Girl Desecrated 1984: Vampires, Asylums and Highlanders, page 27
As if on cue, she made her presence known. A stiffening started in my ankles and rose as Scarlett gathered my leg nerve like she would roll up spilled yarn. I could feel her moving inside of my body, her parasitic crocheting weaving around my vessels, one by one.
I wanted to scratch the word “Rachel” into the metal shower stall—leave some reminder that I had existed before I was completely consumed.
Over the sound of the water, the rustle of cloth whispered, followed by a sharp intake of excited gasp. A hazy vision of my landlord, fed by Scarlett’s awakening skills, danced behind my eyes. I gasped low in my throat as my suspicions were confirmed.
The landlord was watching me, but not over the top of the shower as I had always assumed. He was standing on his side of the basement, leaning over, peering through a little hole he had drilled into the corner of my shower stall. He was not two inches away from my naked body, digging into his pants with a shaking hand.
The landlord was another imposter in my life, pretending to be the righteous keeper of my home, and here he was, spying on my nakedness.
I was surrounded by liars and deceivers! A mother who could not protect me. Magda who had pretended to be my friend. Angus who was willing to sacrifice my life and his to fulfill his destiny. My doctor who had never been on my side. And Patrick… Patrick was the worst. He had said I was a 350-year-old problem. He had known, and he hadn’t stopped it. He had failed me more than anyone.
Each person I mentally recited reinforced what I already knew. No one remained for me to be stupid enough to trust.
I choked on a sob under the shower’s spray.
Angus and Lennox were both gone. Lene was useless, she couldn’t even help herself. I had no one. There was no one who could save me from my fate.
Magda had said she would be gone when I got out of the shower. And guess who would be blamed for the murders? Magda would make sure she and her cousins got home to Scotland by leaving a tip with the RCMP on where to find the real killer.
It was as Scarlett had said, there was only one person to blame, for there was only one person who had killed Angus.
I was looking at life imprisonment. Or worse. I would end up wrapped in one of Dr. Casbus’ straightjackets, bunking down the hall from my mother.
The water cooled as cold despair filled me.
Then my spinning thoughts snagged on a spark of hope.
In Angus’ room, Scarlett had said, “I can always keep us safe.”
She was a huntress. She was a survivor. She would never let anyone cage us.
Determination dried the tears in my eyes. I wasn’t going to end up under Casbus’ care. Not if I was the “Mistress”.
My ear’s honed in on the sound of the landlord’s moan as it caught in his throat. My eyes narrowed. I sensed his budding orgasm.
Scarlett was coming on whether I liked it or not, and she and I shared two common goals. Desire to survive and desire to punish the landlord. I wanted to because he was an asshole who deserved to pay. Scarlett wanted to because he was prey and blood flowed through his veins. That was enough for me.
“Might as well make it a party,” I whispered, not caring anymore.
Closing my eyes, I released myself to the demon within.
She climbed up my larynx and grabbed my conscious thought in a vice of slivered metal and screeching death. Her control hooked into my spinal column like a wicked spider twanging the threads of her web.
And then we were up—skimming over the top of the shower stall in a fluid movement of slippery flesh.
The landlord twisted his face in terror as we dropped on him from above.
I latched our teeth into his neck.
He fell to the cold concrete floor, his legs kicking wildly.
His struggles thrilled me, but Scarlett’s reaction fired in the range of spiritual glory.
The landlord’s thrashing caused his flaccid dick to flap on the edges of his zipper like a flag of surrender.
A small twist of my head and his throat opened wide, pliant and willing to accept my darting tongue. I gulped his pathetic existence with greedy swallows. The heat of his blood washed away my emotional agony and cleansed my regret until there was nothing but warm satisfaction left.
As the landlord’s cries reached the pitch of a Scottish piper’s call, a wailing beacon lured me to Scotland. Home of the McNabs, where Magda smug and victorious would return with a hero’s story of how she had conned me.
I lifted my face from the nest of torn flesh between the landlord’s ear and his shoulder. The air cooled my wet chin.
Magda.
