FREAKS

by Hart, Callie

  It wasn’t as though I’d asked anyone to do those drawings of me back in Centralia, though. And I hadn’t posed for them, either. Maybe the sick fuck who drew them drew this picture, too, and sent it to Sadie as a way of fucking with me. Of infiltrating my life.

  God, if that were true, I was going to have to tell her the truth. I was going to have to tell her something. If she’d been dragged into this nightmare and she’d been sent such graphic, vile, personal artwork, then I owed her the apology of a lifetime.

  I kept hold of the drawing as I padded barefoot down the hallway and opened my bedroom door. I’d get dressed, and then I’d have to speak to her. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but—

  The scream left my lips before I even really registered the sight before me.

  Blood.

  On the bed sheets.

  On the window panes.

  On the walls.

  On the rug.

  There was blood everywhere.

  I couldn’t fucking breathe. My bed was soaked with the stuff. I took a step into the room, and that’s when I found the source of the blood. Dead eyes stared up at me, black and lifeless. Matted fur—brown, white, and now red—lay in clumps all over the sheets, torn from the…

  I tried not to gag.

  …torn from the body, as if someone had grabbed handfuls of skin and ripped…

  It was no good.

  I dropped to my knees, crumpling forward, and I retched, vomiting so hard it felt like I was never going to stop.

  It was Archie, my dog.

  Archie?

  It made no sense. Archie was with the dog sitter. Colby would never have brought him back here and left him if I wasn’t here. He loved Arch more than life itself. They were best fucking friends. Most of the time, I felt like Archie loved Colby more than he even loved me. So this…this was not sinking in properly. Who would have done this? Who would have hurt him so badly? Cut him open and pulled out his intes—

  “I wasn’t joking when I said I’d made a mess, Ser. I really am sorry about all of this.”

  I blinked, staring at the crimson stained rug beneath my palms, trying to focus my eyes, but they weren’t cooperating. Slowly, I turned, and Sadie was leaning against my bedroom door, holding a mug in her hands. Hot steam rose from the mug—she must have made herself a coffee. “I see you found Daddy’s drawing, too. Quite the little sneak, aren’t you?”

  “Daddy’s…?” My whisper barely made a sound as it slipped past my lips. What the fuck was going on? What was she saying? I couldn’t fit any of the pieces back together now. I couldn’t comprehend even the simplest, most obvious of things.

  Archie was…dead?

  Sadie walked into the bedroom, the Cuban heels of her boots making dull thudding sounds against the rug; she pulled a face as she gingerly stepped over a red, twisted mound of what looked like internal organs that had been piled to the right of the bed. With her back to me, she faced the window, clasping the mug in both hands as she looked out over the city. “He didn’t like people to know he could draw. He was always so dead-set on people being afraid of him. Drawing seemed like too romantic a pastime for a man supposed to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who had dealings with him. Funny, really. If he’d shown anyone his drawings, they’d have seen right away that there was nothing romantic about them at all.”

  “Sadie. What the…fuck is going on?” I was breathless. Couldn’t fucking speak.

  She came to me, squatting down so she could pick up the drawing I’d dropped. Our eyes met, and for the first time in years, I felt like I was looking into the face of a complete stranger. The warmth in her eyes was gone. Her usual, sunny disposition was gone, vanished, as if it had never been there at all. Her mouth was drawn down at the corners into a grimace of displeasure.

  “What d’you think’s going on, Sera? Come on,” she said, tutting quietly. “I thought you were the clever one. The girl who had it all figured out. You certainly pulled the wool over my eyes, that’s for sure. Do you have any idea what it was like to stand in that hallway before and see you hurtling around the corner toward me? Hmm? I thought I was about to have a fucking heart attack. See, I thought you were dead.” She stroked her hand down the side of my face, her eyes sharp as daggers. “I brought that lovely bottle of wine here to celebrate your untimely demise, finally, and then boom. There you were, alive and well. I shouldn’t have been surprised. You have this way of manipulating people. Bending them to your will and getting them to do whatever the fuck you want. I’ve watched you do it for years. If you could convince one hitman to spare you, why would I have assumed you wouldn’t do the same with the second. Tell me. Did you fuck him, too?”

