Bare Girl

by Bella Forrest

  Eddie was shivering all over now, unable to look at her.

  Suddenly his head snapped up and his spine straightened. The abrupt change made her take half a step back. He glared down at her, almost standing at attention.

  “You’re not remembering all of it, Erin. What else did they call me?”

  They.

  Vague memories of other girls, other boys. Laughter and tears. More tears than laughter, and much of the laughter cruel. She couldn’t focus on faces, couldn’t recall names.

  But Eddie had been there too, an older boy of about twelve. He had looked almost grown up to five-year-old Erin. She couldn’t say for sure, but she had the impression that all the other children had been small like her. Eddie, however, had been a few years older than all of them. The man with the old hands had put him in charge. He had been prince among the children.

  “Prince Eddie,” she whispered.

  “Ah, little Erin,” he said in a mocking, proud tone, so different than the hesitant stuttering of a moment before. “You were always my favorite. His favorite, too. Even then we could tell you would go far. The thing is, he never realized that you would go far enough to put a glitch in his plans. I could see that, but he never did.”

  “I don’t understand. You were abducted too?”

  His haughty façade faltered, then collapsed. He looked at his feet for almost a full minute, creating a silence that drowned out the sounds of the busy sidewalk and hurrying crowd swirling around them.

  “No. I wish I had been,” he said at last, his words barely audible. “It would be easier then. I envy you. I suppose it’s easier when you are one hundred percent victim.”

  Those last words brought up another memory in her, another vague impression. Prince Eddie had been a tyrant. Erin had feared him almost as much as the man with the old hands. She supposed the other children had too. She could almost hear the distant sound of sobs and pleading echoing down over the decades.

  “So you were…”

  “His son,” Eddie husked.

  Another silence.

  “Why are you here? Why now?” Erin asked.

  That question brought back his bravado. He straightened again, took on the look of a different person. Erin began to wonder if this was some sort of rapid-change form of bipolar disorder or multiple personality disorder.

  He inclined his head toward the museum. “Let’s go inside. I’ve always loved this place. Don’t get over the ocean enough. I still live in England, you see. I came over especially to see you. Happy birthday, by the way. I wish I could have been there for the occasion but the time wasn’t quite ripe.”

  He started walking up the steps, Erin falling in beside him.

  “You said something about the Isabel case. You know something about that?”

  “Wait for it,” he said in a dismissive manner.

  “A woman has been abducted. I don’t have much time.”

  “You have more time than you think, but no, you don’t have much.” Eddie paid for their tickets and they entered. Being in the thick of the crowd, Erin held back from asking the million questions swirling in her head. They confused her thoughts and she felt they held down more memories trying to well up from her subconscious like blood from a shallow wound.

  Why now? Why were these memories coming up now? She hadn’t had any new memories since she had been freed.

  That hadn’t been for lack of trying. The police had grilled her. Her parents had tried to coax her to talk. A steady parade of psychologists had laid her on a thousand sofas and tried to get her to step back into her early childhood. Even hypnotherapy had failed.

  And now, at age thirty-one, when the number of her years on Earth corresponded to the number those old hands had scrawled on her own skin, memories had begun to invade her dreams. Facing Eddie stirred up the memories until they bubbled in her head, threatening to boil over.

  Eddie had been his son, and he had been older, he would remember more. Eddie could answer all her questions.

  Prince Eddie, she corrected herself. He was never your friend.

  Eddie led her through the Great Hall, taking a right into the Egyptian galleries. An entire Egyptian tomb dominated the first room. The rectangular building of large stone blocks stood in the middle of the large gallery. Erin recalled this from an earlier visit. When you got closer you could see figures carved on the inside walls, some still retaining the paint that had made them bright and colorful all those centuries ago.

  Eddie stopped in front of it and sighed.

  “Amazing, isn’t it? An entire Egyptian tomb more than four thousand years old. It’s called the Tomb of Perneb. He was a courtier to the pharaoh. This kind of tomb is called a mastaba, that’s Arabic for bench. It kind of looks like it, doesn’t it?”

  Erin tried to control her impatience. He must know that she was aching for answers, but Eddie had always liked to be in control. She remembered that now.

  “People tend to glance at this one and go on to see the more famous Temple of Dendur on the other end of this wing. I must admit it’s the more impressive one but I’ve always preferred the Tomb of Perneb. Tombs over temples, eh? That’s us. It’s from Saqqara, near Cairo. That’s where the first pyramid was built, the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Basically they built a bunch of mastabas, one on top of the other, each one smaller than the last. Couldn’t figure out how to make a real pyramid at first. Practice makes perfect,” he said, smiling at her.

  “I didn’t come here for an Egyptology lesson.”

  “As impressive as it is, it’s in a bit of a state, isn’t it?” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “A bit like me. Here, I’ll show you something a bit more like you.”

  He led her through the Egyptian wing, past mummies and statues and gold figurines, the two of them wending their way through the busy crowd and ducking a tourist with a selfie stick taking a picture of himself next to the statue of a goddess. Eddie gave the tourist an evil glare and led Erin further along one of the galleries to pause in front of a slab of black stone covered with hieroglyphs.

