She could wait for Dawn but she didn’t even know if Dawn knew where the apartment was. Erica was pretty sure she knew what building it was but few people other than Walt had the wherewithal to just walk into a place and start randomly trying doors. And how long would it take Dawn to come looking for her? Wasn’t it more likely to think that, after a few days of Erica not coming around, Dawn would just convince herself she’d lost interest and gone elsewhere?
While she still had energy, Erica did the only thing she could think of to do. She stood up and felt along the wall until she found the door. She began beating on the door with everything she had and screaming as loudly as she could. She knew she would pay for it. This time her payment wouldn’t be collected by Walt but by herself. It would be a massive loss of strength with nothing to replenish it. She pounded and screamed until her fist and throat felt like shredded meat. The wild torrent of emotion pouring from her felt somehow liberating. She had typically seen emotions as either weakness or a tool that could be used to manipulate other people. She continued pounding long after her hands surpassed pain and went numb. She continued screaming long after her voice went hoarse and then went completely. She continued until she couldn’t continue anymore. She didn’t rest until her shaky muscles no longer supported her. She let herself collapse on the floor, the stink of the room replaced by a fresher stink, something coming from inside her – fear, desperation, and all the fluids that had escaped her over the last several minutes all released to the rancid atmosphere of this room and decaying at its touch.
Separation Anxiety
When conscious, she huddled at the bottom of the door. Sometimes she was awake when Walt slid the slot open and she would try and take in what the light illuminated before deciding she didn’t want to see it. The two girls across the room from her were her future, she realized. Gray, bony, and shuddering, hardly anything left in their eyes. There were two reasons for staying against the door. The first was that, in case Walt opened it, she wanted to be ready to bolt. She didn’t even know if she had the strength to do this or not. The second was that she didn’t want Walt to be able to see her in the flesh, which might lead to him opening the door. She knew he had a night vision camera set up in two opposite corners of the room. She thought she remembered him pointing these out to her but it was entirely possible she had only imagined that. Regardless, seeing something on camera was not the same as seeing it in person. That explained the popularity of strip clubs, she thought. Why else would people pay to have something they couldn’t touch that tantalizingly close to them? Because it was real. It was actual flesh. Something about mass and the way the body occupies a certain space and being able to gauge that space in person. Otherwise, one could just stay home and watch way more attractive people completely naked and actually fucking on a screen.
She kept her nose pressed to the door but the absence of sound only made her more afraid. It meant Walt was either spending less and less time at the apartment or he spent most of his time plotting or, quite possibly, just sitting on the floor in the living room watching the monitor display what went on in this room. Which was nothing. Which was three girls suffering with no way to fight. If she knew how or maybe if she had the strength she wished she knew of a way to suffer loudly. That would ruin it for him. She imagined him in there, naked, drinking a beer, knowing that the quiet lack of movement in this room was suffering manifest. If there were movement and screaming, he would see that as strength, he would see that as meaning there was still fight left and the more fight there was, the less suffering there was.
When everything was black, it was hard to discern waking dreams from sleeping dreams. It was like the mind hated blackness. Like it wanted to see it as a canvas to paint things on. At one point, she was sure her eyes were open but she was back in that cave and searching for the glowing hollow people, not finding them, only stepping on shards of their shattered skin and she kept thinking these were the people who had brought light to a very dark place and they had been smashed. Every last one of them.
She was pretty sure one of them had made her drink a heart one night. It was something she hadn’t thought about a lot and now she found herself doubting it had really happened. Everything could be analyzed, she thought, although she didn’t usually like to subject herself to that kind of thing. It probably had something to do with Dawn. Like maybe Erica was afraid she didn’t have enough emotions, enough heart, for Dawn and conjured this magical glowing man to bring it to her. But the man had been around before Dawn had reentered the picture. Maybe the figure had been the nebulous something she wanted. A blank waiting to be filled.
She had a lot of thoughts like this but it wasn’t long before they fragmented and vanished completely and she would try to go back and seize upon so much as a shred of it but there weren’t any to be found.
At one point she was sure she heard Walt vomiting, possibly in the bathroom across the hall or possibly just on the floor of the hallway. She imagined smelling it. She imagined what was causing it. She remembered thinking he was sick when they had first met and how it seemed like so long ago. She imagined reaching an arm down his throat, finding whatever virus or cancer lingered in his stomach and stroking it, petting it, telling it, “Good job. Good job.” Only, if Walt died, how would she ever get out of here?
More blackness.
Slanted beam of light thrown across the room and falling on the girls now huddled against the far wall like the world’s most sadistic flashlight.
Blackness.
Vomiting. Distant sound of sirens from outside.
