The Darkness Within

by Taylor K. Scott

  Once I’m in the queue, which is thankfully only three people deep, my phone begins to vibrate against my thigh.

  “You ok, Mils?” Gabe’s voice booms through the speaker. A couple of girls are giggling nearby, and I can only imagine what a tremendous flirt he’s being. “I can’t see you.”

  “I’m just queueing for the bathroom,” I laugh at him, “you sound very hard at work though.”

  “Actually,” he says, feigning insult and slightly slurring his words, “I’ve been questioning some of the girls about what happens at these parties. And apparently, pot is quite the stimulant of use here. Someone brought coke once, but Matt went ape shit and threw them out.”

  “Christ, I can imagine he would have,” I think out loud. His parents would literally disown him if they caught anything like that in their house. “Listen, I’m next to go, but I’ll come find you when I’m done.”

  “Over and out, mini-Thomas,” he chirrups and hangs up.

  After mother nature has taken its course and relieved me with the most satisfying wee, one which had my eyes rolling back in pleasure, I get up to wash my hands and check I don’t have mascara smudge under my eyes. My phone begins to vibrate again, but when I stand up to reach for it, my head feels dizzy. I even have to reach out for the sink to steady myself before I can answer it.

  “Hellooo?” I say with a distinct slur. I clear my throat to try again, this time sounding a bit more respectable, “I mean, hello?”

  “Millie, where the hell are you?!”

  “Who is this?!” I reply rather indignantly before pulling back to look at the ID, where I see Bowie’s name lit up across the screen. “Oh, it’s you. What’s up, Bowie?” I ask with a bored tone of voice. “Your girlfriend is downstairs looking fuckable by the way.”

  “Have you been drinking?” I shake my head, not even considering the fact he can’t see me. I then giggle because he sounds so serious and uptight, and I probably sound ridiculous. “Well, maybe, but just the one!”

  “Where are you?” he barks, sounding angrier with each word. The funniness I was finding in his tone of voice erratically morphs into feeling pissed-off.

  “That’s none of your concern anymore, you…” I hear myself slurring again and suddenly feel overcome with emotion. “Y-you ended us, remember?”

  “Stay where you are,” he orders me, “I’m coming to get you, Amelia!”

  “Amelia?!” Now I’m all the way back to finding him hilarious again, so I laugh, but the single ring tone tells me he’s already hung up. I merely shrug my shoulders and shove the phone back inside of my bag. “Charming!”

  Wow, how alcoholic was that beer Matt gave me? The dude must seriously be able to hold his drink better than I can. I guess he does seem to be drinking most of the time when I catch him out in his garden at night. The hallway is now spinning around and around in front of me, and it’s embarrassing because I can hear a few people in the line snickering at me while I try to walk in a straight line by grabbing at the wall. The trouble is, I can’t work out if I want to shout at them or join in with their laughter. I can’t understand why I’m feeling this bad after just one drink. I’ve managed to hold more than that before.

  As I ponder on this conundrum, I lose my footing and begin to fall headfirst towards the floor, where Matt’s filigree patterned carpet, which currently looks like a funky trip, is heading straight for me. I brace myself for impact, but something catches me, something being two large hands and a manly chuckle. When I’m turned to face my savior, I can just about make out Matt’s face as he picks me up bridal style with a huge grin on his face.

  “Hey, Matt!” I smirk at him, “The walls are moving!”

  “Millie, Millie, Millie,” he laughs, “how much have you had to drink young lady?”

  “J-just one, I swear!”

  We both laugh, with me trying to hold up a finger, though to be honest, I have no idea how many I’ve stuck up. I might well be giving him a very rude hand signal. Before I can work out the situation with both my fingers and the walls, I’m placed on top of a bed that smells decidedly of Matt. I have an eerie feeling that I should be worried, complete with an image of both Grant and Sam yelling at me to get my butt out of here, but in my incapacitated state, I can’t quite make out why.

  “Take a nap, Sweetheart,” Matt whispers and kisses my head softly.

  A small part of my brain is currently shouting at me to get up and to go and find Gabe, but the duvet already has me, so I end up curling up on top of his bed. I let the sweet release of blackness begin to take over, thus blocking out the vomit-inducing spinning that’s still going on all around me. The music has changed the song to ‘Starboy’ by The Weekend, and it must be an album because I’ve already heard two tracks by them. I then hear Matt laugh in the distance before he closes the door. The room spins for a while longer, and I have to take deep breaths to keep the nausea at bay, all before I finally submit to the darkness.

  Chapter 32

  Amelia

  When I wake, it feels like hours have passed by, but ‘The Weekend’ is still playing so it can’t have been as long as I thought. My head is foggy and I don’t quite remember where I am, but at least the spinning has ceased. I feel around and realize I’m in a bed, so I rapidly check for my clothing, which thankfully, is still on.

