Spider

50

Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York It has been more than fifty hours since any food or liquid has passed the parched and blistered lips of Ludmila Zagalsky.

As she slips in and out of delirium, her mind is constantly tormented by the knowledge that she is involved in a unique act of self-cannibalism. As well as the awful stinging in her eyes, a new agony has surfaced, a raw and wretched stabbing pain in her kidneys. Lu doesn't know enough anatomy to be able to even name the organ that's hurting, let alone diagnose that she's rapidly heading towards permanent renal damage. But she knows one thing for sure; something important inside her is screaming for water and without it she is going to die.

Once upon a time, back in the real world where people weren't kidnapped, stripped naked and tortured to death, she'd been eating pizza with an old boyfriend; they'd watched Scream, or was it Scream 2 or 3? Anyway, they'd jokingly discussed what would be the worst way to be killed – the bullet, the blade, drowning or maybe fire. Her friend had said he'd hate to be burned alive at the stake, like they used to do in France with chicks such as Joan of Arc. Lu had confessed she couldn't swim, had never been in the sea or a swimming pool in her life and was shit-scared of drowning. As they'd finished off the deep pan and thought about making out, neither of them had considered that probably the worst way to die was to be deliberately starved to death.

Right now, Lu reckons drowning might not be such a bad way to go after all. A girl she used to work a corner of the Beach with once told her that she should drink about half a gallon of water every day to stay healthy. Half a gallon a day! She'd nearly wet herself laughing. The kid had said she'd been balling some kind of health freak, a gym monster who had muscles like the Incredible Hulk, and he'd told her that more than eighty per cent of blood is made up of water so you've got to keep topping up the fluid level. It had sounded like bullshit. Until now. For the first time in her life, she understood every word of it.

In the last hour or so, she's noticed that her mouth isn't only painfully dry, her tongue has started to taste bitter and almost poisonous. Were the gym monster around, he could have explained that her electrolyte balance is badly screwed, or, to be technical, critically destabilized. Her body cells are under fatal attack and her blood plasma is already seriously damaged.

Ludmila Zagalsky doesn't believe in God. She's never been in a church or, for that matter, anywhere holy in her entire twenty-five years. Her mother didn't even bother to have her birth registered, let alone have her baptized. But this very second she is praying. She is telling the God of her own special Darkness, whatever religion he is, that she is sorry for everything bad that she has ever done in her stinking, miserable, worthless life. She's telling him that she forgives her stepfather for all those things that he did to her; that she hopes he's fine and happy and healthy and that she didn't mean it when she told him that she wanted him to rot in hell while devil dogs chewed his bollocks off. She's asking for forgiveness for blaming her parents for her anger and for hating her mother for the beatings that she got. And she's confessing to all the sins she's committed and all the sinful thoughts she's ever had. And in return, she's asking God for only one thing.

Not to save her, but just to let her die quickly.