Chapter 8
No one had come for her. No police car or sheriff's cruiser had pulled up the long drive. No Highway Patrol helicopter had appeared in the cloudy sky. Paige’s body ached as if she’d been shackled to the tree for a long time, but she could tell by looking at the sun that it had only been an hour, maybe a little longer. Had she actually heard someone answer her call? Maybe she’d only heard the wind blowing through the hollow limb of a dead tree and not the voice of a stranger hero. Maybe the sound had been a creation of her mind.
She told the doubting voice in her head to shut up. She hated that doubting voice. Someone had heard her, she told the voice. Someone was coming.
The crows returned. Some landed in the trees, some on the roof of the house, some on the grass around her. Several of the birds pecked at the ground for worms, a few cawed. She briefly wondered if they liked human flesh. Had they fed here before?
From atop the canyon Paige watched a rusty Ford pickup appear at the bottom of the drive. Her heart sprinted out to meet it.
The black gate swung open and the truck motored up the drive. This was it. This was the man who had heard her screams for help. Then it hit her. A stranger hero wouldn’t know the code to open the black gate. The man behind the wheel could only be Edward Patterson. Her heart dropped back into her stomach.
Edward parked, stepped out of the truck, tucked his shoulders back, and spread a thin smile across his lips. Paige kept her eyes on his. Took several deep breaths. She’d show him she wasn’t afraid.
He had broad shoulders and a quiet strength in the set of his jaw. His eyes were clear and confident, and even now that she knew what kind of animal he really was, she couldn’t help thinking how striking he looked--especially dressed in a pressed white shirt and dark pants with a long black overcoat that was clearly too warm for this time of year. She’d never seen him dressed in business clothes. He looked like a stockbroker or a bank executive. A VP gone American Psycho. Her mind flashed on the description of the man shooting women in the face that morning. The one sought by the police.
Could he be the man who was robbing and shooting women? The man Eddie had warned her about who had been all over the news? He certainly fit the description and she couldn’t help but wonder if she was next, if he planned on putting a bullet through her brain.
Edward glanced down at the wet ground where she’d peed.
She hadn’t gone outside since she was a child. It had been a disgusting experience then and it was a disgusting experience now. The urine had run down the inside of her leg and she still felt the wet trail of it drying on her skin. But if men could pee outside then so could she.
Edward flared his nostrils sniffing at the air. “It looks like you made a little mess,” he said.
She refused to answer. She wouldn’t allow him to make her feel shame in it.
“We speak when we are spoken to,” he said. “Doing otherwise is rude, and I have a very low tolerance for poor etiquette.”
He had some nerve. The man strips her, chains her to a tree, and then wants to lecture her about etiquette?
“Urinating is nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “It’s quite natural and in time you’ll learn to embrace the opportunity.”
Urinating as an opportunity? The man had obviously been sniffing paint.
“Edward, I can understand you wanting to play out some kind of kinky fantasy, but you’ve made a mistake. I’m not interested in you, and I’m not into this kind of thing. I’m married and my husband will be looking for me. He knows I’m with you.”
“Will he come looking? Can he truly know anything? He is lost.”
“If you’ll just let me loose we can forget about this.”
Of course, if by some chance he did let her down there was no way she was going to stick around for one single additional second. She was done with this pervert.
“You hang upon the tree because you refused to follow your true nature. You refuse to follow my commands. Continue down this path, and I will leave you hanging all night.”
She shivered at the thought of being chained to the tree all night, but she refused to play the submissive. She wouldn’t back down. “I don’t follow commands, you freak. That is my nature.”
Edward didn’t respond. He looked at her with a smile and eyes that groped her body. She wanted to cover herself, to hide herself away from those probing penetrating eyes, but she could do nothing. She waited in silence. His eyes stopped on her chest. He stared at her breasts.
Paige bristled. She didn’t like being stared at, especially in that place, in that way, by this perv. “You’re one sick puppy.”
Like two smoky moons breaking a horizon, his eyes lifted from her chest to meet her gaze, her first victory.
