Rebecca Lim: Mercy

Like their faces, I’ve seen this room before.

‘You get used to it,’ says the bird girl quietly. Her voice is dry, like fallen leaves. It sounds almost rusty, like she hasn’t used it much lately. Except maybe to scream.

I try to reconcile the outline of the smaller girl with the photos from her dresser. She looks beaten, emaciated, unlovely. Her ash blonde hair seems white to my eyes, even in this light.

‘Lauren?’ I ask, though I don’t need to, nausea in my words. The smell in here is so strong, it’s crowding my thoughts, the very oxygen out of the room.

‘Who wants to know?’ she replies. Her voice is thin and uninterested.

‘Ignore her,’ pleads the taller figure, Jennifer. ‘She doesn’t seem to care if we ever get out! Does anyone else know we’re here? Please say yes.’ She is speaking barely above a low whisper, but she might as well be screaming, fear crowds the spaces between her words.

‘Her brother does,’ I say, hoping my voice sounds reassuring. ‘We were supposed to come back here tonight, to try and get you both out. But something happened on my way back from Paradise High before I could meet up with him. Any idea what that was?’ A chemical taste rises in my mouth and I have to stop to vomit over the side of the bed. So much for never getting sick. I face the wall again, gasping, waiting for the unfamiliar nausea to subside.

Ryan, I think miserably. I found them. Now what do I do?

Like an unconscious echo, Lauren gasps aloud, ‘Ryan?’ and she begins to cry.

It is like a dam bursting, and a chill flash breaks out across my skin. Lauren sounds inhuman, like a wounded animal, and across the room Jennifer shifts uncomfortably on her metal cot.

There’s a sudden loud banging on the door above us, at the top of the stairs, and Lauren’s crying cuts off abruptly like she’s been choked.

‘Don’t make me come down and hurt you, Lauren!’ a man’s voice bellows. So distorted with anger I can’t tell whether I’ve heard it before. Lauren gives a tiny whimper and lies down. Her cot shifts and creaks.

Jennifer and I are silent for a while and then we start talking again, as if the other girl isn’t lying there, facedown and rigid, listening to every word we say with every cell in her body.

‘Did he hurt you?’ I ask Jennifer fiercely. I dart a quick glance in her direction. She’s still shaking like a leaf in the dark.

‘Apart from ripping some hair out of my scalp because I wouldn’t do what he wanted, and sticking a needle in my neck, no,’ she whispers. ‘I’m still in one piece. But I’m so scared.’

‘He hasn’t had the time to do anything yet,’ I say.

‘He’s been greedy with the two of us. Snatching us so close together.’

‘So far, all he wants me to do is sing,’ the girl continues, puzzlement in her voice. ‘But I think he’s a little … disappointed.’

‘That’s good,’ I reassure her. And it is. I’m relieved.

He’s had her for almost a week and all he’s done is ask her to perform a few tunes? ‘That’s great. You’re okay.

Hold onto that.’

‘There’s a room just up the stairs,’ Jennifer adds, her voice growing a little stronger. ‘With a piano in it. A baby grand. Candle holders. A gold music stand. Armchairs.

Like a recital room. He keeps it real tidy. That’s where he takes me when I’m not here. Sometimes he takes her instead.’ I look over quickly. Jennifer inclines her head in Lauren’s direction in the dark, forgetting I shouldn’t be able to see, though of course I can.

I hear the other girl draw a sharp breath. Force myself to leave her alone a while longer, though I have so many questions. She’s not ready to talk. She may never be ready.

‘He just looks at you?’ I repeat in Jennifer’s direction.

‘When he makes you sing?’

‘He says that he was always obsessed with me, but I’ve changed. I’m not the girl he remembers. I’ve defiled his memories of me, even though my voice is better, stronger, than it ever was. Things can change a lot in two years.’ There’s a shudder in Jennifer’s rich, expressive voice. Her words tumble out so quickly I can barely make sense of them. ‘He said I left town before he could act on it, that he shouldn’t have hesitated before, but he’s been waiting for me to come back ever since.

And the minute I did … I shouldn’t have opened the door. I just wasn’t expecting to see him there, so late.

‘Plus, I’d had a crush on him forever — it all came rushing back, and that didn’t help. I wasn’t to know he was some kind of … pervert. I wasn’t thinking. I was kind of … flattered he remembered me.’ She sounds disgusted with herself.

I wrinkle my forehead in the dark. A crush?

Flattered? Out of the corner of my eye I see Lauren sit up suddenly, pushing her long hair back from her face with shaking hands.

‘I only came back because my aunt insisted I sing at Julia’s wedding,’ Jennifer says. ‘So who else knows we’re here?’ The hope in her voice is painful to hear.

‘Just me and Ryan,’ I say, my back to them both, still facing the wall. ‘But he should be on his way right now.’ I sound more confident than I feel. ‘He knows where we are. We’d planned to get you out of the basement tonight, anyway. He’ll just have to get started on his own. We just have to wait a while, and we’ll be free.

Simple as that.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ Jennifer murmurs, relief flooding her voice, though she cannot stop shaking. ‘So fantastic.

I keep thinking I’ve stumbled into someone’s idea of a sick joke. Though he did say something strange before I passed out. Said it was a shame I’d gotten so big and so

… fat.’ There’s indignation in her tone.

That makes me frown. Something familiar in it.

‘Said he liked me much better when I was smaller,’ Jennifer says incredulously. ‘Like her, I suppose.’ In the dark, I see her wave vaguely in Lauren’s direction.

I hear Lauren inhale sharply, and I reach the same terrible conclusion a heartbeat after she does.

‘You mean,’ Lauren says in a trembling tone, ‘all this time I’ve been here because of … of you? Like some substitute for you? He couldn’t have you, so he took me?’ Her voice flies up the scale, breaks sharply on the last word.

‘You don’t know that,’ I say, but she’s right. The timing is too awful, the coincidence too awful. Just over two years ago, both girls were bird-bright, tiny, centre-stage together for one mesmerising performance. Two rare sopranos brimming with talent. Then one flew the nest and the other was swiftly … caged.

Lauren begins to wail. ‘Do you KNOW what he’s DONE to me?’ She’s suddenly uncaring of whether the monster above us can hear as she mercilessly catalogues the sins that have been perpetrated against her since she was taken. As she speaks, her voice drops lower and lower, grows mechanical.

In between the retelling of inexorable hours that felt like months, months that felt like lifetimes stitched together end to end, every sordid, unclean thing, I can hear Jennifer’s harsh sobs.

‘I’m sorry,’ she cries, over and over, hands covering her face. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘He says it’s to keep me safe,’ Lauren murmurs.

‘That he’s the only person who can truly appreciate my… talent.’ Though I am moved almost beyond bearing, I remain dry-eyed, my forehead resting against the wall.

It is a peculiar thing, though I cannot cry tears the body I’m in may choose to follow a different directive. I am grateful for the darkness for I need not feign them.

‘Last year,’ Lauren whispers, ‘when I refused to sing once, he hit me so hard that I nearly died. And, you know,’ she says, her voice suddenly fierce, ‘I was almost glad. I’ve been in hell,’ she says simply. ‘Am in hell. And now you are, too.’ Jennifer weeps noisily, and I am reminded of Lauren’s mother, completely undone by grief. I imagine Lauren, doubled over alone in this room, and something rises up in me like a red fog. For a minute I cannot see, and my head is filled with a terrible roaring, like the sound a city makes when it is being razed, stone by stone, to the ground. There is a firestorm in me, greater than me.