Текст книги "Hero"
Автор книги: Leighton Del Mia
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
6
Master of the house
The equipment’s hum suits the room’s grey, steely surroundings. Machinery that never rests heats the space, but warmth seems inherently wrong for all the sharp edges. Indiscriminate file cabinets filled with data close us in. Files are labeled, alphabetized, slid, shut, and locked into place. Cameras guard the most important corners of the mansion and transmit here. From this underground security chamber, I am even more transcendent than usual. My shoulders depress with a deep and overdue exhale.
“I can handle this, sir,” Norman says to my back. “You have more important things to worry about.”
I ignore him as screen number four of twelve distorts, erratic scribbles marring the black-and-white dining room.
“I know how this type of behavior upsets you,” Carter mutters as he rewinds the footage.
“You say this isn’t the first time?”
“She has fits now and then. So far only during the day when you aren’t around.”
“She should be thankful for that.”
“Give her time,” Norman says. “There’s bound to be some wreckage until she settles.”
I turn to face him with an arched eyebrow. “It’s not the wreckage that concerns me. It’s the disregard for your authority and the lack of a routine. We don’t ask much of her. It shouldn’t be so difficult to acclimate.”
“Put yourself in her shoes,” Norman says under his breath. “It’s only been a week.”
“This is the time for authority. There’s no room for mistakes in our world, you know that. Even the smallest one can change everything. If I could ignore her antics, I would. I don’t give a damn what she does with her days. But disobedience has to be cut off at the source.”
“I understand, but all I’m suggesting is some patience. Maybe I can give her something to make her feel more at home. Is there anything in her apartment she can have?”
“Like I have time to go snooping in her apartment. She seems to like Mexican food—why don’t you have Michael make her some of those chicken tacos?” He frowns when I laugh. “Don’t treat her like such a child, Norman. She’ll adapt. If she doesn’t, I’ll just have to put myself in her path. How’s that for an idea?”
“Not a good one, Master.”
“If she behaves this way while I’m here, it’ll come to that. Once she sees tantrums won’t be tolerated, she’ll have no choice but to accept her situation. However, if she snoops, or if she insists on being difficult, she might unknowingly walk into a world she couldn’t even dream up. A world where I’m this,” I say, touching my chest and lowering my voice, “and that’s information she can never know.”
“Sir?”
I glance down at Carter and then the screen. Cataline sits in a tall chair at the dining table. She’s still for so long that I find myself studying her face. The camera turns her unblinking blue eyes a shade of grey. Her cheeks are probably pink to match lips that are too feminine, too shaped like a heart for my taste. As though she picked a rose from its vase and rubbed it over her white skin. In monochrome, her hair is a tangled inky web waiting for prey. Waiting for me.
“Is everything all right, sir?” Norman asks.
“Why?”
“You made a noise.”
I raise my eyebrows just as Cataline’s body jerks into motion. Without warning, she lunges across the table, reaching out for something.
“Here we go,” Carter says.
7
Cataline
I’ve been bad. Locked in my room for five days because I tried to smash a dining room window with a candlestick. And when I noticed cameras in every shadowy corner of my room, I broke them all. They were replaced by the next morning, but I’ve been imprisoned ever since.
Days are beginning to blur together. I watch time pass on a desk calendar I sneaked into my room from the library. Each day I tear away a page, thankful that it isn’t one of those calendars with jokes or images of baby animals. I know I’m almost two weeks into captivity, and I can spend up to an hour tracing the bold, red date with my finger.
True to his word, Norman is either out of information or refuses to give it to me. Guy obviously pays him well, and I have nothing to tempt his loyalty. The thought always makes my shoulders slump, and my posture grows poorer by the day.
Norman brings me the things I ask for and checks on me from time to time. For good behavior, he has Carter free my ankle after a couple days. But he won’t engage me in conversation. Before I was confined to my room, Chef Michael was easier to get talking, but only to a point. It’s as if there’s a barrier in our conversations that nobody will leap—and it’s not very far from the starting line.
