She’d successfully fled the day. Shops began to close for the night, with sales assistants dragging down noisy metal shutters and heading to the bus station. Packs of kids in high school uniforms hunted entertainment through the dark streets, loitering around benches to swap jokes, smokes, and saliva. Samara staggered on.
Passing a closed kebab shop, she lurched into an alleyway at the side, nearly slipping in a puddle of old grease leaking from a skip bin. She pressed a hand against the worn brick of the opposite wall to steady herself.
A woman marched down the street, her heels hammering out a steady, echoing rhythm on the concrete. A mother and child hurried past the entrance to the alley. She’d burrowed deep in her coat, eager to be out of the cold, while he chatted excitedly, keeping step at her side. Walking the opposite way, a balding middle-aged man in a brown leather jacket, a cigarette poking from his lips, cast Samara a curious glance. He pressed on, deciding she wasn’t worth it.
She ventured further into the alley, desperate to be out of the light and away from prying eyes. The rich and salty stench from the used cooking fat tasted sweet on the air, barely masking the reek of rotting meat. Samara pressed the back of her hand across her mouth and closed her eyes, forcing herself to overcome her rising nausea. Her eyes were useless, swamped in shadow and blurring further with every step. She managed to reach the corner of the building before flopping down to the grimy cobbles, her legs collapsing under the sudden weight of her body. Slumped against the wall, she grimaced in the shadows and plucked the bottle free of her pocket. Samara focussed on the cap to unscrew it, and took a short, sharp drink of the foul liquid. She winced and sucked in a harsh breath through her teeth. Replacing the bottle, she tried to wash the vodka down with a cigarette. Her packet came up empty. She flung it across the alleyway and fell back against the wall.
“I jus’ wanted,” she told the dark. “I jus’ wanted them to see.”
Her head flopped forwards.
“But everyone else better. No matter…” She swallowed. “No matter what I do…”
She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve.
Samara grunted and fought the mass of her head, throwing it to the side and looking down the tight lane.
The streetlights cast a comforting glow through the narrow entrance, and people still hurried past, their breaths fogging before their faces. They all ignored the figure standing between the buildings, long arms bridging the gap, silhouetted against the well-lit street.
“You,” said Samara, her head drooping back down. Her chin rested on her chest.
Her eyelids fluttered, fighting to stay closed. A sensation persisted: a dancing stroke across her left cheek. The dainty tickle gently pulled Samara from her slumbers, and surrendering to the ongoing caress, she opened her eyes.
Below, the girl stared up at her, her face barely visible through hanging, dark locks. Samara believed the girl was on her knees until she stepped back. In a long-sleeved shirt, black jeans, and thick leather boots, the girl considered Samara for a moment. Apparently satisfied with what she found, she turned her back. With her pale face hidden, the girl was swallowed by the dominating shadows. She had returned to the abyss, the featureless darkness. A single point of illumination formed an island of light in the opaque, and Samara hung suspended below it, the only actor on an empty stage.
She tried to step forwards, to chase after the girl, to grab her and spin her around and not be left alone in the desolate. Her body refused.
My legs, she realised. I can’t feel my legs!
For a sickening moment, she savoured the knowledge, for she had become living proof, a real work of art. To try and exhibit such horror and suffering, to stab through the reassuring cocoon of modern life and touch that nerve, the part in all of us that still remembers and buries it down, so far down! The fear of pain and injury. Of death.
And she too had rationalised it, studied it, attempted to replicate it. Yet here it was.
Terror lived in the realisation.
Dread lived in-between, those sweet and bloody seconds before the next wave of realisation hit, hope scattered, the surf hitting the rocks.
Her mind cascaded.
Had she been appended by hooks? Her mind blocking out the agony of their cold embrace?
Samara tried to look down, expecting steel points, glistening with blood, to be poking from her chest. Perhaps her legs were nothing more than stumps, ragged with sawn meat, dripping on the floor, sounding like a rainy day.
Locked in place, she could but watch her tormentor drift back from the darkness and attend to some unseen task. The sound of Samara’s suffering failed to materialise, motionless lungs unable to birth her screams.
The girl turned around and waded back through the clinging night. She brushed hair from her eyes and pressed her lips together in concentration: a gesture Samara had done countless times before. She raised her hand, returning it to Samara’s left cheek. The small paintbrush she held resumed its delicate work.
The soft, precise touch consumed Samara, focussed and refined by the lack of all other physical sensation. Her psyche seemed to sigh in relief with this contact with the world, no matter how slight. She strained to close her eyes and be swept away by the touch, to escape the yet unknown ravages performed upon her. Her eyelids had fallen under the same paralysing spell that had conquered every muscle and tendon. She could only stare down at the girl who continued her painstaking work.
She’s painting me, thought Samara.
13.
Samara hacked and coughed, drooping to her side and pressing her hands against the filthy cobbles. The image of the girl touching up her face with a detailed brush strokes lingered in the shadows. She sucked in a deep breath to clear her head of both the haunting scene and alcohol haze.
Her back heaved, pressure building between her shoulder blades. A knot of snakes seethed in her stomach, burning her insides with acidic venom.
The outline of the girl, featureless before the glowing light from the street, had shifted deeper into the alley. Her fingertips still brushed the walls either side as she slowly approached. Silent footsteps negotiated the stinking used fat leaking from the skip bin.
“You!” Samara wailed, flinching from the sound of her own voice. “What…do you want?” Saliva dripped from her bottom lip. She spat. “It was…a waste.”
The ground seemed to float: the square and rounded stones easing her upwards. Samara held on tight, now on all fours, and snarling at the advancing figure.
“No one understands,” she screamed. “This should’ve… It should’ve let me in! Kept you out.”
Samara retched.
The artist had once again turned her back on Samara, perhaps to reapply fresh paint to her brush.
Caught in her silent cry, Samara stared at her, helpless against the surge rising up her throat. The horrors that had lurked within her had come crawling out into the world for all to see. She felt them squirming around the back of her throat like plump, black, chocking maggots. Others nipped and scratched around her teeth and gums, pricking the insides of her cheeks with barbs, scraping along her tongue. How she longed to spray them, to spit each tiny monstrosity out like bullets, uncaring who became caught in the crossfire.
Locked in place, Samara could only endure the suffering. Her attempt to rid her body of the demonic troupe, to present the pain that ate away at the inside, had failed. She exposed her heart, tearing out great chunks of flesh just to show them, holding thin ribbons of skin like loose stitching plucked from a ragdoll. Still the horrors remained, cavorting around her, safe inside the darkness.