Rebecca Lim - Mercy

The room reveals its dingy secrets. There are rust-coloured marks on the floor, on the walls, buckets containing human waste in one corner, food scraps everywhere, empty bottles of cleaning fluid, water, rubbish, rags. I look up at the man descending the staircase, strolling down unaffectedly in his designer shirtsleeves. Then to the other two girls, chained by their necks to their respective walls, as I am.

Jennifer looks whole and largely unmarked by her ordeal, as I’d expected. Her round face, glossy hair and smooth skin shine with rude health. But Lauren is a ghost girl, with cracked lips, sunken eyes, collapsed cheeks, a paper-white skin marked with random scars. Her hair, long and matted, is more white than blonde. It has fallen out in places so I can see down to her pale scalp. She will never be beautiful again, and is so dangerously thin that her feet, head and hands seem too big for her body.

She cringes from the illumination, hands laced tightly over her eyes, her mouth a terrified arc, her fear palpable. It hangs about her like a detectable odour, a familiar on her shoulder, gnawing at her flesh.

I have already felt an echo of this fear through Ryan’s skin, how the dark is almost more bearable to her than the light. Bad things happen in the light. Bad things are about to happen now; one needs no second sight to know it. The pain in my hand spreads up my forearm like wildfire, and I feel the sweat suddenly stand out on Carmen’s brow, her heart assuming a frantic tattoo.

I put my head down as Paul walks among us, studying us curiously as if we are museum exhibits.

Jennifer is dressed like Lauren is, as I am, in a short-sleeved nightgown, and I see that her glasses are missing, that her nose is heavily freckled, and that she is voluptuous, tall, everything an opera singer should be.

Paul runs a hand up one of Jennifer’s long, pale calves, causing Lauren to moan and rock on her fold-out bed.

When Jennifer reacts violently to his touch, Paul’s response is immediate and brutal and so is the flowering wound above Jennifer’s eye.

‘You’ll learn,’ he says quietly, unwrapping Jennifer’s chain from around his fist and crossing the room to where Lauren cringes and moans louder.

‘Lauren was a slow learner,’ he murmurs, squeezing her small face in the fingers of one hand until she bares her teeth reluctantly, like a cornered animal. ‘And you see what happens?’ Jennifer screams again and looks away, blood still running freely down the side of her face.

Tears leak slowly out of Lauren’s eyes and over Paul’s long fingers. I study the terrible damage to her shattered mouth. I have seen faces like hers before, I remember now, dimly, in war zones, or caused by old age and disease. Not like this; never like this. Violence and pleasure the same impulse.

The anger rises in me again, so fiercely that Carmen’s heart skips a beat in her chest and there is that twinge again, only stronger now, as if Carmen is waking up, is struggling to be heard. I don’t want her to see this, or to remember. No one so innocent, so young, should have to.

I jam my burning left hand beneath my right in agony, and the slight movement causes my chain to rattle. Paul turns his head sharply at the sound, releases Lauren’s ruined face from his grip. I see the marks his fingers made, a starker white against her already stark skin.

‘You,’ he says over his shoulder to Jennifer, still sobbing, ‘got too gross. Too fleshy for my liking. It was a shock when you opened the door. I was offended when I saw how much you’d changed, although I was already committed. This one,’ and I know he means me, ‘is how you once were. But so much better — a rare creature, a pearl beyond price, all for me.’ He steps forward and lifts my chin gently.

‘Sing, Carmen,’ he says kindly, as if we are standing together in the empty assembly hall at Paradise High, beside the upright piano. The youthful, handsome teacher; the wise-cracking student. ‘Sing and show them why I had to have you, why you are so peerless.’ He caresses my face and it is as if he has put a hot iron to it. I jerk away from his touch and the instinctive gesture of rejection obliterates the beauty from his features in an instant. He lifts me by the chain around my neck and I am off my feet, hanging before him like a rag doll. We are eye to burning eye.

He shakes me. ‘Sing!’ he hisses, the Devil in his voice.

‘Sing or suffer.’

‘Please,’ gasps Lauren.

‘Do it,’ Jennifer begs.

I have no sense of up or down, so dizzy that the world has telescoped. I am the world, or the world is in me, and in me so much rage and fear and loathing I can feel plates moving, floes breaking, separation, reconfiguration, an unlinking.

And the pain in my hand, my forearm, burns so fiercely that I let out a shattering scream that has Paul staggering to his knees, clutching at his ears. The two girls on either side of the room rock backwards on their cots, holding their heads at the sonic after-bite.

I fall to the floor at the end of my taut chain.

Cradling my burning hand against my chest, leaning on my right, on my knees, panting like a dying animal.

As a thin trickle of blood seeps from between Paul’s fingers, I feel something inside me splitting in two, hear gasps from the others, dim shapes above me to the left and right. In that instant, I catch Carmen’s slight figure fall away, forwards onto the floor. Her body lies there, lifelessly, at my feet as I rise and bellow: Si dextra manus tua scandalizat te, abscide eam!

Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum!

I have no sense of my physical self, but I know that I am very tall. Six, maybe seven, feet.

My perspective has changed. The room that once reeked of the cavernous dark to myself inside Carmen’s skin can almost no longer hold me. Its dimensions feel doll-like, unreal.

And I know this too, because I watch their eyes follow me upwards, huge in their white faces, until I am standing over Paul Stenborg and I am his horizon, I am his world, and the fear in him is as a detectable odour, a familiar on his shoulder, gnawing at his flesh, and it is good.

‘Who are you?’ he shrieks, blood still trickling from each shattered eardrum.

‘I am pain, Paul,’ I whisper, a whisper to rend steel, to rend stone, a whisper to wake even the dead. ‘The living sword. And I shall gather all things that offend, all those that do iniquity, and I shall cast them into a furnace of fire.’ The words come from me freely, as if they have waited all these lifetimes to emerge.

I am dimly aware of Jennifer’s cries, Lauren’s terrified whimpering.

And I raise Paul Stenborg by the collar of his shirt, high, high above the ground, with a fist like bloody mail, and shake him as he shook Carmen’s frail, small frame, and I say again:

‘ Si dextra manus tua scandalizat te, abscide eam.

If your hand causes you to sin, Paul, cut it off. Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum. And if your eye causes you to sin, Paul, pluck it out.’ And with my burning left hand, I put out his eyes, first one and then the other, so that he may never see again, may never covet another living being for the rest of his days. See not music nor colour, joy, rage or fear.

His no longer. Willingly given, willingly taken away. I to do it. And it is done.

For I am the living sword and a creature of my word. The words come to me and I know them to be the truth. Whatever I did to set the sorry course of my life in tremulous motion all those years ago, these things I know now to be immutable.

‘And there shall be a wailing,’ I say quietly, setting the man gently upon his feet, ‘a gnashing of teeth.’ As Paul Stenborg staggers around his basement fortress screaming and roaring, blood streaming from his ears, from the wounds his eyes once were, I move towards first Lauren, then Jennifer, and rip their bonds out of the wall with my bare hands.