The Resident

by Francis Cottam

  The screen displayed a close, high-angle view of the bed. Juliet entered the room and put her water glass on her night table, then picked it up and took a sip, put it down again, pulled back the duvet and settled into bed. She saw that her eyes radiated a red glow on the screen, as though caught in the flash of a cheap, disposable camera.

  The film jumped forward in short, staccato cuts, revealing her own toss-and-turn movements during a restless slumber. Then there was a long moment. Juliet just lay in it, at its centre, when suddenly, Max entered the room.

  At first, he just stood at the foot of the bed. He seemed to be staring at her. Then he sank to his knees beside the bed and sort of slid and shuffled under it. He had vanished from sight, the movement in the room had ceased and the screen went black. Juliet, watching the monitor, had to fight to prevent herself from breathing a sigh of relief. But worse was to come, the strong part of her mind insisted to her. Much worse. He had not sedated her merely to do this.

  The picture clarified with a start. The time code had shifted forward by ten minutes. Max was rising from under the bed. Ambient light from the street and bridge traffic below, painted him purple and his eyes were scarlet so that he looked like some grim and determined demon.

  He took off his shirt. He methodically stripped off the rest of his clothes, the deliberation in his movements a demonstration of his sureness that his victim would not wake, then he peeled back the duvet and poised over her. There was some slithery item in his fist, a piece of clothing Juliet could not properly make out. He draped this across her naked groin in a movement so formal it seemed almost ceremonial. Then he climbed onto the bed and straddled her. He squirmed and thrust spasmodically, huge in the camera’s eye, until finally he shuddered to a stop.

  He extricated himself from her and, as Juliet watched, aware of the loudness of her own breathing in her ears and the cold sweat that had broken out all over her body, he crouched over her, moving in pecking stabs of motion for a while, kissing her, she supposed, but from the angle at which she watched in horror, less like a demon now than a large arachnid eating leisurely at something stunned but still living at the centre of its web.

  Somehow she managed to squeeze the remote’s stop button. The image on the screen disappeared, as though retreating back into nightmare, its rightful domain. It was an abomination. But she knew it had happened. The toxicology report had shown how he had prepared her for her ordeal and his sick gratification. The surveillance camera had recorded what he had done. The remaining mystery in the churn of Juliet’s nauseated mind was how on earth he had got in.

  And where on earth was Jack?

  Thirty-nine

  THERE WAS A knock just then at the door. Someone banged their knuckles against it three times. In the charged silence that followed, Juliet crept to the door and looked through the peephole. Max stood outside in the hallway. She caught her breath and moved away from the door on silent feet. But then, behind her, as she reached the living room, she heard the doorknob start to turn and remembered that the door was not locked.

  A moment later Max peeked his head into the living room. He was neatly attired. In one hand he carried a bottle of wine. Juliet could see enough of the label to see that it was Château Margaux. Seeing her he smiled, easily. He looked very relaxed, as though everything was totally normal and he hadn’t a care in the world. ‘You just get home?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Standing where he was, at the entrance to the living room from the hallway, he was blocking her escape route.

  He handed her the bottle. She took it. ‘I found this great old vintage in August’s wine closet,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll open it,’ Juliet said. She did not honestly know how she had taken it from him without fumbling the bottle to the floor. She was controlling the urge to tremble only by brute force of will. She felt a mingling of disgust, anger and fear. But the fear was the dominant emotion. Where the hell was Jack?

  She stepped into the kitchen. Max followed her, which was only natural, she thought, while thinking him the most unnatural man in the world. He was a creature dragged from dark subconscious dreams, a beast made flesh, standing behind her, watching her in black, secret amusement. She started to pick at the foil of the bottle neck with a paring knife but could not control her mutinous hands. They were shaking too much to achieve the task.

  ‘Here,’ Max said, ‘I can do that for you.’

  He took it from her, opened the bottle and poured two glasses, spilling a little of the wine as he poured. He gestured for her to sit at the kitchen table and she did so. She did not feel in thrall to him but she was more terrified than she had ever been of anyone in her life. She was alone in the presence of a madman.

  Max was clearly insane. He was sexually obsessed with her. Risk and retribution did not inhibit him. He did not fear being caught and punished. It made her wonder bleakly what steps he might have taken to make sure he wouldn’t be; it made her wonder what his insanity and carnal appetite would drive him to do now.

  For the moment she had to live in the moment, she did not feel she had a choice. She must not provoke or confront him or otherwise inadvertently pull the hair trigger of his rage. She had to bide her time and recognise her opportunity to escape him when it came.

  He slid a glass of wine towards her. He gestured over her right shoulder and said, ‘Could I have that towel?’

  Juliet turned to reach for the towel and when she turned back to hand it to him she saw his hand move across the top of her wine glass. Had he put a sedative into her drink? Had he spiked it again?

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the towel. He mopped up the spillage and then stood to put the towel back and she swapped their glasses in the brief second while his attention was elsewhere. She did it deftly. She did not think that he could have noticed. She took a sip. He did the same. He seemed to be watching her, she thought, every bit as carefully as she was watching him.

  Max said, ‘You OK?’

