Normally the night would have scared her, nothing would have persuaded her to walk the lonely, exposed track of tarmac, but things change; they always do. It was one of the fundamental facts of life that the girl had learned so abruptly in the recent hours; so, she walked along the darkened highway, tears of anger and humiliation clouding her vision.
She pulled the jacket she wore tighter around her, but it didn’t help against the biting cold of the night. The wind tore through it and the short skirt she wore with little resistance, her fingers had been numb for the last hour, her wrists and forearms for the last forty minutes, and her legs had gone too, making her stumble along like a little girl in her mother’s shoes.
It was beginning to occur to her that she may be freezing to death. The idea was remote and she felt a distant complacency concerning it. The road she’d travelled had been long, its dark corners too treacherous for even the most street-hardened to survive without wounds to show for it. The girl had her wounds, deep ones that scarred her heart but left her well enough to walk further along the lost highway.
She thought, arranging, and re-arranging the occurrences of her life in a foolish attempt to make sense of it all, even though no one who knew her would consider her a foolish soul. Most would consider it a fact that the word clever could not come close to describing her, she was more intelligent than even she suspected. She had always thought her problem was that her heart was strong and in a straight battle between it and her mind, it always left no prisoners or gave up any ground. Her mind, strong as it was, never stood a chance against it; it always lost, as it had done tonight.
When she felt the first drops of rain, a sickening shiver ran through her as she staggered to a halt. She found herself in a near panic and she turned in a quick circle, like a wild animal as she searched for shelter. In the sheer blackness around her, she saw nothing, knowing that in this darkness she could be feet away from shelter and not see it. She looked down at the faint image of her feet, blotches of grey in a confusing monochrome world of varying black.
As the wind buffeted her, the rain began to fall harder, and the young woman wished she was merely freezing once more.
Miles behind the young woman the car sped, constantly closing the distance. Inside the car, the man yawned as he switched the windscreen wipers over to double speed. On the radio Lindsay spoke, drawing her conversation with Richard to close moments before David Bowie and Mick Jagger began to sing of people dancing in the streets, the man tapping the steering wheel in rhythm.
Nothing else changed, the car was like a time capsule moving through the night. The man knew he would have to stop eventually, if he failed to find a twenty-four-hour petrol station then the side of the road would have to do. Driving in this state was foolish at best, his attention could barely be contained on the strip of blackness before him so he had little choice, and he had to stop or find some other way to cease his mind’s endless wanderings. The man smiled; he knew he had the attention span of a goldfish at the very best of times.
Five minutes, he promised himself, five and I’ll pull over, maybe have fifty winks.
In the darkness through the veil of rain, he saw something, a pale flicker of movement. Instantly his feet slammed down on the clutch and brake and the car slid, skating on a fine skin of rainwater.
Heart slamming the blood between his temples, the driver fought for control against a car that seemed possessed by evil spirits intent on some vicious deed. The man twisted the wheel into the skid, trying to angle the tyres into the direction of the slide, praying for their tread to bite into the wet tarmac. Finally, he reined the evil beast in and won, the car grinding to a halt.
The young woman, half deafened by the pounding rain, never heard its approach until something huge slammed through the air beside her. Her mind had become irrational. The cold and pain had eroded her sense of self, and she saw it as a beast; a thing conjured from the deepest recesses of the sickest man’s mind.
She shrieked, throwing herself backwards into the shallow ditch beside the slick tarmac of the hellish road. The thing rocked, swaying across the whole highway before it stopped sliding to a standstill, affording the young woman a view of its low, blood-red eyes and she felt sure it was indeed a monster.
Suddenly light sprang on from inside, and she saw a figure move behind glass.
A car!
It was a car that was all!
That was all? She thought. Oh! Lord!
She pushed herself from the ditch, sliding on its slick sides and the figure from the car moving in her direction. She slid, her nylon-clad legs sinking deeper into the thick mud. Thoughts of quicksand suddenly filled her mind, and she kicked out in panic. Then a hand slipped around her arm and dragged her from the marshy ditch.
