Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “Ouch!”

  The back of her left hand had clipped Kit’s cheekbone. Kit was holding a squat, cut-glass tumbler nearly full to the brim to her lips, and was regarding her with her habitual hauteur. She looked magnificent, like an eroticized angel, with her hair loose and rippling over the filigree lace straps of a nightgown of cotton so fine it was transparent.

  “What are you doing, Kit?” She was trying hard to temper her outrage. This was tantamount to rape. As she struggled to control her trembling hands, interlocked in front of her like a breastplate, she realized she was more than a little afraid. What if Kit overwhelmed her physically and forced her to drink? What if she was already corrupted by those drops spilled on her lips? I did not swallow it. She saw herself standing in a court with Paul seated in judgement, his left eyebrow raised. Did that mean he was sceptical? I didn’t, Paul. I didn’t.

  “Oh, Agnes, I just wanted to wake you nicely so that we could have a talk. I thought you might be missing your whisky. I remember how much you enjoyed it.”

  “I don’t drink any more, Kit.”

  “Don’t be silly, Agnes. Drink with me. Be sisterly. Come on.” She proffered the tumbler again and Agnes only just managed to stop herself knocking it from Kit’s hand. As she turned her face away, she saw that Kit had brought Hugh’s entire decanter, which stood emanating a lurid glow beneath the bedside lamp. She set about imagining a dead plague rat festering in its depths. Noli me tangere. Was this thought sacrilegious? Probably, but at this juncture she would grasp at any fragment that would hold her steady.

  “You have to help me.” Kit’s face was pressed so close Agnes could see the silken layer of moisture on her skin. Her pupils were extremely large, their magnetic pull disorienting. “Help me, Agnes. I can’t tell you what I have to unless you drink with me.”

  “I’m an alcoholic, Kit.” There, she had said it.

  “What! Don’t be silly, Agnes. You’re far too young. People our age can’t be alcoholics.”

  “Yes, they can. And I am.” The strained cords in her neck and shoulders eased as Kit at last put the glass down.

  “Okay, I’ll plunge on then. Only hear me through because you won’t want to believe what I’m going to tell you. But I swear it’s true.”

  Kit now sat erect in the bedside chair, hands folded neatly in her lap. Agnes pulled the sheet up to her neck in an empty symbolic effort to insulate herself from whatever unpleasantness, manufactured or otherwise, was about to be revealed. She had no doubt it would touch on Hugh.

  “That disgusting performance this morning with me half-naked and my hair in those horrible little braids and the junk jewellery and the stupid plastic snake — he made me do that, Agnes. There are lots of other things, debased and degrading things, that he makes me do. Things that make me ill. Like sucking him off. And lying down with him naked while he tries . . .”

  Kit stopped and buried her face in her hand.

  A self-protective instinct prevented Agnes from reaching out to comfort her. Was she witnessing yet another performance? How on earth could Hugh force her to do these things? In addition to her abrasive emotive power, Kit was by far the physically stronger of the two.

  “You’ve got to believe me, Agnes.” Kit had uncovered her face, on which Agnes saw no evidence of tears. “He threatens to tell my father my mental state is deteriorating, that I need to be hospitalized again. Last time they gave me four electro-convulsion treatments. I can’t go through that again, Agnes. I’d kill myself rather than go through that again. You feel like your soul is being fried. You can hear it screaming.”

  She covered her face again. Her shoulders heaved. Agnes watched appalled, picturing Kit strapped to a metal trolley, her beautiful body juddering as a jagged electric current passed repeatedly through her brain. She had supposed such torturous “therapies” had long been banned. Was it possible this was another of Kit’s lies? Would it be heartless to doubt her in this case? If her claim was true, it was unconscionable that Kit’s parents would subject their daughter to such a barbarous treatment.

  “You have to help me, Agnes.”

  “Tell me how, Kit? What is it you want me to do? Can I help you get away? Can you not simply leave Villa Scimmia?”

  Kit regarded Agnes blankly, as if this idea had never occurred to her. After a moment, she said in a leaden tone: “He’s hidden my passport. He took it from me the first day I arrived. For safekeeping, he said.”

