Rather You...

“In here!”

Chelle pushed the dark, metal door open and urged me through it. I crashed through the gap. The adrenaline coursing through my body fighting with a terror that threatened to tear me apart. I could barely see through my eyes, they vibrated with fear and a roiling river of tears pushed at the weakening dam, almost undoing me.

Holding it together was a full-time job I just wasn’t qualified for. My bladder vied for my attention and somehow shouted more loudly than almost everything else assailing my beleaguered senses. I was a wreck of a human-being seemingly filled to the brim with piss. The pending humiliation of wetting myself was a straw that had a sharp end tipped with the poison of shame. 

I hit the wall, an instinctual presence of mind had me reaching my hands out to manage the impact. The wall itself was cold and rough-hewn. There was something satisfying about its solidity and substance as I slid my hands down it, my legs going from under me as the last of my strength evaporated.

Over my ragged breath I heard the door shut and for an insane second I thought Chelle was the wrong side of it. My heart took a pause and I froze in the seeming isolation I now found myself in. 

“That was intense,” Chelle breathed the words out with every laboured exhalation.

I turned slowly towards her.

“Intense?” I asked the question even before I saw her face and the triumphant smile she wore on it.

She nodded now and I saw it all for the first time. I saw it and I took it in and allowed it to wash over me. There was a resignation here; I should have known.

“They don’t usually get this far,” she examined me as though I were a specimen, or rather a lamb to the slaughter, “you did well. At one point, I thought you’d get away.”

The cold expanse of the wall was matched with the chill that ran through me. The time for running was over. Sometimes you know what is required, even if it isn’t to your taste, “you don’t need to do this,” I told her.

“Oh! But I do!” she crowed.

“You’re making a big mistake,” I replied.

She stood at the door, her hand on the handle. I looked from the handle to her vindictive face and she saw it all, “there’s no mistake, and don’t even think about trying to get out.”

I sighed and the resignation took hold a little more, “why, Chelle? Why betray me like this?”

She chuckled, a cold and cruel laughter that pinballed off the bare stone walls, “because I can!” Her eyes narrowed and I had a vision of her killing insects, then working her way up to small animals. I wondered how far she’d gotten in her callous career of petty hatred and the murder of innocents. Cats, I thought to myself, this is a girl who has killed cats. Maybe not kittens though, not yet anyhow, “besides, it’s fun!” Her face hardened in readiness to deliver the verbal coup de gras, “I like to watch,” she hissed this phrase in an am-dram approximation of a snake.

Before our exchange could go any further, there was a loud, confident knock on the door. 

Rap-da-rap-rap-rap, that familiar rhythmic pattern so oft used by those who knock on doors. It had no place here. Another morsel of wrong that detracted from the world around it.

I shook my head at Chelle, she read this as my wanting her to keep the door firmly closed, “too late now!” she said cheerily. I wondered what she thought was going to happen. How much did she know? Was she prepared for what was about to happen in this room?

“I hope you have the stomach for this,” I said to her, a melancholy haunting my words.

She trilled with that hollow laughter, “you’re the one who won’t have a stomach!”

With that, she opened the door to reveal a hulking figure in the doorway. The figure that had chased us into this abandoned building and run us to ground. Run me to ground. He stood there before me, in no rush to enter the room. Using this moment to intimidate me. Confident in the knowledge that I had nowhere to go. I could no more go through him than through the door that he had replaced.

“You don’t need to do this,” I repeated these words to him as I pushed myself up to a standing position. No point in remaining on the floor, I wasn’t going to make it easy for either of them.

In answer, he brandished the hook he’d slashed at us with when we’d encountered him in the woods. The silent terms of engagement had been established via the sight of that crude and brutal weapon. There was no finesse here, only a clumsy sadism.

“Chelle,” he said gruffly as he stepped into the room.

“Dad,” she replied.

“He’s your dad?” I asked with incredulity. 

“Yes!” she said proudly.

“Figures,” I said sarcastically.

