Oh why did I agree to do this?
She followed him into a wide hallway lit by more of the orange flambeaux. Crooked frames on the walls that once held artwork were now nothing more than ripped up canvas. The ones not slashed were spray-painted over with various designs. Nina saw one that looked like a white spiked penis jetting a red spray of blood from the tip, and she quickly looked away only to see the skeleton of a small animal nailed to the wall. A cat, maybe. She put her fist to her mouth to hold back a scream.
“Just a little farther now, good girl . . .” Nina looked up again toward the source of the voice and a bar of moonlight briefly illuminated the bone white body of a man climbing along a web of crisscrossed ropes like a human spider. No. No, that couldn’t be an actual person up there, could it? Before she could make out more, the shadows swallowed him (or it) up again.
It was a design in the ceiling, she reasoned. Some sort of artistic or architectural element.
But it was moving, Nina girl. Didn’t you see it? Can’t you hear it breathing? Use your damn ears. Her mother’s voice again. A pillar of common sense was Janie Quick, but she was right. Over the echo of her heels on the dirty black and white tiled floors and the squeaky rumble of the cart rolling in front of her, Nina could now hear shallow intakes of breath. Wheezes, really. A few drops of water fell on her forehead and she reached up to wipe them off. The salty smell on her fingertips told her a different tale. This wasn’t water. It was sweat, dripping off the thing above her.
Oh dear Jesus, please get me out of this.
When Nina looked down again, the cart was stopped, and she nearly ran into the “butler’s” back. Another shiver wormed its way through her at the thought of touching it. This close, she could now see the thin white strings attached to its arms and shoulders running up to the ceiling. Another one connected to the top of his head. It was indeed a human sized marionette. Nina’s stomach turned.
They were now standing before a pair of enormous double doors. More graffiti marred the delicately carved wood. No strange symbols this time. Just nonsensical yet horrifying words, DADDY FUCK MEAT, in white spray paint. Nina tried to swallow, but her throat felt sticky like fly paper.
The arm of the butler fell against the door in a clumsy attempt at a knock. “Hello, sir. Your goody good girl is here.”
The human spider above her giggled again, a sound that was sure to render her certifiable if she had to hear it many more times. Nina came to a decision right then. Forget the job. Forget the half-mill and her plan to run away with Ramón. Even if the Madam was officially done with her and it meant roaming around the country with a giant target on her back, it would be worth it just to get far away from this place. She would endure anything just to avoid seeing what was behind that door. Before these thoughts could reach her feet and carry her back the way she came, the cart with the puppet butler wheeled around.
Her horror was as immediate and searing as a branding iron on her brain. The laughter from above entwined with her screams in a ghastly braid. The corpse in the cart might once have been a man, but it had since been fashioned into a freakish toy. His skin was leather stretched over bone. White ping-pong balls with black diamonds painted on them jutted from his eye sockets. Decomposition long since reclaimed the corpse’s nose, leaving a gaping hole in its place, and his mouth was a permanent rictus of teeth filed to sharp points. With a yank of the ropes, its hands were suddenly on her shoulders. They felt like giant bird talons.
Nina screamed again.
She tried to push the hands away, but with a deft motion from above, the dead butler’s hands wrapped around the straps of her dress. The thing above her head screeched more laughter.
“Oh no no. Not so fast, good girl. Daddy still has to eat,” he said. Play acting, like a kid with a gruesome set of action figures.
Daddy has to eat. Daddy has to eat. The last words Ramón ever heard his beloved Angela speak, and now Nina understood why.
“No! No, I want out! I don’t want to do this!” Nina screamed, but the thing only laughed louder, and her dress straps would not come free of the brittle fingers holding them. She started beating against its arms, hoping to splinter the bones, but its head shot forward and knocked against hers with a clack, like two billiard balls colliding. Nina rocked backward. For a moment she saw stars in her vision. Then she felt a cold piece of metal slide up her back, lifting up her dress and exposing her back to the cold air before grabbing her bra strap. A hook. This isn’t happening. Please God tell me this isn’t happening. She choked out a sob.
