Carol knew that could only be Inspector LePage.
“We knew you were broke so you’d have to wire someone for cash. I phoned around and talked the guy at the money transfer office into telling me who sent you the dough and when you picked it up. Then I called the airport and found out you’re booked on the ten thirty and flew right up.” She shook her head from side to side and Carol thought she looked sad. “Trust ain’t that easy to build, but it sure is a breeze to knock down.”
“Gerlinde, I didn’t want to hurt you or betray you.” She took a few steps into the room. “But I can’t do this. I just can’t go back. I’m sorry.”
“Not half as sorry as you’re going to be!”
She turned at the sound of André’s voice. He slammed the door closed and moved towards her slowly. His eyes resembled those of the wolf she had just dreamed about, mesmerizing. She felt like prey that had been patiently and methodically stalked and now the predator moves in for the kill. His tense body looked close to being out of control. She had never seen such black rage on anyone’s face and it made her tremble. Those grey eyes had turned steely and hateful. His lips had parted, exposing the tips of menacing fangs. Carol was horrified by what she saw and at the same time unable to do anything to defend herself.
“Salope!” He slapped her so hard she was knocked to the floor.
“Hey! Hold it, André! You’ll kill her or hurt the kid. Get a grip!”
“Fuck you! I know how to handle this, you don’t. You’re the one who was stupid enough to let her escape.”
“Maybe so, but what you’re doing is only going to make things worse. Just cool your heels a bit. Wait ‘till we get back and talk with Chloe, okay?”
Carol was jerked to her feet. She felt groggy, stunned. Her ears rang and she couldn’t see very clearly. But she saw his face close to hers, his darkness penetrating. He grabbed her by the throat and shoved her up against the wall.
“You better listen to me, bitch, because you’re out of chances and I’m out of patience. The three of us leave here and you keep your mouth shut. The slightest move or gesture, if you even think about escaping again, first you can watch what I do to anybody you involve and then you can experience firsthand what I do to you. And you’d better believe that I’ll do it slowly and painfully and you’ll be begging for death.”
He pulled her towards the door.
“Just a minute,” Gerlinde said. “Let me wipe the blood from the kid’s mouth.” She used her finger and licked it.
They walked through the airport, one on each side of Carol, holding her arms securely. She felt dazed, unable to comprehend how she could again be trapped by him. She went over and over in her mind what she had done and what she should have done differently.
André bought three tickets and they caught a late flight to Mérignac, arriving in Bordeaux just before midnight.
Outside the airport it was drizzling. The silver limo pulled up to the entrance immediately. Gerlinde got in, then Carol and finally André. As soon as the door closed they drove off.
On the flight as well as now in the car no one spoke. André faced front in a silent rage. Carol cowered in the middle. Gerlinde stared out the side window. At one point, as they neared the house, the redhead tried to talk to Carol. “Look, kiddo, maybe—”
“Shut up!” André snapped.
“Hey, babe, this is Gerlinde here. You don’t hold any papers on this model.”
“But I own her!” he said, his voice intimidating.
Gerlinde stayed quiet.
Carol was despondent. Tears pushed their way out of her eyes but she was afraid to make a sound, afraid André would hit her if she did. She bit down on her finger to stifle her feelings. But things were bleak. She didn’t know just what would happen but she did know that she’d really messed up. Four more months with them and now I’ll be a prisoner with no rights and have to deal with André’s wrath besides, she thought gloomily.
When they reached the château the three immediately went into the living room where Chloe and Karl waited, both looking serious. André shoved Carol into a chair.
“Carol, why?” Chloe asked immediately, her voice distant, her look cool, as though she, too, was hurt and disappointed.
Carol shook her head, afraid to speak, afraid she would cry. She knew she would get no sympathy.
“What’s the difference why?” André said angrily. “She ran away, we found her and now we keep her locked up until the birth.
And after that,” he looked down at her, “a little revenge.”
