Chapter 7
VII
On some nights, I would wake and wait for Ophelia to come upstairs to initiate our routine, but she did not always come. I knew she was in the house because her agitated voice would rise against Gunnar.
Their fights were nothing like those I once had with Sylvie.
With her, there had been doors slammed hard enough to rattle walls.
There was always an insufferable punishment of silence.
I would try to soothe her, telling her we could fix things, while she admitted she was no longer sure she wanted me at all.
I had always convinced her it would get better.
Gunnar and Ophelia fought differently. I had overheard enough to know she resented the time he spent alone in the room beside mine, the one filled with stifled whispers. Gunnar never raised his voice. Only Ophelia. Her vocals carried with the wounded pitch of a spoiled child.
Gunnar looked at me more often now, pinning me with his gaze while he used my body.
Perhaps he wondered if I was the reason Ophelia was spinning out of control.
The attention was unsettling, but it also brought a strange comfort.
For a moment, I felt less snubbed and more like something with shape. A person, perhaps.
Ophelia clung to me with a kind of aching urgency. She moved against my body to find her own release, using me until she broke, and afterward, she held me close, as though we were lovers.
The scar on her neck had vanished completely now. And perhaps she had forgiven me.
Or perhaps she was smoothing me out before she broke me fully.
When I woke, it was not to noise but to a tense quiet.
I had learned to tell their movements apart even with my eyes closed. Gunnar never entered this room without Ophelia, yet I often heard him climb to the third floor and retreat into the room beside mine.
“She’s not enough! We either finish her or you find someone else!”
Gunnar’s voice carried through the stairwell, the steps groaning beneath his weight.
Everything inside me froze. Was he speaking about ending me? Now? No. No.
The door opened. My body stiffened, bracing for a fight, but it was not him. Ophelia stood there with a candle, the flame trembling in the draft. Another door slammed somewhere nearby. Gunnar had gone to his room. I couldn’t help but wonder what was in there.
Ophelia sometimes mentioned it with open scorn.
He spent too much time there, she said, whispering to the dead.
I never asked what she meant. I no longer had the strength to form the words, let alone search for answers.
I finally took the world, however ugly and grotesque, for what it was without questioning it.
I stopped trying to reshape it, or bend it to my will for I no longer had a will.
“I’m just so lonely, Agatha,” Ophelia said softly. “I’m so glad you’re here with me. You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting a friend.”
I kept thinking about what Gunnar had said earlier. Not like the last time. Whatever had happened before, it had not ended well.
When she removed the shackles and motioned for me to follow, I obeyed. I always obeyed. My body trailed after her as though pulled by a thread.
“I need your help, darling.” Ophelia led me to the master bedroom.
I startled at the threshold. The room was so unwelcoming. Who would ever want to live here? It was choked with old, mismatched furniture that didn’t belong together. The wallpaper was so dark it swallowed what little light made it inside. No couple sharing this space would ever be happy.
Now, dust lay thick along the baseboards. The floor bore old stains I didn’t want to identify. The mattress was marked with stiff, darkened streaks. Even the radiator where she had chained me carried discoloration along the metal, like rust that had never been cleaned away.
This was the kind of room you would see in a true crime documentary, a place that made no effort to conceal what had happened there. A murder room.
She pointed to a bucket of cloudy, soapy water and a brush in the corner.
“If you could try cleaning up a bit, you would be of so much help.” It was spoken so playfully, but I had come to learn the directness lurking beneath. An order, not an option.
Something caught my eye beneath the headboard. A small object, dull in the weak light. The Stanley knife.
My gaze fixed on it and would not move.
It would not kill her. Of course not. But if she left me here long enough, I could reach it. I could end it. I could leave on my own terms.
My chest ached with the thought. And more terrifyingly, I wondered if I actually wanted it to end.
Above me lay the room where Gunnar spent so many hours. His steps traveled through the beams, each one a reminder of how close they were. How little distance separated me from them.
By the time I forced my eyes away from the knife, Ophelia had returned.
She crouched and lifted it between two fingers.
“You won’t be needing that,” she said. Her smile hitched higher. Then she left and locked the door.
I dipped the brush into the bucket and began to scrub.
Sanguinary patches had sunk deep into the grain. I pressed harder, working the bristles in slow circles until my arms burned. The only sounds in the room were the bristles dragging across the floor and the splash of water in the bucket as it slowly turned the colour of expired salmon.
Tucked in his room like a secret, Gunnar made no sound, yet I could feel him, sense his uncertainty. I did not hear the hiss of his words, but rather experienced them. They bore through me, steady as wind, splintering my nerves and tugging my spirit.
He was speaking with someone.
Not Ophelia, no. I could not imagine he’d ever be so emotionally raw with her. This companion, this stranger, felt like someone . . . older. Wiser. Absent.
I stopped scrubbing. The ceiling held me with something close to hypnosis. A woman formed in my mind’s eye.
I saw her only in fragments, the way a dream shows a person’s features before you wake.
A narrow, sharp face. Pale hair braided tight.
Eyes pitch as a starless night. She was tall and broad-shouldered.
Not beautiful in any gentle sense, but impossible to ignore.
The longer you studied her, the more expressive she became.
