Tori-speak: when one wishes to express a sentiment or thought, but is unable to because he or she is incapable of speaking clearly and without a stutter.
She smiles slightly thinking about it now, tears still coating her cheeks.
All of these things…had made her so embarrassed that she wanted to die.
Disappear.
Never be seen or heard from again.
But now they seem so small.
They seem so distant.
So pointless.
Now she-
i’m not going to save you.
there’s nothing worth saving.
you never appreciated being alive. you never appreciated being human.
now it’s too late.
it’s too late to be saved, tori vasser.
30
“I went to lunch with my good friend Bill. We’ve been working together for a long time.”
Victoria screams through the gag.
He looks off into the distance thoughtfully.
“Yes, he writes a sports column. He joked about how people would rather read about the type of lingerie a national sports hero’s super model wife wears than about the actual sport. I told him that people would rather read about political figures having sex with teenage girls in seedy motel rooms, or ten year old boy scouts who just wanted an interview for a civics badge, than a new bill being introduced on the Senate floor for tax expenditures.”
It hurts to move, but she can’t stop herself.
It hurts too much not to move.
“That’s it, that’s it, breathe. This doesn’t have to hurt. It’ll stop hurting, if you just let it. Why is this so hard for you, Tori? Shutting off pain? You do it every day, don’t you? You’re a very unhappy girl deep down, aren’t you? Very unhappy. Roof over your head, food on your plate, good education, and yet you’re still unhappy. How ungrateful.”
He keeps telling her that she can shut off the pain the same way she can shut off the impulse to breathe.
But she’s yet to master either.
But Malek knows, of course.
Malek could make this painless.
He could-he could- but he won’t, because-
“I do suppose you get tragedy points for your father and mother, though,” he says idly.
He rolls the scalpel a full 360 between his fingers.
Victoria can’t help but scream through the gag again as it briefly, lightly pushes her skin up.
“Shot by a robber who didn’t even steal anything. Nothing worth stealing in that house after your mother cleaned him out. The only thing she left was you. Couldn’t be bothered with that, could she? Or perhaps she just felt she had everything she needed, everything of value, before she left. And then he left too, didn’t he? Popped out of this world like a light. How fragile humans are.”
Her throat tightens.
“Anything else?”
He pries at the incision with his fingernails.
She lets out another bloodcurdling scream that is absorbed by the gag like a ragged, overused sponge.
He pulls the cloth free and she gasps.
“No, that’s it! Please! That is the truth! My father was killed by a robber. He didn’t find anything valuable so he left. I wasn’t home. I was at a friend’s house at the time. I never g-got to say g-goodbye. That’s it. I loved him. He’s gone. That’s it. There’s nothing else to it, please, stop!”
“Hm. I don’t believe you,” he says.
He wipes the blood off of her stomach with the gag.
“There’s more to it. You aren’t just sad. But never mind that. Today I’m interested in a more scientific truth.”
He taps the metal tray with the scalpel.
“You and I are both members of a highly flexible species. This place did use to be a research facility in addition to a slaughterhouse, you know. They used to do experiments here. Painful ones. The kind that would shock you.”
For some reason, he laughs at that.
“You could perform surgery on a Revenant without using any anesthesia. Cut off their limbs, just to watch them grow back. Peel off layers of skin like I’m doing now just to watch it replenish itself. It’s really quite morbidly fascinating.”
She shudders.
She’d thought nothing could be worse than being held underwater until her lungs felt like they would burst and then some.
She’d thought that spending fourteen hours underground, feeling like she’d just inhaled her last scrap of air every hour or so, would be the worst thing she’d ever experience.
But god.
Was she wrong.
About everything.
About the worst things that could ever happen to her.
About the journalist.
And worst of all.
About Malek.
Because all night, she’d been thinking, perhaps hoping, that he would give in.
That he would get fed up.
Bored.
Tired of being trapped in a fridge for so long.
Tired of being still, of being confined in a coffin, essentially.
He liked to feel alive, didn’t he?
Isn’t that what he wanted, when he was trying to convince her to go out, to have fun? Didn’t he want to be along for the ride?
She’d expected him to give in.
To free himself, and herself, in the process.
But…she’d been wrong.
Again.
And now…
“Skin is so messy. It doesn’t peel easily, does it?”
She grits her teeth.
But still screams when he starts again.
Because it doesn’t matter if the skin grows back, which she watches, with a grim, morbid fascination.
It doesn’t matter if the flesh reconnects itself and regenerates, good as new, as though nothing had happened.
Because it had happened.
Because she felt it.
