The dress was cheap, with stray threads and no lining, and it was too tight across her bust, but she managed to put it on and tug the hemline down to her knees.
‘Well, look at you! Excellent! You look so much like her, I could’ve sworn she’d come back from the cemetery.’
She said nothing. She was shivering, and she had no idea what the three masked men were going to do next.
The scowling man trampled across the mattress and stood very close to her, on her left-hand side. He smelled faintly of camphor, like pain-relief liniment. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘She could be her double, almost. But – you know – prettier, if anything. Not so goddamned blotchy.’
The expressionless man crossed over the mattress, too, and stood on her right. She looked from one to the other. They were both staring at her, but of course their masks were giving nothing away. She was so frightened that she was close to wetting herself.
‘Well, now, the next thing you need is a drink,’ said the laughing man. He reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a plastic bottle of Sobieski vodka. He unscrewed the cap and held it up. ‘Same brand she always favored. Only eleven bucks the bottle, that’s why. Bring her here, fellas.’
The scowling man and the expressionless man took hold of her arms and frogmarched her into the middle of the mattress. They all found it hard to keep their balance, so that they looked as if they were trying to stand upright on the pitching deck of a ship. The laughing man said, ‘Come on, now. Think you can do what she used to do? Think you can match up?’
She couldn’t find the words to answer him.
‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s have you down on your knees, shall we? Then we can see what you’re good for, or what you ain’t.’
The scowling man and the expressionless man forced her arms so high up behind her back that the tendons audibly crackled and she had no choice but to kneel. Under her bare knees, the mattress felt damp and lumpy, and it stank of stale urine and dried blood.
The laughing man came right up to her and held out the bottle of vodka. ‘Here . . . help yourself. She always did.’
‘I don’t drink,’ she whispered.
He cupped his hand to his papier mâché ear. ‘What? What did you say? You don’t drink? But you have to drink! That’s all part of the exorcism. Everything has to be played out exactly the way it was, right down to the very last detail. She never wore no underwear so you can’t wear no underwear. She always wore a red dress like that, or some other dress that was very much like it, so you have to wear one, too.
He paused for breath, gasping behind his mask. ‘She drank. I mean, that was almost the whole reason it ever happened. She drank from morning till night. Sometimes she was so drunk she didn’t even know who anybody was. Sometimes she didn’t even know who she was.’
He held out the bottle again, prodding it against her lips. ‘Come on, be a good girl, drink.’ But she closed her mouth tightly and turned her head away.
‘Well – sorry about this,’ he told her, and nodded to his two companions. The expressionless man took hold of her hair and pulled her head back, while the scowling man squeezed her jaw so hard that she was forced to open her mouth, like a freshly-landed fish.
The laughing man poured vodka straight down her throat. It blazed all the way down her esophagus into her stomach, and when she tried to cry out, she breathed some of it into her lungs, so that she felt as if she were choking. The laughing man stood over her, waiting for her to finish coughing, but when she didn’t, he nodded to his companions again and he splashed even more into her mouth, regardless of her coughing and her spluttering.
‘You may look just like her,’ he told her, ‘but you sure can’t take your booze the way she used to, and that’s a fact.’
She retched and gasped for air, but he forced her to go on swallowing until the bottle was empty. He tossed it on to the floor, reached into his other coat pocket, and took out another bottle.
‘No!’ she screamed at him. ‘I can’t! You’re killing me!’
‘Killing you? We’re not killing you. All we’re trying to do is show you a good time!’
Scowling and Expressionless pulled her hair again and opened her mouth, and Laughing splashed almost half a bottle more down her throat.
Eventually, however, they let her go, and she crouched on the mattress on her hands and knees, her stomach heaving, wheezing for breath. The men stood around her, watching her, saying nothing.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she sobbed. ‘What have I ever done to you?’ She raised her head.
