It was a severed rope.
The further she was dragged into the room, the deeper the stink dove down her throat. She felt its fury in her lungs. She coughed and choked.
Two gloved hands heaved her off the ground, which was a shame; it hadn’t been as comfy as her bed, but with such a sore head she was probably better down there. She was dumped in a chair. There was a rustling as the same hands to have dragged her pulled something from a Millbury Hardware bag.
A thin, black snake wrapped around her wrist, fastening it to the arm of the chair. Before long, the snake’s friends joined him, wrapping themselves around her other wrist and ankles.
Her vision finally sharpened, her thoughts cleared.
She looked at the snakes: cable ties.
Renata, glasses and cane discarded, watched fear fall over Sandie as the reality of her situation hit home. The girl writhed against the ties, her eyes darting around the cellar like a trapped animal. Her feeble excuse for clothing betrayed every detail of her dread: the skin of her arms contracted into goose pimples, she flexed every muscle defensively, her neat cleavage heaved in panicked respiration. Renata looked the girl over. She was an illustration of beauty, more a representation than a living thing; from the flawlessly manicured nails to the assiduously applied make-up, she was an imitation. The contours of her body were toned to perfection, a figure into which hours of sculpting had been poured. The teenager’s every inch was engineered with meticulous care. She was a dictionary definition, nothing more, but the wannabe intellectual had always vied to be let out, to be taken seriously. No amount of books under her arm could make this wish a reality. Renata removed Sandie’s glasses and peered through them. As she suspected, just plain glass. They dropped to the floor.
Sandie’s choking turned to rasps as the lubricant of her throat dried. She wheezed and spluttered, mascara running down her cheeks. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what is this? Renata, you—’
The woman raised a hand, silencing the girl. She pulled a tub of Vicks from her pocket and held Sandie’s head in place as she applied the gel under her nose. The menthol began to numb her nasal passages. The choking eased.
‘I wasn’t born this way,’ Renata said, dabbing the Vicks under her own nose. ‘I was made.’ Sandie watched in horror as she removed the leather gloves from her hands, still ruined from the physical trauma of her brother’s exhumation, and wiped leaking scabs onto her pleated skirt. She knelt upon the hexagonal slab on which Sandie’s chair was positioned and whispered into the girl’s weeping eyes. ‘I can’t feel what you feel. I can’t feel what any of you feel. Your love, your pain – none of it. I understand that now.’ She placed a hand on Sandie’s tear-stained cheek. ‘But what you feel, my dear, is still of use to me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Sandie said, watching her rise and walk to the door. ‘Renata, please. Whatever this is, we can—’
The hand raised again, then moved to the light switch. The fluorescent bulbs flickered off.
‘Take some time to settle in,’ Renata said through the darkness. She stepped out of the cellar.
The door slammed.
The blackness embracing Sandie robbed her of all spatial awareness. The length and height of the cellar, the distance between the roughly brick walls, the position of the door through which the woman had left: it all disappeared. She floated in space. Disorientation dominated her every sense.
Panic remained.
A solid rectangle of light formed at the opposite end of the cellar, throwing the girl’s world back into perspective. The door opened with a struggling creak. Her sense of time had warped so perversely that it may have been days she’d been sat here. Hunger gnawed at her insides and a desperate thirst, at odds with the violent need to urinate, moaned within. With senses so shaken, as well as the deprivation of her body’s natural requirements, the rectangle took on an almost angelic form. It was like a vision, a heavenly apparition from which possibility poured:
The cops! Daddy!
The room was soaked in a terrible glare as light exploded from the ceiling. Wrists still bound to the chair, all the girl could do was squeeze her eyes shut, but it was no use. The brightness corrupted every molecule in the cellar, passing through her clenched eyelids effortlessly. She recoiled at the sudden barrage of light, gripping the arms of the chair.
