“Why are we doing the Macarena?” I asked confused.
“I always loved that dance,” Bess replied, her porcelain skin looking deathly and really fucking creepy in the moonlight.
Angel’s screams and pounding on the sides of the tub diminished. Bess clapped her hands excitedly.
“Let’s look!” I pulled up my mask and wiped my brow, feeling hot from both the dancing and the heat from the tub. It was steaming as I moved the weight and lifted up the lid. It smelt like stewed offal. Angel’s body was boiled to perfection and the skin on her arms floated on the crimson surface, tender as fuck, leaving gruesome skeletal arm bones dangling in the water. Half of her face had detached from her skull and bubbled about like a gory Phantom Of The Opera mask, eyeball and all. Bess turned off the tub and I stared unblinking at the carnage, not feeling anything.
“Savannah says soon it’s for reals. It won’t be long until you can avenge her. She says you’re ready.”Bess said, skipping towards one of the sun loungers. I suddenly felt dog tired, as I always did after committing murder, so I got on the lounger and closed my eyes cuddling Bess against my chest.
“Bess?” I said yawning.
“What is it?” she asked, her little voice also sounding tired.
“You’re the best friend I ever had. You see the real me and I don’t have to hide. You won’t ever leave me will you?”
“No. We’re friends forever Caspian.” And with that, I fell asleep.
When I woke, I was still on the sun lounger but covered with a blanket. Bess was nowhere to be seen and there wasn’t a body in the tub. I padded bare foot into the house where I found my dad making pancakes. My stomach growled hungrily.
“Hey sleepy head! Want some breakfast?”
“Yes please, I’m starving,” I replied, sitting down at the breakfast bar.
“Why did you sleep on the terrace? I found you shivering when I went to the bathroom, so I covered you with a blanket,” my dad said, placing a stack of pancakes in front of me.
“I got a bit overwhelmed with the hookers,” I admitted, “whereare they?”
“They left just before you came in.”
So me killing them had been a dream. What the fuck? Ifelt like I was seriously losing it. It had to be real. It felt like it happened. I could still smell Angel’s cooked flesh burning my nostrils.
After breakfast, I checked in my bag and there was Bess, just like I’d packed her, and I was sure I saw herwink at me.
5 The shadow of the dollmaker
It was six months until my eighteenth birthday, and the last year or so had pushed my sanity to its limits. I felt like I was lost in the eye of the storm, the tornado of my life whooshing around me and there was fuck all I could do to neither stop it nor understand it.
Youri had proposed to mom on their European holiday, as I had predicted, and she was busy planning their wedding. They were hoping to get married in the spring. She had wasted no time doing podcasts about wedding planning and her subscribers thought it was so romantic and well deserved, and that she should be granted happiness after all that had gone on. She was less concerned about the neighbors, but all of her old girlfriends had come out of the woodwork because they wanted to be invited to the social event of the year, but Mom didn’t want them there. It was going to be filmed for her channel, and the guest list would be a chosen few from a competition on her page, whereby the winner would attend the wedding and win a wellness hamper. Also in attendance would be the camera crew and the mansion staff.
Mom and I were like strangers. She no longer cared if I did well at school or about anything that was happening in my life. I could drop dead, and she wouldn’t notice. I reminded her of dad and her failed marriage, so the sooner I moved out, the happier she’d be. It was like she was counting down the days until my graduation. The mansion felt suffocating in spite of its size and no longer felt like my home.
