Once Arthur had started talking there was no more stopping him. The floodgates opened wide and the hospital room was filled with the dark pressure of his haunting experience.
Caleb felt deep sympathy for the old, exhausted man that seemed to age with every sentence he spoke.
“Do you think that my night terrors are somehow related to what is happening in Brettville?” he asked. “Am I sick too?”
Caleb saw that the old man’s eyes rested on his client. They were frightened eyes and, passing into the early evening, Arthur Toaves seemed almost desperate. Desperate to understand what was going on and, Caleb thought, desperate for his own private relief.
When he heard nothing echo in his head, Caleb turned toward Jane.
“What do you want me to tell him?”
Jane shook her head and gently patted him on his hand. Her touch was soft but very cold. If it was meant to be reassuring, it completely missed the mark.
It was then that Jane forced her voice through her bloody and bruised throat. It sounded rusty, like a car engine that refused to start because the battery was dead.
“Mr. Toaves… I am… I am so very sorry. You… asked if you were sick too. You are not… sick. I am afraid… that you are the sickness.”
Caleb heard her say these heartbreaking words to the tired old man and wondered what they were good for. How could she say something so horrible to the one man who had spent years, and no small fortune, on trying to make his world a better place? What could that possibly accomplish?
The old man replied very patiently, however. “How do you mean?”
Jane replied, “I think… that you know. Deep down… way… way… down. Your night terrors…. These memories being… forced on… you.”
Caleb watched as his client choked down another gush of blood.
“Just tell me what you want to say, Jane! I’ll do it no problem,” he said.
Jane shook her head and Caleb understood her meaning. This was too important, and she appreciated the old man too much, not to say the words herself. It was her insight and so the message to relay had to be her burden.
“Mister Toaves…. The thing that haunts… Brettville. It lives in… you.”
Darkness clawed itself into the hearts of Brettville’s tired inhabitants. Another long day of work and hardship saw its ending reflected in a star-filled sky. Life was always quietest in the hours approaching midnight, a moment filled with anxiety for days still to come.
Tonight the cold air was underscored by a careful breeze that gently made its way through the lonely streets. It climbed up the houses toward the roofs, where it lingered like an invisible fog over the entire town. The breeze’s claim, though gentle it seemed, slowly choked the life out of Brettville.
If you had asked Gold what she was afraid of tonight, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you. All she knew was that a dark feeling roamed deep inside her core and tore at her throat. She felt as if an ugly stranger had entered her body and pierced her soul with his demanding stare.
Restlessly Gold walked around her apartment. Up and down the hallway, and again, and again.
She had spent the day shopping in this little town, looking for clothes that had proven to be hard to find.
In the course of her shopping spree she had lost many assumptions as to what a woman was supposed to wear in this day and age. Everything showed so much of a woman’s body now. Her arms, her legs…. Some upper-body wear had even laid bare her middle, covering only her chest.
So now Gold paced up and down the hallway of her apartment, wanting to go outside but being afraid to. Not so much because of what the men might think of her, but because of her mother’s voice that she still heard inside her head after all these countless years. The judgment Gold imagined was harsh and crippled her self-esteem.
How could she even think of dressing like this? Only whores showed this much skin. She was no whore, was she?
Wasn’t she? Gold dreaded the question because she found herself incapable of understanding the answer. She used her body to get what she wanted from men. Her vagina in trade for their flesh, blood, and bones. What did that make her exactly? Did it matter that she made the trade for the benefit of somebody else? Should a good girl not serve her father to the best of her abilities?
Gold wanted very much to be good. She wanted to be perfect for the father that had spared her all those ages ago. That had torn the heads from Black and Red, but had favored her far above her sisters.
She had been allowed to live because she could be useful for him. To Gold, still being alive signified her value as a woman. To be a woman was to be a daughter and that was all Gold ever wanted to know.
The memories of the life she had lived before her father had found her again were vague and she didn’t want to have them. Whatever they were, whatever her life had been, was but a silly intermezzo between the acts of her servitude.
To serve. That was what she had to do. If she had to use her sexuality for that purpose, she gladly would. She was good at it and Gold decided she wanted to be the best possible whore she could be.
She had consumed much of the man she’d killed last night and felt much more powerful. Gold was anxious to find out exactly how much stronger she had become. Last night it had taken effort to generate Ralph’s, or Ron’s, something with an R’s, interest. How would it go tonight? Who would be her next prey and what was the amount of effort she had to put in?
Gold took a deep breath, tossed her mother’s damning voice in the garbage can, and walked out of her apartment.
Quickly she ventured down the stairs and reached the main area of her store. To her left, in the storage room, lay the bloody remains of the man she had killed the night before. Soon he would begin to smell, she thought, and Gold realized she had no idea what to do with the parts of his body that weren’t edible.
She’d figure it out… or maybe her father would help her.
Ray was a man of many convictions. He had built them up over the years and had never cared to reevaluate them. His view on the world was set in stone and nobody had ever been able to shake it. He liked it that way.
To be stuck in the confines of his establishment where men drank their nights away was safe and it was manageable. Every day he got up and knew exactly what to expect from the world around him. In return, he made perfectly clear to that world what it could, and could not, ask from him.
Yet tonight, the world had betrayed its silent agreement. The betrayal had come in the shape of a big black man and the young girl that accompanied him. Or, she wasn’t a girl, supposedly. The ID she had very carefully taken from her wallet said she was in her early twenties.
Fake IDs were something you saw in the big city, Ray knew. He had spent a few years in one trying to make it in the music industry that hadn’t wanted his presence. He remembered the underage girls sneaking into clubs on the merit of their blossoming sexuality and poorly crafted fake IDs. Big cities were ugly like that. They consumed the very people they vowed to shelter, in the safe knowledge that the next batch was always just around the corner.
The girl’s, or young woman’s, ID had looked real and though it went against Ray’s comfort, he’d allowed the odd couple access to his establishment. He watched them, though, very carefully.
The black man could be a problem if he was unable to hold his liquor. Though he was clearly out of shape there was something about him that suggested real, almost primitive strength. Ray recognized the vibe. It was the same one bouncers had, big and scary men that you couldn’t really read. The kind of men you had to point a gun at if you wanted to have a chance at beating them.