I’m transfixed. Everyone is, I suspect. The camera pans to the journalist, now struggling to get up.
Her face is a perfect mix of anger—how dare she push me!—and a kind of queasy almost-joy—that sequence, you can see her think, that’s going to makes the news!
The girl pushes at the camera now—it swings away, points briefly at the sky—and then it’s back. The girl is still crying. Now she’s wrapped one arm tightly around herself, the other limp beside her, her gloved hand palm upwards.
I feel a sick thump in my stomach. That’s how she sat when I… I feel myself start to remember it all, those memories I’ve only allowed myself in fits and starts since I made the phone call that changed everything.
Eight days after
Tonight the sleeping pills stopped working. I’m not sleeping anymore. In the first few days I slept, long, medicated, exhausted sleeps from which I awoke, with body cramps and a dry, gummy mouth. But last night, every time I tried to sleep—in my bed, then in the spare room bed, and then, increasingly desperate, on the sofa—her hunched body appears behind my eyelids, her matted hair covering her face, one arm splayed out in an imploring gesture. Her fingers looked chewed, their ends just red stumps. Her cupped palm is a lake of blood, tracing tiny rivers slowly down her arm. She lifts her head, slowly, so slowly, and I panic, I try to turn away. In my dream, I fight to wake, but a heavy dread keeps pulling me back down, back to the shed, with its blood and stink and mess.
I wake up, blood hammering in my ears, mouth open, hands gripping the duvet. My limbs are aching: that fierce, clenching pain of rheumatoid arthritis. I scrabble for the strong painkillers and swallow four dry. I lie there for a while, heart throbbing hard in my chest, trying to breathe deeply. By the time I’ve calmed down and the pain has subsided, I realise sleep has gone, so I get up slowly and painfully, and limp across the house, now stuffy with that intense, closed-curtains smell. It’s about four in the morning, but I’m cold and still trembling from that dream. My bones ache too much to sit down. I pace up and down the old carpet that we never got round to replacing… then, suddenly, it’s the use of ‘we’ that catches in my throat. Until now, I’ve deliberately tried not to think about him, except for the first few days when it was all police cars, and statements and his sudden, startling absence, as loud as a sound in the empty house. I threw all the photos of us—of him—into a box, in a crying, angry daze as soon as they took him away. He was telling me not to worry as they pushed his head down, hard and savage, to shove him into the back of the car. I close my eyes and feel my heart start to thunder again in my ears. The betrayal is so immense; I can only begin to start imagining it all, it’s like trying to take in the whole Alps in a look.
Nevertheless, my traitor body still remembers him. It makes constant mistakes like making coffee the way he likes it, setting the table for two, keeping my music turned down. I hate those times that I’ll drift and forget for a moment and then remember. I am sick with a violent resentment of him, of what he’s done: of what he’s done to me, to her.
There’s a newspaper under my door. I’m sure it’s one of those photographers. I look outside between a crack in the curtains. There’s two of them there, cold and huddled into shapeless black puffa jackets. There’s—I count them—three, four cars parked in my driveway and spilling carelessly onto the road. No doubt some of them are sleeping in their cars. The familiar rage rises up in me, red and congested. I drop the curtain, flick the switch on the kettle and pick up the tabloid paper. Its cheap ink smears on my fingers as I open it. I don’t have to look far; it’s on the front page.
GIRL TORTURED
—it blazes out—
IN SICK MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS!
I am so still I am barely breathing, as I stare at the page. Absent-mindedly, I notice how twisted my fingers are, their shape worn crooked from the clenching and the pain. Somewhere far away, the kettle clicks off with a cheery bubbling accompaniment. I read the headline again, and on, into the article.
“We can now EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that the girl in the centre of the SUBURBAN SHED SHOCKER was forced to submit to SICK MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS! Gillian Langdon relives her nightmare at the hands of suburban accountant David Philips and claims he DELIBERATELY TORTURED HER, recording her suffering on a video-camera and in a notebook.”
