Mercy

by Rebecca Lim

  I hear Lauren inhale sharply, and I reach the same terrible conclusion a heartbeat after she does.

  ‘You mean,’ Lauren says in a trembling tone, ‘all 240

  this time I’ve been here because of … of you? Like some substitute for you? He couldn’t have you, so he took me?’ Her voice flies up the scale, breaks sharply on the last word.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I say, but she’s right. The timing is too awful, the coincidence too awful. Just over two years ago, both girls were bird-bright, tiny, centre-stage together for one mesmerising performance. Two rare sopranos brimming with talent. Then one flew the nest and the other was swiftly … caged.

  Lauren begins to wail. ‘Do you KNOW what he’s DONE to me?’

  She’s suddenly uncaring of whether the monster above us can hear as she mercilessly catalogues the sins that have been perpetrated against her since she was taken. As she speaks, her voice drops lower and lower, grows mechanical.

  In between the retelling of inexorable hours that felt like months, months that felt like lifetimes stitched together end to end, every sordid, unclean thing, I can hear Jennifer’s harsh sobs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she cries, over and over, hands covering her face. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘He says it’s to keep me safe,’ Lauren murmurs.

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  ‘That he’s the only person who can truly appreciate my

  … talent.’

  Though I am moved almost beyond bearing, I remain dry-eyed, my forehead resting against the wall.

  It is a peculiar thing, though I cannot cry tears the body I’m in may choose to follow a different directive. I am grateful for the darkness for I need not feign them.

  ‘Last year,’ Lauren whispers, ‘when I refused to sing once, he hit me so hard that I nearly died. And, you know,’ she says, her voice suddenly fierce, ‘I was almost glad. I’ve been in hell,’ she says simply. ‘Am in hell. And now you are, too.’

  Jennifer weeps noisily, and I am reminded of Lauren’s mother, completely undone by grief. I imagine Lauren, doubled over alone in this room, and something rises up in me like a red fog. For a minute I cannot see, and my head is filled with a terrible roaring, like the sound a city makes when it is being razed, stone by stone, to the ground. There is a firestorm in me, greater than me.

  I almost cannot contain it.

  I don’t hear Jennifer’s question. She repeats it sharply.

  ‘Where are we? Where has he taken us?’

  ‘You’re not that far from home, Jennifer,’ I reply distantly, blood still in my eyes, roaring in my ears.

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  A great tempest inside. ‘You’re at his place, Laurence Barry’s place. We’re going to get you out.’

  ‘But I don’t understand.’ There is confusion in Jennifer’s voice. ‘Laurence Barry? Are they in this together?’

  ‘Who?’ I say, confusion in mine now. ‘Who’s in this together?’

  Then Lauren begins to laugh, and the sound is so strange that I feel that cold flash race across the surface of Carmen’s skin again. ‘We’re going to die here,’

  she crows, rocking backwards and forwards on her makeshift bed. ‘We’ll die here, and no one will find us until we’re bones.’

  Her crazy laughter grows into a wordless keening, until the banging from above starts again. The shrieking ceases instantly, Lauren making herself as small as possible on her metal cot. Somehow, the sudden silence is almost worse.

  When Lauren’s voice finally issues out of the darkness again, it’s muffled and flat and weirdly controlled.

  ‘Ryan’s not coming, no one’s coming,’ she says.

  ‘Because this isn’t Laurence Barry’s place.’

  I freeze, unable to believe we were wrong.

  ‘It’s Paul Stenborg’s. Sten- borg. Get it? Stone fortress.

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  We’re never going to get out.’

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  Chapter 23

  Right dream, wrong place.

  I react so strongly to her words that I forget and turn away from the wall. Paul’s place? How is that possible?

  Both girls rear back from me so powerfully that I curse aloud. It’s too late to hide.

  Now they can see me as clearly as I have seen them all along. For a moment, I recall the shining man, my dream brother. How his light pierced the darkness as if he were a little sun. Do I seem like that to them, trapped all these days in darkness?

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say wildly. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Jennifer chokes out.

  ‘ What are you?’ breathes Lauren.

