Chapter 3
III
The light outside was the soft gold of late afternoon, but something about it felt wrong.
The stillness of a snow globe scene, a frozen, plastic perfection that lasted only until someone lifted the world and shook it.
I stood by the window, seeking a moment of apricity to thaw the chill that settled deep in my bones.
Dust suspended in the beams slanting through the apertures, drifting like ash.
Through the glass, I saw Sylvie’s car pull into the driveway.
She stepped out slowly, keys jangling in her hand. By the way she shut the door (a single, irritated motion), I already knew. She was in a mood. A bad one.
I fluttered with nervous anticipation. How could I fix it? What could I do to make it better?
Things had been strange for weeks. She didn’t talk to me anymore. When she did, it was always a list of things she didn't like about me, and it usually ended in raised voices and one of us retreating behind a locked door.
I scrambled mentally, trying to figure out why she would be upset with me this time.
A thought pressed against the edge of my mind, but I couldn’t quite catch it.
Something forgotten. Something I couldn’t name.
It slinked just beyond reach like a shadow crawling along the wall, slipping away when I tried to look at it, creeping closer every time I turned away.
I felt it in the pit of my stomach, down to my very core. It was dark. Oh, how dark it was.
And I was so very afraid to remember.
I knew that once I caught it, everything would change. There would be no more light. No more love.
The air curdled, and my lungs stalled. A low hum filled my ears, like bees trapped in the walls. The house whimpered and shifted, uncomfortable. Shadows stretched long and unnatural across the floor. My body began to shake, though I wasn’t cold. It was a dread that trapped me like roots.
I wanted to run to Sylvie. To call out and tell her not to come in. To warn her. To tell her to leave before it was too late.
But I couldn’t move.
The memory—whatever it was—pressed down on me like a tombstone. Somewhere in the house, a door opened with an ominous creak.
And then the light began to fade.
The smell came first.
Sharp, metallic, coppery. Biological. So intense it seemed to have penetrated every pocket of oxygen, replacing the air with a thick, iron weight.
I had cut my hand on a switchblade once, and the mess had smelled exactly like this.
Only now, the stench was a thousand times stronger.
Beneath it, sour threads of piss and sweat coiled upward.
A stench of bodies reduced to their most primitive, animal state.
My head throbbed. Each beat felt like something trying to break out. My arms would not obey, heavy and aching in their sockets, like they had been forcibly removed from me and loosely reattached.
It was all coming back in uneven bursts. The strangers. The woman with the gash across her throat. Red hair plastered with gore. The knife in my hand. Sylvie.
Sylvie!
I sat up like something possessed from the grave, but my resurrection was brief. A violent tug yanked my arms backward, sawing bone.
The sound came second. I heard it now, what had been there all along. A percussion. Slapping, obscene. Low gasps breaking the air, throats working with effort and release, skin dragging against skin. The sound of two bodies locked together, panting, moving.
And beneath it, something else. The sound was hard to separate from the pounding inside my head, but the longer I lay there, the clearer it became. The noise was coming from outside.
Music.
Not in this room, but rising from somewhere below, from the speakers Sylvie had bought.
It was too loud. A deformity. A blunt insult to the style of Whitmore.
She listened to the kind of music I despised—some strain of techno.
Now, its synthetic breath filled the room with a relentless, vibrating thrum that melded with the sounds from the bed—the moans, the sucking, the sharp knock of flesh. Madness in stereo.
My throat constricted into a dry knot as panic scraped against my ribs. I closed my eyes, praying it was a nightmare.
It wasn’t. It remained, no matter how fiercely I pleaded to wake.
I tried to focus. I needed something steady to cling to, but the room refused me. It tilted. It stretched. It warped around me. The dark was not empty; it shifted and gathered, taking on wobbly shapes before dispersing them like a swarm of flies.
This was our bedroom—mine and Sylvie’s. The sheets, the dresser, and the canvas featuring our first holiday over the bed. Her perfume bottles were still neatly aligned on the vanity, ordered by expense, not by favour, because Sylvie always shoved what she didn’t like out of sight.
But it all looked unbearably wrong.
The only light came from the night lamp.
Sylvie had thrown a strip of red fabric over it after reading something about ambience in Elle.
