Текст книги "Fear Itself"
Автор книги: Duffy Prendergast
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
I answered with my silence. I didn’t want to have sex with Amber anymore. I felt vile for having given in to her pressure and at having included Melanie in our dirty sexual banter. I was also disgusted with myself for being the passive submissive. I was the blackmailed man-whore serving the satanic bitch who held my life in her hands. I wondered how I could ever have taken Amber for the sweet misunderstood housewife. She was cheating on her husband just as Catherine had cheated on me. She was no good, but she had a hold over me and for the first time since I had come to Kansas she had clarified our roles; had all but stated her position of power over me. For the first time since I had slept with her I felt cornered…like a mouse.
“Well lover, are we gonna fuck or what?”
* * *
I changed the bed sheets and sprayed air freshener in my bedroom before I climbed into the tiny tub and tried to wash Amber’s musky balm from my body as I bathed in the stubby tub filled with scalding hot water. I may have been paranoid but I couldn’t seem to escape Amber’s tincture and I new that Melanie would be stopping by to see how Amber had taken the news. I was such a coward. I wanted my freedom but I was willing to settle for tranquility. Not that I necessarily felt that I was ready to commit to Melanie; but I felt trapped, like a ping-pong ball being batted in an unending volley.
I heard the kitchen door open and close followed by soft footfalls and then the bathroom door opened.
“Can I join you?” Melanie said with a teasing tone.
“Sure there’s room on the spigot.”
She kneeled down next to the tub and then reached into the water. “Yes, there is room on the spigot.” She leaned into me and kissed me prying my lips apart with her tongue. Our kiss lingered for a moment before she released my lips.
“You’re going to get wet.”
“I hope so.” She stood up and grabbed a towel from the chrome-plated towel rack that was slowly pulling away from the yellow plastic wall tiles and she held it open for me as I stood.
“How did Amber take the news?”
I drew a breath and toweled myself dry, “She didn’t take it at all.” I said dejectedly.
“What do you mean?” Melanie’s voice carried a mixture of agitation and deflation.
“I mean she refuses to give me up.” I looked Melanie in the eyes so that she could see in my eyes that I felt helpless.
“It isn’t her decision. It’s yours.” She crossed her arms.
“If you’ll remember, she has something on me.” I draped the towel around my waist and tied it at the side, “I’m not saying that she would turn me in, but the truth is she might. She made it quite clear that it was not my decision to make. I can’t be with anyone if I’m in jail. I can’t take care of Sarah if I’m in jail.” My voice was as of a child pleading for mercy.
“What did she say about us?”
“She was happy for us. She wished us much sex and happiness. She wants us to have a little orgy with her.”
“That cunt!”
“Well you did sleep with her before didn’t you?” I knew it was a low dig but I wanted to put things into perspective.
Her eyes widened in surprise. I could tell that she felt betrayed by Amber for revealing such a private tidbit; and she felt stung by me for saying it.
“That’s what she said anyway.”
She turned away, her face filled with disgust, and walked slowly and broodingly toward the kitchen but I ran, dripping a trail of water behind me, and caught up with her midway to the door and grabbed her by the arm and turned her toward me. I looked into her pretty green eyes and found not a stripper but an injured child. She was willing to strip in front of men, but at heart she was an innocent. She was a victim. I felt a close connection with her. She really had fallen for me. She had been sitting back quietly while she watched Amber come and go and all the while she had been waiting for me to put aside playful things and come to her. I was both flattered at the level of her commitment and warmed that someone so young and Beautiful could feel a genuine love for a wretch like me. I was twenty years older than she. I was an accused murderer with no real prospects and yet she wanted me. And I found, in that moment, that I wanted her too.
“I’m just telling you what she said. Please don’t be upset with me. I’m a little trapped here.” I suddenly longed to have her warm body next to mine for the night. At that moment Melanie reminded me of Catherine in the way that she had exposed her vulnerability to me. And I was a romantic at heart. I wanted and needed her love and comfort and understanding, and I wanted to give her the same.
I tugged her hand but she pulled it away, “You’re playing me.”