  “What are you talking about?” No. No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be. Something ugly, and cold, and evil squirmed in the pit of my stomach. This was a joke. A really cruel joke. A tear streaked down my cheek and dripped off the end of my chin. “You’re not Carver,” I whispered.

  Sadie canted her head to the side, arching an eyebrow. She laughed, and the sound was brittle in my ears. “I’m not?” she asked in a mocking tone. “You sound so sure.”

  “You’re my friend. We’ve known each other for years. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.” I didn’t know who I was trying to convince, now—myself or her.

  “Yes, we have been friends for years,” she conceded. “And even I found myself falling for your bullshit charms. You made it so hard to hate you some days. Mostly, I’ve been quietly despising you, though. Waiting for the perfect time to teach you a fucking lesson.”

  “For what? What have I done to you?”

  Sadie’s face was a mask of pure hatred. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Sera Lafferty? The thing that cripples you with guilt whenever you’re alone?” She used such a measured tone and spoke so quietly that I knew this was a serious question. She really wanted to hear the answer. I wracked my brain, searching through my memories, bracing myself for the fall when I finally tripped over the answer.

  “I didn’t protect Amy as well as I should have,” I said. “I didn’t take her away from my father. I should have put her in the back of the fucking car and driven away from that place way sooner than I did.”

  Sadie’s eyes narrowed into furious slits. Suddenly there was a knife in her hand. The same knife I’d pulled out of the block in the kitchen and then left on the counter. God knows where she’d been hiding it. “Wrong,” she snapped. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. That isn’t the worst thing you’ve ever done. Try again.”

  I eyed the knife, flinching at the five-inch blade as she held it up in front of my face. The thing was wickedly sharp, its serrated edge a row of jagged teeth, primed to bite.

  “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

  She turned the knife and pressed the tip of it against my cheek. “Think,” she hissed.

  “I—I—fuck! I don’t know!”

  “You are such a piece of work. Let me help you out, since your conscience seems to have taken a permanent leave of absence. You used to live in Montmorenci. Your father, Sixsmith Lafferty, was a gambling, womanizing, alcoholic scumbag who didn’t like to pay his bar tabs. One day, Sixsmith made an agreement with a local business owner he owed money to, and low and behold, you started to pay that local business owner weekly visits. You’d go to his apartment above his bar, and you’d disappear into his bedroom. You’d be in there with him for hours, crying and moaning, begging for him to stop, pretending you weren’t enjoying his attentions, and all the while the local business owner’s daughter sat in her bedroom with her hands clapped over her ears, trying not to listen.”

  Oh…

  Oh my god.

  She was…

  “Julia?” I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to process the information, but it was written all over Sadie’s face: she was Sam Halloran’s daughter. I would never, ever have known. She looked nothing like him. There was nothing of that fat, disgusting pedophile in her at all.

 
; Her lip curled back into a sneer. “Before you started going to Sam’s bar, he used to worship the ground his daughter walked on. He venerated her. Treated her like she was a princess. But all of that changed the moment you walked through their door. You warped something inside his head. You liked to pant and groan. You said no, you told him you didn’t want him, begged him not to hurt you, but you made him do all of those things. You enjoyed it when he was inside you. You twisted everything, turned everything upside down. You taught Sam that a girl meant yes when she said no.

  “And then, one day, Sam was furious. Sixsmith kept you home, told Sam you were sick, but the old man had been anticipating your visit all day. He’d paced the floor for hours, waiting for you to show up. He was disappointed. He turned to his daughter with a dead, hollow expression on his face and he told her to go into his bedroom. And there, inside the four walls of his bedroom, his daughter begged and pleaded for him to stop. But he didn’t. He did terrible, awful, painful things to her. From that moment forward, Sam fucked you twice a week, but the other five days of the week, he dragged his own daughter into his room by the roots of her hair…and he did unspeakable things to her.”