Slowly the blaze of light became bearable. She unpeeled an eyelid and saw a figure in the doorway. Not the cops, nor Daddy, but Renata, her face straightened into the same expression of sombre duty as it had been the hours, days, months, or years since she’d left her. The woman descended with a tray, kicking some of the piled, damp books on the floor aside as she approached Sandie.
‘Please,’ the girl croaked. The words were sandpaper in her throat. ‘I need water, food…the bathroom. Renata…I’m begging you.’
The tray came into focus. Half a baguette sat on the plate, ham and salad spilling out its sides. From the sight alone she could taste the pepper on the tomatoes and the dressing glistening on the lettuce. An ice cube bobbed in the glass of water by its side. Renata knelt by Sandie and carefully held the baguette to the girl’s mouth. Scepticism was swept away by bodily need; she snapped like a turtle, clamping her jaws around the crusty bread. Renata regarded her deeply. She tipped the glass delicately against the youth’s lips. The water drained in seconds.
‘I need to pee,’ said Sandie, sitting back with a sigh. Renata gazed into her eyes, allowing an unfilled silence to linger. ‘What do you want?’ the girl demanded.
She stepped to the desk behind Sandie’s chair and set the tray down, then spoke to the back of the teenager’s head. ‘I meant to ask, what hand do you write with?’
Sandie twisted round, but Renata remained out of sight. ‘What? Why are you—’
A small, silk-bound diary fell on her lap. ‘I was hoping you’d write a journal for me, Sandie.’
‘I…I don’t understand, Renata,’ she stammered, head shaking. ‘I just want to—’
‘Actually, it was mine long ago,’ Renata continued. ‘I’d have been about your age. In its pages I recorded my days, but in those days there was no comfort.’ She stepped in front of Sandie. ‘Fiction became my comfort. The entries became less about my life and more about the lives I invented, but what I wrote is of no significance.’ She placed a finger under the girl’s chin. ‘You see, all that matters now is what you’ll write.’ Tears traced Sandie’s cheeks. ‘Now, sorry to keep asking, but what hand do you write with?’
‘Left,’ she whimpered.
Renata produced her mother’s orange-handled fabric scissors, blades like garden shears, and snipped the cable tie of Sandie’s left wrist. Renata opened the diary on the girl’s lap, dropped a pen on the blank page, then stepped back.
‘Please, write.’
She’s told me to write in this diary and to tell whoever reads it to ignore the dates. I dunno what else to write except my name is Sandie Rye, aged 19, daughter of Quentin C. Rye. I’m confused and scared but my captor is treating me well and she should know I’ll cooperate any way she wants and my parents are very important people and they’ll give her anything she
The pen dropped as the closed blades of the scissors stabbed through the side of Sandie’s knee, lodging behind bone. Her brain scrambled to process the sudden wall of agony, a roar of pain exploding from her mouth before the pen hit the concrete. In her head, the scream seemed somehow detached, lingering abstractly in the distance before finally rushing in as if through an opened airlock. The girl became a vessel of suffering, anguish incarnate. Her wailing dominated the small, narrow space. Faintly, the midnight tolls of the clock tower could be heard filling the fields.
Renata held the closed blades in place behind Sandie’s kneecap, whilst also holding the girl’s free hand against the arm of the chair. The teenager looked down at the orange handles fastened to the side of her knee, then vomited, undigested baguette bursting over Renata’s shoulder. Urine merged with the current of blood streami
ng down her legs.
‘You fucking PSYCHO,’ screamed Sandie. ‘What do you WANT?! I’ll fucking—’ She gagged before she could finish the sentence, her body convulsing into a rage of spasms.
‘Such furious fluttering,’ whispered Renata. ‘Fear not, little moth. I, too, struggle with the first word.’ She leant in, ignoring the girl’s lashing free hand, and clenched both handles of the still-impaled blades, one in each fist.
‘What do I want? I’m sorry, dear child, but I want you to try harder.’
