BENEATH THE WATERY MOON a psychological thriller with a stunning twist

by REAVLEY, BETSY

  I lay there consumed by the new, excruciating level of pain. I could feel the raw muscles in my back grinding against the hard wood. My skeleton felt so heavy in its skin. Breathing was impossibly difficult. The scent of burnt flesh was in the back of my throat, and my broken rib was pushing into one of my lungs. I began to convulse. The harder I shook, the worse the agony became, until at last my mind gave in and shut down.

  * * *

  When I woke up, the light that poured in through the small window blinded me. It bounced off the mirror and straight into my eyes. Had I been a believer, it might have felt like a religious experience. The light was so clean and felt hot against my hollow face. Quickly, my vision adjusted, and I was able to look around the room. I was still there. Nothing had changed. From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something red moving in the mirror. I slowly turned to look more closely and saw only my own reflection. I was greeted by a charred, bald lump of bloody meat. My scalp was black and raw. Tufts of singed hair that had once been blonde now remained sticking out like thorns on a cactus.

  I stared at myself for a long time. My brain was unable to comprehend what it was seeing. It was as if I had woken up in someone else’s body. What I saw in the mirror wasn’t me. It looked dead already, like a corpse in the early stages of decomposition. I tried to move my hand to my face to touch it. I needed confirmation that I was real, that it was real. Before then a small part of me had been able to imagine escape, but looking at what remained of me brought the reality screaming home.

  I hoped that no one would ever see my body. No one should have to look at that. I was the stuff of nightmares. I was reminded of the graphic images of the bodies of prisoners at Auschwitz that I had seen in history books. I tried not to think of my mother, having to identify these remains. She would never believe it was me. It occurred to me that the families of his other victims had been subjected to that gruesome experience already, and I ached for them. I cursed him for extending the terror to those who were left behind. The gap left in their lives from the loss would be filled with horrific images. I doubted that any of those people would ever be the same again. How could they?

  I battled with my reflection for many hours. I fell in and out of time. It felt like I was wandering around in the dark, searching for a light switch that didn’t exist. I was a needle lost in a field full of haystacks. I began to feel at home in the maze of my mind. Before long I realized I would rather dwell in the darkness. The daylight was cruel. It showed me horrors I could never get to grips with. I turned my head away from the mirror and knew that I would never be able to look at it again. That action took the most, but meant the least. It was time for me to say goodbye to the moon.

  I longed for night to fall. I needed her blackness to consume the image of what I had seen. It seemed unlikely that the stars would ever shine again. I felt like I was being pulled out by the tide and I knew I would never return to the shore again. A swell of fury surged through me. I was angry that I was alive. I wanted to scream and shout and pull at the shackles. Cursed self-preservation stopped me. My skin felt tight and fragile and like it might break at any moment. I knew that my scabby back had moulded itself to the table. Had I moved, it would have ripped. That was not a pain I was prepared to inflict on myself, the monster had done enough of that already. I would conserve my energy and prepare myself for his next visit.

  I focused on the glimpses of memories that flitted around my head. Images flashed rapidly through my mind. It was as if I were flicking through a photograph album. Snippets of childhood appeared before vanishing into my subconscious. Strangely, I became obsessed with trying to remember my brother’s eighth birthday party. I knew it had been a happy day but was unable to see it clearly. Colours whirled around in a cloud of blue smoke and I was kept from dreaming. It remained just out of reach.

  Only Jude was clear. I wanted him to evaporate too, but he would not. So I did the next best thing, I rewrote my end. I pretended my life was a book and I formulated a happy ending.

  I tried not to think of the fantasy world I had lived in with Jude previously. I wanted something more realistic. I pictured myself living in a small cottage near a wood. Life would be uncomplicated. There would be chickens to feed and vegetables to look after. I would have a few apple trees. I imagined walking in the sunlight in the orchard, reaching up into the branches and picking ripe red apples. I could feel the warmth on my skin. Jude would be there, in the centre of it all, with our shaggy dog standing faithfully by his side. Our children would be playing on the swings, a girl and a boy. The boy would be the spitting image of him.