He took a step toward her and the shadows cast by the trees and the house grew thicker, moved closer. Her feet were still free, but he stopped just far enough away from her that she couldn’t reach him with them. If she could only get him in range, she would kick his penis to the stars.
She looked Edward over to see if she could find any weakness she could use to her advantage, maybe an old injury. Then she realized he had something in his hand. A rolled up towel. Somehow she hadn’t noticed it until now.
“I’m going to do what I want to you,” he said. “If you look deep within yourself you’ll recognize that I’m saving you, that you want this. You need someone else to take responsibility for you. You want someone else to tell you what to do, how to live, how to act, to focus you, direct you, channel you. You want your life to have a higher purpose and you need someone to show you what that higher purpose is. I will do all of this and more.”
She thrashed against her bindings. “You’re out of your skull. You need to be locked up in a rubber room.”
“It’s pointless to struggle. And it goes against your nature to do so. You cannot stop me,” he said. “And trying will only make things much more difficult for you.”
Reaching inside the towel, he pulled out a small tube. It looked like it might be some kind of lotion. He opened the top and squeezed a large amount of white cream into his hand then he dropped the tube to the ground.
“Hasn’t anyone ever taught you how to properly groom yourself?” he asked, circling the trunk of the tree, circling her.
What was he talking about? She was well groomed. She was always well groomed. She washed her hair every day, showered every day, kept her nails clean, and her legs and underarms shaved. She used extra anti-perspirant to make sure she stayed dry even though it would probably cause nine kinds of cancer. He couldn’t know about her condition. He just couldn’t. Besides, her condition had nothing to do with hygiene. He had to be making some odd reference to her peeing outside.
“If a man can pee outside, then so can I,” she said. Why was she explaining herself to him? He didn’t deserve any explanation.
Edward shoved the hand full of cream between her legs, rubbing her crotch, and smearing the cream on her skin.
“Get away from me you filthy pervert,” Paige spat.
She forced her legs together to keep his hand out, but even though her legs were free and his fingers were thick like polish sausages, she couldn’t keep them out. His hand touching her crotch disgusted her. The cream made everything slippery, and his hand and fingers were too strong.
“Get it off me.”
She kicked at him with her foot, but he stood beside her, so the angle was wrong, and her foot found only air.
Edward grabbed a fistful of her hair with his free hand, turned her head, and kissed her on the neck. His breath tickled her ear and sent her skin crawling.
“It looks like it’s wearing a toupee and that long-hair-bush-woman look simply will not do,” he said.
He bit her earlobe.
She breathed in sharply at the pain, shut her eyes, thought of gouging out his eyes with her bare hands.
“Are you th
inking nasty thoughts about me?” he asked. “It’s okay. You can tell me. I like nasty thoughts.”
“What is that stuff? What did you put on me?”
“Nothing that will hurt you, my dear.” He released her and stepped back wiping his hand off on the towel and tossing it over his shoulder like a waiter.
“You freak,” she spit.
“I understand how you feel, but you simply do not realize how fortunate you are. There are thousands of people out there who would love to be where you are. I know you find that hard to believe, but it is true nonetheless.”
“Then they’re freaks, too.”
He ignored her words. He studied her chest again.
“You’re nothing but an ugly pervert.”
He rushed her, pressing his body against her, and crushing her against the tree. She felt her hair being twisted up around his hand. Her head slammed back into the bark hard. It struck the tree with a thud and black spots filled her vision.
She blinked the spots away and a straight razor came into focus. He was holding it right in front of her face. She hadn’t even seen where it had come from. He smiled.
“There is nothing ugly here,” he said. “Do not take any lenience for weakness.”
He pressed the point of the blade to a spot above and in between her breasts. She couldn’t move. His hot breath was on her ear again, the wet huffing breath of a demon.
“It’s important for you to know, to understand, that you cannot escape me. No one will come rescue you and you will never be free of me. You are to be mine until your end, and I will choose that end. I will choose when it will come and how it will come and it will be many years from now. The sooner you learn these things, the easier it will be for you. Your path is now my path, and I am relentless. I will craft you into something which transcends this world. You will accept this and you will learn to do as I say without hesitation. The quality of your life will depend on it.”