The car, now tamed with its engine idling, tilted, and shook as she climbed into the passenger seat. The man climbed in beside her, his body twisted to half-face her as he babbled an almost continual stream of nonsense in her direction. The words washed over her broken mind as the warmth of the car heater dried her sodden clothes, but all the meaning in his words was lost on her, she caught a phrase here, a word there, but that was all. All she felt she needed to know for now was that she was out of the cold, if anything else turned up she’d deal with it when it came.
She looked over at the man briefly and thought, but maybe I’m not safe yet.
He was mid-twenties but seemed past the age where he bothered to try to be interesting, his clothing was neat though a little out of sync with current fashion, and his dark blue eyes showed nothing but an innocent concern, but it wasn’t clear if his concern was for her or himself.
She looked away, kicking off her single shoe; the other gone lost in the ditch presumably, and pinched her stockings between thumb and forefinger, tugging the torn laddered nylon from a muddied graze that ran up her calf almost to her knee.
The man, unnoticed by either of them, had fallen into silence as his eyes moved over the wicked rip through her stocking in her leg. Unknown to the girl her skirt had twisted and rode up allowing him a view of the dark band that encircled the snow-white top of her thigh.
It was obvious by her dress that she’d been out nightclubbing in one of the larger cities to the south, her cropped leather jacket and mid-thigh length skirt affording her so little cover from the cold that she must have endured. His gazes moved to a profile of her face as she inspected her wound, not a single syllable had escaped her yet, and no explanation of why she was dressed for partying but had been walking in that freezing maelstrom since God only knew when.
The man was worried, it may have been a wise move to keep going. He still could. He could push her from his car, then from his mind and drive on. Instead, he dragged his knapsack from behind the backseat and pushed it into her arms, twisted and stepped out into the biting rain.
The woman gazed at the grey canvas bag, her lower lip trembling and her hands visibly shaking as she clutched it.
When he had moved so fast her mind had ground to a stop and fear had descended on her so fast, she thought she’d drown. For one eternally fleeting moment, she had found herself caught in a vacuum, then the bag had fallen into her lap and the man was just as quickly gone, leaving her alone in the warm cocoon of his car.
Cautiously she unclipped the hood of the bag and pulled the drawstring that secured the top open, the young woman peered inside.
Should she feel shame? No, a moment’s kindness hadn’t proved a thing. His actions had so far proved nothing.
She turned off the interior light and peered around through the rain-streaked glass for him. Then, confident that if she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her, she began to change.
Though not before she locked all the doors.
His long raincoat kept him relatively dry and the wind had little chance to touch him, but still, his legs had gone numb.
The light on the dashboard had gone out so he thought it safe to assume she’s accepted his invitation to change and he found himself shocked to discover how deeply pleased he was that she had.
He glanced at the black hulk of the car once more, squinting through the stinging pellets of rain; already this silent, hurt woman had struck something within him making the concept of moving on without her a joke, a delusion. Some people had a magic you simply could not say ‘no’ to.
Here he stood in this ferocious rain while a stranger changed into his clothes inside his car. A car he’d left the keys in, so the heater could keep her warm. Foolishly he smiled to himself, aware that any moment the car could start up and disappear down the road, stranding him here, but trusting that this wouldn’t happen.
The minutes ticked by like hours, and he thought irresistibly of a line from Romeo and Juliet; ‘I will wait every day within the hour, for in a minute there are many days.’
He sensed movement and his gaze snapped to the car from which it had wandered, the light inside was on once more.
When he saw her, he was shocked, not because of how different she appeared, even though she did, he was shocked because of the choices she’d made. The trousers she’d picked were his heaviest, an old army surplus pair that was grey, broad belted with buttons instead of a zip. Her too-big toe-capped boots matched, but most disturbingly she had buried herself under at least two shirts that he could count, and an enormous pullover that was too large even for him.
He sat, slamming the door a little too heavily behind him and her gaze snapped to meet his own for the first time. Her long dark hair had been pulled back into a loose ponytail, so for the first time, he saw her face.
