Chapter 10 #2
"'Course you haven't." He scoffs. "You're a woman.
You're safe from him — from what he does to men, anyway.
" Something bitter twists his mouth. "For all I know, you called him yourself.
Had him come deal with me, the way those women do.
" He snatches the folded poster off the counter — I'd left it there, forgotten — and slaps it down hard in front of me.
"Don't think I don't know what that carnival's for.
All it'd take is one word from you about how I get when I've had a drink, and I'm a dead man.
I'm not stupid, Ophelia. You probably skipped whatever proper channel and went straight to the devil himself. "
I have no idea what in the world he is talking about. Or accusing me of.
"He's been stalking me," I say, my voice cracking. "Breaking into this house. Watching me sleep. That's not — I never—"
"Then let him." He says it flat, final, chilling in how little it costs him.
"Let him stalk you. Let him watch you sleep.
Let him knock you up for all I care — I am not going to be the next man that bastard kills over some woman.
If he wants you, Ophelia, he has my blessing to take you however he pleases.
Even if you don't want it. So don't you ever call for me again when it's him coming after you. "
He turns and walks out, leaving me standing there with the spatula still in my hand, egg cooling in the pan, my whole body gone rigid and hollow at once.
I don't move for a long time. I simply stand there, staring at nothing, trying to understand how a man can hand his own daughter over like an offering and call it fatherly restraint.
I don't know how long I've been standing there when the landline starts ringing, down through the floor, in the shop.
I already know who it is.
I go down slowly, my hand trailing the wall — the phone works even without electricity, I remind myself, some detached, practical part of my mind still functioning; the telephone line runs entirely separate from the mains — and I stop in front of it, black and gleaming, ringing insistently on its little shelf.
The answering machine clicks on before I can decide whether to lift it myself.
"I do love watching you stare at that vintage rotary, paralyzed, wondering if it's me on the other end," his voice says, unhurried, amused.
"Pick it up, Ophelia. Let me hear that little gasp you make right before you realize there's nowhere left to run.
Come now, cracked doll. You know you want to. "
I snatch the receiver up before the machine finishes recording. "I'll call the police," I say, and my voice shakes despite every effort to keep it steady.
"Will you, now." I can hear the smile in it. "Go on, then. Ring them. Nothing on this earth is going to keep me from you, love — not tonight, not any night after it. You could have the whole of Scotland Yard standing in that shop and I'd still find my way to you eventually."
"I mean it."
"So do I."
"I'm hanging up," I say.
"I know."
I hang up.
I stand there a long moment, breathing hard, before I lift the receiver again and dial three numbers with a finger that won't quite hold still. Nine. Nine. Nine.
"Emergency, which service do you require?"
"Police," I say. "Please — police."
A pause, a click, and a new voice — calm, professional. "Police emergency, what's happened?"
"There's — I have a stalker." The words tumble out faster than I mean them to. "He keeps breaking into my house. He's been watching me sleep. He put a knife to my throat, more than once, and he calls, he leaves messages, he just — he won't stop—"
"Alright, I need your name first, please."
"Ophelia. Ophelia Sorrell."
"And are you in immediate danger right now, Ophelia?"
I glance around the empty shop, every shadow suddenly suspect. "I don't — I don't think so. I can't see him right now."
"Alright. If he appears, or if you feel unsafe at any point, you call us straight back, understood? We'll get someone out to take a full report as soon as we can."
"Thank you," I whisper, and hang up, my hands still trembling.
The rest of the day passes in an unbearable, watchful quiet. No knock. No note. No shape in the street. It should feel like relief. Instead it feels like something coiling itself tighter, waiting for exactly the moment I let my guard down.
I sell a handful of items over the course of the afternoon, and this time, I don't leave the till for my father to empty.
I take nearly everything upstairs and hide it in the loose floorboard beneath my wardrobe, leaving only four pounds fifty in loose coins behind in the drawer — enough, I hope, to look plausible, not enough to buy him more than a single sorry pint.