The laughing man shrugged and said, ‘You never did nothing, sweetheart, except to be in the wrong location at the wrong time. For you, that is, anyhow.’
He reached into his coat again, and this time he took out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He shook one out, tucked it into the slit in his mask, and lit it. When he blew smoke, it leaked out of his eyeholes as well as his mouth, so that it looked as if his head was on fire.
He hunkered down in front of her and held out the lighted cigarette. ‘Here you are, take a drag on this. That should calm your nerves.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t smoke.’
‘You’re still not getting it, are you? She smoked, so you got to smoke. This is an exorcism, don’t you understand? Everything that she did, you have to do. You have to be her. What’s the word . . . it’s symbolical.’
He held the cigarette up to her mouth. She stared defiantly into his cockroach eyes, but he prodded it up against her lips again and again.
‘You know you’re going to have to smoke it, don’t you?’ he told her. ‘Because if you don’t, I’m going to be obliged to stub it out in your eye, and you wouldn’t enjoy that too much, would you?’
‘I hate you,’ she whispered.
The laughing man nodded in appreciation. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s excellent. That’s exactly the way that she used to talk. You’d be right on top of her, giving it everything you got, and she’d look you straight in the eye and say, “you scumbag, I wish you’d have a heart seizure, right here and now, so I could feel you die inside of me”.’
He prodded her lips again, and this time she opened them a little so that he could insert the cigarette. The smoke drifted up into her eyes and stung them, and she started coughing again.
He watched her for a while, and then he said, ‘Come on now, sweetheart, you got to inhale. Otherwise you don’t get that hit.’
She hesitated, and then she breathed in. She managed to hold the smoke in her lungs for only a second before she exploded into another coughing fit. She coughed so hard that she bent forward and pressed her forehead against the mattress, as filthy and evil-smelling as it was.
‘I’d say she needed a little more practice at that, wouldn’t you?’ said Scowling. ‘She used to get through two packs a day, no trouble at all. Sometimes three.’
The laughing man sat down in one of the armchairs and lit another cigarette. The expressionless man sat down, too, but the scowling man went to the window and parted the dark brown linen curtains so that he could look outside.
‘Still raining,’ he said.
‘Close the goddamned drapes, will you?’ the laughing man ordered him. ‘You want half the goddamned neighborhood to see that there’s somebody in here?’
‘There’s nobody out there, man.’
‘You never know. Just close the goddamned drapes.’
Ten minutes went by, while the laughing man smoked and the expressionless man jiggled one leg as if he needed to go to the bathroom, and the scowling man paced around the living-room asking irrelevant questions, which neither of the other two men bothered to answer.
‘Got to get that alternator fixed, you know that.’
‘Did you ever try the roadhouse steak sandwich at Quizno’s? Now that’s what I call tasty. Or you can have the chicken with chipotle mayo. I never know which to choose.’
‘Think it’s going to rain all night?’
S
he stayed on her knees in the middle of the mattress. She was beginning to feel woozy, and she found it hard to keep her balance. She closed her eyes and prayed that when she opened them she would be back at home, and that none of this would have happened, but even with her eyes closed she could smell the laughing man’s cigarette smoke, and hear the scowling man prowling around the room, talking to himself.
Please please dear Virgin Mary let this all be over. Please.
Suddenly, however, without a word, the laughing man flicked his cigarette butt into the fireplace and stood up. The expressionless man stood up, too. All three men approached the mattress and stood over her.
‘You look pretty goddamned drunk to me,’ said the laughing man.
‘I feel sick,’ she said, and her voice didn’t even sound like hers.
‘You don’t want to be barfing, sweetheart, believe me. Barfing can put a fellow off, if you know what I mean.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well, in that case, let’s show you, shall we?’
With that, he pushed her in the face with the flat of his hand, hard, so that she fell over backward. She cried out, ‘No! What are you doing? No!’ and tried to roll on to her side, but he pushed her again, with both hands this time, and clambered on to the mattress on top of her.
