BENEATH THE WATERY MOON a psychological thriller with a stunning twist

by REAVLEY, BETSY

  My eyes rolled around in my head with the pain. After the initial surge passed, I was able to focus again. I saw him standing there in the nude. His rough, hairy skin looked grotesque in the moonlight. I searched in the mirror for the moon, but she wasn’t there. That night she hid. I felt abandonment blanket me. I prepared myself for another violation, but he remained totally still, eyeballing me. He licked his dry lips. His tongue reminded me of a slug. Then he moved his hand over to his penis and began to rub. The only thing I could do was close my eyes.

  ‘Open ya eyes, ya bitch, or I’ll get the vinegar again,’ he hissed.

  I did as I was told. It was a more disgusting sight than looking at my battered legs. Then the strangest thing happened. I started to laugh. Standing there, he looked utterly pathetic. It was tragic. Here was a monster, my monster, naked, wanking, and it was funny. The harder I laughed, the faster his erection waned. He tugged harder and harder at himself, trying to focus, but it was no use. I was winning. The tears rolled down my cheeks as I shook with hysterics. The laughter hurt, but the more it hurt, the harder it was to control myself.

  ‘You are fucking pathetic!’ I screamed at him, in between chuckles.

  The monster froze. He let his penis go flaccid and stared at me. His expression was one of disbelief.

  ‘Look at you! You’re a freak, a tragic little freak. You are disgusting. Didn’t mummy love you enough?’ I spat at him. ‘You wouldn’t dare pick on someone who could defend themselves would you, you gutless fuck!’

  A split second later, he had reached for the bottle and was drenching me in vinegar once again. But I was so angry I almost didn’t feel it. My fight response had finally found a voice.

  ‘Take that, cunt,’ he hissed.

  I gathered a mouthful of phlegm and spat it at his face. He stopped and began to smile. The spit slowly made its way down his forehead, above his eyebrow. His eyes were twinkling.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, wiping his face with his hand. ‘Keep fightin’, my little pussy. I like it when they fight.’ Then he lifted his hand, made a large fist, and brought it down into my cheek. I blacked out.

  In my unconscious state I found myself in an unfamiliar world. It felt like I was walking through a fog in a derelict land. The world was covered in a silver-grey shroud. I felt like I wasn’t alone. I called out, but no one replied. I walked for a long time. The quiet surrounded me like a bubble. Through the mist I could make out the faint outlines of bare tree branches. I tried to walk towards them, but they stayed at the same distance.

  I put my hand out in front of me, trying to feel for something, I didn’t know what. My skin was translucent and I could see all the intricate blood vessels, my muscles and bones. I thought that perhaps I had died. Then I thought I heard something in the distance. I stopped and listened carefully. It came again; a muted noise, like a tiny voice. The air around me felt cold and empty. I strained to hear the noise again. It was like a dying echo.

  And then something moved. It darted across my path in a flash. I couldn’t see what it was. I froze, and became aware of my own heavy breathing. Then something brushed against my shoulder. It was so light and gentle that I might not have noticed, had it not been for the stillness of the unknown realm. I turned around and saw it again. It darted back into the fog before I could identify it. I tried to run away but I couldn’t make any ground. I was running on the spot, unable to escape.

  Then a voice sounded through the dense air, as clear as a bell. I looked left and right, trying to see where it had come from. Before I knew what was happening they appeared in front of me. The faces of three young women greeted me. They were in a state of decomposition. They stood in a row like broken angels of death. Their hair was matted and clung in streaks to their pallid faces. Their bloodshot eyes stared at me, unblinking. They were as grey as the world they inhabited. I should have been appalled, but I felt no fear. I reached out to touch them, but my hand passed through them like a sword through silk. They spoke with one voice, ‘You are coming home. You will be with us soon.’ Then they disappeared and everything became black.

