The Eye Unseen (31 page)

Not that I’d get any.

But Tippy needed to eat. Something besides the cans of tainted chicken soup.

I set up the closet the same as before. Hoped God wouldn’t jump in again. How embarrassing if He materialized and landed in my slop bucket!

With nothing to do but lament about my situation, I grabbed Evelyn’s book and opened it, without shame this time. Tippy was not around to give me her one-eyed look of disapproval. Mom would have to bust down the door to see me with it, and even if she did decide to free me again, I’d have ample warning to tuck it back under my mattress.

Funny how much I needed a friend, and the only one I had left was this deranged woman and her scary, secret lover.

I pulled my blanket off the bed and plopped on the floor next to the heating vent. Sitting against the far wall, I could hide the trickle of light I needed to illuminate the diary.

Not that anyone would be looking.

So much movement made me dizzy. With my head balanced against my knees, I swallowed the discomfort. Once my eyes could focus, I opened the book back to where I had left off.

Horror in the Himalayas. The two of them, Evelyn and her man, taking out the kindly Sherpas helping some hikers from Australia make it to the top of Everest. The poor Aussies were lost without their guides, a blinding snowstorm relentlessly dogging their every move.

They were separated from each other. Terrified. Driven nearly mad by the cold and confusion, the drive to survive the treachery of the mountains.

Evelyn took pride in her destruction of the men. She slid up behind one and pushed him off a small ledge, watching him tumble but catch himself on a boulder. His left leg was broken, the bone sticking out of his thigh. While the man fought to climb down to their camp, his compound fracture slicing through muscle and skin with every movement, Evelyn made his plight worse.

She shoved him into an ice cave.

This time his hip was demolished. Shattered. Excruciatingly painful.

He screamed for quite some time, while Evelyn reveled in his pain. When she joined him on the ledge where he had landed, precariously perched above an endless abyss below, the hiker had thought she was an angel, sent to help him.

She started with his ear. Biting it off. Sticking her tongue inside the hole, then slapping it with her hand until his eardrum exploded.

Evelyn turned the man on his back, jumped on his injured leg, sat with all her weight on his shattered pelvis. She chuckled over agony.

In the end, the hiker slowly strangled to death on his own entrails. Evelyn had been kind enough to hang him, intestines wrapped around his neck, from one of the pitons he used to climb the mountain.

She watched while her boyfriend raped the next man to death. Acted as his personal cheerleading squad, the dutiful lover, assisting him as needed, inflicting more pain here and there when she wanted in on the action.

The third man suffered the most.

Evelyn cut his lips off with his own pocketknife, then went to town on his tongue, which they split in two and devoured while the hiker watched in horror. She made love to her boyfriend after removing one of her victim’s eyes, wallowing over his body and covering herself with his blood.

They kept him alive for several days, feeding on his living corpse. Evelyn went so far as to compare their love fest to that of newlyweds, the festivities of their holiday abroad interrupted by fits of deviant sex and gastronomic delicacies.

I turned off the flashlight before shutting the diary.

Crawled over to the bed, my blanket in tow, wishing desperately for Tippy to keep me company after reading of such atrocities.

The kids at school wouldn’t be afraid. They would have laughed at the part where they gnawed off all his toes, screeching with delight. I could hear their cries of “That’s awesome!” and “What a trip, man!” as they listened to Evelyn’s story.

But I wasn’t like that.

I shuddered under my blanket. Pined for my sweet puppy, thinking about the man with his missing eye, and Tippy with hers. Wondered what kind of story Mom would write when I was gone. Would she be proud that after eight years of keeping me in storage, my bones were picked of all meat by the rodents that shared my room? Or would she simply burn down the house, and all evidence of my presence, before running to Rome, where she could live in hiding and pen her memoirs of being a murderous mother?

*  *  *

Eight raisins and a granola bar do not make a very hearty meal.

I toyed with the idea of having an enormous feast: pounding the rock-hard pretzels until my teeth shattered, despite the fact that the salt on them would only worsen my condition. Or do nothing for me when, sixteen days from now, I was reduced to bones and a couple drops of blood after I had starved to death.

Earlier in the day I had felt a bug on my arm and devoured it without even knowing what it was. A tick? Probably not, in this cold weather. A beetle? A roach? We had never had those in the house. Maybe another silverfish, Tippy’s favorite meal when we had lived without food before?

Time eluded me. The weaker I became, the more I slept. Or felt I slept. Or, at least, wanted to sleep. Perhaps my dreams woke me in twelve-minute increments; I would never know. When I drifted off, it was in complete darkness, except for the light slinking under my door. When I woke up, everything remained the same. Did that mean twenty-four hours had passed, or ten minutes? I did not know.

I got my book and returned to the heated spot on the floor, blanket pulled all the way over my head this time, trapping the heat and making my body use fewer calories to keep it warm.

When I went to scratch Tippy, I remembered she wasn’t there.

I couldn’t bear to think about her future. Or lack thereof. For all I knew, Mom had tired of chicken noodle soup and was making brunch with my dog as the main treat.

Evelyn would certainly do that. That and much, much worse.

“Yeah, but she was a good old broad. We had a lot of fun together.” God’s voice came through the pitch black of my room and practically made me jump out of my skin.

“You did?” I asked, unsure if He was a hallucination or not. 

“Until I tired of her, sure. Evelyn kept me company for many years.”

I put my marker back in the book, closed it tight.

When it hit me, my head flung back so hard I knew I’d probably dented the wall. “You mean…this is about you?”

