by Will Carver
‘I don’t know what you mean. Look, I just know that the new tenant taking over Abe’s old room will be arriving soon. That’s all. And we don’t want this mess here. All I meant was that we need to get this sorted quickly. It’s right by the front door.’
Time was ticking by. Mrs May knew that she had spoken for too long. She didn’t need to be explaining herself to Gail. She just needed her to listen and obey the instructions.
‘You’re lying. You are LYING. I remember it. You told me when Abe was dead that I had one minute to get rid of his body. You’re doing it again. What is going on in this house?’
Saffy’s Beetle was loud. Mrs May and Gail both heard it in the distance. It was getting closer to the house.
‘Please, Gail. She’s here. The new tenant is here. We have to move Aubrey. I can’t do it alone.’
‘If that doorbell rings in sixty seconds, so help me God I will fucking lose it. Tell me what is going on here!’
A car door slammed out the front of The Beresford.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Liar!’
‘She’s coming. She’s twenty seconds away at the most.’
‘Then you don’t have much time.’ Gail pointed the knife at Mrs May as though telling her to proceed.
‘I can’t explain it, Gail.’
‘Try.’
Through the window, Mrs May could see a deliberately scruffy-looking bohemian type walking up the steps.
‘You are going to have to trust me. That’s all I can say. We can talk after. Just move the body around the corner for now. The new girl is here.’
Gail paused for a second. She didn’t want to trust the old lady, she couldn’t even trust herself. From the corner of her eye, she could now see the woman approaching. She was holding a cardboard box with both hands.
‘Please, Gail. You’ve just tied up the loose ends. Don’t create more.’
Gail shook her head, bent down, grabbed the neck of Aubrey’s blouse and started pulling. She dragged her around the corner and left her lying in front of one of the bookcases that was out of view from the front door. Then she dropped to her knees in front of the spilled red wine, covering the blood that had spilled on the floor. She pretended to be picking up the broken glass and let the red wine stain over the blood on her skirt.
The doorbell rang and Mrs May took a deep breath to compose herself before opening the door.
Gail thought to herself that it had been around sixty seconds since Aubrey last breathed.
Not a minute.
Exactly sixty seconds.
FIVE
He had managed to add another ten pages to his script on the train journey. He wasn’t sure they were any good but he was pleased with the volume. He’d read somewhere that Bukowski didn’t have a word count, he just tried to write ten pages a day. Jordan Irving wasn’t even a fan of Bukowski but he did like the way that he worked.
The story concerned a young blues guitarist, sitting in a grubby apartment, playing along to a Robert Johnson record when a citywide power cut drops the area into darkness. When the power comes back on, the record starts to play in reverse and he hears a voice telling him to murder everybody in the building.
Irving wasn’t sure how it was going to end but he was writing his ten pages each day and hoping that the answer would come to him as he got deeper into the story. It went against everything he was taught at film school, but he believed he was on to a winner. Commercially, it ticked the horror box, crime box and the public’s fascination with the occult. And, if he was lucky enough to get his first project off the ground, it would provide a lead role for a young black actor.
He was dreaming big and working hard.
The city station was busier than the town where he had started his journey and it was colder. He wrapped a scarf around his neck and kept his headphones on, partly for the music, partly for the warmth. And he walked.
His phone was fully charged, but the navigation was telling him that he was less than ten minutes from his temporary home. He kept his hand on his laptop bag as he walked. If some city street urchin wanted to take it from him, they would have to prise it from his cold, dead hand because the information on the hard drive was irreplaceable.
It was his life.
His life’s work.
Eight minutes later, he was outside The Beresford. There was an old-fashioned Volkswagen Beetle parked outside and an old woman clipping flowers by the front door.
SIX
‘Mrs May, I presume.’ Saffy put the box down for a moment, and the old lady spotted a rainbow of plastic beads. Thousands of them, she guessed.
‘That’s right, come in.’
‘I’m Saffy. Saffron is my real name but nobody has called me that in literally forever, not even my mum.’ She seemed nervous. Scatty. She hadn’t even noticed Gail down on her knees, picking up broken bits of wine bottle, at that point.
‘Saffy it is, then.’
Gail was stewing. She felt like a dog or a puppet. Mrs May could just turn it on and off whenever she felt like it, it seemed. She was over there small-talking the new girl while Gail was on her knees in a puddle of blood and red wine.
Paranoia kicked in.
She felt like Mrs May was laughing at her. She always seemed to have a favourite. It was clear that she never liked that Sythe guy, but she never said anything horrible about Abe, even though he’d slapped Gail around the face. She wasn’t damning about Blair, but she wasn’t complimentary either. Gail had moved into top spot once Abe was gone, and she was sure the old lady had wanted her to triumph in the battle with Aubrey.
But now there was Saffy. What a ridiculous name.
And why was she so happy?
‘That’s Gail over there.’ Mrs May pointed, and Saffy looked over and gave an awkward smile. ‘She accidentally dropped a bottle of red wine on the floor. A good bottle, too.’
