Hush (34 page)

near as he could tell. He was breathing okay. The first minute or so after she

kicked him it hurt so bad he thought he was going to choke to death, like there

were metal bands down there cutting off his air. For awhile he'd actually

stopped thinking about her. But his throat didn't feel so bad anymore, and even

his hand had stopped throbbing. Best of all, she's in there, the fucking

bathroom, and she sure as shit isn't going anywhere. He smiled when he realized

this.
He switched on her bureau lamp and found her underwear drawer right away, the

one filled with panties and bras in mostly pale colors, peach, baby blue,

yellow, and some of them in that nude color too. And pink, like the pair he'd

ripped apart. He remembered how good it felt to tear them to pieces. She had a

whole drawerful of them. Underthings to cover her up and underthings to hold her

up. But she sure as fuck doesn't need this.
He pinched a pink bra between his thumb and index finger, as if it might dirty

him, and lifted it out of the drawer.
Goddamn...she doesn't need this.
He threw it on the ground and kicked it. Then he reached in and grabbed a

fistful of panties and pressed them to his face. He took a deep breath. They

felt soft and satiny and smelled of laundry soap, just like the pair he'd held

up to his mouth a few days ago and moistened with his breath. He searched his

hand. This pair. He dropped the others to the floor and held her pale underpants

up to the light. He could see right through them. They ask for it. They really

do. He threw it down with all the others and stomped them with his heel. They

made him want to rip the gown right off her back. Make her stand naked in the

night.
*
Celia thought she heard him open a drawer, but she couldn't be sure. She

listened to a sudden flurry of movement. Yes, he's in there. Nevertheless, she

glanced at the window. She feared he was everywhere.
He jiggled the handle, and she felt his brutal presence in the door. The lock

held. She had been terrified it would spring open as soon as he touched it, like

a tarantula that jumps into the air the moment it's approached. She was tempted

to hold the handle— to try to steady it from her side— but her hands shook so

badly she was afraid she'd pop the lock. And if she held it she'd be touching

him too, for she would feel his madness through the metal, the hard cut of his

darkest intentions.
The door now vibrated violently as he tried to wrench it open, and it took all

of Celia's concentration to keep leaning against the jouncing mirror. He tried

repeatedly to force his way in, but the handle held and the lock did not fail.
She thought of fleeing, of climbing through the window herself, but could not

take the first step. She thought of fighting him, but knew she couldn't do that

either. What Celia understood was neither flight nor fight, but the moment that

hung eternally between them, that refused to relinquish either of its two

terrifying options; that produced paralysis, frozen seconds that ticked off

forever.
She was learning about fright, the way it could bite into the hardest bone and

fill every hollow spot of hope with dread, with horror, with mortal resignation.
Bam!
She leaped away from the door. Her whole body shook. She looked down and saw the

pointy tip of his boot sticking through the mirror just inches from where she'd

been standing, no more than a foot and a half above the floor. Jesus.
Bam!
He kicked again, and the mirror crashed to the floor in a coruscating explosion.

She stared at the pile of glistening shards and felt as though she were in

someone else's bathroom living someone else's life. Nothing was right,

everything was wrong. She looked up and saw the rectangular outline where the

mirror had hung...and more of his boot sticking through the door.
She forced herself to step onto the broken glass and lean against the naked

wood. The sickness in her stomach clotted. The door shook. It was hollow-core,

cheap. It would never hold. Neither would she. That's what she believed— the

weakness in the wood reflected a weakness in herself— that even as it splintered

and broke apart, she too would fall from the fury of his attack.
She had just turned her head to scan the room for something— anything— when he

grabbed her leg. She screamed and looked down and saw that he had stuck his hand

through the hole he'd kicked in the door and was dragging her to the opening.

His fingers were digging into the bones right above her knee and leaving red

trails on her from the bite. She beat him with her fists but he did not let go.

His grip only tightened. The pain was excruciating.
In seconds he had worked his hand all the way around to the back of her leg and

turned her toward the door. His grip felt like a steel clamp, and he used

enormous force to start pulling her knee through the hole. With terror, she saw

that he was trying to drag her entire body through it. Splinters tore into her

skin, and her torso was forced against the door, which shook without pause from

his efforts. She tried to push away, but failed. It was horrifying to feel his

hands and know that his raw hate and rank animal heat were little more than an

inch away, and that all that stood between them was this flimsy hollow barrier,

these two thin layers of wood and glue and screws. The hinges screamed— as if

they might sheer off at any second— and the handle banged repeatedly into her

hipbone. It was as though the mirrorless door had come to life like the blank

face of evil, a vicious vibrating extension of him that shuddered with the

grisly power of his every exertion.
He clawed at her and dragged her knee deeper and deeper into the hole, and then—

with her leg bent at a sharp angle— she felt something so unbearably painful

that it stunned her breath and rendered her lungs silent. He'd slashed her

kneecap with a blade, a deep metallic probe of bone. And again. The sudden pain

shocked the urine right out of her system, but Celia was only dimly aware of the

warm currents that ran down her legs. She was dying the horrible death she had

always feared and could no longer think. She knew only an animal-like awareness

of extinction and survival, and the savage gap that lay between them.
She beat the door with her fists and screamed and yanked on her leg with a fear

she had never before known, and managed to break free of his slippery grasp.
She backed up over the broken glass and fixed her eyes on that hole like a child

who has seen an apparition and knows the ghostly presence is real, ravenous, and

ready to devour her. She looked down at her knee, drawn to it as a body is

always drawn in a time of death— not to its life— but to its wounds, to the

rough seepage that seals its fate.
Her kneecap was crimson with a wash of blood. It ran down her leg and puddled on

