by Will Carver
A private room.
It follows the same pattern as the room before it, only this table is large enough for all fifteen of us to fit around. The table in the centre has two poles; we have a private bar and gambling area. There is also a small stage area to the left as I walk in. In the far right corner is a doorway covered by curtain and a large bouncer lurks in the shadows concealing his identity, guarding the entrance.
‘Please, take a seat, your waitress will be out shortly with your drinks.’
I look at Paulson, my eyes asking him how he pulled this off.
‘I play poker in a lot of fucked-up places, Jan.’ And he smiles at me, raising both his eyebrows twice in quick succession.
A woman of perfect proportion appears from behind the stage area. She is wearing a pair of purple French knickers and nothing else. Her hair is a dirty blonde with a natural wave. I would place her at twenty-seven years of age. Her breasts would suggest that she has never had enhancement surgery, nor does she need it: a 32C unaffected by gravity. Her legs are lean and long, her arms follow suit and her breastbone is evident, but not indicative of an eating disorder. She is 5’ 7”, but her heels make her 5’ 10”. Her face is a symmetrical triangle ending in a perfectly thin rounded chin.
She silences us all with her presence. But she is merely the starter.
Two other beauties appear at her sides. One with dark hair, one with flowing red hair. Each with a small silver tray resting on the hand over their shoulder, each containing a set of champagne glasses. They walk towards us, brunette and redhead with glasses, blonde with three bottles of champagne. All naked apart from the exotic underwear that protects some of their modesty.
Paulson starts to sweat profusely. His face is reddening in anticipation. I can almost hear him salivate.
The next hour goes by in a quiet, seedy way. The women dance around the poles and we watch. They pour us more champagne and we watch. They kiss each other and we watch. We don’t even really talk to one another. In fact, it takes several glasses of champagne to realise that nobody wants to be here apart from Paulson. It makes us all feel somewhat uncomfortable. The fact that these girls seem completely at ease is even more unnerving for us. For me, anyway.
I cautiously check my pager. No messages.
Then another girl appears on the stage with a chair and a blindfold, and I am five minutes away from meeting The Smiling Man, from seeing his face in all its exaggerated reality.
It’s been twenty-four hours.
Amy, Girl 3, is already dead.
I am beckoned forward with a seductive curling of the finger from the Amazonian vision on the stage. The rabble regresses back to their more base instincts seen earlier in the bar as they push me out of our secluded booth. Paulson taps me on the buttocks in a playful way, as if giving his blessing for me to enjoy the imminent pretend fornication. Dry-humping, they call it.
Warily, I edge closer to the raised area. The exquisite temptress in front of me is pulling me in with her doe eyes and long lashes. I look back at the gaggle of reprobates prodding me forward, secretly wishing they were in my position, their chants fading into a steady hum and then a silence. Turning forward again I suddenly find myself on the stage, where the stunning siren forces me to a stop by placing both hands on my shoulders and lowers me effortlessly to a seated position in the chair.
I feel mesmerised, like in a dream. Like I have no power over what is to happen to me.
I am four minutes from my living nightmare.
Four minutes from the smile.
She circles me like a predator marking its territory. I belong to her now. I am under her spell. She never breaks contact with me, always leaving her index finger touching me, dragging it over my shoulders and chest as she circumnavigates my ever-decreasing world. Sultry and smooth, it relaxes me to begin with.
She stops behind me.
Now touching me with both hands she runs her smooth cold palms from my shoulders down my arms to my wrists. I smell her perfume, floral and acidic; as she crouches the whiff of hairspray makes me clear my throat.
Her touch is soft and sensuous as she ties my wrists together, jerking them at the end as she pulls the fabric tighter.
I sense her stand up again and the sound of her heels as she wheels around to face me increases my anxiety. I look left towards the horde, who cheer me on in a silent, smoky bubble, punching the air and blowing inaudible wolf whistles.
I look back at the denizen of sin before me. The light behind this goddess envelopes her in a calming halo and she bends in front of me, her finger pressed against her pursed lips.
‘Sssshh,’ she whispers. ‘Relax. You’re going to enjoy this.’
I feel excited and dirty all at the same time. Audrey was right, this isn’t my last night of freedom, so I shouldn’t allow this to continue, but the danger of the situation has allure. And I let it happen.
She produces a blindfold from the waistband of her panties and places it gently over my eyes, before stretching the elastic over the back of my head to secure it in place.
I’m plunged into complete darkness, despite the spotlight that now illuminates me from above.
I have three minutes.
The music starts.
She circles me again, this time touching more than just my shoulders and chest, using more than just one finger. She moves round behind me and turns her back to mine. Leaning against the back of the chair she lowers herself slowly, so that the satin skin on the back of her legs grazes my tied hands. She lowers herself further until her bottom just touches my wrists and I can feel the warmth from between her legs. Instinctively, I curl my fingers, touching her where I shouldn’t be touching anyone apart from Audrey. She jolts up, feigning surprise, and slaps my hand playfully.
Lowering herself to her knees she licks the tips of my fingers and sucks on the ring finger of my left hand. Then she crawls. With the coiled poise of a jungle cat she eases her way around to my front and perches herself on the floor between my legs.