“Carol,” Chloe said, “you gave us your word.”
“I told you I wouldn’t hurt myself or the baby. I haven’t,” she explained in a small voice.
“But you ran away.”
“She’s scared to have the kid,” Gerlinde said.
“Why don’t you just shut up!” André turned on Gerlinde.
“Screw off!”
“You’re as crazy as she is.”
“If you didn’t scare her half to death she wouldn’t have run away.”
“Obviously I haven’t frightened her enough since she didn’t think twice about using you.”
“What did you expect? You try to control her every move. No female of any species would put up with that for long.”
“You think you can empathize with her but she manipulated you, just the way she’s manipulated all of us. You cunts are all alike.”
Before Carol’s eyes, Gerlinde’s face changed. Her face seemed to narrow and pale, her features became exaggerated, her eyes glistened. Her lips spread apart and two razor sharp teeth emerged. A low hiss came from her. Suddenly Gerlinde slashed André across the face with her nails. Carol didn’t see him move, but instantly Karl was between them, keeping Gerlinde back with one hand and holding the other up to André. “Let it go,” he said to André.
André’s body quivered with tension. Before Carol’s startled eyes the gashes on his cheek were already healing. He spoke in a low strained voice, “You’d better keep her under control, Karl, or she’ll have your balls on a silver platter, just like Ariel.”
“Look,” Karl said, reasonably to both of them, “we have a problem here we should be directing our attention to and that’s how are we going to deal with this for the next—”
“I told you,” André cut him off harshly, “we lock her up.
She belongs to me and that’s what I want so that’s the way it will be. C’est fini!”
He grabbed Carol’s arm, hoisted her to her feet and pulled her across the room.
“André, don’t hurt her or you’ll hurt the child,” Chloe warned, but he only laughed bitterly.
He was using such force that near the top of the stairs Carol fell but he just dragged her up the rest of the steps and along the hallway. While he opened the door she got to her feet. Once inside the room he locked the door, ripped her clothes off and shoved her down onto the bed. Within seconds he had her handcuffed to the brass posts. Now she let the tears flow freely; there didn’t seem any point in holding back.
“Get used to it! This is how you’ll live for the next four months. I’ll keep you chained here like a dog. You’ll eat, sleep and live in this bed. I’ll fuck you as often as I have to to keep the baby alive. And whenever you get even an inch out of line you’ll have me to deal with. You couldn’t play it easy with me. Well now we’ll play hardball!”
He slammed the door on his way out. Carol sobbed uncontrollably.
Chapter Fifteen
Over the next four days Carol plunged from misery to despair. During the daytime she cried herself to sleep. At night she endured being used sexually. Throughout it all she was handcuffed to the bed on her back, unable to even turn onto her sides. Apparently André did have free reign to treat her any way he liked because she saw none of the others, only the maid—who seemed hardly aware of her—and him.
Food was placed on the pillow next to her face and she ate with only her mouth, feeding like an animal. She ate almost no
thing. He let her up three times each night to use the bathroom but it wasn’t enough and during the day the bedding became saturated with urine that she was forced to lie in. Every evening the maid turned the mattress. The room stank.
But worse than all the pain and discomfort was the aching loneliness. André never talked to her now, not even to threaten her. Carol talked to herself to stay awake and sang herself to sleep. She tried to remember movies she had seen, books she’d read and conversations she’d had, but she wasn’t an excessively introspective person by nature and found it painful. This was not like the year she’d isolated herself. This was his doing. She was going crazy and knew she had to try to save herself.
Five nights after she had been returned to the château he cuffed only one of her wrist to the bed, which meant she could sit and stand. She took this as a sign. He was at the door, his hand on the knob.
“I think all this is hurting the baby. I need exercise. Can we make some kind of deal?” She tried to keep her voice calm, reasonable, the way a lawyer would present a fact, without self-serving emotion. They were the first words she’d spoken to him.
