Chapter 47
Fergus turned back to me, grinning and sweating. He pulled the industrial stapler from his hand, its metallic mouth red and wet with its feed.
“You wanted to teach me a lesson, didn’t you?” he said.
“No…” My voice was small and pathetic.
“Yes, you did.” He nodded at me, teeth and gums bared. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his hand. “Oh, he’ll never make fun of me again after that, you thought. No one will ever make fun of me again.”
He moved the stapler up to his wrist.
“No—!” I tried to stop him.
He pulled the trigger again. Sch-unk! This time with a faint crunch. He shuddered. A guttural exhale escaped his still-grinning face.
“Well,” he said. “Do you feel better now?”
He raised the stapler from his wrist. I shook with horror at the blood pooling round his battered flesh. He paced closer, pressing the teeth end of the stapler to his neck.
“What about now?”
He fired the glinting payload into his neck.
Sch-unk!
I backed away.
He moved the stapler down to his collarbone.
“Or now?”
Sch-unk!
My fingers shook over the axe.
He carefully undid the buttons of his flannel shirt then placed the stapler over a hairy nipple.
“Or now?”
Sch-unk!
He kept approaching me, metal staples in his flesh catching the light, blood blooming on his clothes.
I frantically searched the shop around me, looking for something to make him stop.
He raised the stapler up to his eye. The world went white-hot.
“Or how about now?”
Before I could answer, he fired the stapler into his eye.
Vuh-schunk!
“No!” I screamed.
The buzzing in my ears shrilled like the string of a strained violin.
Fergus lowered the stapler. I didn’t want to look and yet I was still looking.
The metal staple hovered in the centre of his eyeball.
As his gaze shifted, it flickered, catching the light, a silver strand of confetti in a night sky.
There wasn’t as much blood as I thought there would be.
But his pupil… God, it looked like his pupil was melting.
It dripped down to the side, like the darkness was spilling out of his eye.
“I don’t feel better,” I said. “It doesn’t make me feel better! It never does. It just makes everything worse!”
He froze, staring at me. Two white clouds formed around the punctures in his cornea.
“It always makes things worse.”
And then I realised. This was it. I was being tested. This was my first challenge.
I lowered my axe and reached into my pocket for the thread.
“When she tests you,” Callie-Ann had said, “make a knot instead.”
“That story was never about humiliating me. Not really,” I said. “The way Rowan is around you makes me think that you’re not actually an arsehole. I mean, you’re an arsehole, but he knows why.”
Fergus’s body twitched, but he didn’t approach.
I tucked the axe under one arm and slowly wound the thread around my fingers.
“You told that story about the kid with the birthmark living in this house. So, you grew up in this village. I don’t think you’ve ever left it.
And the way you’re so antagonistic to visitors, but not just any visitors—the ones from cities—makes me think everyone you grew up with—all your friends, your cousins—they all left.
For university, jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses.
And they left you behind. Like this village, and therefore you, weren’t good enough for them. ”
I twisted the thread over and under itself, my fingers finding the right loops to pull.
“You accused me of thinking the people who lived around here were dumb. Superstitious. ‘Fucking idiots,’ you said. I don’t think that about you, by the way.
But it’s clear that you do. You believe it so much you assume everyone else does, too.
That’s why you told that story the way you did.
You were shadow boxing with an assumption of an assumption. ”
I pulled the thread tight. A knot.
“It was never about me. None of this is. You couldn’t even see me.”
The store was silent. The ringing in my ears had stopped. Fergus stared at me, still with that horrible grin and that awful, punctured eye.
But then the corners of his grin began to falter.
The metals shelves in the aisles rattled and the fluorescent light flickered and buzzed.
Fergus’s grin pulled down into an anguished scream as a tide of bloody staples tumbled from his mouth.
With a roar he rushed me, stapler held at arm’s length in my direction.
I turned and bolted as the store crumbled and fell apart around me.
Ceiling tiles rained down in clouds of dust, and cans of wood stain fell from shelves and rolled across the floor.
Fergus’s screams were close behind me, along with that horrible metallic sch-unk sch-unk sch-unk!
I ran for the front doors and the darkness beyond.
Clutching the axe close and the thread tight in my fist, I shouldered the door open.
And fell onto the landing of 1a.