THREE TIMES A LADY (8 page)

Claire Bishop closed her eyes as tightly as she could, tried to squeeze the eyelids right off her face, attempted desperately to transport her body to another place.  Anyplace but here.  Try as she might, though, her confused brain refused to even
consider
the possibility that this could be real.  This was just a bad dream – a horrific
nightmare
– and pretty soon she’d soon wake up from it.  If she closed her eyes as tightly as she could, maybe when she opened them up again everything would make sense and she’d be safe at home in her own bed.  She didn’t even care if her mother’s boyfriend forced her to give him blowjobs every day for the next month. 
Anything
was better than this.

But when Claire opened her eyes again she saw that she wasn’t back home in her bed.  Far from it.  She was still standing in a walk-in freezer with an insane boy she’d just met half an hour ago behind a dumpster at McDonald’s.  An insane boy who was dressed up in women’s clothing, smelled of an expensive perfume made famous by Marilyn Monroe and who was now slicing through the other strap on her halter top.

The boy smiled and pulled down Claire’s destroyed shirt around her waist.  Her nipples immediately hardened into painful diamond points as they made contact with the frigid air.  No doubt a well-placed flick of a finger would have shattered them clean off into a million tiny pieces. 

‘Nice tits, Claire,’ the boy said after a moment, running ran his gaze admiringly over her naked chest while wave after wave of painful goose flesh danced across her bare skin and stitched it up tight.  ‘
Real
nice tits, as a matter of fact.  Some of the best I’ve ever seen.’ 

The boy reached out his free hand and tested the firmness of her breasts, squeezing gently and lifting first the flesh of her right breast, and then her left.  ‘Much better than I thought they’d be.  But to tell you the truth, I didn’t think boys were supposed to
have
tits.  What are you?  Some kind of freak?  Some kind of transsexual or something?’

Claire fought back the overpowering urge to vomit.  Stomach acid crept up her throat and burned the thin lining of her esophagus.  ‘I’m
not
a boy,’ she whimpered, swallowing back the acrid fluid she tasted in her mouth and finally reduced to acting her age now.  ‘I’m a
girl
. 
You
’re a boy.’

The boy sneered and lifted the hand that he was using to hold the meat cleaver, rubbing tear-streaked mascara gently from beneath her left eye with the pad of his thumb.  As he did so, the cold metal of the flat side of the blade pressed softly against Claire’s cheek and left an impression that she knew she’d be able to feel for the rest of her life – however long or short
that
might turn out to be right now.  ‘Well, now,’ the boy said.  ‘I’m a boy, huh?  I guess we’ll just see about that, now won’t we?’

Whirling around abruptly, the boy reared back his right arm and with all his might flung the cleaver into a side of beef ten feet away, a baseball pitcher dialing up the speed on his very best fastball.  The fabric of his dress wrapped around his legs from the sudden motion.  An audible
whoosh
concluded with the grotesque hacking sound of metal biting deep into flesh and bone.  Then he lifted his dress over his head. 

Claire widened her eyes in shock and horror. 

The boy wasn’t wearing underwear, and there wasn’t anything between his legs, save for a mass of ugly scar tissue where his boy-parts
should
have been.

‘Do you see a penis here?’ the boy asked incredulously, lifting his hands high into the air and staring down hard between his thighs.  ‘Do I
look
like a boy to you, Claire?’

Claire Bishop stopped crying then, much too stunned by the gruesome sight in front of her to feel anything but revulsion and pity.  Despite her bizarre circumstances – despite the fact that this boy had kidnapped her and had her tied up half-naked in the middle of a downtown freezer – she actually felt
sympathy
for the pathetic figure standing before her.  How could she not?  Never before in her life had she witnessed anything even
half
as gruesome. 

Claire lifted her burning stare to meet his.  ‘What
happened
to you?’ she breathed.  ‘Who
did
this to you?’

The boy dropped eye contact with Claire first.  A look of sorrow crossed his down-turned face.  ‘
I
did this to me, Claire,’ he said mournfully.  ‘I did this to me because I was a disobedient little boy who didn’t listen to my mother.  And I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to do it to you now, too.  That’s just the way it has to be.  Since
I
’ll never be a real man, I can’t let you be one either.  Fair is fair, after all.’

Stepping forward again, the boy slid Claire’s shorts down her hips, all the way to her ankles.  His sparkling green eyes narrowed into accusing slits when his gaze landed on the feminine triangle nestled between Claire’s trembling thighs.

He lifted his disbelieving stare and trapped Claire in his freezing emerald eyes once more.  ‘What the fuck’s this?’ he snapped.  ‘Where’s your fucking dick?’

Claire tried to answer him but couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say.  What in the fuck
could
she say at this point?  The boy was clearly insane, and all she could do now was pray.  In her mind, the religious mantra she’d spent countless hours repeating in catechism class echoed over and over again:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.  Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths.

‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ the boy said after a long moment, dropping his stare between Claire’s thighs again and continuing to study her genitalia with great interest.  ‘I guess you’re not a boy after all, huh?  I guess you were telling me the truth.’

Shaking his head in confusion, the boy slid Claire’s shorts back up over her naked lower half before he turned away and teetered on his three-inch heels over to the side of beef into which he’d flung the cleaver a moment earlier.  Working out the blade with a few hard back-and-forth tugs, he then walked back over to Claire and slipped the sharp metal through the thin ropes restraining her wrists and ankles.  Then he put his dress back on and went over into the corner of the room. 