She heaved the scissors apart.
help me please whoever reads this it hurts my leg she stabbed me its I dont know why please
what the fuck do you want me to write everything keeps going black and
I keep passing out but she wakes me and makes me write I dont know what to say shes fucking insane whoever reads this my name is Sandie Rye please God help me someone anyone please
25
Her mother, now dead, burnt alive by him, had slinked around the house like a guilty dog. Even as a child the terror under which Sylvia Wakefield lived was obvious to Renata. The real shock had been the contrast between life under Thomas’s rule and who Sylvia became when he left on ministerial duties, when her father would take the Ford Cortina to Stonemount, or south of the Crove to smaller parishes such as Claybeck or Tull Pyke. Sometimes, with a couple of days to themselves, the real Sylvia Wakefield could finally surface as if emerging from hibernation. Mother and daughter would bake all day, laughter and song filling the kitchen as clouds of flour led to Samson’s inevitable sneezing. As Renata grew older, it became obvious these times were acts of reversion, a kind of ritualistic regression for her mother from her current life back to childhood. She needs this, she would think as balls of dough flew across the kitchen. This is like the exhaust pipe of Father’s car, letting it all out. She needs this.
Upon his return, her mother’s exuberance would instantly dissolve. The front door’s slam would mark the lowering of her gaze and the falling of her smile back into calculated composure.
Yet there was another time, just one, when the real Sylvia Wakefield emerged, but not to laugh and sing and throw dough balls. She’d opened in another way, a deeper way, courtesy of this black beast of a machine which now sat before Renata some thirty years later in a basement she never knew existed.
Now that the burst dam of her subconscious let every memory flow free, she vividly recalled the dread of descending the staircase in the middle of the night, every step threatening to scream its treacherous creak through the walls to her father. She remembered one particular descent, successful – until she’d opened the lounge door to find someone there.
Luckily it had been the right someone.
Her mother had looked up from the typewriter with the same terror Renata felt descending the stairs: the terror of being found out. That horror quickly dissolved into a smile reserved only for her, but another moment stuck in her mind from that night, the briefest second before her mother looked up in dread. It was an enduring memory, and there was only one way she’d ever have been able to describe it.
Arts and crafts class. Two years prior. Christmas. ‘Make a Santa,’ Mr Feldman mumbled as he sank into the chair behind his desk, a newspaper rising in front of his face. Every manner of sculpture was produced that afternoon, mostly as far from the intended Santa as possible. Renata had driven her tiny hands into the bucket labelled PLASTICINE – RED a little too late, and they came back with nothing. Same with the WHITE bucket. The putty was in everyone’s hands but hers. Scraping several empty buckets, she’d managed to gather just enough Plasticine to warrant an attempt at the given brief, albeit in a sickly yellowish-green.
The image of that day’s creation re-emerged the night she witnessed her mother slumped over the typewriter. The Plasticine figure had meant to be standing upright, but upon returning from lunch break she’d found a Daliesque creature drooping forward, perhaps from the overhead heating, or the knock of another child. Or, more likely, simply from Renata’s lack of innate engineering ability.
Every iota of the yellowish-green Santa seemed to be pulled forwards and down; even the carefully sculpted fingers stretched towards some invisible treasure. Its head, top-heavy and insufficiently supported, bent as if in search of a lost contact lens. Its whole being was both pushed and pulled down, and it was with this push and pull Renata witnessed for that brief moment her mother falling into the typewriter. There was the side of her mother under tyrannical rule, there was that exhaust pipe of childhood regression, and then there was this.
Purpose.
She saw the woman’s index fingers stabbing the keys like crazed woodpeckers. She saw the chair slid so far back in accumulated tension that her behind barely remained seated. She saw eyes reaching out from their sockets as if handing the contents of her head straight over to the paper. Her mother, like gravity-stricken Plasticine, had fallen further and further into the keys, diving into the typewriter.
Renata had stared in awe. At the machine her mother was strong. A tornado could have swept the house away and those fingers would have kept on pecking, oblivious. It possessed her, and she possessed it.
