Mercy m-1

by Rebecca Lim

  There’s breathing in here, not mine. The sound of a clock ticking.

  ‘You okay?’ someone whispers. It’s a girl.

  For a minute, I wonder if I’ve fallen out of Carmen’s life into a new one. Where am I? What am I doing here?

  I try to sit up, and discover the weight around my neck is some kind of iron collar. I follow the chain with my hands to find it padlocked to a metal cleat in the wall behind me. There isn’t much room to move once I sit up. And I’ve caught sight of that faint, telltale luminosity coming off my skin, so I stay facing the wall. I don’t want to freak out whoever’s in here with me. They’ve probably got enough to deal with already.

  In my head, I am able to run, in order, through the full Latin verse that Mahler set to music over one hundred years ago, and backwards through every single thing that I have done since the bus from St Joseph’s first drew up in the car park of Paradise High, and I know that Carmen Zappacosta and I are not yet done. All the details are still there. Clear and sharp and immediately accessible.

  So where am I?

  Ryan! I think suddenly, my breathing quickening. I was supposed to meet him. What will he be thinking?

  It’s like I fell into a rabbit hole between the school and his place.

  I feel for my general shape in the dark and I recognise the same denim jacket I put on this morning over the same hooded sweatshirt, Carmen’s improbably narrow, little-boy jeans. The same dirty, canvas sneakers.

  Carmen’s bag is gone, along with her sparkly wallet, her mobile phone and her music, but I’ve already committed that to memory anyway and earthly possessions seem the least of my troubles. I glance quickly through the hair hanging down over my right shoulder. It, too, seems the same. Curly. Long. Dense. Almost too heavy for my head.

  Through my screen of wild curls I make out two shapes in the darkness on different sides of the room, both with long, straight hair, one big, one tiny, like a bird girl.

  The taller one is visibly trembling, as if she is dangerously close to hypothermia. The small one is so still she might be made of stone. Though it should be too dark for me to make out their features, I can see them as clearly as if the sun is shining overhead and I know who they are. And I can make out the dimensions of the room, too, which is bare save for a staircase in the far corner. Like the staircase in Ryan’s dream.

  Like their faces, I’ve seen this room before.

  ‘You get used to it,’ says the bird girl quietly. Her voice is dry, like fallen leaves. It sounds almost rusty, like she hasn’t used it much lately. Except maybe to scream.

  I try to reconcile the outline of the smaller girl with the photos from her dresser. She looks beaten, emaciated, unlovely. Her ash blonde hair seems white to my eyes, even in this light.

  ‘Lauren?’ I ask, though I don’t need to, nausea in my words. The smell in here is so strong, it’s crowding my thoughts, the very oxygen out of the room.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ she replies. Her voice is thin and uninterested.

  ‘Ignore her,’ pleads the taller figure, Jennifer. ‘She doesn’t seem to care if we ever get out! Does anyone else know we’re here? Please say yes.’ She is speaking barely above a low whisper, but she might as well be screaming, fear crowds the spaces between her words.

  ‘Her brother does,’ I say, hoping my voice sounds reassuring. ‘We were supposed to come back here tonight, to try and get you both out. But something happened on my way back from Paradise High before I could meet up with him. Any idea what that was?’ A chemical taste rises in my mouth and I have to stop to vomit over the side of the bed. So much for never getting sick. I face the wall again, gasping, waiting for the unfamiliar nausea to subside.

  Ryan, I think miserably. I found them. Now what do I do?

  Like an unconscious echo, Lauren gasps aloud, ‘Ryan?’ and she begins to cry.

  It is like a dam bursting, and a chill flash breaks out across my skin. Lauren sounds inhuman, like a wounded animal, and across the room Jennifer shifts uncomfortably on her metal cot.

  There’s a sudden loud banging on the door above us, at the top of the stairs, and Lauren’s crying cuts off abruptly like she’s been choked.

  ‘Don’t make me come down and hurt you, Lauren!’ a man’s voice bellows. So distorted with anger I can’t tell whether I’ve heard it before. Lauren gives a tiny whimper and lies down. Her cot shifts and creaks.

