I took a pace back in alarm when she suddenly thrust out her arms toward me. The man turned in my direction, his features lost in darkness, but I could see a single lidless eye staring, daring a response.
I didn’t wait to find out what he was doing, or what was going on between him and the girl. It was best not to know. In the suburbs you don’t talk to your neighbours even if they’re being murdered. Be it black mass, buggery or bestiality, the general opinion is that it’s best to leave them enjoying themselves so long as everyone’s over eighteen.
Slamming the door and running back to the bedroom, I scrabbled for matches and relit the candle, then tore open the zip of my case for jeans, a sweater, a jacket. Unable to lay hands on my trainers, I was forced into heeled shopping shoes, all the while thinking, Murderers, perverts, I should never have come here. Why would anyone chain a young girl up like an animal? I wondered if she was an unwilling participant in the kind of sex games you read about every Sunday in the family newspapers.
Remembering my mobile, I ran back to the kitchen, found it, checked the reception meter and saw there were no bars available. End of the ground floor corridor, Malcolm had told Cathy to tell me, that was the only place where you could get reception at the moment.
The front door hadn’t been locked or even pushed shut. My feet were numb on the cold floor. Space expanded ahead, folding outward into the rooms as I raised the light. I stopped in the doorway to the guest room and shifted the lantern forward.
She was standing behind the door.
She dropped her arms over my head and I screamed, releasing the lantern. The cheap glass didn’t break but oil splashed in a spray of tiny comets, setting the bed quilt alight. I twisted in her tightening embrace, so that her stomach was pushed against my buttocks, and tried to tip her over, but she proved too strong. In my state of panic I couldn’t tell if she was trying to get help or hurt me. She suddenly pulled up her hands and I shoved as hard as I could, forcing her against the wall. I had little hope of stopping her, but she fell away.
Grabbing the end of the bedspread I flicked it over on itself, so that the burning patches were smothered. One crackling chunk of material floated and brushed against the wardrobe in a shower of autumn sparks. Acrid smoke hazed the air. The girl had frog-dropped to the floor and closed herself into a foetal position at the base of the wall.
I set the candle on the floor and tried to get a clear look at the collar on her neck, but she twisted from the light. Her lank black hair curtained her eyes. As my fear subsided, I heard her moaning. I waited for her to look up, flinching in anticipation of some terrible sight, but the face that stared back was magazine-beautiful. She was perhaps eighteen, with empty blue eyes and sharp jawline of a photographer’s model.
The slim steel noose was fixed tightly at her throat, a metal version of the plastic tags that electronics shops used to bundle cables. She was trying to speak but her voice was undecipherable, a spatula-on-burnt-pan rasp. My instinct was to try and wrench it from her neck, but I was frightened of making matters worse because it was fastened so tightly.
She was clearly in pain. Where the steel edge bit, her skin was ringed with a raw, violet line. Her wrists were connected by a white plastic tag, so that she looked like a product that had been delivered to the wrong address and dumped on the floor in the recipient’s absence.
I tried to pull the collar apart, but she flinched and twisted when I touched her, an eel writhing on a hook. I had no idea what to do. The look of fear on her face panicked me even more. Another flinch, more violent this time. Her legs kicked out hard as her muscles bunched. Should I go and fetch the creepy, condescending Dr Elliot, or would that be worse?
I pulled at the steel circle, but I couldn’t slip my fingers beneath it. Running to the kitchen I pulled open drawers, searching for a knife. Then I remembered the lethal-looking set of Sabatier knives that lined the wall, and selected one of the smaller blades. By the time I returned to the bedroom she was lying arched on her back, convulsing violently against the collar. I scraped back her hair and held her head steady, trying to slip the knife blade under the band, but it was impossible to do so without cutting her neck. I needed something else, something that could …
In the kitchen I had seen a pair of heavy spatchcock scissors, designed for chopping chickens apart. Now I ran back and grabbed them.