Tonight, I’m in bed, staring up at the mesh canopy. The more I want sleep, the more I need escape, the harder it is to catch. Every night I try to understand my new reality. If I’m to be sold or prostituted, why am I here? Shouldn’t I be locked up in a room with other girls, stripped of even my most basic rights? Is there some other use for someone like me I haven’t thought of?
My mind plays a constant loop of scenarios, mostly what I could’ve done differently. I imagine not holding Guy’s eye contact in the restaurant and not inviting him to sit with us. Not inviting danger into the booth next to me. I dissect my current situation, examining it for loopholes in much the same way I run my fingertips along all the mansion’s walls.
Before my outburst, I spent hours in the library finding escape in the pages of books. I also discovered a darkroom and asked Norman for a camera, which he promised to try and get from “the Master of the House.”
Since my punishment does not allow me even books, boredom infiltrates the days in my room—but anticipation rules them. I’m growing desperate to know what Guy’s planning, so much so that I’m tempted to investigate the fourth floor once I’m released back into the mansion. Sinister thoughts feed off my ennui, breeding fear and paranoia. I wonder if the cameras broadcast to the entire world. Maybe I’m an experiment, and people are watching me right now from their living rooms.
I must have fallen asleep, because I wake up to screams. Realizing they’re my own brings me no comfort. In my nightmare, the cameras transmitted footage right into people’s living rooms. They shoveled TV dinners into their mouths, watching as I stacked furniture to reach the camera in the corner. “Pretty girl like you ought to be more careful,” they said, ignoring my screamed begs for help.
I’m panting as the dream fades into the night and reality comes into focus. The bedroom window is open, and a breeze fondles the bed’s white drapes. My tight chest staggers with short breaths as sweat trickles down my temples. I pull off the comforter and take the few steps to the window, my only tenuous connection to the real world.
With my knees on the cushioned seat beneath the window, I hang the upper half of my body outside. It’s dark tonight, the mean moon a curved slash in obscurity, beginning and ending with two sharp points. I close my eyes to the night air’s caress. If I jumped, could I latch onto that crescent in the sky? Hang there until the sun rose? I wonder if it would matter, if daylight would frighten the monsters away or merely expose them.
I look down and down and down because darkness swallows everything beneath me. Still, I know the rosebushes are there. How fitting it would be to have my fall broken by a thousand thorns, painting crimson roses black with my blood.
I descend from the windowsill and go to the wall where I’ve defiantly marked the days I’ve been in this room. The slashes blur together, and I scream. My fingernails scrape away the wallpaper, peeling a path of coiled ringlets.
I’m at the bed, pulling at fistfuls of gossamer until my palms burn. Its heavenly appearance is unaffected by my earsplitting screams; it continues to invite, deceiving me to sleep under its feathery veil and awaken in velvet red and sunlight gold.
I release the stubborn fabric and sprint to the door where I alternate between beating on it with my fists and pulling the handle with my entire body. And it continues without breaking, this horrible screeching that starts in my stomach and destroys my throat. I want out. I want my freedom.
Relief hits with metal on metal, a key in the door. The old man has come to calm me. My throat is raw and dry, but I choke, “Please, Norman. Let me out.”
The answer I get is gritty, rolling with incredulity. “Norman? No such luck.”
I’m stunned into silence, barely leaping out of the way when the door opens. A flash of low light illuminates a silhouette, the same one who stalked my bed the first night. When the door slams, we’re plummeted once again into darkness. Thinking only of escape, I lunge forward and dodge to what I hope is his side. Despite the blackness of the room, he catches my waist with surprising accuracy.
“Run, and I’ll chase you,” he says calmly. “Believe me, you don’t want that.”
I squirm in his tightening hold, my elbow stabbing into his side repeatedly. My screamed protests are incoherent with panic; my body’s never felt more alive and more foreign, every frantic thump of my heart diffusing fear and adrenaline through me. My fist thumps against his chest, pain shooting from my wrist, but he just grunts.