I spent a lot of my time in a tortured mental state, so unsure of what was real and what was imaginary. The character I played at school began to become a chore. I was getting tired of pretending to be perfect and had to work extra hard to keep my grades up because my mind just kept wandering and I felt impatient like I was waiting for the final act. I’d been waiting all of my life, and I was sick of it. I wondered what it would have been like to have a normal life without these constant nightmares of the past and grisly visions of the future, where I would finally break and murder my parents for their sins. I felt angry with them. Because of what they did, I had suffered for my entire life. I felt so alone. Even Briar had ghosted me ever since she had seen Bess. In reality, Bess was the only person I had that I could talk to and that was a sad state of fucking affairs when my only confidante was an inanimate doll. But Bess didn’t answer my questions when I fished for information, so I went to the public library on High Street and tried to look through old newspaper articles to find out anything relating to Savannah and what had happened to her. I came up empty. But surely something this heinous would have been reported. The presswould have loved hashing out the juicy details and it would have held front page for weeks. But there was nothing. Just when I thought that all of this was a figment of my imagination, I decided to try looking through birth, marriage and death records. That’s when I struck gold. I jumped up and fucking screamed with joy when I saw her and was abruptly cautioned by the stern looking librarian, an old crone with skin as yellow and crinkly as the ageing books that she cared for.
Savannah was standing dressed in a cheerleader outfit with a good-looking guy in his football kit, outside of that old house at the end of Lull Lane, the one that was off limits because it was classed as dangerous, only in this photo it was well kept and tidy. My parents had always warned me never to go to that house. Its rickety old, rusty gates covered in blood red climbing roses with sharp thorns had been chained shut for as long as I can remember. Mom told me an old witch lived there who liked to eat children and if I dared go there then she would come through my bedroom window at night and steal me away to be boiled in her cauldron. I shook my head. My mom sure was one sadistic bitch. Nowadays, the house was a crumbling mess. No one lived there, the family or more specifically, Savannah’s family had left long ago, but it had always been a local place of interest that had scared kids for years.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that I wasn’t losing it. Savannah was a real person and now I saw her in front of me, I felt more determined thanever to help her. I cursed the guy in the photo who had actually touched her and fucked her. Prick. It also occurred to me that Savannah’s family must have been wealthy, and I would stake my life on it that they paid for the “problem” to be kept out of the press, that’s why I couldn’t find anything on it. Mulling it all over, I made my way back home, humming the melody that had become a staple part of my life.
* * *
Dad had fallen into a relationship with Angel, who was no longer hooking, but practically living with him now, and they were burning their way through his fortune spending it on drugs and alcohol. I went round to his house, namely, to escape my mother, but after my findings, I also had questions about Savannah. Despite it being past noon, the blinds were still drawn when I let myself in with the spare key that dad had given me. There was a horrific stench of rotten garbage, and the house looked less like the glamourous abode of old and more like the quintessential junkie’s crack house.
Dishes were piled high in the sink, remnants of food waste on them and pizza boxes were stacked next to an overflowing trash can around which a horde of flies greedily buzzed. Items of clothing and shoes were strewn over the place, and the coffee table was full of stains, half-filled glasses and an overflowing ashtray. I baulked as I narrowly side stepped a pile of vomit that had solidified on the expensive red rug. Fuck me. How did things get so bad, so quickly? I pulled open the blinds and the room wasflooded with light, further highlighting the abysmal state of the place.
Suddenly, I heard the sounds of fucking. Really dad? This place is a shithole and all you care about is sex. Disgusted, I stormed into his bedroom and nearly threw up. The smell in here was worse. It was a mixture of cigarette smoke, unwashed bodies, and a rotten sex smell like dirty genitalia. Angel was on top of my dad, her body pale and scrawny, her peroxide hair needed the roots doing badly and it was a matted mess. She turned her head when she heard me enter and her eyes were sunken, but were still caked with thick makeup, which looked like it had been on for a couple of days.
“Hey look who it is! Want to join?” she said brashly, smiling at me, her teeth looking browner than I remembered. I heard a guttural moan as my dad emptied into her fetid cunt and when she got off him I could see his cock was thick with lumpy, cottage cheese-like semen and the beginnings of warts around his glans. I was glad I stood my ground about not fucking a disease spreading, junkie whore.
Angel staggered towards me, my dad’s semen dribbling down her inner thighs. The smell of fish and body odor was overwhelming, and it made me cough.
