I witness the scene with my hands clamped over my mouth, too numb to do anything except stare through the keyhole.
Throughout the girl’s ordeal, I could see little more than her tail and the thrusting of Darryl’s hips. The ugliest thing about the rape was how closely it resembled the everyday submissive sex that I have consented to hundreds of times before: no screams, no struggle, and a leather belt constricting a throat. But this time it’s being perpetrated upon a vulnerable, childlike, murderous young woman, in the bedroom-cell that I assume she has spent her life being abused in – until today.
I saw the upward jerk of her hands. I had only realised that something had altered between them when the man had begun to punch her backside. She had dragged her tailbone away from him, revealing a blink of metal and a sudden surge of blood. Before his hands had time to cup the flow, I had glimpsed the red-spewing stump that remained between his legs.
This sight alongside the man’s strange mewls awakens me from my stupor.
I had only heard three voices coming from outside, so does that mean that there is only one more threat in the house? Or is the girl a danger to me as well?
Regardless, I heave the toilet lid up from the ground, brace myself at the door, and say a silent goodbye to my twin babies still sat in the bath in my home, just a minute away.
You’re both survivors. If you have to, you’ll survive without me.
Holding the lid with one shaky arm to my chest, I thrust the door open.
The girl is leaning over the bed, perhaps bent double with agony. The man is still kneeling, jeans down, grimacing. Blood gushes between the gaps in his fingers at his crotch. His mouth drops open as he sees me – catching flies, Stuart might have said – and he frowns, as if performing mental arithmetic.
He has no time to lift his arms before I swing the toilet lid into the centre of his face. His features seem to implode: lips curling into themselves, nose shattering, eyes squeezing shut, cheekbones breaking with a brittle snap. At first he stays kneeling and his arms raise reflexively a second too late, trying to block a blow that has already caved in part of his head. I swing the edge of the toilet lid into his throat. It propels him back towards the wall, his face and the ruins of his genitals slopping waterfalls of blood over the concrete floor. He slides down and lies motionless on his side, perpendicular to his dead companion by the door.
I turn to the girl. She still hasn’t changed her crumpled position over the bed. I want to wrap an arm around her, but instead I circle her until I’m standing at her desk. One of her cheeks rests against the bed sheets. Her face is furrowed, her skin a vivid white.
My mouth is so dry that I can barely shape the words: “What did you do?”
She lifts a trembling, scarlet hand in explanation, and then pushes her front up from the bed with a wretched groan.
The handle of her knife juts from her pubic mound, like a lever waiting to be pulled. Her fingers twitch, paused a few inches from the protrusion. It spatters rhythmic red dots over the floor between her knees.
“Don’t touch it,” I tell her.
If she doesn’t reach a hospital soon, I’m convinced that she will die. If I had ever envisioned a revenge for all she has done to my family, it would never have been this obscenity.
“Stay still. Look at me.”
Kneeling, she looks. Her vacant expression has vanished and her eyes shimmer with sorrow, and in the midst of her agony she is almost beautiful again.
“I’m going to take off your top,” I tell her.
If there is a live feed to the camera on the wall, I’m as good as dead.
I believe that to treat stab wounds you’re supposed to leave the impaling object alone if possible, to avoid further bleeding. But when the exit wound is internal and in a place such as this, how could I even stem the flow without removing the blade?
“You need to stay as you are, kneeling.”
She obeys and two words seep into my head, like a vile prophecy: Good girl.
I think that what I’m about to do will be for the best, and not only for her.
Her survival may depend on me slowing the blood until a medical professional tends to her.
My survival may depend on me getting my hands on that knife.
25. Girl
“Lean against the bed,” Serenity tells me.
The clouds have gone, but I still can’t see her clearly. Serenity doesn’t even look like Serenity, anymore. She looks like a shadow.
The pain in my nice smooth cunt is really big, but I’m not feeling shaky or different anymore. Everything moves slowly. I’m trying to stay kneeling up and doing everything that Serenity the Shadow-Girl tells me to do, but it’s hard.