  Jennifer and I are silent for a while and then we start talking again, as if the other girl isn’t lying there, facedown and rigid, listening to every word we say with every cell in her body.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ I ask Jennifer fiercely. I dart a quick glance in her direction. She’s still shaking like a leaf in the dark.

  ‘Apart from ripping some hair out of my scalp because I wouldn’t do what he wanted, and sticking a needle in my neck, no,’ she whispers. ‘I’m still in one piece. But I’m so scared.’

  ‘He hasn’t had the time to do anything yet,’ I say.

  ‘He’s been greedy with the two of us. Snatching us so close together.’

  ‘So far, all he wants me to do is sing,’ the girl continues, puzzlement in her voice. ‘But I think he’s a little … disappointed.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I reassure her. And it is. I’m relieved.

  He’s had her for almost a week and all he’s done is ask her to perform a few tunes? ‘That’s great. You’re okay.

  Hold onto that.’

  ‘There’s a room just up the stairs,’ Jennifer adds, her voice growing a little stronger. ‘With a piano in it. A baby grand. Candle holders. A gold music stand. Armchairs.

  Like a recital room. He keeps it real tidy. That’s where he takes me when I’m not here. Sometimes he takes her instead.’ I look over quickly. Jennifer inclines her head in Lauren’s direction in the dark, forgetting I shouldn’t be able to see, though of course I can.

  I hear the other girl draw a sharp breath. Force myself to leave her alone a while longer, though I have so many questions. She’s not ready to talk. She may never be ready.

  ‘He just looks at you?’ I repeat in Jennifer’s direction.

  ‘When he makes you sing?’

  ‘He says that he was always obsessed with me, but I’ve changed. I’m not the girl he remembers. I’ve defiled his memories of me, even though my voice is better, stronger, than it ever was. Things can change a lot in two years.’ There’s a shudder in Jennifer’s rich, expressive voice. Her words tumble out so quickly I can barely make sense of them. ‘He said I left town before he could act on it, that he shouldn’t have hesitated before, but he’s been waiting for me to come back ever since.

  And the minute I did … I shouldn’t have opened the door. I just wasn’t expecting to see him there, so late.

  ‘Plus, I’d had a crush on him forever — it all came rushing back, and that didn’t help. I wasn’t to know he was some kind of … pervert. I wasn’t thinking. I was kind of … flattered he remembered me.’ She sounds disgusted with herself.

  I wrinkle my forehead in the dark. A crush?

  Flattered? Out of the corner of my eye I see Lauren sit up suddenly, pushing her long hair back from her face with shaking hands.

  ‘I only came back because my aunt insisted I sing at Julia’s wedding,’ Jennifer says. ‘So who else knows we’re here?’ The hope in her voice is painful to hear.

  ‘Just me and Ryan,’ I say, my back to them both, still facing the wall. ‘But he should be on his way right now.’ I sound more confident than I feel. ‘He knows where we are. We’d planned to get you out of the basement tonight, anyway. He’ll just have to get started on his own. We just have to wait a while, and we’ll be free.

  Simple as that.’

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ Jennifer murmurs, relief flooding her voice, though she cannot stop shaking. ‘So fantastic.

  I keep thinking I’ve stumbled into someone’s idea of a sick joke. Though he did say something strange before I passed out. Said it was a shame I’d gotten
so big and so

  … fat.’ There’s indignation in her tone.

  That makes me frown. Something familiar in it.

  ‘Said he liked me much better when I was smaller,’ Jennifer says incredulously. ‘Like her, I suppose.’ In the dark, I see her wave vaguely in Lauren’s direction.

  I hear Lauren inhale sharply, and I reach the same terrible conclusion a heartbeat after she does.

  ‘You mean,’ Lauren says in a trembling tone, ‘all this time I’ve been here because of … of you? Like some substitute for you? He couldn’t have you, so he took me?’ Her voice flies up the scale, breaks sharply on the last word.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I say, but she’s right. The timing is too awful, the coincidence too awful. Just over two years ago, both girls were bird-bright, tiny, centre-stage together for one mesmerising performance. Two rare sopranos brimming with talent. Then one flew the nest and the other was swiftly … caged.