A steady low-pitched hooting coming from the far side of the room. A low placatory whisper. Erica tried to close her ears to this but it kept going and going. It didn’t stop. Low and steady it worked its way into her brain and insinuated itself into all of her nerve endings. A period of time would pass and she would convince herself it had to stop but it kept going and she would tell herself any second, any second, and then she realized what she heard was the sound of one of the girls dying so, surprising even herself, she stood up and crossed the room. She pulled the hooting girl away from the wall, straddled her hips, wrapped her hands around her neck, and choked the remaining life from her. Then she did the same thing to the other girl. She went to stand in front of the door but didn’t last very long before she got tired and slid down until her ass rested on the floor and she looked in the direction of the two girls she had killed. No, she hadn’t killed them. They were already dead. What she did was preventative maintenance. She didn’t know how long it was before she saw two gray things – one for each girl – crawl out of their skin and disappear through the far wall and drift into oblivion. She thought it was strange. She had been thinking of their skin as fragile and glass-like but maybe it was more like chitin and needed to harden.
“What do you want to do?” Walt had asked her.
“I want to be able to walk through walls,” she should have said.
“When nobody’s paying any attention, you can do whatever the hell you want,” Walt had said.
But what can you do when there are two cameras trained on you?
Feeling around in the darkness, she found one of the girls and tore at her neck until the blood began to flow. She collected palmfuls of the stuff and flung it at first one camera and then the other. She would give it a while to dry and crust over the lens and then she’d do it again. For as long as the blood in the girls remained liquid.
What did she want?
Not this. Anything but this.
Too Much Alike
She stood at the door and waited without knowing what it was she waited for. Well, she knew what it was she waited for – a chance to get out – she just wasn’t so sure it was going to happen. Eventually she collapsed into a heap in front of the door and woke up with a great thirst. The feeling of gnawing hunger had long since passed and she wasn’t going to submit to the desire to eat from the girls she had killed. Besides, it wasn’t so much a desire to eat human flesh as
it was to stay alive. She wondered if that would change the way she felt about Walt at all. If he needed human flesh to stay alive, like if he was a vampire or something. She doubted it. Didn’t even think that was the reason she felt about him the way she did. Didn’t even really know how she felt about him. After all, it wasn’t like he had surprised her. Maybe at first. But he had given her the option of running if it freaked her out. She was attracted to him. That was what it amounted to. She was attracted to him and she was lonely. Early on in their relationship he probably could have done anything and she would have found some way to justify it, some excuse for his flaws. Which, ultimately, only let her know she was as fucked up as he was, if not in the same exact way.
She thought about screaming again but, no, she would no longer give him that satisfaction. Besides, she was all screamed out. Part of her wanted Dawn to show up and another part of her wanted Dawn to stay as far away as possible. If Dawn showed up then Walt would hurt her.
Or he would take an interest in her.
And that might be even worse.
Walt would never open the door if he knew she was in here waiting for him. Unless it was to open the door for the last time. At least that would put an end to it. If she were given the choice of dying right now or facing all the potential things awaiting her, she would have probably chosen death.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She knew she could root around in one of the corpses on the floor and find a bone fragment or something to open up one of her veins. And she knew she wouldn’t do that.
No. Walt wouldn’t open the door. But he probably looked in. With the cameras blinded, having her in this room without watching her was completely useless for him. He wanted to see the suffering. He needed the spectacle. Just like with eating all the people he had eaten. It wasn’t really about the flavor or eating until he was gorged. It was about knowing he was consuming a life. It was about consuming a person who potentially had everything Walt didn’t have – emotions, feelings, family, friends, hopes, desires – everything that makes a human being human.
She continued to wait for him. The first time he slid the view slot open, she stood too close to the door and by the time she had taken a few steps back to try and make eye contact with him, he’d slammed it closed.
She didn’t want to be standing in the middle of the room when he saw her anyway. She wanted to be right in front of him, close enough to touch him. Close enough for him to smell her.
With what little strength she had, she dragged the corpses over to the door. She tried to remember if the door opened in or out and couldn’t. She thought that doors were supposed to open out but then she didn’t know if that would have been for the person standing in the hallway or the person standing in the room. It seemed like if it opened into the hallway it would block everything. If he was ever going to open the door, she definitely didn’t want anything blocking it. But she needed the corpses for leverage. She kept thinking about this, which way the door opened, to the point her mind was nearly as exhausted as her body.
She stood on the corpses to make sure they would support her. While there certainly wasn’t any life left in them, they felt almost warm compared to the floor. Or maybe it was just the difference between soft and hard.
When the view slot opened again, she was pretty sure she had fallen asleep standing up with her head resting against the door.
Her eyes sprang open and she hissed, “I’m coming for you.”
Walt stared into some dying place within her. Once she had looked into his eyes and thought about a wild electrical storm. Now she thought about concentration camps, of flesh-covered skeleton people huddled in the corners of bare stinking rooms.
He smiled and made a sound like, “Hup hup,” before slamming the view slot closed.
