing out of the bonnet of the car. Lights were flashing, and Dan started to stir back into consciousness as the men in uniforms pried open the driver seat door and dragged him from the wreck. He was bruised, surface deep cuts all over my body, and a few deep cuts, but no broken or fractured bones, nothing they couldn't take care of. It was somewhat with relief that Dan's cuts were bandaged up, and his blood soaked clothes were cut from his body. The stretcher in which he was tightly bound to was lined with a soft, even if only wafer thin, sheet, it hugged his skin with affection and warmth, and he was wheeled into the back of the ambulance and driven away.

There were two paramedics in the back of the ambulance, making sure that Dan remained in a stable condition.
"Hey there, mister! How many fingers am I holding up?" One of the paramedics had something in his hand... a... doll? And he was doing a very poor ventriloquism act with it.
Dan lifted his right arm and extended all digits on that hand. The doll had one arm up, of which all the fingers were permanently pointed outwards.
"Barry, don't be a tool, stop playing with this guy's doll..." the other paramedic seemed like the senior of the two, snatching the doll off him and placing it out of Barry's reach.
"The... doll..." Dan croaked. The two paramedics leaned in, and Dan mustered up all the energy and contempt he could, and said "Throw it... out the window..."
He was feeling short on energy, and sensed that he was drifting out of consciousness. He witnessed the man that wasn't Barry fling the doll out onto the side of the road, just moments before he closed his eyes.

Head pounding something chronic, Dan opened his blurry eyes, to see a bright white ceiling, fluorescent light tubes rolling past, as he was pushed through the hospital. He could just hear muffled voices of the people surrounding him, their footsteps resonating through the hallway, the wheels on the stretcher racking up a low rumbling in his skull. Bang! The saloon style doors swung open as he passed through the hospital, steering towards the operating theatre. Entering through another set of double doors, it was obvious this was where doctors would stitch Dan's wounds closed. The room was circular, concentric circles lining the ceiling, and the bright white lights in the centre of the room were almost blinding.

The operating table stood directly under the lights, and Dan was struggling to keep his eyes open when the doctors carried him off the stretcher to the table. A doctor leaned in over him, blocking the light, and gently placed a gas mask over his mouth and nose. It took only a few moments before Dan drifted off into a disturbing dream like state. The image of the crash flashed through his mind, the toy warehouse, the body in the van, the jack-in-the-box with the shrapnel in Jaquie's body, the toys killing Jacque in the trolley, the clown... It was all just one blurry nightmare, and it shifted and transformed, Dan was watching his own surgery. Cutting away his clothes, one doctor said something to the other doctors that Dan couldn't hear, and then he did the unthinkable, with his index and medius fingers together, he slipped the gloved digits into one of the many cuts on Dan's body. The others laughed maliciously, and they started doing it too. Dan, in his mind, was screaming in pain and agony, clenched teeth, breathing deep, these doctors would be the death of him, and he couldn't do a fucking thing. The first doctor, now with excessively bloody gloves and scrubs, held up a razor sharp scalpel for inspection, before stabbing it deep into Dan's chest. Another doctor was quick to follow suit, picking up a surgical saw, and hacking Dan's ribcage to pieces, surgical hammers, knives, drills and saws, they were all playing this violent little game, mutilating Dan's body beyond repair, beyond recognition.

Thank God it was only a fucking dream. Dan awoke in a cold sweat, wearing a flowered hospital gown, sitting upright in a wheelchair. There was a lot of bandage all over his body, and he could feel where the cuts and stitches were pulling at his skin. According to the clock, Dan had awoken at near on 2 O'clock in the morning. Grasping the rubber wheels with his cold hands, he rolled out of his dimly lit room into an even more dim hallway. A fluorescent light flickered somewhere behind him, becoming an annoyance in the back of his mind. At the forefront of his mind was the ominous light calling to him from all the way down the far end of the hall. It was the glow of a green exit sign. A fixation, a goal. He had been taken in by the mother bird, and been nursed back to a condition of independent living, and after the night's events, Dan just wanted to be alone. More than alone, isolated. There were people in this hospital, even if they were out of sight.

So Dan propelled himself down the hallway, rolling closer to the exit, closer and closer. He saw the cold green glow of the exit sign growing larger, but he also saw another form of life come into vision, and stand between him and his goal. It was an elderly man, with infinitesimally thin wisps of hair, marking their ways across the otherwise sparse nothingness of his scalp. Skin sagging something chronic, the man clung to the pole that supported the IV bag that ran tubes into his body. What exactly this man wanted, it was impossible to tell, but he stood squarely in front of the exit door, and signalled to Dan to follow down the hallway perpendicular from whence he came. Dan, as compromised by his wheelchair, was in no place to bargain, let alone bargain at a tempo that doesn't wake the patrons of the hospital. The estranged man hobbled clumsily down the hallway after Dan, his footsteps echoing heavily throughout the hallways.