He turned. In that moment she realized she had either taken the wrong approach or that any approach at all was a mistake. His eyes hardened and his flesh paled; it appeared more stretched across the bone; a gargoyle mask. A low animal sound seeped out of him. When Carol saw his teeth she screamed.
In a flash he was on her, choking her. She struggled to pry his powerful fingers from her windpipe. Her scream cut off, she could only thrash wildly, desperate to breath.
As they pulled him off her, she dragged in air. Her throat felt crushed. It took all three of them to hold him. She could clearly see him struggling to get at her, a demon from Hell, unleashed, bent on her destruction.
Terrifying sounds came out of Carol’s mouth, something between a shriek and a yell. It was as though a voice far off, and not her own, made all this racket. The bed filled with excrement and the food tray overturned, adding to the mess.
“Geez, her neck!” she heard Gerlinde say.
“Bring me some warm water. You’d better call the doctor, too. Karl, take André out of here!” Chloe instructed.
The women worked on her for half an hour while Carol convulsed, frothing at the mouth. When the doctor arrived he gave her an injection that knocked her out almost immediately. She heard Chloe ask, “Le bébé?” but she didn’t hear the answer.
When Carol woke she felt dead. Or more, that something inside her had died. She lay in bed watching and listening, an invisible barrier separating her from everything that went on. She floated somewhere just outside her skin. It wasn’t uncomfortable and she decided to stay right where she was.
Every night all night long Chloe and Gerlinde and sometimes Karl sat with her. She never saw André now. The three of them gave her injections, cleaned her up, talked to her, tried to feed her and get her out of bed and generally discussed her condition in worried voices. They made efforts to bring her out, but Carol did not respond.
“Carol, why don’t you try to get up tonight?”
She stared at Chloe, who seemed to be covered in a thin layer of gauze. The face was soft-looking, the voice concerned. It meant nothing to Carol.
Gerlinde appeared behind her. “Come on, kiddo. You’re okay. Snap out of it. We just want to help.” And then she said to Chloe. “I think this is serious.”
Carol wouldn’t chew. They hooked her up to nutrients that flowed intravenously and also force-fed her, tilting her head back, inserting a large funnel into her mouth and then pushing pureed food, like baby food, through it, the way geese are fed to enlarge their livers for paté. They had to change her sheets all the time because she wouldn’t move even to the bathroom, although she was no longer locked to the bed. She viewed them from a far-off place, a place with no attachments, no emotions, no worries, no fears, where nothing mattered. She felt no wants, needs or regrets. She drifted in limbo, unaware if days or weeks had passed.
One night Jeanette appeared in front of her. She looked down at Carol, her face full of concern. “She won’t respond,” Chloe said.
“Yes, I can see. I’m glad you asked me to come. How long’s she been like this?”
“Almost a month.”
“What’s the doctor say?”
“Shock and depression,” Gerlinde said. “And she almost had a miscarriage—she was bleeding for a day but now he thinks that part’s okay.”
Carol looked at the faces of the three females hovering above hers. Their words didn’t seem to relate to her. What they said sounded funny even, and she was tempted to laugh, but then the impulse passed and she closed her eyes.
Jeanette talked to her off and on during the night but Carol had no desire to respond. Towards morning she heard Jeanette say, “Look, I don’t know what to say about this. But you’re right. She could lose the baby. I’m going to phone Julien—he’s back in Austria with Claude and Susan—and ask him to come here. I think he might know something the rest of us don’t. Anyway, I’ll feel better if he’s here.”
The next night the tall, austere man named Julien came into the room. He stood beside the bed and looked at Carol for a long time without saying a word. His eyes were dark orbs, severe, cold, like black pits leading to oblivion, and Carol could hardly stand looking into them. Her own eyes grew heavy and she had to close them. Every once in a while she opened them again. He was still there.
