by Bourne, Sam
That calculus sped through her in the time it took to blink. Same with the question of whether to march towards the bathroom and ambush the intruder or lie in wait for him here. The element of surprise, compared to the greater room for manoeuvre offered by the larger space she was in now, set against the ability to hide – all these factors she weighed up and against each other in a splinter of a second. And through it all, she heard another quieter thud and then another – the footsteps of a man who had come to get her.
She tucked herself in behind the return on the open kitchen, before it gave out to the corridor leading from the bathroom. She hadn’t decided what she would do or how she would do it, but a kind of animal reflex, seizing authority from her frontal cortex in an internal, neurological coup, had put her there. Now she awaited further instruction from her instincts.
It came when the bathroom door creaked open. She moved out, knife glinting, standing not in the narrow span of the corridor, but with the space of the kitchen to her right. What she saw sent a flood of terror flowing through her, the fear a physical substance, like a toxic, yellow chemical gushing into her bloodstream.
Before her was a man two inches taller than her, dressed only in black, his face covered in a black ski mask. He stood still, as if adopting a combat stance in a martial arts class. The fixedness of his pose, its rigidity, made Maggie wonder if he too was shocked, even frozen, by the sight of her.
‘No knives,’ he said, which added surprise to her alarm. She had not expected him to say those words, in a flat, uninflected American accent; she had not expected him to speak at all. Somehow that helped. He was no longer an undifferentiated threat, a masked intruder. He was now specific. She did not have to repel an abstract menace. She had to defeat this individual person, vulnerable enough to have his own voice.
She too adopted a kind of simian posture, her hands hanging by her side, drawing attention to the knife in her right hand. Just as she was contemplating her next move, and without warning, he thrust out his right leg and, in a single, accurate, darting movement, kicked the blade from her grasp. She heard the knife skittering across the wooden floor behind her.
‘Like I said, no knives,’ he repeated, in such a way that she had her first, subconscious intimation of what was happening.
Now, emboldened, he stepped forward and grabbed her by her wrists. Without delay, she raised her knee sharply upward, so that it pile-drove into his balls. He reeled backwards, his hands clutching at his groin, towards the bathroom door through which he had just emerged. Maggie followed him as he tottered back, eventually pushing at his shoulders with both hands, her palms flat. Using all her strength, it was enough to make him lose balance and fall backwards, hitting his head on the wall as he went down.
She was searching for another weapon, wondering about the razor in her bathroom, when she instead dashed back down the corridor to retrieve the knife. She had taken the first step and then the second when she felt herself plunging downward, landing hard on her knees. He had pulled at her ankle.
Now, without getting up, he crawled until he had caught up with her, letting his weight fall on top of her, his groin pressing into her backside. He placed one hand over her outstretched wrist and was attempting to pin down the second.
The sensation of his proximity to her, and what it threatened, filled her with a rage she had rarely known, which metabolized first into will and then into strength. She moved to raise herself, to throw him off her back, like a horse ejecting an unwanted rider. Somehow, she found the might to do it and, once he was off, she sprang to her feet.
She got as far as the knife, but overshot, accidentally kicking it forward. She could feel him getting up, moving towards her. She wheeled around to face him. She could hear her own panting, and feel her features contorted into a mask of complete fury. She loathed this man with a hatred so pure it was physical.
Instinct made her want to kick him in the balls once more, but some inner voice of restraint warned her of the risk: he might catch her leg before it reached him, then use it to pull her down again. She felt her right fist turn into a ball and understood that her body had decided for her.
She all but ran at him, holding up her left palm like a traffic cop. It was a decoy, distracting his gaze from her right arm, which now launched a single hard jab at his jaw. Except he jerked his head upward and out of the way, so that her fist landed hard in his throat.
Through the mask she could see his eyes widen, as he let out a dry, rasping noise. She seemed to have hit his windpipe.
She worked hurriedly now, anxious not to lose advantage. She grasped his head in both hands, as if holding a watermelon, and with no ceremony rammed it hard into the wall. He slumped down, and she moved with him, her hands still on his head, crashing it into the wall a second time. Now he crumpled.
For a second or two she thought she’d killed him. For an insane second, she wondered if this man was in fact Jeffrey Todd, and if she was about to re-run the events at Natasha Winthrop’s house four nights earlier. But then she saw his chest rise, and heard a lowing sound come from his mouth.
She darted back along the corridor to pick up the knife, then into the kitchen where Uri had somewhere stashed a ball of rope. (He’d had a notion about constructing a washing line on the fire escape.) Knife in hand, she opened first one drawer, then another, looking up every other second at the doorway: she feared the man would be back, standing there, revived and arisen, his eyes blazing. This time, he would be determined to finish her off.