I turned to her again and held her hands, and spoke softly, “I don’t know where we’re headed. My life is a complete train wreck right now, and I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I’m not playing with you.” I drew a deep sigh, “I would like to be with you tonight. I would like to take it slow and see where this leads if you still want to be with me. I don’t have any control over the rest. All I can tell you is that Amber means nothing to me anymore. You, on the other hand, mean a great deal to me.”
She studied my eyes for a moment and then she pulled herself to me and kissed me. I led her to my bedroom and closed and latched the door and I made gentle love, for the first time in my life, with someone besides Catherine. And afterwards we spooned and I cupped her breast in my hand and I slept peacefully for the first time since the night Catherine died.
11
For the next few months Melanie spent her nights with me, except on the evenings when Amber would stop by for her sexual servicing. Amber would call me after work on a Friday or early in the day on a Saturday and she would inform me of what time she would be arriving. She never came out and directly coerced me but whenever I would make an excuse as to why I could not keep my appointment with her she would retort with a veiled threat such as: I don’t think that would be wise of you, or more directly, That detective Bergant called me again today looking for you. Do you think we should invite him to share our bed?, and I would ultimately capitulate
I must admit that at first I was a little confused at Amber’s obsession with me; at her unwillingness to relinquish control over me. I was nothing special. I’m sure that I was an adequate lover and I was by no means hideous, but I am equally as sure that given Amber’s firm young body, her long alluring blond locks and her undisputable beauty, that she could have slept with any man she wished if she had plied her wares publicly; but upon reconsideration I think she got off sexually on the whole power trip. She just seemed to enjoy the manipulation. She had, in her mind, a sexual slave in me whom she controlled under the guised threat of incarceration. Her orgasms were no doubt heightened with each session in which I acquiesced to her primal demands. She grew bolder towards the end as she brought sexual toys to spice up her play. On the last night that we spent together, at my most degraded moment and despite my fervent protest, she tethered me to the bed with my own neckties (the only four I had). Then she pulled out a strap-on dildo and dangled it in front of me while I shook my head from side to side (my mouth was gagged) then she strapped the device to her body and she raped me while I cried like a little baby begging her to stop with every violent thrust of the un-lubricated plastic prosthesis. Had I known what she had in mind
I never would have let her tie me up. I was so humiliated that I never confessed the violation to anyone, not even to Melanie.
By that time Melanie had all but moved in with me. She had quit stripping altogether and she lived off of her apparently vast savings and she spent her time with Sarah shopping and cooking and cleaning for me. During this time she experienced a strange but understandable emotional pattern in which she would be sweet and loving at the beginning of the week but would day by day grow listless and finally she would become malicious towards me only to become loving and sweet all over again, overnight, in the early part of the week. Beginning Sunday morning Melanie was as sweet to me as a girl could be going out of her way to do the little things to show me that she loved me, like baking chocolate-chip cookies, my favorite, or stopping out at my jobsite with a thermos full of hot coffee, or by simply making love to me in the most tender fashion. But as the weekend approached, knowing that Amber would soon be calling, Melanie would become agitated and short tempered. How could I blame her? For all she knew I was enjoying the sexual sessions with Amber. That is not to say that I deny experiencing orgasms with Amber; I did, but at what price? I was a victim. I had been systematically raped and sexually abused much as she had been as a child. But Melanie probably thought that given our history of a years worth of titillating phone conversations that I actually looked forward to being Amber’s subject. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Melanie did try to reason with Amber, asking her to back-off out of friendship and to let us be a happy couple, but Amber had responded in her catty fashion with the suggestion that the three of us ‘get it on’ together. I suppose any normal woman would have left me under those circumstances; would have turned me in and tossed me to the hounds. But Melanie was a damaged human-being and I was her first male lover. But she grew less intolerant with each passing week. I couldn’t understand why Melanie stood by me throughout the whole ordeal because to be truthful her logic defied me. Had our situations been reversed, had she been the one who was forced to sleep with another man, I could not have stood by her. I would have gone insane with jealousy. It is beyond my comprehension that she tolerated my confederation with Amber; which is why I first suspected her when I woke up to find Amber dead in my bed.