He tossed Claire a brand-new T-shirt from a cardboard box full of them and kicked her socks and shoes over to her feet.  ‘Get dressed,’ he said.  ‘Just get dressed and get the fuck out of here.  I need some time to think.  This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.’

Claire did as she was told, hastily pulling the T-shirt over her head and balling up her socks in an effort to save time.  Cramming her bare feet into her beat-up Keds, she was halfway out of the freezer when the boy suddenly sprang forward and yanked her backward by her hair, jerking forcefully enough to temporarily lift her newly re-sneakered feet off the slippery metal floor.  The roots of her hair screamed as though they were on
fire
.  More tears of pain and fear flooded into her eyes.

‘Wait just one goddamn minute, there,’ the boy said, still holding Claire backward by her hair and staring down hard into her eyes.  ‘You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you?  You can
never
tell.’

Claire looked up at the boy and shook her head the best she could in his viselike grip, too terrified to even
whimper
the wrong way, much less provide him with an incorrect answer.  And it was the truth.  Jaded as she was, Claire Bishop wasn’t the
only
one who life owed.  Apparently, there were some fates in this life worse than death.  Some fates in this life worse than living in a shitty third-floor walk-up with an uncaring mother and an alcoholic child molester who was constantly copping ‘accidental’ feels whenever your mother was away at work.

‘No, I’m not,’ Claire said; choking out the words around the jagged lump of fear lodged in her throat.  ‘I’ll never tell anyone, I swear it.’

And Claire Bishop never
did
tell anybody – not even when she grew up and got married and had kids of her own.  At that exact moment, she didn’t know she’d live to regret that decision one day.  Regret it with her whole heart and mind and body and soul.  Because the decision Claire made in the freezer that day would wind up costing more than half a dozen innocent people their lives.

Still – selfish as it sounded – at least
she
hadn’t been one of them.

The overwhelming blackness of Dana’s nightmare morphed first into a hazy gray, then pure white, and finally a blinding flash of vibrant colours that hurt her brain so badly it threatened to bring on a seizure. 

Dana squinted hard against the disorienting visual onslaught, feeling more confused than she’d ever felt in her entire life.  Nothing made sense to her.  Nothing had
ever
made sense to her.  Nothing would ever make sense to her again.

As she gradually established her bearings, a soul-freezing chill passed through her body, directly through her heart.  Shocked, she watched as the colours in her world transformed again into a grainy black-and-white, like an old-time newsreel where everything jumped around and flickered, as though the footage was being played on an antique film projector set to the wrong speed.

Dana sucked in a sharp breath that sent an agonising stab of pain slicing hard through her lungs.  A man had just walked right
through
her.  A small silver pistol peeked out from the rear waistband of his dirty jeans.  His walk was confident, completely sure of itself, practically a
swagger
.

Dana blinked rapidly and tried desperately to make sense of the mind-bending scene in front of her.  No use.  Suddenly, though, her brain collapsed on itself when she realised
exactly
what this was, exactly
where
she was.

The home of her childhood.  3330 Eastlawn Street; West Park-section of Cleveland.  The place where her parents had been brutally murdered thirty-five years earlier.  The place where
she
’d barely escaped bloody murder at the hands of the same deranged madman when she’d been just four years old – saved only by a concerned neighbour who’d heard screaming in the night.

Dana’s breath hitched in her throat.  Her heart stopped beating dead in her chest.  A cold shiver ran down the length of her spine, as though some unseen ghost was using its bony fingers to lovingly trace a feathery path along the vertebrae. 

Dana shook her head in bewilderment and tried again to process the baffling imagery before her.  No good.  But then a second, more powerful wave of shivers racked her body as the next chilling realisation dawned on her.  Since she now understood exactly
where
she was, it could mean only one thing.  She also knew the identity of the man who’d just passed through her in the darkened hallway, knew his lifeless eyes as well as she knew her own.

And now he was heading for her bedroom.

Dana willed her legs to move but it wasn’t easy.  Her limbs felt like cast-iron weights chained to her body.  Marshalling all her strength, she struggled forward to the doorway of her bedroom and peered in to witness a horror movie she didn’t want to see.  Not again. 

A Superman nightlight illuminated a child’s sleeping face in the darkness.  Nathan Stiedowe loomed over the child’s bed with a huge butcher’s knife dangling from his powerful right hand.  Beams of moonlight streamed in through the window next to the bed and bounced off the razor-sharp blade.  Dana almost threw up when the child shifted in his sleep and afforded her a clear view of his unlined face.

Bradley, the little boy from the plane who’d promised to marry her one day.

Stunned stupid, Dana watched in horror as Nathan Stiedowe lifted the gleaming knife over his head, ready to plunge the unforgiving steel deep into the boy’s tender throat.  She tried to scream out a warning but no sound emerged. 

Shifting her gaze to the mirror hanging above the bureau of her childhood bedroom, Dana abruptly caught sight of her own face.  Her mouth had been sewn shut.  Tight stitches fastened her lips together, rendered her mute.

She tried to hurtle herself into the room to stop the monster before he could kill the little boy but looked down in horror to see that her feet had been nailed to the floor by six-inch railroad spikes bleeding rust.  All she could now do was look on helplessly as Nathan Stiedowe brought down the sharp knife in a blinding flash of silver that would soon be joined by a sickening explosion of red as the boy’s jugular vein severed and he bled out all over the matching Superman sheets.

But the knife never came down.  Instead, Nathan Stiedowe simply lowered the glimmering steel to his side and reached down to stroke the boy’s silky blonde hair.  ‘I’ll be back for you in just a minute, little boy,’ he whispered.  ‘That much you can count on.’

The little boy only mumbled dreamily in response.