Restoration (37 page)

  If the voice of the box was God, God was vicious. The things it said flitted between promises and threats. But Chester was used to harsh love. So when it encouraged him to explore its wooden seal – which would not open to him, it promised, like a teasing virgin, not until he had proved his love – he had done so. When it made suggestions as to experiences he might like to try, violence he might like to commit, he did that too and with a glad heart.

 

 

He had first felt blood on his hands on the evening of his seventeenth birthday and it had been the box's doing.

  His parents had thrown a party. Not out of love for their son but because parties were what wealthy families did, it showed those less rich how truly extravagant they could afford to be.

  A string quartet had set up stall in the corner of one of their many function rooms, laying down sweet, inoffensive music to guzzle canapés to. People much older than Chester had danced and ate and laughed and sighed at the opulence of it all. He had sat quietly, utterly alone – he had no friends and even if he had they would not have been invited, this was not a party for him, whatever the banner may have said that hung from the ceiling.

  His parents had employed a catering company and various staff mingled amongst the guests, doing their best to be invisible. Chester had set his sights on one woman in particular, a small, unattractive thing with freckles and hair that bobbed around her head as if it were unattached, perhaps controlled separately by wires from above. She had made a bad effort of ignoring the expensive things around her – this was an important distinction, Chester knew, your guests were supposed to coo at your furnishings, the staff were not – and he frequently caught her admiring a painting or a vase or a set of silver candlesticks. She longed to touch them he realised, longed to live the sort of life that could surround her with such things. After realising this, and seeing the lust in her eyes grow steadily deeper as the night went on, Chester had been only too aware of what the girl would do in the end. It was, after all, exactly what he would have done himself.

  She was collecting empty glasses from one of their sideboards when her fingers brushed the edge of a silver snuff box. It was a tiny thing, part of a larger display, items bought to fill a space. She had extended her fingers, picked the snuff box up and concealed it in the hand that held her tray, giving a quick glance around the room to make sure that nobody had seen her. But Chester had. And having done so knew that he finally had a sliver of the power he most craved right there in front of him.

  "She'll do whatever it takes not to get caught with that," said the voice of the box in his head. It was an unusual voice, an English voice, it reminded him of a movie actor… he couldn't remember the damned man's name. "But you need to catch her now, while it's still hot in her hands not hidden away to collect later or even dumped in the bushes outside when fear of getting caught drives her to ditch it. You need to talk to her
now
."

  He had followed the woman out of the main function room and along one of the corridors that led to the kitchens. She dumped the tray there, slipping the snuff box into the pocket of her apron and called over to the man that Chester took to be her boss. "Just taking a couple of minutes, Sal," she said, "watching all those fat cats drink has made my bladder burst."

  "Sal" nodded and returned to supervising the construction of small chocolate truffles on silver platters.

  Chester followed the woman through to the servant's quarters – they had been given the night off, why have two sets of slaves after all? – towards the bathroom. She didn't look behind her, eager to hide away so she could examine her prize. He crept closer and closer until, as she opened the bathroom door he was right behind her. He pushed her inside, sliding the bolt of the door behind him. She opened her mouth to scream at him but he clapped his hand across it, shoving her back against the wall in the tiny room.

  "I saw you," he whispered, fingers reaching for the snuff box and pulling it out, "saw you take this."

  Once presented with the evidence her face went from indignation to fear, her eyes fixing on the snuff box as it glinted in the light of the naked bulb that swung above.

  "I didn't mean…" she started to say before giving up. There was no excuse she could think of, nothing that would allow for her having pocketed the box. "I'm sorry," she said instead, "please don't call the police, I'll just go, you'll never see me again."

  Chester pressed himself against her wanting to sniff the fear on her skin.

  "She'll do anything," the box said, "anything at all. She has a child, an apartment she struggles to pay for… she won't lose all that easily, you could make her do
anything."

  This excited Chester beyond words, clearly the serving girl felt it – pressed so tight against her she could hardly have missed the pulsing nudge against the top of her thigh. Her face fell as she realised what was likely about to happen. He watched the expression change, watched a misery wash over her that she tried to swallow like a rough pill. She replaced that look with a false smile and reached for his groin with her hand.

  "Is this what you want?" she asked, a beautiful tremor in her voice. She could barely get the words out without crying. "Would this make it alright?"

  She stroked his cock through the fabric of his trousers, not seductively, she couldn't quite manage that, disgust and self-hatred getting the better of her. It was more like trying to remove a set of keys from a suit pocket that was on its hanger. A functional frisk that sought to get the job done. Chester watched her face, that false smile that choked off any more attempt to speak. Eyes that spoke only of utter hatred, leavened with thoughts of her child and the things she stood to loose if he called the police on her.

  "Get off me," he said. "I wouldn't dirty myself with you."

  Her hand fell away and a glimpse of relief crossed her face.

  "I want something else," he said, "or I will drag you out of here and hold you up in front of my father as the thieving bitch you are."

  She looked confused, trying to think what else this man could want from her if it wasn't sex.

  "She'll do anything," the box said again. "Power… control…"

  "Hold out your hand," he said, "show me your thieving little fingers."

  She stretched out her left hand, slowly and fearfully, her right still pinned down by her side.

  "Spread them," he said, his groin hotter than ever, the noise of the box so loud in his head that it made him squint.

  "She'll do anything, anything, anything,
anything
…"

  He opened the snuff box and clamped it down on her index finger so the decorative silver edge, a serrated line of autumn leaves, pinched against her skin. She winced. He stepped back a little to free up her other arm.