“Let go of me!” He does, and I launch myself to the ground from the force of my struggling. I retreat, crawling backward to the bed, seeking refuge in what I just sought to destroy.
“Do I not provide everything you need?” he asks. My eyes search the nothingness desperately as menacing footsteps close in on me. “Why do you insist on throwing a tantrum like a child?”
His voice is made of pure threat, so low I feel it underneath me in the floor. “Are you the M-Master of the House?”
“Get back in your bed and keep quiet,” he says. “Don’t make me come back to this room.”
My arms are trembling so hard they’re on the verge of giving out. I don’t know when I began crying, but it’s turning hysterical.
“Did you hear me?” he asks. “I said get back on the goddamn bed.”
When I don’t move, his presence abruptly surrounds me, his fingers wrapping around my bicep. I thrash more, kicking his shin, slapping his firm grip with my free hand. My teeth and nails hunt wildly for exposed skin.
He pulls me to my knees, yanking so hard my face collides with his leg, and my hands grasp his pants. For a weighty moment, there’s only his heavy breathing and my whimper. His hand leaves my arm to seize my hair, and he shifts my cheek to the side fractionally. He curses under his breath. My skin scrapes against coarse denim as he gyrates once. His fingers curl into my roots, urging me closer.
My scream is silenced with a harsh tug of my hair. “Please, don’t do this.”
“I warned you,” he says with another sinuous motion.
My mind can’t compute how we went from fighting to him humping my face. I attempt to back away, but the result is only futile struggling. The teeth of his zipper hiss, and I have to clench to keep from urinating all over myself. My hands rip at fabric as I wrestle with his legs. From this angle, Guy is no longer the golden boy I saw on my last day of freedom. He is a black shadow, towering from where I sit underneath him. I’ve never been in the presence of someone so commanding, so fear inspiring.
His hand still clutches my hair while he hastily shoves down his pants. He rubs himself against my cheek; the disparity of soft and hard makes my body shake and pulse like my heart.
His loud groan spirals through my body as he presses the tip against the corner of my mouth. “Open.”
“No,” I plead through gritted teeth.
He yanks my head back and bends at the hip. All I can see are the shadowed ends of his hair curling away from me. “Do as I say. You’ve earned this lesson in obedience.”
I jerk back, but he shoves himself in my mouth. He pushes deep, ignoring any muffled objections. I close my teeth around him but hesitate too long, and he catches my jaw. “You’d instantly regret that,” he says. “No teeth. Just leave it open for me.” Holding the back of my head in both hands, his hips urge forward once and then again, his pace increasing with each repetition. “Good girl.” I’m stretched open all the way and still can barely taste all of him. “You’ve always been such a good fucking girl, Cataline.”
He thrusts until my mouth is full and my throat constricts around him. Hot tears flood my eyes. He doesn’t relent until I begin to choke, gasping and begging for mercy by shoving his unyielding thighs.
When he pulls out, only a thread of saliva connects us. It droops and eventually breaks, swinging back onto my chin.
“Have I come?” he asks. “Don’t shut your mouth yet.”
“Fuck you, Guy,” I cry through my burning throat.
He freezes instantly. There’s an eerily deafening silence as his fingers pull so tightly on my hair that I squeal. “What did you say?” I stare at him in awe. His body seems to grow bigger as he crouches over me. “What the fuck did you say?”
I flinch, and a noticeable tremble laces my whispered response. “I know you’re Guy Fowler.”
He shoves me away so I fall onto my outstretched arms. Immediately, I ball into the fetal position, flinching with each of his heavy, retreating footsteps. My quivering is uncontrollable while my mind scrambles to catch up. When it does, the thoughts come as easily as the tears: violated, used, disgusting. I hate this place, my situation, but most of all, I hate Guy Fowler. My fingers bury in my hair.
“You’ve always been such a good fucking girl, Cataline.”