But now she was dead, burnt alive by him. And tonight, in this basement with this brutalised girl, it possessed Renata.
Whatever her mother hammered out that night, and others like it, would never be read. Romance stories, she guessed, in the same vein as the books banished to this place. That banishment, however, had proven too tame for her mother’s writings, which ended up in the fireplace during one of her father’s particularly vicious rampages. No, her mother’s legacy at the hands of this typewriter wasn’t to be in her writings, but in Renata’s vision of her that night, lost in the machine’s spell.
As Renata had told the little moth, she really did struggle with the first word. She knew what she wanted to say, of course. The noose had squeezed that from her. As she’d hung, the sudden, shattering understanding of what must be done had exploded from her. She knew exactly how this story was to play out.
She thought of this strange career she’d forged, nothing more than manipulation on a professional level. Through the same recycled plots and cheap language she’d led along the mindless cattle of her readership. Their troughs had always needed refilled with that same old swill, book after book, year after year. The clichés, tired tropes, the need to love vicariously through another; it all seemed so distant now. For the first time in her life she had something real to write about, as real as her mother melting over these keys all those years ago. She’d do as Rye had. She’d make truth her muse.
She’d manipulated before. Now, she’d manipulate again. He’d torn her world apart. Now, with words, she’d return the favour.
Yet, despite Renata’s conviction, her fingers remained locked above the keys as if sealed by rust. The words were there, ready, begging to be born. Her fingers were desperate to give, as the keys were desperate to receive, just like lovers ripe and ready to seal their lust. But nothing came.
She looked over her shoulder, wiping her hands on a wet wipe. Unconsciousness had finally taken Sandie. Renata peered at the wound stagnating in the girl’s knee. Upon the black laceration she saw movement.
Two moths sat upon the exposed flesh, deep in concentration, hard at work, enjoying the task at hand. They were feeding.
Sandie twitched.
Renata stared.
The girl looked down at the wound through half-open eyelids. She jerked, then tightened her hands around the arms of the chair as the insects gorged on her blood. Her mouth dilated like the aperture of a lens, the intended scream replaced by a spray of vomit over her legs. The moths vacated their dinner. She wept.
Renata’s eyes widened.
Suddenly the words came.
She would begin with the knives.
Her fingers began typing of their own volition, sentences appearing on the page before she’d even registered the sudden tapping. All she had to do was hold her fingers to t
he keys and the words erupted before her. The calculation and arrangement of that stunted airport fodder was gone; only truth remained. The same truth he’d so arrogantly pursued? Probably not, but he’d get it anyway.
To the typewriter’s side sat the beginnings of the girl’s diary entries, to the other her mother’s fabric scissors, encrusted with Sandie’s blood. Renata’s periphery collapsed as she typed, the room falling out of focus, until she was staring down a tunnel onto the page. The words were all that remained. That, and the girl’s sobbing.
So she wrote.
For Quentin, she wrote.
26
‘Good evening, Miss Wakefield,’ said Detective O’Connell.
The man stood just outside the porch’s overhang, his tatty umbrella doing little to keep him dry. Rain streamed over his raincoat. He burrowed his head into hunched shoulders in a preventative measure of such futility, Renata considered the possibility of its purpose being no more than a ploy for her sympathies. This theory solidified once she saw him register her dark glasses and cane, which prompted him to lower the umbrella and raise his bald head indifferently to the rain.
Through the cataract glasses she watched him work those yellowed detective eyes as he chewed his faithful toothpick. Like his sodden clothes – that same tieless navy shirt and waistcoat he hadn’t changed since her arrival in Millbury Peak – his powers of observation soaked up every possible truth, but there were as many holes in these powers as there were in the tattered umbrella. She forced an expression of benign calmness as she writhed inside at the thought of everything that had slipped through the gaps in his abilities. She looked into his eyes and saw where the blindness really lay.
For Rye Page 21