Spider

60

Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York They live in a small white cottage with a thatched roof beside a river with a waterwheel and their young children chase each other in a garden that has an old stone path meandering across a lawn full of daisies. Lu Zagalsky is hallucinating, and she's glad she is. She and Ramzan are married and have two beautiful young children, a boy and a girl who look exactly like them. They want for nothing and they live a perfect life in a perfect home in a perfect country where summer never ends, and no one ever strips you naked and leaves you to die like a dog. She's been dreaming a lot since being held in the basement, and few of her dreams have been as pleasant as this. Mainly they've been about pain, humiliation and death. Some have been so terrifying that she's now afraid of falling asleep.

For the past hour though, she's been fantasizing about Ramzan. In her life of a few days ago he was just a tall, good-looking waiter who'd caught her eye and turned her head. Today, she imagines him as her lover, her husband and the father of her children. The last thought hurts most, for she realizes now that she will never be a mother, her womb will never carry her children and she will never see smiles on the faces of her babies.

Lu opens her eyes and stares vacantly at the black plastic ceiling, with the shiny rodent eye of the camera peering back down at her. At times she is sure he is still in the house with her, watching her from somewhere on the other side of the door, moving the cameras to get a better look and no doubt jerking himself off as she inches her way towards death. She's met some sickos in her time, sadists and masochists, scopophiliacs and scatophiliacs, but this guy is a wacko way beyond her experiences.

How can you get your rocks off watching someone starve to death? What kind of warped mind finds that a turn-on?

It's been eighty-seven hours since Lu last had any sustenance, and even then it had only been a vanilla milkshake. The effects of starvation and dehydration are becoming more acute by the hour. As well as the onset of delirium and hallucinations, her body temperature is now sky high. Despite the lack of food she is vomiting a lot, dry-heaving doctors call it, because her stomach is completely empty and its lining is as dry as parchment paper. Each bout of retching brings spasms of crippling cramps and shooting pains through her abdomen and chest. She's almost completely stopped urinating, but when she does, it's like a burning trickle of acid that destroys the last shreds of her dignity.

Maybe someone will find you, Lu. Maybe they've caught him and right now they're on their way here and they're going to break down the front door. Any second now you'll hear them coming down those basement steps.

And then what?

Boom! That's what.

Didn't he say the whole place was wired and that it would explode into a fireball and burn everyone alive? Well, better to be burned to death than go like this. But then others will die as well, Lu. Innocent people will be killed trying to save you – is that what you want? Is that how desperate and unworthy you have become?

And so the thoughts torment her, never letting her rest, always crushing any sign of hope, always making her imagine the worst. And when they're done with her, then the guilt moves in.

You're getting what you deserve; this is God's way of punishing you for the sinful life you've led. Count them up, Ludmila, all the sins you've committed; the thefts, the lies, the adulteries, is there a single Commandment you've not broken? Murder was the only one that stood out, and right now she'd gladly kill the freak that was putting her through this living hell.

Lu's vision is now permanently blurred and her eyes are so painful that she can't close them. The head restraint has come loose from her straining against it and it is possible to move from side to side, but the strap has badly chafed her flesh. Most of her skin is completely numb. It has lost its natural oiliness and elasticity and is starting to shrivel. At times the numbness fades and her skin tingles. Only this isn't the pins-and-needles type of tingling that she'd experienced as a child. This is a high-voltage cattle-prod tingling, the type that stuns her so deeply she feels as if she's going to croak.

Lu wonders whether she is already so sick that even if the cavalry arrived right now, right this minute, she would still die from what he's done to her. She's fully aware that she's being killed by her own body; that it's been turned into a weapon to murder her.

It's justice, Ludmila, for the life that you've led. Sell your body to strangers and God will punish you appropriately – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; you should have remembered that. You really should have remembered that.