Her flesh had lost its unhealthy blue-grey sheen and although she was still pale her understated beauty struck him. With cheekbones so high they seemed almost beside her dark sad eyes she looked like an abandoned child of royalty with lips straight and foreboding; with no love lost for anyone.
The sight of her angry sad perfection struck pain into his heart and he was mildly aware of his hand reaching to his chest.
“Thank you.” She said, but her words were as cold as the lips that spoke them, and the phantom pain struck again.
His eyes tore from her and instantly the pain vanished.
It took more concentration than he would have thought. He popped the handbrake with a hand that trembled with more than the cold and slipped the car into gear.
To begin with, he asked gentle questions as the cats-eyes flashed past, the car once again trapped in a cocoon of darkness, but the questions remained unanswered and only the radio spoke, sometimes with songs other times with callers. Even the man’s sideways glances ebbed away once he discovered that his chest began to hurt every time, he saw her sad face.
The woman sat staring out over the darkened road without seeing it; her mind was in another place – another car in fact – re-experiencing hell only hours old.
When he heard her tears he didn’t look, he couldn’t bear to, knowing the consequences, so her crying joined the radio as the only sound in their tiny world travelling through limbo. The darkness weighed on him, the mournful tears drowning him; so, he began to speak. The words themselves were unimportant but the sad sobs they masked were far more. Gradually the young woman’s tears subsided, drawn from her by his almost senseless rhetoric; but still, he spoke with words drifting in tone and content toward a place he did not wish to go.
From the corner of his eye he saw the lovely young woman staring at him, her face-swollen red around her eyes, and a stark contrast to the pastiness of her cheeks and forehead. The man looked at her, his heart twisting as he frowned at her questioningly. She stared back at him without comment and so he quickly looked back at the road.
“So, what’s your name?” He asked her over the murmur of the radio.
With her hands hidden under the long sleeves of the pullover, the woman crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at her feet.
“Marianne.” She answered simply, her voice still cold.
“Jacob.” The man crossed his right hand over his left arm for her to shake, still grasping the wheel with his left. He was not surprised when she ignored it and as he placed it back on the wheel a shard of rejection slipped through him.
“So where are you going?”
Something flickered across her face, Jacob missing it entirely. Marianne shifted in her seat and crossed her legs, right over left.
She had no idea where; she hadn’t thought of it. Quickly she rooted through her mind desperately, but there was nowhere, the car was heading away from the only place she had ever been welcome, and there was no way she could ever return.
Not after what had happened.
She opened her mouth to answer and then closed it with a snap.
Jacob looked over, biting his lip as he frowned in bleak consternation, then he slowly relaxed and spoke quietly.
“You don’t have anywhere to go do you?” Silently she shrugged and Jacob plunged on ahead. “You’re running from someone?”
Immediately she shook her head vigorously, her dark eyes looked up at him, fresh tears spilling down her face, her tiny voice saying, “No!”
The pain slammed through him and a sudden numbness pressed against any feeling in his arm; the car swerved slightly but Jacob caught it and regained control.
He could feel her sitting there, he did not need to look, it was like a block of ice in the shape of a woman had been placed in the car seat beside him. It drew heat from around him while radiating a menace. He knew that touching the ice would burn his fingertips and, as if the pressure of his fingers would rupture her skin, something dark would pour from it. Something dangerous.
Jacob could feel it, so far, so close.
The girl could deny running, but the flight was carried in the cold sweat that poured from her.
He sighed, and from the corner of his eye he saw her glance at him
“I spend most of my life on the road.” He said and he could hear the weariness in his words. “I sometimes get a bit scared that morning will come, and the sunlight will blind me.”
The girl didn’t answer him; he didn’t expect her to.
“My first job was as a video sales representative, actual cassettes. I’d travel all around the country visiting all these mum-and-pop operations to talk them into stocking movies that no one would even remember now.
“Some of the places I visited too… There was a store that had been an alleyway between it and the house next door. The owner had just blocked it off one end, shelved both walls and there was his store. When I got there, he was halfway through an argument with his neighbour, a little old lady and her two – rather large – sons.
