A slim middle-aged woman with high cheekbones and a pinched, prominent nose, wearing an excess of makeup, trotted into the house. Adriana was immediately impressed by her confident stride and the cut of the business suit she wore. The woman’s artificially whitened teeth flashed in a slash of a smile as soon as she saw Adriana, but the girl could not help but feel as if something sinister was lurking behind those large eyes that gleamed with such allure below the arches of her perfectly plucked eyebrows.
‘My, my, my, the rumours are true,’ the woman exclaimed as she sized Adriana up and down. ‘This is the homestead of the most beautiful girl in the Carpathians.’
She sat down on the moth-eaten sofa and crossed her legs with elegant grace, and over the course of fifteen minutes or so she explained the details of what her employers were looking for to Adriana and her mother. With every word this woman spoke, warning bells pealed louder and louder inside her head, yet as the woman was handing her the papers to sign, it seemed as if a demonic force was guiding her hand; it fastened the pen in her fingers with a granite grip, and moved her trembling digits to forge the shape of her signature, doing so entirely against her now-panicking will. A scream was beginning to build within her lungs, but she felt as if she had been forced under water, and that she was drowning in the black depths of some deep quarry pool. Dread crashed around her, crumbling like a temple of Atlantis as the cataclysm rent its foundations asunder and the earth swallowed it up.
Adriana tried to pull her hand away from the contract, which burst spontaneously into flames, but invisible fingers kept her pen locked on the paper with a vice-grip. She looked up at the job agent, and a tsunami of terror flooded her mind as she saw that the woman’s eyes had turned black, and blood was now gushing out of her sneering mouth.
She turned, trying to get up and run, but her limbs seemed to be mired in wet cement, entombing her still-living body like that of a mastodon in a tar pit. Her mother’s head twisted grotesquely upon her neck, rotating until it was entirely back to front, and then a howling hurricane wind smashed out all of the windows, sucking her mother out of the house and sending her spiralling up through the vortex into dense banks of storm clouds, spinning and growing smaller and smaller until she was but a speck against the pitch of thunder and lightning.
And then they were there, in the house with her: vile, stinking men of all shapes and sizes, their greasy hands pawing at her, tearing at her, rending her flesh and ripping skin and meat from her body, devouring her with cannibalistic relish as she somehow remained conscious throughout the unspeakable agony.
Finally, a monstrous figure, his face hidden deep within the shadows of a massive hood, shoved the others aside, slammed his iron-wrapped fist into her chest, and tore out her heart. He held it, still beating, before her horrified eyes. The earth then opened up beneath her, and in an instant she was falling, tumbling, accelerating through the void towards a fiery pit. As she reached terminal velocity and was about to plunge into the glowing lake of magma, however, she awoke with a jarring start.
For the first few seconds of consciousness Adriana could not even breathe, so overwhelming and real was the fear that lingered in the wake of the nightmare. Her heart was palpitating madly, and her palms were clammy with cold sweat. Yet slowly, ever so slowly, reality began to materialize through the torrid haze of fear-laden humidity. Above her a crooked ceiling fan spun, clicking with every rotation, and below her the purple satin sheets of her bed were soaked with sweat. A stub of incense smouldered with tenacious pungency in the corner of the room, and a red light bulb illuminated painted scenes from the Kama Sutra that adorned the walls in gilded frames; she had awoken from one nightmare only to find herself inextricably mired in another.
As the cold hardness of reality materialised in all of its harsh impermeability, she saw Roxana standing at the foot of the bed, and the girl’s eyes were wide with fright.
‘Are you … are you all right, Adriana?’ she asked in her gentle voice. ‘It looked like you were having a bad nightmare.’
Adriana let out a drawn-out sigh, and the omnipresent, suffocating sense of despair and hopelessness closed once more around her.
‘As okay as I can be in this awful place, Roxana.’
‘Tippawan just knocked on the door while you were asleep. He says that you need to clean yourself up. You have to go dance in five minutes.’
The words sent a chill down Adriana’s spine, and a soup of revulsion, horror and fear began to bubble in her guts. Up to this point she had only had to strip on stage and dance in private booths in the club, but she knew that the day was coming when she would have to provide more intimate services to the perverts who patronised this hellhole. Sigurd was waiting for a high enough bid on her virginity, and after the first high-paying client finally had his way with her, she would have no more special privileges, and would be made to service countless men, dozens of per day, like the other girls had
