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I done to deserve this? Why had God picked on me as a victim for these two
unknown men? Now they would be really angry. They would hurt me and later
almost certainly kill me. But the police would dig the bullets out of me! What
evil crime were they engaged on that made them indifferent to the evidence of
my dead body? Whatever the crime was, they must be quite confident that there
would be no evidence. Because there would be no me! They would bury me, drop
me in the lake with a stone round my neck!
I came out through the fringe of the trees. The thin man leaned out of the car
and called to Sluggsy, "Okay. Take her back. Don't treat her rough. That's for
me." He put the car into reverse.
Sluggsy came up beside me, and his free hand fondled me lasciviously. I just
said, "Don't." I had no will left to resist.
He said softly, "You're in trouble, bimbo. Horror's a mean guy. He'll hurt you
bad. Now you say 'Yes' to me for tonight, and promise to act sweet, and mebbe
I can get the heat taken off. Howsabout it, baby?"
I summoned a last ounce of fight. "I'd rather die than have you touch me."
"Okay, sweetheart. So you won't give, so I take for myself. I reckon you've
earned yourself a rough night. Get me?" He pinched me viciously so that I
cried out. Sluggsy laughed delightedly. "That's right. Sing, baby! Might as
well get into the practice."
He pushed me in through the open back door of the lobby block and shut and
locked it behind him. The room looked just the
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same the lights blazing, the radio hammering out some gay dance tune,
everything winking and glittering and polished under the light. I thought of
how happy I had been in that room only a few hours before, of the memories I
had had in that armchair, some of them sweet, some of them sad. How small now
my childish troubles seemed! How ridiculous to talk of broken hearts and lost
youth when, just around the corner of my life, these men were coming at me out
of the darkness. The cinema in Windsor? It was a small act in a play, almost a
farce. Zürich? It was paradise. The true jungle of the world, with its real
monsters, only rarely shows itself in the life of a man, a girl, in the
street. But it is always there. You take a wrong step, play the wrong card in
Fate's game, and you are in it and lost lost in a world you had never
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imagined, against which you have no knowledge and no weapons. No compass.
The man called Horror stood in the middle of the room, idle, relaxed, his
hands at his sides. He watched me with those incurious eyes. Then he lifted
his right hand and crooked a finger. My cold, bruised feet walked toward him.
When I was only a few steps away from him I came out of the trance. I suddenly
remembered, and my hand came up to the soaking waistband of my pants and I
felt the head of the ice-pick under the apron. It was going to be difficult to
get it out, to get at the handle. I stopped in front of him.
Still holding my eyes, his right hand came up like a snake striking and
slapped me, biff-baff, right and left across my face. The tears started from
my eyes, but I remembered, and ducked down as if to escape another blow. At
the same time, concealed in the movement, I got my right hand down inside the
band of my pants, and when I came up I threw myself at him, hitting wildly
toward his head. The pick connected, but it was only a glancing blow, and
suddenly my arms were gripped from behind and I was pulled back.
Blood was oozing from a cut above the temple of the gray face. As I watched,
it trickled down toward the chin. But the face was unmoved. It showed no pain,
only a terrifying intensity of purpose, and there was a fleck of red deep
inside the black eyes. The thin man stepped up to me. My hand opened and the
pick fell to the floor with a clang. It was a reflex action the child dropping
the weapon. I give up! I surrender! Pax!
And then slowly, almost caressingly, he began to hit me, now with his open
hand, now with the fist, choosing his targets with refined, erotic cruelty. At
first I twisted and bent and kicked, and then I began to scream, while the
gray face with the blood-streak and the black holes for eyes watched, and the
hands sprang and sprang.
I came to in the shower of my cabin. I was lying naked on the tiles, the
tattered, filthy remains of my pretty clothes beside me.
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