My fingers, clumsy with pain and cold, drop the paper. I let it lie there. I remember the cordon around the shed, the gardai stolidly winding their CRIME SCENE tape around stakes. I remember them coming out with bin-liners of—I didn’t know what, that was all I could watch. That’s when I pulled the curtains closed against the outside world.
I’m not sure how long I stand there, the newspaper at my feet, but eventually I bend down, slowly, breath hitching a little at the pain, and read more. There’s something about me too.
“Many people feel that Teresa Philips is possibly implicated in this terrible crime. Teresa, the wife of David Philips, made the terrible discovery that led to Gillian’s release. Neighbours interviewed were sceptical that Gillian could have been imprisoned in the garden without Teresa knowing. ‘She never really goes out, I always thought there was something really odd about her,’ says one source close to the couple.”
I drop the cheap paper on the counter-top, disgusted with the greedy, gleeful speculation. My eyes fill with tired tears; they well up, and blur the ugly words together in a smear of ink and despair. I open my mouth. I want to say: It wasn’t like that! I found her! I saved her!
And the memory of finding her comes flooding back. One moment it was a beautiful summer day, the next it was a horror movie. I was feeling so happy. I’d woken without pain, and even the quail-egg-sized swelling in my knee had subsided. I decided to surprise David by cleaning the kitchen, washing his clothes and preparing something nice to eat. Normally he did all of that when he came home from work—I’d been signed off on sick leave for the last few months. I was pegging out clothes, enjoying the sensuous feeling of sun crisping the back of my shirt, inhaling the cottony-fresh scent of clean, wet laundry. And then I saw it, a little flash of movement, no more than a glint of sunlight on a windowpane, or a bird flitting off. I turned to look and then I saw a red hand pressed to the window of the shed. For a second I stood, arms full of damp jeans, transfixed, until the hand slowly dropped down, leaving a streaky print on the glass. My first thought was pure horror—
“David!” I screamed, throwing the wet clothes on the grass, in a desperate attempt to get there and save him from some horrible accident. I stumbled and twisted my ankle hard enough to make me scream, but kept running-hobbling, reached the door and scrabbled for the bolt. Horror and exertion had cramped my fingers, so I couldn’t move it. I grabbed it awkwardly, splintering a nail down to the quick. No use. It was locked. I screamed—
“Wait” and fumbled through my cardigan pocket till my hand closed on my house keys—a bunch of all the outdoor door keys—and finally fumbled the lock open. It was the smell that hit me first: the scalding odour of piss, sharp and biting, the rank, rotting smell of shit. I saw a hand, bloody and red.
“David!” I screamed again, but the face that turned to me wasn’t his. The sight of her face flipped my stomach over, I was gone inside, falling into blackness. Her face, it was streaked with blood, the lips stitched together with three raw, angry stitches, a damp, sticky clot where one ear should be. She moaned and grunted loudly, her eyes bright in her filthy face, alive with fear and hope. Her head nodded towards her waist where coils of rope held her arms to her body. She’d sacrificed the nails on one hand to twist one hand free, that dreadful, bloody hand that had fluttered like a red moth at the window. I was crying silently, my shoulders shaking as I pulled at the ropes. The stink, the moaning, the sticky cords, my mind slid over all of them, even as I was pulling her free—under all of them was this awful abyss, the darkness of: who did...? and was it..? and then, before I could think any more, we were in the bright unreality of the kitchen.
The worst bit wasn
’t finding her. Or her face. Or the blood. It was that light, faint sense of déjà vu that crawled over me afterwards.
Nine days after
Still sleeping fitfully. Still the bad dreams. Still on my own. I pad around the house, two pairs of bed socks and my coat on. There’s no oil in the tank for the central heating and my bones ache so badly. I need to talk to him. I need to ask him.
I ring the police station. The man I speak to has a kind, country accent, the sing-song consonants of a Cork twang. He can’t help me. David had been remanded into custody, with no visitors allowed.
“I shouldn’t even be telling you that, like,” he says, in his warm, comfortable voice.
I hold my breath, ignore my shame and play the disability card, something I really, really hate doing. “But I need to speak to him. I’m chronically ill and I need to ask him how I operate the heating in the house.” I feel light-headed and queasy with shame.