On the night she was murdered, Amber, for the first time since we had been sleeping together, had arranged to spend the night with me by telling her husband that she was spending the night at her sister’s house.
I suspected that Amber had chosen to spend the night with me because she knew that it would cause Melanie a great deal of emotional pain. To give me up for a few hours a week for a physical encounter was one thing but to spend the night with me suggested a more intimate involvement. Amber knew that it would get under Melanie’s skin which lent credence to my suspicion that Melanie had killed Amber. And given the bloody nature of the crime it seemed likely that Amber’s assassination was an act of rage. Amber’s throat had been slit, saturating the mattress and the bed sheets completely, and then the knife had been thrust downward into the area where her heart would have been had she been born with one. It was only natural that my first inclination was to think that Melanie had killed her; but that she did so while I slept on the very same bed spoke volumes about the indignation that she must have realized and the animosity that she felt towards me as well. And who could have blamed Melanie for killing Amber (except perhaps a jury of her peers). Amber had trifled Melanie beyond the human threshold and when Amber decided to spend the night with me, coveting an intimacy that she had to that point not demanded, Melanie had simply snapped. She had brooded, back in her home, like a festering volcano until her imagination got the best of her and she popped a rivet. She stormed over in the middle of the night, used the key which I had long ago given her, to sneak into the house, took a knife from the kitchen drawer and stealthily crept into my room and sliced Amber’s throat where she slept. Like I said before, if our roles had been reversed I would have been a jealous mess. I might have done the same. And the worst of it was that I was the one who stood to lose the most. I would, of course, be blamed; I would be labeled a serial-killer; a repeat offender, tried, convicted and put to death. Once the beast has tasted human blood…
But given the weapon of choice, a serrated knife plucked from the kitchen silverware drawer, I should have known right away that Sarah had done the evil deed. The knife was the very same knife (we only had one large knife in the house with a serrated edge) that Sarah had pointed threatingly toward me the night that I came home drunk from Melanie’s house. Amber, in the midst of a sound sleep, would have been an easy victim even for Sarah.
Sarah had chosen to stay home with me that night rather than stay with Melanie at her house. It was one thing, I suppose, for Sarah to be apart from me until the early hours of morning, but another thing altogether to be apart from me for the entire night. The interesting verity of the matter was that despite the fact that Melanie regularly spent the night in my bed Sarah didn’t seem to have any animosity at all towards Melanie. They were the best of friends. I suppose that Melanie recognized the close relationship which Sarah and I shared and she made pains to let Sarah know that she would not interfere with our kinship; that she posed no threat to her. Melanie, unlike either Catherine or Amber, went out of her way to involve Sarah in every aspect of our relationship except for sex. Melanie welcomed her in our bed in the morning and at night before bedtime and made her the “pickle in the middle”. Melanie and I did not date. If we went to a movie Sarah came too. If we went to a restaurant so did Sarah. Melanie included her in everything we did. Amber, on the other hand, on the nights she would stop by, used every manipulation to get Sarah to go to sleep so that she could have me to herself. Sarah’s resentment of this was no secret. Sarah grew wise and she forced herself to stay awake as long as her little body would let her so as to interfere with Amber’s ambitions. Sarah would deliberately take naps (something she normally refused to do) so that she would be well rested when Amber arrived; and this tactic sometimes resulted in reducing our copulations to one per encounter depending on Sarah’s endurance and resolve.
That Friday night before Melanie left for the shelter of her home we had a miserable argument. I had just come home from work and apparently Melanie had only moments previously answered the phone when Amber called.
“Tell Mathew that I’ll be spending the whole night tonight dear.” Amber had said as though Melanie were the maid.
“Fuck you.”
“So you’ve finally come to your senses! You’re going to join us then?”
Melanie hung up the telephone as I stood across from her in the kitchen covered from head to toe in soot from a hard days work. “That was your slut!” her eyes were red with rage, “She’ll be spending the night tonight.”
“What?”
“Yes, she invited me to join the two of you. I bet you’d like that wouldn’t you?”
I walked up to her and tried to comfort her but she pushed me away, “I’m sorry. What am I supposed to do? Tell her no?”
“Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to tell her that you can’t fuck her anymore. That’s what any loving boyfriend would do.”
