by Lucy Taylor
“Who put you there?” Val said.
“Filakis, of course.”
“But why?”
“To punish me for not killing you that night in Fez. But mostly to amuse himself. He’s not like the others here . . . he can’t enjoy real pleasure. He has to get it watching others or torturing them.”
They’d reached the lower landing of the staircase. Majeed suddenly stopped and grabbed Val’s hand.
“Wait. I need . . . it’s been so long without . . .”
“Your drugs, you mean?”
“My drug of choice,” Majeed said. He grabbed Val’s hand and pressed her fingers to his groin. His penis felt achingly erect, his vulva dripping juices. Something new had been added to Majeed’s anatomy since his captivity, a set of gold rings penetrated labia and scrotum, made a bell-like tinging as he maneuvered Val against the wall and tried to lift her skirt.
“There isn’t time!”
But terror, as Val had long known, was the most potent of aphrodisiacs, and sex within the City’s walls was sex magnified a hundredfold, each orgasm an intoxicant that bewitched the mind for days. Majeed’s hunger called to hers, and soon her legs were open, allowing him to rut his fill.
“Turn around.”
She braced herself against the stones and shut her eyes. Majeed thrust inside her, his motion making the vulval rings clink and ping together. He gave a moan that Val thought to be his climax. But there came an instant when he lost contact with her entirely, when her inner muscles clenched on emptiness, and Majeed’s vulval bells were stilled too suddenly.
“Majeed?”
She tried to turn around, but her wrists were clasped and manacled behind her. From the corner of her vision, Val saw Majeed slump to the floor. Behind her, she smelled an unspeakable aroma, a perfumed breath, rich with death and strawberries.
She managed to twist around. Filakis stood before her, lean and dour as a medieval saint. His hennaed fingers, long, El Grecoesque, roved her face as though its contours held the meaning of some mystery. His lips, drawn tight in monkish gloom, bestowed a cold kiss on her forehead, but Val’s attention was distracted by his nudity and by a nakedness far worse, the almost total absence of any genitalia. His testicles were absent altogether; his penis, what remained of it, had been reduced to a limp and useless teat.
He noted the direction of her gaze and smiled almost apologetically. “Ah, I see you’ve noticed my . . . deformity. Well, let me say, I wasn’t born like this. It was my choice. A eunuch savors pleasure vicariously, you see, and I’m particularly skilled at that. It pleases me to think that, while others soil themselves in a thousand nauseating ways, I stay untouched. Pure, if you will. My pleasure comes from taking sex in any form except my own. Let others wallow in dung, their filth never touches me.”
“I only came to get Majeed,” Val said. “You’ve punished him enough. Now let us leave.”
“Majeed? Oh, you mean her,” said Filakis. “The creature pretends to be a male, but she’s a cunt and nothing else.”
“More reason not to need her then.”
Filakis smiled. “Your haste to leave verges on insulting. I thought you wanted pleasure. That’s why you went to so much trouble coming here. I can’t let you go away disappointed.” He smiled. “But maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re like so many others and what you secretly desire and pine for is what you most deeply dread.”
He touched Val’s throat while keeping hold on her manacled hands. The long, emaciated fingers closed and gripped, wringing forth a rain of gold and silver coins behind her eyes. The coins clattered against the inside of her skull, but then the din grew distant, faint, was replaced at length by one exquisite, terrifying orgasm . . . then nothingness.
Val’s body, when she first opened her eyes, was reflected back to her in the ceiling’s mirrored tiles. Her physical condition alarmed and sickened her. Every inch of her, from collarbones to pubis, upper arms to wrists, appeared to be the canvas on which a demented seamstress had created a masterpiece of color and design. A hundred needles pierced Val’s flesh, and through the punctures had been woven the most colorful of threads, which crisscrossed in a splendid zigzag of geometry. The threads, in turn, were tied to hooks nailed into the bed’s headboard and sides. Her slightest movement, therefore, even a breath drawn in too sharply, caused the needles to plunge deeper beneath the skin and her nerves to scream out in ungodly unison.