“Ah now, I’m sorry to hear that.” He actually does sound sorry. “We can send someone out to you, a garda, no bother. Would you like someone to come out and give you a hand?”
I sigh. “It’s OK,” I say gently. It’s not his fault. He’s kind. I tell him I’ll call my mother, and then hang up.
I need to talk to him. Things have started coming back, you see, bits and pieces. I’m afraid. I’m terribly afraid I could have acted sooner. I remember one night, a few weeks ago, when I thought I heard banging outside. David listened carefully.
“I can’t hear anything,” he said, his face politely dubious. “But I’ll check it out.”
He came back in, and smiled at me. “You were right, sharp ears! The gate had come loose.” I remember he stooped to hug me, carefully arranged as I was in my armchair with the extra cushions. I remember wincing as his arm brushed the tender swelling on my elbow. I remember his flinch, his apology.
But I don’t go to check the gate now to see if it was true. I tell myself it’s because there are still three photographers standing and smoking bitterly by their cars. The real reason is my shame. What if I could have done something?
I don’t sleep at all that night.
Ten days after
I remember him the first time I was hospitalised with the agony. I remember him hovering over my bed, afraid, eager to help—his face, crumpled and pink with crying. “If only I could understand your pain,” he said, gripping my hand so hard I cried and twisted it away. He was obsessed with helping me cope with the pain, that ever-present pain that could flare into torture at any moment. He treated me like a porcelain doll, gentling his hands before he touched me.
The image prompts me to do something I’ve been putting off. Slowly I unfold the tabloid article, smooth it out, and force myself to read it all. My eyes skim down it
“…recording her suffering on a video-camera and a notebook. Gillian Langdon claims her captor was a sadist. ‘Sometimes when he hurt me, he’d give me painkillers. I had to nod my head if they worked. He got angry when they didn’t.’ When found, Gillian’s body and face were mutilated horribly: her lips stitched together, one ear severed, fingernails of one hand removed, and deep cuts on her knees and elbows. Superintendent James Kelly said ‘This is the most shocking—’”
—I don’t read on. I cover my mouth with a trembling hand.
I remember his face, soft and gentle above mine, as I lay in bed trying not to cry. “Take four instead of three” he says insistently. “I know they’ll work. I just know.”
Did he?—Was that?—But I can’t even think it. I just start crying, great big gouts of tears from a black pit inside me. I stay crouched over on the carpet, all day. Sometimes I cry; sometimes the tears just ooze out, relentless as rain.
I don’t want to think why I’m crying. I don’t want to think.
Late that evening, I realise that the crew outside have given up. I pull myself up stiffly, using the chair back, and watch them leave through the crack in the curtains. They’re angry, but relieved to be going. “You can come out now, you old bitch!” shouts one. Another takes a long, vengeful piss on my front door. I hear the urine splash against the stone steps, the faint laughter trailing back, then the doors slam, engines cough, and they’re finally gone.
I’m truly alone now. I think of the many long nights ahead, the cold house, the emptiness of the bed upstairs, and the tears come again.
What if I’d know it would be like this? Would I have done exactly what I did? When I saw that hand like a damp splayed starfish on the old shed window, would I have gone to investigate? Would I still have run to the shed door on water-weak legs? If I had known then, would I still have still screamed, like I did? Scrabbled at the bolt with frantic hands?
And after that—and this is the question that keeps me awake at night—would I still have called the police?
Up In The Window
Elizabeth Myrddin
As the cab paused for a red light, I leaned forward and read the sign at the corner.
Easterly Boulevard. We were nearing the street that featured the main attraction for my unhealthy obsession.
Through the dwindling mist, I watched as the traffic light blinked to an acidic green, then the taxi jerked into movement again. The vehicle crawled along the damp city street like a dingy yellow wind-up mouse. No moon was visible. The lampposts lining the boulevard imparted anemic sprays of illumination. A glance at my smartphone showed the hour ticking toward three-thirty A.M. I relaxed and listened to the muted instrumental music the driver had put on. Reminiscent of Flamenco guitar, it was a soothing accompaniment for the ride.