“I watched for about ten minutes, then one of the sons went into the house and returned with a sledgehammer, so I made a quick retreat.
“One movie I had on my docket was called ‘El Topo’, Have you ever heard of it?”
Jacob glanced over to her, she didn’t answer him, but she was looking at him which was an improvement.
“No? Well, it’s this strange Spanish film that opens with this narration about moles going blind when they first see the sun. It’s not true but for ages, I believed it. Now of course I think of myself as El Topo, I sometimes sign myself in as that when I check into motels.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her cold tone had been replaced with an uncomprehending curiosity.
“I’m not sure.” He admitted.
She looked away, arms still crossed, hands still invisible.
When she spoke her voice had sounded so lost that the pain in his chest had returned. From the corner of his eye, he watched as her fine-fingered left hand appeared from its woollen cocoon, a large dark brown graze covering the pad of her thumb.
“What do you do now?” Her words were slow and deliberate as if she was thinking about each carefully as they left her lips.
“Cosmetics.”
She laughed, and the sound was like glass shattering.
“No really, I’m an exec who spends too much time in meetings. If I’m honest, a lot of the time I don’t know what I’m doing. I look at the others, they all nod in the right places and make the right sounds but I don’t think they know what they’re doing either.”
“I don’t think any of us do.”
The words were quiet and dripping with resignation.
“Do you want to know why I’m running?” She asked softly.
Jacob’s breath caught, Marianne’s eyes were that of a stormy sea, dark, dangerous, and inescapable. Jacob suddenly found that he did not want to know, under any circumstances, ever. But the woman’s eyes washed over him, their dark waves forcing him below their surface, he fought but failed and finally said ‘yes’.
Magic he couldn’t say ‘no’ to.
She smiled and her spell broke, the driver snapping his attention back to the ever-present white line before them. Her smile had been beautiful and perfect; like the smile one could imagine from some shark moments before a hearty meal. His heart thudded, the blood thumping behind his ears and his stomach shifted nauseously.
Marianne began her story with a steady and even voice that belied the tears Jacob was sure he had seen in her eyes.
With every word, the pain in his chest seemed to increase.
I need to start a long time ago; eight years is a long time when you’re twenty-two.
I was fourteen when I was first raped, he was a boy in my history class, and I was a virgin. I thought it was normal. I had nothing to compare it to you understand.
It sounds so silly when I say it out loud.
He said yes, and I said no. So, being the stronger, he took what he wanted. It wasn’t long before he left me lying on the thin, worn carpet tiles of the classroom with my blouse torn and my underwear ripped and twisted into a tangle around one ankle.
I never told a soul.
My mother died having me and my father… my father wasn’t much of a father. He never hurt me, but he never had much time for me either, I wonder now if he blamed me, I wonder if he looked at me and saw her, and between the hate and the love he couldn’t look into my eyes.
It wasn’t until a long time later that I connected what happened to me with the word ‘rape’. I was probably seventeen or so, and the incident had faded in my mind into a grotesque dream. Until recently, that’s exactly what I thought it was; a vivid dream like the ones I sometimes have.
Eventually, I met someone.
He was nice, and I liked him a lot, but when he began to ask for things, I couldn’t give I grew afraid and ran from him, and that’s when things went from bad to worse. I’d built a wall up around the things I wanted to forget, but the walls in my mind had begun to crumble to dust, and I couldn’t pretend it was just a bad dream anymore.
My father took me to see a shrink, and then a specialised councillor and I met other women who’d been hurt in the same way.
Eventually, I began to cope again, four years; a quarter of my life was spent trying to deal with it. I never left the house, unless it was to go to the centre, but after a while, I discovered that I could, just. The world began to feel real again.
It wasn’t all bad, there were moments of light. My father could at least look me in the eyes again, though his eyes had this sheen of reflected guilt, a blanket shame I see in men’s eyes sometimes when I talk to them about my past.
For the last year, things had been fine, until tonight. I even began to lose my fear of men.
There was a girl at the centre called Jenny who I spoke to more than most and it was her brother that I began to see. I figured that the brother of a rape victim must be safe.
