Insulation (A Horror Suspense Novella)

by Saunders, Craig

  He cut himself then, a little, where it hurt most. Focusing. Getting ready. Not a sexual thing, but the apotheosis of sexuality.

  Turning off. Shutting down. Because he felt bad. He didn’t want to kill the woman. It was just the way it had to be.

  He wasn’t schizophrenic. He knew that. He had an unspecified personality disorder that according to the doctors made him unable to understand other people, took away his empathy. It wasn’t true, though.

  Simon knew perfectly well what he was.

  Killer...

  Sometimes the voices were right. He nodded in agreement to the silent voices that came from his walls.

  Unspecified Personality Disorder. They’d diagnosed him with as much and pretty much fucked his childhood and any chance of happy memories. They hadn’t got much further. His parents made him go see the psychiatrist, then the psychologist. He’d been eight.

  He’d seen mental doctors for a long time. In the end, though, he didn’t need a doctor. He just had to cut and he felt better. Sometimes his own flesh, sometimes other flesh. Didn’t matter.

  Just enough so he could fill the walls and shut out the noise. Shut out the voices.

  The voices that sometimes told him to cut.

  So cut he did, and then took a photo of his newest cut. Later, he’d be horny. He’d have to cut some more.

  But for now, his neighbour waited on him, didn't she? The ceiling in his bedroom remained unfinished and he could still hear the voices and those fucking voices...they knew just what to say...just how to push his buttons.

  ‘Fuck off, and then keep right on fucking off,’ he told the voices, but they said hurtful things, like they always did, and he cried as he walked through his hall to the bathroom, ready for blood enough to drown the bastards out.

  *

  XIII.

  Whatever hope Yvonne held onto fled when he came back and didn’t look like the same person anymore. He didn’t look remotely reasonable anymore. He didn’t look remotely sane.

  He was also naked.

  He saw her looking.

  ‘Don’t want blood on my clothes,’ he explained, and almost sounded embarrassed.

  He sat at the edge of the bathtub and she saw he was covered in scars, some old, some new. He bled, too, like he’d cut himself coming in here with the heavy cleaver he clutched in one hand.

  He sliced the blade along his own flesh as he sat on the bathtub, staring into space.

  A thick line of blood trickled from his latest wound down his muscled stomach and into his pubic hair. She fought down revulsion, but felt sickness rising in its place. She thought, in that moment, about kicking him, but she couldn’t. The best she’d do would be a glancing blow. She didn’t care about pissing him off. This wasn’t that kind of jeopardy.

  She didn’t bother trying to reason. Nothing she could say would make any difference.

  Here was a man apologising for killing her while they were both naked. A man cutting himself and crying, almost like he’d forgotten she was even there.

  Insulation, she realised. She could scream all she wanted, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.

  Because his bathroom was so much smaller than hers, wasn't it? The floor, the ceiling, the walls. Everything but the door crowded in toward them. What should have been identical dimensions to her apartment had been taken and shrunk and she was in the world of lunacy.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to know.’ He shrugged. ‘Just an accident. You’re a good neighbour. Shaky start, I know, but you’re quiet. Nice enough. Clean, I could see. Good tenant. Could have worked out. ’

  She kept silent. She was thinking how the smell would have bugged her after a while, and almost laughed. Almost, but she managed to hold it in. She didn’t want that, because then she’d know she was broken beyond repair, and for some bastard of a reason she still hoped, deep down, that somehow she was getting out of this alive.

  Desperate thinking.

  Can I persuading him to start on an arm, to get free enough to maybe headbutt him when the arm comes off? Could I stab him with the end of the bone? Would it be sharp enough? Should I get him to start on my leg, if I can? Try to live a little longer? Will he give me a choice, like a lunatic might, to show me just how reasonable he can be?

  Or, she wondered, should I choose a nice straight blow through the neck, just to get it done?

  The cleaver in his hand looked up to the job.