He was big and he was heavy and he was very strong. He gripped her neck with his right hand, half-throttling her, while he used his left hand to reach down and tug open his pants.
‘No!’ she screamed at him, right into his leering white mask. ‘No, you bastard, get off me! Get off me!’
He pulled up the hem of the cheap red dress and then forced her thighs apart with his knees. She kept on screaming, high and hoarse, but she knew that nobody could hear her and nobody was going to come and rescue her.
The laughing man turned around to his two companions. ‘Come on, guys, what are you waiting for? She’s drooling for it. No holes barred.’
She saw them unbuckling their belts, but that was all she saw because she closed her eyes tight and kept them closed. When the laughing man grunted and pushed his way into her, and the other two climbed on to the mattress beside her, she tried to think of that sunny fall day in Lafayette when she and Daniel had taken a walk in the woods and he had proposed to her, and she had never realized that it was humanly possible to be so happy.
She opened her eyes. She was lying on her right side, and she was shuddering with cold. The living-room was in darkness, except for a narrow line of street light that fell diagonally across the mattress from the gap between the drapes. She coughed, and sat up, and looked around.
The three masked men were no longer around, although she could still smell their sweat and their cigarette smoke and the faint pungency of liniment. She listened, but the house was silent, apart from the pattering of rain against the living-room window.
Her dress had been pulled right up under her breasts, and when she pulled it down again she felt the cold slime between her thighs and between the cheeks of her bottom. She felt sore and swollen, and even though the living-room was so gloomy, she could see that the insides of her thighs were covered in patterns of plum-colored bruises. Her lips felt dry, and when she licked them they tasted like bleach.
She didn’t cry. She was too shocked to cry, and she was still drunk, too. All she could think of was the jostling, and the pushing, and the panting, and the pain. She had never felt pain like that before. It had been worse than giving birth.
She sat there for over a minute, trying to find the strength and the will to stand up and get dressed in her own clothes. In a strange way, she felt relieved. In spite of what the three masked men had done to her, it was all over, and she was still alive, and she hadn’t been seriously injured. The Virgin Mary had protected her, after all, as much as She could.
She caught hold of one of the arms of the nearest chair, and was about to climb to her feet when a voice said, ‘Mommy?’
She said, ‘Ah!’ in surprise, and looked around. A boy of about twelve was standing in the shadow of the open door. He was thin and pale, with a shock of wiry black hair, and he was wearing red-striped pajamas.
‘Who are you?’ she asked him. Her throat was so sore that she could hardly speak. ‘What are you doing here? You’re nothing to do with those men, are you?’
The boy stepped out from behind the door. He was an odd-looking child, with large dark eyes that were spaced wide apart, and a long skull, almost like an alien. His lips were a cupid’s bow, and unnaturally red for a boy.
‘Mommy, can I sleep with you, too?’
‘I’m not your mommy, son, and I have to leave now. Where are your parents?’
‘You never let me sleep with you.’
She had to clear her throat again. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not your mommy, and I really have to go.’
The boy crossed the room and climbed on to the mattress. He sat down next to her and looked up at her with those large dark eyes. He reached up and touched her cheek with his fingertips, and he was very cold.
‘But you never let me sleep with you,’ he repeated.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m not your mommy and I’m going now. Do you live in this house? Who’s taking care of you?’
To her surprise, the boy wrapped his arms around her, and pressed his head hard against her breasts. ‘You do love me, Mommy, don’t you?’ His hair smelled musty, as if it needed a wash.
She took hold of his arm and tried to pry him away from her. ‘For the last time, I am not your mommy. So, please, let go of me.’
‘I’m not going to let go. I’m going to stay here for ever. You let them sleep with you but you never let me sleep with you.’
‘Please get off me,’ she told him. She tried to pull herself away from him but he clung on to her dress, and when she tried to stand up she lost her balance and she toppled down on to the mattress again.
