A Terrible Beauty

'Money?'

'I don't know?anything you want. Anything.'

'I'll see you later,' he said. 'And, really, don't bother to scream.'

9

The afternoon went past like a strange grainy dream. Fiona heard his car scrunching out of the driveway in front of the cottage, and then the only sounds were the cawing of the crows and the whispering of the ivy against the window.

For the first five or ten minutes she struggled furiously to get herself free, but he had tied her with such complicated knots that all she managed to do was tug them even tighter. In spite of what he had said, she tried shouting for help, but it was obvious that he had been telling her the truth. The cottage was far too isolated for anybody to be able to hear her.

She shivered with cold and wept with self-pity. Her right leg had turned a pale turquoise color and she couldn't feel it at all. She tried talking to her mother, in the hope that her mother would somehow sense that she was in danger, like people did in Stephen King stories.

But then there was nothing but the crows, and the surreptitious sniggering of the ivy, and the throb, throb, throb of her circulation in her ears.

He came back in less than an hour. He didn't go straight in to see her. Instead, he went directly to the kitchen and heaped his bags of groceries onto the Formica-topped table. 'How are we feeling?' he called, but she didn't reply. He filled the kettle and put it onto the old-fashioned gas stove, lighting the hob with a newspaper spill. Then he put away his cans of baked beans and his packets of biscuits, slamming the cupboard doors. He hadn't bought much in the way of frozen food: there was a refrigerator in the corner which rattled and coughed like a wardful of emphysema victims but only managed to keep food somewhere just below tepid.

He made himself a mug of instant coffee, and stirred it with an irritating tinkle. He could hear Fiona weeping quietly in the bedroom. On the wall beside the stove hung a yellowed calendar for 1991, with a picture of Jesus on it, entering Jerusalem in triumph. As he sipped his coffee, he leafed through the months. On June 11, somebody called Pat had died. On June 14, Pat had been buried.Requiescat in pace, Pat, he thought.

Eventually, he rinsed his mug and left it upside down on the draining board. Then he went back into the bedroom, and switched on a dazzling Anglepoise lamp beside the bed. Fiona flinched and turned her face away from it.

'Well, then! Sorry it's so bright, but I have to see what I'm doing.'

'Please,' she sobbed. 'I can hardly feel my leg at all.'

'Well, that's good. That'sverygood. From your point of view, anyhow.'

'You're not going to hurt me, are you?'

He looked down at her with a thoughtful expression on his face. 'Yes,' he said. 'I probably am.'

'Can't you give me something to deaden the pain? Aspirins, anything.'

'Of course. I'm not a sadist.'

'Thenwhy?'she said, her voice rising in hysteria. 'Why are you doing this? If you're not a sadist,why?'

'There are things I need to know, that's all.'

'What things? I don't understand.'

'There are other worlds, apart from this. Other existences. Darker places, inhabited by dark monstrosities. I need to know if they can be summoned. I need to know if any of the rituals really work.'

'Oh dear God, why do you have to do it tome?'

'No special reason, Fiona. You were there, that's all, standing by the side of the road. Fate.Kismet. Or just plain shitty luck.'

'But you don't know me. You don't know anything about me. How can you kill me?'

'If it wasn't you, it would have to be somebody else.'

'Then let it be somebody else. Please. Not me. I don't want to die.'

This time he said nothing, but left the room again, and came back a minute later with a mug of water and a brown glass bottle of aspirin tablets. He held the tablets out in front of her in the palm of his hand, as if he were feeding an animal, and she bent her head forward and choked them down, three and four at a time, crunching some of them between her teeth and swallowing some of them whole. All the time she was mewling and sobbing and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

'Imagine that you're going on a journey,' he said, and his voice became curiously monotonous, as if he were trying to hypnotize her. 'Imagine that you're going to be traveling, not through some undiscovered country, but through the landscape of your own suffering. Instead of forests you will walk through the thorns and brambles of tearing nerves, and instead of snowy mountaintops, you will see the white peaks of utter agony.'

He held the mug against her lips and she drank as much water as she could, even though most of it ran down her chin.

'I'll do anything,' she said. 'Just let me go, please. I'll do anything at all.'

'You don't understand, Fiona. I simply want you to lie back and experience what's coming to you.'

Maybe it was the effect of the aspirins, or maybe it was shock, but Fiona suddenly stopped sobbing and lowered her head, and stared at the end of the bed with oddly unfocused eyes. Maybe it was despair-the realization that no matter how much she begged, he was going to kill her anyway.