  “Well, we’ll find it. Or we’ll simply ask him for it.”

  “Ask him for it! Agnes, you are so naïve. Haven’t you got it yet that Hugh Massinger-Pollux is an evil man? Can’t you feel and smell his wickedness when he comes anywhere near you? Did you know he belongs to a Neo-Fascist group that wants to put an end to democratic systems everywhere and bring in programs of enforced eugenics and extermination of the mentally disabled?” She hissed this damning revelation, her eyes gleaming slits. “Did you know he makes me kiss . . .?” She stopped, made a show of wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “There’s only one way to deal with him, Agnes, one perfect solution, and that is to kill him. That’s what I want you to help me do.”

  It was as if Agnes had gone snow-blind. Her eyes pained her and she groped, directionless, amidst the white granules that flew thickly about her head. She blinked and saw Kit leaning forward in keen expectation. Her expression was grave, her skin so tautly stretched on the fine bones it looked sore.

  Agnes could taste her own alarm. How did one handle someone who ruptured all reason? She would welcome Kit’s braying jubilance at this point, the display of demonic glee that she had once again played upon her gullibility. What tended to persuade her of Kit’s sincerity now was her sense that everything mild and humane had been drained from the room. She clutched at the fragile proposition that words were not actions, and risked a cautiously phrased reproof.

  “Kit, you realize that what you’re saying is just talk, don’t you? That you could get in very serious trouble if . . .”

  Kit’s eyes blazed, all molten fury. “God, Agnes, you sound like an old woman. Have you ever considered that it might be unhealthy to spend all your time on a weird painter who died hundreds of years ago?”

  There was a condescending contempt in this last remark which Agnes readily deflected. But the mere voicing of the judgement had vitrified Kit’s hauteur. The eyes turned glassy, fastened solely on the live quarry of Agnes’s face and the tender self lodged within. On this front I am unbreachable, Agnes thought, while registering nonetheless the insistent pulse beneath her throat-scar, her body’s now automatic drum of alarm. Was Kit as insane as Guam?

  How could she possibly gauge the weight behind Kit’s wild words? Even though she was sober and Kit apparently already inebriated, she felt like the one undone and floundering. She recalled the man who believed he was a clock, executing his crazed tick-tock measure in the middle of the road, and how she had fled, fearing contagion. Was that possible here? Did Kit’s madness, if it was not feigned, have the power to invade her and make her a collaborator?

  Of course not. Ludicrous. I am a depressive, she told herself firmly. At worst, I sink into a bog of despair and inaction. I am infinitely capable of harming myself, but unlikely to injure others willfully.

  Nevertheless, under the sheets she wrung her hands. She must throw off this galling disadvantage of lying in bed like a child in the clutches of a malign yet mesmerizing storyteller. But as she started to get up, Kit gripped her shoulder hard.

  “Ow!”

  Kit retracted immediately, but Agnes’s physical relief was undercut by the sight of the woman’s mottled cheeks and unfocused eyes.

  “Here’s what you’ll love about it, Agnes, the most wonderful, exhilarating thing that no one can know until they experience it. Can you guess? It’s an art form, Agnes. Murder’s an art form and you feel godlike, filled with a power you can hardly contain as you make your first cuts and lay the heavy bruises and the bright burns on your victim’s skin. Even if
you gag them, the sounds they make — the groans and sobs and cries for mercy — they intensify the pleasure and goad you on to hurt them more and in clever new ways. And when you put that final touch that stops their heart altogether, it’s such a high, such a high . . .”

  “Stop it, Kit!” This must be fantasy; just a sickly chimera her poor brain was spawning. It must be.

  “It’s a high, Agnes. Don’t you understand? The act of murder is better than the very best sex you can imagine.”

  “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Kit.”

  “Grip? What are you talking about?” She looked genuinely affronted. Then her expression turned minatory, the upper lip curling back to expose the long eye teeth. “You’re a coward, aren’t you, Agnes? A boring, conventional little coward. What can we do with you? What, oh what?”

  There was no muscle in Agnes’s body that was not strung tight as a ligature. What weapons did she have, forged of cool reason and compassion, to combat Kit’s aggression and unreason? Only one. It was a risk she must venture.