  "Now crush your finger," he said and the look of shock on her face was so beautiful he felt near to tears. "Do it, or I'll take away everything you have."

  She reached for the box, gripping it in her right hand and squeezing the lid closed on her finger. Then she shook her head, "I can't…"

  He put his hand over hers to help, squeezing in close again, his cheek pressed against hers. "If you scream they will come and I will tell them everything… how you stole the box, then tried to touch me, wanting to fuck away your crime. I'll tell them you begged for that and everyone will know it anyway, even your little boy as they put him in care."

  He squeezed her hand as hard as he could, feeling her shake against him as the lid bit down on her finger, the metal cutting into the skin so it bled. She bit her lip and made a low, guttural moan, a tremolo of pain that made him think of a lowing cow. He squeezed and squeezed, shoving against her so her hip bashed over and over again against the small sink set in the wall next to them. His own hand was slick with her blood now, squeezed through clenched fingers.

  "That's power," the box said, "that's all the power you ever need."

  He let go of her hand and she fought to control tears as she unclasped the box from her mashed finger. Her whole body shaking with the effort to contain wails of pain.

  "You can keep the box," he said, reaching back to unlock the door. "It's a gift." He went to leave and then, unable to resist, punched her in the belly. "So was that," he said as she crumpled, winded to the floor behind him.

  He walked back towards the party and then, noticing his bloody hand, made a diversion to his room. He stood in front of his own basin, preparing to wash it off and finding he couldn't. It seemed such a waste. He unzipped himself and masturbated with the dirty hand.

  "How does it feel?" the box asked him as he ejected pink pearls into the basin. "How does that power feel?"

  "Wonderful," he had admitted. Cleaning himself up and returning downstairs to the party. "It feels wonderful."

  He sat back down amongst the partygoers, sipping at a glass of champagne. He didn't see the catering girl again, no doubt she had come up with some believable excuse for her damaged hand and begged the rest of the night off. He hoped she went home, sat down with her boy and thought about how close she had come to losing everything.

 

 

From that first step, that acquiescence to the box's suggestion and his own pitiful wants, there had been no turning back. The box would encourage him to much greater heights of power and control, it assured him. All he had to do was listen.

  Then he met Penelope Simons.

  She was a sweet girl – as far as any girl ever felt sweet to Chester, his parents made no concession for emotional attachment and he had followed their example. For a while, even his father had seemed pleased. The Boston Simons were an affluent family and well respected. The idea of an alliance through his son was most favourable. Perhaps, his father said to him one day, you didn't turn out to be such a waste after all.

  Chester wasn't a natural beau, his emotions too stunted, his nerves too rough. But he went through the motions, arranging several dates with Penelope, with her friend Dolores as chaperone – a ludicrous notion if either parents had had the least idea as to the girl's personality. They had eaten in a number of fine restaurants, visited society functions and dinners, they had, in short, become an item. Chester, still in regular discussions with that strange voice from the box, began to have other ideas about his future. As if the time he spent away from his room and the close proximity of the thing, began to loosen its hold on him. There were many times in fact, when he gave serious thought to abandoning the box entirely, throwing the damn thing away and forging a more wholesome – and, he had to admit, pleasurable – future with Penelope.

  The box would have none of this. When he returned from his nights out, it was always there waiting for him, a shrewish mother eager to criticise his behaviour and demand to know who he thought he was, gallivanting around the town like that.

  "She doesn't like you," it told him, "I can tell. She laughs about you when your back is turned, her and Dolores both, cackling and jeering at you the moment you're not in earshot. They treat you like a joke. A blundering, foolish joke."

  Chester tried not to listen. Tried to fix a smiling image of Penelope in his mind and blank out the box. But, in the middle of the night, when his resistance was at its lowest it would whisper to him, reminding him how it had felt in that small servant's bathroom, reminding him what
real
power had been like. And on those nights Chester would be lost to it, crying into his pillow with shame at the excitement he couldn't deny inside him.

  Then the box told him what he should do to Penelope.

 

 

They had arranged to meet at the Cotton Club. It wasn't a favourite venue of Chester's – he found the music too loud and the atmosphere too thick – but Penelope adored it there. "Slumming it amongst the niggers" his father would have said, a man to whom the very notion of the Cotton Club was anathema.

  Henryk took the wheel of the family De Soto, and began to make his way towards Harlem. The driver had become a
confidante
to Chester, ever since the box had informed him of the Polish man's enthusiasms. There seemed little in life that was distasteful to the hulk of a man. He rarely spoke but his eyes roved the world, lusting after the women and the money he saw. He was a simple man, Chester understood, a man of hunger. Such people were easily controlled by those willing to feed them a little every now and then.

  "He is loyal," the box had said once, "and that is the only quality in a man you need."

  As they moved through the Manhattan streets Chester held the box in his hands and did his best to negotiate with it.

  "Tonight's the night," it said, "the night that I'll open for you and all that power you wanted will be yours."

  "But, Penelope…"

  "Is unimportant," the box insisted, "just as flimsy and rank as that light-fingered girl we taught a lesson to."

  "She's nice…"

  "She's nothing!" the box had shouted so loudly that Chester had flinched and, even more worryingly, he had noticed Henryk jump in his seat too. Did Henryk hear the box too? Was its voice not just for him?

  "We will take the girl and we will feed from her," the box insisted. "We shall grind her under our heel, bathe in our command of her, she will be so beholden to us that she will beg to dine from our shit…"

  Chester wasn't sure he had much interest in that. It wasn't that he loved Penelope – he had never loved anybody – but he certainly didn't hate her. Now if it had been his father… that was different, he would quite easily make a turd-munching supplicant of that old fuck.