she utters one word. “No.”
Clutching the scalpel, Eva wriggles to her left side again and tries to reach the wrist that is tied down.
The pain is excruciating.
Still, she stretches her right arm until she reaches the wrist.
She runs the edge of the blade against the rope and slips, slicing her arm. She moves it again. This time, the scalpel meets the rope, and Eva starts working it, not stopping for a second.
“I forbid you,” the masked woman says, sputtering and getting back on her feet.
She takes a step forward, then collapses.
The rope’s last fibers give way.
Eva whoops as her left wrist is freed.
She manages to sit. A sharp pain shoots up her back, which has been immobilized for too long. But she doesn’t care. She slides her buttocks forward and bends her knees, trying to reach the ropes around her ankles.
She cuts them off.
Eva feels a wave of breathless euphoria rising in her. She is free. She really is free.
From that moment, everything happens very quickly in a confused sequence. Dizziness overtakes her as she starts to move freely. And when she slides off the table, she discovers that she does not have the strength to stand. She falls to her knees in a puddle of blood-her blood-and the world spins in every direction. The humming coming from the walls rises, whirling inside her.
The masked woman still has her hand over her heart. A trickle of blood drips from her mouth. The wig has fallen off again and lies on the floor next to her.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Her chapped lips stretch into a smile of pure insanity, revealing yellow teeth.
It is the same smile her father wore twenty-four years ago, when he watched his own daughter stab him.
The woman crouches like a wounded animal getting ready to attack one last time.
Lifting her eyes toward the staircase, Eva can see her sister waiting for her on the top step. Vision or reality, that is what she points toward as she crawls up the stairs on her hands and knees.
“No!” the woman screams behind her. “Come back!”
Eva hoists herself up each step.
When she was six, she had crawled up the steps the same way.
The steps were so high.
But she climbed them all.
Toward the door that led out of there.
Toward life.
That’s what she is doing again.
And the steps are just as high.
She’s going up yet again.
One step.
After the other.
All the way to the top.
Surrounded by the heavy buzzing that will not leave her alone.
Behind her, the woman’s cries turn into beast-like howls and then into barks.
76
The front door. The key is in the lock. Eva grabs it feverishly and turns it. The door opens into the night. She sees a small garden with well-tended trees. Behind the hedge, there’s a street lined with suburban houses. Street lamps flood them with light.
Eva makes her way across this garden, dazed, naked, numb from the cold. She grabs the gate, gropes to open it, and when it does, she almost falls to the ground. Eva staggers onto the sidewalk. She sees a lamppost a couple of feet away. If she can reach it, she can rest for a few seconds.
She miscalculates and falls into an icy puddle.
Pain shoots though her body.
She knows she must get hold of herself.
Stunned and shaking, she calls out for help. But as though she were in a dream, only breath escapes her tight throat. She tries to force a sound from her chest. A small grunt gathers momentum and emerges as a deep, moan.
“Help!”
A sound is coming from the house behind her. She is unable to turn around. All she can do is muster the last of her strength.
“HELP!”
Finally, a light comes on in the house next to her. She can see the drapes being pushed aside and a man pressing his face at the picture window.
“Help me!” she screams. “Help!”
She is so weak, she can’t even raise a hand toward him.
She breaks into a coughing fit.
That is when she hears the growl.
The sound of an unearthly beast.
Glancing back, she can see it. The wolf. In the driveway of the house she has just left. The animal is crouched, legs flexed, ready to lunge. A black wolf that isn’t a wolf. A look of red flames that is not the look of any creature from this world.
And suddenly she recognizes him in that shape of an impossible animal, in that look filled with cruelty.
“Claude?”
Eva swallows. The black beast lowers its head. Its hungry eyes stare at her. And in the flames of those eyes dance images from the past. One year earlier, the madman had sent her the same look.
“Claude Salaville?”
The beast bares its fangs in a parody of a smile.
Its chest is close to the ground. The animal is ready to spring at her.
“Leave her alone,” a little girl’s voice orders.
And Eva feels the small hand resting on the nape of her neck.
“Run. Quick.”
“But…”
“You have seen. Now you know. The souls must be freed,” Justyna says.
Eva is unable to respond. The world is spinning around her. She senses that lights have gone on in other windows along the street. A door opens. A man has come out on his front steps. Maybe.
The little girl with white hair walks away from her and toward the black beast with the eyes of red lava.
“No, don’t,” Eva stutters. “You can’t do anything… against him.”
Justyna keeps walking.
And the monstrous animal leaps out, its jaws open wide, and engulfs her in a mass of fur.
Eva begins to scream.
The beast snaps the little girl in two. Then the girl and beast intertwine and merge. The world spins faster and faster.
“Miss? Miss? Oh my God!” someone cries.