He used his forearm to pin her head against the tree. Bark bit into the side of Paige’s face. He cut into the skin on her chest with the razor. She actually felt her skin open up. Felt the blade on her skin like one deep wasp sting after another, slowly working their way down her chest.
“Do you want the pain to stop?”
The question was absurd. Of course she wanted the pain to stop, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing her say it. She would die before she would give him that kind of control. She clenched her teeth together against the pain.
“Be very still and it will end quickly,” he said. “If you struggle it will only make the pain worse.”
She fought to remain perfectly still. It was difficult but manageable. There was no point in causing more damage by moving. She drew several slow breaths in through her nose and exhaled out her mouth. Stay calm.
The edge of the blade began to feel like a hot iron as he moved it through the skin of her chest in a methodical pattern. With each thump of her heart, the blade dug a little deeper. Where he cut there was bone, cartilage, and some muscle beneath the skin, but she could tell he wasn’t cutting deep enough to do serious damage to her. Droplets of blood ran down her stomach. The pain was relentless, but she had survived much worse. The blade was easy to suffer compared to the agony of having a sore split and tear open her skin. Something she’d felt a hundred times over.
As the pain of the cutting intensified, her mind automatically began using a pain reduction technique that, because of her affliction, had become a necessary part of her teen life.
Seeking out something familiar, she saw an outcropping of red and yellow wildflowers. She focused her thoughts on the flowers and everything she knew about them to help ease the pain. The flowers were called Indian Blanket. They were the flowers she’d painted when she’d met Eddie. There was a legend about them that started with an old Indian blanket maker.
The old man created beautiful blankets but was dying. Realizing he had only a short time left, he wove a burial blanket and when he died his family dutifully wrapped him in it. The Great Spirit was very pleased because of the beauty of the blanket, but also saddened because the people would no longer be able to appreciate the old man’s beautiful creations. So the Great Spirit decided he would give a gift to everyone the old man had left behind. The next spring red and yellow wildflowers, the colors of the old Indian’s blankets, appeared on his grave.
Paige imagined a blanket of flowers, forced her mind to picture it in the smallest of details, but Edward’s voice dragged her away from the blanket, back to the pain.
“Scars serve to remind us of our experiences,” he said.
If she was going to die then so be it, but she didn’t want to die listening to a lunatic’s philosophizing. What did he know about scars? What did he know about the pain they caused?
“Just shut up and do what you’re going to do,” she said.
“Tsk, tsk,” he responded, raising the knife back up to her face, touching the blade to her cheek. “Would you rather I work here?”
Her body trembled like a rattlesnake’s tail. “Just kill me and get it over with. I would rather die than listen to your idiotic rambling.”
“I see what you’re trying to do,” Edward said. “It will not work. You cannot provoke me into killing you. I’m not some uncalculating psychopath who kills for pleasure. You are here for a much higher purpose. But know that I can do things to you, things far worse than death, things that you could not imagine even in your wildest nightmares.”
He released her.
She choked back her tears before they fell. Edward didn’t deserve her tears. Forcing herself to look down at her chest, she saw multiple cuts and a wide streak of blood running down between her breasts.
A metallic squeak of an outdoor water faucet sounded behind her. Water sputtered and smacked the ground. He came back to her holding the running water hose.
He stepped around the tree and turned the hose on her stomach. Cold water lapped at her skin below her navel. He ran the water back and forth several times, washing off some of the cream he had put between her legs. Chunks of the white goop dropped to the ground with a plop.
With his free hand, he took the towel from his shoulder and shoved it between her legs. He drove it in and out between her thighs removing what was left of the cream.
She didn’t fight. Whatever the substance was he had put on her, she wanted it off. An odd aroma, like the chemical smell of hair being permed, wafted through the air.
He pulled the towel away. Clumps of cream and her pubic hair covered the towel.