I can feel her all over me, not quite touching me, but getting close enough to give the sensation. I try to stop myself from getting excited, but she grips my zip in her teeth and teases it downwards. I feel myself getting hard. She pushes her face through the opening and grips my underwear in her mouth, her lips momentarily touching me there. She pulls the fabric up through the gap left from my now open zip, then releases it, snapping it back inside making a sharp slapping sound as my underwear cracks against my body. I flinch with the shock, with the excitement, still getting harder, forgetting that fourteen of my friends and colleagues can see me like this.
Is this real?
Am I here?
This isn’t me.
Two more minutes.
She straddles me. Her back to my chest, she slowly drops down to my lap, her hair tickling my face as she descends. Sitting on my lap, her thighs taking the strain, so as not to put her full weight down, she tenses and releases her gluteal muscles. Gripping and releasing my girth, baiting it into a standing position. She swivels her hips slowly, revolving in time with the music, which now seems louder. I close my eyes behind the blindfold and tilt my head back, exhaling heavily.
She adds in a controlled bouncing motion for variation.
I’m a statue. I don’t want to enjoy this.
Then her entire weight rests on me as she raises her legs up and out into an almost split position. Her hands grab me behind my head, interlocking her fingers for extra support. The bulge in my trousers is now evident and almost protruding from the open zip. She moves back and forth, slowly at first then growing in vigour. She fakes her own pleasure for the onlookers.
Sixty seconds.
She tilts her head back and places her cheek on mine. Grabbing tighter on the back of my head she breathes heavily into my ear, subtly letting out the faint hint of her voice with muted moans. The air from her mouth in my ear is making the hair on my head stand on end, as though someone stepped across my grave. I turn cold.
<
br /> Thirty-nine seconds.
Thirty-eight.
She releases her right hand and puts it down between her legs. Stroking her breast on the way down.
Thirty-two.
Reaching into my zip she pulls me towards her, so that we touch as she writhes against me.
I want her to stop.
I don’t want her to stop.
When a man goes out the night before his wedding and thinks that it is acceptable to pay a whore to do something degrading or to let a woman dry-hump you until you ejaculate into your own underwear, that’s not me. That’s not who I am.
Twenty-five.
She continues, getting more erratic and out of control.
Then I feel a vibration.
At first I think it might be the finale to her act. That she is involving some kind of toy for final gratification. But it’s not that.
My pager.
It clicks me back to real life.
I wriggle slightly.
‘Get off,’ I say in her ear. But she continues.
I move more frantically, lifting my hips, but she just thinks I am getting excited.
It vibrates again and I shout, ‘Get the fuck off me!’ And I lift my hips so high that it launches her on to the floor in front of me.
The music stops and everything is completely silent.
Ten seconds.
‘Untie me,’ I say out loud into the black silence.
Seven seconds.
Silence.
Then just a slight sound. Shuffling feet. Behind me. Getting closer. As if someone large is shifting from side to side. The sound moves around to the front of me and I feel paralysed.
The blindfold is whipped away from my eyes and the spotlight above blinds me further.
As my eyes adjust I see the silhouette of a large figure before me. Behind, in the haze, the stripper or exotic dancer or whore is lying on the floor rubbing her elbow. To my left, the mob stares on, completely still, stunned. But they are not looking at the tall spectre in front of me. I don’t even think they can see him.
The light hits his teeth. Those big yellow teeth that torment my dreams.
The Smiling Man. In front of me. I can’t move.
He bends at the waist, like he always does, and looks me straight in the eyes. All the time smiling. I want to look left to see whether Murphy and Paulson can see this, but I’m too afraid after our previous two encounters. But he isn’t here to hurt me. Not this time.
He stands erect again, never taking his eyes off me, then begins to wag his finger exaggeratedly at me, shaking his head as he does so.
Like a giant smiling metronome he entrances me, but what is he warning me about? What does this mean?
I feel my hands suddenly free themselves from the binding behind the chair. I bring them slowly round to where they belong and look at the clammy palms in disbelief. When I tilt my gaze back up, he is gone. The dancer storms off behind a curtain and the sound returns to my party.
The pager vibrates again.
I wrench it from my belt and read the message as it scrolls across the miniature screen.
They’ve found her. Amy Mullica. On the floor of her flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Girl 3.
While I have been out galavanting like a hormonal teenager, knocking back shots of God-knows-what and getting lap dances, nobody has been trying to prevent another girl from being slain in another suburb of London.
‘What is it, Jan? Are you OK?’ Paulson asks, still fulfilling his role as event organiser.
I can’t answer him at first. It’s all too confusing. Why was he not asking me about The Smiling Man? Why is nobody shocked?
‘Jan?’ he probes.
‘I’ve … I’ve got to go,’ I say under my breath slightly, looking down at the pager.
‘What?’
I look up. ‘Sorry lads, I really need to go.’ And I walk through the curtain to my right, back through the plebeian area of the club. Nobody tries to stop me, nobody even notices me against the backdrop of tits and sweat and £50 roulette chips and champagne and lesbian strip shows and degenerate apathy to the reality that lies outside the exclusivity of this curtained lair of iniquity.
