"You will sit down and listen to what I have to say before you have any hope of exiting through that door."
He was nuts. But she did it. She sat down (collapsed more like) well away from him on a chair next to a table and folded her arms crossly.
"Okay, what? Say what you have to say you freaking loon."
"You left Wyatt today. I mean that. You left him. For good. You are not going back."
"That's not for you to say, Malcolm."
"Ah but it is, Angelique. You see you are mine."
"WHAT?"
"You came to my Performance Center. To me. It was only your age that kept you from me, an unfortunate circumstance now rectified. My nephew is your past, he is done."
"What are you talking about, Wyatt is my husband."
"Perhaps at some point in the future I will rectify that too. It matters not. I am who I am, Angelique, and you came into my world and you are mine now. To do with as I please. That is your reality now, and I want you to understand it quickly. Though I would prefer --and I assure you it would be far easier for you-- if you consented."
"You're crazy."
"I am being extraordinarily patient with you, Angelique, as is not my norm. Usually by this time you would be sprawled on the carpet. Has Wyatt told you nothing about me, about my tastes?"
Her face fell.
"Ah, I see you are finally beginning to cotton on," he said with an ironic smile.
"Me? You want me for... that stuff?"
"And I shall have you."
"Never, Malcolm, never! I'd rather die than be... with you."
"You will soon learn that 'never' is a woefully short period of time, Angelique. I will let you get acclimated, fully recuperated. I will be back again later, we will have a late supper and I will explain some housekeeping responsibilities to you. And some of your other obligations as well." He stood and walked to the door, she followed right behind him. He simply grabbed her as the door opened and shoved her back, closing the door behind him.
Angelique hacked at the door and screamed but only for a short while, she knew it would have no effect. And her mind raced, churning the possibilities, terror swelling up in her uncontrollably.
Malcolm is a sexual sadist. True sexual sadists are actually quite rare but Malcolm is one. He got his jollies by hiring prostitutes and doing some pretty unpleasant things with them.
God oh God.
She needed a weapon. Turning, she ransacked the suite, discovering all its contents, none of them useful, coming to the same conclusion Lexa had --she was by far not the first victim Malcolm had imprisoned in the bedroom. She did the chair-thrown-at-the-window thing, and Malcolm, watching below on his monitors, smiled. That window had cost him a million bucks. Worth every penny. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to sit down again (which got her a wince) though Malcolm was disappointed she wasn't crying her head off, that was the best. He forced himself to wait a bit longer though not his normal length of time --this was Angelique. He had a supper tray prepared and he summoned Donald to guard the entranceway when he went in.
"Angelique," he said to her once again, his voice calm and mocking as he walked to the table placing the tray upon it. "Come."
She was glaring at him, he expected that. He even liked it. She moved soundlessly to the opposite side of the room and remained poised.
"I thought we might like to watch some video while we eat, give you a better idea of things," he said, his expression cold-blooded, puerile. Malcolm pulled a remote control from his pocket and pointed it at the flat screen over the fireplace mantel that he usually used for showing his guests consent videos so they would know what he wanted from theirs. The screen flickered on and there he was --with Lexa. Doing the things he liked to do. He turned the volume up so Angelique could hear Lexa's screams vividly. He watched the blood drain from her face and her jaw drop open.
"Stop it! Stop it!" she shouted. He ignored her. In desperation Angelique launched herself at the flat screen to put her fist through it. As her fist connected, her antique "river ice" diamond smashed the glass, exploding it in a spider web craze, enraging Malcolm. He lunged at her, punching her in the face sending her sprawling in just the way he had done to Lexa (and all the others). That cowed 'em fast enough.
"Get... up," he ordered, his voice sharpened.