  I groan and reach for my head, trying to make sense of what’s going on, but when I put my hand up to my ear, I don’t feel the sinking sensation of a nice, soft pillow. Instead, I feel something hard, but soft to touch. Frowning with confusion, I reach my fingers around the object and pull it down towards my eyesight to study. When I see what it is, I’m even more confused. So much so, it instantly wakes me up from my fog with an uneasy feeling.

  “Tibbs?” I mutter, “W-what…how?”

  I sit upright, ignoring the threat of a headache and a secondary bout of sickness falling over me, and look about to take in my surroundings. The wall in front of me is covered in pictures of my face, or pictures of Matt and me together. It’s like a scene from a thriller movie, where the psycho killer has wallpapered his victims to some desolate room somewhere. My mind filters through the odd horror I’ve seen, like Seven and Silence of the Lambs, and it forces me to bolt out of the bed, still with Tibbs in hand.

  Matt’s desk sits in front of the wall of nightmares, where I find the small, pink lipstick which Bowie had used to write on my bathroom mirror, sitting right next to his laptop. Its simplistic presence both taunts and terrifies me and I grimace over the realization that what I’m about to discover is going to be heart-breaking.

  “Please, Matt, no!” I whisper to myself just as tears instantly prick at the bottom of my eyes.

  Something lacy and black sits behind the lipstick devil, but I can’t quite make out what it is. I grab a pencil and begin to poke around. Whatever it is, is covered in a thick coating of something crusty and I screw my face up in disgust before I’ve even worked out what it could be. I soon discover it’s a pair of lady’s panties. Correction, they’re my lady’s panties!

  “Oh, fuck me!” I cry out and instantly drop the pencil, only to throw my hands over my mouth, having realized what Matt has been using them for.

  No sooner have I done so, the screen of the laptop suddenly bursts into light, displaying a huge screensaver of my smiling face staring back at me. I already look like one of those victims who appear on ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ asking for my known whereabouts, and it’s enough to have me dry retching into his wastepaper basket.

  After a few minutes, I force myself up and look at the terrifying image of me and notice that it is now asking for a password. Like any other curious person would, especially one looking for clues and who has watched one too many episodes of Scooby-Doo, I begin tapping in different words and numbers. It’s not until I input my date of birth that it reveals the last thing that Matt was watching.

  The screen remains quite dark, almost black, but I can just about make out Matt standing at his doorway before h
e walks over and turns on his bedside lamp. The screen immediately brightens, and I can see he’s wearing his sport jacket, just like the one Grant used to wear. In fact, if I look a little closer, I can see that there’s a ‘G’ stitched onto the arm. My eyes widen over the realization that he is wearing Grant’s sport jacket.

  With a bottle of beer in hand, he walks over to someone who is slumped over the side of his bed. I take in a large gulp of air, knowing that this is bad, epically bad. Before I continue, I take in a few deep breaths, trying to will my brain into functioning beyond panic. Eventually, Tibbs’ wonky ear and one-eyed face forces me to think of Grant, so I pause the screen and try to find a way to send the file to Gabe. The last thing I want to do is prove my best friend is a monster but if he’s about to do what I think he’s about to do, then I have no choice.

  As soon as I’ve managed to send the video, I take in another deep breath and shakily press play:

  “Grant, please don’t be angry with me!” Sam’s slurred voice echoes through the speakers. She’s wearing my dress and belt and is obviously crying. “I just wanted to try it. All kids try it at some point.”

  “Grant?” Matt laughs at first, then shakes his head before chugging back on his beer. “Yeah, but Baby, you know it’s bad for you!” He moves towards her as she continues to sob, with her head lulling from side to side. She’s pretty messed up from the looks of things, even worse than how I had felt only moments ago.

  “Can we go home, Baby?” she asks, looking up at him and making pleading gestures with her hands. Her whole body is now swaying to and fro in front of him and you can tell she’s not fully able to focus on anything, she even needs to reach out to steady herself. “I don’t feel so well.”

  “Sure, Baby,” he soothes her and begins to stroke her hair with a weird type of affection. One that would make you want to wash for hours afterward, just to get the creep off from you. “But you know I’ve got to punish you, right?”

  “W-what?” she stutters, but again, she’s not wholly giving the conversation her full attention. In fact, within seconds she flops back down to the bed, trying to reach out for him, but not getting her hand anywhere near to where she’s aiming for.

  “All those times you’ve turned me down, Millie,” he says with a pained expression.

  At the mention of my name, bile begins to swim up my throat and I have a desperate urge to shut the video down before I see anymore, but for the sake of my brother and Sam, I keep watching. This shit’s going to give me nightmares, but it can’t be half as bad as what Sam is about to live through.

  “Mil-Millie? What the fuck are you talking about, Grant?!” Sam flaps her hand at him again, this time in irritation, as though he’s talking complete nonsense to her.

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch!” he snaps, turning scarily angry and aggressively grabbing for her wrist. “This doesn’t work if you talk. You should have known that wearing her clothes, wearing your hair the way she does, was going to land you in trouble. So just shut the fuck up and be her for me!”