  * * *

  I woke up in a puddle of blood and sweat. It was the first time for a long while that I felt hot. I had gotten so used to the cold that it had become my home. The sunlight came pouring in through the small window, and I squinted. One of my eyes ached and was swollen shut. Once my good eye became accustomed to the brightness, I examined my prison again. I was alone for the time being. The empty glass bottle that had contained the vinegar lay callously on its side on the workbench empty. I was so thirsty. I swallowed hard, and my throat felt like sandpaper. Looking up at the window, I was able to make out a delicate spider’s web across the panes of glass. It twinkled and glistened in the light. A fat spider sat in the middle, guarding its kingdom, waiting patiently for a victim. I hated spiders but I was glad of the company. I lay still for a while, watching it, before I became aware of a strange sensation in my legs.

  I looked down at my raw, bloody limbs, and noticed the surface of my skin appeared to be moving. I shook my head and did a double take. At second glance, I saw the same image. It was as if my skin had a life all of its own. It looked like a rippling carpet of red, and I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I craned my neck and took a closer look. My legs were crawling with hundreds of small maggots. They basked in my blood and wriggled in and out of the cavities in my flesh. Now I understood why he’d made the holes so small and why he hadn’t just smashed my legs to pieces. I remembered reading somewhere that maggots were used by hospitals to eat away the dead and dying skin on the wounds of amputees. Apparently it was a safe way to ensure that gangrene didn’t set in. Could this have been my monster’s twisted version of kindness? I doubted it. Watching them squirming about on me was intolerable. I strained as far forward as my restraints would allow me, and began to blow furiously at my legs. I thought that I might be able to get them off but it was no use. Although I knew it would be agony to move my leg with its broken knee, I had to get the creatures off me. I bucked and shook myself. A few fell off but the majority remained clinging to my skin, enjoying their meal.

  After twisting and turning for a long time, I was exhausted and resigned to lying back and letting the maggots feast. I could feel each and every one of them creeping over my skin. I felt their tiny mouths sucking on my raw edges. Mostly they were content to focus on the source of food, but a few of them got distracted and began to crawl up my thighs towards my private parts. The humiliation and pain I already felt at the hands of my captor was bad enough, but the thought of maggots now invading me, was too much to bear.

  It was then that I broke down. I do not know how long it lasted but for a good while madness belonged to me. I breathed it in like a poison that took hold of my imagination. It felt like I was falling into a black hole. I was in a state of vertigo. My mind became an entity in its own right. My spirit went astray. My heart dissipated and any trace of the person I’d been dissolved, as I quit being. I became something else; I became all that would remain of me. My mind had fractured and any remnants of hope died. Then came the realization that there was a solution to my situation. It became clear that life consisted of one choice; what you do and what you don’t do. Clarity came to me like a light being turned on, and I felt suddenly drenched in calm.

  I pulled my right arm as close to my face as it would go. My mouth was touching my brittle wrist and my skin felt icy cold against my cracked lips. The blue green veins stood like hills in the landscape. I looked around my prison one last time, hoping to see something new, something different, but everything remained the same. I opened my mouth and let my teeth skate across the skin on my wrist. Then before I had a second to think about it, I bit down as hard as I could. My mouth filled with warm fresh blood, and I bit again. My monster would not kill me, I would not let him. I would kill myself. All I had to do was sever my artery and I would bleed to death. I would fall asleep as the life seeped out of me and never wake up. I bit har
der and scraped my canines against my flesh. It hurt like hell, but it was the only way I could take charge of the situation, regain control of my life. I carried on trying to gnaw through my arm for a while, before I realized that I couldn’t go through with it. No matter how hard I tried I didn’t have the stomach to finish the job.

  By the time I had given up I was so drained that even sobbing was impossible. My chewed, limp wrist looked like discarded road kill that even the crows would pass up. I felt as pathetic as I had accused my monster of being. Death was all around me but not yet close enough to touch. It hung in the air like a distant thunderstorm threatening to break. It was so tiresome that even the thought of it seemed ironic, like the lines from a really bad song that refused to stop playing.