A red bubble burst on my lips as Scarlett’s laugh of anticipation rippled out of my mouth.
CHAPTER 33: SCARLETT APPROPRIATES MY FACE
~
THE LAST WAVERING NOTE OF the landlord’s moan echoed against the concrete walls of the gloomy basement. Or maybe the trembling octave only seemed to echo as it reached into the fleshy cavern where I resided, so deep was I buried in my own body.
The landlord’s leg kicked out, shaking his beige work boot at the end of his Levi jeans. One last complaint against death, and then his body lay still in the small pool of blood that had escaped my hungry mouth.
My mouth? Scarlett’s mouth?
Scarlett stood, naked under the single hanging light bulb. She held my body in the pose of an Amazon Queen, ramrod straight with victory. The water drops evaporated from my skin cooling the flush of the kill. I would have shivered, but she arched my back and stretched my arms to the ceiling above, fingers straining for the cobwebs that laced together the old, wooden floor joists above her.
My life-long battle with the she-bitch for dominion over my body was finally over. A feather stroke of relief at not having to fight her anymore caressed me.
Scarlett slipped back over the open top of the shower stall like an otter sliding over a river bank. She made sure my belly never touched the rusty edges. The hot water tank had been emptied of its warmth, just as the landlord’s body had.
She stepped into the spray and the water struck my shoulders with an icy pelting. It washed the blood off my pebbling skin, churning it around my feet like the stirring of a witch’s cauldron. A glutinous clot caught on my big toe, glistening black against the fire engine red of my toe nail polish. In disgust, I tried to shake the slick blob off, but my legs did not respond to my brain’s order.
I was existing as some sort of back-seat driver to my body. I didn’t have control of the wheel, the brake, or the gas. I could see and feel, yet I had no choice but to ride along. Acting separately from Scarlett was no longer possible. I could not even begin the process of moving my personal choices along my nerve stems, for the moment a command to move started in my mind, it was met with a void of disconnect. I had now become the “Other”.
To escape, I detached completely from her and my body. I buried myself in a muffling emptiness, deep-deep, deeper until my awareness of Scarlett faded to an irritating ticking like the pincers of a beetle snapping together.
She was still there in the background, but from this underground depth in my subconscious, I couldn’t read her. I couldn’t see what she was doing. I couldn’t feel what she was doing. I left her alone with my body.
Scarlett stepped my body out of the shower. She dried my skin with a stiff, frayed towel, which she tossed onto the floor. As she walked to my closet, unanchored within myself, I floated in purposeless buoyancy.
Scarlett rifled through the closet hangers, pushing them with such force along the metal pole, I was sure sparks would fly from the friction. Hidden in the very far corner of my wardrobe Scarlett found the perfect outfit for a villain—a three-quarter length, black satin skirt and jacket. The shoulders were padded with “Dynasty” power, and the skirt hem rippled out with a 1920s school-ma’am delicacy. Scarlett paired them with a white, high-necked blouse, softening the outfit with a touch of romance. She pulled on my black leather boots, and cut the ankle chains off with a knife. The links clinked as they fell to coil like metal snakes on the rug.
When she stepped in front of the mirror, my thoughts folded in on themselves. Here she was, my mental illness incarnate, standing before me in the reflection. Where was my psychiatrist now to see my “dissociation” in all her glory?
My face stared back at me with a calm, self-satisfied expression that in no way matched my emotions of shock, disbelief, and confusion. She controlled the appraising lift of my eyebrows, the confident tilt of my lips.
Moving my hands with unaccustomed grace, Scarlett twisted my long, blonde hair up into a painful knot. She stabbed the unruly curls into place with my ‘hand-painted’ chop sticks.
Another awkward reminder of her peeping became clear for the she-bitch knew where all my make-up was. The cotton balls, the hairbrushes, everything. She gathered it in front of the mirror, and then she used my fingers, which were clumsy and unsure, to dab and brush and stroke make-up onto my skin with practiced motions.