  ‘Exhausted,’ she said, ‘not sleeping well.’

  She took out and checked her cell phone for a signal. She saw him watch her do it. There wasn’t one. He had said that at the outset, hadn’t he? He had said that cell phone reception was poor and sporadic in the building. It might have been the only unequivocally honest thing he had said to her. Where was Jack?

  ‘I like this wine,’ Max said.

  Juliet had started to feel dizzy.

  ‘Here.’ He offered her a napkin. She had started to sweat. She did not bother to thank him. She checked her phone again and saw that she now had a signal.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, feeling light-headed as she rose from her chair, starting to punch a number into the phone, hearing her own voice as a stranger’s, thick and slurry.

  Max took her free hand and held it. ‘Why are you calling him?’

  ‘Where is he?’ She felt barely able to speak. She could not properly fill her lungs with air and her mouth would not shape the words in the way she intended.

  ‘Why would you give him a key to my building?’

  ‘Oh, God. You know where he is, don’t you?’

  ‘All you do is betray me.’

  ‘What have you done to him?’

  He squeezed the hand he had grabbed, hard and suddenly, and Juliet screamed as she felt her tendons crack and knuckles bunch with the crunching force of his grip. She yanked away from him and staggered, her balance badly impaired.

  ‘You put something in my drink,’ she said. But the drug did nothing to take the edge off her terror. She felt that growing inside her, uncontrolled.

  ‘This time you will be awake,’ he said. ‘You will enjoy the experience fully conscious.’

  She still had the paring knife in her pocket. She only had a fraction of time in which to act, perhaps only seconds. She took the knife from her pocket and lunged, slamming it blade-deep into his shoulder twice before Max could fend her off, pushing her to the ground. She heard the knife land on the kitchen floor with a clatter where she could
not reach it.

  He stood over her, breathing heavily. There was no pain on his face and no surprise. Just a dark fury that she realised now, too late, his facial features had been made for. This was the real him. He had no need to mask his nature or intentions any more. He said, ‘Stop. Making. Me. Hurt. You.’

  It was the tone you might adopt with a truculent child. It was a tone that told her in five words that this man had never really related normally to another human being. People were there only to obey him. Anything but slavish obedience would be interpreted as an unacceptable slight. He lived in a world in which he made the rules and nobody was his equal. He would find a way to justify everything he did, however terrible. He always had, hadn’t he?

  Forty

  THE AWFUL CERTAINTY came to her as she lay on the kitchen floor, with the contorted face of Max above her, staring into hers, that Jack was dead. She was on her own. Instinct for survival jolted through the drugs and she lashed out at him with a foot, scrambled to her feet and grabbed a carving knife from the knife block on the counter. He came up behind her and she spun and lunged at him, snagging the long, sharp blade of the knife on his shirt. He stepped back. She ran at him again with the knife raised high. He retreated into the wine closet, closing the closet door on his own hand in a bid to escape the frenzy of her attack, Juliet slashing at and slicing open his forearm in a deep wound as he did so.

  She had the gratification of hearing him gasp once in agony as he pulled his hand through the gap and closed the closet door behind him. And she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had trapped him in there. At least, she had when she had pushed the refrigerator on its side to block the door from being opened again.

  She stumbled. Whatever drug he had slipped into her wine glass was taking effect in her system, numbing her, making her slow and clumsy, deadening her nerves, overcoming her ability to think and act. It was as though she had blundered into a narcotic swamp and she did not know how long she had before it engulfed her completely.

  She staggered into her living room and tried the landline, but it was dead. She had no time to think about how that had happened. She took out her cell phone but there was no signal. She reeled towards her front door. But it would not open. It was as though it had been locked from the outside. She had an insane vision then of Max outside her door, clutching his injured arm, bleeding on to the hallway floor with a leer of triumph on his face having locked her in and secured her in his prison. She shook the thought from her head; it was impossible. The door did not lock from the outside, did it? And Max was safely secured in the wine closet. He was her prisoner, not the other way around.

  But the drug was forcing her further into that swamp. She lurched around her apartment, trying to get a signal on her cell phone. It was no use. There was nothing.

  She tried to assess her situation, but it was becoming more difficult by the second for her to concentrate. She slammed a fist into a wall in sheer frustration and the bright flare of pain cleared her mind for a couple of minutes.

  She was stuck, trapped in her own apartment with no way to get out, no way to raise the alarm and there was a wounded madman confined – for now – in her kitchen wine cellar. And she was drugged. That was her predicament and it was grim and dangerous and getting worse as the drug further enfeebled her. The question was what could she do?

  She checked the Internet, because she should have done that before, she thought, chiding herself. Her computer booted up but there was no broadband signal. She tried to connect three times before giving up on that. She went and piled what weighty items she could against the refrigerator to securely wedge shut the door of the makeshift prison occupied by Max.

  She tried to break the glass of her living-room window by throwing a hardwood chair against it. Plate glass hitting the sidewalk in a shower from the ninth floor of a Brooklyn building would have alerted curious eyes to what was going on up there, wouldn’t it? But the glass was tough, the chair heavy and her throw a puny effort in her drug-weakened state. The chair bounced harmlessly back into the room.