Angelique rolled onto her back peering up at him, feeling something warm trickling down from her lips. She reached up and then looked at her hand. Blood. She didn't know if he had done that or the exploding flat screen had. For a moment she wasn't going to get up for the simple reason he had told her to, but she saw his shoes, all black and shiny by her face and knew one of them would be sent into her ribs (or worse, her head) soon if she didn't move. Still, she took her time in getting leadenly to her feet trying to come up with a solution. She came up with nothing. Bottom line was, he was bigger than her and obviously very, very much stronger. She remembered the power she'd had with Wyatt, the glorious power. But that seemed to be gone, there was nothing there, like it had been only a little light that had been dwarfed, swallowed up, snuffed out the moment she'd entered this room.
"Malcolm," she gasped, "whatever it is you..."
Bam!
He seized her, ripping her clothes from her, hitting her, bashing, battering and hammering her, she fought the best she could but she was no match for him and he soon had her naked under him on the bed.
"Open," he hissed in her ear.
In her terror it took her several seconds to process what he wanted.
"Go to hell you shithead!"
He bent his face down to her, to pry her jaw open and shove his tongue into it. Instead he got her blood on his own tongue, he gagged, he spit. His imagination told him it burned, like acid, he thought he even heard a soft hiss as it touched him. Jumping off her, he sprinted toward the bathroom where he rinsed his mouth out under the sink tap. Angelique staggered off the bed into the far corner of the room, panting. He returned from the bathroom wiping his face with a towel scrutinizing the blood still dripping down her face.
"Come morning, Angelique, we begin again. You will consent. To everything I want from you. As did your friend," he sneered. "I expect you to be as... entertaining... as she was." He strode to the doorway, placed his hand against the square of black glass and the door ground open. He left and the door swung securely shut.
Angelique was reeling but even so she knew she was naked and she wanted clothes. Her own were in shreds around the room. She teetered precariously to the small closet she'd found full of clothes and put some on. She wanted to collapse on the sofa but knew if she did her fear would swamp her resolve and she would remain there frozen not getting up until Malcolm's eventual return.
You know you have to do this, it's the only way, and it's not like you don't have the experience she mastered herself in macabre fashion. She walked to the bathroom as quickly as her injuries allowed and turned on the bathtub's spigot.
Below, Malcolm was pleased. She was going to try and wash himself off her, she'd discover his special soap. He watched her return to the bedroom searching for something, finally she found them, her shoes. She put them on. That made no sense and he scowled.
It was an excruciating decision but she just couldn't face him doing those things to her, the things she'd watched him do to Lexa. She couldn't. And there wouldn't be any point to it anyway. He'd let Lexa go. No way he could let her go, he couldn't, she had Wyatt. If she ever breathed a word of this to Wyatt, Wyatt would kill him. Malcolm'd know that. He'd never take that risk. No, she had two choices. To go through the horror he had planned for her and then die, or die now.
And if she died maybe she could come back again. In her heart she knew that was not so. Whatever had happened to her before had been a mistake, a Great Cosmic Fluke, it would not be repeated. No, she would die and Wyatt would spend the rest of his life thinking she'd left him.
But what choice did she have?
So she told herself to believ
e it, that she could come back, the illusion being the only thing that gave her the strength to do it.
As she moved to the bathroom she heard a crashing noise and the room lit up in a blinding white explosion. Lightning. A thunderstorm.
"NOW?" she protested, like the Great Beyond super had it in for her. "I wanted it last time." Tears rolled down her cheeks and she began sobbing. Maybe, after, if she got really lucky, that rain might burn. Malcolm's house incinerated.
And above, the thing that walked the heavens shrieked in anguish, its tears and fury bombarding the house of Malcolm Cochran who glanced out the window cursing the bungling inadequacy of weatherpeople who couldn't even predict a simple nighttime thunderstorm.
Malcolm waited eagerly for Angelique to get undressed, he enjoyed his voyeurism, in fact he planned on replaying the video and viewing it again later. Instead of undressing though, Angelique just stood there numbly, watching the tub fill.
"Stupid bitch," he said at the monitor, disgusted, "get on with it."
Finally she did. She turned and opened the drawer of the vanity and removed the blow-dryer. It wasn't until she plugged it into the wall socket that Malcolm Cochran began to comprehend, but the full realization didn't come until she stepped, with her shoes on, into the bathtub holding the blow-dryer to her chest.