Her actions heightened my cheekbones and subdued my nose. She skimmed a rich, blood red, lip liner along the outer edge of my lips, enhancing the pouty fullness of them.
The colour reminded me of Angus’ blood.
She ran a finger slowly over the high arch of my brow bone, sharing in the memory of draining Angus. A satisfied smirk emerged on lips that used to be mine.
When she was finished outlining my eyes in black, she stepped back from the mirror, turning my sharp jawline to the left and then the right to observe her handiwork.
I didn’t recognize the woman before us. The light foundation dropped my bone structure into the background, bringing my eyes and my mouth to the fore. The brown of my irises shimmered like the sweat-shined flank of a chestnut horse under the sun. Instead of a hard line of tension, my mouth now begged with yielding softness to be scoured by a man’s bristling whiskers.
Scarlett had taken what I had accepted as mediocre looks and had transformed me into a six-foot-tall, stunning Amazon who could fire the heart of any man. It was the Venus flytrap of make-overs.
Still baffled over my new image, I almost didn’t notice Scarlett digging up my meager savings. I tried to speak to her in my mind, but only succeeded in converting those beetle taps into information—her thoughts. She intended to leave, before the landlord was found mangled in his basement. And she wasn’t packing. She was stealing my college fund.
“I don’t think so,” I had control of my mouth before she knew I was coming up, and the words came out harsh and forceful in my voice.
The familiar pressure of our battle pressed in on me, but this time the sensation was different. This time, I was the rising force, the weaker entity and she was keeping me down.
We raged inside my body, like ships fighting in an organ sea, and in minutes I was tossed and broken, as if ground ashore. Bruised and punished, I shrank, while Scarlett checked her lipstick in the mirror. Then, she marched us out of my home, leaving the door swinging open behind us.
The sun was dropping quickly behind the row of stately Victorian houses on my street. The elongated branch-fingers of Maple tree shadows stretched over the light, grey asphalt of the road. Twisted phantom limbs clutching at the hem of my skirt as Scarlett walked out onto the quiet, empty street.
She put her hands on her hips, looking up and down the empty road, before turning to face my apartment. A slow smile spread across my features as her glance took in the landlord’s red Firebird convertible parked in the lane. Swinging my slim hips, she sauntered to the car. Her touch on the car’s panel was light and delicate, a butterfly proboscis hesitantly tasting the bright red paint. She purred like a cat, then opened the door, and slipped into the black, leather driver’s seat.
A Phoenix was airbrushed on the car’s hood. Its sharp beak pointed at the windshield, at my chest. The wings were streaks of flaming feathers, raised up and dropping curling grey ashes onto the shiny red paint. The bird appeared poised, ready to tear itself from the metal of the hood.
A tremor of recognition tapped the edges of my soul.
The ashes could be the frayed remnants of my life, charred and aimlessly drifting from the impact of Scarlett’s resurrection.
My desperate thoughts did not affect Scarlett. She ran a soft hand across the radio buttons, slid one long finger into the tape cassette port, pressed a sharp nail into the vinyl dash. She drew in that “new” smell of sun warmed leather. I had always loved that smell, but with Scarlett doing the breathing, there was a history woven into the scent. A second sniff and a collage of blurry images materialized with the odor: pictures of green grass, of black hooves clomping forward, towards the slaughterhouse where hides were torn from the cows to fashion seats for cars.
Sickened by the gory memories in the leather, I cleared my unsettling thoughts, but the temptation to read more of the scented messages from the vehicle was overwhelming. I was compelled to unravel each scent: the blood of a car plant worker who cut his hand when putting on the doors, the pungent semen spilt in a moment of release on the back seat, the smudge of waxy lipstick on the visor mirror, and the tang of dog shit snuck onto the front rug on the bottom of an unassuming shoe.
Scarlett was interested in these images, but regarded them without the wonder I was experiencing. Like a detached scientist, she collected data without emotion, archiving knowledge that would help her survive in this modern world.
A traitorous thought surfaced. I shielded it with an imaginary cupped hand. It wouldn’t do for Scarlett to know I wasn’t completely beaten.