“Who else would it be, Lucy? Don’t I match her description pretty well?”

In my mind’s eye, I could see God twirling around in front of me, modeling His rugged look. His red hair.

“I guess so.”

“Well, you don’t sound too impressed.” 

“I thought…you’d be different.”

“Really, Lucy? You thought I’d be what…not like the other guys? The ones who want to do this to you?”

I struggled for about seven seconds before I realized it wasn’t worth the effort. Eight raisins do not equal endless energy or strength. I could never fend Him off.

God was all hands and tongue again, His rough touch invading my every inch.

But then He stopped.

“I just thought God would be about…love. Not all of this death and destruction.”

My words were met with static.

And then He started to laugh.

Demonic. Room-filling, dead-rodent breath yowling.

I pissed myself.

Joan

The dog forgave me.

She had to, if she wanted to eat.

I watched her put her nose against your door, take a sniff, walk away. Since she didn’t linger, I hoped you had already died. That was a nasty hit you took to your head, knocked you out cold for several hours. Well, that and the Benadryl I poured down your throat. What a useful elixir that turned out to be.

The snow put a damper on things. But I managed. Found the wood stacked up in the basement, where we had left it years ago. Boarded the window shut. Double-boarded it, in fact. I figured you might stand a chance of ripping one section off with your demon-nails, but as weak as you were, two would be impossible.

And the door…well, let’s just say that neither of us would be getting through that very easily.

The ax lay beside me in bed. I didn’t fret that the red-headed man would be back. In fact, I hoped he’d use it on me and end our time together once and for all. But I was ready. For you, for him, for whatever it took.

I pictured Aunt Evelyn the day she died, in the kitchen. Pointing her finger at me, just a child. Thinking that if she pronounced my future, the women of the family would just take me outside and hang me with my own belt.

What I would have given for that to happen.

Six days. I could last that long. Even if he came back and shredded me, I could linger through that pain. Just to make sure. Just to know you could do no harm.

And what would I do when it was over? Find Brandy? How would I ever explain the truth to her? That I sent her away to spare her this wrath? That I had loved her with all my heart, her life a blossoming memory of what should have been shared with her father?

No. When you were gone, I would be as well. One day Brandy would return to this house and find nothing but cinders.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

Lucy

The Great Wall of China. The Grand Canyon. Niagara Falls.

Places I would never see.

Fly to the moon. Win a million dollars playing the lottery. Hold my newborn in my arms, right after delivery.

Things I would never do.

I thought of Brandy, alone in the world, and hoped that she would have all the opportunities I would not. That she would fall in love, travel the globe, have a fancy career if that suited her. Maybe she would pop out a bunch of babies and name one after me, once she heard that I was gone.

Dead.

Starved to death in my own bedroom.

The pretzels were a life saver. Scraping the salt off the sides practically killed me, as I had no energy left. But then I thought about the survivors of the Holocaust, forced to perform excruciating labor in the freezing cold with maybe a piece of bread to keep them going every day.

Removing salt became much easier after that.

Hours ticked away while I tried to stay alert. Boredom and hunger cavorted around my room, holding hands; I had no desire to play with them.

I contented myself with the book. Although I must admit, even it had a hard time capturing my attention. The killings became mundane. The sex, another story. One I couldn’t begin to imagine. God, who brutalized Evelyn. Angels He brought along to share in the fun. Six men, two men, five dozen over the course of a week. God demanded and Evelyn performed.

Not what I had ever expected.

My energy level waned to nothing. To the point that turning pages became exhausting. Keeping the flashlight poised so I could read a physical feat on par with an Olympic event.

Skiing. Ice skating. Riding a horse.

Things I would never do.

Scotland. Hawaii. Amsterdam.

Places I would never see.

*  *  *

I couldn’t move when He came back.

“I had to check up on you, Lucy. You holding together okay?”

God curled up behind me. His contact made me yearn for Tippy, to have my cuddle-buddy back in bed with me.

Instead, I was stuck with this creature.

“Don’t hold back anything, Lucy. I know what you think of me.”

I was glad we didn’t have to converse. My lips had lost all desire to move. My voice seemed decades away, lost in waves of time that I couldn’t even comprehend.

His hands, now familiar, coursed my body.

“She wanted to kill your mother, you know. Evelyn.”

My curiosity tilted its head. But I did not move.

“She was jealous of her. Of a little girl. Can you believe that? We had a good thing going, the two of us. She just wanted more than I could give her. Typical woman.”

Not worth my effort to respond.

“But the old broad really crossed the line when she told your grandmother to murder Joan. Pissed me off! I killed her right then and there. In front of your mother, so she’d know how much I needed to keep her around. I wrapped my hand around Evelyn’s heart so tightly the organ nearly burst. She was toast in seconds.”

His words overwhelmed me. I tried sifting through them, sorting them into patterns, digesting them raw. Nothing worked. I was too tired to understand.

“You really are in bad shape. Are you hungry?”

He laid a plate of food on my nightstand. A baked potato, prime rib, green beans. Not my absolute favorite, but not chicken, either.

This time I didn’t hesitate. I figured I knew God well enough to eat His offering. After all, He had been groping me for weeks now, and I deserved something for my trouble.

Behind me, He laughed.

“Is that how you justify it? Well then, here….”

God tossed me flat on my back, just as I was reaching for a bean. I had nothing left but complacence. Whatever He wanted, He could have. Just to get it over with. Just to push it further toward the end.