The Slaughter Man

by Cassandra Parkin

  She and Laurel had always liked their twinship. It felt like a lazy kind of superpower, a way of being special and admired without even trying. As babies, they’d slept best when crammed in the same cot, so their parents had switched them between rooms, to ensure both places were equally familiar. When they graduated to toddler beds, they’d begin the night separated, but more often than not, they’d end up crammed in together, one of them creeping out to join the other. It was only as they grew older that they appreciated the effort their parents had made to shield them from the endless, endless comparisons, to give them the space to be the way they wanted to be. Are you going to dress them alike or differently? What if they have the same favourite colour? Which is the princessy one? Which is the tomboy? Who’s bossiest? Which one is in charge?

  “And do you remember,” her mother continues, “you used to get hold of my hair and twiddle it? You both did it, and I couldn’t stop you because I was holding the book. The first thing I had to do when I’d finished reading was brush all the tangles out. In the end I cut my hair short so you’d both stop. Then you started on your own instead…”

  They’d both begged her not to cut her hair. They loved the long rich fall of brown, loved the secret female mystery of the way she twined it up into a bun at the back of her skull. Until she came home with a shorn head and a satisfied look, they’d refused to believe she’d go through with it. It was one of the reasons they’d insisted on growing their own hair long and flowing. Even as teenagers, they’d still occasionally wondered why their mother had chosen to cut her hair. Now she has the answer, but Laurel does not. Another station on the journey that takes her away from her sister.

  But you can stop it, Laurel whispers. You can come back to me. Willow can feel her, right there in the chair, conjured by the voice of her mother.

  “And we’d have to leave you all tangled up,” her mother continues, “because you both hated having your hair brushed and you were all sleepy. You used to end up with these little clots of hair, like dreadlocks. Yours were on the left side, and Laurel’s were on the right. That’s how we first knew you were left-handed. Because of those little dreadlocks you used to make.”

  But I’m not left-handed, Willow thinks. That was Laurel. You’re thinking of Laurel. Or is it me who’s got confused? For a moment she can’t remember. She raises her hand to her hair, letting muscle memory guide her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It takes about a week for Willow and Joe to find a rhythm to their lives. She’d imagined she would be alone a lot, but Joe seems oddly unoccupied – or rather, whatever it is that occupies him doesn’t often require him to leave the building – and his life is both routine and mysterious. He wakes early, and cleans the house with the kind of meticulous care that makes Willow anxious about taking mugs upstairs or leaving her socks lying around. At nine o’clock, he sits at the desk in the living room and begins what she presumes is his job, although he never mentions to her what he’s busy with. After watching cautiously over his shoulder as he types up and issues an invoice, she works out that he’s a website designer, although not a particularly busy one. Up in her room, she does some calculations to try and work out if this can possibly be all the money he makes, and decides that it probably isn’t. Maybe he has a second life she doesn’t know about. Or maybe her parents are paying him to look after her. Or maybe he’s already got rich.

  At half-past ten, he leaves the room to make a regular phone call that she thinks must be to his partner, out in Perth. At eleven, he leaves the house and goes shopping, coming back around an hour later with paper-wrapped meat and fiddly cheese and fancy bread and vegetables in paper bags. He fusses around Willow, making her meals and bringing her snacks at regular intervals, comes to check on her when she’s up in her room, talks to her about what they might have for lunch or dinner, but without expecting any sort of answer. When she tries to imagine what his days would be like if she wasn’t there, all she can conjure is the image of Joe cleaning his already spotless house, or perhaps sitting in the living room window and staring out at the road like a cat waiting for its owner. The kind of food he likes to eat is beginning to grow on her.

  Because he has a routine, it’s easy for her to get into one too. She applies herself to the assignments her tutors send her, surprising herself with the amount of progress she can make without the distractions of lesson changeovers, teachers, and other people in general.

  Each night, she dreams.