“Any loving boyfriend who wasn’t facing life in prison maybe!”
I stormed into the bathroom and ran my bath while I washed the grime from my hands and face while cursing under my breath. Sarah came into the bathroom and tried to hug my leg. “Ah ah! I’m covered in dirt honey. You’ll get it all over your clothes. Wait until I clean up and then we’ll hug, okay?”
“I don’t like it when you fight with
Melanie.” She looked up at me with sad eyes. “It’s okay honey. It’s just a little disagreement. We’ll be fine.”
Sarah hugged my leg despite my dirt and looked up at me with a smudged face.
“Let me get ready now, okay honey?” “Okay.”
By the time I got out of the tub Melanie had left. Her absence at dinner left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I would have liked to have resolved our differences before she left but I supposed that that was not possible. It was the first time we had quarreled with such conviction. I worried that she might not return. I couldn’t blame her for being angry. Amber was deliberately provoking her and I had been weak and impotent.
Sarah and I ate a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs which Melanie had prepared before I got home from work. Sarah had the table set and dinner served by the time I walked into the kitchen fresh from my bath. Sarah also had lit two white candles which she had positioned in glass candleholders molded into doves.
“Birds of peace.” I said out loud with a hint of sarcasm.
“That’s what Melanie said.” Sarah smiled at me from across the table, “Do they really bring peace?”
“Apparently not, but they look pretty.” “Why does Amber have to come over again tonight? She always ruins everything.”
I didn’t want to sour Sarah towards Amber any more than she instinctively had been predisposed since I was sure that we would have to endure her visits for the foreseeable future. “Be nice. Amber has helped us a lot more than you know. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have a place to live.”
“We could live with Melanie at her house.”
“You liked living there did you?”
“Yes. Her house is pretty. Ours is ugly.”
“Well you’re just going to have to get used to our ugly house and to Amber coming to visit because we’re kinda stuck here for a while.”
“What if she dies?” “She’s not going to die.”
“I know, but if she did she wouldn’t come over anymore.”
“No I suppose not. Eat your supper. I brought home a new movie to watch tonight. It’s an old scary movie, but you have to eat your supper or you’ll miss the beginning because I’m going to put it in when Amber gets here.”
When Amber arrived she was carrying her black leather satchel filled with sex toys.
She smelled like a flower garden and she had dressed deliberately sexy in her short red skirt with a low-cut top that revealed the better part of her tanned cleavage. I was washing the dishes and Sarah was clearing the table.
“Hello lover.” She whispered more loudly than she had intended; apparently loud enough for Sarah to hear because when she said it Sarah turned her head and scowled at Amber.
We turned down the lights and sat on the couch. Amber sat close to me but Sarah climbed up and wedged herself between us.
We watched “The House on Haunted Hill” and then we watched “Psycho”. But just after Anthony Perkins was preparing to slash Janet
Leigh into a puddle of blood Sarah’s eyes began to twitter. She fought a courageous fight but her eyelids soon won the battle and she drifted off to sleep. I tucked her in on the sofa and Amber and I retired to the bedroom where, among other things, Amber tied me up and, with a strap-on prosthesis (and despite my fervent protestations while tied and gagged), anally raped me.
Afterwards Amber untied me and I curled up in the fetal position and pulled the blanket overtop of me. Amber climbed into the bed behind me, nudging me to the opposite side of the bed, and she spooned with me and cupped my breast as though I were the woman. I felt completely emasculated. When I woke up the next morning I was covered in blood and Amber was lying flat on her back next to me as cold and grey as a headstone. Her eyes were wide open as though she were staring at the spidery crack in the ceiling. Her face was splattered with a fine mist of blood as if she had caught the stray sprits from a garden hose. Her throat was ripped apart as if someone had taken a large bite out of her neck and the serrated kitchen knife with the black wooden handle was sticking straight up from her chest. How I didn’t wake up during the attack I really don’t know. Sarah must have been particularly stealth in her approach and I must have been sound asleep. I was probably in the midst of a good nightmare reliving my last sexual experience with Amber; after the abuse I had endured I was certainly exhausted enough to sleep through a cyclone. I don’t know. I only know that I woke up, my own naked body smothered in Amber’s juices, to a gruesome scene that caused me to rush to the bathroom and vomit.