Just Like Old Times
She thought something would happen. She stood on the corpses until it felt like her legs wouldn’t support her anymore. She sat down with her back against the wall, the floor cold on her ass. She closed her eyes, death, surprisingly, not the first thing on her mind. With no clocks and no real sense of light, time was more liquid than concrete. The truth, she knew, was that time didn’t exist. The only thing that existed was the rising and the setting of the sun and humans had found a way to capture it to the millisecond. Her sense of hearing seemed to be more acute. She hadn’t really heard many sounds coming from the apartment because there were so many of them going on outside – traffic, sirens, people, airplanes, the apocalyptic hum of a city’s infrastructure. Now she heard voices from behind her cell door. Walt’s and someone else’s. Everything Walt said had the quality of a megaphone, said as much to be heard by everyone around him as much as by the person he was actually talking to. Erica imagined it was her replacement. She wondered what it had taken to get her here. She wondered what Walt had said to her to make her think he was the slightest bit normal. But not all girls are into normal, she reminded herself. It was her own aversion to complete normalcy that had kept her from her shit town’s pattern of getting married at nineteen and pregnant before twenty-one. And that was conservative. That was ‘holding out.’ Okay, so she wondered what kind of excitement Walt had offered this poor girl. She wondered if he had gone back to the girl’s apartment. From what Erica had seen of her she may not have even been old enough to have an apartment. Maybe she’d taken Walt back to meet her parents. Maybe they had killed her parents and eaten them. Maybe the girl was into that. Maybe Walt wasn’t even into that anymore. She thought she should scream. She thought she should yell and try to disrupt, anything. Surely any female in her right mind would run screaming if she knew the potential boyfriend kept girls locked in rooms with the corpses of other girls. She didn’t scream. Didn’t know why. Didn’t know if it was because she didn’t have the energy to scream or if it was because she felt like if this girl was stupid enough to be seduced by Walt then she deserved to suffer at least a little. Maybe it was just jealousy. Maybe it was fear. Fear that the girl was into the exact same thing Walt was into. On Erica’s first night with Walt, he had taken her to see the boys and she still stuck around. Part of her felt like she should die for being so stupid. To stay alive meant doing something about that stupidity. It meant making up for . . . something.
There was a sound to her left. Someone had tried to shove a paper under the door but it had hit the corpses and just kind of wadded there. Erica fished the paper out from between the congealed blood and the door.
It was a simple black and white sheet of paper. A flyer for a missing girl. Rosalia Atkins. Missing since May 22. So many of the girls Walt had taken looked similar but she was pretty sure this had been the first. The waitress at the diner. Erica stood up and walked it to the far side of the room, adhering it to the wall with the sticky blood.
She went to the corpses and dragged them back from the door, hoping something else would find its way in.
When she returned to her spot beside the door and closed her eyes, she continued to hear the voices. Walt, definitely, and one, possibly even two, female voices. A dream scenario worked itself out in her head. If one girl was the replacement then the other girl was Dawn, come to rescue her.
But there was no rescue.
Time, liquid before, became measured in paper.
Another flyer. Kayleigh Cooper. Missing since June 1st. It went up on the wall.
She had to receive more than a flyer a day. Otherwise, she knew, without food or water, she would be long dead. Which meant whoever was leaving them had to be there a lot. But if it was Dawn, why wasn’t she saying anything.
Jennifer Beaumont. Missing since June 3rd.
Alison Bowsman. Missing since June 5th.
Laura Pauley. Missing since June 6th.
Amy O’Keefe. Missing since June 6th.
Saturnine Rebania. Missing since June 7th.
Sadie Sands. Missing since June 8th.
Jennifer Nicely. Missing since June 8th.
Indiana Virginia. Missing since June 9th.
Reagan Bentley. Missing since June 9th.
Jordan Musgrave. Missing since June 10th.
Mercedes Tolson. Missing since June 11th.
Violet Ney. Missing since June 11th.
Phoebe Ross. Missing since June 12th.
Bridget Smith. Missing since June 13th.
Appalonia Ferrara. Missing since June 13th.
Eventually she received two or three flyers at a time and she put them all up on the wall. She wanted to respect them, remember the names, think over their images, but they soon all ran together and formed a monstrous collage, mocking her. And when nearly the entire room was plastered with these flyers – all different, but just slightly – she felt the weight of it pressing down on her and collapsed in the middle of the room. This many women had fallen to Walt. This many women had been tricked or blindsided in one way or another. Who was she to think she could escape? Who was she to think she even deserved to escape?
Suddenly the apartment exploded with voices. Over them all was Walt’s, happy and laughing. She hadn’t heard him sound like that since the night with the Boys and when she heard him outside her door saying, “Just like old times,” whatever was left inside of her died.
Or so she thought.
The End of It
The door opened and she imagined throwing herself on Walt, clawing out his eyes, and darting for the front door, naked or not. Who would notice anyway? Who would care? She recently spent the greater part of one day hanging naked off the balcony. No one showed up to rescue her. Besides, she barely had the strength to stand up. As soon as she did that and turned to face the doorway, the harsh fluorescent lighting from the hallway scalded her eyes. Instead of gouging her way through Walt she ended up falling into his arms. He placed her on the floor and she found herself thinking about the door. It didn’t open inward or outward. It slid into the wall.
Sociopaths In Love Page 19