  I tried hard to think of happier times, I’d had plenty of them. My childhood should have been a haven for daydreaming, but it was lost to me. I couldn’t remember my parents, my brother, how I felt, what I did, nothing. It was all an empty shell. I had been a fortunate child but it was too far away from me now. I couldn’t summon it up. I might as well have been born into this state. Everything that went before seemed somehow unreal. It was as if nothing had ever happened before. I could only live in the morbid present. I was a leach at home in the swamp, and my monster was my god.

  If only I could recall something else, something concrete and true, then surely I would be able to confirm I existed. Life ran on a loop that was caught somewhere between slow motion and fast-forward. That was it. I was on stage. Playing a role. It seemed like I was due an interlude, but life is not theatre and not that convenient.

  Then I remembered how hungry I was. It was the kind of hunger that anorexics must suffer. My body was too frail to gorge on anything truly tasty but my mind fantasized about it. At the same time there was a sick satisfaction in starvation. Control, control, control; an eating disorder’s best friend. That reminded me of something, a feeling from youth maybe. Some teenage girls flirt with the idea of bulimia, or something similar. Bulimia is the beginner’s hurdle. If you like food, which most people do, then the idea of giving it up all together is horrifying. Bulimia gives you the best of both worlds, eat but stay thin. Fill your face with biscuits and chocolate but avoid thunder thighs - it’s almost cheating. Maybe if young girls stopped seeing it as romantic, and saw it as a swindler’s answer to mirroring the models in magazines, it would lose its appeal. Or maybe not, all I know is that during my school years, a girl was only worth something if she was fucked up enough to stop eating or spent hours huddled over the loos with her fingers down her throat. I spent many hours thinking up new ways to get thin quickly. I was fourteen at the peak of my dieting obsession, and now that seemed the only thing I could remember about my past. I was unsure if I’d been popular. I couldn’t recall if I’d had any real friends. Shakespeare said, ‘Nothing is so common as the desire to be remarkable.’ Hindsight should have answered those questions, but it was all too much of a blur. Reality, fantasy, and delusion had all become so tangled that the truth was completely lost. I couldn’t begin to try to sieve through it all. It was swallowed down like a bitter pill. Deep in my subconscious, I hoped that someone, somewhere, knew the truth about me.

  * * *

  The shackles were gone. I looked down at my tiny wrists and saw that I was free. My bruises were fading and the gashes in my skin were slowly healing. The cellar looked different. It was warmer. I sat up, a free woman, and wondered what had happened. My body was sore and felt tender. I was weak and didn’t trust my legs but I knew I had to get up.

  My legs hung over the edge of the surface I had been tied to and I noticed the chipped nail varnish on my toes. It seemed if I could just paint them then everything would be alright. My life could return to normal.

  He’d changed his mind. Something had happened to alter my fate. I felt hope return. It was like ice melting in the sunlight. My body was on the mend. It was unclear when everything had changed but I didn’t stop to question it. I got up and gingerly made my way towards the cellar door. I remained stark naked but I didn’t feel cold. It was daylight and in the mirror I spotted the smiling crescent of the moon in the blue sky. She was with me as I reached the door and tried to turn the handle. I felt a screaming heat in my palm and watched as my hand crumbled into a pile of ash.

  I woke myself up, crying and screaming. It had been a cruel dream. But then I noticed something was different.

  I don’t know when he did it. I couldn’t have been awake. I was lying on my belly, cuffed. He must have turned me over. It hadn’t happened by magic. The new position felt so alien. I had spent so long on my back that the familiar position had become a sort of comfort. Now I was lost again, left floating in a strange deep space. My view was altered. Where had the moon gone? And then I realized it was morning. I could just see the mirror still, and therefore when I needed her, I knew my lunar goddess would reveal herself to me once more.

  My chin was so uncomfortable, rubbing against the wooden base of the bed. My ruined toes and knee were lying, wounds down, on the hard surface. The bitter scent of my faeces and urine infested every sense with unforgiving intrusion until my eyes watered. I could taste my own filth. I was living in a sewer. I wriggled on the slab for a while. I must have looked like a worm, or a beetle on its back.