She grimaced at that, but did not deign to respond. She pushed the door closed and bolted it.

“You’re making a big mistake,” I told her.

She flicked a switch and a bare bulb added inadequate illumination to the space we occupied.

“Mistake?” she said, “you’re the one who made the mistake, and now you’re trapped in here with us.”

I smiled my best shit-kicker smile. A smile that can mean a great many things, but certainly didn’t fit with the current world view of either of these amateur monsters, “no, you’ve got this badly wrong. You’re trapped in here with me.”

An eerie silence crawled into the room and wrapped itself around the both of them, just one of the many devices at my disposal. A piece of punctuation. A noticeable drop to a whole other line in the script. Only this was not in their script and it would take them a while longer to fully understand that this was now my show and they were lucky to have speaking parts. That would of course change presently.

I stepped into the centre of the room, “I thought we were friends, Chelle?” I said this in a pleading and wheedling sing-song voice.

Chelle only gawped at me, then she had the presence of mind to actually do something. She made the mistake of getting angry.

I have always marvelled at how limited people make themselves. They have so much going for them, but time and time again, they fuck it all up. Their insecurities and worries are bad enough. They overthink themselves in ever decreasing circles in favour of actually living. They have such wonderful brains and they are capable of creating immense beauty, but far too often they corrupt their own operating systems and limp around in an ugly pastiche of life that is barely an existence.

Anger is pretty much the worst of it though. Anger is giving up. A mindless emotion that never got anyone anywhere worth going. Faced with any number of viable options, anger is the most ridiculous cop out going.

Worse still, people fall for anger’s false advertising. Anger is not power. Anger is the relinquishing of everything of value. A degradation to a state that is beneath animalistic. 

I smiled a supercilious smile in the face of Chelle’s anger, just to turn the dial up on her stupidity, “you betrayed me, Chelle,” I said in a mocking baby voice, “how could you?”

“Kill her, dad!” she hissed, “the bitch is proper mental!”

Her dad duly obliged. Only for the first time in his murderous career, things didn’t work out the way he had expected them to. He raised his muscular arm in a fine show of power and dominance and he brought it down and around in a majestic killing blow. I have to admit that it was pretty good, right up to the point before the metal met the meat.

Yeah, that was never going to happen. Instead I happened, and I happened quite meaningly to his arm. 

He screamed.

You might think me a little odd, and you are entitled to that viewpoint of yours, but I find certain screams so very satisfying. They speak to me on a musical level and Chelle’s dad’s screams really were music to my ears. For starters, he had a fine pair of bellows on him. In another life he could have been quite an impressive tenor. 

I took a step closer to him, right after his knees buckled. He was cradling the useless part of his arm and trying to understand exactly what it was he was cradling, let alone how it had come to be that his arm had snapped so completely that it only remained a part of him by virtue of the skin that held it there. If he’d let it go, it would have flapped like a meat pendulum, counting the final seconds of his life.

Through all his pain and incomprehension he understood that this was the end. His end. He fell silent and he looked up at me. His eyes transformed by the overwhelming sadness of a dawning comprehension. He had seen this look, but never worn it. It was the dumb look a sheep wears and it was a desperate, last ditch plea for mercy and escape. Not once had he shown mercy upon gazing at that look and he wasn’t rendered stupid enough to expect to receive it now. I appreciated that about him.

This is the part that an ignorant bystander would misconstrue as my taking a moment, perhaps considering whether I should proceed with the pending bloodshed, or perhaps relishing the fatal violence to come. What most miss is that I am, in this moment, deploying another of my weapons. An invisible knife cutting away all the incomprehension and mental protections so that in their final moments, they not only see it all, but they feel it all too.

“You bitch! What have you done!?”

I’d almost forgotten about Chelle. It can get like that. I get very focused at times. I think I might be on a spectrum.