“Lift your arms,” Serenity the Shadow-Girl says. “I need the top.”
I lift my arms and the Shadow-Girl puts her hands against my sides. Even though I can’t focus on her, I can still smell her sweet skin. She lifts the top-clothes. They slide against me and it almost feels Good, in spite of all the pain.
“I think you’re going to have to stand up, actually.”
Her hands go to my armpits, brushing my tits a little. She doesn’t want to fuck me, though. She’s not like that. Girls aren’t like that.
“This is going to hurt.”
She pulls on my arms. As I stand up I hear a scream. My cunt feels like it’s been fucked by 15 cocks and 15 of My Daddy’s buzzing toys, all at the same time.
“Don’t fall. Stay as still as you can.”
I stay still, even when the Shadow-Girl crouches in front of me and puts her hand onto the knife handle. The pain gets even bigger. My legs go shaky, but the Shadow-Girl had told me to stay still, so I stay still.
Now the Shadow-Girl’s head is at the same height as my cunt.
“I don’t think I can do this quickly. I think I’ll make it worse if I do.”
She starts to pull. The 15 cocks and 15 buzzing toys twist and I scream again, I scream and I scream like I sometimes do when one of my Daddies says, “Scream for me, slut.” My legs go really, really shaky and the room goes really, really dark, and everything becomes small and gets even slower. I can’t remember if I’m awake or sleeping. If I’m sleeping, I wonder if I’m ever going to wake up.
There’s a sharp, wet noise and a bright white pain, and when I look down at the Shadow-Girl she is holding my knife.
“You can sit on the bed, now.”
I sit on the bed. Everything in My Room looks really far away, like the blue ceiling had when I’d found the big room next to My Daddy’s big place. Way down there between my legs, my bedsheets are going red.
The Shadow-Girl pushes open my legs and slides her thumb and her first finger into my cunt. The 15 cocks and 15 toys shake and break and hurt inside me. When she pulls out her fingers, she’s holding something that looks like another little finger, except fatter. She drops it and it lands with a PLIT sound. When she looks up at me, she doesn’t look like Serenity or even a Shadow-Girl anymore.
She looks like the bigger Girl who I think used to live in My Room with me, the one who used to hug me and make me feel warm. It almost makes me feel safe, but not the kind of “safe” that My Daddy used to talk about. This is a different kind of safe, one where someone wants to help me but not because they want to fuck me.
I think that this bigger Girl just wants to stop the red stuff, and even though everything hurts more than cigarettes or scratching the Bad away, more than choking and hitting, and even though I think I’m going to go to sleep really, really soon and I might not wake up, I think that this is okay. I think that this is the real safe.
The bigger Girl pushes part of the top-clothes up into my cunt. I bite my lip really hard and taste red stuff. The bigger Girl folds the other side of the top-clothes over, and pushes it against the shaved red hole that the knife had made above my cunt.
“Push down on that, hard.”
I push and the top-clothes go dark red.
The bigger Girl stands up and goes to the door. Throug
h the pain and the black, I remember something.
“Here,” I say, pushing the top-clothes down with one hand but pointing towards the bottom of the bed with the other.
The bigger Girl checks underneath the bed and finds what I’d taken from My Daddy’s pocket. She goes to the door and slides the key into the lock.
It goes CLA-CLUNK.
She turns back to me, and she really is the bigger Girl who I sometimes think that I can remember.
What was the word that Serenity had used earlier?
Mother.
She makes me think of My Mother.
“Don’t fall asleep,” My Mother says to me, standing at the door. “I’m going to get help, so just keep pushing as hard as you can to stop the blood. Think of something Good. Or count, or something. I’ll be back.”
She pulls the door open.
“Will you really be back?” I ask.
My Mother looks at me from far, far away. “Yes.”
I lift my hand and make a fist, and point my little finger. “Promise?”
She looks at me for another second. I think that she’s going to come back and wrap her little finger around mine, but then she disappears.