Movement created pain so sharp and constant that, after a time, it crossed a psychic border and became a kind of lunatic arousal. In this, Val realized, lay the peculiar horror of the City, its ability to wring appetite from even the most appalling cruelties, the most demeaning humiliations. Desire not linked to satisfaction in the slightest way, but a perverse and masochistic lust that fed on misery as fervently as those in the outside world generally sought comfort.
She learned all this in her strange and all too familiar prison, a room she had only to glimpse for one brief second to know its parameters and furnishings, the contents of its bookshelves and its dresser drawers, to know, without going near the window, what view she would see: not crenelated walls of a Moroccan Casbah, but plowed fields and distant tree-clad hills, a decaying barn belonging to some unknown neighbors to the east and a silo above whose entranceway a hex sign had been drawn. To know that if she were free to turn the photo on the desktop to face her, she would see a picture of the person she had been, the child who was held prisoner in the Sewing Room.
How such an illusion of a return to the chamber of her childhood captivity was possible was lost on Val. She assumed, at first, some sort of hallucination was at work, that Filakis had, unknown to her, slipped some type of drug into her system. This belief was comforting for it implied that, at some point, the drug might either wear off or be overcome by sheer force of will, and she resolved not to give in to panic but to simply accept her fate for the moment and await the next development the way one allows a nightmare to run its course in the confidence of, at some point, awakening.
When she heard a key turn in the lock, Val prayed to see Filakis even as a part of her mind braced for something worse. It came. What entered the room wasn’t Filakis but her mother Lettie or something identical to her right down to the dimple in her left cheek, the small scar above one eyebrow.
“How are we, sweetheart?” crooned the Lettie creature, mincing across the room with a breakfast-laden tray. Val didn’t have to look to know the contents: toast and milk, half a grapefruit, a jar of honey.
“How do we feel now? Better?”
“These stitches . . . whatever they are . . . they hurt.”
“Well . . . naturally . . .” said Lettie, no more moved by Val’s predicament than she’d been twenty-five years earlier. “That’s so you won’t get up and leave. But the laces are quite beautiful, I think.” She set the tray down on the desk and strummed a lacquered fingernail idly across the weave. Like falling dominos, Val’s nerves responded to the wiggling needles. Fire shot beneath her skin. She howled.
“. . . This design in particular I find attractive. A cat’s cradle, don’t you see? Much prettier than any clothing you could wear.”
The pain receded. Val tried to concentrate on the apparition at her side. She was as Val remembered her, plump and auburn-haired and artfully made up. False eyelashes and rouge and Cleopatra lids, a Vegas showgirl gone to seed but handsome still and not a day older than when Val had been her pet and prisoner in the upstairs room in Tarrant.
“Please . . .”
Lettie made a shushing sound and leaned over Val. Her mouth was crammed with needles that protruded from it like silver fangs. One by one, she threaded them, replaced them in her mouth. Pinching up a bit of flesh from the underside of Val’s breast she ran the needle through. Val gasped with pain and fright, but she dared not struggle too much for the least movement on her part caused the other needles to shift and dig.
“This is going to be so beautiful.”
“Please stop. Please let me up.”
“But then you might run away. The world is such a dangerous place. You might hurt yourself.”
The words were spoken with the correct tone, the perfect inflection that the real Lettie, were she living, would have used. Val blinked and tried to clear the apparition from her mind. “You’re dead,” Val said. “You killed yourself after someone saw me at the window and called the police, and they took me away from you.”
“Hush now. All that was only a bad dream. It’s over now. Come here now and look out the window.”
“I can’t move. You can see that, can’t you?”
Lettie sighed. “No, I suppose not. Then I’ll bring the view to you.”