Through the deserted hospital, the stranger guided Dan, clueless as to his whereabouts, it was only as they approached a foyer area that the stranger placed a hand on Dan's shoulder, indicating him to stop. Dan had figured out from the signage that they were in the emergency corner of the hospital, and quite close to the operating theatre where Dan had his operation.
The stranger leaned in and said "There's a woman at the information desk over there" pointing through the wall, roughly where the information desk would be. "Make sure you keep out of her sight". Disregarding his own comment, he made no hesitation before moving through the open foyer towards another hall on the other side of the room.
Once there, the man signalled Dan when to make his dash across the room. As Dan made his pass, he glimpsed the woman at the information desk, who had her back turned on the room, as she poured herself another coffee.

Down the hall they went, until they reached the double doors that opened out into the emergency operating theatre. Dan pushed the doors gently open and rolled inside. He shifted towards the middle of the room, and took a long, heavy sigh, gazing at the flat rectangular table that had seen many a death, and had brought Dan's brutal life back into the foreground of reality. He turned around, looking for the stranger that had brought him here. The man was nowhere to be seen. Dan told himself that "he might just be waiting outside" but he knew that this was not true. Next to the door stood a tall and narrow whiteboard, a pin in the middle to spin it over. Dan pushed himself over to the whiteboard, and spun it over. On the other side was a mirror, and Dan stared into his reflection, the stitches crawling across his face, pale grey skin gave him quite a zombified appearance. He touched his face with disgust, running his fingers across the cuts. He held his arms up to his eyes to see that they were in the same condition. Grasping the arm-rests on his wheelchair, he pulled himself to his feet and inspected his whole ghastly body. He threw his nightgown to the floor. There was some bandaging over his chest, arms, legs and head, but there was so much stitching across his skin, holding him together like an ancient rag-doll that a little girl refused to part with. The stitches held themselves together well, however, the wounds were still fresh, and with all his movement, some blood seeped through Dan's bandages, just another stain on his already tarnished appearance.

Dan threw a look of utter revulsion at the self in the mirror, before determinedly searching through the room, rummaging in drawers, hoarding significant items, like a bluebird would of shiny or blue objects to decorate its nest. Dan took to the small underneath compartment in his wheelchair; several scalpels if different shapes and sizes, small drills and saws, some cloths, bandage, needles and thread, along with other bizarre collectibles. With these safely tucked under his wheelchair, concealed with his nightgown, he pushed his wheelchair out of the operating theatre.

Dan walked down the hallway, retracing his steps back to his room.
Without thinking, without hesitation, he walked through the foyer area, when a woman spoke out "excuse me sir, where did you just come from?"
Dan froze in his tracks, and turned to look at the source of the voice, and there behind the information desk stood not the young woman of before, but a man wearing clown make-up, and in his hand was a scalpel. He spun it cleverly through his hands several times before throwing it at full force at Dan. It scraped past Dan's scalp, shaving the stitches on a deep cut on his head. Blood dripped to the floor. The clown pulled another scalpel from his pocket, and Dan didn't need to be warned twice, without hesitation, he tore through the passages, footsteps echoing with all the weight of fear and anxiety, the wheelchair only making things infinitely more difficult. Surely someone would wake up and find Dan out of bed at night, running from a homicidal clown, and they'd find all the surgical tools that Dan stole, hidden in his wheelchair, and he'd be in the shitter.

But it was miraculous that no-one did find Dan. Several glances across his shoulder, he had come to the conclusion that the clown's initial threats had diminished, and it was safer now to resume stealth mode, and creep carefully towards his room. He was a the door. Rattling the doorknob, he pushed the door open, and stepped into his room. It was a plummeting sensation that Dan felt when he realised that this wasn't his room. It was somewhat of a staff lounge, and there on the couch sat a doctor, and he was watching some low budget hospital slasher flick. As Dan slithered closer, he noticed that it was his friend, the clown, and in his hand was another scalpel, twirling through his fingers like a teasing ballet of torture. Well, Dan thought, two can play at that game...

And he quietly reached underneath his wheelchair and pulled out his own scalpel, a vicious blade with serrated teeth. Dan crept up on the man that had made his life a living hell, and gripped his head, slicing the blade across the throat like cutting butter. The clown's scalpel fell from his hand, and stuck straight up and down on the hard wooden floor. Dan dropped his own scalpel, upon the realisation that it was being coated in copious amounts of blood, not to mention the blood gushing onto the couch was more than enough to make any normal being queasy beyond belief. Dan didn't want to look, but it was by mere accident that he caught the eyes of the dead man gazing soullessly up at him, and it was only with that did he notice that this was not the clown doctor at all. So Dan ran his wheelchair out of the room again, intent on distancing himself from his murder. He was in such shock that he failed to notice that the TV was not tuned to the cheesy hospital horror he initially thought, but rather an infomercial on cooking appliances, nor did he notice that the doctor's scalpel was nowhere to be seen.