  It’s a good question, the very question I’d like an 245

  answer to myself, only, it’s as if the word, the name, for what I truly am has been cut from my mind. Always, when I reach for it, when it should be obvious, it’s not there.

  I’m desperate to set their minds at ease as much as the situation allows, but there’s that little problem of trust that I seem to have and I’m silent for a long time; weighing up the pros and cons, I think you call it. Only in a situation like this one, there are no cons. There’s nothing left to lose. I could die in this stupidly frail, borrowed body and never know the answer, never make any meaningful human contact and that’s not what I want. What I want is to talk to someone so badly, tell someone about me — the real me and not the face I’m presenting to the world — that my misgivings suddenly disappear and I wonder why I held onto them for so long.

  So I tell them almost everything of myself that I have managed to piece together in this lifetime, and of the multitude of disjointed lifetimes that I only dimly recall living. I speak so fast, my words falling over each other in the rush to get out, that I’m sure I’m making no sense at all —

  ‘And I can see things,’ I hear myself say, ‘about 246

  people. Some people I don’t even need to touch to know what’s eating away at their … souls. I just know —’

  I’m just grateful for the chance to tell my story because then it might now stay, and I might now remember.

  For a while, they cleave to the sound of my voice and forget the unspeakable place we have found ourselves in, and they shower me with questions.

  ‘So is she in there, then? Carmen?’ Lauren asks in awe.

  ‘And can she hear you, Mercy?’ says Jennifer, her voice uncertain, a person who has always dealt in concrete realities.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ I say carefully. ‘And she probably can hear me. But I’m not really sure whether she knows what’s going on. I hope she doesn’t. It’s almost like she’s sleepwalking, I suppose. She’s a soprano, you know, like you are. But tiny, Lauren’s size. With dark hair.’

  There is no need for me to say this — they can see her now — but what is inside me feels so removed from what is outside that I must make the divergence clear.

  ‘We’re his type,’ says Lauren in a small voice. ‘I think he’s … collecting us. Treasuring us.’

  And I know she’s right. Paul said so himself, was talking about himself by the piano after last night’s 247

  rehearsal, only I didn’t know it. Didn’t grasp the underlying darkness in his words.

  ‘Does Ryan know? About the real you, I mean,’

  Lauren asks, resting her chin on her drawn-up knees.

  I hesitate for a moment, before saying, ‘No. But he suspects I’m not altogether, uh … normal.’

  Both girls laugh quietly.

  ‘Does … Paul?’ asks Jennifer. She swallows jerkily before she can say his name.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I reply. ‘I think I was under a streetlight when he grabbed me. Things probably happened so fast he never even noticed. I’m not sure the fact that I glow in the dark would change anything.’

  ‘Make you more or less … collectible, you mean,’

  Lauren whispers.

  ‘So what else can you … do?’ Jennifer says, her voice husky from crying.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say slowly. ‘S
ing.’

  ‘We can all sing,’ says Lauren disgustedly. ‘That’s what got us into trouble in the first place. I’m never going to do it again, if I get out of here. Never.’

  ‘No one will be able to stop me,’ Jennifer disagrees fiercely.

  ‘Who knows if I’ll still be able to … after all this,’ I 248

  say.

  I don’t tell them about being able to see in the dark like a cat, or make random impersonations of complete strangers. I don’t want them to feel self-conscious, and I don’t quite believe the last part myself. It might have been some kind of fluke, a shared auditory hallucination, a temporary madness. Without any explanation or context for it, I’m not going to class it as some kind of

  … gift.

  The three of us are silent for a long time.

  ‘If we ever get out of here,’ Lauren suddenly says, urgently, ‘you have to promise you’ll tell Ryan? He’ll want to know. But he won’t believe me. It’s got to come from you.’

  The links of my chain lie cold and heavy against my heart as I draw my knees up under my chin as Lauren had.

  ‘Oh, he’ll believe you,’ I say softly. ‘He’s believed you when everyone else gave up a long time ago. He’s put everything on hold in his life just to find you. He doesn’t think about doing anything else. He heard you, kept hearing you when even your parents …’ I don’t bother finishing my sentence. She’s been hurt enough, no need to spell it out. ‘Anyway, it’s remarkable. He’s 249

  remarkable.’

