by Kitty Thomas
Most of the guests scrambled to get their clothes and get out of the basement. A few lingered—trying to finish up as if they couldn’t make their own orgasms at home. Like it was worth risking a bullet to the head or a snapped neck, two things I was sure Shannon was more than capable of delivering.
He physically broke up a few sexual encounters, herded them all up the stairs, and shut and locked the basement door, leaving me down below.
When everyone was gone, the door unlocked and Shannon came back down, only slightly calmer. He still wore the gorilla mask. The white cat was on his heels looking smug, like she couldn’t wait to watch this unfold.
I should have taken the opportunity alone to put clothes on. They were in my hands. I was just so freaked out by everything. Maybe it was shock. It felt eerily like the night I first met him all over again. I backed away from him, still clutching my clothes to me like I’d done with the sheet the night in the castle.
Shannon continued to advance. The music still blared. He turned it off, and silence poured like water into each space that had once contained sound.
When he spoke, his voice was dead calm, which was about a thousand times more scary than the yelling of only minutes before. “I thought I told you to stay in your room.”
“I’m s-sorry.” I couldn’t keep my eyes from straying over him. He was still naked, and hard. I didn’t want to think about what part of this was exciting him. If he was a normal person with any sense of decency and morality, seeing some other guy almost violate me wouldn’t have him worked up this way.
“T-take the mask off.” I continued to back up until I ran out of space to retreat. He sounded so inhuman, his voice warped behind the rubber.
“No.” He said the word slowly as if pausing to taste it first before giving me his decision. “It makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” I knew there wasn’t a lot in those eyes, not usually. But I still wanted to be able to see them. Because as inhuman as Shannon might be, he was infinitely more human than a rubber gorilla mask.
“You broke my rules. I’ve been very good to you. I’ve protected you and kept you safe. Except for the night we met, I’ve kept all the darker business of my life away from you, including this. You are the one who opened the box, my little Pandora. Now we can’t close it. All the evil inside can never go back in. It’s in the air now. Can you smell it?”
What I smelled was sex and alcohol.
He ripped the clothes out of my hands and dropped them on the floor. “Do you know how much I’ve had to rearrange my life for you? My schedule? My routine? All so I wouldn’t have to kill you? I’ve asked myself... Why, Shannon? Why even bother? I knew why, but I wanted to keep you pure and untainted by all the dark things that crawl around inside me. But now you’ve seen too much of it, though not nearly the worst of it. You know what? Fuck it. I kill people, Elodie. For a living. But I bet you already knew that, didn’t you? You’re smart. Maybe too smart.”
I thought I’d known, but hearing it out loud was a whole other thing. There was a part of me that had thought it was pure invention, my imagination running wild, my mind playing tricks on me.
“Shannon, please stop.”
He was never letting me go now. Not only had I seen his freaky little sex party, but we couldn’t pretend anymore that I was ignorant about how he financed his life.
He wanted it that way... for me to know... to be sure that I knew how he made his living so he could justify keeping me locked up in his house. I didn’t know why he wanted to keep me here, but I knew that he did. The way he’d acted just now with that other man wasn’t the indifference I’d thought I mostly inspired in him.
“Do you know what else?” he prodded, just gaining steam. “I really like my job. A lot. You can’t believe how much job satisfaction I have. It’s a shame guidance counselors in school aren’t allowed to suggest this career path. Robbing young minds of their callings, I say. But hey, more fun for me.”
“You’re drunk,” I said.
He laughed. “No. I haven’t had a drop. This is all me, baby.”
“You’re no better than Trevor.” In fact, Shannon was probably worse.
“In general, you’re right, but where you’re concerned...” He took a step back and released a heavy sigh. “You might still be right.”
He hadn’t lied to me. At least not overtly, not that I was aware of. Maybe he lied by omission, but everybody did that, and in truth, he owed me nothing. He hadn’t kept me prisoner in an abandoned theme park, thinking the entire world had ended and almost everyone in it had died. But he’d kept me prisoner in a nice house. Was it that much different?
I had begun to think of my life in two chunks of time: the theme park captivity and the monochromatic minimalist house captivity. The world may as well have ended for all I’d seen of it during both imprisonments.
When Trevor took me, and my face was splashed all over the news, he’d ended the world for me. Shannon was keeping the same cycle going. Though I couldn’t imagine any reality in which everything wouldn’t be completely fucked. The moment some part of my brain had shut down and locked up all my memories was when things had gone to shit. Because from that point there was no option of heaven, just different circles of hell.
My eyes kept straying downward unable to stop looking at Shannon in all his glory. He just chuckled.
God, why was I so attracted to him? On the looks scale, both Shannon and Trevor were very appealing—certainly neither of them looked like the monsters they were. But from the first moment I’d seen Trevor in the pirate ship, there had been an active revulsion. It was only desperation and fear and isolation and the need to survive that had brought me around to finally sleeping with him, then to convincing myself I actually loved him.