  “Grant, what the…?” She stands to confront him, but as she sways on her unsteady feet, he grabs hold of her and spins her round to face the bed before roughly pushing her onto it. Tears spill from my eyes as I watch in horror when he rips her panties away and begins hurriedly unbuckling his belt with his face screwed up in determination. She’s screaming at him to stop, telling him he’s hurting her, that she doesn’t want this, but he pushes her down even further before holding her in place on the bed with his knee. I emit a small yelp as I watch her struggling, all the while he continues to fumble around in his pocket for a condom.

  “I knew you’d come to me, Millie,” he says, right before he slams into her.

  She screams and screams, and I have to look away with my hands covering my ears, no longer able to bear watching the sickening act before me. I continue to cry when he ignores her whimpers and grunts mercilessly as he rapes her.

  When the screaming finally subsides, I force myself to look back up to see her lying face down on the bed, weeping softly into the duvet. Matt has now dropped to the floor, with the condom still hanging from his semi-flaccid penis. He begins crying and rocking against the bed, saying the same thing over and over again; “I’m sorry Millie, I’m so sorry. I love you, only you!”

  The screen returns to darkness and I angrily slam it shut before giving into violent sickness which is now traveling up my gut with record speed. I run into the bathroom and only just make it to expel the entire contents of my stomach, all the while sobbing between wretches. I don’t know how long I go on for before panic begins to build up inside of me.

  Eventually, my survival instincts kick in and I force myself to listen to that part of my brain which has been trying to warn me that I do not want to be in here, that this is the worst place to find myself in. Taking in three deep breaths to try and calm me down to somewhere near normal, I get up and quickly make an exit, with the sole purpose of bolting for Gabe outside.

  However, like any good horror story, these escape plans never go the way you want them to, and when I step into the bedroom, I find Matt standing there with a glass of water for me. And like any psychotic, terrifying villain, he’s wearing a huge, friendly grin on his face. It’s enough to make me gasp out loud, to which he automatically frowns.

  “You ok, Baby?” The use of that word, ‘Baby’, brings the video back to the forefront of my mind and I instantly want to attack him, to beat the living shit out of him. However, that would be beyond stupid, so I simply smile sweetly and go to take the water from him.

  “I’m fine,” I reply and sit down to lean up against the window, desperately trying to find Gabe amongst the crowd. “Just a little bit of puke is all. Thanks for this, you’re a lifesaver.”

  “Anything for you, Baby,” he smiles innocently, then comes in close to kiss me on the cheek.

  Bowie

  Shoving through the front door, I’m met with a scene I know all too well but does nothing for me anymore. Sweaty bodies pressed up against one another, a couple of dudes smoking pot in the corner, while bottles of alcohol are left open all around the room. I grimace as soon as I spot them looking like open invitations for shifty pricks to drop something inside of. After your sister is raped, you tend to notice these little silent threats, which subsequently makes you question everything and everyone at places like this.

  Saving that battle of morals for another day, I push my way through the throng of people with Mercy sticking close behind me. She came to me with her usual shitty attitude but with a genuine concern for Millie’s safety, something I couldn’t ignore. It didn’t take much for her to persuade me to come and haul Millie out of here but by the time I called, I could tell she was already at risk of something terrible happening to her. She sounded drunk, two sheets to the wind, and I knew I needed to get my ass over here asap.

  My temper is beginning to simmer when I look at countless faces that aren’t hers and panic takes over all rational thought. I head straight outside, to where the usual crowd of football buddies and their significant others are gathered. Most of the football team, those who possess half a brain, choose to stay out here and not get wrapped up in the usual bullshit which goes on inside. It’s where I would have been had I come here, back before Matt and I had finally parted ways. Melody slinks up to me and practically wraps her whole body around mine, choosing to ignore the fact that I’m trying my best to push her off.

  “I was wondering when you would show up,” she purrs in my ear, “fancy finding somewhere more private?” She playfully bites her lip, hoping to tempt me with her seductive moves. Once upon a time, that’s all I would have needed to follow after her, to give in to temptation. However, that was then, and this is now.

  “Sorry, Mel, I’ve already told you, I’m not interested,” I say as gently as I can, “you need to find someone who doesn’t treat you like crap!” Not me!

  “I don’t mind,” she grins, with her eyes full of lust and probably hal
f a bottle of Vodka, “as long as it’s you in my bed, you can treat me any way you like.”

  “What?!” I question her with irritation. “Look, have you seen Millie?”

  She ignores my question, being lost to the mood of one of these parties, and continues to rain kisses down against my cheek, even when I start to push her away.

  “I can see how much she really meant to you, asshole!”

  Millie’s brother-slash-boyfriend figure is in my line of sight and I’m obviously not his favorite person. He’s not exactly mine either but he might know where she is, so, for now, I gotta play nice.

  “Where is she? Where’s Millie?” I demand but he merely shakes his head and laughs at me. The idiot has also been drinking, though clearly not as much as the girl still trying to suck on my neck.