‘Oh, no. It looks like it has gone all over your outfit, too.’ Saffy feigned concern. She used the word ‘outfit’ instead of ‘skirt’ and that was enough to annoy Gail.
Saffy turned back to Mrs May and they mumbled more inanity. Gail had reached her limit. She stood up, knife still in her right hand, and moved over behind Saffy. It was too quick for Mrs May to intervene.
Gail held the whacky jewellery designer around the neck with her left arm and placed that sharp, bloodied blade against the front of her neck.
‘What are you doing?’ Mrs May kept her movements small so not to spook Gail.
Saffy wriggled. She wasn’t trying to free herself, it was more to get into a position of comfortable surrender.
‘Be careful, dear. She’s pregnant.’
Gail took Mrs May’s words as concern for her and her unborn child. That she didn’t want Saffy to throw an elbow back or something because it may hurt the baby. It softened her rage a little.
But not enough.
Saffy froze.
‘I want to know what happens if I run this blade you gave me across her neck.’
‘You gave her the knife? What is this place?’
‘Be quiet, girl, the grown-ups are talking.’ Gail did not sound like herself at all. Her eyes looked different. Her mind kept going back to Aubrey’s final words about her child being the Devil. She couldn’t understand why she had said that. Was it just to hurt her? Was it to fuck with her mind? Because it was working.
‘You know what will happen if you cut her neck. She’ll die, Gail. More blood on your hands.’
‘More? What are you two?’ Saffy was outspoken in life, and it appeared she would be outspoken in death if it came to that. ‘Is that why it’s so cheap? So you can lure people in and kill them, you fucking psychos.’
Gail ignored her.
‘I know what happens if I cut her. What happens after? What happens sixty seconds after, Mrs May?’
There was a back-and-forth between the old lady and the pregnant woman in which the question was dodged and then asked again in a different way. Dod
ged again. Asked again. All the while, Mrs May was calm and collected, and Gail grew more and more tired of her politician-style rhetoric.
‘I don’t know what the hell you two are talking about, but if you’re going to do it, just fucking do it.’
Maybe Saffy was playing a risky game here, calling their bluff, hedging her bets. The women seemed the most unlikely of killer duos. Maybe it was a game or a prank, or some kind of initiation gone too far. What were the chances that a two-hundred-year-old and a frumpy woman in her second trimester were a couple of slashers.
The thing was, Saffy couldn’t see Gail’s eyes, because she was behind her. Also, she had never seen Gail’s eyes when she was frightened and alone and vulnerable, and trying to escape her own horrible, abusive home life. So she couldn’t tell the difference.
‘Just fucking do it,’ she had said.
Gail just fucking did it.
She pushed the silver blade into Saffy’s annoying neck and pulled it quickly across to the right then let go of her third victim.
Two thousand coloured plastic beads spilled out across the floor of The Beresford, reaching out to every corner, as Saffy dropped her cardboard box and instinctively grabbed her own throat in a futile attempt to stem the blood flow.
Neither of The Beresford Two paid her any attention. Their focus was on one another. Mrs May looked resigned, while Gail held up her side with anger and frustration.
‘Why did you have to go and do that?’
Saffy was still alive, gurgling from the slit in her neck as she lay on the floor. She looked on in disbelief as the old woman spoke so matter-of-factly. She seemed more irritated by the broken wine bottle than the almost-murdered tenant on the ground.
‘I want to know what’s going on here.’
‘With what?’
‘Stop it. Just stop. You know what. What is this place? Why does this happen? I’m not a killer.’
‘I’m sure this girl with the stupid name would disagree. As would Aubrey over there, by the bookcase.’
‘What is going to happen in sixty seconds? Is that doorbell going to ring again? Because there are a load of beads to clear up if that’s the case, and not a lot of time.’
‘I’ve told you that I can’t give you all the answers.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I can’t. Honestly.’ Mrs May looked around as though somebody might be listening in on her. ‘We can sit down once this is cleared up, dear—’
‘Don’t “dear” me.’
Mrs May did not take orders.
‘We can sit down properly when this is all over, dear, but until then, this needs to get cleared away.’
‘There’s someone else coming, isn’t there?’
‘I will tell you this much, we should get a head start on these beads, your sixty seconds doesn’t start until she finishes breathing.’ The old lady pushed her foot against Saffy’s hip to see how weak she was. ‘I reckon we have another minute or so before that kicks in.’
Gail fell right back into her place, doing as the old lady instructed. She was to take Saffy’s phone from her pocket in case she tried to call anyone, then go to the cleaning cupboard near the library and take out the large broom to sweep all the beads into one pile, and the pruning shears so that Mrs May could head off the new tenant out the front of The Beresford to buy a little extra time.
She made Gail feel like they were a team. In on this together. Co-conspirators, even though Gail was doing all the dirty work. If one of them went down, the other would have to follow.
So she did as she was told. She took the broom from the cupboard and started brushing all the beads back towards the box, which had been flipped so that the coloured plastic balls could be pushed inside. She swept up the broken glass, too.
Every ten seconds or so, one of them would prod the girl with the claret smile across her neck to see if she was still holding on.
They cleaned around her.
She choked.