  “What would Campbell think, Kit, if he heard you talking in this way? It would hurt him badly, wouldn’t it? He would want you to stop saying these foolish things and go to sleep so that tomorrow you will see everything in a clear light.”

  “Oh, my beautiful Campbell. Oh. Oh.” Kit buried her face in her hands. When she took them away, Agnes witnessed the naked anguish, the black cavern of her mouth stopped up with her fist. “Oh, Agnes, if you knew. If you only knew . . .” Kit began to gnaw at her knuckles. It was like watching a terrible ritual mourning where women tore at their own flesh.

  Obedient to impulse, Agnes slipped out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed facing Kit. How pitiable the woman looked, her delicacy carved away by raw distress. Her nightdress smelled of sweat and spilled whisky. “Stop it, Kit, please.”

  Agnes succeeded in gently taking the abraded fist from her mouth. Bravely, she stroked Kit’s temples. She had to reach up to do so because of Kit’s height, the gesture thus striking an uneasy blend of obeisance and solicitude.

  “Try to calm yourself, Kit dear.” The “dear,” which had been Nana’s standard endearment, came to her tongue unbidden.

  Kit seized Agnes’s wrists in a manacle-tight grip and held them fast in her lap. She leant forward so that her forehead touched Agnes’s. Her heavy hair, now in disarray, covered them both. Agnes fought the irrational notion she was smothering and managed to emerge from beneath the shrouding weight. She sat as erect as she could, taking long, deliberate breaths and tugging in gentle resistance to Kit’s grip.

  In response, Kit tightened her hold. “I left something out, Agnes, and that’s the sweetness. It really is true what they say about revenge. Sweet. Sweet.” She seemed to lisp the repeated adjective, made harrowing in this context.

  “Please stop this, Kit. You’re just imagining all these terrible things. Grief does that.” How facile she sounded. She was grasping at what? Not straws, but some bare-boned verity on which to haul herself out of the ever-quickening morass.

  “You can’t tell me anything about grief I don’t know, Agnes. The claws at the heart. The black cell where no light comes. The vengeance helps, you see. It eases the pain a little because you’ve made restitution to the person you lost. You do see, don’t you? That was why I had to kill Fergus and I did it lingeringly, the way he liked to make love, if you can call it that. Fergus liked his sex heavily salted, with blood, I mean. So I gave him plenty of salting at the end. I drew the pain out for him as long as I could, as imaginatively as I could. In winter he liked to couple — another of his nasty words — naked, near the woodstove, where the overwhelming heat brought you close to fainting. So once I had him securely bound, I got the fire roaring, even though it was spring, and I heated up the tongs until they glowed. And then . . .”

  “Please stop this, Kit. You’re . . .”

  “Are you going to say raving? Well, I’m not, Agnes. I’m only telling you what I did, and it was glorious. The pièce de resistance — and oh, how he resisted — was the wire I strangled him with and then sliced right through his windpipe. It was from the same spool of wire he used to kill Campbell.”

  “Kit!” Agnes was inside a thundering void. Her face felt wet, as if with blood spouting from an unspeakable fountain. “It cannot be.” She was uncertain whether she had spoken these words or even if she had a tongue to utter them.

  “Yes, it can, Agnes.” So she had spoken, and with this affirmation, Kit’s face came back into focus, pale, intent and exultant. “He told me he wanted me purely for himself; that I had to give up Campbell. I told him I couldn’t, I wouldn’t ever do that. But I had no idea, Agnes, that Fergus was that crazy. He wouldn’t kill an animal, but he had no compunction about murdering Campbell.”

  “It was an accident, Kit, an awful, inexplicable accident.”

  “No it wasn’t, Agnes.” Her nails dug in. “Fergus was gloating afterwards, strutting up and down. You know, the way he did. He set Campbell up first, telling him what night the animals would be delivered to the lab. He tipped off the pharmaceutical company about the demonstration, told them the Ark members would be violent, that they were bringing homemade incendiary devices. That’s why there were so many security guards. Fergus strung the wire there . . . He calculated exactly how high it should be and how fast Campbell would be going. He wanted a flawless decapitation. That’s what he said, Agnes, a flawless decapitation.” Kit shuddered; then jerked back and clawed at the air.