Because she remembers the feeling, sees the look on the journalist’s face, curls physically and emotionally inwards with every agonizing cut, tear, and pull. And as long as she remembers the sensation, it does not matter who or what she is.
It happened.
Nothing feels real but that pain.
And you can’t take it away from me. You can call me a Revenant, show me that I’m-that I’m no longer…human. But as long as I still feel that pain, and remember it, I…
are you becoming a masochist, my dear?
She refuses to answer the traitor.
i do wish people would stop calling me that.
31
The smell of burning flesh.
She’ll never get it out of her nostrils.
Her face is still scalding, her eyes still watering, her nose wrinkling as she smells her own-
“How do you feel about your aunt?”
remember the time you went to a horror movie
This time, she had begged him not to put her in the refrigerator.
She’d gotten on her knees and begged.
The tears and snot dribbling down her chin in disgusting, terrified clumps.
And he’d relented.
So handsome was his face as he closed her into one of the derelict, abandoned cells.
So perfect.
She’d felt revolting in his heavenly presence. Repulsive and sordid before his calm, composed demeanor.
Childish and undignified.
Powerless, as she knelt in the dirt and watched his flashlight fade into the distance, down the long dark hallway.
you got scared. you left. and they got angry, because they paid for your ticket. selfish little girl.
“Sweet dreams, lovely.”
For the first time in her life, she feels the urge to kill someone.
To rip apart that handsome face and toss it on the ground and kick it into dust and grime.
you wanted to look cool, but you didn’t know just how much of a coward you were until you saw it for yourself. and such an inconsiderate one too.
letting them pay for a ticket to a movie you couldn’t even finish.
She closes her eyes and sees herself sitting in her room.
The bars are there too.
She just couldn’t see them before.
little tori-fied tori.
All those nights.
Alone, petrified of being alone.
Afraid someone would come.
Afraid no one would ever make her feel as safe as her father had.
he was weak. he couldn’t protect himself, much less you. if he wasn’t weak, he’d still be here.
and maybe you wouldn’t be here.
Afraid.
Afraid that if she disappeared, if she died, then there would be no one left to mourn for her father.
And no one would mourn for her.
“You don’t love her? Your aunt? Why not?”
That was the question he had asked.
She had given him an answer.
she hates you.
“No she doesn’t,” Victoria says aloud.
Her own voice frightens her.
It’s too loud.
The empty spaces of the prison are much too still.
Nothing living, nothing moving is meant to be down here.
you can hear it in her voice. see it in her eyes. on her brow. she’s constantly quivering with repressed rage. and you know why.
“Admit it. Go ahead. We’re alone. It was your mother, wasn’t it?”
She…
She’d never, even when her parents were together-
Victoria buries her face in her hands.
At least she can stretch out.
At least she can breathe, even if her gasps are short and choppy, and it feels like she’s breathing in evil.
“She didn’t hate her.”
she thought her sister was the perfect sibling, the nice one, the smart one, the behaving one.
she was secretly glad her sister’s marriage hadn’t worked out, because she looked at her own husband and child and smugly thought that she had finally succeeded where her sister hadn’t.
“She was jealous of her.”
and when she left, and your father was left alone, out of a sense of self-righteous, condescending pity, she checked in on you. and took you in when he died. all out of malice.
Liar.
“You don’t know anything,” Victoria says hoarsely.
i know everything you know, tori.
Tori. Tori-fied Tori.
God.
How she hates that name.
32
She has no idea what time it is.
If it’s been hours or days.
She doesn’t feel any hunger and that scares her more than the darkness and the silence and the non-silence.
The whispers that might exist.
Might not.
The skittering of animal feet.
Of bugs.
Of people, maybe. Children. Young people. Elderly bones creaking. Rattling the bars of cells.
The click clack of high heels.
The clinking of glasses and test tubes.
The hum of computers.
Dead silence.
But the dead are not silent.
She hears them.
And she fears them.
But more than anything, she fears becoming them.
A noisy formless being, composed of sound and light and nothing else.
She fears the lack of hunger.
The lack of thirst.
She’s still breathing, but there’s a dull ache, somewhere in her heart, that’s whispering too.
Telling her that she could stop doing that too if she wanted.
But she doesn’t want to.
In vain, she waits for the journalist to come back.
Or to die.
Whichever comes first.
And she honestly isn’t sure which one she’d prefer to come first.
(But then, death would have more dignity).
33
She has no idea how much time passes.
If the journalist will come back.
But it doesn’t matter.
She’s not afraid anymore.
Just disoriented.
Blind.
Mute.
Deaf.