  All the while her jaw screamed at her and her head pounded with more power than she’d even know. She didn’t cry any longer though thinking through the pain became more difficult. Her jaw, shattered, screamed for her while she couldn't. Screaming would move her mouth, her jaw, the sound...she'd puke for sure.

  Can't puke. Mustn't...I'd pass out...and then...

  She knew it was true.

  So she watched the cleaver in his hand and the blood running down his stomach as he cut deeper and deeper. She tried to ignore the fat blade, but her eyes were dragged back, just the same.

  Pain already and more to come.

  He stopped cutting and turned to her. For a moment, she’d thought...that he’d forgotten her. But that was stupid fairytale shit. There was no deux ex machina in real life.

  In real life, you lived, you died. End of story, because life’s not a story.

  She didn’t have any doubt about that, and when he said, ‘Where do you want it?’ she was ready. Ready to go.

  ‘Seems only fair, you know? You didn’t bring this on yourself. Not your fault. Just the way it works out.’ He shrugged.

  Fuck. He's actually apologising, still.

  She was ready to go, but now she had a choice.

  A chance? No. Dangerous to think like that. Dangerous because hope would be worse. Wishing would be worse.

  Just die, she told herself.

  But a chance. Maybe. It all depended on just how mad he really was.

  *

  XIV.

  Is fat slippery?

  Probably not. Not like lard, or butter.

  But blood is, right?

  The walls were tiled all the way round. No doubt he'd done it so the blood was easier to wash off. But then, wet tiles were slippery, too. And him, barefoot.

  How mad was he? Mad enough for distractions?

  Could she get him to cut somewhere that’d bleed well, but not be fatal?

  She’d read about fat guys getting stabbed and barely being hurt. Most knives wouldn’t go deep enough to hit anything major. She didn’t have that much fat, but then...a cleaver wasn’t for stabbing. It was for chopping and slicing.

  Wouldn’t go deep, but it’d go long.

  But she didn’t have that many options.

  ‘The fat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I could do with losing some weight,’ she managed. The longer sentences were...hard. Her words slurred. Her jaw ground as she tried to form words. She could feel the small pieces of bone. She thought it had dislocated the side he’d punched her, shattered the other side.

  ‘You want me to cut out the fat,' he said, like a statement, almost as though he couldn't believe she'd say such a thing.

  ‘There,’ she said, indicating her side with just the smallest movement of her head, where her belly sagged. She wished she hadn’t nodded, but it was a toss-up as to which was worse; moving her head or speaking. Turned out moving was worse.

  ‘This isn’t a fucking game,’ he said, angry.

  His anger didn’t matter, though. She couldn’t be any more scared than she was already.

  ‘I fucking know,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know.’

  He grabbed her side and cut without a further word. From conversation to cutting in an instant and she went from worrying about talking through the pain of a broken jaw to wide mouthed screaming, but with her eyes open, seeing his bloody hands and her flesh being carved away well enough...and yet, somehow, though the slanting sheet of pain, she was still thinking.

  Now, no, now, no... />
  Now.

  She lashed out a leg as high as she could get it. The blow glanced from his temple. His belly, resting on the side of the bath, slipped in her splashing blood. He slipped just enough to drop the cleaver as he threw his arms wide, trying to steady himself. As he moved to the side, she bucked up as hard as she could. She screamed and her shoulders, her side, her jaw, her mind all screamed back at her. She managed to catch him in the face with her blood-soaked hip. Caught him hard enough to make him slip from the bath and crack his chin on the edge, then out of sight for a moment below the edge of the bathtub.

  *

  XV.

  Yvonne growled, steeling herself for more agony, then with the last shred of will and courage that remained, she pulled herself up, closer to her bonds, with her arms bent behind her. She found herself just about high enough to peer over the rim of the tub...she did, hating the whimpering that came from her quivering lips, but unable to stop.