  Since coming to the cottage, her dreams have changed. The Death Bird has a human face now and occasionally she glimpses it, looking out at her from beneath the crow-skull. Sometimes, he holds a pig’s head; sometimes carries a gun. Sometimes, she wakes outside, standing at the base of the stone steps and looking out towards the woods, as if the Slaughter Man is calling to her as she sleeps.

  It’s a whole week before the inevitable happens. She wakes up gasping and retching, sweating with the horror of a nightmare – she was tied to a metal table, the Slaughter Man standing over her with a sharp metal beak strapped to his face – to find her pyjamas and bedsheets are soaked. For the last few nights she’s managed to wake in time. She’d hoped she might be getting over it, that this humiliating phase of her life might have finally passed.

  You’re pathetic, she thinks, as she peels off her pyjamas. Absolutely vile. The skin of her thighs and buttocks is damp and itchy. Furious and ashamed, she claws recklessly at herself, gouging at the soft flesh until she’s marked with raggedy lines of bloody dots that make her look as if she’s been pecked by a crow.

  Her penance paid, she strips her bed and finds clean pyjamas. She doesn’t dare venture out of her room to look for fresh linen. She’ll have to manage without sheets tonight. Can she risk going downstairs to put on the washing machine? No, she can’t, she might wake her uncle, but if she doesn’t, her room is going to stink. How can she hide the evidence?

  Of course, she thinks, and opens the door to the outside staircase. The air smells fresh and sweet, and strong enough that within a few minutes, her room feels clean again.

  It’ll be all right, she tells herself. You can sort it out in the morning. He’ll never know.

  She shuts the door on the heap of soiled linen, and crawls back into bed.

  “Anyway, I thought we might have a stir-fry tonight.” Joe has a habit of starting conversations as if they’ve been talking for a long time already, and have accidentally strayed from the main point. “Maybe something with beef strips, marinated. Five-spice powder, maybe. Some soy, a bit of honey.”

  She’s sitting at the table, eating her breakfast and wondering what to do with her day. Around her, Joe is cleaning the kitchen. The second day she was here, she tried to join in, and he laughed and shooed her away.

  “Not sure whether we should have rice or noodles though. What do you think?” He squints up at her over the top of the dishwasher. “Rice? Or noodles? Okay, you’re right. Noodles it is.”

  She’s getting used to being treated as if she’s a pet rather than a person. Who would Joe talk to if she wasn’t here? The cottage with only him in it must be almost unbearable. Joe empties the dishwasher, closes the cupboard on the meticulously stacked plates, and goes into the utility room.

  She bites at her toast, feeling the crunch echo in her head. Yesterday she’d been rereading Rebecca and thinking about the heroine’s strange relationship with food, the time she stole dull plain biscuits and ate them in the woods because she didn’t like to go to her own kitchen, in her own home, and ask for something nicer. I used to do that, she thinks, but now I eat meals at normal times like a normal person. Does that mean I’m getting better? And because she’s thinking about feeling better and about the texture of the toast against her tongue, she forgets to keep a watch on what Joe’s doing, and when he comes back in again and says, “So I’ll grab the laundry baskets and we can blitz through the washing. Do you mind me sorting through your stuff or would you rather do it yourself?” it takes her a moment to rememb
er that she has her own secrets to keep from last night.

  She leaps from her chair, but it’s too late, he’s already up the stairs and in her room, looking at the naked mattress and the crumpled quilt and the outside door slightly ajar and the sheets lying dead on the steps outside, and then he turns towards her and the look of compassion on his face makes her skin crawl with shame.

  “Oh, look,” he says, and holds out his arms to her. “Hey, it’s okay, you know. And you didn’t have to sleep without sheets. Why didn’t you come and get me and I could have helped?”

  Because, she thinks, because I don’t want you to help me, I don’t want anyone to help me. I want to be left alone to sort everything out by myself.