Of course, that wasn’t the case. All you think happened did happen, all that and more besides.
We were on our way home; we’d gone to one of his friends’ parties, me, him, Jenny, and her boyfriend. Jenny was stoned, she was always stoned, she and her man had the back seat and they’d begun to use it before she passed out, but he went on and used her anyway.
The car slowed, then stopped.
From the corner of my eye, I watched as her brother grinned brainlessly and I followed his gaze. He was watching what was happening in the back seat through the rear-view mirror. He nibbled his lip and then turned his head around as Jenny’s boyfriend stripped off her clothes. I watched him as he watched, his eyes wide and I knew I was in trouble.
I turned my eyes to the darkness outside the car, the sun was setting by now and I could see the ragged silhouette of hills against the red of the sunset. I watched it and I felt my hands as they began to shake
Before long he bored with her, I suppose, and I felt eyes on me and the car turned to ice and my clothes turned to vapour. I probably begged; I hoped I didn’t, but I think I probably did. I know I fought and kicked, but it took years of forcing and punching and hurting before they had their fill. Then they sat back in the car and waited, I was outside. I don’t know how I got there, I was naked, and the earth was so cold. The whole Earth I mean, not just the tiny piece under me.
One of them said, ‘C’mon honey get in,’ and smiled.
He smiled a happy smile, a satisfied smile and something in me broke and I started to cry as I gathered my clothes and pulled them on. I saw a bruise across my stomach and I thought one of them must have punched me, but I didn’t remember it, then I saw more bruises and I didn’t remember any of those either.
But, at the same time, I did remember, but it was like the memory of a movie you once watched, perhaps a movie about a mole blinded by daylight.
I wanted to hurt them, but I did more than that…
In the glove box, he always kept a few tools. So, when I sat in the passenger’s seat, I calmly popped it open and reached in. My eyes were fixed on Tim, so I reached in blindly, grasping the first thing my fingers touched. He was looking at me like a fool, mouth half open to speak, a string of spit dangling from his lip and his face glistening with sweat.
The tip of the screwdriver I’d grabbed pierced his lip, smashing a tooth before I felt it pop through the back of his throat. I think it went into his spinal column because he twitched a spasm ripping through his torso and then just died: it was as simple as that. His ending was boring really, he died without a fight, without a scream or a struggle.
I heard the back door open and it was only then I heard a scream. At first, I thought Jenny had woken up but it wasn’t Jenny it was the other one. The door beside me was ripped open and I felt his hand in my hair.
When I landed on the ground beside the car it had started to rain, and I remember how good the cold felt on my face. He kicked me, and the air went out of me, but I didn’t feel it. Something had broken in me and I wasn’t feeling anything anymore.
That’s a lie, I was feeling one thing. I was feeling rage.
I shrieked a sound that made my ears ring and his hands went to his head as if the noise was rattling his brain, and I launched at him. He was big, a mountain, but I was like a cat, a wild cat that climbed him like a tree. I raked him with my nails and tore at him with my teeth. When I got to his face, I sucked in a mouthful of his cheek and bit down.
His blood was sweet, I spat out his cheek and bit down again. This time I caught his neck and as I bit down, I felt something crack between my teeth, I think it was his larynx.
His legs fell out from under our weight and we hit the ground.
My knees were in an inch of water and the rain that hit my back had increased to a torrent.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I felt huge. I felt as if I could reach up and pluck the moon from the sky and use it to smash his skull to dust, but instead, I slapped his reaching hand aside and went for his eyes.
Eyes are firm little things, but you only see that when you get them out whole. The first one burst as I went in for it. My nail tore it and it deflated, what came out was the husk of a huge squashed grape and it looked so much like it I almost popped it into my mouth. Instead, I threw it aside and went for the other one.
He’d stepped struggling, his leg kicked slightly, and his hand tapped against my arm feebly. The water around us had turned to ink in the moonlight, I knew that by the light of day, it would be red.
The other eye came out whole, and by this time even his hand had ceased moving.
I sat astride him, and his blood-soaked cold onto my flesh.