  “Look at this,” he sighed. “It’s from the New Kingdom, much more recent but still three thousand years old. Look, there’s not a scratch on it. As perfect as the day it was made.”

  He gave her a wicked grin.

  “But this doesn’t symbolize you. No, not at all. Now let me show you what I brought you here to see.”

  He led Erin into another room, her anger and impatience rising. It was only at that moment that she realized that she could call the police. He claimed to know something about the Isabel kidnapping, and he certainly knew plenty about hers. Eddie needed to be taken into custody. Odd that this obvious step hadn’t occurred to her before.

  But she held back. If arrested, he might stop speaking. People with a deep need to be in control often did. Once in jail it was the only power they had left, and they guarded it zealously.

  He stopped in front of a large glass display case. In it lay row upon row of little figurines. They all looked like miniature mummies, with their feet and legs bound together. Some had no arms while others had low bumps crossing their chests to suggest arms. Each had a clearly crafted face, though, and a few hieroglyphs written on their chests and legs. The display case must have held a hundred of them, of all sizes and made of wood or some sort of glazed ceramic. A few looked like they were carved from ivory. Some were beautiful while others were crudely made.

  “These are called ushabti,” Eddie said. “The ancient Egyptians placed them in tombs to act as servants for the afterlife. While the person was alive the ushabti were nothing but little statues, but when that person passed to the Western Lands, the place of the dead, the ushabti came to life to do his bidding.”

  Erin turned to face him.

  “Enough of the tour. I’m not a scared little girl who will play your mind games any more. What does all of this have to do with me?”

  Eddie’s confident grin faltered, and then rallied a moment later.

  “You m
ean what does it have to do with us? All of us. We’re like ushabti, Erin. His ushabti. He’s dead now, and we are all doing his bidding to maintain his immortality.”

  Chapter 10

  “Let’s go find some place to chat where we will have a tad more privacy,” Eddie said. When he saw Erin hesitate he hurried to say, “No, don’t worry, just some park bench or something. You have nothing to fear from me, not directly anyway.”

  They walked out of the Egyptian wing in silence, Eddie striding forward with a nervous gait, his right hand twitching a little. Once in the Great Hall he hesitated for a couple of seconds before ducking into the gift shop where he bought a book on ushabti and gave it to her.

  Suddenly he looked shy. He opened his mouth to speak, only managed an awkward blushing stutter, and then inclined his head toward the entrance.

  The unexpected gift brought up an old emotion in her. Eddie hadn’t been all bad. She couldn’t remember what he did or he had been forced to do, couldn’t even remember clearly what he had looked like as a child. She sensed, though, that while he had been part of the whole sick dynamic at that house, he hadn’t been an entirely willing participant.

  He was a child, just like me, Erin reminded herself. Yes, but he’s not a child anymore, and he’s still playing his control games.

  It was a bizarre sensation to be interacting with someone based not on memories, but subconscious reactions created by events she couldn’t remember. She hoped he’d help her remember now. She felt helpless next to him—this weak, twitching, obviously unbalanced man.

  They walked for a time in silence as Erin grew increasingly impatient. She felt like throttling him and demanding he tell her everything he knew, but she sensed that wouldn’t be any more productive than calling the police. He would tell her what he wanted to tell her, in his own time.

  Erin glanced at the book in its plastic Met Museum bag. The book would have his fingerprints on it. Yes, it might prove a useful present.

  As they got out of the crowd Eddie seemed to relax a little. His shoulders lost some of their tension yet remained slumped. The Met stood on one end of Central Park and Eddie led her there. It was now late afternoon, and office workers sat on benches chatting on cell phones or with their eyes closed, enjoying the sunshine of this late spring day. A few families were scattered about, the adults lying on blankets together as the children rolled around and laughed. Tourists took pictures of fountains and trees, their eyes filled with wonder as if there were no fountains and trees where they came from. Eddie seemed a million miles away from this happy, tranquil scene even though he was right in the middle of it. Erin felt the same.

  They found an unoccupied bench and sat down, Eddie at the far end and Erin at the other.

  Erin stared at him. He gazed at the grass at his feet, his mouth forming words that didn’t come out. Erin’s patience reached the breaking point.

  “I’ve had enough, Eddie, I—”

  “You weren’t raped.”

  The words came rushing out, and as he said them Eddie managed to look her in the eye.

  Then he curled in on himself and looked back at his feet again.

  Erin let out a long, slow breath, feeling a lifetime of tension and doubt ease out of her body.

  She had been a virgin when she had been found, and there had been no other evidence of sexual trauma. Erin, however, had always assumed that she had been molested— there were plenty of things a man could do that wouldn’t show up on any medical test.

  She had lived with that assumption all her life, and it had changed her in profound ways. The years of expert therapy and a loving father had kept her from being terrified of strangers or developing sexual hang-ups. Erin had learned that if you dug into the pasts of most prostitutes or people with extreme kinks, most often they had experienced some form of sexual trauma in their early development.