  Lauren begins to wail. ‘Do you KNOW what he’s DONE to me?’ She’s suddenly uncaring of whether the monster above us can hear as she mercilessly catalogues the sins that have been perpetrated against her since she was taken. As she speaks, her voice drops lower and lower, grows mechanical.

  In between the retelling of inexorable hours that felt like months, months that felt like lifetimes stitched together end to end, every sordid, unclean thing, I can hear Jennifer’s harsh sobs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she cries, over and over, hands covering her face. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘He says it’s to keep me safe,’ Lauren murmurs.

  ‘That he’s the only person who can truly appreciate my… talent.’ Though I am moved almost beyond bearing, I remain dry-eyed, my forehead resting against the wall.

  It is a peculiar thing, though I cannot cry tears the body I’m in may choose to follow a different directive. I am grateful for the darkness for I need not feign them.

  ‘Last year,’ Lauren whispers, ‘when I refused to sing once, he hit me so hard that I nearly died. And, you know,’ she says, her voice suddenly fierce, ‘I was almost glad. I’ve been in hell,’ she says simply. ‘Am in hell. And now you are, too.’ Jennifer weeps noisily, and I am reminded of Lauren’s mother, completely undone by grief. I imagine Lauren, doubled over alone in this room, and something rises up in me like a red fog. For a minute I cannot see, and my head is filled with a terrible roaring, like the sound a city makes when it is being razed, stone by stone, to the ground. There is a firestorm in me, greater than me.

  I almost cannot contain it.

  I don’t hear Jennifer’s question. She repeats it sharply.

  ‘Where are we? Where has he taken us?’

  ‘You’re not that far from home, Jennifer,’ I reply distantly, blood still in my eyes, roaring in my ears.

  A great tempest inside. ‘You’re at his place, Laurence Barry’s place. We’re going to get you out.’

  ‘But I don’t understand.’ There is confusion in Jennifer’s voice. ‘Laurence Barry? Are they in this together?’

  ‘Who?’ I say, confusion in mine now. ‘Who’s in this together?’ Then Lauren begins to laugh, and the sound is so strange that I feel that cold flash race across the surface of Carmen’s skin again. ‘We’re going to die here,’ she crows, rocking backwards and forwards on her makeshift bed. ‘We’ll die here, and no one will find us until we’re bones.’ Her crazy laughter grows into a wordless keening, until the banging from above starts again. The shrieking ceases instantly, Lauren making herself as small as possible on her metal cot. Somehow, the sudden silence is almost worse.

  When Lauren’s voice finally issues out of the darkness again, it’s muffled and flat and weirdly controlled.

  ‘Ryan’s not coming, no one’s coming,’ she says.

  ‘Because this isn’t Laurence Barry’s place.’ I freeze, unable to believe we were wrong.

  ‘It’s Paul Stenborg’s. Stenborg. Get it? Stone fortress.

  We’re never going to get out.’

  Chapter 23

  Right dream, wrong place.

  I react so strongly to her words that I forget and turn away from the wall. Paul’s place? How is that possible?

  Both girls rear back from me so powerfully that I curse aloud. It’s too late to hide.

  Now they can see me as clearly as I have seen them all along. For a moment, I recall the shining man, my dream brother. How his light pierced the darkness as if he were a little sun. Do I seem like that to them, trapped all these days in darkness?

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say wildly. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Jennifer chokes out.

  ‘ What are you?’ breathes Lauren.

  It’s a good question, the very question I’d like an answer to myself, only, it’s as if the word, the name, for what I truly am has been cut from my mind. Always, when I reach for it, when it should be obvious, it’s not there.

  I’m desperate to set their minds at ease as much as the situation allows, but there’s that little problem of trust that I seem to have and I’m silent for a long time; weighing up the pros and cons, I think you call it. Only in a situation like this one, there are no cons. There’s nothing left to lose. I could die in this stupidly frail, borrowed body and never know the answer, never make any meaningful human contact and that’s not what I want. What I want is to talk to someone so badly, tell someone about me — the real me and not the face I’m presenting to the world — that my misgivings suddenly disappear and I wonder why I held onto them for so long.