  The day passed slowly, and the light started to change. The onset of night grew imminent. I hoped my moon would be there. I watched the sky through the glass as it turned from blue to grey to blue again. Then veins of purple began to creep in, and finally peach, amber, gold, and silver. It seemed a long time that I gazed upon a sapphire-blue blanket, before tiny pinpricks appeared gleaming through. They were my lost children and I knew they dared not come out without their mother.

  Before the clear beam of light could shine on the mirror, I heard the lock of the cellar door click again. I strained to free myself, with more gusto that I had for a while. This new uncompromising position had shaken me. I was still struggling when he came in. I bent my neck as far as I could to see if he had any vinegar with him. His hands were empty, but his obtuse smile held a promise of its own. He slapped the side of his thigh, as if he were about to participate in line dancing. I held my breath and waited. Nothing happened, but I knew the show wasn’t over. I longed for the strange lucid drug he had given me before, like an addict returned home to the indulgence it was rectifying.

  My hollow skeleton pushed down into the wooden table, finding strangely familiar grooves. He approached the bench and slapped the area where my healthy bottom had once been. It was now nothing more than an empty discarded sack. If he had hit a fraction harder I was sure he would have broken me. That was what I hoped for. Instead his greedy, fat sausage fingers pulled at my baggy flesh, like a dressmaker pinching cloth round a mannequin.

  I don’t know when, or how the moment came about, but in a blink he was on me again. This time it was different. I felt like a bull in a rodeo. I bucked and did all that I could but he was too strong. His penis may as well have been pliers, because my insides felt like they being pinched and pulled. It was similar to a cramp. I was sure I would die then. My dignity had already been shattered, and I remained only a lost shadow. My lost children would have thought of Peter Pan. How many times can someone die, I wondered. Nietzsche said, ‘When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.’ Right then, I understood what he meant.

  When he had finished with me, he climbed off. It stung so badly. He walked round to stand in front of me. I kept my face pressed to the wood and didn’t look up.

  ‘You dirty little whore. You fuckin’ bled all over me cock,’ he said, waggling his tackle in my direction. I stayed perfectly still and refused to look. There was no point. He chuckled to himself and then firmly patted the top of my head, before pulling up his trousers and leaving the room.

  * * *

  My lost childhood hung about, taunting my memory and trying to rise from the dead. It threatened to introduce itself, like a perverted stranger, but never a
ctually stepped forward. It remained lingering in the wilds of my mind, observing but never stepping out of the shadows. I didn’t know what I should have remembered, but I knew that something should be there. The empty space bothered me.

  I was left holding onto a void. My mind wronged me cruelly. Even my unspoken name felt unfamiliar. I could only live in between the lines.

  I listened to the quiet and found my family; my mum and Will and the complicated harmony we shared. She would torture herself with guilt and he would find a home in anger. That saddened me more than any of the physical abuse the monster dished out. I knew them so well and could see them in the future, a future that didn’t include me. I ached for them, and was thankful they couldn’t see me now. I had already gone, and they were all that was left. It felt like the end was getting closer, and I could only ponder it. It was such a strange sensation. Not far from being suicidal or terminally ill, whichever was worse. I knew death was round the corner, and I could hear it approaching. It tiptoed with creaking footsteps and was relentless.

  Then I began to ponder something new. Was there a heaven and hell? I was always sure that we ended up as a small pile of bones and nothing more. I wish I could tell you that I suddenly found religion and everything lost its gloom, but that wasn’t the case. My situation only backed up my beliefs. If there was a great divine power, how could it allow such misery? If there was a god, surely it would be brave enough to take responsibility for its creations? I found no divinity in a lack of responsibility. If I had a child, would I have believed that free will meant it was on its own and I was free from any responsibility? The answer was a resounding no, and I could see it no other way. What the faithful fail to realize is that atheism is a belief in its own right. I found relief and comfort in my beliefs, or lack thereof. The only time I suffered from conflicting thoughts was when I thought about my captor. Only then did I wish that God and the devil existed. My logic suggested that if they did, then he would surely spend eternity burning in hell.