I was panicked and my heart was pounding like a snare-drum and my image in the mirror was horrifying; the hair on my naked body was matted down by the thin basting of blood that covered me from head to toe. I looked as though I had bathed in a tub of claret.
I crawled from the toilet to the tub and I put the rubber stopper in the drain and I turned the handle to the hot water on full. I got to my feet and I stumbled to the kitchen, steadying myself on the bathroom doorframe, and then grabbed a large black garbage bag from under the kitchen sink and I scrambled back to my bedroom and latched the door from within. The knife made a blood-curdling meaty noise
(like the sound of a large chilled shrimp as you bite into it) when I pulled the knife from Amber’s chest. I rolled her body up in the blood-soaked blanket that covered the bed and I pushed her onto the floor (to the side of the bed opposite the door) with a low thud so that the whole mess would be hidden from view should Sarah enter the room (at that point I thought that Melanie had committed the murder). I flipped the mattress over on the bed-frame and I pulled some clean linen from my dresser and I made the bed up with a fresh blanket. I wrapped the pillows into the bed sheet and I bundled them and stuffed them into the garbage bag and I pulled the yellow drawstring and tied it shut. I took a brand new quilt, a thick dark blue comforter still wrapped in cellophane, from my closet and I stretched it out on the bedroom floor. I rolled Amber’s body, bloody quilt and all, into the clean blue comforter and I shoved it up against the bed once again on the side opposite the door.
Back in the kitchen I found a bottle of citrus cleaner and a roll of paper towels. I returned to the bedroom and I wiped the blood from the bed frame and the wall and the nightstand and the alarm clock which showed the time, in red boxed LED letters, to be eight twenty-seven in the morning. I sprayed the kitchen knife with the citrus cleaner and I wiped the blood from the blade and the handle and then I wiped the hardwood floor from my bare footprints at the bed and through the hallway and the living room and the kitchen and all the way to the bathroom, around the toilet and over to the tub. The whole house smelled like a citrus grove.
I went back to the bedroom and closed the door and I slipped back into the bathroom and fell into our tiny tub and I tried to soak the death from my body and melt the stress that was balled up in my abdomen. The water turned red as soon as I sank myself into the balmy stew. I washed my hair and scrubbed my skin with a soapy washcloth and I ground my fingernails into the green bar of soap to loosen the blood that had seeped beneath them. But I still didn’t feel free of the death so I drained the tub and drew a new bath and I washed myself all over again.
I knew that no matter how many baths I took that the feeling was not going to leave me. It wasn’t the blood on my skin that was causing the wretched feeling in my stomach, it was the death; the second death in my own bed in twelve months time. Death was following me. I felt like Angela Lansbury in an episode of “Murder She Wrote”. Death was waiting for me at every turn. I began to wonder if the demons that haunted me in the dark might not be real. I wondered if I was cursed. I wondered what it was that I had done to provoke my god to torture me so.
This is going to sound a bit cold– hearted, but there was a rather urgent problem I needed to solve. As I sat soaking the death from my body I also thought about more pressing practical issues like what I was going to do with Amber’s body. I couldn’t keep it. It wasn’t the sort of thing one kept lying around and it would have begun to decompose in a few days and the smell would have become unbearable. I could have buried it, I supposed, but buried bodies always seemed to pop up out of the ground and bring policemen trailing behind them and that wouldn’t do either. Same thing went for dumping the body in the river. I could have dumped it on Melanie’s doorstep and let her deal with her own mistake, but that would not have been chivalrous and it would ultimately have led the police to me anyway. I could have buried it in the basement but the other tenant might wonder why I was jack– hammering the concrete in the basement floor. I was stuck with Amber even after she was dead. The bitch just wouldn’t let me be.
And then it came to me like a cold crystalline flake of snow drifting slowly to the ground; a faint wisp of an idea. An insane thought, I supposed, but it was the only semi– logical idea I could summon. I would return her, like an unwanted gift. I would deliver
Amber back to where she had come. I would give her back, anonymously of course, to her husband. I would drive her home.