Crimson pooled over the walls, soaked the rug, slicked the bed.
Everything looked flayed open. Not a room, but the stomach of some great beast. I felt as if I were being digested alive.
I blinked hard, certain the color would thin, that sense would reassemble. But it only thickened until the world itself shrank into a pulsing red haze.
Shadows writhed on the bed, their shapes tangled and perverse. For a heartbeat, I thought they were hurting Sylvie, tearing her apart, but when my eyes adjusted, I saw it was them—the man and the woman with the slit throat. How was she still alive? How could she still move?
Oh God. She was not just alive.
They were fucking. Vigorously.
Their bodies writhed and twisted. She was on top now.
For a moment, I thought she wore a skin-tight bodysuit, something glossy and slick, until I realized she was completely naked, drenched in a glistening, cranberry sheen.
The lower half of her face looked like it had been dipped in paint, her lips and chin smeared and shining in the lamp’s suffocated glow.
The gape in her throat was hidden beneath a silk scarf, the edges stained like bruises.
Blood shone on her chest, streaking her lover's skin as she moved. She let out small, fractured sounds, fragile and almost childlike, interrupted only by the occasional guttural groans of the man.
I twisted once, uselessly.
The chains around my wrists trailed back and locked around the radiator—old metal pipes from another century, built heavy and indestructible.
A shift rippled across the bed. I thought the man was slipping, his body sliding from beneath her thighs. But no—they kept moving, rutting, as if nothing in the world was out of place. The shift continued, and then, with heavy, graceless weight, something fell off the bed, crashing to the floor.
A body.
The scream that tore out of me did not sound human. It dragged itself from my throat until my vocal cords were ribbons of scalded, weeping grit.
Because the body lying crumpled on the floor was Sylvie.
I reached toward her, helpless, my arms cut short.
Sylvie’s limbs contorted at impossible angles, her face barely recognizable.
Eyes open, unblinking. Mouth frozen in mid-scream.
Sylvie was naked, her skin crosshatched with raw cuts.
She was coated in a dark film of blood. I wrenched and twisted, but the chains were merciless.
I wanted to claw at myself, peel away my skin, gouge out my eyes, shatter my ears—anything to smother the roaring in my skull. I wanted to disappear from every sense, to stop existing in every way.
All I had left was to scream, and scream, and scream, staring into Sylvie’s dead eyes.
The figures on our bed ignored me entirely. They moved in their own filth, lost in their frenzy, treating me like nothing more than a harmless spectre thrashing in the sullied light. Like they were accustomed to it.
The woman with the scarf shrieked, a high, piercing sound that tore through the room.
Her entire body convulsed and shook while he held her against himself, seeking his own release.
At last, their violent ecstasy ended. He lay splayed across the sheets, limbs slack, his form melting into the gloom.
Even from here, the man looked enormous next to this subtle woman; the bed was barely long enough for him.
She slid off him, and his male organ leaned sideways, winking in the hue of the lamp.
They had been rutting in Sylvie’s blood.
My stomach clenched.
The woman rose from the bed and stepped over the pile that had once been the love of my life.
In her bloodied nudity, beneath the scarf at her neck, she wore a large medallion that nestled between the smooth swell of her breasts.
I was perplexed as she advanced toward me, all feline grace and feral eyes.
She showed no sign of pain or discomfort.
I must not have cut her as deep as I thought.
Maybe I dreamt it all—the knife slicing through her throat, the struggle, the fight.
Maybe it ended before I realized it had ended.
Turning to Sylvie’s vanity, her hand hovered before plucking something small and silver from its surface. A sharp click split the air. A Stanley knife.
She looked at me. And her eyes—God, her eyes. They were feverish pinpricks, the eyes of a madwoman.
Oh God. She means to do it.
The knife wasn’t strong or long enough to kill me instantly. It would be slow, miserable, a punishment for what I had done to her.
Death by a million cuts.
Her grip was iron. I writhed like a trapped feral cat, spitting and jerking against her hold, but she didn’t give an inch.
She drew the knife across my wrist, and the flesh yielded under the blade.
Pain burst through me in a blinding white bloom.
My essence oozed from the open seam of my wrist, hot and syrupy.