missing, that her nose is heavily freckled, and that she is voluptuous, tall, everything an opera singer should be.
Paul runs a hand up one of Jennifer’s long, pale calves, causing Lauren to moan and rock on her fold-out bed.
When Jennifer reacts violently to his touch, Paul’s response is immediate and brutal and so is the flowering wound above Jennifer’s eye.
‘You’ll learn,’ he says quietly, unwrapping Jennifer’s chain from around his fist and crossing the room to where Lauren cringes and moans louder.
‘Lauren was a slow learner,’ he murmurs, squeezing her small face in the fingers of one hand until she bares her teeth reluctantly, like a cornered animal. ‘And you see what happens?’ Jennifer screams again and looks away, blood still running freely down the side of her face.
Tears leak slowly out of Lauren’s eyes and over Paul’s long fingers. I study the terrible damage to her shattered mouth. I have seen faces like hers before, I remember now, dimly, in war zones, or caused by old age and disease. Not like this; never like this. Violence and pleasure the same impulse.
The anger rises in me again, so fiercely that Carmen’s heart skips a beat in her chest and there is that twinge again, only stronger now, as if Carmen is waking up, is struggling to be heard. I don’t want her to see this, or to remember. No one so innocent, so young, should have to.
I jam my burning left hand beneath my right in agony, and the slight movement causes my chain to rattle. Paul turns his head sharply at the sound, releases Lauren’s ruined face from his grip. I see the marks his fingers made, a starker white against her already stark skin.
‘You,’ he says over his shoulder to Jennifer, still sobbing, ‘got too gross. Too fleshy for my liking. It was a shock when you opened the door. I was offended when I saw how much you’d changed, although I was already committed. This one,’ and I know he means me, ‘is how you once were. But so much better — a rare creature, a pearl beyond price, all for me.’ He steps forward and lifts my chin gently.
‘Sing, Carmen,’ he says kindly, as if we are standing together in the empty assembly hall at Paradise High, beside the upright piano. The youthful, handsome teacher; the wise-cracking student. ‘Sing and show them why I had to have you, why you are so peerless.’ He caresses my face and it is as if he has put a hot iron to it. I jerk away from his touch and the instinctive gesture of rejection obliterates the beauty from his features in an instant. He lifts me by the chain around my neck and I am off my feet, hanging before him like a rag doll. We are eye to burning eye.
He shakes me. ‘Sing!’ he hisses, the Devil in his voice.
‘Sing or suffer.’
‘Please,’ gasps Lauren.
‘Do it,’ Jennifer begs.
I have no sense of up or down, so dizzy that the world has telescoped. I am the world, or the world is in me, and in me so much rage and fear and loathing I can feel plates moving, floes breaking, separation, reconfiguration, an unlinking.
And the pain in my hand, my forearm, burns so fiercely that I let out a shattering scream that has Paul staggering to his knees, clutching at his ears. The two girls on either side of the room rock backwards on their cots, holding their heads at the sonic after-bite.
I fall to the floor at the end of my taut chain.
Cradling my burning hand against my chest, leaning on my right, on my knees, panting like a dying animal.
As a thin trickle of blood seeps from between Paul’s fingers, I feel something inside me splitting in two, hear gasps from the others, dim shapes above me to the left and right. In that instant, I catch Carmen’s slight figure fall away, forwards onto the floor. Her body lies there, lifelessly, at my feet as I rise and bellow: Si dextra manus tua scandalizat te, abscide eam!
Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum!
I have no sense of my physical self, but I know that I am very tall. Six, maybe seven, feet.
My perspective has changed. The room that once reeked of the cavernous dark to myself inside Carmen’s skin can almost no longer hold me. Its dimensions feel doll-like, unreal.
And I know this too, because I watch their eyes follow me upwards, huge in their white faces, until I am standing over Paul Stenborg and I am his horizon, I am his world, and the fear in him is as a detectable odour, a familiar on his shoulder, gnawing at his flesh, and it is good.
‘Who are you?’ he shrieks, blood still trickling from each shattered eardrum.
‘I am pain, Paul,’ I whisper, a whisper to rend steel, to rend stone, a whisper to wake even the dead. ‘The living sword. And I shall gather all things that offend, all those that do iniquity, and I shall cast them into a furnace of fire.’ The words come from me freely, as if they have waited all these lifetimes to emerge.
I am dimly aware of Jennifer’s cries, Lauren’s terrified whimpering.
And I raise Paul Stenborg by the collar of his shirt, high, high above the ground, with a fist like bloody mail, and shake him as he shook Carmen’s frail, small frame, and I say again:
‘ Si dextra manus tua scandalizat te, abscide eam.
If your hand causes you to sin, Paul, cut it off. Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum. And if your eye causes you to sin, Paul, pluck it out.’ And with my burning left hand, I put out his eyes, first one and then the other, so that he may never see again, may never covet another living being for the rest of his days. See not music nor colour, joy, rage or fear.
His no longer. Willingly given, willingly taken away. I to do it. And it is done.
For I am the living sword and a creature of my word. The words come to me and I know them to be the truth. Whatever I did to set the sorry course of my life in tremulous motion all those years ago, these things I know now to be immutable.
‘And there shall be a wailing,’ I say quietly, setting the man gently upon his feet, ‘a gnashing of teeth.’ As Paul Stenborg staggers around his basement fortress screaming and roaring, blood streaming from his ears, from the wounds his eyes once were, I move towards first Lauren, then Jennifer, and rip their bonds out of the wall with my bare hands.
Lastly, I do the same for my poor Carmen, and carry her lifeless body up the stairs, through a stinking warren of underground rooms and shield doors the monster has built beneath the floor of his home. And on into the clean darkness beyond Paul Stenborg’s back door, Lauren and Jennifer following behind me as swiftly as their chains and their injuries will allow.
And the starlight in my eyes, the infinite sky, the cold wind that lifts the hair of my head, each strand straight, even and exactly the same … That is all I remember, for a time.
Chapter 24
I am facedown against the cold, sweet-smelling grass.
It is night. There is soil beneath Carmen’s curled hands, her curling black hair. And Lauren’s urgent voice is in our ears before I can think to rise.
It is no dream, I think, momentarily disappointed.
I am not asleep. Luc will not appear this time, either to praise or to damn me depending upon his mood.
I am so tired. So strangely tired I can barely open my eyes, but her words make me stiffen.
‘Jennifer’s gone to get help,’ she says urgently. ‘The story is that Carmen distracted Paul long enough to enable us all to get away. Carmen’s going to be a hero, Mercy. Because you can’t be. Can you hear me?’
‘His eyes?’ I mumble, getting to my knees slowly, the world righting itself once more along its proper axes.
The night is kinder to Lauren. She seems almost her own self in the moonlight; the girl from the photos, dispensing hugs to a thousand friends. And I wonder if she could be that girl again. In this moment, it seems almost possible.