  This time Agnes succeeded in pulling away altogether. She was beset by the ghastly image of Kit raking her nails down Fergus’s fair, freckled face, about to gouge out his eyes with their tapered points. She was in shock, her hands and feet numb. A lightning bolt had split open the room and in its cruel light she saw her bones beneath the skin. She wondered if this might be a good thing: to leave her human flesh behind because this was where sin resided.

  She did not want any of it to be true, but most especially Campbell’s murder. The idea that he was plotted against and deliberately executed soiled his memory in a way that made her want to run from the house screaming to the heavens. But not to drink. Never that. Must not. She looked at the decanter of whisky and conjured up again the repulsive, bloated plague rat with the festering purple sores on its flanks.

  There was still the very real possibility that all these horrific things Kit had told her were phantasmagoria, chimera generated by trauma or a congenital mental illness. In that case, she would be heartily sorry for this woman’s suffering.

  “I know you cared about him, Agnes. Campbell told me you slept together. That’s why I believe you’ll see why I had to do it.”

  Mere hours ago, having her most intimate, sacred secret exposed so casually would have made every cell in her body ache with loss. Now, in the context of bloodlust, unbridled impulse and a welter of burnt flesh and splintered bone, this divestment seemed a meagre thing.

  “You do see, don’t you, Agnes? What I did to Fergus was perfect justice. And believe me, Hugh deserves the same. You can help me, Agnes, help me to kill him. There are other wicked and unforgivable things he does, right here in this house, not just to me, but . . .”

  “Please, Kit, please. I can’t. You know I can’t. You’re overwrought and not yourself. You must try —”

  “You’re talking like an old woman again, Agnes.” The eye teeth were on full display. “And why do you presume to know what my ‘self’ is. You haven’t a clue about life, have you?” She stopped, seemed to reflect a moment, then smiled slyly. “I know you were a virgin. Campbell told me everything. Absolutely everything, Agnes. I know what you like, how you want your nipples nibbled and his tongue darting in and out of you. You would beg him to ‘spread you wide.’ So cute.”

  Was the furnace scalding Agnes’s skin mortification or some emotion impossible to name, with a cankerous betrayal as its root? Can the dead betray us? Apparently.

  “Go away, Kit.”

 
“I could give you the same pleasure, you know. I am very good, very good in bed.”

  Agnes did not doubt it. While Kit’s unseemly offer appalled her, it stirred a humid, churning desire. She despised herself for this low instinctual craving, born of her cells and nerves. She was so much more than this yearning of the flesh. If that were not so, she would be drunk now, the contents of the decanter demolished, along with her dignity, will power and lucid reason. Her tongue would be lolling in her head and her chin flecked with spittle. She might be ready to follow Kit, God knows where. But not there. Surely never to collusion in a murder.

  Even as she erected this mental bulwark, Kit slipped her hand inside her nightgown. Against the firm cupping of Kit’s palm, her nipple stiffened. Kit reacted immediately, pulling and pinching so dexterously that Agnes was overwhelmed, her vagina already wet and pulsing.

  Quickly. “I can’t do this, Kit.” She grasped the hand that threatened to undo her and pushed it away.

  Kit’s fleeting look of surprise was succeeded by an arrogant scrutiny.

  “No one resists me for long, little Agnes.”

  If Kit intended the diminutive to be withering, it left Agnes unscathed. She felt only relief at the restitution of a small island of calm as Kit swept from the room, her hair swinging in a heavy arc, first left, then right, then settling along her spine.

  She sat hunched on the edge her bed, listening to the slithering of Kit’s bare feet as she ran down the stone steps of the servants’ staircase. Once she heard the door to the kitchen open and then shut again, she leapt to her feet, closed her own door and wedged the back of the chair under the doorknob. This was sheer symbolic protection, but for the moment she needed to muster whatever defences she could. Her hands were shaking and there was a muted nervous trill in her throat that threatened to become a full-fledged ululation. Veiled women in faraway lands made such sounds, at times of crisis and of death, an ascending looping whoop that married lamentation and alarm.