  He was right there, his horrible face, with her blood on him. No more than two feet away from her. And, he looked to be out cold on the bathroom floor.

  How long he'd stay that way, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if he’d wake in a minute, or two. She didn’t know if she could bleed to death from the cut in her side. She’d misjudged, maybe. Maybe she could. One chance and she might yet bleed to death.

  But she didn’t know.

  She couldn’t break free, either. The cleaver was in the bath, but she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. She couldn’t pick it up with her hands bound.

  He’d come around soon enough. She’d die. She didn’t want to die.

  She looked down at the blood flowing freely from her side, and from a deep cut in her hip where he’d dropped the cleaver on her.

  Maybe I'll just stay here, she thought with the hazy logic that was all she had left.

  Might be better.

  Could she even take the pain anymore? She thought she’d known the height of agony through the worst of a migraine, but now it paled, because during a migraine she’d wished herself dead, but now she knew pain while she wished herself alive, and the fear somehow made the pain worse.

  There wasn’t a damn thing she could do...or...

  The cleaver was in the bath. If she didn't try, he would wake up, pick it up, then cut her into pieces.

  Come on, she told herself, goading. Come on you pussy.

  Could she pick up the cleaver with her feet? She thought she could. But then what? Throw it at him? Throw it at the cord he’d used to tie her?

  With my fucking feet?

  Wouldn’t work either way. There wouldn’t be enough force behind it. Not to cut deep enough to kill. She couldn’t reach the ropes with her feet.

  But she could scoot, and with her bum, her thighs, her calves, she did just that until finally she could reach the cleaver with her feet.

  He stirred.

  What now, Yvonne? You're so clever...what now?

  She couldn’t reach her arms with her feet. She couldn’t throw it with her feet over the side of the bath and kill him. But she could reach the ropes with her teeth. Her teeth weren’t sharp enough to cut her bonds. Could she clench the cleaver in her mouth and cut?

  She tried out clenching. The pain was unbelievable. But though the bone was out, and broken, the muscles were in the right place. It hurt like hell but she could do it.

  Do it...

  Despite herself, she swore at the voice...she thought for a second he'd woke. He was down there on the floor laughing at her, playing dead. Some cruel joke...

  It's not his voice, she thought a second later. It's me...I've gone mad.

  Either way...she was wasting time.

  Pussy.

  This time, that thought was from her mind, and she knew she wasn't mad at all. So what, it meant flicking a cleaver at her face? The bastard groaned, right then. It didn’t sound like a young’s man’s voice anymore, either. It sounded like someone older. A harder sound, a deeper bass. She didn’t like it, but then she was right in the middle of a whole list of things she didn’t like and she couldn’t do a thing about any of them right now except maybe flicking a cleaver at her face and taking that one last chance, because when it all comes down, there’s always one last chance.

  It’s not about God’s hand in things, she thought. It’s just what being human is.

  She flicked, and while the cleaver tumbled toward her face, she thought she heard a voice from the walls, or more like tens, perhaps hundreds of voices in a rush of wind, as though a crowd all roared at her at once.

  Kill...him...KILL...

  But then the cleaver hit, and the voices silenced.

  *

  XVI.

  The cleaver flipped through the air. The lights glinted off the blade. She had time to see that, then it hit and the only voice she heard was her own.

  It stuck in her clavicle. She didn’t scream this time, but shouted something guttural.

  Then she heard his voice. She could make out words from him now, dark words spoken in a voice that wasn’t entirely the one she knew...but a new voice. His...but with something else within him, too. But whoever he was, in his head or for real, didn’t matter right at that moment. He was down on the floor and she was in the bath. There was a wall between them. Porcelain and consciousness.

  Sanity, too, but she couldn’t think about his, or her own.

  She heard his hands slide about in the blood on the tiles, like a baby clenching and unclenching its untutored hands in its sleep. She heard, too, time moving on, slow or fast, but moving regardless of her wishes.