My heartbeat fit enough to burst and the bruises across me burned with each beat. The pain was like energy and when I looked into the sky, I thought I saw far-off lightning. It looked like a feeble mirror of what I felt inside.
I stood and walked to the car.
Jenny slumbered inside; her jacket had been thrown over her. One breast was uncovered and just over the nipple was a blue bruise ringed with teeth marks.
I wanted to kill her too.
I stood there for a long time thinking about it.
She led me here, she must have known.
Then I thought of the terror when she woke to the blood and death and I think that’s when I started to laugh. I was still laughing when I collected my things and began walking into the darkness, towards the hills that were now just stencils of black against the stars, and away from the town.
Jacob watched her from the corner of his eye, stealing a glance, then back to the road. The night seemed thicker, the rain harsher, the world darker.
Her tale told; the young woman looked down, studying her arms that were hidden beneath the thick sweater and slowly the world solidified around Jacob once more, the rumble of the road beneath them, the car’s engine, and the warm air coming from the heater becoming real as he was released from the vicious world of Marianne’s past.
“That’s all of it; I finished dressing as I walked along the road and time slipped away from me. Then you came along.” She paused for a lifetime.
Jacob set his face on an impassable wall, staring out over the headlight beams. He couldn’t put it all together. None of it could be true. He looked at her. She was barely bigger than a child. The sweater was large enough for three of her, but the seat dwarfed her.
“What are you going to do now?” He asked and his voice sounded remarkably calm.
He didn’t feel it.
She didn’t look at him, but he thought he saw the flicker of a smile.
“I don’t know.” She said, but he immediately saw the lie in the words.
Marianne knew that her words belittled the truth, she knew the plan. It had been forming in her mind since watching Jenny dribble in her drug-induced slumber. She realised now that her walk from the car had not been directionless; there had always been a plan deep down in her heart. Only one choice presented itself, an option hidden from Jacob’s view. Her right hand, forever hidden, unfolded like a flower exposing its secret treasure.
The craft knife, the one that lived in the car’s glove box, had a retractable blade and the sound it made as she slid it open sounded like the clacking of the tiniest train pulling into the smallest station.
It could bite deep into flesh, slashing through veins and tendons with little resistance.
The car slowed and Jacob’s eyes were drawn to the glinting blade.
“No.” Her voice was quiet but calm. Drawing out the two syllables as if she were talking to someone who could not understand the situation at hand. “Don’t slow down.”
Jacob pressed down on the accelerator and outside the cats’ eyes darted past more quickly.
His breaths came in deep shuddering gulps and the roof of his mouth felt suddenly dry. He saw the knuckles that clutched the plastic of the steering wheel stand out like blobs of red, but the rest of the flesh of his hands were as white as death.
Marianne cut a ditch into the heel of her right hand, the blade biting in a quarter of an inch, she withdrew it and blood flowed, then inserted the blade again slicing out a V-shaped gash, the flesh lolling out like a tongue.
“I know.” She said but the words didn’t carry so she spoke them again.
“You know what?” This time his words were small, little things that tumbled from his lips only to hide in the confines of the vehicle.
“The first one,” she said, and her words were breathless, excited, “the one who started everything; I know where he lives.”
And with those words, Jacob felt his world end.
“Turn around.” She said, and Jacob complied.
Their destination was a small town on the other side of the city, a collection of houses and businesses that slowly became a suburb of the city and would one day be swallowed up by it. Small towns were like that sometimes, they grew too close to something larger growing beside them and gravity did its job. Everything worked this way, planets were like that too, moving too close to a larger body in space and either becoming captured by it or destroyed by it.
Now Jacob realised people sometimes also shared that fate.
Even people like himself.
He thought he could see a slight blue cast in the sky over the horizon and he could not remember the last time he had slept. He thought he could remember almost hitting something on the road, he didn’t remember if Marianne was with him or not what that happened, but he remembered her being upset, so perhaps she had been.
He knew that he hadn’t slept in a long time and his very bones felt weary, but he had never felt less like sleeping. He also knew where they were going, and why they were going there, but he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and instead thought about his other destination, the one he knew now he would never get to.