Lu tries to lick her lips but it's an effort agonizingly beyond her. Her tongue has swollen and cracked painfully. Her throat feels permanently blocked and it is hard even to swallow air. In the last few hours her broken nose has started bleeding again. Part of the cause of the haemorrhaging is the beating that he gave her, but the continual rise in her body temperature isn't helping matters, nor is the fact that the lining of her nose has completely dried up and cracked like plaster. The congealed blood almost blocks both nostrils and Lu feels as though she's breathing through a damaged straw.

She tries again to think positively. There is the cottage in the country, with the children playing by the river, and maybe there's a dog too, a long-haired golden dog jumping and barking for its ball to be thrown.

And then it happens.

The cattle prods are at her again, sizzling into her flesh, stabbing at her nerves. This time, they're stronger and more painful than ever.

Lu's entire body goes into convulsion.

The world turns black.

And she stops breathing. Spider sits by the monitor, watching the series of spasms with the wide-eyed excitement of a sports fan on the edge of his seat. He leans towards the screen, his chin resting on interlocked fingers. It looks as if she's going to die much earlier than he'd wanted, but that's okay, he can adjust his plans.

He stretches out a hand and runs it gently over the screen and a crackle of static flows over his fingertips. He'd chosen her for a purpose, for a reason beyond lust or longing, but right at this moment he wants her, just as strongly as he'd wanted all the others. Give up the fight my sweet, sweet Sugar. Breathe out your final breath and go to the Better Place.

He watches the screen as her body shakes uncontrollably, her muscles snapping tight and then relaxing just as suddenly. The camera's wide shot shows her whole frame shuddering like a rag doll, bouncing up and down on the hard leather table in a fleshy muscular ripple from foot to head.

She's at death's door and he wants to be there to press his lips and flesh against her and feel that precious last spasm of life spurt from her body.

The shaking seems to become more violent and then Lu flops limply down on to the black leather of the bondage table.

The overhead camera shows her face in close-up. It is motionless.

Spider puts his hands tenderly on either side of the monitor, like a lover would hold a dying partner's face. He stares intently into Lu's eyes.

Glazed and glassy, like the marbles children play with. Look how the orbits of her eyes are all sunken. See how her cheeks are hollowing out so nicely, so beautifully. And her skin – isn't it gorgeous? So white, so beautifully pallid. Your mother would approve of her, Spider. Your mother would have picked this one too.

Spider strokes her face with his damaged hand and then presses his cheek against hers. He holds the monitor for almost half a minute, feeling close to her, connected to her last moments.

Beautiful, so amazingly beautiful.

The body hangs limp on the table. He longs to remove the shackles from her arms and legs. He aches to wash her, to powder her all over and to dress her properly. And then he feels saddened. Saddened that the plan he has for her, the scheme he's nurtured her for, is going to prevent him keeping her, and exploring her.

Time was always a problem. Putrefaction: his least favourite word.

Spider has kept diaries on what happened to the other Sugars and knows that within an hour from now those vivid blue eyes of hers will start to change as the blood vessels become lumpy and patchy and the red blood cells begin to clump together. Within two days, strange yellow, triangular spots will appear on her corneas and will then fade to brown and black. Spider has set the basement temperature at thirty-seven degrees, the same as body temperature, so he hopes to slow down the natural cooling process of her corpse but knows that this will prolong the state of rigor mortis to probably about forty-eight hours after her death. He also knows that there is nothing he can do to stop the gravitational slump of blood and other body fluids. They will flatten and settle against her back, shoulders and buttocks as she lies on the leather table and will leave ugly reddish-purple lividity marks that he will have to cover with concealment creams and powder.

Adjust the plan. Find a way to spend time with her.

Spider sits and fantasizes. He's been lonely for so long and he yearns to have someone new by his side. If he could, he'd stay with her night and day, holding her, talking to her, sharing intimate moments with her, sleeping with her and waking with her. It could be perfect. But that's not the plan.

And then something on the screen catches his attention.

Lu's left hand twitches.

Is it a cadaveric spasm, simply a dead muscle jerking as the body settles?

Or is the little bitch really still alive?