But Shannon? I’d been trying to pretend I wasn’t attracted from the beginning because our story didn’t start with the fuzzy lie that he was my loving husband. I’d known what he was. I’d known the moment he started chopping up my fake husband and throwing him in the flames.
With Trevor I’d had to force myself to feel things; with Shannon I’d had to force myself not to. Think of him as a big brother. Think of him as a sexless bodyguard. Think of him as a distant guardian angel. But God, whatever you do, don’t think of him as a potential lover.
It had been easy before tonight. He hadn’t tried to take anything from me. There had been no overtures, no innuendos. I’d had safety and warmth in my own room. I’d had food and shelter and running water. I’d had someone who didn’t demand anything from me at all. I’d been convinced he was this asexual being, that the hunt and the kill were all that mattered to him. That the only way he interfaced with a human body was by destroying it and chopping it into pieces.
And now, that one safety had been ripped away because Shannon was the worst possible man for me to want or fall for. He might be a much more sexual being than I initially thought, but whatever kernel of an emotion the cat made him feel or I made him feel... I knew it was continents away from love. It was the barest glowing ember, ready to die at any moment. And what happened when the ember smoldered out? All bets were off, right? Then what would keep him from disposing of me when I became too inconvenient? What kept him from it now?
“I’ve tried to keep you at a distance,” he said, echoing my own thoughts back to me. “You make me feel normal. Like a real person. When I saw you in the castle, I felt this warmth I didn’t know was possible. I felt something like that but with less intensity with the cat. But never before with another person. I have these idiots around me who think they’re my friends who can’t see behind the mask. But it’s all surface shit with them. They don’t notice because they’re just that shallow. I can’t give you what you probably deserve, but for my own self-preservation, I can’t let you go, either. I thought if I thought of you like another pet in the house it would be fine, I could keep you compartmentalized. And now... I can’t anymore.”
This was the most Shannon had talke
d to me in the weeks I’d been living here. Normally it was a perfunctory robot sentence here or there, nothing of much depth or value. I tried to determine if he was being honest or just belatedly turning on some sociopathic charm to chase his own selfish impulses. But that stupid gorilla mask was still between us.
“Please take the mask off.”
He ripped it off and tossed it on the floor, then his hands went back to pressing against the wall, framing either side of me.
“W-what are you going to do with me now?” It must be a special talent of mine to always ask the most wrong questions—things I didn’t really want the answers to.
“Everything.”
From the way he looked at me and the way his gaze shifted to the sex furniture, it was clear what everything meant. Whatever had allowed him to treat me like his roommate or kid sister had vacated the building. In its place was something wild and hungry that might devour us both if given half a chance.
“Why can’t we just go back to how things were? I’m sorry I left my room. I’ll pretend I never saw any of this.”
His hand started in my hair, then trailed down my face and along all my contours. A tremor ran through me, chasing his hand down the length of me as if each cell in my body stood in line, waiting its turn to show appropriate fear of him.
“Elodie, what was it like living in that theme park?”
I didn’t like to think about any of that. It was a testament to how awful it had been that this set-up with Shannon occasionally made me forget I was technically still somebody’s prisoner. On a visceral level, I still thought I’d been saved instead of just captured again.
“Hopeless. Awful. Boring. Dead.”
“Did he light you up?”
“No.” Trevor had been mostly nice enough once I’d figured out which buttons tripped what, but I’d only ever gotten to the point where I could cope with it. I’d thought of fucking him as my wifely duty—some comfort I owed him. A transaction to pay for the food and shelter he provided me. I’d felt too guilty to take away the last shred of his wife from him. And the whole time he’d been taking from me. Everything. But somehow Shannon’s everything and Trevor’s were solar systems apart.
“Do I light you up?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t do this again.” I can’t fuck another monster who holds my life in his hands.
Shannon’s mouth found the pulse point of my throat. He sucked gently on the skin—enough to make me gasp, not enough to mark me.
“What if I made you? Would you cry? Would you fight me?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
He pulled back and stared at me for a full minute before he answered. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel about your pain yet.”
Yet.
He was so bizarrely honest. But that didn’t help anything. It didn’t make Shannon more feasible. Given my limited experiences with men on this side of the wasteland that was my lost memory, it was easy to assume all men were monsters. I’d yet to have an experience to contradict that notion—even though I felt like I knew in the vague way I knew about ATMs and pirates that not every man was this way. Somewhere out there was someone who was kind and considerate and smart. Someone who would let me be a part of a world where I wasn’t the freak show or... that poor girl. Someone who would love me in a way that was safe and in a way I didn’t have to work myself up to wanting.
If only I didn’t want Shannon so much.
“You’re going to play all my games, Elodie. And you’re going to love every minute of it. I’m tired of you being a toy I can’t play with. I’m ready to take you out of the box.”
“What if I’m not ready?” I desperately sought to turn this into another veiled threat like Trevor’s. As if the idea of being in Shannon’s bed could distress me half as much.
His hand dipped between my legs. He smirked as he raised a finger to his mouth and licked off my juices. “Oh, you’re ready.”