His company had booked him a nice suite in a nice hotel, and the booking had been for five days even though the conference was only due to take place over three. The other two were for the meetings that they hoped would result from the networking he would be doing.
He was intending to keep his head down and have a couple of days lounging and reading on the company cheque, perhaps spend a little time in the bar, if they had one, chatting to whatever ladies he could find in there.
If he had pushed a little harder on the accelerator during the journey or stopped off once more for snacks or once less to go to the bathroom then he might be in bed by now, or in that bar, and he would be contemplating a few boring days of speeches.
Instead, he was contemplating murder.
He could see blue over the horizon now, and their destination was stencilled in black beneath it. All the buildings were less than four stories and almost all shared the same profile, one or two had lights on, and Jacob thought it looked like any other sleepy neighbourhood about to see a new day.
Beside him, Marianne looked up from the blade that had captivated her attention as the first of the town’s streetlights bathed the car. They tumbled from pocket of light to pocket of light, her face lit by the cold blue of the lamps only to disappear back into darkness. The blue made her skin sickly, and her smile twisted.
Jacob saw little of the broken creature he had picked up in the moonlight merely hours before. This creature was also broken but in a whole different way. The person that Marianne was, had been broken by cruelty, while this one wanted to pass that cruelty on.
The blade glinted.
“Left.” She said, and though the word was no more than a whisper he shuddered in response.
Turn right, he thought; but he obeyed her and not himself.
He could derail her plan, not that she had spoken of her intentions, but he knew them well enough, well enough to derail them at least. The blade was one reason he did not turn right, but it was not the most compelling.
She was also right.
He pushed the thought away, but it returned home.
She was right.
Retribution was the core of justice, and how else could she remove the mark that only those who dominate others can see without it? To no longer be a victim, to walk life free of its mark.
“Right.”
Turn left; turn left Jacob.
He turned right.
Hostage or accomplice were his choices.
You could just turn away; the next time she says left turn right.
Turn away, isn’t that what everyone’s been doing to her? Isn’t that why she had a blade in her hand looking for flesh to draw it through?
“I think we’re almost there.” She said, almost to herself. “Another right.”
Left. Left!
He turned right and his foot raised from the accelerator.
In front of them sat a dead-end.
Marianne sat there and did not speak and for a moment Jacob believed that she was nothing more than a doll made by a master of the craft. Her eyes were beautiful and wide with just a hint of sadness behind their smile and the whole countenance was framed with a perfect cascade of tousled hair. For the moment he just watched, and he thought his heart would break at the sight of her, and then the smile of her eyes infected the curve of her lips and they pulled into something transforming.
Cruelty.
Rage.
Retribution.
And then her hand crept to the door and unlatched it.
There were six houses, two on either side of the short road that led into the dead end and four that sat back further from the road in a semi-circle. In one of them, a light shone in an upstairs window, the glare diffused, making Jacob think it was probably no more than a night light.
Which probably meant children.
Each house was secluded from its neighbours like little islands in the darkness.
The breeze touched his face and he realised he had stepped out of the car, above them the clouds had vanished, and the rain had died.
Jacob didn’t remember stepping out of the car.
Marianne walked ahead of him, a thin stream of blood dribbled from the cut in her palm, Jacob watched his show as it stepped in a tiny puddle of it. He had nice shows, expensive ones, his mother had told him that women could tell a lot about a man by his shoes when he was young, and he decided always to have nice shoes.
Marianne was so small, that she probably only reached Jacob’s ribcage, and her feet were bare. The boots he had given her were far too big to walk in so she had discarded them near the car, but she still wore the huge pullover that hung almost to her knees, under this she must have still more the trousers he had given her, but he could not make them out in the darkness.
They stood in front of the third house from the right, one with the night light on inside.
The one Jacob feared had children inside.
Marianne raised the knife and pointed, and Jacob felt a piece of him die as she turned and walked towards the building, but even as his stomach turned and his breath caught in his throat he felt his feet begin to move to match hers.