  I didn’t know how to process any of this. The shock was just too much. “He told me he never touched you,” I said numbly.

  “Maybe at first, he didn’t. But you gave him a taste for the taboo. And what’s more taboo than raping your own kid?”

  “You really think I went in there willingly? You really think I fucking chose to go visit your father?”

  “I didn’t see anyone walking behind you with a gun to your head. Yeah, that’s right. I used to watch you coming and going all the time.”

  “Peter would never have let me run.”

  “Pssshhhh. Are you kidding me?” She was tinged with madness: the wild, unbalanced excitement in her eyes; the way her fingertips drummed against the handle of the knife; the way she kept lifting the coffee mug to her mouth, only to lower it a second later. She’d been so calm and together when she’d walked in here. Now, she was anything but. She’d completely lost her cool. “Peter was a weak, mindless idiot. He wouldn’t have done a fucking thing if you’d tried to bolt.”

  God, perhaps she was right. Peter had been a bit of a soft touch even back in high school. Still, there were other reasons why I’d had to comply with Sixsmith and Sam’s fucked up arrangement. “If I didn’t give them what they wanted, my sister would have paid for it. I could take them hurting me, but I couldn’t let them hurt her. And I never encouraged Sam. I wasn’t saying one thing and meaning another. I meant no. He raped me. Every week, twice a week, for a solid year, he fucking raped me.”

  Sadie rolled her eyes.

  I couldn’t believe any of this. For the longest time, I’d been meeting her for lunch. Brunch every Sunday. Yoga classes. Margaritas and tacos whenever either one of us was celebrating a big win. And all along, she’d been putting on a front. For fucking years. She’d been pretending to be my friend, pretending to be there for me, tolerating me when I came to comfort her, when all along her skin must have been crawling at my very presence and she’d been plotting this in the back of her mind.

  “I need to put clothes on,” I said. “You need to let me stand up.”

  “Does it really matter if you’re naked or fully dressed when you die?”

  “Sadie, please. Just let me get dressed and we can talk. You can tell me what happened with Sam. Explain everything. Just let me put some clothes on first.”

  She looked at me pityingly. “You’re in no position to bargain. You don’t get to negotiate terms here. If you think you’re gonna be able to talk your way out of this, then you clearly don’t know me at all.”

  “I don’t know you, Sadie! You’ve been lying to me since the day we met.”

  An arrogant pride flashed across her face. “Of course I did. There’s something quite intoxicating about holding the balance of power in one’s hand. At any moment, I could have brought everything crashing down around your ears. You thought you were so smart, that you had everything under control, but you had no idea how much danger you were in. How out of your control your life was. Even with Gareth, you were so fucking blind. You caught him fucking his secretary in the end, but you had no idea I was fucking him for months before that.”

  What? Sadie and Gareth? I rocked back on my heels, the hairs on the backs of my arms standing up. I’d had no idea. Literally none, whatsoever. Gareth had let me down and hurt me, but that was old news. It hurt beyond belief to know that she had betrayed me with my ex-boyfriend. Stung more than I knew what to do with.

  “Get up, then,” she said, poking the end of the knife at me. “Get dressed if it’ll make you feel better. Hurry, though. I plan on being far, far away from this place by the time your treacherous moron of a boyfriend returns.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off her, didn’t turn my back to her as I quickly donned a sports bra, panties, an over-sized t-shirt and a pair of running shorts. Could I get away with putting shoes and socks on? I doubted it. She’d know I was trying to figure out how to run, and she’d never let that happen. My stomach tied itself into a knot of sorrow as I moved back to stand by the blood-soaked bed.

  “You didn’t need to kill Archie. He was a fucking dog. He didn’t do anything wrong.” I wanted to close his eyes, to try and give him some kind of peace, even though he’d obviously died in agony, but Sadie stepped in front of me, brandishing the knife in my face.