  ‘You like him,’ Lauren says softly after a pause. It’s a statement, not a question.

  ‘ I like him,’ I agree quietly. ‘But Carmen won’t know him from Adam when I’m gone. Which could be anytime now. I have a habit of just … flitting away. It will only confuse things. So if he doesn’t know, don’t tell him.’

  Then the door above the staircase is thrown wide and I am rendered momentarily blind by the brilliant light from the overhead fluorescents being turned on, like the heavens are opening.

  ‘Ladies,’ Paul Stenborg says conversationally, shutting and locking the door behind him, pocketing the key.

  I have always hated that appellation, feel an unreasonable rage when it is directed at me personally.

  Especially now. My left hand begins to ache dully.

  Jennifer and Lauren moan into their fingers, their sensitive eyes screwed tight against the unnatural illumination. Carmen’s pupils have contracted to mere pinpoints, but my adjustment to the light is almost instantaneous.

  The room reveals its dingy secrets. There are rust-coloured marks on the floor, on the walls, buckets 250

  containing human waste in one corner, food scraps everywhere, empty bottles of cleaning fluid, water, rubbish, rags. I look up at the man descending the staircase, strolling down unaffectedly in his designer shirtsleeves. Then to the other two girls, chained by their necks to their respective walls, as I am.

  Jennifer looks whole and largely unmarked by her ordeal, as I’d expected. Her round face, glossy hair and smooth skin shine with rude health. But Lauren is a ghost girl, with cracked lips, sunken eyes, collapsed cheeks, a paper-white skin marked with random scars. Her hair, long and matted, is more white than blonde. It has fallen out in places so I can see down to her pale scalp. She will never be beautiful again, and is so dangerously thin that her feet, head and hands seem too big for her body.

  She cringes from the illumination, hands laced tightly over her eyes, her mouth a terrified arc, her fear palpable. It hangs about her like a detectable odour, a familiar on her shoulder, gnawing at her flesh.

  I have already felt an echo of this fear through Ryan’s skin, how the dark is almost more bearable to her than the light. Bad things happen in the light. Bad things are about to happen now; one needs no second sight to know it. The pain in my hand spreads up my forearm 251

  like wildfire, and I feel the sweat suddenly stand out on Carmen’s brow, her heart assuming a frantic tattoo.

  I put my head down as Paul walks among us, studying us curiously as if we are museum exhibits.

  Jennifer is dressed like Lauren is, as I am, in a short-sleeved nightgown, and I see that her glasses are missing, that her nose is heavily freckled, and that she is voluptuous, tall, everything an opera singer should be.

  Paul runs a hand up one of Jennifer’s long, pale calves, causing Lauren to moan and rock on her fold-out bed.

  When Jennifer reacts violently to his touch, Paul’s response is immediate and brutal and so is the flowering wound above Jennifer’s eye.

  ‘You’ll learn,’ he says quietly, unwrapping Jennifer’s chain from around his fist and crossing the room to where Lauren cringes and moans louder.

  ‘Lauren was a slow learner,’ he murmurs, squeezing her small face in the fingers of one hand until she bares her teeth reluctantly, like a cornered animal. ‘And you see what happens?’

  Jennifer screams again and looks away, blood still running freely down the side of her face.

  Tears leak slowly out of Lauren’s eyes and over Paul’s long fingers. I study the terrible damage to her 252

  shattered mouth. I have seen faces like hers before, I remember now, dimly, in war zones, or caused by old age and disease. Not like this; never like this. Violence and pleasure the same impulse.

  The anger rises in me again, so fiercely that Carmen’s heart skips a beat in her chest and there is that twinge again, only stronger now, as if Carmen is waking up, is struggling to be heard. I don’t want her to see this, or to remember. No one so innocent, so young, should have to.

  I jam my burning left hand beneath my right in agony, and the slight movement causes my chain to rattle. Paul turns his head sharply at the sound, releases Lauren’s ruined face from his grip. I see the marks his fingers made, a starker white against her already stark skin.