So when she throws herself against the bars of her cell, over and over and over, partly to see if she can bend them, and partly to see if pain will jolt her out of the frozen numbness encompassing her mind in icy sheets of detachment, she is not particularly shocked to hear the rusted metal squeaking.
And she isn’t particularly surprised when it crumbles.
When its lock gives way to her merciless pummeling and she is able to rattle the door and shove it out of place.
Malek perks up.
where are we going
She doesn’t answer.
She just starts walking.
Slowly.
Painfully.
But as reality begins to sink in again, as her aching limbs begin to remind her that she is in fact alive, and all of her senses are indeed intact, she begins to walk quicker.
So quickly that she starts to stumble.
Hitting the walls, but never faltering for long.
I’m doing it, I’m doing it, I’m going to get out of here-
Her excitement begins to swell with every step.
She begins to smile, grinning so hard that it hurts.
She’ll go home.
She’ll return to her boring little room and boring school and boring weekends with friends and-
acting as though you’re one of them?
She continues to ignore him.
She doesn’t need him to escape.
She walks.
And walks.
And the smile begins to fade as she realizes that she has no idea where she’s going.
Or how she’s going to get home.
Or if it’s even possible.
At this point.
34
you’re lost.
Keep walking.
you have no idea where this tunnel goes. if it goes anywhere.
Keep walking.
you could be walking forever. you’d be trapped down here, a living spirit haunting these halls until everything you’ve ever known has been reduced to dust, and everyone you ever knew is long dead.
Keep walking.
She makes marks in the walls, but she never encounters them again.
She tries keeping track of which way she turns.
But after a while, there are no turns.
Just a straight hallway.
Leading nowhere.
is anyone looking for you, i wonder?
Keep walking. What else can I do…?
anyone? your aunt? your uncle? your cousin? larissa?
More than anything, she just wants to see light.
Just a little.
A light bulb.
A lantern.
The whites of someone’s eyes.
A bonfire, burning beneath a sky filled to the brim, bursting with blindingly bright stars.
Anything.
i bet they forgot about you. in fact, i bet the only person who’s actually looking for you is the damn journalist.
It hurts, this fear.
This increasing desperation.
She can’t determine if it’s better or worse than the detachment.
Can’t decide if the tears are better than the dry-eyed indifference.
In the end, it doesn’t matter anyway.
She has to cry.
She has to sit down and just cry into her arms.
Because Malek is right, again.
She could just be walking for eternity. No one would know. No one would find her.
She would never find anyone ever again.
She could walk and walk and walk until the earth stopped spinning, until all evidence of the human race had been wiped clean by natural disasters, and never know any of it.
But before she begins her pilgrimage to n
owhere, she wants a minute to rest.
So she does.
And she doesn’t notice when her tears cease, when her eyes flutter, as exhaustion overtakes consciousness.
She lets out a deep breath and sleeps, only to find-
A boy, wrapped in gloom, crying in his cell.
His hair dark and knotted, his pale face twisted up in agony.
Is he bleeding or is he covered in blood, someone else’s or his own, is he screaming or crying, or perhaps even laughing, and why is he reaching out to her, to help her or to hurt her-
He looks up slowly.
A boy at the end of the tunnel.
His soft, hardened face covered in blood, his cold, passionate eyes clouded and white, impassive and fervent, fearful and daring, red dripping from his mouth.
She’s never seen such a miserable, wretched looking creature, and is paralyzed with horror and pity.
He says something to her, but she has no idea what.
Only that there’s something coming out of his back, the base of his spine.
Something dark and smoke-like, as though someone had set the child on fire.
It curls out of his back in a disgusting parody of a spider’s legs, flexing and bending like a tarantula is hugging his small, trembling body from behind, preparing to put him to sleep and begin dissolving and drinking his organs.
When he looks up, there are dark patches of skin on his face.
They twist under his chin, resembling pincers, and when he opens his mouth, he bares fangs, his face deformed and gray, his hair white.
She screams herself awake.
She screams and screams and screams.
The walls seem to scream back at her, echoing her fear.
Or perhaps mocking it.
When her throat is too sore to scream anymore, she just closes her mouth.
Only letting out a small whimper when the journalist lifts her into his arms.
Gently, gingerly carrying her back to the fridge.
And it falls completely silent, tight-lipped, when he slowly, carefully lowers her back into it and shuts the door.
35
“Daddy, I want to be a zoo person.”
Daddy’s not looking well.
He looks tired, he moves slower than usual, and sometimes he sighs when he thinks he’s alone in the kitchen.
Sighs like the whole world is on his shoulders, pushing it from him like air out of a balloon.
Victorian Tale Page 9