It’s true; I’ve spent my life trying to do the right thing, see the positive in people, find light in the darkness. This is where it’s led me. Now that I know I’m right to be afraid, all I want to know is how far this will go. I have to find out whether I’ll ever be free again, or if it’s my fate to die here in this breathtakingly beautiful mansion.
8
The light slam of the door rouses me. Footsteps vibrate in my ear because I’m still on the floor, curled tightly into myself. I’ve moved to the side of the bed furthest from the room’s entrance, mostly underneath it.
I’m my seven-year-old self again, hidden under a new bed in a new home. Fear manifested as silent sobbing while my small hands clung to a bedpost, hoping, impossibly, my dead parents could still come for me.
“Come out from there, Cataline,” says a man’s voice. He waits, unmoving, until I go to him. “Why are you crying?”
“I’m afraid.”
“You’re braver than that, aren’t you?”
“I miss them.”
I’m lifted by my armpits and put under the covers. The last thing I hear before I fall asleep is, “You’ll be happy here. I promise.”
Despite the obscure country night, despite the crystal-sparkle of my tears, I’d known it wasn’t my foster father. When a new, valiant hero surfaced in New Rhone years later, my scalp tingled remembering my first night at the Andersons’.
As the steps draw nearer, my mind spins a silent prayer, my ears heat with a sudden rush of blood. I cease breathing, blinking, and all other basic functions as I attempt invisibility.
“Oh, dear. Cataline?”
My relief is a loud exhale, but my throat protests as words shred from my mouth. “I’m over here.”
Norman comes around the bed and heaves a sigh. “Thank goodness. For a moment, I thought you were gone, but, of course, where would you go? Did you sleep there?”
I ease my stiff back from the floor to sit up. “I slept. That’s all that matters.”
The wrinkles that stripe his forehead deepen. “I wasn’t aware you weren’t sleeping well. I’ll bring you calming tea in the evenings going forward,” he decides. “Perhaps that will help.”
“Help? If you want to help, open the front door. That’s it.” I get to my hands and knees and crawl to Norman’s feet. “I won’t go to the police,” I say, looking up at him. “You don’t even have to tell me where I am or how to get home.” My voice cracks as I whisper, “Just open the door.”
He stares down, impervious to my groveling. “Why, Cataline? Look at all you have here. You have nothing like this at home, not even a family.” His harsh words are delivered gently, and instead of enraging me, they weigh down my already-heavy grief.
“I do,” I say emphatically, and my hands go to his legs, fisting the fine fabric of his pants. “I have a family who loves me, and I love them. They’ll miss me so much, Norman. I’m sure they’ve reported me missing. My mother will be devastated without me.”
I’m forced to release his trousers when he drops into a squat. He rubs my shoulder with papery fingers. “None of that is true.”
“Yes, it is,” I say. I continue to list the members of an imaginary family as he peers at me, his head angled while he listens. I don’t know where the lie comes from, but I tell him the names and locations of siblings, cousins, grandparents. He’s bluffing. He doesn’t know the truth about me or where I come from; he couldn’t possibly.
His response comes moments after my plea finally ends, and it sends a chill down my spine. “You have a foster family in Fenndale and a roommate called Frida. Isn’t that true?”
I blink, too dumbfounded to form an answer.
He looks at the floor. “Come. It’s time for breakfast.”
“How do you know about Frida?”
“You must be hungry.”
My back teeth grind together from his bullshit. Though I want to rail against him, I can’t seem to raise my voice above a whisper when I say, “Do you know what he did to me last night?”
The coward refuses to look at me, but at least he doesn’t pretend not to hear me. He glances at the door and subtly at the nearest corner of the room. “My advice is not to rile him. He only came to your room to stop your tantrum, not to torment you. If you behave and stay out of his way, I’ll do my best to ensure he stays out of yours.”
“If I cooperate, I won’t have to see him again?”
He furrows his brow at the floor as though the question requires deep thought. “Only he knows the answer to that. But I believe it’s your best option.”