She should call the police, she knew that. And yet she also knew what that would mean: delay as she explained the situation, more delay as they headed over here. There was no time for that, not while this man was just a few feet away. To say nothing of the risk that the police would do to her what they had done to Natasha, that they wouldn’t believe her, that she would end up the one accused. She had rammed his head very hard into that wall.
Now she came to a third drawer, filled with dishcloths, reels of Scotch tape, old power cables, a defunct computer charger. She slammed it shut. He would be stirring now, recovering his strength . . .
She flung open a cupboard. Saucepans, cheese grater, handmixer. Then another: dustpan and brush, vodka, a kite she’d bought for when the nephews visited. Come on, come on.
There was a rustle and another low moan from the corridor. She moved, with her knife, and peeked into the corridor: he was still there, though now he was stirring. She went back in and there it was, on the counter the whole time. She remembered now: Uri had given up on the washing line and put the rope there. Maggie had not moved it in three weeks.
Now she grabbed it, and a second later was standing over the man who had broken into her house. She considered shoving his head into the wall one more time, just to be sure. But then she imagined his corpse in this room, and that thought horrified her even more than the sight of him, breathing noisily now. So she bent down, used the blade to cut off a section of rope and, as swiftly as she could, tied his hands together. Then she tied them again, tugging at the rope to test her handiwork. She did the same to his ankles.
Now she stood back up to full height, planting her feet into the floor to steady herself. With the knife in her right hand, held about six inches away from his throat, she gripped with her left the man’s ski mask. She held it for a moment, like a waiter about to lift a domed, silver cover off a dish, and then, swiftly, she pulled it off.
Revealed was the face of a man in what she guessed was his early thirties. He was white, clean-shaven, with features that were somehow childish. She understood why he wore a mask. Without it, he was not a man to fear.
The act of exposure had startled him, forcing his eyes wide open. Maggie used that as her cue to shift round so that she was standing directly in front of him. She gave him a second to flex, to realize he had been restrained and then, as if in resignation, to resume leaning, sideways on, into the wall.
>
She was about to begin her interrogation when he surprised her by speaking first. His voice was slurred, as if he’d woken from a hangover. Or been concussed.
‘Is this your thing?’
‘What?’
‘This,’ he grunted, using the failed movement of his hands to indicate his current situation, bound from top to bottom.
‘What do you mean, “my thing”?’
‘This why you got me here? You get off on this shit?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘’Cause I gotta tell you, I don’t.’
‘You just broke into my house. You. Not me.’
‘No one “broke” into anything.’ He was slurring badly. She wondered if she had inflicted brain damage. Or broken a couple of teeth.
‘Well, actually, they did. You broke into this apartment.’
‘So you changed your mind, is that it? Decided you didn’t want to go through with it?’
‘Listen. I’m about to call the police. You can save all this bullshit for—’
Now his face was that of a panicked child. She wondered if he was even younger than she thought. ‘No, no. Please no. Not the police. I’ve got a job. I’d lose my job if this came out. No way.’
‘You’re a fucking rapist. You think I give a fuck about your job?’
‘No way. It’s not rape when you consent. You don’t get to—’
‘Consent? What the fuck?’ She could feel the fury rising in her throat. ‘You burst into this house wearing a ski mask. There was no consent.’ She was conscious of the knife still in her hand.
‘Once you’re on the site, that’s consent.’
‘What?’
‘Everyone knows that. Once you agree to the terms of that site, that’s the consent right there. Don’t believe me, go check. As soon as you gave your information and checked the box, that was your consent.’
‘What box? What?’
‘The site. You know, where you signed up.’
‘I promise I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’
‘Let me get my phone.’
‘No way.’
‘All right. Look, it’s in this pocket.’ He used his chin to indicate a breast pocket. She could see the bulge, under a Velcro flap.
Gingerly, she got nearer.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I can’t do anything. Just pull it out.’
She flipped the flap and brought out the phone, handling it carefully, as if her fingers were tongs. ‘All right,’ she said, taking two steps back. ‘What’s the code?’
She followed his prompts, opened the phone, clocked the picture of the attacker with what she presumed was a girlfriend, and then did as he instructed – going into his browser, set in ‘Private’ mode, rolling through the tabs until she was in the right place.
The page took the form of a low-spec message board, formatted like a website from the turn of the century. All words, no pictures. ‘Keep scrolling,’ he said.
And then, without further instruction from him, she found it. There in black and white was her first name and her precise street address.
‘What is this?’ she said.
‘It’s a . . . forum. For, er, you know. Like-minded people.’
‘What kind of people?’
He was colouring around his neck. ‘People who, you know.’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘It’s for people who share rape fantasies.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘So you didn’t post on there?’
‘No, I fucking did not.’ Maggie reached for a kitchen chair. She needed to breathe. ‘You mean, men who want to rape someone and women who want to be—’
‘—who fantasize about being raped. No one is actually raping anyone.’