The moment her eyes fell on Gunnar, she knew he would belong to her. Not from love, not even from desire, but from a deeper and more complicated hunger.
Hunger.
Then she stepped toward him and–
Outside, a car engine rumbled. Tires ground over gravel. The woman in my mind vanished. The vision broke like a popped soap bubble.
My pulse quickened, and for a single, fleeting moment, hope flared. Someone had come—someone passing by the house, maybe from the bank, or perhaps from Sylvie’s work.
I wanted to scream, to let them know I was being held here, but my throat strained, and nothing came.
Then the locks on the front door released with a heavy crack.
Ophelia laughed—high-pitched, almost drunken. I knew she was faking it. A man’s voice answered. I couldn’t catch the words, but Ophelia’s were laced with venom. Gunnar shifted upstairs. Something moved with him, subtle, deliberate, as if he had set something back on a shelf.
Ophelia had invited someone to Whitmore.
The stairs creaked as they climbed. Their voices entwined. A request for gin, a prayer for sex without boundaries.
“You don’t have to worry,” Ophelia assured him. “I’ll have you begging for mercy.”
He laughed, and the amusement carried as her guest inquired about the lack of light, the sour smell, and where he could relieve himself.
“Right this way.”
They stopped outside the master bedroom where I was cleaning.
With the heavy click of the latch, the door opened. I recoiled into the corner, desperate to dissolve into the floral patterns of the Victorian wallpaper, where the shapes gathered into skulls.
He stepped in first. For a moment, the darkness swallowed him, leaving only a silhouette framed by the flicker of candlelight. He stood slightly taller than Ophelia, but wide, heavy through the frame.
From my corner, I could smell him. The tart tang of alcohol clung to his clothes. His breath was mephitic. Sweat soaked into his skin—thick, human, unclean. It gathered in the folds of him, between his legs, along his skin.
But beneath it all, there was hot, hot blood.
Blood . . .
It burned under his flesh. I could feel it from where I sat, heat rolling off him in slow waves. I shouldn't have been able to perceive the brine of him from across the room, but it was a strange new sense of smell, almost an intuitive guess.
The floor lamp clicked on, and everything was cast in a cranberry hue. He winced at the sudden glare, then paled as he took inventory.
Dumbstruck, his gaze tracked the damp patches that faintly smelled of cheap pine cleaner.
The red flecks spattering the wallpaper.
The bed, stripped of sheets.
The mattress, sunken and fetid.
And finally, finally, he saw me, and I felt a sense of realism I hadn’t experienced since that first frenzied feeding.
“What the fuck is this?” His voice was nails on a chalkboard. Ophelia laughed and gave a small, careless twirl before drifting toward him. The man faltered and stumbled back—straight into Gunnar, who had appeared like a silent assassin.
In a single, fluid motion, Gunnar seized the man by the throat and lifted him off the ground. The man convulsed in his grip, legs kicking into the empty air. Saliva spilt down his chin.
Gunnar raised him higher, tightening his hold until the man’s back bowed and he shuddered in breathless bursts.
And then, release.
He hit the floor. His ghastly gurgles mixed with soap.
He barely managed to scramble on all fours. Ophelia stood over him, the knife I’d coveted held loosely in one hand. She forced him to stay down, pressing him forward before swinging herself onto his back, straddling him with practiced ease.
Her weight, still impossible to determine, drove him to the floor. One hand yanked his head back as her legs locked around his torso, urging him forward in jerking, violent motions.
His eyes locked onto mine, huge and glassy, frantic. He strained to shape a plea.
The knife winked.
I smelled it before I saw it—the blood. From across the room, I felt its warmth, its sudden, heavy essence. The heat of it dulled my thoughts, softened them. I couldn't look away. I watched as a thin, pale line appeared on his throat, then widened, before spilling all at once.
I pinched my nose, viced my teeth, but it made no difference. The taste was already there—copper and oil, coating my tongue with something thick and expectant.
He jerked violently, choking, coughing. A grotesque spray of spittle and blood undid all my hard work. His eyes bulged as if they might burst from their sockets.
Ophelia laughed, bright, moving with him as though breaking a wild horse, one arm arcing through the air while the other held him tight.
I wanted to look away, but my eyes refused. Slowly, I slid down the wall until I sank into a seated position. Nausea and fear coiled through me, my chest tight with the sickening spectacle. And yet, I salivated.
Gunnar stood at the door and watched, detached, while Ophelia glowed with the fevered energy of a child on a carousel.
In a final, desperate surge, the man lurched toward me. Ophelia slipped from his back, laughing, the sound too merry for what was happening.
His hand found my ankle. It dragged across my skin, leaving a smear of heat. Then he gave up.
He collapsed at my feet, fingers curling in a phantom reach before pulling back. Ophelia caught his leg and hauled him around, forcing him onto the grain of the wooden planks. With a scream of victory, she threw herself onto him, drinking in deep, greedy gulps.
But it was not enough. The wound was too shallow. She caught the hilt of the knife and drove it home, stabbing harder, deeper, widening the gash until the red overflow was finally thick enough to satisfy her.
Gunnar finally pushed himself from the threshold. He cast a brief, detached glance in my direction before bending over the convulsing body.
In the gloom, their bodies blurred into a desperately ravenous thing.