Looking back on the idea, it was a ludicrous solution. But I was under an incredible amount of stress. My life was at stake. My thinking wasn’t all that lucid. In hindsight I should have buried her in the basement or wrapped her up and encased her inside of a concrete wall. But even though things were rather sour towards the end, and even though she used me like a blow-up doll, we did sleep together as lovers before our relationship evolved into the twisted affair that it ended up to be. I just couldn’t bring myself to disrespect her remains in such a way. And her family; her children, deserved closure. Besides, I figured if they had a body they wouldn’t come looking for her in my house.
The knot in my stomach didn’t disappear altogether, but the twisting in the base of my gut, like the wringing of water from a wet shirt, had stopped wrenching tighter. My idea was so ludicrous that I thought it might actually work. If I returned the body from where it came they wouldn’t know where she had been killed. There was, of course, the chance that Amber had told her sister where she was going, but probably not specifically. My house was addressed to Melanie. And Amber didn’t likely have anything with my address on it. And then again Amber might not have told her sister anything at all. In any event my options were limited and I had little to lose in the effort.
Having resolved the issue, in my mind at least, I arose from the tub with the energy garnered from discerning a clear plan of action.
I realized that as disturbed as I was by Amber’s death, not to mention having slept with her bloodied body next to mine for god knows how many hours, that the knot in my stomach was more the product of my indecision and fear than the horror of the event. I felt more than just a little bit liberated. I even began to feel flattered that Melanie had killed Amber on my behalf. She had killed out of jealousy as I saw it, and no matter how ugly a beast jealousy can be, let me tell you that it can have a powerful affect on the subject’s ego. I was actually lifted emotionally. Through all of the misery I had experienced over the previous six months I had been relieved of an extraordinary burden with Amber’s death and I had a lover in Melanie who would kill for me. I actually started to whistle happily as I dressed and despite the smell of death that still thickened the air I cooked a hearty breakfast of French-toast, potato pancakes and fried ham and eggs.
It was then that I noticed Amber’s purse sitting on the kitchen chair. I quickly grabbed it and bolted to the bedroom. Amber would certainly not have left her purse behind. I had to pack it into the plastic garbage bag with all of the other bloody objects. But before I could shove her purse into the bag I noticed the corner of a white envelope sticking out of a side pocket and curiosity got the best of me. Inside the envelope was a letter addressed to both Melanie and me. It read:
Dearest Melanie and Mathew,
Sorry to be such a rotten bitch! I hope the two of you fuck each other until death do you part. It was fun while it lasted. If you ever need a third don’t hesitate to call.
Love Amber.
I was shocked. The heartless bitch had a heart after all. Her spending the night was her version of a fond farewell. The ass raping she had given me was not the kindest send-off I could have hoped for, but she was planning to set me free. I suddenly felt guilty for feeling glee at her demise.
I restored the letter to the envelope and slipped it into my shirt pocket and I reached into Amber’s purse and found her cell phone. I removed it and put it into my pants pocket. I would need to destroy it (it contained my phone number). Then I shoved her purse into the garbage bag and I hurried back to the kitchen and tended the skillet.
I was in the midst of cooking breakfast, the realization that Amber’s body lay cold and stiff no more than thirty feet from where I stood no longer the arduous burden it once seemed, when Melanie came trundling up the kitchen stairs.
“Good morning.” I turned and smiled at her and then returned to my cooking but in the flash glance that I had taken I realized instantly that Melanie didn’t look at all herself. Why should she? She had killed someone and it was playing on her mind as it would any sane person. I turned off the burner on the stove and I slid the last few pieces of French-toast onto the serving plate and I sat it on the table; then I removed my apron, a full-length white chef’s smock that Melanie had brought from home at some point over the recent months, and I turned back to Melanie to give her my full attention. Her eyes had bags under them from lack of sleep. She wore no makeup. Her hair was disheveled as were her clothes, the very same clothes she had worn on the previous night. Despite the horrible act she had committed, an act of love as far as I was concerned, I saw nothing but her beauty.
She spoke in a low almost inaudible baritone growl, “Where is that cunt?”