Right next to her heart.
I'd rather die...
NOOOOO! he howled, he screamed, running as he'd never run in his life, inane chaotic thoughts scorching his brain as he blasted out of his study, down the hallways, up the stairs, if Tinka had appeared he would have run right over her.
SHE COULDN'T DO THIS.
The blow-dryer was old, it had belonged to the very first victim of his secure chamber, and that was years ago. He knew it would have no modern safety features, and his house, his house was old too. He didn't like strangers in it, monkeying around with it. He'd installed no ground fault circuit interrupters in the bathrooms.
He had heard of people dying this way, blow-dryers electrocuting them in the bathtub. No, no, no! It would make him a murderer.
Buried deeply under mounds of consent papers and videos, under layers of denial, rationalization, justification, and rigidly enforced ignorance and repudiation, there were a few molecules of Malcolm Cochran's brain that knew what he was. The specter that was never acknowledged much less confessed. Barely, he had come to terms with that quashed and suppressed knowledge and it had been no small struggle. And the way his twisted soul had done that was by thinking one thing.
I'm not a murderer.
He let them live. Always. And that infinite risk he took always paid off. He wasn't like those sickos he read about that left rotting corpses in shallow graves. He didn't do that. He was a good person, he was beneficent. He gave them money and jobs. Heck, they were better off after they'd been with him, they should be grateful. Even Angelique he would not kill when he was eventually finished with her --he would simply put her someplace permanently secure. Malcolm Cochran's entire psyche was built upon this delusionally convenient house of cards and if Angelique killed herself it would all come crashing down, he knew. He also knew he'd never get to her in time.
In the bathtub Angelique knelt down in the water, glad she'd made it hot. Somehow that made it... easier. Her fingers fumbled for the blow-dryer's on switch.
Wyatt oh Wyatt oh Wyatt... I love you.
She turned the blow-dryer on and its roar sounded foreign, impossible. How could such an everyday sound be like that? Because it's about to kill you, that's why. She forced all the air out of her lungs. When the electrocution came, if she inhaled, she wanted it to be water, lots of it.
A movement caught the corner of her eye, she looked up.
Malcolm Cochran was in the doorway, his face beet red, charging through.
"No, Angelique, NOOOO!"
"Bastard," she spit at him, she didn't want him there for this. But she knew the dithering time was done. "Wyatt!" she proclaimed as her last word, launching herself forward, face down.
It wasn't an explosion or even a loud noise. It was more of a soft crackle as the blow-dryer hit the water, the sound of her body splashing jerkily against the sides of the tub made more noise. No, in all of it, it was only the water that acted bizarrely.
It danced. Little tiny droplets of water hopped up into the air then fell back down in a faint patter of rain at the same time the whole bathtub turned orange then gold then blue-white then nothing. A bolt of lightning crashed into the forest near the house and a tree exploded.
And Malcolm Cochran screamed so loudly he tore the back of his throat. He threw himself across the room wrenching the blow-dryer's cord out of the wall socket then plunged to Angelique's mostly submerged body. He seized her, heaving it out of the tub, banging her lifeless head against it, not caring, laying her flat on the floor and feeling for a heartbeat. There was none.
She could have told him that.
She was right above him, the asshole. She was spirit again, but this time she knew the ropes. She knew there was nothing she could do to him, not in that condition. All Angelique could do now was to go say goodbye to Wyatt, knowing he would not hear her. She was going to spend the rest of Wyatt's lifetime looking for a way for her to come back, knowing that it just wasn't going to happen. But if it did, she would destroy Malcolm Cochran, not for killing her, but for the pain Wyatt would be going through at her disappearance. So she touched Malcolm, she collected. She collected the knowledge she would need to hurt him if she ever did find a way back. The other she almost didn't, but she did, she collected it just out of curiosity, she wanted to know, not that it made any difference now. She rose up and flew out to the bedroom to leave, and it happened.