She lay still on the beechwood floor of the bedroom, as pale as bone. The collar was so tight that her face had turned a mottled indigo, the colour of a bad sprain. Suddenly she coughed, spattering the walls, the floor and me. Her head fell back, eyes bulging hard.
I tried to work the tip of the scissors under the band, but couldn’t without slicing her skin. Several times I caused pinpricks of blood and apologised with a grimace. I could see I would be forced to dig deeper. I wiggled the blade under the steel edge and felt her flesh yield.
I was making a mess of her neck. I dug under again. The metal was thin but incredibly strong. I finally managed to shift the tip of the scissor blade right beneath it, but it seemed to take forever to saw all the way through. As it broke she fell back, sucking in air.
I cut the plastic ties from her wrists and dragged her to the balcony doors. She had almost no body fat, and weighed nothing. Her body was cadaver-white and muscular. We left a skidmark of blood through the flat. She still clutched at her throat and the side of her head, but was unable to move her hands properly. Behind me, the light from the tipped-over lantern fanned and died to a faint blue pulse.
I brought her a beaker of water, blundering and spilling most of it in the darkened flat. She winced and allowed the water to overflow her mouth.
‘I have to go for help. Who did this to you?’
Moving the lantern closer, I was finally able to see the side of her head. A sore-looking lump rose at the base of her right ear, up toward the occipital outcrop of her skull. A blood vessel had burst in her right eye. She’d been hit pretty hard. I needed to get her into the light, so I slipped my hands under her armpits and pulled. The stinging reek of the burned coverlet made my eyes water.
Her breath had become shallow and fast. I lowered her against the wall and pulled the scorched eiderdown from the bed, wrapping the unburned part around her shivering body, but when I tried to stand, my legs folded beneath me. The room rotated away as the shock of the last few minutes began to catch up.
I wondered if the psychiatrist next door had any useful medical knowledge. He had warned me about the others in the building, told me to go home, and I had ignored him. I knew I should at least bring him here, but tried to raise myself again and failed.
The girl was laying on her side, breathing more faintly than ever. I gave up trying to stand and lay down beside her for a minute, less a gesture of solidarity than an inability to command my muscles. Shoving the spatchcock shears into the rear pocket of my jeans, I put my head back, listening as our respiration matched and phased.
When I rose and opened the front door again, I made damn sure that her attacker had gone. Only the black candle remained, guttering in the sudden draft. My inability to aid the girl was upsetting, but I was out of my depth and needed help.
I’d left the lantern behind because it seemed wrong to leave her alone in darkness. When I tried to unglue the black candle the wick was extinguished in splashed wax, and as the spirit of the flame departed I found myself stranded with the front door closing behind me, a truly blind panic tamping down my senses.
The bell on the lintel of Dr Elliot’s door failed to work without electricity. I slapped my hand against the wood but there was no answer. He’s gone out, I thought, he’s asleep, he’s refusing to help me, just like the others he told me about.
I pressed my ear on the cool maple grain and listened. Nothing. Perhaps I had only seen his dummy at the window. What kind of man would keep a dessicated corpse on display in his lounge? These people weren’t my kind, I didn’t understand them or want to be like them. The backs of my arms were sweating ice. How
much time had passed since I discovered the girl, seconds, minutes, half an hour? The absence of light seemed to rob me of other senses.
Dr Elliot finally answered the door in a creepily short towelling robe. He looked liverish and guilty, his skin as slick and breath as shallow as if he’d been running or having a marathon bout of afternoon sex, and his hair was sticking up on one side like a duck wing. For a moment he didn’t seem to remember me.
‘Oh, it’s you again.’
‘I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.’
‘Then I suppose you’d better come in.’
He seemed reluctant to admit me, not standing quite far enough aside to allow me by. ‘You’ll have to be quick.’ He smoothed his hair into place. ‘I’m expecting someone very shortly.’
‘Something awful has happened.’
‘Really. Do you have to involve me?’