  It didn’t seem that much to ask for. All I’d ever really wanted was something simple. Sometimes what you want and what you need are two very different things. During that moment they were intertwined; freedom in whatever form it came.

  The truth was that I was so tired. I had reached breaking point and hadn’t anything more left to fight on with. I could feel my body eating away at itself. Hunger was all-consuming and my breathing had become so shallow that I thought my lungs might pack up at any moment. My thoughts crept like dying animals trying to pull themselves out of the gloom. It had been so long since I had been a human being that I could scarcely remember what it was like.

  I was going to die like an animal and that seemed to make a poetic kind of sense. When you scratch the surface that is what we are, after all: animals. Our televisions and smart phones are only props we use to create a façade that we are more than that. I always believed that was true but had never appreciated the relevance of my faith in that belief, until then. It turned out I did believe in something, after all.

  I suppose it was predictable that I found myself indulging in distorted philosophical mantras, but I had to do something. Lying there was actually fucking boring. In between the pain and self-pity my time was empty and dull. It was similar to being in hospital. Time went more slowly than I thought possible. I wished I could have spent my last moments enjoying the pleasures of just being alive, but the truth is that I get bored very easily. I wondered if I should tell the monster that I was bored. Surely that would take the wind out of his sails. I am sure it wasn’t something that had ever occurred to him. He would have been too busy enjoying the horror he had created. It saddened me that I was going to die emotionally broken. The physical pain, I could just about bear.

  I had made a promise to myself upon leaving Redwood Psychiatric Hospital that I would fight my illness and never become an emotional mess like that again. I was gutted that I couldn’t keep my promise to myself. That was the worst thing of all.

  It is a funny thing, having to address your mortality. I hadn’t thought about how I might die any more than anyone else my age, setting aside the period I spent feeling suicidal, which is different. When the idea did enter my head, I presumed that I would be old and that if I wasn’t lucky enough to live to see my twilight years, that my life would be cut short by something like cancer or a heart attack. You never think that you will die at someone else’s hands. It wasn’t that difficult to consider that I might be blown up while travelling on a plane, but this, being there with the monster, I never could have imagined that.

  As children we are taught that we need to be careful crossing the road. Parents teach their children to beware of strangers, and women know not to walk around in the dark on their own. I had chosen to ignore all the fundamental things that I’d learnt about being safe, and that had landed me in the cellar.

  I realize that it was just bad luck that led me there. I could have been any young woman walking along in the rain on that night. He saw the opportunity and took it. It wasn’t personal, I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again my belief in fate was reaffirmed, although I cursed the universe for doing this to me.

  * * *

  The next time my monster paid me a visit, things were different. He came into the room as usual, but this time he seemed angry. Previously, he had been happy to see me. There had been a glint in his
eyes, excitement about the next chapter of torture. This time he looked uninterested, like a child that had grown bored of playing with its latest toy. He sat down on a stool and played with a lighter. The dread of fire and heat returned to me. After a few minutes he put the lighter back in his pocket and spoke.

  ‘What’s ya name?’ he asked.

  I was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me that he didn’t know my name. He knew my body so intimately. It seemed odd that we fundamentally remained strangers.

  ‘Annabel,’ I said in a whisper.

  He grunted and got up from the stool. I readied myself but he just turned his back and left the room. I struggled to understand what had just happened, but the sound of my name had felt good. I said it again.

  ‘Annabel, my name is Annabel.’

  Just that word brought me a tiny bit of freedom. I was a person after all. I had a name and a family and a life. I had a past and at one time thought I had a future. It was clear my name didn’t matter to him, but I wondered why he wanted to know. Curiosity, I suppose. It might not have been important to him but it gave me a feeling of worth, strange as that may seem. Thinking about my name made me think about my family. My name was synonymous with them. They were entwined.