  “You don’t have to deal with stuff like this on your own,” Joe continues, kind and courageous, and she feels as if she might burst with the pressure of all the words that she can’t speak. “I mean, seriously, Willow, this is my specialist subject. I’m astonishing at laundry. I’m the God Emperor of Clean Washing. I’m the Persistent Stain Ninja. Next time, bang on the bedroom door and give me a shout. I won’t mind, I swear. I quite like being awake in the middle of the night anyway, we can come downstairs and eat cake in the kitchen while we’re at it…”

  And what good would you have been anyway? Because guess what, Joe, you put a sleepwalker in a room with a door that goes straight to the outside, and I’ve been going out there without you knowing anything about it. I went right into the woods and I went up that path you said I shouldn’t go up, and I saw him, I saw the Slaughter Man, and he shot me in my heart.

  “Don’t look at me like that, I mean it. You can come and get me, any time. I want to help you. But you have to talk to me, okay? Tell me what you need and—”

  He realises his mistake and puts his hand to his mouth, but it’s too late. He’s said the words, he’s done the one thing he promised her mother he’d never do. And even though she knows he didn’t mean it, even though her mother did the same thing multiple times a day without realising it, even though she doesn’t even really mind, she knows she’s got the upper hand. Now she’s allowed to flounce off, because putting pressure on her to speak is the one absolute taboo everyone around her is supposed to observe.

  She feels a twinge of mean triumph as she storms off through the back door, leaving him to deal with her horrible sheets. She’s glad she’s already wearing her shoes.

  To start with she’s worried Joe might come after her, but within a couple of minutes she realises he’s not going to. She wants to be alone, of course she does, but does she want him to give in to her? Sometimes what she wants isn’t good for her. She slows down and looks back through the trees, wondering if he might simply be struggling to catch up.

  Hey, croons Laurel, from inside her skull. We don’t need him anyway. It’s nice out here on our own.

  Willow closes her eyes. Why can’t ears come with some sort of shutdown device too? She can hear a bird singing, loud and shrill, the sort of sound that you’re supposed to love but that probably means this is my tree, you bastards, all mine and none of you are coming in it. In the pocket of her hoodie is a long curved metal stalk with a thick rubber grip. Her fingers trace the length and hesitate over the top, where the stack of five little blades sits innocuously behind the thin cover of plastic.

  When did she steal this? She remembers going into Joe’s room, looking at the photograph, finding the razor, putting it back. Has she been back since and forgotten? Or is she remembering wrong? The bird’s stopped singing and stands effortlessly balanced on a curve of bramble, watching her with oil-drop eyes.

  Whatever I do with this is Joe’s fault, not mine. It’s his job to keep me safe. He’s not supposed to leave stuff like this lying around. But I’m not going to do anything stupid. It’s just something to play with.

  She takes the razor out and pops the head off the body. She can’t do much with it yet, it’s built to cut hair while protecting delicate skin, but if she takes it apart she can get at the true prize, which is the little stack of cutting edges. She snaps off the top and picks diligently at the sides. They’re not made to withstand a determined attack. If she works away at it for long enough, then eventually…

  The razor head comes apart with a satisfying click. The blades spread out across her palm.

  This is what her parents are terrified of, but they don’t need to be. She’s only curious. She’s not really interested in tablets or razors or bleach. It’s only that they’ve hidden everything dangerous away from her so successfully, they’ve started to acquire a charm all of their own.

  She won’t cut herself, she won’t. She just wants to see. All teenagers experiment with danger, and now she’s doing it too. This is a healthy sign, a normal thing. She presses a blade gingerly against the vein in the crook of her elbow, trying not to let herself flinch. They take blood from here. How much can it possibly hurt?

  Remember when we saw that stupid movie about those two boys? Laurel says. And they cut their thumbs and swapped blood? And we did it ourselves later on?