I thought he was going to throw me down and fuck me in the basement—now filthy from other people’s trysts—but instead, he scooped me up and carried me up the stairs. On the main level, he set me on my feet.
“Go to my room and wait for me. You have a punishment coming for your earlier disobedience.”
I’m sure my mouth hung open like a fish, as if I couldn’t believe he’d really just said that to me. Despite everything I knew of Shannon, despite the orgy I’d witnessed and almost been recruited into, somehow this one utterance almost unhinged me.
I wanted to run for the door, despite my lack of clothing. But not only was the security system armed, I knew now from observing him, that it wasn’t a one-way system. The door wouldn’t open for anyone going in or out without the code. And I didn’t know it.
But I didn’t try to run. I went upstairs just like I’d gone upstairs earlier. I passed my room and went to his at the end of the hall. His room was another forbidden room. He’d never stated it outright. It wasn’t always locked, but I felt like lightning would come out of the ceiling and strike me down if I were to go snooping around in there.
His room was the same exercise in restrained minimalism as the rest of the house. Utilitarian was the best word I had for it. There was an attached master bathroom and a balcony—which were the only big differences from my room. And then there was the normal bedroom furniture one would expect. Nothing freaky or kinky or serial-killer like. No hooks hanging from the ceiling. No blood splattered on walls.
His bed was a standard king-sized four-poster. The frame and posts were a sleek, shiny steel. Given what I’d seen in the basement, I imagined that could be of some use to Shannon’s proclivities, but someone who didn’t know anything about them wouldn’t think it odd. It fit into the clean, simple lines of the room.
He didn’t have a bunch of knickknacks lying around, or framed art on the walls. It was just a crisp bare emptiness. Utterly peaceful. Much like my own room. But I’d expected that much from the guest room. I wasn’t sure I’d expected it fully from Shannon’s.
The balcony door was oddly unarmed at the moment. So I went outside. It was the first bit of fresh air I’d gotten in weeks. From here I could yell and possibly have some hope of someone hearing me. I could see other houses. They were a bit of a distance off, but technically in the same neighborhood. Within screaming distance. Surely this option for escape hadn’t been available to me all this time. Had it?
As fucked up as it was, I think I’d wanted to stay cocooned in Shannon’s house. As long as I felt safe, I didn’t want to escape. And up until this point, despite logic, I’d felt safe. Whatever he did out in the larger world, I just thought I was in a separate category somehow. He didn’t skin and cut up his cat, so I thought he might not do it to me, either.
I’d always thought I’d want to go outside eventually and interact with the three-dimensional world of people, places, and things, but I’d been content to remain shielded for a while, secretly hoping my memory would return first, so when I did venture out, I didn’t feel like an alien from another planet.
“Thinking of jumping?” Shannon whispered in my ear. He’d been like a ghost, silent as mist wafting through walls.
“N-no.”
He threaded his fingers through mine and guided me back inside. There was a coil of rope and a paddle on the bed.
“First I’m going to paddle you for coming downstairs and interrupting my party. Then I’m going to tie you up and fuck you.”
I wanted to protest, maybe negotiate my way down to a light spanking and missionary sex with the lights off. Give me the illusion of love and caring. But the way his face lit up when he spoke and thought about doing these things to me... I’d never seen him look more like a real human being before.
There was no coldness in his expression now. It was all warmth like the sun. It was the closest we’d gotten to that first night when he’d felt pity for me. At the time that emotion from him had been awful. In hindsight, knowing more about him, I realized what a
rare gift it was—to make him feel something like that. To make him feel anything.
He was still aroused, and I couldn’t help the way my eyes continued to stray over him. But when I finally was able to tear my gaze away from his erection, I saw that he was equally captivated by me. His gaze roved over me, soaking in each detail he’d denied himself all these weeks starting when he’d turned his back on me in the castle so I could dress.
“If you wanted me, why didn’t you take me at the castle?” I asked.
“I did take you.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean. Why didn’t you just fuck me there? Why did you turn around to give me privacy to put clothes on? You could have done whatever you wanted then.”
“I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“Oh.”
“And if I’d fucked you then, you wouldn’t have wanted it. You would have been too scared and upset. You were still processing the death of the man you thought was your husband. You would have screamed and fought me. No way would I have been able to get you to come with me peacefully out of the park. I would have had to kill you.”
It was good to know Shannon wasn’t impulsive. But then, I’d already known that. Absent necessity, he didn’t do anything without a plan and probably a thick dossier on whoever the plan involved.
Shannon stepped over to his closet and pulled out a pair of freshly pressed jeans. Yes, he ironed his jeans. I feel like that should be in a list of psychopath traits somewhere: doesn’t name his cat, irons his jeans. He pulled the jeans on and zipped them.
I raised a brow. He fucked with his clothes on?
“I like the power imbalance: you nude and helpless, me at least partly dressed. I could go outside right now without calling any odd attention and without putting another stitch of clothing on.” His gaze moved over me again. “You, not so much.”
He sat at the foot of the bed and dragged the paddle up next to his thigh. “Elodie?”