  I glanced into the mirror, and ignoring my own hideous reflection, gazed at the grey sky framed in the image of the window. The world looked dull and fitted in perfectly with how I felt. When I was little and the weather was bad, I would sit with Will, eating popcorn and watching Star Wars films over and over again. I remember the feel of the blanket that I curled up under. It was large with beige squares, made from a soft fleecy fabric. My brother would sit at one end of the sofa and I at the other. Quite often we would have our guinea pigs on our laps, telling them to pay attention. I lost count of how many times we watched those films.

  In fantasy games he would be Luke Skywalker and I was Princess Leia. We would take it in turns, swinging from the rope that hung from the huge chestnut tree in our garden, pretending we were battling Storm Troopers. Long sticks made good light sabres and our dog that followed us around, wagging its tail, became a Chewbacca. The memory of this made me smile properly for the first time since my incarceration.

  Lying on the bed, I began to hum to myself. I tried hard to remember the various tunes that John Williams had composed for the films. I couldn’t remember them all, but while I hummed I felt content. I had found another happy place.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the creaking ceiling. Heavy footsteps limped around above me. It had to be the monster. It wasn’t possible that anyone else lived in the house. My screams would have been heard. I realized the house must be in the countryside somewhere. I hadn’t thought about it until then. I hadn’t heard the sound of the city or roads.

  It left me wondering what the house was like. It had to be old. The cellar had old beams in it, and the floorboards were aged and worn. Even the air smelled ancient. The stale, musky stench of damp lingered like fog. I hoped the rest of the house shared the smell. I liked the idea of the monster living somewhere offensive to the senses. I pictured the rooms of his house being cluttered with filthy objects. It was easy to visualize him living in a dusty room with no windows. I wanted his existence to be miserable and hollow. My tired eyes scanned the room, looking for confirmation of my suspicions. The cellar was empty of objects and offered me no clues.

  Then I heard him coughing and spluttering. For a moment I thought he was on the stairs, making his way back to the cellar, but he was still in the room above. It was hard to picture how he might fill his time when he wasn’t busy brutalizing and killing. Did he have a job? Maybe, but I found it hard to care. It made no difference to my situation. I imagined him doing a labouring job, something physical that required strength, like kidnapping, raping, and killing. I didn’t want to spend another second thinking about him.

  I focused my thoughts on Wookie. How his brown tail wagged backwards and forwards, like a pendulum. It never seemed to stop. His slow and deliberate wag was reassuring. I wished I could see his large, kind eyes now. He always made me feel safe. He had a knowing look. If ever I, or any of the family, were feeling blue, he would be there, sitting loyally by your side, with his head resting gently on your lap. Stroking his solid head was calming.

  It was strange how quickly my body had adapted to the new pain I was suffering. My skin felt tight, dry, and stretched too tightly over my bones. My scalp and back throbbed endlessly. My skin was like a covering of eggshell. I knew if I moved, it would crack and bleed. I was sweaty. The pulsing tenderness felt like a hot blanket wrapped around me. It made a difference to the cold feeling I had grown used to.

  It was best not to concentrate on that, though. If I allowed myself to think about how my body was feeling, the ache increased tenfold. I understood that my pain was temporary but it seemed that the heinous nature of it was going to stay with me for eternity.

  Slowly, the hours passed, and I watched as the daylight faded. There was an orange glow in the room at sunset. The wooden beams looked warm and homely under the soft light. I pictured a beautiful sunset in my mind and allowed the colours to flood over me. I felt consumed by the pastel warmth and hoped it would last for a long time. But gradually the sunset faded and darkness began to creep into the room. I realized that I had been alone for a long time. This meant that I should expect a visit from the monster soon. Adrenaline rushed around my body like cars on a racetrack, and the familiar buzz of nervous anticipation left my body shaking. It hurt.

  Before long, I heard him coming down the stairs, and I braced myself for the unknown. He came into the room and flicked the light on. The sudden brightness made the world I was trapped in seem stark and uncompromising.

