17. Dollie—present day #3
Almost silent cries wrack my body but are quickly drowned out by the smashes and crashes that replace each thud of his sneaker.
The noise tortures me, and I feel my heart kick up a beat. I rise on shaking legs and slowly drift into the reading room.
I find the mirror more broken than ever. It sits in pieces on the floor. Quickly, I avert my gaze out of fear that my broken reflection will bring more bad luck my way.
My eyes land on Shane and the pile of damage around him. My crystals are lost to the mess he’s caused.
Bright colors crunch under his sneakers as he stomps down on the remains of my mother’s ornaments.
My jaw almost shatters on the ground with every unicorn and Pegasus.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I stride through the devastation in my over-knee socks and an aura of disbelief.
He doesn’t stop, using a big piece of ceramic to hack into the wall I’d spent hours painting, chipping the paint and the wall below, and huffing with the challenge as he accepts it.
“These are my mother’s ornaments!” I crumble to the ground with the pieces. “They are all I have left of her!”
Shane takes a break from destroying the plaster to run over to me.
His dirty nails pierce my cheeks when he grabs my face and spits hatred.
“Well, you can thank your cunt brother for that, can’t you!
Not me. No, not me. She’d be alive if not for that cunt.
You don’t hate him for that, but you hate me for a few fucking messages?
” Through bared teeth, his spit hits me again as he nudges his head against mine and says, “Get fucking real, you stupid bitch.”
He pushes me away.
My hands come out to stop me from head-butting the floor, and I’m lucky that they avoid all my broken memories.
Before Shane moves off, he delivers a kick that catches me in the hip.
Shock grips me. He’s never been like this with me before. He’s broken things and screamed, but he’s never hurt me physically in an argument.
It leaves me shaking on the floor.
And he doesn’t care. He really doesn’t care.
“You just can’t leave stuff alone!” he screams, pulling at the hair I cut for him last weekend. “This mess is all your fucking fault.”
Ignorance is bliss, or at least that’s what I try to tell myself.
I can’t focus on him right now.
I push happier memories into my head and blink away tears because all those memories are attached to another person, one who hates me enough to threaten my life.
More tears fall, and I force myself to look at Shane rather than think of Ambrose—because, somehow, the thing with him hurts more.
As soon as my hand leaves my hip and the bruise forming there, it moves to a coral wing that bites at my skin as I pluck it from the ground. Ignoring the pain, I collect as many matching pieces as possible that I can see.
I know I won’t be able to fix Mom’s ornaments, but I can’t stop the urge to try to fix at least one.
“You just couldn’t believe me, could you?” Shane stops hacking at the wall for a second time to ask the stupidest question in history.
“I saw it with my own eyes, Shane! I saw you ask another girl to reenact a movie full of sex. I saw all the pictures you asked to see of their bodies and that you saved them to a chat where you could access them daily. You did that, and you did this! Destroyed priceless things that belonged to my parents!” I don’t even mention the kick.
But I tremble because of it each time his pitch gets higher. Each time, he lifts the broken ornament in his hand.
I’m terrified.
“Well, believe me then, and I’ll stop. Believe that I haven’t done anything.”
“But you have. So, I have to lie to myself?” I wait for an answer that doesn’t come.
We’re done, and it weighs heavily on my chest.
Still, he says nothing. Just keeps hacking until I talk again.
“Sure, let’s say I believe the lie,” I offer. “But you still have to leave now.”
“Why? We both know I’ll be back in a few days.”
Just like every other time after every other argument. He said he stayed with his parents. Had he really?
“I can’t forgive this.”
“Well, you have to because I’m not going anywhere.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Then I wonder what the police will say.” With my shaking knees protesting, I stand, heading for the door where my phone sits in my coat pocket, carrying the broken pieces of the Pegasus and my broken heart with me.
Shane rushes up behind me, slamming me into the arched doorway. The wind is knocked from me. My hand rushes to my hip, which accepts another injury, and I drop the tiny pieces, stepping on them as I try to get away from Shane and the manic look in his eyes that I don’t recognize.
I rush for the door, forgetting my phone in my desperation to get away. I open the fidgety thing, only for him to force his weight against it with another huff. My skin threatens me with another bruise, this one on my arm and down to the bone.
A scream rattles the house, making me wish the neighbors lived close enough to hear it.
“What do you think you’re fucking doing?”
“I want to leave. You’re crazy right now!” And I’m fucking terrified.
My whole body shakes, and I choke on my sob as the shard in Shane’s hand—the one big enough to damage my walls—presses into my jugular.
“But I’m not the fucking crazy one, am I?” His voice alters and assaults my ears.
He sounds nothing like the man I know as he removes the weapon and replaces it with his thick fingers that wrap around my throat and lift my body from the ground.
The door and my hopeful escape get farther and farther away until my spine hits the bookcase between the staircases.
“You’re the one who thinks she sees fucking ghosts.”
My head spins from his comment—from the hate behind it, and my back aches from the wooden shelves.
“You’re so angry because I cheated—” He talks as if he still believes he’s done nothing wrong.
“But I’ve been second best to some murdering scum cunt for years, haven’t I ?
I don’t know any other girl who’d pine for the brother that murdered her parents, but you did for fucking months on end when you first came to stay with me.
If it weren’t for that death threat, you still would.
I guess you’re a special kind of fucked up, and I’m not the only one who sees it.
” His head bobs to the reading room, where all the seedy accusations lie within the destroyed wall, as his grip tightens.
The shard in his other hand cruelly teases my chest, and the promise of death looms.
I no longer feel like a human.
I feel like a badly treated possession that awful things are happening to. My vision and sense of sound abandon me, leaving me with only fear.