I’m happy to get outside and breathe in the polluted smog that most visitors to the capital complain about. I’m alive. This is reality.
I hail a cab and make my way over to see Amy’s crumpled, naked husk of a life contorted on her lounge floor, just as The Smiling Man had told me it would be.
Girl 3
WHEN THEY FIND me, I’m lying on my side on my dark, dusty, laminate floor. I live right next to a road and the laminate seems to act as a magnet for any microscopic debris that car tyres help to throw up and disperse. No matter how much I sweep it, it’s never clean for long. But the faux wood was the allure when looking for a place to rent in this area. Especially after the first three places the estate agent recommended.
My left hip bruises as it digs into the floor, as I try to release myself from Eames’ grip. If I’d have taken the place up near the Catholic school, the place that had carpets, I might have got away with just a small carpet burn. But that place was too close to the market. The market scared me when I first came here. It felt enclosed. Like the endless stalls selling saris and fabrics and personalised mobile-phone covers, towering so high that they reached a point in the middle where they met, forming a canopy of technicolour ethnic products I would never have a use for. But I found it intimidating. So much so that I was afraid to venture down an aisle advertising £6 haircuts for men and women.
As I got to the end of the market, when I thought I was all the way through, back to safety, a short black guy was shouting at himself about a Chinese family. ‘I pay rent. All their family’s here. Call the police! I’ve had enough of this Chinese shit!’ He eventually found a female community warden to vent his distress at. As he powered ahead towards the aggravator, she waddled along, laid back, always six or seven steps behind him. I dropped my pace and slotted in just behind her. That’s when I decided to never walk down there alone, but the fact that I felt the need for an escort meant I wanted to live away from here. Farther down the road, where the cultural diversity spreads even more and the floors have less carpet and instead of a little burn on your hip bone, you end up with a black bruise the size of an Olympic discus.
But the bruise is the least of my problems.
I can’t swallow. That’s another issue.
I haven’t been to the dentist in five months. The last time I went was a simple check-up, fundamental in maintaining dental hygiene. The time before, I had a filling in my lower left premolar. It was numbed with a local anaesthetic and a cotton-wool tube was placed in either side of my mouth to soak up any excess saliva. To aid with the fact that my mouth was open wide, preventing me from performing the natural reflex of swallowing, an attractive girl in her early twenties stood on the other side to the middle-aged doctor of teeth with a small tube that sucked the saliva I would usually swallow into the vacuum.
But that doesn’t stop you wanting to swallow.
It’s a similar situation now.
A brace, usually used by dentists to hold the mouth open when performing a bleaching or whitening, is wedged into my mouth, forcing my jaw apart so far that the corners of my mouth might tear at any point in the next minute.
So not only can I not naturally swallow, but I can’t bite down either.
But it’s worse than that.
My back hurts.
Nothing to do with the laminate floor, though.
At school, in gymnastics, the girls would demonstrate their flexibility by falling into the crab position. I remember that Kelly could fall backwards from a standing position and place her hands down on the mat to perform the crab. What was even more impressive was that she could then push off with her feet straight into a hand-stand, then drop her feet back down to the floor to end up in her original start position, only four feet behind where she started.
I couldn’t do this.
I had to start from a lying position on my back, bring my hands so that they lay flat on the floor with my fingertips almost touching my shoulders and, essentially, force out a reverse press-up that would end in me holding the crab position for around a maximum of four seconds before collapsing into a heap, resulting in cruel, demoralising laughter from the other girls.
That’s what this feels like. Except, the four seconds I could hold the crab has been eight minutes. And instead of pushing up from a lying position or falling into it from a standing position, I am on my side, my hip digging into the floor, forming a very unattractive bruise, my arms and legs stretched beyond their point of elasticity behind me, the ankles bound tightly to my wrists. My stomach is taut with the force of all my limbs extending in a position alien to me since I was twelve years old.
But that’s not really anything worth complaining about.
I’m naked, still.
The last thing I remember was being in a position that was almost the complete opposite to this, lying on my back with my knees resting on my breasts and my hands gripping my ankles voluntarily, while Eames pushed himself deeper inside me. I remember us both splayed on the mattress, sweating, panting, not saying anything.
And then I remember waking up, still naked, my arms stretched backwards, tied to my feet, my entire weight balanced on my hip on the dirty fake wood floor that enticed me to this location, with my mouth being held open by a mould that is slightly bigger than my jaw can usually open.
That’s nothing, though. It’s merely preparation.
I can just see the white paper and brown scraggly wisps of tobacco hanging from the front end below my nose, which blurs and shrinks into a pink triangle as I peer down the length of my septum. The smell is putrid for a non-smoker, but Eames soon helps with that by clamping my nostrils shut with a red jump lead. He wraps the long wire around my neck twice, before clipping the other end to the wire itself so that it remains secure. The initial pain of the clamping detracts from the constriction of my oesophagus with the cable. It feels almost sexual, but the pain is starting to outweigh the pleasure.