“Come now, good girl. Don’t fight.”
The double doors parted down the middle and the corpse-puppet butler rolled backward, pulling her into the room. She went without protest, because she feared next there would be a noose dropping down from the ceiling to hang her with and she wasn’t ready to give up and die. Not yet. There had to be a way out of this. The flickering blue glow she’d noticed from outside was not coming from a television, but from two or three of those bug zapper lights, a regular fixture of the redneck porch as she learned growing up in Iowa. One hung near the room’s cavernous fireplace. Large mounds of bug corpses were piled up beneath it. Next to that sat a wingchair pointed toward the end of the bed.
Nina heard the freak overhead wheezing and grunting as it moved around. Then something stung the back of her neck and she cried out. A few seconds later, her muscles went completely limp and she hit the floor, breaking free of the corpse butler’s grip and willing her mind to just detach and float upward like a balloon cut from its string.
But it refused. She couldn’t move her extremities, but she still felt fear, still knew exactly where she was and the horror slowly unfolding. It was a powerful and interesting drug cocktail, evil in its refusal to provide mercy of any kind. The way she landed, her head was pointed in the direction of the wingchair and she could see someone sitting in it. Or at least a shoulder of that person illuminated in the blue light. She wondered if it was a guest, or if it was “Daddy.”
A cold pair of hands slid her useless arms up over her head and tied ropes to her wrists, elbow joints, and shoulders, and she soon realized it was her turn to become the puppet. She couldn’t see the thing doing the work, but only smell its putrid mix of sweat and human waste.
“Lay still, good girl. Lay very very still,” he whispered. “Then you can dance for Daddy.”
She heard the thing shuffle back up to its web and then with an immense grunt of effort, he hoisted her to her feet. Nina heard her shoulders pop and she screamed not from agony—the pain was dull and distant due to the drug now pumping through her system—but from terror. He pulled the strings from above, and her arms flailed around as she turned and twirled under no direction or volition of her own, like a drunken ballerina, her head flopping back and forth on the overcooked spaghetti noodle of her neck. The ropes dug deep into her skin, but she could only dimly sense the pressure. The pain would later be enormous, though, if she would still be alive to feel anything.
Her useless bare feet, dangling from her equally useless legs, dragged along the floor toward the enormous bed as this horrifying charade continued. She passed the wingchair as she went. “Daddy” was mercifully shrouded in darkness, but she knew she’d see him soon enough. This sideshow would continue until it consumed the last of her mind. That’s how it worked for all the good girls. Finally, she reached the bed where another of the bug zappers hung from one of the posts on the headboard, and with a hard yank of the cords, the freak pulled her up onto it and let her fall back with a heavy thump. The crispy corpses of dead flies and other bugs slid down the pillow, piling up against her neck. Then the freak lowered himself down by his legs like a well-trained acrobat on a trapeze. He was a hairless specter of a thing with long, spindly limbs and knobs of spine prominent beneath his translucent skin. He looked like he should be too weak to move, but then she realized with revulsion he was nothing but lean muscle, and he pulled her legs onto the bed with little effort.
“Please . . . please,” she whimpered, knowing it was useless but unable to stop herself. “Don’t do this. Whatever it is you’re going to do, please . . .”
He looked around at her then, and another chunk of her eroding cliff of sanity fell away. His eyes were more insect-like than human, with shiny black orbs bulging out of their sockets. A third one bulged out of the center of his forehead, but that could have just as easily been makeup. Nina’s fragile mind insisted that this be so, whether it was or not.
His cheekbones were so sharp and prominent they looked like they could tear through his skin. Like the butler, his teeth were filed to sharp points. He licked them with his tongue, which was as white as a sun-bleached slug, and blood spilled from his mouth, running down his chin. A pleasured moan escaped him, and she knew her pleas were useless.