  “I did have to kill him. You loved him, and he loved you. I need to destroy everything and everyone who cares about you. That includes your sister, and Marcosa.”

  “You really think you’re going to outsmart Fix?” A chill ran up the length of my spine, though. She’d managed to fool us all until now. She was an expert liar, and an even better actress. If she put her mind to it, she’d probably be able to concoct some sort of scenario whereby Fix found himself alone with her, vulnerable and taken by surprise. Sadie would revel in the chance to prove he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, too.

  She was a complete sociopath. Were sociopaths capable of feeling alone? If I were her, living a lie every day, putting a fake smile on every time she saw or spoke to me, feigning our entire friendship, then I would have felt like the loneliest person in the world. It was all pretty sad, for me and for her. She’d wormed her way into my life out of hate. And it turned out the woman I’d called my best friend for a long time had been secretly planning my violent demise since day one.

  “My father drew you from memory, y’know?” Sadie said, kicking at the drawing on the floor with the toe of her shoe. “He never wanted to ask you to pose for him, so he’d sit there for hours, scribbling, trying over and over to capture an accurate likeness of you in his sketch book. He’d get so frustrated when he got something wrong that he’d beat me. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. It was when he got it right that I’d be truly scared. When he was pleased with what he’d done, he’d get turned on. He’d bind my hands behind my back, then bind my wrists to my ankles, so I was stuck in a kneeling position, then he’d cut my clothes from my body with a knife. He’d fuck my mouth until he came, and all the while he’d be staring at the picture he’d drawn of you, grinding out your name between his teeth as he thrust himself as far as he could down my throat. Didn’t care if he made me gag. Didn’t care if I threw up all over him. He actually seemed to like it when I did that,” Sadie clarified in a bitter tone. “So long as his imagination could whisk him away to you, it didn’t matter if I was hurt, or sick, or bleeding. All he fucking cared about was you.”

  I was sick to my stomach. Peter had never said anything about Sam interfering with Sadie. With Julia. Why would he have said anything, though? It wasn’t like he’d ever told anyone about Sam raping me. He’d kept his mouth shut, and he hadn’t breathed a word to anybody about anything. Sadie blamed me for what happened to her back then, but it wasn’t my fault. It was difficult to purge myself of the guilt, though. I supposed, in a small, fucked
up way, she was right. If I’d railed against Sam a little harder in the beginning, his sense of shame might have gotten the better of him. He might have stopped. And then, later, if I’d quit beseeching him to end the assaults, if I’d just laid there, limp like a ragdoll, glassy-eyed and staring at the ceiling while he took what he wanted from me, maybe he would have grown bored. I’d known how excited it made him when I cried and whimpered. I was all too aware of how hard it made him when I told him he was hurting me, and I wanted him to stop.

  He’d become obsessed with the power he had over me, and that obsession had bled over into his relationship with Sadie, until even her misery and fear didn’t matter to him anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Truly, I am. I can imagine what he put you through, because he put me through the same thing. But I’m telling you, if I’d known…”

  Sadie sobbed, lunging forward with the knife. Her eyes shone brightly, but she wasn’t crying. It was as if she was refusing to let her tears fall. “If you’d known, you would have killed him sooner?” she spat.

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I never intended t—” She lashed out with the knife. The polished steel sang toward me, making contact before I could dart out of the way. Blood blossomed from the burning three-inch long laceration on my forearm, and Sadie froze, eyes locked on the sight of my blood, as if transfixed by it.

  “Don’t make excuses, Sera. Excuses are only going to make me angry.”

  I hugged my arm to my chest, covering the shallow wound with my hand. If I didn’t hide the damage she’d done, I could guess what was going to happen: one cut wouldn’t be enough. She’d want to do it again, and again, and again. She’d want my blood to flow freely, and once we’d reached that stage, I was fucked. She had a knife. I had nothing to defend myself with at all. I knew how to relieve an attacker of a weapon, but I needed to wait for the perfect moment. Act too soon, and I’d end up on the floor, staring up into Sadie’s crazed eyes as she stabbed me to death.