As I passed his bedroom door I caught a glimpse of several leather straps attached with rings and buckles, laid out on the duvet in a fetishistic order that reminded me of the spanners and pairs of pliers my husband kept under our stairs. Dr Elliot led the way into the kitchen, scratching, and poured himself orange juice.
‘A girl. I saw her in the third apartment, the empty one. Then she was outside with a man who had … there was something wrong with him. Then she came into my apartment. She had a thing around her neck.’
‘It sounds as if you were dreaming. I hope so. I have no history of being useful to strangers.’ He seemed bored by me and walked away, so that I was forced to follow him into the lounge.
Dr Elliot dropped onto the sofa, his robe falling open at an uncomfortably high level. Either he hadn’t noticed or was unalarmed by the notion of displaying his genitals. ‘Are you familiar with the legend of Pasiphae?’ He glanced over at the bare wall, as if checking to see if it was listening, and I noticed that the eviscerated dummy was missing.
‘A Greek myth,’ I said, puzzled by the change of subject.
‘Oh the Greeks, endless cruel revenges of a sexual nature. The daughter of Helios was cursed by Poseidon so that she lusted after a huge white bull. In order to copulate with it, she had Daedalus build her a portable wooden structure covered with cowhide, which she climbed inside, and the bull raped her. She gave birth to the Minotaur.’
I had no idea why he was telling me this. His robe had opened further, exposing a testicular sac like a fortnight-old peach. I wondered if he did this with all his female guests, in the same way that baboons exposed their backsides to mates. He smiled as he lazily flicked the robe back in place.
‘A shocking excess of female sensuality and deceit, don’t you think? Painfully penetrated for the pleasure of others, the ruptured Pasiphae was wilfully damaged by her beast. Surely any female who would allow that must be damaged herself.’
There was a noise in the hall. The girl’s attacker was standing in the lounge doorway. Maurice’s sectioned face, one side skull-bone, the other a Brylcreemed 1930s gent, turned. His single naked eye stared down at me. He seemed to be having trouble staying in one place, and I realised it was because he was balancing on what were presumably prosthetic legs, incongruously clad in grey tracksuit bottoms. A glistening red plastic penis poked up from his waistband below his multi-coloured intestines like some kind of X-rated glove puppet.
Dr Elliot addressed his friend. ‘Oh hello, we were just talking about you.’
‘The girl didn’t want to play,’ said Maurice, his sinewy jaw muscles working against bared ceramic teeth. He sounded like a BBC presenter from the distant past, as though a recording was playing inside his chest.
‘How is he doing that?’ I shouted, standing. ‘Is this some kind of trick?’
‘God, no, he’s like this all the time,’ said Dr Elliot, snorting. ‘It’s just that you people never usually see people like Maurice. I’m surprised he managed to keep his mouth shut when you were here.’
Maurice took a step forward, wobbling slightly, like a World War II pilot on calipered stumps. His eyes swivelled over me.
I had to ask. ‘How is he moving?’
‘Obviously, he’s alive, but he’s not been well for a long time, ever since he got out of Helmand province. The army surgeons repaired the physical parts but the mind never truly heals. And he’s got worse lately. Now he needs a steady supply of girls to keep him calm. They stop him from going strange. You probably get the same effect from – oh, I don’t know, shopping.’ His crab-fingers traced a pink scar on his inner thigh. ‘It’s fascinating from a clinical point of view. There are new frontiers opening all the time. Don’t get me started, I could bore for Britain on the psychological effects of war. Sometimes the solution is to give the patient exactly what he needs. Maurice, where’s our little Pasiphae?’ He turned to me. ‘Forgive the pun. Pacify, you see?’
Pasiphae. I tried to imagine her hunched on all fours inside the hot darkness of the rough wooden box, her exposed private parts extended back toward the cool opening in the planks, waiting for the burning heat of the bull’s great member to tear her apart. One human, one an artificial representation of a human form, reconstructed after God-knows-what kind of horrific accident.