  Erin hadn’t developed that way. Instead she had become a sort of emotional recluse. She had formed a close bond with her father, one that had remained strong throughout the rough years of her adolescence and continued into her adulthood. At an age when most children only saw their parents occasionally and called perhaps once or twice a week, she lived only a few blocks away from him and visited him daily when work permitted. With his declining health those visits had become more frequent.

  But there had been few close friends beyond him, and no boyfriends. On the surface she had been well-adjusted, getting good grades in school and graduating with honors from college. But she knew that people around her sensed a slight detachment. When she had started both high school and college there had been a fair number of young men who had made passes. They had always been politely but firmly rebuffed. After a few such incidents word got around and people stopped trying. A wicked rumor started in high school that she was a lesbian. That had kept the men away, but attracted a shy, quiet girl named Melanie who befriended her and one day came out of the closet, thinking that in Erin she had found someone who shared her feelings.

  She, too, had been rebuffed.

  Erin had felt bad about that, not because she had any more feelings for women than she had for men—that part of her psychology seemed to have been permanently switched off—but because she had obviously hurt a vulnerable teenager. She hoped Melanie hadn’t been too bruised by her rejection.

  She hadn’t felt a similar solicitude for the boys. They had only been after one thing, and when they saw they wouldn’t get it, they had shrugged their shoulders and moved on.

  So growing up with the knowledge, but not the memory, of being abused, had separated her from the world. She was a bit like a more socially capable Eddie, passing through the crowd while not being a part of it.

  All these thoughts shot through Erin’s head like lightning. It was only a few seconds before she replied.

  “Nothing? He did nothing?”

  Eddie shook his head. “Not to you, or me, or any of the other children.”

  “I remember him drawing a bath for me,” Erin said, feeling some of the tension coming back.

  Eddie shrugged. “You were five years of age. You could hardly draw a bath for yourself.”

  Erin nodded, relaxing again.

  Eddie looked at her with concern.

  “Have you spent all this time assuming that’s what happened?”

  “Of course!” she snapped, suddenly angry. “Wouldn’t you? He took my innocence away whether he touched me or not!”

  Eddie shrank from her.

  “It’s not my fault!” he pleaded. “I was twelve. I may have been older than you but I was still a child. He was my father and I was under his control.”

  Erin felt a pang of pity for him, but steeled herself. Now that she had Eddie on the defensive she’d get some answers from him.

  “So what happened? Tell me everything you know.”

  Eddie shook his head. “I can’t. I’m not allowed. He won’t allow it. But I can tell you what you need to know.”

  “Eddie. You need to tell me everything—”

  Eddie raised a silencing hand, suddenly the erect, confident boss he had been with the younger children. Prince Eddie. The second in command. Heir to the throne.

  “What I can tell you is a bit about that number you’ve been wondering about all this time. Now listen up, because I don’t like repeating myself. As you might have guessed by my sudden appearance, ‘thirty-one’ refers to your age. He was—”

  “Who’s ‘he’? What was his name?”

  Eddie waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, angered at being interrupted.

  “You can find that out easily enough now that you know my name. It doesn’t matter in any case, because finding out his name won’t tell you any more about what happened. To all appearances he was a slightly eccentric recluse. He was never in trouble with the law. Now as I was saying, he drugged you for much of your stay with us, as the doctors discovered. That was to keep you docile and also curb your memories. Father doesn’t want to be caught. He feels his work is importa
nt and wants it to continue. The idea is that all those muted memories would come back with a trigger, so he gave you the trigger of the number thirty-one on your hand, knowing the press and the police would make a big thing of it and it would stick in your mind. He knows that now that you’re thirty-one it will be foremost in your thoughts, no matter how much you’ve tried to put your past behind you.”

  Suddenly something struck her.

  “Wait, you said he was dead and now you’re suddenly talking about him in the present tense. Is he dead or not?”

  “Yes, he’s dead, thank God, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone. I wasn’t playing games with that ushabti book. He has just as much control over us now as he ever had.”

  Erin shifted in her seat. “How?”

  “You and the others weren’t abducted to be sexual playthings like everyone assumed. No, his intentions were far more twisted. Father was obsessed with death, which I suppose is why he studied Ancient Egypt so much, and made me study it too. For the ancient Egyptian, their entire life was an elaborate preparation for when it ended. It was the afterlife that mattered. With the proper rituals and techniques, it was possible to maintain life indefinitely. Look at all the trouble they went through with mummification and the ushabti and—”

  “What does this all have to do with us?”

  Erin felt a strange twist inside her when she ended the question with “us”. She had meant to say “me” but that wasn’t how it had come out.

  She was part of a community, she knew that now. She was one of the children. One of his children.

  And this unbalanced man sitting next to her was one of them too.

  And he was also one of the abusers, a tool in a pair of old hands molding the children as he saw fit.

  “He wanted to mold a community of people who would do his bidding after his death, like the ushabti. My father was a brilliant but weak man. He inherited a small fortune and never had to work, which was good, I suppose, because he was so socially maladjusted that he could never have kept a job. So he spent his life in quiet, solitary study, obsessed with gaining the power over others that he never had in life. He got degrees in psychology, pharmacy, and comparative mythology. He found another oddball to marry, my mother, although she died shortly after giving birth to me. I suspect he did her in, although I can’t prove it.”