Learning that Norman knows more about me than I thought causes me to miss his invitation downstairs. When I’m allowed out of the room, my chest seems to expand more easily with each breath. I insist on helping clear the table after breakfast. Chef Michael’s cheerfulness is contagious as we wash dishes, even if our conversation is stunted.
Norman instructs me on how to use the cinema, though I’m certain it would’ve taken me less time to figure it out on my own. There’s an entire library of movies to select from, but I end up watching animated children’s classics all afternoon to dull the memory of last night. A tuna sandwich and Coke are delivered to me between features, followed by popcorn at my request.
It’s early evening when the third movie ends, and my mind feels restless. I’m learning the best cure for that is the library. I eject the film and replace it where I found it. Upon studying the shelf, I notice it doesn’t matter where I put it; the movies are in no particular order. I decide that one day I’ll devote time to organizing them. I leave the cinema pondering if I should arrange them according to title or genre when Norman stops me.
“We have an assignment from the Master of the House.”
I bite my thumbnail absentmindedly. “Okay.”
“He requires that you call your family and Frida to assure them you’re okay.”
At the mention of her name, my hand touches my heart. “No. Frida has nothing to do with this.”
“I’m sorry. There’s no getting out of it.”
“It’s been too long. She’ll have called the cops by now.”
“Indeed she has. Please, follow me.” He turns his back and walks to a closed door on the ground floor. My heartbeat skips as he unlocks it, my mind conjuring up the possibilities of what’s hidden in this mansion. When I step inside, I’m disappointed by the blandness of a simple study that’s almost identical to the one I broke into. He walks to a desk that holds a large, clunky, black phone and gestures for me to follow. I nearly salivate when he hands me the receiver.
“Go on, dear,” he says when I hesitate.
“I’m not calling my family.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll call Frida. She can call them for me.”
“We’ll see.”
“What do I say?”
“You’re instructed only to tell them that you are alive and well. Also—and this is important—that you’re happy. Nothing more.”
“She won’t believe that.”
“Make her believe it, and hang up. It’s part of doing what you’re told.”
There are times when Norman is short with me, but somehow I know it’s his way of helping. I stare down and dial the numbers. In the early evening Frida is most likely at the apartment, stretched out on our couch. Part of me hopes she’s out with friends, but the part of me that wants to escape—a very large part—hopes otherwise.
Her voice is immediately familiar. “Hello?”
“Frida?”
“Cat—oh, shit. Where are you?”
“I’m safe,” I say, nearly choking on the word. “I’m only calling to let you know that.”
“Where?”
I glance up at Norman. He shakes his head but smiles and points to his mouth, indicating that I should do the same. No matter how hard I try, my smile is not convincing. “I can’t say, but—”
“What do you mean you can’t say? I’m calling the cops, just tell me where you are.”
My swallow echoes in my ears. “Frida, I–I don’t know where I am, please call them, I’m in a m—”
The phone is snatched from me like lightning.
“No, please,” I say, attempting to wrestle it back and finding that Norman is surprisingly strong.
“I trusted you, Cataline. I’ll have to tell the Master of the House about this, and he won’t be pleased.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” I say and storm away.
I know my mind; it can’t be distracted with reading now. I return to the cinema, dropping movies from the shelves onto the floor until I can’t take the silence another second. I sit cross-legged on the floor directly underneath the enormous screen as the credits for Hitchcock’s The Birds begin. Squawking fills the dark room as the screen flashes black and white. That might as well be all this is: broken flickers and flashes of a disintegrating existence. I can’t follow the story anyway as I bawl myself deaf and blind.
The look of betrayal on Norman’s face was the same one he had when I threw the log at him. He’s been kind to me, as has Rosa, my motherly maid, and Chef Michael. Norman’s disappointment feels real and palpable. I vehemently tell myself I don’t care what he thinks. But what exactly do they want with me? And how can they be so equally accommodating and cruel?