My room is just grey stuff and black clouds now. I count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 up to 15, and then stop. I try to think of something Good, like My Mother told me to, but I can’t.
I get up from the bed and the pain almost makes me fall back down. I keep my hand pressed against my cunt and I walk through the black clouds until I can see My Daddy sleeping on the floor.
I don’t know why, but I lie down behind him. The bits of broken screen all over the floor feel like fingernails against my skin, like little scratchy kisses. When I put my arm around him, I try to start counting to 15 again, but I can’t remember how. Then my whole room goes black and there’s nothing else, nothing at all.
26. Serenity
I pad a careful path up the stairs, gripping the blade and holding it before me. I try to focus on Phillip and Lilith, but all I can imagine are my husband and eldest son lying dead, reduced to leaking sacs of blood, and all I anticipate is being used as the thin man had used the girl downstairs.
I’m just five feet, three inches of holes to be fucked.
When I get back to the twins I’ll lock us in the bathroom and hold them tightly, and I’ll call the emergency services while I rock and squeeze my children to my chest.
At the top of the steps, I put my ear to the door. Pointless. It’s fucking soundproof, like the bedroom I’ve just escaped.
I pull the sturdy metal handle and to my surprise it opens with a padded huff. There’s a waft of herbaceous kitchen smells.
There’s still no sound, even as I slip through the narrow crack between door and frame. My bare feet touch the gritty floor of the walk-in cupboard. I take three tentative steps, surrounded by jars and plastic bags lit by the strip light in the hidden passage behind me.
Satisfied that I can hear nothing close by, I ease open the cupboard door. The kitchen is lit by sunshine streaming through the tall windows. It’s still just an averagely bright, warm summer’s day outside.
I edge forwards and turn to the glass door, the portal to my escape no more than 10 steps away.
I’m thinking of those 10 steps as someone grabs a handful of my hair and wrenches me sideways off my feet. It feels as though I’ve been scalped, the pain so intense that it is almost blinding. My knees jar with the kitchen tiles and I instinctively swing my arm behind me, flailing the knife until someone grips my wrist.
“Drop it,” a thick voice says.
The grasp on my lower arm tightens, fingertips intruding between the tendons. My attacker’s other hand yanks my hair. There is a juddered clang as my knife hits the metal counter and then the floor.
“Last man standing, eh?” the deep voice says from behind me. “I saw what you did, you know, interfering little cunt. Camera feed. Always streams to the office, even when it isn’t filming a show.”
Still clamping my wrist and hair, the man hauls me backwards and away from the kitchen towards unknown parts of the house. I hate myself for whimpering, but when I try to spin myself around the man twists my arm up and behind my back. Pain fires through my shoulder, feeling as though my whole arm is going to snap.
“Did Jeff take a shine to you, want you for himself? Is that how the little whore came to turn the tables on him? Your bad influence?”
I’m dragged on my naked backside through a lounge that smells like dust, old books and sweet biscuits. There is a chintzy brown three-piece suite, paintings of farmland, an old-style box TV and a row of near-identical brass clocks above the fireplace.
“Probably think that we’re bad guys, don’t you?” he says, pulling me in his wake.
I try to push myself up but my legs just kick and slip against the carpet. My foot hits a small circular table and a figurine of some kind topples with a clunk.
“We may as well be heroes, though.” He pulls me through another doorway. “Prickly little bitches like you think that we’re the minority, but let’s be honest: youth is the only beautiful thing we’ve got in this broken fucking world.”
I find my breath: “Stop! Let me stand up at least!”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he replies, and slams my head against a wall.
Golden stars spray across my vision, and as we reach a wood-panelled corridor, a dangerous smell hits me: something cloying and flammable.
“If we hadn’t started this, someone else would’ve,” he says. “And maybe they’d have gone about it in the wrong way: kidnapping random kids. Then you lot would really be complaining, wouldn’t you?”
We reach an office and the smell of fumes thickens. At my feet, beside a filing cabinet, I see a red jerry can with its cap unscrewed.