It isn't enough yet for the electric bill either, not nearly, but if I keep doing this, a little at a time, it will be, eventually.
I am done funding his drinking while I can't even afford a coat that fits.
He comes down that evening, rifles through the till, and finds almost nothing. "Why's there so little today," he mutters, not quite looking at me.
"Slow day," I say. "Barely any customers."
He grunts, mutters something about it barely being enough for a proper pint, and shuffles off toward the door.
I watch him go and look down at my own dress, my own hands, and think — not for the first time — about how wrong people's assumptions about me really are.
They think I dress like this because I love it, this whole gothic, Victorian, out-of-time look, and in a strange way, I suppose I do, now — it's mine, it's become part of who I am.
But that was never the reason I started.
The truth is far simpler and far sadder than that: my father drinks away nearly everything the shop earns, and what's left barely covers food, so there's never enough spare to buy anything new.
These fancy dresses — my mother's, my grandmother's — were simply the only things left in this building that still fit me once I outgrew my own childhood clothes.
When I grew up and my clothes from 12 years old stopped fitting me, I started taking them to my room since my father wouldn't buy me new clothes.
And they were all black, or dark aesthetic like.
I tried my best to save money to buy new clothes but each time, I needed to either fix something at the house, or clean, get food, or pay a bill. So I had no choice.
I used to wonder why I couldn't at least wear something of my mother's from her own adult life — something more modern, less conspicuous.
But there's nothing like that to wear, because there's nothing like that left at all.
My mother died the day we were born, and my father, unable to face a single reminder of her, destroyed every trace not long after — burned or donated every stitch of her modern clothing while we were still too small to remember any of it.
All that survived were these — the Victorian pieces, kept only because they were never hers alone to grieve.
They were shop stock she came with from her mother's house.
Antiques. Things that existed for the business, not for memory, and so he never thought to destroy them.
Which means everything I own, everything I wear, every single day, once belonged to a woman who died before I ever knew her, or to a grandmother I barely remember.
Nothing in my wardrobe was ever chosen for me, bought for me, given to me because someone loved me enough to pick it out.
It's all inventory. Leftovers nobody cared enough to burn.
I wonder, sometimes, if that's exactly why he calls me his doll. Because in every way that matters, I already am one — dressed in whatever survived, whatever nobody thought worth destroying.
That night, I light every candle I own — the shop, the kitchen, my bedroom, the hallway, the sitting room, every last stub I can find. I can't afford to let the dark hide anything from me tonight, not after everything.
I leave alone the rooms I always leave alone. My childhood bedroom which I only now see as my sisters’ bedroom. And then the attic that my father always tells me never to go to.
I’m still shaking, my nerves frayed to a thin, snapping wire.
I move through the kitchen like a ghost, preparing a quick, mindless dinner.
Cooking is the only thing that grounds me; the repetitive chop of the knife, the sizzle of the pan, the smell of garlic and butter—it forces me to exist in the physical world, away from the screaming void in my head.
I make a quick supper — beans on toast, simple, fast, the kind of meal that asks nothing of me — and settle in with an old, cracked-spined novel from the Victorian side of the shop, one with my mother's victorian's dresses that I took from when I started getting too big from my own clothes, its pages gone soft and yellow with age.
I never watch the television anymore, not properly — not tonight, with no power to run it anyway, but even on ordinary nights, the thought of that black screen going dark and throwing my own face back at me keeps me well away from it.
I avoid the TV, the microwave door, anything with a dark, reflective surface.
If the screen goes black, I might see her—or worse, I'll see the fragmented, broken version of myself that I can't stand to look at.
Instead, I light a few thick candles, their amber glow casting long, dancing shadows across the walls.
Cooking settles my hands. Reading settles my mind. Together, most nights, they're enough to get me through until sleep takes what's left. Tonight, buried in someone else's story, someone else's ruined love and gothic tragedy, I let myself disappear a while — anywhere but here, anyone but myself.