  ‘You,’ he says over his shoulder to Jennifer, still sobbing, ‘got too gross. Too fleshy for my liking. It was a shock when you opened the door. I was offended when I saw how much you’d changed, although I was already committed. This one,’ and I know he means me, ‘is how you once were. But so much better — a rare creature, a pearl beyond price, all for me.’

  He steps forward and lifts my chin gently.

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  ‘Sing, Carmen,’ he says kindly, as if we are standing together in the empty assembly hall at Paradise High, beside the upright piano. The youthful, handsome teacher; the wise-cracking student. ‘Sing and show them why I had to have you, why you are so peerless.’

  He caresses my face and it is as if he has put a hot iron to it. I jerk away from his touch and the instinctive gesture of rejection obliterates the beauty from his features in an instant. He lifts me by the chain around my neck and I am off my feet, hanging before him like a rag doll. We are eye to burning eye.

  He shakes me. ‘Sing!’ he hisses, the Devil in his voice.

  ‘Sing or suffer.’

  ‘Please,’ gasps Lauren.

  ‘Do it,’ Jennifer begs.

  I have no sense of up or down, so dizzy that the world has telescoped. I am the world, or the world is in me, and in me so much rage and fear and loathing I can feel plates moving, floes breaking, separation, reconfiguration, an unlinking.

  And the pain in my hand, my forearm, burns so fiercely that I let out a shattering scream that has Paul staggering to his knees, clutching at his ears. The two girls on either side of the room rock backwards on 254

  their cots, holding their heads at the sonic after-bite.

  I fall to the floor at the end of my taut chain.

  Cradling my burning hand against my chest, leaning on my right, on my knees, panting like a dying animal.

  As a thin trickle of blood seeps from between Paul’s fingers, I feel something inside me splitting in two, hear gasps from the others, dim shapes above me to the left and right. In that instant, I catch Carmen’s slight figure fall away, forwards onto the floor. Her body lies there, lifelessly, at my feet as I rise and bellow: Si dext
ra manus tua scandalizat te, abscide eam!

  Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum!

  I have no sense of my physical self, but I know that I am very tall. Six, maybe seven, feet.

  My perspective has changed. The room that once reeked of the cavernous dark to myself inside Carmen’s skin can almost no longer hold me. Its dimensions feel doll-like, unreal.

  And I know this too, because I watch their eyes follow me upwards, huge in their white faces, until I am 255

  standing over Paul Stenborg and I am his horizon, I am his world, and the fear in him is as a detectable odour, a familiar on his shoulder, gnawing at his flesh, and it is good.

  ‘Who are you?’ he shrieks, blood still trickling from each shattered eardrum.

  ‘I am pain, Paul,’ I whisper, a whisper to rend steel, to rend stone, a whisper to wake even the dead. ‘The living sword. And I shall gather all things that offend, all those that do iniquity, and I shall cast them into a furnace of fire.’

  The words come from me freely, as if they have waited all these lifetimes to emerge.

  I am dimly aware of Jennifer’s cries, Lauren’s terrified whimpering.

  And I raise Paul Stenborg by the collar of his shirt, high, high above the ground, with a fist like bloody mail, and shake him as he shook Carmen’s frail, small frame, and I say again:

  ‘ Si dextra manus tua scandalizat te, abscide eam.

  If your hand causes you to sin, Paul, cut it off. Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum. And if your eye causes you to sin, Paul, pluck it out.’

  And with my burning left hand, I put out his eyes, 256

  first one and then the other, so that he may never see again, may never covet another living being for the rest of his days. See not music nor colour, joy, rage or fear.

  His no longer. Willingly given, willingly taken away. I to do it. And it is done.

  For I am the living sword and a creature of my word. The words come to me and I know them to be the truth. Whatever I did to set the sorry course of my life in tremulous motion all those years ago, these things I know now to be immutable.

  ‘And there shall be a wailing,’ I say quietly, setting the man gently upon his feet, ‘a gnashing of teeth.’