  She remembers it perfectly. The two of them, seven years old and crouched in their parents’ wardrobe, clutching the kitchen knife they were forbidden to touch. The moment when she dropped the knife and had to fumble for it, and Laurel squeaked, Be careful, don’t cut yourself! And they’d laughed as quietly as they could at their own absurdity, because what was the difference between a cut by accident and a cut on purpose? Then, the breathless tension as Willow pressed the point of the knife hard against the pad of her thumb, and the bright startling pain as it slipped beneath the surface of the skin and the blood began to flow.

  You took ages, Willow thinks. I was afraid mine was going to stop bleeding before you were ready. But then you did it. And we mashed our thumbs together and said, Now you’re my blood sister. As if that was going to make us any closer than we already were. What was wrong with us? We were so fucking weird.

  She can see her pulse throbbing in the little fat blue worm of vein. It’s surprisingly tough, like trying to cut into a rose-stem. Or is she not being brave enough? She bites her lip and presses harder, sawing a little, and then the pain of remembering is blotted out by a different pain, and she’s rewarded with a thick dark trickle of blood.

  The flow is steady and satisfying. It gathers to a rich point on her elbow, then frees itself in little droplets that patter onto the leaves under her feet. The bird – what sort of bird is it, anyway? A small brown one, like a million other small brown birds in the world – hops off its bramble. She closes her eyes, then opens them again. The bird is almost at her feet. It dips its head into the leaves. When it raises its beak, the end is wet with blood.

  She wants to scream, but even this relief is forbidden to her. Instead she gasps silently, like a fish, her arms wheeling. The bird flutters upwards, and she thinks that if its wings brush against her skin, she will die.

  It takes her a moment to coordinate her limbs, but then she finds her way back into her body again and she’s running, one fist clenched tight inside her pocket to keep hold of the blades, and it’s not until she gets to the other side of the woods and throws herself over the fence, charging among the goats that toss their heads and scatter to the corners of the field, that she realises where she’s going.

  She comes towards the farmhouse through a thin muddy path that leads past vegetable beds filled with cabbages and salad leaves and a long stand of neglected-looking vines, with curling leaves and long browning bean-pods and withered tendrils coiling around sticks. The beds look untidy, but the smell of earth and greenery is comforting. On the other side of the vegetables, there’s a hedge and a fence and then a field, where two pigs lie blissfully in a mud-wallow and bask in the sun. At the top of the garden, a worn wooden gate seals off the garden from the farmyard.

  Is she really allowed in here? Katherine told her to visit whenever she wanted, but saying it isn’t the same as meaning it. A couple of chickens are squabbling over scrummaging rights in a patch of
ground that looks exactly the same as all the rest of the yard, but that must be better in some way only chickens know about. A flock of fat geese stalk around with tall necks, pecking bad-temperedly at each other. When she opens the gate, the geese turn towards her as if their heads are tied to the latch. She waits for them to lose interest in her before slipping inside.

  What happens now? If she knocks at the door, what will she do when Katherine answers it? She can’t just stand there, she’ll look insane. Perhaps she can look around for a bit and creep away again and no one will know she’s been here. The geese stretch their necks and hiss warningly, but don’t come near. She wonders if a goose can actually hurt a person. When she takes her hand out of her pocket, she finds she’s cut her fingers on the blades. Perhaps the geese can smell the damage. Perhaps that’s why they’re staying away.

  Halfway down its length, the farmhouse gives way to a series of stables. She wonders what goes on inside them. Milking, possibly? Feeding? Sleeping? Do goats come in at night, or do they live in their field all the time? Through a door that’s closed at the bottom but open at the top, she hears a scuffling sound as if something’s jumping about, and a quiet continuous stream of swearing.

  The stable’s divided by a chest-high panel of chicken wire with a gate in it. On one side of the panel stands the boy, Luca. On the other – guarding the gate with a menace that’s surprising in a herbivore – is a plump white goat with a long, intelligent face and a duo of miniature replicas skittering nervously beside her. Luca is holding a pitchfork, and the mother goat’s clearly decided this makes him a threat, because the expression in her big yellow eyes is clear and eloquent. Don’t you mess with me, mister, or I will destroy you.