Mrs May sprayed something on the spilled wine and sticky blood.
Saffy tried to speak.
Gail didn’t want to hear any more last words. Her baby was no devil. It was innocent. Like all babies. Whatever the dying girl was trying to whisper, she could keep to herself and the Gods.
Most of the beads had been swept back into the box, but Gail plugged in the vacuum and chased some of the stragglers down. Mrs May had a scourer in her hand to scrub the wine and blood but gave Saffy one last kick before getting on her decrepit hands and knees.
‘Gail!’ She had to shout over the sound of the vacuum. ‘Gail!’ She did it again, and Gail pressed the button to stop sucking up the bits of plastic. ‘She’s gone.’
The timer had started.
Jordan Irving would be there in sixty seconds.
The old lady dropped the scourer, picked up her secateurs and stepped out the front to pretend that she was tending to her roses. It could buy some much-needed time.
Gail wrapped a clump of Saffy’s scraggly hair around her hand and dragged her over to Aubrey. She was petite and easy to move. Her oversized cardigan probably weighed more than her body. Gail managed to pile her on top of Aubrey’s body. And she wondered whether Aubrey had said all of those things that Mrs May had told her. She did have a wicked tongue.
‘Devil baby,’ she muttered under her breath, shaking her head, trying hard not to spit on a dead woman, then picked up the scourer that Mrs May had dropped and got to work on the stains.
Thirty seconds later, she could hear a man’s voice, and then the old lady joined in.
Gail was so close to having everything cleaned up. Not perfectly, but enough that somebody who had never been to The Beresford would not notice things were out of the ordinary.
When she had that knife to Saffy’s throat, all she wanted were answers. Why she could feel herself changing. What was so special about that building? What did Mrs May know? How long had it been happening for? Who the hell was she becoming?
She hadn’t thought any further than threatening to kill the tenant in order to gain this information.
Of course, it would always end in her death, because you can’t be held up by someone you live with and not alert the authorities. How would you sleep at night?
Once she realised that Saffy would definitely become her third kill, Gail had the notion that she would continue to murder someone every sixty seconds until Mrs May opened up and told her the truth.
The doorbell would ring and Gail would stab.
While on her knees, wiping the last bit of blood off the wood, she caught a glimpse of the newest of new tenants to The Beresford. He was over six feet tall. Black. Beautiful. And built like a tree. She would not have stood a chance against him.
Mrs May had opened up enough for Gail to abort that idea. And for that, she was grateful.
The latch to the door clicked, and Gail ran over to the dead bodies and sat on them. There wasn’t much space around that corner but it seemed the best option because she was still covered in her victims’ blood.
Their introduction could wait.
He seemed eager to get to his apartment, and Mrs May was not in her usual hurry to give a tour of her famous garden and library.
Gail peered around the corner as the new guy walked off towards Abe’s old place. He was athletic and muscular. If it came to the point where Gale had to take his life in some way, it was going to take some real effort to saw through those limbs afterwards.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Nuclear families. Remember those? Two parents. Married. A man and a woman, just like it says in the Bible. 2.4 children. Mating for life. Like penguins. Or Catholics. Job done. Exist until death.
And that works. For a third of the population. They can cruise until the end, just like that.
That’s okay.
Maybe that husband steps out whenever he feels the urge. His wife knows about it but it isn’t hurting anyone. Only her. In fact, after he’s cheated, he’s often nicer than usual.
> Your sex was purely procreation, not recreation, anyway.
Sure, sometimes the dinner isn’t on the table at six and that can make him angry. He doesn’t know why, he just knows that he should be and he can be. He walks over to you, his knuckles dragging on the floor, and he pushes you. Maybe a slap. Maybe you feel the back of his hand.
It’s nothing, right?
Just the way things are.
Nobody gets hurt. Only you. The kids don’t see anything. And he’s still providing for them. For you. You have food and shelter. You want for nothing. Nothing but some tenderness or compassion or help with the kids. But you stick it out. You are a unit. A family.
You don’t want a divorce.
You don’t want to have to share your kids.
You don’t want to have to think about finding someone else now you feel stretched out in all the ways you were warned would happen.
But you don’t want to be alone.
So you stay. And maybe he comes home late from drinking with friends and he climbs on top of you in bed, his full weight pressing down on you, and he has his way. You don’t like it. He’s hurting you.
Maybe you never got to that point of 2.4 children. You found it difficult to conceive and he blamed you or felt like less of a man. A push turns into a slap, which mutates into a punch, and that ends in a beating. You miscarry early. You lose another when you’re almost at the finish line.
He treats you better for a while. Until you fail him.
You know you don’t want this anymore, but there seems no alternative.
What do you want, Gail?
Escape. I want safety. Security. And a baby that doesn’t die.
Vengeance? Justice?
Walking out will have left him angry, self-destructive, embarrassed and defeated. He will torture himself and drink to a hastened demise. There is no sense in asking for vengeance when somebody is their own worst enemy. His loneliness is enough justice. I made that happen.
I am a mother. I do not ask for myself.
It seems only worthwhile to ask for the things that I cannot guarantee myself.