‘You’re just forcing women to have sex with you.’
‘It’s role play. I play a role. You – you know, the women – play a role.’
‘So that’s why you said, “No knives”?’
‘Yeah. It can get kind of dangerous, once knives are involved. Things can go wrong.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘It’s sort of a rule. In the community.’
‘Community? Christ alive, you’re not making a quilt.’
He gave a grimace of pain.
‘And you saw my name and address on there and you thought that meant I wanted to play out a rape fantasy?’
He nodded. ‘That’s kind of the way it works.’
‘Why me?’
‘What?’
‘Of all the listings on there, why did you come here?’ Her breathing had barely settled. She still sounded as if she’d run up three flights of stairs.
‘It’d only just gone up. I like the fresh listings. I mean, everyone does. But I’m really on it, so.’
‘Did you just say, “fresh listing”?’
‘You know, a new person on there. And you sounded very hot in the description.’
Maggie looked again at the phone. She was struggling to navigate her way around the very dense website. Her name and address had been embedded in what looked like a customized spreadsheet. Now she saw that that information was in a box, and that alongside it was another which read: Mid-thirties, slim, fit, long auburn hair. She felt a dull nausea stir in the well of her stomach. It meant someone, someone who knew her well enough to describe her and give her home address, had doxxed her – placing her personal details online for all to see – but, much worse, had offered her up to be raped, or near as damn it. The idea of it sickened her, her body placed on a slab for these sick losers to feast on. Fresh listing.
Then a new thought came, one that made her guts rebel.
‘How long did you say this has been up?’ She gestured towards the phone.
‘Not long.’
‘How long?’
‘Maybe a few hours.’
‘Because you’re quick on the new material. But if you saw this, someone else will have seen it, right?’
He gave what she thought looked like a guilty nod.
So it could happen at any moment, another entrant through her bathroom window, some loser dressed up like a Provo volunteer playing Jack the Ripper.
‘How did you manage to get in?’
He looked towards the bathroom. ‘It was like I expected.’
‘What? What do you mean, “like you expected”?’
He sighed, resting his head against the wall. He looked exhausted. She had, she realized, beaten him quite badly.
‘Oh, I get it,’ she said. ‘The women leave their bathroom windows open, is that it?’
He said nothing.
‘And mine was open?’
A tiny, weary nod.
‘And if it’d been closed?’
‘That might have been, you know, part of it.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I’d have turned back. But some guys would—’
‘Have forced it open, because it might all be “part of it”, all part of the fun?’
Now she wondered. Had she left that window open? Or had someone not only put her details on a rape site, but also broken into this apartment, leaving it primed for her faux rapist? She tried to think, spooling back to the shower she had taken in that room earlier today. If the room had got too steamy, she might have opened a window. On the other hand, this time of year, she’d surely have closed it . . .
Either way, it wasn’t the main question. What mattered was that someone had, deliberately and maliciously, set her up for what would have been an horrific, deeply traumatic experience. She looked again at the man who had let himself into her home, his hands and feet now bound, his head apparently throbbing.
‘Normally, when you do . . . this,’ Maggie said. ‘If a woman resists, what happens?�
��
He paused, reluctant to answer.
‘Tell me, for fuck’s sake.’
‘I keep going,’ he whispered.
‘You what?’
‘I keep going. It’s what you expect. That’s all part of it.’
‘So if I’d been scratching and kicking at you, screaming for you to get off me, you’d have—’
‘Kept going. Yes.’
‘Even if I’d said stop.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Is there not a safe word or something?’
‘Sure. And if you’d have used it, I’d have stopped.’
‘Jesus Christ. And what is it, the safe word?’
‘You don’t know it?’
‘Of course I don’t bloody know it, you stupid bastard. I didn’t put myself on your rape club thing; someone put me on it, remember? So go on. The safe word.’
‘It’s the name of the president.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
Very suddenly she decided she wanted everything about this episode to end and for this man to be out of her home. She was about to hand his phone back to him when she hesitated. She punched in the code one more time, saw the screen light up and then took a couple of screenshots, which she promptly forwarded to her own phone, taking care to delete her details from the ‘Sent Messages’ queue on his device. She noted the web address for the gross rape fantasy forum, then took a look at his emails and texts, jotted down his address and number, and finally dropped the phone back in his pocket.
‘OK. These are the terms. I will cut this rope and let you go if you immediately do whatever it takes to remove me from that website, forum, thing.’
‘I think only an admin can—’
‘Well, find the admin and tell them. You get me off that thing right away. Within the next thirty minutes. Or else I will have the police on you so fast, your employer . . .’ She consulted her scribbled note. ‘Oh yes, Voltacity Systems of Reston, Virginia, won’t know what hit them.’
The remaining colour drained from his face.