  ‘Annabel.’ My name sounded wrong on his tongue. It didn’t belong there. My stomach began to churn. From his pocket he removed a chunk of dry bread. He approached me and held it to my mouth. I took a small bite and chewed it for a long time, before swallowing it with difficulty. The bread was too dry. It caused more discomfort than it did me good. I no longer saw the point in eating anything.

  ‘No more . . .’ I croaked, turning my face away.

  ‘Please ya self.’ Casually, he put the bread back in his pocket and turned his back. I thought he might be about to leave the room. From behind, the monster looked like a vast mountain. His bulky form seemed to eclipse the light from the single bulb that hung from the low ceiling. My blackened body felt like a vacuum.

  Still with his back to me, he said, ‘I saw ya mum on da telly. Nice lookin’ aint she.’

  The horror of it left me speechless.

  ‘Pleadin’ she was. Wants to know where ya are, wants ya home.’

  He turned to face me. He was enjoying himself. ‘Fing is, da bitch’ll see ya soon. May not recognize ya, but she’ll see ya for sure. Once I’ve finished, course.’ And then added, ‘Thought you’d like ta know.’

  My heart was in my throat. Not like this, I prayed to the universe, please do not let her see me like this. I imagined her in front of cameras. Lights flashing as photographers captured her agony. I felt sick at the thought of the monster looking at her, and panic began to bubble away. Until then I hadn’t imagined I could feel any worse, but fear for my family brought with it a whole new level of dread.

  ‘Don’t you . . . just . . . leave her . . .’ I struggled to speak.

  ‘Old birds aint my fing. Surely ya know dat by now. Stupid cunt,’ he spat and muttered to himself. The disgusted look on his face told me that he was telling the truth. Relieved tears began to stream uncontrollably down my cheeks. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. The swell of emotion surprised me. I had thought I had no more tears left to cry.

  As I began to get control of myself, he approached me and balled his hand into a large fist. He punched down into my stomach three times, leaving me breathless and gasping for air. Then he rubbed his knuckles, smiled gleefully to himself, turned out the light, and left the room.

  I wa
s left reeling. The blows had knocked the wind out of me with such ferocity that white spots danced about in front of my eyes once again. The familiarity was sickening. My mind didn’t know whether to focus on trying to breathe or trying to clear the stars from my vision. It took me a little while to calm down, but once I had, I noticed my breathing was raspy. There was a thumping pain in my empty stomach. My intestines had been pounded and felt as if they were tangled up. Gurgling and growling noises echoed out of my tummy in protest. This could not go on much longer. Surely the end was near.

  * * *

  The next time the monster paid me a visit, I was ill. I was vomiting large amounts of bitter bile tainted with blood. I knew I had a roaring temperature and was unable to control liquid faeces from pouring out of me. I remained lying in my own stench and filth for hours before he arrived. When he came in, he recoiled at the putrid odour and looked at me with contempt. It seemed that it was all right for me to wallow in filth, provided it was a result of his handy work. He grunted and pulled the door closed. I thought that my revolting state had done enough to put him off for that day, but a minute or two later he appeared with a metal bucket. I could see water sloshing about at the top of the bucket. It glistened and sparkled. It was the loveliest sight. Everything about it looked clean. I wanted to bathe in it. A second later I got my wish.

  The monster, whose top lip was curled in repulsion at the sight of me lying in my own excrement, took a step back from the table to which I was shackled. As if in slow motion, he threw the water over me like he was putting out a fire. I let out a high-pitched shriek. It was ice cold and my body instantly was covered in goose pimples. The feeling of the freezing water on my burns was almost soothing. After I had recovered from the initial shock, I began to enjoy the feeling of being clean. He hadn’t meant to do me a favour, but that was how it felt. The brown clots of blood and bits of smashed bone were washed away from my toes and my kneecap. The tight feeling of my skin, which I had grown so accustomed to, was considerably relieved. The cold had been worth it. I felt the sweat from my fever being sluiced way.