both sides of her bare foot. She wiped it with her hand and revealed the cross,

the two lines he had carved into her flesh. Their intersection was centered, the

cuts almost even in length. She felt marked, stained and scarred with a demon's

stigmata.
She looked up and saw his hand hanging there. Strangely, he had not pulled his

arm back through the hole after she'd broken away from him. It was as if he

didn't know fear. He pointed to her; and when he spoke it was spooky, as if his

finger were actually talking and not the man himself hunkered down behind the

door.
"I'm coming in. You hear me?"
Celia found herself nodding at the finger.
"You open this door and let me in and I won't hurt you. Or we can do it the hard

way."
Celia was still nodding.
"You scared? There's no reason to be scared. I'm not angry. I've had dog bites

worse than this."
He stopped pointing, and opened his hand. His palm was red, and she saw a dark

purple color where her teeth had ripped apart the base of his thumb. He turned

his hand over, and after a second's delay a flap of spongy flesh, held only by a

hinge of skin, fell loose and dangled in the air. He made it jiggle; and Celia

thought she'd be sick, not from the mutilation but from the strict memory of the

bite itself, of lying on her back and having to fight like an animal to survive,

only to find herself here, bleeding and wet and wounded, and faced with the

thick chunk of tissue that had filled her mouth and made her gag. She could

taste him still. He shook it again. Her stomach lurched.
"See, that's not so bad. So tell me, what's it going to be?"
Chet sounded pretty relaxed, and for good reason: he was enjoying himself

immensely. He figured that no matter what happened, everything would work out

just fine for him. One way or another, he'd have her. Nobody does this to me— he

jiggled his hand again and felt the weight of the loose skin— and walks away. He

knew that biting cut both ways.
You bite me and I'll bite you.
Celia stared at the wound. Once more, his hand just hung from the opening in the

door, and for a full ten seconds it looked lazy and bloody and bored.
"Okay, don't say I didn't warn you."
He started to reach up and feel for the handle. That's when she heard Pluto, the

same painful cry her cat had made when she'd accidentally stepped on its paw.

But this was no accident, no accident at all.
Boyce withdrew his arm quickly, like a bloody animal burrowing into its hole.

She heard a scuffling sound and a gut-wrenching scream from her cat. A hacking

and gurgling. And then silence. Seconds later she watched as he stuffed Pluto

through the hole. He had to shove the cat's hind end in first, and he held him

by the back of his neck. He'd slit Pluto's throat from ear to ear. The fur on

his chest was soaked with blood. He'd also gouged out his one eye, and the

gaping socket cried a red stream that ran down his shiny nose and spattered the

broken glass. She saw her cat's fractured reflection in the zigzag pieces of

mirror on the floor. Insanely, Boyce started bouncing Pluto up and down on his

rear paws, as if he were trying to make the dead cat dance.
Maybe he was. She heard him humming the same maniacal tune over and over. It was

all of madness, the sounds mixing with the night, demanding attention even as

she stared at the gory spectacle: Pluto's eyeless head rising and falling, its

limp legs touching down on the glass, its matted fur dripping bright red spots

all over the broken mirror, its belly sagging and front paws sticking straight

out in the stiff-armed pose of Frankenstein.
Chet hummed to himself. He heard his little ditty clearly in his mind and had no

idea that it had passed from his lips. When he knew for certain that she'd been

listening, he stopped and shook his head. He didn't want to share it with her;

it was a private pleasure, and now she knew. She would pay for this too.
He dropped Pluto's body onto the glass, and withdrew his arm. A moment later he

reached back in and flipped the cat's eyeball at Celia. It struck her nightgown

just above the waist and fell to the tile, making a distinctly moist sound, like

a wad of wet toilet paper. She gripped her belly, bent over, and fought her

nausea. When she looked up, still shaking, his arm once more hung from the hole

in the door. Fresh red streaks ran from his fingers up to his elbow. A

paralyzing fear left her almost breathless: He'll rape me with his fist. She

lived this terror so single-mindedly that she didn't notice Pluto for several

seconds.
Her cat hissed softly, trembled, and started to stand. She was shocked he was

still alive. The eyeless creature tottered on his front paws and dripped more

blood onto the bed of broken glass. His head turned in Celia's direction— she

was sure it did— before swinging down and to the side like a drunk's. Pluto

raised one rear leg before slipping on the slick surface and finally collapsing.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Boyce's hand clamped around Pluto's neck.
"No!" Celia screamed. "Leave him alone."
He picked up her cat and slammed him back down. A noise escaped Pluto's mouth,

and Celia cried out when she heard it. Boyce gloried in her reaction and beat

her cat savagely against the shattered mirror until the broken pieces scattered

across the tile. He pounded Pluto into the floor with so much force that Celia

heard the cat's bones breaking from several feet away. When Boyce had finished,

he flipped Pluto's body toward her. It landed like a bag of marbles. Red bubbles

trilled from its black lips.
Boyce lay on the floor outside the door and stared at her through the hole. Then

he reached out and picked up a piece of glass. He flicked it at her and watched

her jump. That's right, jump, goddamn it, JUMP. Another piece. And another. Like

he'd flicked matches at that ugly retard when he was a kid, all the way home

from school. Watching her cry until finally he'd taken the whole fucking pack

and lit them all at once and pushed them into her frizzy fucking hair and

listened to it sizzle. He could still smell her burning. It smelled great.
He pulled his arm out of the hole, but kept looking in. Celia could make out

only the roughest circle of his face, but his grin was apparent in the crinkling

of skin around his eyes and in the slightly upraised movement of his sharp-edged

nose, as if these two senses— along with all the others— were slow-dancing with

death.
She touched her wet face and realized she was weeping. She wanted to ball