Predator

18

Ev Christian is awake and sitting on a mattress that is black with what she by now believes is old blood.

Scattered about the filthy floor inside the small, filthy room with its caving ceiling and water-stained wallpaper are magazines. She sees poorly without her glasses and can barely make out the pornographic covers. She barely makes out soda-pop bottles and fast-food wrappers scattered about. Between the mattress and the splintery wall is a small pink Keds tennis shoe, a girl’s size. Ev has picked it up countless times and held it, wondering what it means and who it once belonged to, worried the girl is dead. Sometimes Ev tucks the shoe behind her when he comes in, fearful he will take it from her. It is all she has.

She never sleeps longer than an hour or two at a stretch and has no idea how much time has passed. There is no such thing as time. Gray light fills the broken window on the other side of the room, and she can’t see the sun. She smells rain.

She doesn’t know what he has done with Kristin and the boys. She doesn’t know what he has done to them. She dimly remembers the first hours, those awful, unreal hours when he brought her food and water and stared at her from the darkness, and he was as dark as the darkness, dark like a dark spirit, hovering in the doorway.

“How does it feel?” He said to her in a soft, cold voice. “How does it feel to know you’re going to die?”

It is always dark inside the room. It is so much darker when he is in it.

“I’m not afraid. You can’t touch my soul.”

“Say you’re sorry.”

“It’s not too late to repent. God will forgive even the most vile sin if you humble yourself and repent.”

“God is a woman. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.”

“Blasphemy. Shame on you. I’ve done nothing to be sorry about.”

“I’ll teach you shame. You’ll say you’re sorry just like she did.”

“Kristin?”

Then he was gone, and Ev heard voices from another part of the house. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was talking to Kristin, must have been. He was talking to a woman. Ev really couldn’t hear it, but she heard them talking. She could not make out what they said, and she remembers feet scuffing and voices on the other side of the wall, and then she heard Kristin, knew it was her. When Ev thinks about it now, she wonders if she dreamed it.

Kristin! Kristin! I’m right here! I’m right here! Don’t you dare hurt her!

She hears her own voice in her head, but it might have been a dream.

Kristin? Kristin? Answer me! Don’t you dare hurt her!

Then she heard talking again, so maybe it was all right. But Ev’s not sure. She might have dreamed it. She might have dreamed she heard his boots moving down the hallway and the front door shutting. All this might have taken place in minutes, maybe hours. Maybe she heard a car engine. Maybe it was a dream, a delusion. Ev sat in the dark, her heart flying as she listened for Kristin and the boys and heard nothing. She called out until her throat was on fire and she could barely see or breathe.

Daylight came and went, and his dark shape would appear with paper cups of water and something to eat, and his shape would stand and watch her, and she could not see his face. She has never seen his face, not even the first time, when he came into the house. He wears a black hood with holes cut in it for his eyes, a hood like a black pillowcase, long and loose around his shoulders. His hooded shape likes to poke her with the barrel of the shotgun as if she is an animal in the zoo, as if he is curious about what she will do if he pokes her. He pokes her in her private places and watches what she will do.

“Shame on you,” Ev says when he pokes her. “You can harm my flesh but you can’t touch my soul. My soul belongs to God.”

“She isn’t here. I am her Hand. Say you’re sorry.”

“My God is a jealous God. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.””

“She isn’t here,” and he pokes her with the gun barrel, sometimes pokes her so hard it leaves perfect blackish-blue circles on her flesh.

“Say you’re sorry,” he says.

Ev sits on the stinking, rotting mattress. It has been used before, used horribly, stiff and stained black, and she sits on it inside the stinking, airless, trash-strewn room, listening and trying to think, listening and praying and screaming for help. No one answers. No one hears her, and she wonders where she could be. Where is she that no one can hear her scream?

She can’t escape because of the clever way he bent and twisted coat hangers around her wrists and ankles with ropes through them and looped over a rafter in the falling-down ceiling, as if she is some sort of grotesque marionette, bruised and covered with insect bites and rashes, her naked body itching and racked with pain. With effort, she can get to her feet. She can move off the mattress to relieve her bladder and bowels. When she does, the pain is so searing, she almost faints.

He does everything in the dark. He can see in the dark. She hears his breathing in the dark. He is a black shape. He is Satan.

“Help me God,” she says to the broken window, to the gray sky beyond, to the God beyond the sky, somewhere in His heaven. “Please God help me.”