Nina couldn’t turn her head, so she just closed her eyes. The imprint of that horrible face remained on her retinas, but she couldn’t open her eyes again if she tried. They felt like weighted shades. She floated off into some fevered state of semi-consciousness as the thing spread her legs apart and bound them by the ankles to the bed. Right then, she understood the other women who came here before her. They were trapped in a looping nightmare of this place, and she wondered how much worse things could possibly get before they were over.
A sharp slap to her cheek forced her to open her eyes, and she cried out. His upside-down face hung mere inches from hers. His blood-rotted breath hit her face like a hot blanket of spew and she couldn’t recoil no matter how hard she tried. Burning bile rose into the back of her throat and she swallowed it back.
“Daddy’s ready to eat now. Be a good girl. Keep your cunny cunt niiice and wet,” he whispered.
He wiped the tips of his fingers across her eyelids before climbing back up the rope, giving Nina a full view of the horror standing at the end of the bed, bathed in a blue wash of light. His face was little more than a grinning skull covered in a wiry cap of gray-black hair, and he wore a tattered gray business suit that looked to be at least thirty years old. His teeth weren’t filed points, but they gleamed a shade of white that could only be paint. Ping-pong balls filled his eye sockets, just as they had with the butler, but instead of being painted with black diamonds, they were more lifelike with irises colored a corrosive and hateful green.
Then something occurred to her, and maybe it was the gray hair and the suit, but “Daddy” must be Hank Ballas. The real Hank Ballas, if he were still alive, would be pretty old. It made more sense that he was long dead, perhaps even murdered by the human spider, the puppet master orchestrating this whole freak show, the thing hanging above them that kept calling this dressed up dead guy “Daddy.” But none of these realizations destroyed the flagging remnant of her calm. That honor belonged to the thing jutting from the open fly of Hank Ballas’s pants. It was an instrument of pure torture and mutilation, white and covered with spikes, and at least as long as her forearm. It would ruin her. It would likely even kill her. But not right away. No, it would be a slow, rending horror, like being flayed from the inside out. Nina tried to close her eyes, but she realized with a panicky dread that when the freak brushed her eyelids a minute ago, he was gluing them open. Now, like her, they had no hope of release. Not without suffering major damage. As the demented son of Hank Ballas lowered the corpse of his father onto her, Nina did the only thing she could do. She screamed until she knew nothing more.
Chapter 2
Ramón Takes a Detour
He sat in the Town Car in front of the Ballas estate, waiting as he always did for the deed to be done. The last of his coffee gone from his thermos, he was now flipping through the paper when the screams inside started up again. They used to upset him, those screams, but he’d heard them so many times over the years they now washed right over him, becoming nothing more than a signal that the nastiness happening inside the house was business as usual.
He had always given the girls a chance to run, but every one of them refused. It was like they had been conditioned after so many years to suffer any amount of torture for money. And they all wanted to take the money and run. Ramón knew from personal experience how hard it was to resist the temptation of free cash and the open road.
The girls trusted him. Some even sympathized with him. He’d always had one of those faces—the round eyes and down-turned mouth of a sweet old dog no one would ever guess would bite. It had even fooled his mother growing up, but Madre had him figured out by the time he was ten or so, after one too many missing dollars from her purse. Ramón knew if the Weeping Willow girls learned about the things he’d done in his old life, they wouldn’t be so trusting or sympathetic. He’d grown softer in his old age, but he’d buried too many bodies to be what one would call a reformed man.