“Get up,” the man says, coming to a halt.
I’m able to pull myself to my feet, but he still holds my hair and wrist.
“You try anything, and I’ll make things a lot worse than they need to be. I don’t care if I should leave ASAP – I’ll make sure that you and I have some fun first.”
Once I’m standing, my captor drags my head around by the hair and shoves my face towards two old-style computer screens.
“Nice guy, Jeff was, but a cheap bastard,” the man whose face I still haven’t seen says. “Splashed out for the cameras, a top-line PC and a big wide bandwidth, but still wouldn’t buy anything flatscreen. Wouldn’t even buy an electronic lock for the girl’s room, the silly sod.”
One computer screen shows the girl’s hidden basement bedroom. The girl is lying on the floor behind Mr Crisp’s corpse, not moving.
The other screen shows a spreadsheet filled with male names.
“See that?” the man asks.
I can’t help but turn my head to take in his appearance. He’s stocky and short with neatly cropped chocolate-coloured hair, wearing a pale blue shirt and thick-rimmed specs around a pair of almost kind-looking eyes. He seems anxious, a little short of breath, but he looks like any other guy I might see at the supermarket or stuck in a traffic jam.
“Look there, cunt,” he says, pushing my head closer to the screen. “Last time I checked, there were 360-odd thousand names on that list, watching our broadcasts. Think of that. 360 thousand men who aren’t out there doing what we’ve been doing, because we were giving them what they need. And our girl wasn’t even suffering, not really. Used to squirt for me, she did. Creamed like a little pornstar.”
The words sicken me, but I stand obediently and listen, like one of his good girls.
“Living the dream, we were, playing with that fucktoy and making plenty of cash from all these punters.” He gestures at the screen. “If there’s this many secretly subscribing to us through the darkweb, imagine how many more there could be across the world, the ones who didn’t find us. A million? A hundred million? Half the population?” He sighs. “Shame that such a good thing has to come to an end, really.”
I gasp in pain as he
tugs my arm so high behind my back that my fingers hit a spot between my shoulder blades. He gives my arm a sharp twist and there’s a jolt of agony, a breaching of some kind of boundary, and a hollow snap.
I scream.
“Shut up. That was necessary.”
When he releases my arm, I can’t move it without feeling blazing pain. He releases my hair and hooks his arm around my throat, trapping my breath. I’m dragged backwards another couple of steps and there is a metallic clunk behind me. He seems to pull me closer to the wall, but then I realise that there is another hidden door, another secret compartment in this dreadful fucking place.
The slightest change in temperature suggests that we are about to descend again.
“Don’t be too sorry,” the man says. “There’s worse ways to go. Down here, the smoke will get to you before the flames do. And at least you’ll have someone to snuggle up to while you go.”
I feel him drop a few inches behind me, and when he yanks my hair again I can’t help but picture Stuart’s face, twisted aggressively. I remember the father of my children choking me, biting me, slapping me. I feel my dead husband chewing my labia, as if my most sensitive parts deserve no more tenderness than a mouthful of gum.
The man behind me leans towards my ear and growls, “The world thinks that the sun shines out of your snatches, doesn’t it? Everything was fine when you all knew your place, though. Now we can’t even discipline you, but you know what? It won’t always be like this. We will…”
I thrust my feet into the floor and launch my body backwards. I hear a panicked whistle of breath and brace myself as we fall. The man wrenches on my neck but as our feet leave the ground I feel my skull collide with something. Blood rushes to my head as we plummet backwards and after a short fall I land against the man’s sturdy ribs with a crack.
The next few moments are a confusion of tumbled impacts, grunts, and wild flares of pain. His grip loosens on my neck and, using my good arm, I roll sideways. The staircase is too narrow though, and I feel his palm clap against my face.
“Cunt!” he shrieks. His fingernails claw at my cheeks and he grabs my nose, squeezing it shut. “Don’t you understand anything?”
What Good Girls Do Page 8