Breathing deeply, standing in an isolated hallway Dan pulled his nightgown over his head, and wiped his bloody hands on the material. Then, he sat himself down, and tried to wheel himself back to his room. His palms were sweaty, and his hair was slicked to his forehead, drenched in a similar cold sweat. He rolled along the hallway, thoughts rushing through his head. The dim lights that illuminated the path seemed to be burning white heat inside his skull, blurring his vision. Pushing along the hall, confused, angry, scared, Dan knew not where he was heading, he couldn't make out the writing on the signs he passed. His head swelled, and the feeling of drowsiness and hopelessness consumed him, it was almost with a sigh of relief that Dan could see the vague blurred outline of a human being moving towards him.

"Excuse me, sir? Sir, are you okay?" The woman could have been a dream, a figment of Dan's imagination, but he had an instinctual feeling to trust her.
"Unnhh..." Dan said. His mouth was dry, and he felt that he was moments away from passing out. Dan held a hand up and pointed it to his mouth.
The woman, whom Dan presumed to be a nurse wheeled him out into what looked like a waiting room. She left his side, and returned momentarily, lifting his chin to pour a cool clear liquid into his mouth.
"Thanks" Dan said, with a hint of gratitude. "Can you take me back to my room, please?"
"What were you doing out of your room at this time of night, anyway?" she sounded a little suspicious, but Dan could tell that she was just following standard protocol, and really had no clue as to what he'd done.
"I... I needed to use the bathroom. So I left my room, and... yeah. And on my way back, I felt feverish, you know, hot... sweaty... and tired... and then, you came along." Dan gave a wry smile, he was going for an Oscar.
"Are you sure you're okay?" the nurse asked. She seemed afraid that Dan might almost die on her, or something of the sort.
"Haha, yeah, I'll be fine. Thanks, but I really just need to get back to my bed and and get some sleep." Of course, Dan knew he'd never get any more sleep tonight.
"Okay," she laughed nervously and started to push the wheelchair along.
Back in Dan's room, she tucked the sheets around him.
"Thanks again, miss" Dan said, leaning his head back into the soft pillows.
"You're welcome." she said, her cheeks turning slightly pink. "I should leave you to get your rest, but can you tell me one more thing before I go?"
"Hmm?" Dan lifted his head off the pillows slightly.
The nurse turned towards the door and asked "if you needed to use the bathroom, why did I find you all the way over the opposite side of the hospital?"
She turned to see him respond, but he had already fallen asleep. She turned back around and left the room, and Dan's eyes snapped open again. That was a close one.

The next morning, Dan's doctor came in to his room to see how he was recovering from the surgery. Following him was the nurse he had met last night, who was somewhat concerned about the patient, after last night's peculiar encounter. The room was dark as night, the blinds on the window were closed, and the curtains around Dan's bed were pulled tight.
"Good morning Daniel" the doctor called through the curtains in a simply cheerful voice. But the smile was wiped from his face when he drew open the curtains to find an empty bed. He heard a sharp click coming from behind him. Turning around, he saw Daniel, standing by the door, as he took his hand off the lock on the door.
"Daniel... Daniel... Daniel... what are you doing?" the doctor spoke down to his patient as if he were a mere child.
"Something I badly need to do" Dan replied, with a malicious tone in his voice, he had overcome the initial shock of last night's murder, and he stood next to his wheelchair, revenge shining in his eyes.

"Stop, you're still in shock from the accident and the surgery. You don't want to be making any rash decisions. Think it through, Daniel." the doctor spoke with an urgency and panic in his voice, for once, life and death and the fine line between the two fell outside his controlled and well educated hands.
"Oh, I've thought it through, doc. I've thought it through very well." He leaned into his wheelchair and pulled out a scalpel. "I'm sorry" he said to the nurse, and he threw the instrument at her.
With the cry of a wounded animal, she fell to the ground, with the scalpel sticking out of her chest.
"Daniel, stop, you're being ridiculous!" the doctor yelled, and knelt down beside the nurse.
Dan rushed towards the doctor and took a hard kick at his face. The doctor fell back, in agony. There were broken teeth. It was now Dan's turn to kneel by the nurse. Her face was white, and blood was bubbling from her mouth. Dan ripped the scalpel from her body, and she cringed over, crying out in agony, squeezing her hands to her wound. Stab. He plunged the scalpel back into her. Another cry. And again, and again. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab. Blood soaked the once sterile instrument, and blood soaked the body, floor and Dan himself was covered in fresh blood again, although now he was absolutely soaked, there was no way he could hide this crime blaming the stains as leaking wounds of his own blood, this time he wouldn't hold back, he wouldn't stop.