Aside from Angela, Nina had been the closest to convincing him to flee. She was smart and a little cunning, a bit like the younger version of himself, and just as prone to bad luck. In the end, though, she still wasn’t smart enough to save herself when given the chance, and that made her like all the rest. Sure, he’d left out some of the more gruesome details, the bloodier parts, but so what? He’d given enough, and these girls had stopped caring about the integrity of their bodies a long time ago. Besides, he was too damn old to run now, too tired of the romantic idea of freedom that infected the heads of the young and later killed most of them with crushing disappointment. The Cassinis had always made sure he was just comfortable enough to want to sit tight and not risk the generosities they’d afforded him, and the older he got, the more comfortable he became. Comfort had a way of killing the romance in just about everybody.
But he let Nina see him drive off before she went into that dungeon. Better to let her think there was hope waiting on the other side of things. He tried to think how long her hope might have held out before her screams began, but that only depressed him more. Best not to think of those things, old man. What’s done is done. It wasn’t his fault. He’d given her an out, but she’d been too foolish and greedy to take it. Ramón knew all about greed. There was no real cure for it but the total destruction of self, and that was what was happening to the girl right now.
Instead of going back to the Willow to pack his bags, he just went back down the driveway, turned around at the gate, and came back. By then, he could see the glow of orange lighting in the windows, which told him the game was under way.
To his credit, he did spend about an hour seriously contemplating Nina’s proposal. The girl was right about him knowing a few people who still owed an old man a favor or two. Enough to help him get passage out of the country. At one point, he even started up the Town Car and put it in gear. He did think about going back to the Willow, packing a bag, and maybe even bringing along some cans of gas to torch this hellhole like it deserved. After that, he could take the girl and dump her in an emergency room with some cash in her pocket, and maybe a note for the doctors telling them who she was and that she needed to be protected from the Cassinis. He couldn’t very well take her with him. She’d need to see a doctor, first of all, and would likely need reconstructive surgery. A girl that sick would draw a lot of unwanted attention, slow him down. Of course, the Family would like as not find her and eliminate her while she was still in the hospital, but by then it would be a mercy to the kid.
But when the screams started inside the house, it was like someone pushed a button on the part of his brain that knew how things were really going to go down, that it was time to stop with the fantasies about skipping town and living out the rest of his days on a Baja beach under an assumed identity. He moved the needle on the gear shifter back to “P,” powered off the car, and continued waiting.
Ramón didn’t know what really happened in the house. Didn’t want to know. The girls’ mutterings were enough to scare him. He only ever stepped inside the place far enough to grab the suitcase always waiting just inside the door. No doubt the actual events were a nightmare—he’d seen the aftereffects too many times to count. Not
just the madness, but the lacerations around their arms, and the bleeding. So much blood, in fact, that it ran in little streams down their legs, leaving pools on the Town Car’s floorboards and leather backseats. He was shocked any of them survived, but the Madam had plenty of help to fix things up so they could keep working, at least on a limited basis. All of them eventually went away for good, though. They were just too broken, both in their heads and down below, and no john wanted to fuck a broken girl, even at a steep discount.
The ordeal was nearly done. He could judge the end of the ritual as much by the intensity of the screams as by the coming sun, and hers were fading fast. Eventually, they would stop for good. They always did. Ramón pulled an old silver pocket watch from inside his jacket and checked the time, like some ghastly train conductor. It was just shy of eight o’clock, right on schedule. He decided to wait out the last couple minutes on the porch. Stepping out into the cool, dewy morning, he adjusted the cuffs of his jacket and walked up the steps, listening for the cues. There would be a rolling sound followed by a heavy thud and a weak couple of knocks signaling it was okay to open the door and collect both the girl and the cash.
When nothing happened after a few minutes, he checked his watch again. It was three minutes past. Unusual. Ballas was normally about as dependable as a Yellowstone geyser. Ramón shuffled his feet and tried to tamp down his mounting impatience. The Madam had never laid out a contingency plan for what to do if Ballas either stiffed on the money or decided to keep the girl longer, but Ramón supposed he would go inside and collect. The thought of venturing any deeper into the oversized crypt chilled his blood, but not nearly as much as the thought of coming back to the Weeping Willow empty-handed.
Strings Page 5