Terrorscape (Horrorscape)

by Campbell, Nenia

  A voiceless creature trapped in glass, beautiful but possessing no freewill. It would fight, but only because a fight was required; after perfunctory effort had been expended, it would collapse in defeat, opening itself up like a flower.

  That was what he wanted. Deep down, she had always known, just as she knew she would have bruises, and an aching tenderness that would not abate for days.

  His drive was terrifying, and seemed to know no refractory period.

  He was a Darwinian nightmare. Survival of the fittest. Nature's Perfect Storm. As with each time, she thought, I will kill him. And if a divine being had appeared to hand her a weapon, she would have, too.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cypress Val hated that these serial one-night stands were starting to feel routine, but they were.

  She changed back into the black skirt and gold lace shirt. In the bathroom, as before. The day she gave him permission to look upon her was the day she acknowledged that he owned her.

  Gavin was doing up the buttons of his shirt when she opened the door. He glanced her way when he heard the squeak of the hinges without stopping. He looked so ordinary—and deadly, all at the same time.

  Maybe her brain supplied those lethal attributes, filling them in like a coloring book. Confirmation bias. Top-down processing.

  “You shouldn't look at me like that,” he said mildly, straightening his cuffs.

  He was right, only not the way he thought. “You put the 'sin' into scintillating.” He walked around behind her and retied the knot of her halter, kissing the skin beneath the bow before letting it fall back into place, eliciting a cascade of sensation down her spine. “I only have so much self-control.”

  She whirled around. “You have no self-control.” “All the more reason not to tempt me.” His hand around her wrist, stroking her pulse point.

  Not affectionate. Proprietary.

  She knew that, and knowing did not bother her nearly as much as it should have. She was no longer in possession of herself, and it seemed only logical that someone else would be.

  So this is madness.

  It was like slipping into a silk robe. He reached into his jeans pocket and produced a ring of keys. He played with them, swing them around on his finger, like a child or a cat, making a jangling sound that grated on her fraying nerves.

  She had difficulty calling what transpired between them “sex.” It was bestial, rough and often painful, bereft of affection. There was pleasure sometimes, but a horrible perversion of it. A kind of pleasure that made Val want to scrub herself for hours with steel wool, flaying apart her skin until she came to that foul place inside her that was aroused by such dreadful depravity.

  Fucking , Val thought. Or maybe rutting. Rutting had an almost mechanical sound, greasy, dirty, filthy. Yes. Rutting was good.

  She nodded at the keys. “Are you checking out?” “So eager to be rid of me.”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled, and other piece of her splintered off and fell away. “I'm sorry to disappoint you. But no, I'm not.”

  He looked down at the keys he was toying with. “Actually, I believe these belong to you.” He lobbed them at her.

  She caught them, awkwardly. Once in hand, she recognized them immediately; they were the keys to her dorm, the ones that had been missing all this time. Yes, there was the fob she had purchased from the student bookstore, made of soft foam in the school's colors, gold and blue, and the faded H.

  “You stole my keys.”

  “I merely borrowed them.”

  “Why are you acting like this?”

  Gavin tilted his head. “What way is that?”

  He was right; she was exactly the same. She was the one who had changed.

  “Perhaps you should go,” he said.

  Val stood, frozen.

  “Mm, but first the matter of payment.” Her mouth dropped and she felt heat rise up her throat to color her cheeks. “Don't say it like that, you bastard. I'm not a whore.”

  “Your clue, Val, is protection.” “A rook,” she said automatically. “The castle; it's a fortress.” It was such an easy clue. Too easy. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Was that the point?

  “Yes,” he said. “Rather ironic, considering.” “What are you talking about?”

  “Now my dear, don't play coy.”

  “I'm not.”

  “Could it be—do you really not know? Oh my. I knew that you were naïve, but I never once imagined that you were stupid as well.”

  “Tell me what you mean.” “Haven't you felt at all different?” He ran the back of his hand along her belly. “You certainly taste different. Sweeter, almost. Riper.”

  “No,” she said, “no.” “What's the matter, Valerian? Don't you think I'd make a good father? I do so love children. Of course there remains the question of what to do with you. I could marry you,” he mused, “but that would be according you too much dignity, wouldn't it?” “I would never marry you,” she snarled.

  “You would,” he said, with a deathly calm. “But you will get nothing but what I choose to give you— and what I give will only be given when you come asking on your knees. Who else do you have? As you told me, you have no friends, no family, who do not believe you to be either deranged or psychotic or both.”

  She struck him, hard enough to make something crack. She hoped it was his nose. Probably not. The windows rattled in their frames long after Val had slammed the door behind her.

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪ I can't be pregnant.

  But she could. That was the thing. She could.

  Val was the only passenger on the bus. Most students didn't go this way, and it was too early for the afternoon commute. She watched Sequoia Ave shift to 1:05 P.M. on the LED display.

  Time had ceased to hold any real meaning a long time ago. She often felt as if she were in one of those nightmares where an entire semester had passed in the blink of an eye only for her to realize at the end that she had neglected to attend any of her classes.

  When she saw the college parking lot she reached up to yank the stop cord. Some functions, at least, were preserved by sheer automatism.