  So I tell them almost everything of myself that I have managed to piece together in this lifetime, and of the multitude of disjointed lifetimes that I only dimly recall living. I speak so fast, my words falling over each other in the rush to get out, that I’m sure I’m making no sense at all —

  ‘And I can see things,’ I hear myself say, ‘about people. Some people I don’t even need to touch to know what’s eating away at their … souls. I just know —’ I’m just grateful for the chance to tell my story because then it might now stay, and I might now remember.

  For a while, they cleave to the sound of my voice and forget the unspeakable place we have found ourselves in, and they shower me with questions.

  ‘So is she in there, then? Carmen?’ Lauren asks in awe.

  ‘And can she hear you, Mercy?’ says Jennifer, her voice uncertain, a person who has always dealt in concrete realities.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ I say carefully. ‘And she probably can hear me. But I’m not really sure whether she knows what’s going on. I hope she doesn’t. It’s almost like she’s sleepwalking, I suppose. She’s a soprano, you know, like you are. But tiny, Lauren’s size. With dark hair.’ There is no need for me to say this — they can see her now — but what is inside me feels so removed from what is outside that I must make the divergence clear.

  ‘We’re his type,’ says Lauren in a small voice. ‘I think he’s … collecting us. Treasuring us.’ And I know she’s right. Paul said so himself, was talking about himself by the piano after last night’s rehearsal, only I didn’t know it. Didn’t grasp the underlying darkness in his words.

  ‘Does Ryan know? About the real you, I mean,’ Lauren asks, resting her chin on her drawn-up knees.

  I hesitate for a moment, before saying, ‘No. But he suspects I’m not altogether, uh … normal.’ Both girls laugh quietly.

  ‘Does … Paul?’ asks Jennifer. She swallows jerkily before she can say his name.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I reply. ‘I think I was under a streetlight when he grabbed me. Things probably happened so fast he never even noticed. I’m not sure the fact that I glow in the dark would change anything.’

  ‘Make you more or less … collectible, you mean,’ Lauren whispers.

  ‘So what else can you … do?’ Jennifer says, her voice husky from crying.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say slowly. ‘Sing.’

  ‘We can all sing,’ says Lauren disgustedly. ‘That’s what got us into trouble in th
e first place. I’m never going to do it again, if I get out of here. Never.’

  ‘No one will be able to stop me,’ Jennifer disagrees fiercely.

  ‘Who knows if I’ll still be able to … after all this,’ I say.

  I don’t tell them about being able to see in the dark like a cat, or make random impersonations of complete strangers. I don’t want them to feel self-conscious, and I don’t quite believe the last part myself. It might have been some kind of fluke, a shared auditory hallucination, a temporary madness. Without any explanation or context for it, I’m not going to class it as some kind of… gift.

  The three of us are silent for a long time.

  ‘If we ever get out of here,’ Lauren suddenly says, urgently, ‘you have to promise you’ll tell Ryan? He’ll want to know. But he won’t believe me. It’s got to come from you.’ The links of my chain lie cold and heavy against my heart as I draw my knees up under my chin as Lauren had.

  ‘Oh, he’ll believe you,’ I say softly. ‘He’s believed you when everyone else gave up a long time ago. He’s put everything on hold in his life just to find you. He doesn’t think about doing anything else. He heard you, kept hearing you when even your parents …’ I don’t bother finishing my sentence. She’s been hurt enough, no need to spell it out. ‘Anyway, it’s remarkable. He’s remarkable.’

  ‘You like him,’ Lauren says softly after a pause. It’s a statement, not a question.

  ‘ I like him,’ I agree quietly. ‘But Carmen won’t know him from Adam when I’m gone. Which could be anytime now. I have a habit of just … flitting away. It will only confuse things. So if he doesn’t know, don’t tell him.’ Then the door above the staircase is thrown wide and I am rendered momentarily blind by the brilliant light from the overhead fluorescents being turned on, like the heavens are opening.

  ‘Ladies,’ Paul Stenborg says conversationally, shutting and locking the door behind him, pocketing the key.

  I have always hated that appellation, feel an unreasonable rage when it is directed at me personally.