Something grabbed her.
She was slammed backwards, slammed, hard. She felt herself whipped right past Malcolm, and sucked downwards.
Back into her body.
And in that infinitesimal fraction of a moment when she was both spirit above and physical below, she registered what was happening. She felt her nose pinched, his mouth on hers, his foul putrid breath filling her lungs and she thought I'd rather be dead before darkness claimed her.
Above her, Malcolm desperately felt her neck once again and thought THANK GOD. He'd punch-thumped her chest but good, right over her heart, and stopped the fibrillation. She had a heartbeat again. He waited. Finally. A gasp, a gurgling rasping breath. She was breathing.
God damn her. God damn her to hell! Oh the things he was going to do to her.
*****
"Welcome back," Malcolm said in a hoarse gritty voice. "You dim-witted little cunt."
Angelique was in the bed, her eyes fluttering open, foggily staring into the malignant glittering eyes of Malcolm Cochran. Oh God she hurt. Everything was too loud, too stabbing. It felt like all her nerve endings were fried and then she remembered they probably were.
"You have lost all bathroom privileges, you will use a chamber pot. When I let you wash, Donald or I will be with you. If you do anything to hurt yourself I will kill Wyatt." His words seemed to ricochet about the room in one great lethal salvo.
She struggled to understand, put everything back in reliable reference.
Go fly a kite in traffic was all she came up with but that wasn't what she uttered before she passed out again.
"You win, Malcolm," she lied complacently, relieved to still be alive and unfazed by his threat against Wyatt though morbidly fascinated by his willingness to make it.
"No surprise there," he smirked in satisfaction.
She awoke once more but this time she was alone. The room was silent, dark, moonlight was trickling in through the large window where raindrops still lingered. She remembered in her original search she had found a digital clock bolted to a nightstand (why did any of his victims need a clock, she'd wondered; then she'd realized it was probably for him, he wouldn't want to lose track of time in the room, he no doubt had commitments elsewhere). She looked at it, the twisting of her body agonizing. It was
three o'clock in the morning. She needed to get up, ignore the pain, get to it.
Now or never she willed the blistering aches away, gathering her strength.
She stood and tipped in the direction of the closet once again because she found herself naked and wanting clothes. She didn't turn on any light so it was difficult but she did it, dressed herself, discovering her shoes on the carpet when she tripped over them. She put them on, they were soggy.
His favorite show is Phantom of the Opera. Sometimes I think he pretends he's the Phantom.
She went to the fireplace.
I should have thought of it myself she admonished herself. I read the original novel, I knew.
In her fear and desperation she just hadn't thought of it. And then again, on her own she probably never would have found it.
Holy cow, I almost didn't even ask, she shook her head but stopped immediately because it hurt.
And what she'd asked, the information she'd collected, had been Was there any way out?
Yes, there was. Because Malcolm Cochran pretends he's the Phantom.
In the novel, Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom designed and built a torture chamber for his enemies. The chamber was a room of mirrors. The room heated up, his enemies were baked alive. But anyone who built a torture chamber always built it with the same thing --the fear that one day they'd be the one trapped in it. And so they built a way out, a secret way. In the Phantom's torture chamber it had been a miniscule lever alongside one of the mirrors. In Malcolm Cochran's torture chamber it was a larger lever up the flue of the fireplace. If the power went out, if his electronic door malfunctioned, he would not be trapped inside, he had an out, an out even Donald and Margret didn't know about just in case they got any bright ideas.
But now Angelique knew about it too, she'd collected that information. And a whole lot more. It took her a few minutes of groping around, but she found it and pulled. Immediately the door ground open. She stopped to pull the pillowcase off of one of the pillows on the bed and then she walked through. Silently she padded down the hallways and staircases, her will and anger dominating her fear. As she got to the ground floor she didn't just fling open the door and run. No, in quiet devious contemplation Angelique turned off all the security systems. Then she walked into Malcolm Cochran's study and closed the door. She turned on his computer and typed in his password.
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