  She pulled her head to one side and bit down on the handle of the cleaver with a muffled scream and wrenched it free from her splintered collarbone. Both the biting and the pulling hurt beyond belief – her clavicle and her jaw, both broken, cut, torn.

  No time...no time for blacking out...

  She rolled her head to the right and pulled her hand down and her body up, both as far as strength and bonds would allow. She began to saw.

  He pushed himself up, grunting, speaking in that strange and heavy voice, but as yet she couldn’t make out the words. She could just see the back of his head above the lip of the bath, as he tried to rise, then it disappeared as he suddenly went back down again. There was a thud. His hands must have slipped, and his head hit the floor again.

  She hoped he’d knocked himself out again. But she’d had all the luck she was going to get. He was a fighter, trying to beat the count. Maybe he’d beat it. Maybe he wouldn’t. Yvonne was a fighter, too, though, and she wasn't ready to give in.

  Worry about the rope, she told herself, not him.

  Sawing at it wasn’t easy. She had no coordination. She couldn’t bite down hard enough. Panic, so long subverted to fear and pain, was trying to overwhelm her. She fought that as she fought with the slippery cleaver clenched in her shattered mouth.

  Easy. Go fast, you’ll lose. You’ll die. Because you’ll drop the cleaver. Drop it and you won’t get it back. He will.

  Slowly, so slowly, she sawed at her bonds. The synthetic filaments gave way, slowly. He moved, slowly.

  ‘Bit’th,’ he said. Like he’d lost some teeth.

  Saw a little faster, maybe.

  I can do that...I can...can I?

  She bit down as hard as she could. The bathroom lights dimmed as the pain grew beyond any pain she could ever imagine existed. But the bonds gave way.

  Her arm came free. His head came over the bath. His first two teeth were out and his eyes were still unfocused. She took the cleaver from her teeth, not realizing she knocked her own front tooth loose as she did.

  She roared something. She'd never know what.

  Her hand was numb...she had no idea if she even still held the blade, but swung anyway, imagining it was a giant fucking sword burning bright blue with fire, a headsman's axe waiting to fall. Swung it as hard as she could with a snarl and a scream and smashed the heavy blade deep into his forehead.

  Something else cr
ied out, louder than both of them. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t him, but it sounded very much like it came from the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling. From all around her.

  It screamed and then it was silent. The last thing she saw was blackness, but then, slowly, it turned to light.

  *

  XVII.

  Bright lights woke Yvonne two days later. She found she had a steel frame round her head. At her collarbone, her hip, her side, she had a total of 78 stitches. Her collarbone was chipped, not broken. The surgeon had taken out the chip of bone. She had more stitches in her face, where they’d operated on her jaw. More bone lost.

  She couldn’t speak. She’d be drinking through a straw for months to come.

  She was on a drip, and sedated. She drifted on the heavy painkillers, floating on top of a sea heavy with pain. She thought about blackness, turning to light. Every time she woke the light came, or the dark came, and she could never tell what was her dream and what was real day, real night. She dreamed of the dead, tortured and dismembered and stuffed into a madman’s walls. She dreamed of them crying out for release, and of them crying as they met her before great gates set into the sky. She dreamed of many things. Sometimes they were nightmares. Her landlord, cutting on her, cutting her legs from her body, or cutting her arms away with two swift chops. One dream she had, her head was stuffed into a plastic bag and she couldn’t breathe and when she woke from that one she couldn’t even scream because her jaw was wired shut.

  She thought maybe she’d really died after that dream, and that the hospital bed and the pulling and the itching as her wounds healed was the dream, too.

  Dreams have a way of healing, though. She drifted and dreamed. The dreams receded, a tide going out, coming in, ebbing, flowing, until she drifted to shore and woke, not whole, but not in parts, either.

  Just a woman in a hospital bed waiting to see someone, anyone, just to be sure that she wasn’t dead.