Apparently, our switch in power had heightened some of my special talents, talents which I now figured out, were hers. My ability to track, my reading of shadow colours. These “talents” weren’t delusions like my psychiatrist said they were. They were demon skills, leaking out of the she-bitch and into my tool box.
Scarlett was out of touch. At most, she’d only observed life. I was a child of the 70s, I had lived my life, and I knew way more about this world of rock ‘n roll and rising world powers than she did. Maybe, just maybe, using what I knew of this world and her skills from whatever hell-hole world she came from, I could find a way to level the playing field and get my life back.
A quick mental check showed Scarlett was too wrapped up in the car seduction to care about my thoughts of liberation.
Scarlett tightened her grip on the wheel, twisting the leather binding with barely contained excitement. She smiled as she tapped her red nails against the steering wheel three times, and whispered some mumbo jumbo. The car’s powerful engine roared to life, the rumbling quickly followed by George Thorogood’s voice grating “Bad to the Bone” out of the car’s speakers.
I couldn’t drive standard, but apparently, Scarlett could. She hit the shifter with her palm, and the car squealed as it reversed out of the driveway. She hit third gear and the Firebird’s tires burned. The sound of screeching tires scared the songbirds out of the maple trees, their flighty shadows mixing with the crooked-limbed, shadow-fingers on the road. The tires finally gripped the pavement, yanking the car out of its fishtail and launching it down the street
Scarlett sped away from my life, trailing Thorogood’s stuttering B behind us.
CHAPTER 34: THE FIREBIRD BURNS AWAY
~
IT WAS EERIE, VIEWING THE road from the driver’s seat, feeling the pressure of the gas pedal beneath my foot, but having no idea of the destination.
I tried and failed to decode that tick-ticking a second time, so I didn’t know where Scarlett was driving us. It wasn’t until I saw the sparse lawn in front of Angus’ house, that I realized she was taking me back to the place of her “birth”.
Scarlett pulled the Firebird too close to the curb, causing the tires to squeak an announcement as they rubbed up against the concrete barrier. The sun was almost down and there was a stillness to the neighbourhood, broken only by the idling engine. Scarlett slammed the car door, strode up the sidewalk. Apparently, she wasn’t sneaking in. She was drumming the marching beat of an approaching army with each step, and she’d left the engine running, just in case.
Returning to the scene of Angus’ death terrified me. This house was the place of ultimate betrayal, where both my lover and my friend had thrown me to the She-bitch. I didn’t know why Scarlett was here, but if it was to lap up the remaining blood that had pooled around Angus’ body, the last of my stability would give, destroying me forever.
I couldn’t stop watching as Scarlett stopped in front of the house and peered through the windows. She was checking to see who was home, listening, smelling, waiting. That much I could understand by the way she tilted her head, sniffed the air. Cautious yet eager, as only a predator can be, she took her time making sure the house was still. Then, with a glance back at the Firebird, she killed the engine from afar, and I knew we were going in.
The fear of seeing the carnage of Scarlett’s resurrection, made me attempt to get the she-bitch to reconsider before barging into the Scotsmen’s den. I knew from experience that my panic would only feel like a little flutter in her belly. My evil twin brushed a hand along the side of my head, smoothing the curls escaping the bun. Then, she walked confidently up to the cheap, hollow wooden door. It swung open before she touched it, clearing the way for her to enter.
The living room was exactly as we had left it. No personal objects, no persons. Unbidden, I recalled Magda’s orders to the others to get the place ‘cleaned up’. That confirmation of Angus’ death seemed engraved into the wood paneling of the house like a haunting. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be faced with what I had done. I didn’t want to think of Angus, or his betrayal, or his death. It was all too painful.
Are you here to gloat? I pressed the question into our shared space, not knowing if she would answer.
Scarlett ignored me, perching on the arm of the couch I had sat upon only six hours before. She pulled up my satin skirt to reveal as much leg as possible, then leaned back, placing her arm along the back of the couch. She could have been posing for a Vogue model shoot. Her stillness became unnatural as she stared down the dark hallway.