I looked up at my erstwhile friend. My BFF. The lying cow who wanted me to be her dad’s  plaything, “quiet…” I said this softly, but it roared in her mind and she saw something in my eyes. That thing she saw was me. That thing was what I really am. At least I think that’s what I really am, even though I am rarely myself. Mostly I’m your average kind of girl. Well, a little above average if you take into account my grades and all the merit points I get for being really kind and caring. Everyone has two sides to them though, right?

Chelle pissed herself.

The girl I usually am nearly did that just a short while ago. That girl would pity Chelle. She would care about her friend, and she would make sure Chelle was OK. She’d even help Chelle to clean herself up and she’d never say a word about Chelle’s little accident to another soul.

And Chelle would hate her for it. Hence Chelle’s current predicament. Her own worst enemy was Chelle, and she was about to learn a harsh lesson and learn it in the hardest of ways. She would also learn that sometimes you come into the possession of knowledge that you will never get the opportunity to use.

“Not my daughter,” croaked Chelle’s dad.

I looked down at him and grinned wickedly, “I didn’t think you knew that?” I cocked my head and widened that grin of mine, “and your best mate Pete? What a duplicitous bastard he was! But then, you asked him to look after Tracy when you did your stretch and Pete wasn’t one to pass up that sort of invitation.”

Chelle’s dad looked hurt. Genuinely hurt. 

“You didn’t know?” I shrugged, “oops! I seem to have made you angry…”

Chelle’s dad was rallying himself for a second go at me. Not an act of bravery, more a misjudged angry lunge. Anger gets them every time. I’d had enough fun with him. Time to open his neck up.

I’ll spare you any lurid details. Suffice to say that I was thirsty and I was done playing games. With him anyway.

Chelle wasn’t lying. She really did like to watch. Naughty voyeur! I revised my assessment of her down from cats. I think she was more a watcher than a doer. Most people are. I blame the internet and box sets. It’s certainly got worse, and the pickings are less rich.

It was only as I finished up and was wiping my chin along my sleeve that Chelle had the presence of mind to move. She woke up from the mesmerism of my feeding time at her dad and she spun on her heel and fled.

That old fight, flight or freeze response can be hilarious. I swear slapstick comedy was sired by this ancient instinct. We’d had it all this evening, and I do love a variety show. Chelle had been full of fight. Then she’d frozen when I snacked on her dad, and now she was in full flight.

The problem with these instinctual reactions is the exact same problem there is with anger. They have no brain. In fact they fully disconnect the brain. Right now, Chelle was a headless chicken, and even headful chickens are not adept at operating doors, less so doors with a big, metal slide bolt. 

Chelle was delightful. She didn’t even bother with the door handle. Nor did she bother with her hands. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides as she accelerated at the door and used her face as a battering ram. That battering ram was not very effective. It made a cracking sound though. Literally. 

She froze for a moment, then she turned towards me with the most idiotic expression I have ever seen. In the midst of that expression was a very messed up nose. Now I knew what had made that very satisfying cracking sound.

I could see that she wanted to bestow a look of hatred upon me, but right now, she couldn’t quite remember how.

I stepped over the prone and very dead lump of her not-father and I took Chelle in my arms and I embraced her in only the way the very best of friends would embrace. I whispered softly in her ear, “this is going to hurt you more than it’s going to hurt me.”

She screamed.

She screamed and that scream made me wonder whether she was his daughter after all. Or maybe nurture really is more powerful than nature.

She screamed a lot that night. I took my time. I made her feel everything until she went beyond feeling, but still she screamed. She screamed until her lungs bled and the screams were as much a gurgle as a noisy expression of her pain and anguish.

I didn’t have to make it hurt. Of course I didn’t. When I’m with my friends I make them feel good, and I can even make it feel really good. Sometimes, it’s the best they’ve ever felt and they always come back for more. I don’t always kill them. I don’t often kill them. Not straight away anyway. After all, there are any number of ways to kill someone and they can be dead well before they ever expel their terminal breath.

But Chelle wasn’t my friend. Chelle had betrayed me and there’s a special place in hell for the betrayers, but before they go to my father’s place, I like to have some fun with them. Give them a taste of what is to come…