  She went into her bathroom. She rifled through her medical cabinet, grabbing headache pills. She knew of course how they worked, which chemical ingredients they comprised. They contained caffeine and the stimulant pseudoephedrine. She slammed down four pills, gulping water after them.

  Juliet went and sat on her bed. The temptation to bury herself in her duvet and seek what refuge she could in sleep was almost overwhelming. But that was the effect on her mind of the cocktail of drugs Max had slipped her, she knew. Sleep here had been anything but a safe refuge. This had been the scene of her violation. The apparent safety of her bedroom was a thin and probably fatal illusion.

  She looked out of the window, over the gables and gantries of the great riveted iron bridge; over the twinkling waste of the East River to Manhattan and its million twinkling lights and stone canyoned enormity. And the reality hit her of how alone she was in the looming, indifferent vastness of the city. She was alone and she was helpless, wasn’t she?

  This gloomy reverie was interrupted by the ringing of her cell phone. She saw the glow of its green display on the floor by her feet and heard it vibrate as it received an incoming call.

  It was Jack, she thought. It had to be Jack. He had gone to a bar to while away the time before she returned from work and had got absorbed in some ball game or boxing match being televised there. He did not know she had been sexually assaulted, made supine by a cocktail of sedatives administered without her knowledge. He did not know she had fought and wounded a madman who was now her prisoner.

  He would know now, though, she thought, reaching for the phone, because she would tell him and he would return urgently with a posse of armed police officers and they would take Max off to Bellevue buckled into restraints with a rubber clamp in that grinning mouth. And he would never do again to anyone what he had done to her because there would be no end to his incarceration, other than death in his cell endured staring out at a barred window.

  And that was the fate he fucking deserved.

  The call ended as her fingers reached around the phone. She groaned inwardly.

  ‘Hello?’ she said it anyway, desperate not just for rescue but to alleviate her solitude. She craved a human voice. ‘Hello?’

  But there was only silence because the instrument was dead in her hand.

  She did not sense a presence in the room with her until it was too late. Probably that was the drug from the wine, dulling her instincts, swamping her natural alertness. She was only aware that Max had returned when she felt the grip of his hand around her throat. How the fuck had he got out of the wine closet?

  His free hand found her mouth, stifling her scream of fear and rage. He stared at her. There was desire in his eyes and the set of his mouth. Incredibly, there was also what she figured must pass in his incomplete mind for love. She was scared to death, but the air had an erotic charge around the two of them she could almost hear the crackle of.

  If she wanted to survive this, she had to play along. The old cliché had it that only when you were close to death did you really appreciate life. Juliet felt that cliché intensely; at the moment she wanted to live more than she ever had before.

  She reached out and touched Max’s face. The effect was immediate on him. His eyes softened and his mouth puckered coyly like an adolescent boy’s. He melted under her touch. Certain that she had never caressed anything quite so loathsome, she cocked her head and smiled at him, inviting him with her eyes. He touched her slowly, tenderly now, the tears trickling down his cheeks, the simpering expression on his face that of someone fulfilling his life’s most precious dream.

  The carving knife lay on the bed next to her. His blood was congealing on the blade, but Max seemed unaware of the weapon or its proximity. Her free hand moved towards it as Max leaned in to kiss her. Incrementally, her hand got closer and closer to the hilt of the knife. And then she had it and gripped and raised it high.

  With no
hesitation at all, Max raised his own hand and grabbed her by the wrist.

  ‘Stop. Making. Me. Hurt. You,’ he said again. It was a promise, not a threat.

  She broke free of his grip on her by clawing at his eyes with the hand not holding the knife. He punched her hard on the mouth and again with a dull thud of his knuckles juddering against her right cheekbone. She fell off the bed onto her face, but managed to scramble up and into the bathroom before he could grab her securely again. She slammed the door closed, locked it and cowered in the corner furthest away from it, gasping for breath.

  Forty-one

  MAX HAMMERED ON the door. It shook on its hinges with the pulverising force of him, but seemed solid and held. After a while, he stopped and there was silence.

  She needed a weapon. She had dropped the carving knife in the bedroom struggle. Think, girl, she said to herself. Come on Juliet, you can’t give up now. You can’t let that bastard get you. You can’t. You have too much going for you, too much to live for. You can’t let a miserable pervert like this guy deprive you of your future. You can’t. Not in these horrible circumstances, not in this sordid way.

  She felt more alert. That was something. The caffeine and pseudoephedrine she had ingested were working against the drug he had given her. Unless it was the adrenalin. Whatever was doing it, she was escaping the narcotic swamp that had threatened to submerge her. Her brain felt more alert and her body more responsive.

  She was pretty badly beaten up. Her vision was blurred in her left eye and it was swelling painfully. In a minute, she would examine the damage in the bathroom mirror. First, though, she really had to improvise a weapon of some sort. She had inflicted two puncture wounds to his shoulder and sliced deeply into the meat of his forearm. But he had not been bleeding excessively on the bed and he still possessed his strength and agility. She had hurt him, but she had not severed an artery or damaged any of his vital organs. The significant and depressing fact was that she had not hurt him seriously enough to really slow him down.