Later she heard a voice, but she didn’t know whose, say, “Get André in here.” Fear, like a battery being jump-started into life, quivered inside her.
She heard many voices now, whisperings, murmurings, hissing sounds, sounds of snakes slithering in the grass, worms crawling through corpses. Then words, out of context, “Punish”, “Bitch”, “Betrayal”, “Drain”, “Baby”, the word “Love” came up again and again, but she didn’t know who said what and none of the words meant anything. Someone mentioned hypnosis. Someone else, Chloe, she thought, said, “The resistance is too deep.” She heard Julien’s voice and André’s voice and occasionally Karl’s. They were speaking French, Julien calmly, steadily, André in tones rising and falling with anger.
Someone reluctantly took hold of her limp hand. She didn’t open her eyes. There seemed no need to. Whoever it was sat beside her on the bed then touched her face. Suddenly she knew it was André. Her heart began to pound quickly, erratically, her breathing became ragged and shallow. Fear washed over her, the first complete emotion she had felt in a long time.
The others were still in the room, she could sense them, but the silence was palpable. He said nothing, just held her hand and stroked her for what seemed like hours while her heart raced along, threatening to overstep its abilities and plunge her into a permanent sleep.
At dawn he picked her up and carried her downstairs. They turned left, through what must have been the dining room, into the kitchen where she had made tea occasionally and then down more steps. She didn’t know where she was, but felt afraid to open her eyes to find out.
It was cool here, it felt dark. She heard a key click and the sound of a combination lock, like the kind on a safe, being spun. A door creaked open.
He laid her down and covered her with a quilt then locked one of her wrists to something wooden, a horizontal bar near her head.
She felt him lie down next to her, up against her. She had an urge to scream, to move away, but was frozen, afraid, her heart thudding heavily in her chest, her breathing stifled, suffocated.
Later, when she felt brave enough to open her eyes, she found herself in complete darkness. The air was cool but not cold on her face; the quilt kept the rest of her warm. She could still feel him up against her but something had changed. She moved her arm slightly and then she understood. This was his place. It isn’t a coffin, she thought, but he sleeps here in the day, like the stone cold dead.
Chapter Sixteen
The following night André carried her upstairs to the living room.
“
Julien has another idea I think is a good one,” Carol heard Jeanette tell the others, listening with her eyes closed.
“He thinks we can’t let her keep withdrawing, it’s dangerous. We’ll tie this loosely around her waist and around the waist of one of us. We can take shifts. At least physically she’ll always be connected to someone. Symbolically it’s an umbilical cord. But André, you’ll have to do most of this.”
Carol heard André arguing in French, his words fast and furious. Julian answered him.
Jeanette tied something around Carol, a rope maybe. “When you go out of the room you take her with you, everywhere,” Jeanette continued.
“Do you want me to take her up to my victims and introduce her?” André asked sarcastically.
“Stop complaining,” Gerlinde said. “This is all your fault anyway.”
“No, it’s your fault. If you hadn’t been suckered she couldn’t have run away and—”
“All right, you two. I’m sick of this argument,” Karl said.
“Ditto,” Gerlinde added.
“I think we’ve got to try this,” Jeanette said. “If she stays withdrawn it will definitely hurt the baby. As it is, I’m afraid that every five years the child will go through a trauma.”
“How come?” Gerlinde asked.
“Well, there’s this theory.” It sounded to Carol as though Jeanette had sat down. “Whatever happens in the womb is reflected throughout a mortal’s life, in cycles. For example, if you’re born prematurely, then things tend to always feel premature for you.”
“Look,” André interrupted, exasperation in his voice. “You still haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do with this millstone while I’m hunting down blood. I can’t drag her around with me.”
“André, since you’re her main connection, you’re going to have to find a way to alter your attitude,” Chloe said.
“Mon Dieu!”
“I’m serious. Of course, it’s your choice, but there’s no point to doing this if you hate her. She’ll feel that and stay withdrawn.”
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