  The drive pulled up beside the curb and the swinging motion matched the butterfly swarm in her stomach.

  But is that all there is to it? Or was he lying? Lying or not, Gavin had never used protection. Even if she wasn't pregnant, she could have—all sorts of problems. It simply had never occurred to her to buy a morning after pill or go to Planned Parenthood for an STD screening. It had never occurred to her because that would be admitting to herself that this was really happening, that it wasn't a nightmare.

  But the nightmare had happened anyway; in the face of all else, she had failed to take care of herself and now she was reaping the consequences.

  Was she now paying the price? “Hey—you pulled the cord. Are you getting off or not?” The bus driver sounded impatient, and Val flushed with unhappy embarrassment.

  “Actually…where's the nearest clinic?”

  The driver gave her a look that was equal parts pity, sanctimoniousness, and scorn. “You'll need to get on the downtown express line.” The women at the clinic were very nice, kind and brisk in their efficiency. They drew some blood in a vial, made her pee in a cup. They gave her a pap smear, asked about her period, and studied her breasts. They took down her cell phone number and told her the results would be ready in a few days. They gave her pamphlets she could not focus on, and advice it was already too late to heed.

  Maybe she was infected. Maybe she was rotting from the inside-out. Syphilis did that, didn't it? Ate away at you from within, made you crazy.

  Stop that, she told herself. You stop that right now. Was she crazy, or was she sick? What was insanity if not an illness of the mind? She returned to campus feeling as despondent as ever. Now here she was, feeling as though she were traversing across two great extremes—one real, one surreal. At the moment, she was unable to tell the difference.

  She was taken aback by the sight
of a police car. Several police cars. Like a horde of sharks that had just picked up the scent of fresh blood, they were circled around the lot facing the campus green belt.

  A crowd of students and teachers were standing idle watching as the men in blue uniforms crawled around the area like ants. Val turned to the nearest person at hand, a heavier girl in a Jimmy Eat World shirt. Hesitating, Val said, “W-what happened?”

  “They found a dead body in the creek.” Val sucked in a breath. “Dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did they say who?”

  The girl's eyes flicked over her. “I have no idea,” she said crisply. She walked away to the other side of the lot where a group of similarly attired girls were standing, leaving Val stinging from the slight.

  Mary came bounding up out of nowhere, pushing through the crowd. Startled, Val stood frozen like a deer in the headlights as the black girl wrapped her arms around her. Mascara ran down her cheeks in soupy black streaks.

  “Val! Oh, thank God. Val—when you didn't show up last night, I thought you were with him.” “With who?” Val yelped. “What happened? What's going on?” A stone formed in the pit of her stomach where it sat conspicuously as Mary looked at her with pity. “Jade. It was Jade. The Nature Club found his body on their morning hike. He's—dead.”

  Dead?

  “Val?” Her lips mouthed the word silently—dead—as if it were a curse or incantation too horrible to be spoken aloud.

  “Val?”

  Her name seemed to be coming from the other end of a tunnel. She disregarded it.

  He was alive just a— When? When had she seen Jade last? She had heard nothing—nothing—from him for days. All this time, she thought he had been angry at her, and yes, maybe he had been at first, but this…this was worse than anything she could have anticipated.

  And then there was the box. The horrible box with the mutilated bishop, overflowing with fake blood. The warning.

  Beneath her feet the ground began to slant. Her ears rang. Val tried to block out the terrible sound. This was no accident. Jade had been murdered.

  Because of her.

  Because she couldn't solve the grandmaster's stupid mind games.

  “Val!” The words were even fainter now, almost inaudible. That incessant buzz had taken on the earsplitting quality of a mosquito's high-pitched whine.

  A bad smell sliced through the fog. Val opened her eyes, which she could not remember closing, coughing, and took in a cloudless sky and Mary's worried face. A man in white uniform stood by, replacing a small brown bottle in his bag.

  “Are you all right?”

  Val shook her head. Her eyes were watering, and it wasn't entirely from the ammonia. Oh God. “You should lie down,” Mary said, “that paramedic, he said you were in shock.”

  “Yeah,” said Val. “Shock.”

  “You want me to take you back to the dorms? Can you walk?”

  “Yeah,” Val said. “Walk.” If Jade—she couldn't bring herself to say that terrible word, body—had just been found this morning, then his death must have been recent. GM was nothing if not resourceful, but even he couldn't run all the way to the college, commit murder, and then sneak back into his room. Not unless he had killed him remotely. A trap, poison…

  Not unless he hadn't killed him recently. Val grasped Mary's wrist. She missed the first time, and had to try twice. “When did he die?”

  “I don't think we should talk about that.”

  “Please.”

  “Val…you're hurting me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don't know. The cops said he'd probably been dead a while before they found him.” Mary shook her head. “The things they were saying…thank God we didn't see him. It sounded horrible, just like—”

  Just like what? Like the chess piece?

  Had he been cut in half?

  “Poor Jade. He didn't deserve that.”

  “Val, who does?”

  To which Val did not have an answer.