The window didn’t budge, but Val’s mind suddenly filled with long-forgotten images. The winding dun-colored streets of the City disappeared, and it was spring in upstate New York, and the earth smelled fresh and thawed. Green buds were visible on the trees, and swallows, so far away they looked like asterisks in full flight against the sky, did airborne lifts and plummets. On the road beyond the untilled land, a man was passing by on horseback. He wore a cowboy hat and his boots must have been tipped with metal, for now and then the sun would catch just the right angle and a blinding shaft, a pin of light, would blaze and spangle. He moved farther and farther out of sight, until his horse and he were no bigger than the swallows, a pinpoint of light, a disappearing diamond. He was, thought Val, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen and as unattainable as the most distant star.
Tears filled Val’s eyes. She knew the scene was an illusion, produced perhaps by Filakis’s trickery or her own weary, traumatized mind, but the needles in her flesh were real. With the slightest hint of movement, the arabesque of threads across her body tightened and a hundred tiny wounds were enlarged and deepened.
“Don’t you like to look?” said Lettie.
“Of course.”
“Then why are you crying?”
Val tried to turn her head to indicate her bonds, but even this small effort was rewarded with myriad needle stings, sweet silver bees that set upon her at the faintest shiver.
“It’s painful to look out there and see the world and not be able to be in it.”
“I know I wouldn’t want to be out there,” said Lettie, and she wiggled one of the needles just under Val’s left arm.
“Why not?” said Val, awash in pain.
“The dangers.”
“But think,” Val said, “of the possibilities for pleasure.”
“No!” Lettie’s face contorted viciously. She made a choking, half-mad sound, and stomped her feet so fiercely that the vibrations reached Val’s needles and set each shaft to shivering. A thousand penetrated nerve endings sang with pain, Val’s synapses ignited and juggled fire. She writhed, and with each movement, more nerves were torched until her body shivered in the cold fire of a hundred small impalements.
And still Lettie screamed. “You’re lying! You’re evil and you’re lying. The world’s an evil place, a terrible place. Only here is where it’s safe. Just here. And you and I will never leave.”
That said, she crossed the room and fetched her sewing box again. A heavy picnic hamper-type box, when opened up, it revealed all that Val recalled and more – threads in a hundred colors, dull muted shades to glittering metallics, pastels diluted from the sea and sky, a dozen nuances of crimson comprising all the shades of blood – from freshly shed to tacky moist to the dull scarlet of dried gore. To go with these – a shimmering hierarchy of needles, from the thinness of a human hair to those with the length and heft of hatpins.
“This will surprise you,” Lettie said, “but I’m not doing this to hurt you. I’m doing it because I want to keep you safe and wise, like I wish someone had done for me.”
And she pierced a threaded needle through the skin of Val’s groin. Quickly, with hands that moved so fast their speed was almost magical, a conjuror’s hands, plucking miracles from the air like doves, Lettie pierced Val’s labia half a dozen times in swift succession.
The pain produced was anything but magical, dazzling and sickening in equal parts. Val screamed and dug her teeth into her tongue. Lettie unscrewed the jar of honey on the breakfast tray and spooned sweetness into Val’s mouth.
“You’ll come to understand this later,” she said, proffering honey. “You think the needles keep you bound, but it isn’t really so. It isn’t even the pain, although that will come to seem like pleasure, too. It’s the seduction of confinement that will keep you here.” She laughed, a hollow, mirthless sound that teased dread from every pore. “The day will come when I could snip every thread, remove every needle, and open the door wide, and you’d beg me not to make you go, not to turn you out into the world. You’d weep bitter tears at just the thought of being asked to leave this room.”
“Try me,” said Val, tasting blood and honey.
“Believe me, dear,” Lettie said. “Someday you’ll come to love this . . . especially since I’m going to teach you how to sew.”
She wiped her sticky fingers on her dress and disappeared from the room. She returned a few moments later leading Majeed, who wore a chain around his neck and women’s clothes. Of the two, Val guessed it was the clothing that caused the more humiliation.
“Don’t worry,” Lettie said. “I’m only going to hurt your lover a little bit. Enough to show you how it’s done. Then it will be your turn to wield the needles.”
Val shuddered with disgust. The needles in her nipples stung and tingled, their slender shafts contacting nerves that echoed in her vulva, in her womb.