My God. The word humiliation did not match what she felt. He had chemically removed her pubic hair.
The veil of hair that had helped to obscure the unsightly scars left by her disease was gone.
Her whole body reddened with the knowledge that she was naked beyond what she had ever thought possible. With Ms. Whyte’s discovery, her secret had first been exposed and now it was being exposed again. Even though she had grown to understand her condition, even though the painful sores had left her, leaving nothing but angry scars behind, she still felt like that little girl all over again. It wasn’t rational. She wasn’t a child, wasn’t that young girl in Ms. Whyte’s office.
Her PE teacher had only been trying to help. Paige knew that now. She’d wanted to understand why Paige grimaced in pain when she performed stretches, why she frequently refused to dress out, what it was that kept Paige from participating in gym class. She had been afraid Paige was being physically abused by her parents. But knowing Ms. Whyte’s intentions hadn’t changed the degradation Paige had felt at being exposed. Couldn’t erase the look of disgust she’d seen in Ms. Whyte’s eyes when she’d discovered her oozing sores.
Paige had spent most of her life hiding the sores that had slowly turned to unsightly scars, scars that were the calling card of her disease Hidradenitis Suppurativa, scars that had brought humiliation down on
her like nothing else could. And now she was feeling that humiliation all over again.
Edward studied the look on her face and smiled at her look of horror.
She closed her eyes. There was nothing she could do. She didn’t have the power to become invisible.
“You have nothing to fear,” he told her. “I will not hurt you in the way you are thinking. I am not a rapist.”
In the throbbing red-tinged darkness behind her eyelids, she heard him move behind the tree.
She didn’t believe him. The man was a liar and any moment now he would sexually assault her, discover the ravaged area around her perineum. He might even think her unclean, unworthy of even rape.
The sound of water from the hose drifted back around the tree. There was another metallic squeak, and then the sound of water splashing to the ground stopped. Beyond tears, Paige’s mind rebelled against what was happening, wanted to leave her body, to wander away from the world in search of a place that was safe. But she fought to remain in this place and time, fought to remain Paige, although she wasn’t sure why. Wouldn’t she rather be somewhere else, anywhere else? Nothing could be worse than this. Could it?
She heard the door to the house open and then a few moments later close. Still, she couldn’t open her eyes. Couldn’t bear to look. As long as she kept them closed she could imagine she would soon wake from this nightmare. Continuing to see reality would push her over the edge and into a chasm out of which she knew she could never climb. Then she heard the crunch-scuffle of his boots across the pavement and then dirt. He was coming toward her again. Her body involuntarily recoiled at his approach.
Something cool pressed against her lips and cold water washed into her mouth. She drank. The water rushed her dry throat. Paige hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. It was as if she had been without water for days.
She gulped nearly all of the water. Some of it ran down her chin and into the cuts on her chest, chilling the fire of those wounds if only for a few seconds.
“That’s a good girl,” he said.
Good girl? That brought her anger back. She snapped her eyes open and spit the last of the water in Edward’s face. She was drained, didn’t have the strength to fight him then, but she wasn’t going to give up. Not now. Not ever.
He wiped the water from his face with his hand and smiled his awful smile again.
“You are very beautiful,” he said.
Paige’s eyelids drooped. Everything in her vision took several steps back away from her. Her consciousness pulled away from her body. Vaguely, she heard Edward say, “The spirit and the flesh should be one.”
What did he mean?
He stroked her hair. She saw his eyes wander across her body. The world spun. She wondered if she was dying. A part of her hoped she was. It occurred to her that he might have drugged her. She tried to blink her eyes awake. She didn’t want to fall asleep. She might never wake up.
Edward’s hand was on her check, caressing her. There was music. No, not music. What is it? It sounded familiar. She concentrated on the sound but her brain wouldn’t cooperate. Was it humming? It was. He was humming the song “Only You.”
Everything in her vision stood haloed by darkness. His hands were on her stomach. His face came closer.
Then, even as she lost consciousness, she heard the ferocity in his voice.
“This must not be.”
A Perfect Canvas Page 8