‘The lady hurt her, not me. It wasn’t Maurice.’ Maurice dropped his jaw and laughed in his scratchy recorded BBC manner, staring at me as he wavered in the doorway.
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Housewife, you’re quite safe from Maurice, you’re too old for him,’ said Dr Elliot.
I still had the spatchcock scissors in my back pocket, and felt like sticking them in his balls.
‘Better run away now, though. Maurice doesn’t take kindly to people who spoil his nights. Neither do I.’
Maurice wavered on his stumps, guffawing madly, his laughter turning into a string of ragged sobs. I pushed from the room and fled the building, leaving them to their experiments.
You always suspect there’s a class that lives so far apart from you that you have no idea what their lives are like. That night, I caught a glimpse inside this other world, and it made no sense to me at all. The curtain briefly parted, then closed again. I know now where these people live, in the darkened luxury apartments that line the Thames, in the backstreets of Belgravia, in the blind shuttered terraces of Kensington. Their money is accepted with no questions asked, their crimes go unreported, their behaviour remains unchecked.
The next day I asked Cathy to ask Malcolm about the residents of his building, but he never told her anything, or perhaps she never asked, so I never found out.
I walked past the apartment tower in daylight and it appeared normal. But looking up at the sky-reflecting windows, I got the feeling that Dr Elliot and his friends were looking down at me, hoping to find solace in the lower orders again tonight, wishing I would go away and be replaced by someone younger, prettier, poorer, lonelier.
I think – for just an instant – I saw the curtain part again.
THE FRANKLIN’S SECOND TALE
FROM THE ‘LOST’ CANTERBURY TALES
Paul Freeman
Paul Freeman is an English instructor working in Abu Dhabi, where he lives with his wife and three young children. In addition to being a novelist, he has published numerous short stories and is currently working on a series of thirty-three ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tales. His contribution to this book is his shortest Canterbury Tale to date and offers a foretaste.
Prologue to The Franklin’s Second Tale
The hoary-bearded Franklin in our band
Of pilgrims quod: “’Tis time I set my hand
To spinning out a cautionary tale.”
He put away his flask of Kentish ale
And added: “Though I generously host
My household guests, not every man can boast
A temp’rament as open-palmed as mine.
In fact I’ve found that villanelles who dine
On meagre means are likely more to share
What little they possess (with scarce a care)
Than those born high with spoons of soli
d gold
Betwixt their lips. Ennobled fellows hold
Their riches tight, and always crave more wealth.
So hear you, how a sovereign risked ill-health
To measure those around him. Listen well!
A regicidal yarn I have to tell.
The Franklin’s Second Tale
King Egbert, past his prime, felt wont to test
The folk he trusted most ere he divest
His kingship, so he rustled up a plan.
He feigned to be a foolish, deaf old man,
So fragile he was promptly put to bed
To languish in his dotage until dead.
One morning he awoke to find a band
Conspiring to purloin by force his land.
“Usurping father’s realm is nothing wrong,”
Prince Fredrick quod. “He’s lingering too long.
Perhaps some actions radical and bold
Are needed lest I’m regent when I’m old.”
“’Twas mooted that by April he would die,”
Quod Martha, Fredrick’s wife. “Yet months go by.
King Egbert’s time as potentate has passed,
But still the stubborn ass is holding fast.”
The last collaborator of the group
(The King’s physician) quod: “Upon thin soup
I’ve starved him, but his servant girl takes pains
To feed him well, ensuring that he reigns.
Her ministrations need to be curtailed
Lest Egbert’s abdication be derailed.
So, if we’re in agreement let’s dispatch
This millstone through a scheme we’ll newly hatch.”
The traitors laid their plans and all agreed
On how to carry out the fatal deed.
Prince Fredrick strode towards the bed to place
A pillow over Egbert’s pallid face.
The sov’reign thrashed about, then acted dead
Till Fredrick took the pillow from his head.
“Inform the guards of Egbert’s sad demise,”
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