Blood Mountain

Fucking bitch. Before he sliced her throat, he would cut off all her fingers. Stuff them in her mouth and up her broken nose. Then he’d piss on her. Maybe even rape her again before finally destroying her.

He stopped. Caleb was screaming up ahead. His yells rolled through the quiet night with greater and greater insanity as if the trees were coming alive and hollering for blood. Victor could not let himself become another shouting madman. He had to remain calm, keep his crazed fantasies in check. Mercy had been clever and determined enough to escape into the woods and if let rage boil his mind, she might gain the upper hand once more. That once more might be all it would take.

The name of the game was calm, not crazy. She was probably launching herself up the mountain as fast as she could. She’d run out of steam pretty quickly. The mountain’s summit was a fair distance off with many steep sections that required patience to scale. She was not going to make it very far.

Even if she stopped at the cutout overlooking the town below, there was still nowhere to hide. The scenic lookout was a three-sided cliff with jagged rocks marking the drop all the way to the bottom.

He knew this place and she was just a stupid woman.

Victor took several deep breaths and continued up the mountain.

FORTY-TWO

Even tough bitches felt pain and that pain knew no bounds. The agony in her crotch had been the lead horse in the race of pain but her thighs were gaining on that horse and now her nose, a long-trailing contender, was galloping harder and harder, vying for the coveted lead position and right along with it was the race-fatigued head pain, always a participant, seldom a winner’s circle celebrant.

Every breath she dared take through her nose lit her nostrils on fire and that burning flared through her head as if electric shocks were zipping across the surface of her brain. She grunted against these shocks and screamed strength into her arm muscles to keep grabbing the trees but those muscles were burning and shaking and deteriorating to Jell-O. On top of it all, finally here came the misery of her poor feet. A big toe broken against a rock. A deep gash through the sole of her foot that could have been a giant carving knife laid as a trap.

Maybe Victor had set up traps. What if she was headed right where he wanted her to go? What if she made it all the way to the top of this mountain only to fall into some pit he had dug or step right into a bear trap? She would have to gnaw off her own foot.

That image released a flutter of cackles.

Now, you sound mad, she thought. Mad woman Mercy.

She could be a superhero like Wonder Woman only slightly crazed and out to castrate every male in the world. She’d wear a red cape and her weapon of choice would be a giant pair of gardening shears.

More laughter and her muscles nearly gave out in collective capitulation. No, no, no. She had to keep her wits and find that strength buried deep within her. She had to make it to the top of this fucking mountain and once there she could . . . could what?

“Chop some fucking balls,” she said and that did it.

As a child she had loved laughing so hard at jokes that the laughter constricted her breathing and pain radiated through her lungs with intense pleasure. She’d fall into those fits at some joke and then forget why she was laughing but her emphatic tear-inducing peals of joy were self-propagating and she could laugh at nothing but her own laughter for several minutes before her lungs insisted that they needed air. In such throes, she was helpless, vulnerable.

When new cackles morphed into all-out laughter, she did not reminisce on her hilarious laughing fits of childhood with fondness but focused on the vulnerability it presented and that brought fear. Tough bitches didn’t laugh. Tough bitches didn’t let themselves be vulnerable. Yet, somehow, the intense certainty that Caleb was going to jump out of the darkness and stomp her head into the ground like it was a watermelon only made her laugh harder.

“Bitch!” Caleb yelled, much closer now. “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”

Bring those balls, she wanted to yell. Bring them here because I’ve got my shears!

She fell onto her side laughing and rolled against a lush evergreen tree that seemed to vibrate in the night as if it were an angel. An angel tree come to watch the great Mad Woman Mercy chop some balls.

Her laughter was a torrential deluge on The Kentucky Derby of Pain. All the horses had gone back to their stables and just as Head Pain was about to pull off the upset of the season.

In her rolling fit of laughter, Mercy knew this apparent lunacy was panic borne from exhaustion and genuine fear. Even so, it was kind of funny to be laughing when you were about to die. People probably wouldn’t accept such a reaction as genuine but not everybody knew what it was like to be raped and hunted like an animal. Laughter might be the sanest response.

For a quitter maybe, a new voice said in her mind. Not just any voice, though. It was Mommy again. I never had a chance, she said. But I still fought. If you give up, I might as well have never fought to live as long as I did. I should have just killed myself.

That stopped the laughter as if it were water flowing from a spigot that had finally been shut off. She could laugh about this all she wanted. But not until later. Perhaps in some psychiatric ward. So be it.

“Fuckers,” she hissed and got back to her feet.

The horses were coming out of their stables again.

She started back up the path and stopped. The evergreen was glowing like a cutout set before a flood light. Not a floodlight, though. It was the moon.

She went to the tree and then pushed through its branches into a luminescent world where angels might actually tread.

FORTY-THREE

Victor’s mother loved playing hide and seek. It is the earliest memory he has of his mother. She would sit in the big red chair in the living room, the chair she called ‘Your Highness’ because it looked like something a Queen might use, and count to thirty. He would run around the house until there were five seconds left and then he’d jump into the bathtub or squirm under the bed or cram himself in the back corner of his closet. Then she’d come find him.

She would stand right where he hid, on the other side of the shower curtain, beside the bed, or right outside the closet and wonder aloud where her little man had gone. He’d start giggling and then she’d reach in with her long arms and drag him out and he would be laughing hysterically even before the tickling began.

This went on for years. Sometimes she would hide and he’d have to find her. He found her once in the bathroom, completely naked, her body pale and spotted with red blots as if she were allergic to something. When he ran away, she called him back but he didn’t want to see his mother like that. He couldn’t help his eyes from taking in her drooping breasts and the dark patch of hair between her legs. The image would be with him forever.

Yet that was only the beginning.

She went after him. Found him in his closet, reached in with her sinewy arms and pulled him out, one hand gripped in his hair, the other on his wrist. Face to face with his naked mother, he kept his eyes shut and begged her to let him go. “First you have to do something for mommy,” she said. “Then you can go hide again.”

Then she started her lessons on the importance of being charming. Of seduction.

For years afterward, hide and seek meant Mommy needed something only her darling little boy could give her. By the time Victor was a teenager, he could give her what she wanted without trying to run away and hide. He knew how to send his mind somewhere else, off into a place he thought of as Elsewhere, while his body did what had to be done. While he gave Mommy her “prize.”

Mommy had been a bitch but he’d been too cowardly to do anything about it. Eventually he’d wizened up. Now, Mommy was playing a game of hide and seek where no one was ever going to find her.

Mercy was playing the same game, only she didn’t know it. But when he found her, Victor would not need to