His longer stride carried him closer to her with each step, even as they both advanced on the slumbering inhabitants of the house. She led him down the front of the building, to their left a pathway cut between the side of the house and a high hedge that offered the family inside some privacy. The night light on the floor above shone down the stairs inside and cast a pale yellow light on the frosted glass of the front door.
Marianne paused, her eyes moving over the front of the building as if searching for a way to gain entrance. As if somewhere there would be a window open through which she could stealthily gain access to those inside.
Jacob’s gaze shifted to the building and his spirit lifted when he saw all the windows secured and no way to them even if they had not been.
A moment of madness had been averted, and then he remembered her horrible story and he corrected himself; a further moment of madness averted.
But then he heard breaking glass and he knew that this wouldn’t end.
Blood splashed across the remaining glass, a toothy mouth through which Jacob could see the blue carpet of the hallway inside. A small shard of it had pierced Marianne’s fist, the one that clutched the open knife and the sight of it released Jacob from whatever spell he found himself under.
They both reached at the same time, she for the door and he for her arm.
The touch was electric.
Jacob had been thirteen when he had first kissed a girl, her name was Catherine and she was like an Amazon to him. He barely came to her shoulder and his friends made fun of him for being so much shorter than she was, but he didn’t care. He felt the tingles for a week afterwards, butterflies tickling with the same electricity over his insides and her eyes intruding on every thought.
He had never forgotten her.
But Marianne’s touch eclipsed her.
He could feel his neurons lighting up as if he had been wired to the grid, a shattering light rushing through his mind and his body trembling with the contact. He wanted to pull his hand away from her wrist the sensation was so intense, but he held on. He pulled her to him, and she screamed in rage and lashed out.
Jacob felt a line of heat slash across his arm, the warmth spilling from him, drawn by gravity towards the earth.
He held on, the cut was from wrist to elbow, deep enough to show bone, a wound that led to his very soul, one that could not be closed. The knife switched hands and Marianne opened his other arm, Jacob wresting the blade from her before it cut too deep.
Neither of them heard the man as he pulled open the front door, the broken glass under it grinding to splinters as the wood ground them into the hall carpet. Neither of them heard his shouted warning, and only one of them heard the shot.
The handgun was no larger than the palm of his hand, the gauge small, but it was big enough to enter the cheek and exit through the back of the skull. If the man had fired from a distance the damage may not have been so bad, but the distance between muzzle and target was less than the average height of a man.
It shattered teeth and cracked the roof of the mouth, sending shards of bone up into the brain.
When Marianne and Jacob hit the soggy earth, they were tangled into a mass the man could not distinguish. Blood spilt out from the head wound over the lawn looking like an oil spill in the moonlight, the night filled with the gasps of the dying and the struggles of those only just alive.
Jacob’s whole body shook.
Marianne still slashed with her blade.
The man moaned unintelligible words, the shouts of his family behind him barely registering.
The entwined bodies on the lawn slowed their movement, one of them ceasing entirely as the other fought to remove themselves from the tangle. A hand emerged, reaching and the man instinctively took it and pulled.
The face that greeted him was blood-smeared and tainted with mud and grass from the lawn, but even so, a spark of recognition flared in his mind.
“Do I know you?” He asked, his voice a whisper, and Marianne smiled but let her blade answer.
The grass was cold on what remained of Jacob’s face. It didn’t take long for the blood to cool and his arms to turn that particular shade of blue of the bloodless. Part of him screamed inside still, a remnant of himself that bridged the gap between this world and whatever came next.
He heard the noise of a knife cutting through flesh, but if it was his flesh, he could no longer feel it. The cold was distant now, everything was distant now. He knew it would not take long but he felt no fear of what lay next.
Jacob remembered Marianne’s dark sad eyes as he died. He remembered her tears and her ethereal beauty, but most of all he remembered her pain and his heart’s empathic but feeble echo of it.
They can’t touch you now, he thought.
On the cold anonymous lawn Jacob’s frozen heart stopped and across his lips, cold and dead as they were, stretched a sad smile.