With an abrupt shiver, I tucked the phone into my purse, then zipped up my jacket. I adjusted the strap of my handbag over a shoulder and across my body, then wiggled on the chilly upholstery and wished I’d worn tights. From the top of my ankle boots to the hem of my dress, goosebumps emerged on the exposed skin.
The weather had changed in the last week, heralding the arrival of holiday season. I wasn’t ready for it. Never was, really. Once Halloween had passed, the perennial multitudes amassed and began their shopping frenzy. To take care of simple errands became a battle with a human obstacle course. Such predictable chaos, people rushing about, spouting carefully constructed expressions of goodwill. It always made me cringe.
An impatient sigh pushed past my lips as I nudged my tipsy attention away from petty grievance. I tried to focus on the scenery as the cab driver continued down Easterly. Closed shops and establishments slid past my view in a silent, shadowy montage. There was nothing intriguing to see, at least not yet.
At night when in a taxi, or on a bus, or in a car, I liked to gaze into the uncovered, lit windows of apartment buildings. Sometimes this voyeurism granted only a quick peek into rooms awash in the ultra-blue radiance of TV screens. On other trips through the city, I’d see interesting wall hangings, décor, and fixtures. The best experiences were when I became privy to random slice-of-life occurrences. An embracing couple; guests helping to clean up after a dinner party; someone training with weights or performing other structured exercise: bite-sized appetizers allowing me tiny tastes from a variety of offerings—momentary candid snapshots, here, then gone.
One specific window interested me the most, though.
Earlier in the evening, after our boisterous group exited the Ace Tavern, I joined Saul and Lucy for a nightcap at their place. One pint of the rich, home-brewed chocolate stout enhanced my bourbon high and spawned a devil-may-care attitude. Nighttime was the right time for adventure, wasn’t it? The drink at my friends’ place wasn’t my real agenda. On the cab ride home, I planned to travel past the window that preoccupied me. What would I observe at such a late hour? I was on my way to find out.
As the taxi drove past window after darkened window, my eyelids drooped. Time inched toward dawn. By now, most citizens were deep in sleep.
An impetuous decision, this late-night divagation. The alcohol I had consumed fueled and strengthened my moodiness. The painful end of a recent romance still s
tung, and I yearned for any sort of escape—no matter how absurd—to divert my ego from picking at emotional wounds. This was how I came to indulge an idle but persistent curiosity: my fixation with the window and the peculiar-looking person who always seemed to be seated there.
I can’t say with certainty when I first became fixated on the person in the window. It began over a year ago, around the time I was a regular at the Gin Ricky, a now-defunct craft cocktail bar on Rosewood Street. Straight up Rosewood was the quickest route, and my penchant for looking into apartment windows while going to and from the venue resulted in my noticing this particular window. Revisiting it soon became a compulsion.
What stoked this burning fascination?
Well, every time I gazed up, the same individual was there and posed in the same position, appearing seated at a desk or a table. Months ago, as my taxi languished in unexpected traffic, I had a few extra moments to study the figure.
The window, two floors up, is a good size and I’ve never seen curtains or shades drawn. The figure strikes me as masculine. From the sternum up, he exhibits a thin build, a bald head, and a face devoid of hair. I’ve not detected any hint of eyebrows. His eyes, dark and round, are a stand out feature and display a glassy intensity. I’ve discerned an unremarkable, smallish nose, and the palest slit of a mouth. He is either shirtless, or always garbed in the same milky beige shirt, which fits snug and seamless against his body. The man gives the impression of focused concentration while staring down at something. Does a fascinating book absorb him? Is he watching a movie on his tablet? Playing a computer game? Studying?
Creepy, grayish light suffuses the room, but at intervals, it shifts to varying tints of amber then back to gray again. The strange glow seems to emanate from the seated individual and not from a device in front of him. Perhaps this effect was a fault with my perception, but it reads that way every time I’ve looked.
Onyx Neon Shorts Presents: Horror Collection - 2015 Page 6