“I won’t do it.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Lettie, twirling Majeed’s chain as she affixed it to a leg of the oak bed, “what people think they’re incapable of doing. Even the saints are capable of the worst atrocities – it’s when they recognize it that they decide to become saints. You’re capable of anything. What has been done to you, believe me, you can do to others.”
Lettie held a needle to the light. She squinted at the tiny eye, then sucked the end of a thread thin and white as hair plucked from a crone’s head. Steel and fabric glinted in the light as Lettie carried the threaded needle back to the bed. She undid Majeed’s blouse and bra, murmured something in his ear. Majeed nodded solemnly.
And then, to Val: “You’ll learn to love this someday.”
“No! Don’t!”
Needle penetrated flesh. A drop of blood flowered on Majeed’s chest. Lettie looped the needle back again and pierced the skin at the edge of one aureole.
There was a moment of pure terror when Val felt the urge to wield the needle, to bleed Majeed in every pore, a moment when she knew to her profoundest core that Lettie was right as to what she was capable of doing.
Everything.
Anything.
And it was more than she could bear.
“You fucking crazy freak! Stop it!”
Hatred galvanized her. It was her antidote for pain, and now, while fury numbed her, she bent one knee and elbow, using them for leverage, pushed up with all her strength into the needles. There was a teetering moment of agony and inheld breath when the combined strength of the needles held her down, pulling at her stretched and bleeding skin in a fresh fury of torture.
“No!”
The power of her voice infected muscle. She flung herself against the cumulative strength of the lacings in one final effort. Flesh tore as hooks and needles parted company. Blood-soaked threads broke and dangled down Val’s chest and legs, while the greater part of Lettie’s design, the shimmering cat’s cradle, remained intact, covering her torso in a gory arabesque.
“You stupid, sick bitch!” Val swept past Majeed and knocked Lettie to the floor. Her hands flew to Lettie’s neck, as they had done – in fantasy – a thousand times. The woman flailed and kicked beneath her, but there was scant conviction in her struggles. It was as if she was resigned to accept whatever fate Val deemed appropriate. Val realized her tears were dripping onto Lettie’s face along with blo
od. Images – of midnight rides under skies so black they snuffed the stars, of haggard, frantic faces pressed against the window – “You buyin’, Mama?” “You sell-in’?” – of glossy women, strutting-rolling-undulating come-ons as they did their spike-heeled sway, savage women, electrical with desperation and crackling with need, and Lettie’s face, entranced and lustful as she peered out through her private looking glass to view that other world, that vast Outside, a piece of which was trapped and languishing inside her like a dead embryo, and the need was sucking Lettie dry, starving her. You see what a terrible world it is. Just look at that. You see.
“Oh, God,” said Val, and she released Lettie’s throat.
Lettie coughed up flecks of blood. “I knew it.” Her voice was tiny, dry, the sound of petals being plucked from long dead flowers and crushed to powdered scent. “I knew you’d try to kill me someday. I knew you hated me.”
“I did,” said Val. “I wanted to kill you with my own hands. I used to plan it sitting by the window. But then you killed yourself and took away the chance.”
“I hated you, too,” said Lettie.
That startled Val. She’d seen herself as Lettie’s victim all these years; the newspapers and magazines, the neighbors, the teams of tutting psychiatrists and clucking therapists who worked with Val after she’d been freed, had viewed it the same. As one tabloid had put it, Lettie was The Monster Mom Who Kept Her Child in Chains.
“I hated you for being free,” said Lettie. “For seeking out the dark.”
“But you’re the one who showed it to me.”
“To scare you, not to make you want to leave me.”
“And I never have,” said Val. “I’ve carried you around in my head like soiled clothing at the bottom of a suitcase. I’ve carried you in my dreams. I’ve hated you for being there in every place I ever went to, every bed I ever slept in. You’ve always been there, haunting me, spying on me, watching.”
“Then forgive me,” Lettie said, “and I’ll go away.”
“Unlock the door.”
“I can’t do that.”