I barely have a minute to process what’s happening—that my boyfriend has a weapon pressed to my chest and his hand around my throat.
The pressure on my bones and the swelling of the surrounding tissue have become too much.
Tears roll over his hand. Something white catches in my blurred vision, and I blink at the sight, choking as I hit the floor.
With my vision still cloudy and disoriented, I vaguely make out the angry scowl knocked from Shane’s face as a giant fist collides with his weak jaw.
Clarity comes with each blink, and I almost wish I couldn’t see.
A clown.
There’s a clown in my house.
The white paint on his face covers the scars below, catching both mine and Shane’s attention.
The clown holds Shane in place, visibly cringing over the contact. All hesitation disappears when a badly scarred hand hits everywhere between Shane’s shoulders and cheekbones until the weapon in his hand pings across the floor, landing in front of me.
I try to stand, but my legs aren’t ready, so I fall away from it, landing awkwardly.
My throat still hurts as I gulp giant breaths of air and rub my neck.
Another punch lands deep in Shane’s rounded stomach.
Red lips move close to his ear, and a strained, husky voice says, “You don’t get to hurt her. You shouldn’t even get to fucking touch her.”
Pushing myself backward, I edge away, but the clown, laying off Shane for a second, steps forward, replacing Shane’s intimidation with his own.
He gazes down at me, at my rapidly rising chest, where a small drop of blood lingers.
Extending a hand, he reaches for me. I shake my head, declining his touch because I remember what happened the last time I accepted a clown’s offer.
Those red lips pull down. His face is angled and sad. He nods, wavy green hair falling into his pleading eyes, shielding the uniqueness from me before I do something I never do.
I meet his eyes.
He nods again, encouraging me to take his hand.
And when I don’t, he lowers to his haunches. His fingers gently guide mine from the bruised skin on my neck. The scars on his hand snag on my glove as his hand slides over mine.
The clown eyes the ring on my finger with judgment. Something like hate flicks in the gaze I now try to avoid.
Pinching the loose material at the tip of my middle finger, he pulls the garment away, and my ring pings off into the distance.
Tucking the lacy material into his jacket pocket, his hand moves back to mine, his fingers filling the gaps between them.
Too afraid to move away, I let him lock our hands together.
Shane looks at me, at my scars, in disgust.
Moving my gaze from over the clown’s shoulder to his face, my heavy breathing blows his hair from his eyes as he comes closer, and something familiar about him, that’s not the big red smile or the black diamonds around his eyes, stares back.
What’s beneath is familiar.
The scars on each cheek that give him a permanent smile. The smaller army of scars that stain each inch of his face. The brown pattern in those enchanting green eyes that resembles a heart.
He stands, and the rhythmic way his body bends, soft and slow like the movement of a dancer, lets me know…
I know it’s you.
I shouldn’t let him touch me after those awful threats, but I barely resist. He pulls me from the ground, my body pressing too closely against his.
His long fingers splayed on my back, holding me against tight stomach muscles like he thought he’d never get this moment.
A moment where he’s comforting me when I need it most.
And that’s the only reason I let this happen. I need someone.
And then it’s over.
My eyes widen as I see Shane approach behind him with another weapon.
Clocking my reaction, the familiar clown releases me and twists. The new shard in Shane’s hand digs through fabric and skin and embeds into his arm. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t flinch. He just smiles with near-perfect white teeth beyond those red lips, aside from the one missing.
They scuffle, and the violent thrashing moves around the foyer.
“Lancie,” Shane calls out in terror. “Hit this fucker with something!”
Ignoring him and the sociopathic tendencies of the clown feeling no pain—just like the last clown—adrenaline and the will to survive sends me up the stairs toward the scene of those who hadn’t.
Eerily, a broken record that stutters almost every word plays Billy Idol’s White Wedding from one of the adjoining hallways and greets me as I near the top.
A glance at the staircase behind me and the one in front of me proves the clown— Ambrose, because I know it’s him—hasn’t followed me to the second floor.
My fingers turn white as they grip the wooden gargoyle to stop myself from shaking. I lean down and look at the bookcase below.
He’s gone.
Shane is gone.
Turning back to the second floor, I peek around the banister and freeze, eyes fixed on the thick carpet where Dad took his last breath.
A flash of lightning takes me back in time, and I wait for the roaring thunder to follow and snap me out of the nightmare.
One, two, three, I count the seconds silently.
Dad lies before me, rolling from his back to his knees with a struggle. Blood runs to the carpet as he stumbles to his feet. A puddle of his blood forms around him, more dripping from his mouth.
His lean body falls to the ground, clutching his stomach and the wounds that are causing the deep red stains on his tattered bed shirt.
Bloody fingers move to me, and then he points to the wall between his room and the family bathroom. The words, “YOU FUCKING CLOWNS,” are painted in his blood, standing out against the cream paint.
Trying to avoid him, my eyes move anywhere else but stall on my mother and her red lips, red with her blood from the smile drawn upon her face. She sits lifelessly against the frame of her bedroom door.
I sink to the floor, the pain in my chest too much. “I’m sorry. I love you both. I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”
I close my eyes, and somehow, tears still leak from them.
“Do you remember, princess?” Dad’s whisper is in my head so deep that I can’t get it out before he says more. “Do you remember your brother gutting us and slitting our throats? Do you remember his plan to leave? To run away.”
My head shakes from side to side because I don’t remember anything about their deaths, but I do remember Ambrose asking me to leave. To run away with him.
That memory returns, hitting me with the weight of a truck.
A floorboard creaks in the distance, forcing my eyes, now raining tears again, to open, only to see my father and his pale skin and dilated pupils too close to my face.
The crack of thunder finally hits, and I jump backward, slipping off the top step and hitting each one, and then my head at the bottom.
Everything fades to black.