  I never feel safe anymore. I can't be alone. I can't be in crowds. He's always there, watching me. And I can't escape. Not unless I die—

  Or he does. “You must think I'm royally fucked up,” Val said, pushing away from her as the two of them stumbled into the door.

  “I think you're the bravest person I know.” Bullshit. She popped a sleeping pill, and waited for darkness. Chapter Twenty

  Butterfly Weed

  How easy it was to hurt her now. He smiled to himself, toying with the metal object in his hand as he walked towards the garishly painted building. If he was being perfectly honest, it was almost too easy.

  That dawning horror on her beautiful, ravaged face, though—that would give him pleasure for days to come. But it was not mere schadenfreude, nor even sadism. No, it was far more than that.

  What they had was a savage, endless cycle of avoid and approach, plateau and decline. It was dynamic, sustaining him as no stable relationship ever had, and he thrived on it.

  A short, dark-skinned young woman passed him on the stairwell. He recognized her instantly. The roommate. She glanced his way and he allowed an absent smile to settle on his lips, a parody of camaraderie. It worked; she continued down the hall.

  He glared at her departing back, irate. He did not want her to be here. Her presence complicated things. But only a little. He used the key to enter. It had been simple to get a copy done, even on such short notice. Tragic, really, how morality disappeared in a puff of smoke when a bit of lucre entered the equation.

  The door swung open, revealing a messy room denoting a female presence. Clothes cluttered every available surface, and the décor was very much feminine. None of these things interested him, however; he had seen them before.

  It was the unmarked envelope on the doormat that held his interest. Black, grainy, almost like thick crepe. He slid the envelope open and as he suspected, several photographs spilled out. Polaroids of course.

  All of Val. He reached into his coat and produced another set. These were fewer in number, and he was the subject in all of them. He tucked both sets of pictures into his coat. The copy wishes to challenge the original.

  How tedious. How dull. What a waste of his time. He did not approve of taking such risks for so little of consequence, but confrontation seemed inevitable.

  The occupant of the room made a sound that attracted his attention. He picked his way towards the bed, taking care to sidestep the various obstacles littering his path. When his shadow fell over her like a cloak to block out the light from the sun she shivered.

  He smiled. Truly, she was quite lovely. Quick and intelligent, but subordinate to him in all ways. The perfect mate. Several minutes passed in silence marked by the rise and fall of her chest with each gentle breath.

  Life fascinated him precisely because one's grip on it was so tenuous; it could end at any moment.

  His eyes drifted to the jar of pills on the nightstand. He tilted his head to read the label and then clicked his tongue. Foolish to dull the senses, to leave oneself so prone. He climbed onto the bed and knelt over her, savoring the warmth of her inert body. He ran his thumb over her pulse. If he killed her now, she would seamlessly slip from dreams to death.

  But he would not kill her. Not the mother of his unborn child. With the tips of his fingers he tilted her face towards him and kissed her—gently at first, but when she parted her lips to inhale he deepened the kiss, sliding his hand down her breast to lie over her stomach. She stirred, and her breathing changed.

  She had always been slender, willowy even, but her belly was now slightly distended. Not enough to show, but noticeable if one knew what to look for. He nudged his fingers beneath her shirt to cup the taut flesh beneath. Fertile, lush, and carrying his offspring. He sketched abstract patterns around her navel and thought he might even detect the musky scent of her arousal. His erection strained against his fly when she made a soft, low sound, causing him physical pain.

  Her body wanted him, even if she hers
elf did not. He was tempted to oblige it, but there was no pleasure to be had in the act of conquering if it were not proceeded by a battle. The sentiment was shared by man and beast alike; even a wolf knew the difference between a fresh kill and carrion.

  He pulled the hem of her shirt down, covering her demurely, and contemplated her sleeping face. If they were married she could not escape him. Yes, it would accord her some dignity—but in name only.

  And he could lock her up if she defied him; if she were dependent on him and his numerous resources she would not be able to leave. He could chain her to the wall like an animal, in her room like a prisoner, or on his bed like an odalisque.

  Of course, there would have to be some give and take in the economy of his household. And yes, her good behavior would earn her privileges, gifts, which he could revoke whenever she became so feisty as to be outright defiant.

  He could put her out on display during social occasions, dressed in beautiful fabrics as if she were a rare, exotic animal. He could teach her French poetry and Italian pillow talk. He could control what she did, who she saw, and even what she ate and wore.

  He could dress her to his tastes morning, day, and night. Especially nights. Every night, he could take her if he pleased, and it would be his marital right.

  Oh, she might resist at first because a bird that has known freedom is the bird that fights hardest when caged, but she could not fight him forever.

  Especially if there were children. He placed a lacy green plant on the blanket, folding her hands over the leaves to keep it in place. A mere token, a reminder to be vigilant.

  His task completed, the door closed with him on the other side, latching with almost no sound. And then, except for the steady ticking of an unseen clock, the room subsided into a hush once more.

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪ Hours passed before she roused herself from sleep, blinking in confusion as her eyes took in the afternoon sun. Sleeping pills were not meant to be used in this way, to make oneself sleep whenever reality became too overbearing to face-on. They were meant to be taken at bedtime to maintain a healthy, normal sleep schedule.