Turning towards the doctor, an even more sadistic, demonic grin crept across his face. The doctor, after spitting out his teeth, had not bothered to get to his feet, but rather allowed Dan to handle him like a rag-doll, throwing him unceremoniously onto Dan's bed, tying him to it and taping his mouth shut. Dan pushed his wheelchair up next to the bed and retrieved all the implements he had stolen, placing each on the bedside table, enjoying listening to the doctor's nonsensical moans, muffled cries, pleading on deaf ears. He watched every singly motion Dan made, sweat trickling off his brow and onto his wide eyed face.
"Oh no, Daniel, look at all the cuts and lacerations on your skin" Dan said to himself, as he ran a scalpel across the doctor's body, listening to his deep, fearful breathing, and groans as the pain of the scalpel tortured his body.
"Shh... shh... it's okay, it's okay, I'm looking after you" Dan had replaced the scalpel with needle and thread, and began stitching the cuts back together. "There, good as new."

Tears trickled down the doctor's eyes, and he struggled in his bondage. The wounds freely leaked blood, and the poor stitching job did nothing to prevent this, but Dan paid no attention.
"Yes, this needs quite a lot of work... the leg, it must come off, and that arm!" Dan said, enthusiastically, as he picked up the surgical saw, and cut through bone to sever the leg at the ankle and the arm at the shoulder. The doctor was writhing terribly, tensing up, trying to bear the pain, but crumbling into agonising cries like a helpless child. And Dan laughed. He was psychopathic, a complete madman, this boy is beyond therapy, and the doctor lay, taking the abuse, willing the torture to end. But Dan was patient, savouring the moments of "revenge". He brought out the needle and thread for a second time, and crudely, yet with some affection, stitched the doctor's foot back to his leg, and arm back to his body.

"We've got a problem, we've got a very big problem here" Dan picked up the scalpel again, and dug it into the doctor's leg, then in his other leg, and his arms. He then made a long thin incision down the doctor's face, with a delicate and soft motion.
"You thought you were doing me a favour, saving my life. You thought that, didn't you? Didn't you?!" The doctor nodded. "And you thought that I, a youthful man with his life still ahead of him would want nothing more than to breathe and think and live again. You thought that you would be greatly rewarded for this selfless act of giving, when it was never really selfless at all. You want praise, you want approval, you want acceptance, well you're not getting that from me, you don't even get my sympathy. I hate you, I hate you! Look what you've done to me!" Dan yelled, on the verge of tears himself. He picked up a small surgical drill and thrust it into the doctor's chest.
"Look at me!" he cried again, pushing the drill deeper into the chest. Dan picked up the scalpel again.

"Why? Why did you do this to me?!" He stabbed the blade into the doctor's chest, and tore down, ripping it open. "Why do you punish me? I've done nothing to deserve this! I've done nothing wrong!" And with one last maniacal outcry, he took the saw, and ran it all through the doctor's chest, arms, legs, the entire body. And that was when two armed police officers broke the door down, and dragged the bloody Daniel Freeman from the mutilated corpse, blood curdling screams ringing in their ears.

And so Daniel wound up with life in prison, taking weekly psychiatric sessions, and mostly keeping to his own confines. He never talked to the other inmates, never had any visitors, nor did he send or receive any mail, so it came as a surprise to Daniel when he received his dinner, that a package also slid through the hatch. Dan looked at the package, and started blankly at the guard that had made the delivery.
"Who's it from?" Dan asked. The guard said nothing. "Hey, guard! I'm talking to you! Who's this package from?!" But again, he was met with bitter silence. And in that momentary silence, Dan heard a sound coming from the box... a tune of some sort. So Dan lifted the lid on the box and pulled the item out. The tune was growing louder and louder, and Dan slid the package into the corner of the cell. It was too wide to fit between the bars, and he knew damn well that was intentional. He also knew whom had sent the parcel. It was a jack-in-the-box. Dan pressed himself up against the bars on his cell.
"Guard! Guard! Help, let me out! Let me out, let me out, let me out, let me out!" But the guard stood firm, dedicated to averting his eyes from the notorious prisoner. The music played innocently through Dan's desperate pleads for help, but as the jack-in-the-box played its final notes, the clown had his last laugh, barely containing his malevolent grin behind his guard uniform, the game was over; click, boom.

The End