‘Let go of me!’ she shouted at him. ‘Just let go of me!’
‘I’m not going to let go,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not going to let go.’
She swung her arm around and slapped him hard on the ear. He held on to her even tighter, so she slapped him again, and then again.
‘Get away from me, you little bastard!’ she screamed at him.
‘You never let me sleep with you! You never let me sleep with you!’
‘Get the fuck away from me! Get off!’
The boy raised his head, although he didn’t release his grip on her dress. He stared at her, his face so close that she couldn’t focus on him.
‘Do you remember what happened, Mommy?’ he asked her, in a low, conspiratorial voice.
‘I’m not your mommy and I don’t remember what happened, whatever it was. All I want you to do is to let go of me.’
‘You remember what happened.’ The way he said it, it sounded as if it was something extremely lewd.
She grasped his shoulders and tried to shove him away from her, but he held on to her like a monkey that couldn’t be pulled off a tree.
‘Get off me! Let me go!’
In desperation and fear, she seized his ears and shook his head backward and forward, as hard as she could.
‘Get-off-me-get-off-me-get-off-me!’
At that instant, the boy burst into flames. Not just his hair, or his pajamas. He exploded into a mass of roaring fire, as if he had been doused in gasoline and set alight. He screamed, his mouth stretched wide open, and she screamed, too, because the flames seared her face and her arms and her hair flared up like a Roman candle.
She tried to wrench herself away from him, but the fiercer he burned, the tighter he held her. She felt her ears twisting into little charred knots, and her eyelids shrivel, and then her eyeballs popped in the heat and she was blinded.
The pain was unbearable. She burned and burned from her feet to the top of her head, and after her red dress had been reduced to blackened tatters, the skin on her back turned bright red, too, and then that became blacke
ned in turn. Then she could smell her own flesh roasting, and it smelled just like roasting meat.
The flames died down, and she lay on her side on the smoldering mattress, quivering with shock, in the fetal position that burns victims almost always adopt as their tendons tighten. She was only seconds away from oblivion, but even though she was blind and deaf and her fingers were nothing more than charred twigs, and she couldn’t have felt the boy even if he was there, she was sure that she was quite alone.
TWO
Ruth was woken up by Amelia whispering in her ear, a hot thunder that she could barely understand.
‘I made you breakfast.’
She opened her eyes, and blinked. Amelia was leaning over her, her dark blonde hair pulled back into a lopsided ponytail. Her elf-like face was so close that Ruth couldn’t focus on her.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I made you breakfast. I even wrote you a menu.’
Ruth sat up. Next to her, all that she could see of Craig was the fingertips of one hand, sticking out from underneath the comforter, like a man crushed below a collapsed building. He was breathing so quietly that he could have been dead.
‘Look. Here’s your menu,’ said Amelia, and she held up a sheet of notepaper – again, so close that it was too blurry for her to read.
Ruth twisted around and looked at her bedside clock. Five fifteen a.m. Her alarm was set for five thirty a.m. in any case, so Amelia had woken her only fifteen minutes earlier than usual.
‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Don’t wake your daddy. He hasn’t been sleeping too good lately.’
It all came out in a breathy gabble. ‘Daddy said you never had a proper breakfast, but you said that you never had time for a proper breakfast so I made you a proper breakfast myself.’
‘Shh!’ Ruth repeated, touching her finger to her lips. ‘I’ll see you in the kitchen.’ She went into the bathroom and took her pink flannelette robe from the back of the door. Then she looked in the mirror over the basin. Her eyes were puffy and her short blonde hair looked as if she had been standing on the poop-deck of the Pequod all night. She splashed her face with cold water, bashed at her hair with a hairbrush, and gave herself an exaggerated scowl. She was still pretty, in a bruised-angel kind of way, still slim, although she was quite big-breasted, but she was beginning to feel her age.
Fire Spirit Page 2