A Terrible Beauty

'These are your last few days, Fiona. You ought to make the most of them.'

She began to cry, although she didn't feel sorry for herself anymore. She had already accepted that she had been abducted entirely by chance, and that ifshewasn't enduring this agony, it would have been another girl. And who could wish this pain on anybody else? Extreme suffering can bring on a very clear, self-sacrificial state of mind.

He tied a thin nylon cord around the top of her left thigh, and pulled it viciously tight, grunting with the effort.

'Not the other leg,' she said, dully.

He nodded. 'I'm sorry. It's the way it has to be. Right leg, left leg.'

'But why? Why are you doing it? Can't you just kill me?'

'I could, yes. Scalpel, carotid artery, that'd be quick. But a ritual is a ritual. If I don't observe all the niceties, then it wouldn't work, would it, and you wouldn't want to go through all of this for nothing, would you? To die in agony, that's bad enough. But to die in agony for no purpose whatsoever?well, what can I say?'

'What time is it?' she asked him.

'Two-thirty in the morning.'

'I need a drink of water.'

'That's all right. I'll get you one.'

He went out to the kitchen and came back with a thick blue mug filled with warm, peaty-tasting water. She drank all of it, dribbling it down her chin.

'Do you hate me?' she said.

It was incredible, but he actually blushed. 'Of course I don't hate you. I think you're very, very special.'

'But look what you've done to me.'

'I know. I know that. And that's what makes you so special. That's what they don't tell you in the history books, do they, that every human sacrifice was a person, with a mother and a father and ideas of her own? But that's what makes every human sacrifice so valuable. That's why it means so much. You can sacrifice a goat, but what does a goat know? To sacrifice a human life? especially like this?that's what brings the demons out of hiding. That's what really causes a rustle in hell.'

He opened his instrument case and selected one of his scalpels. 'You know, Fiona Kelly, this is the best time of all for stirring up demons. The third hour of the day, when the angels of death come fluttering down through the darkness to squeeze the struggling hearts of the elderly, and to press their hands over the faces of sleeping babies.'

Fiona tried not to listen to him, or even to focus her eyes on what he was doing. She tried instead to think of her mother, sitting at the end of the veranda in her whitepainted rocker, sewing and smiling; and she tried to visualize her bedroom, with its pink gingham bedspread, and the crimson bougainvillea that fluttered on either side of the window.

She tried to think of a song that her mother had taught her when she was little. She had never really understood what it meant, but now she sang it over and over, silently, inside her mind, like a mantra. Anything to keep her mind off the pain.

One girl asked for rosemary

One girl asked for thyme

Another girl asked for locks and keys

And clocks that never chimed.

But all I want is a door that leads

To the road that leads to the sea

And to know when I turn that my shadow

Will still be following me.

She had often asked her mother what it meant, and who had taught it to her, but her mother would never say. When she was older she had looked it up in books of children's poetry and nursery rhymes, but she had never found out. It had always disturbed her, for some reason, especially the line about wanting to know if her shadow was following her. Supposing it wasn't? What then?

She was repeating the rhyme for the third time when he cut into her thigh. He cut deep, right through the skin and the fat and the femoral muscles, until the tip of his scalpel touched her bone. Blood welled out of the wound and pattered onto the newspapers underneath the bed.

The scalpel was so sharp that she hardly felt it. She had once cut her tongue on an envelope that she was licking, and she hadn't realized until blood came pouring down her chin. This incision hurt even less than that, but all the same she let out a long wail of despair.

'Don't cry,' he told her. 'This is only just the beginning. You wait until tomorrow. Then you'll know what pain is. Then you'll not only feel it, you'llunderstandit.'

He sliced through all of the quadriceps, all the way around, right through to the femur. All the time he was breathing steadily through his nose, the way that dentists do. When he had cut around her upper thigh, he moved down and made another cut about an inch above her knee. His hands were smothered in blood now, and there were bloody fingerprints all over her leg. She let her head fall back, so that she wouldn't have to look, but then she raised it again, her chin shuddering with pain and effort. She found a terrible fascination in watching her own mutilation. He had been right: it was like a journey through an undiscovered country, a country where anything was possible, where no pain was too great and no horror was too excessive.

Having cut one circle around the top of her leg and another circle above her knee, he then took another