Page 80 of Little Deaths
He went to it immediately, but the handle wouldn’t give. It was like someone was holding it closed. “Who the fuck is there,” he growled, feeling the first stirrings of unease when he realized he couldn’t hear anything on the other side. No taunts or laughter: only silence.
And then a terrible hissing sound filled the air, crackling and sibilant. The wall slammed up against his back as he turned in surprise, climbing to maddening intensity until it cancelled everything out.It’s a radio, he thought, half-blind in the dark.Or a recording.
Which meant someone was close enough to start it remotely.
“Hello?” he said again, whipping out his cell phone for light. It caught on a pile of trash he’d previously ignored in the corner, and when he kicked it aside, he revealed an old tape recorder.
“You want to know why I do what I do?”
The voice was Donni’s, but younger, and harder than he’d ever heard it sound in person. It carried so well, he half-expected her to be right there in the room.
“It’s because I’m so fucking tired.” Her voice whispered through the rotting slats of dimensional lumber. “Tired of living in a world where men get to continually slip the knife in and walk away. People talk about sexism like it’s a single killing blow, but it’s actually a series of little deaths. Women are dying and men are the sickness.”
There was a loud, deafening click.
“I want you to think of me as the cure.”
There was another click from the other side of the room, followed by a beep.
A British-accented voice intoned, “I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Rafe slammed the door and heard an answering sound on the other side. He took a step back just as something sharp and glittering lanced through the old wood, mere inches from where his face had been.
“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for your that one of your members perish than that your whole body be thrown into hell.”
“Slip the knife in and walk away.”
“I say to you.”
“Men are the sickness.”
“With her in his heart.”
“Think of me as the cure.”
An eye appeared briefly in the hole before disappearing.
Gasping, Rafe found the handle of the shed and shouldered it, hard, causing the door to rain open in a shower of wood. Light poured into the dark, foul space, and a cold breeze from the lake tickled the sweat beading on his face and throat.
The two tape decks continued to play, warping in and out of sync. The second one, the one spouting bible verses, had been tucked into the sleeping bag.
Rafe looked down at the ground and saw an old padlock. Someone had clipped the door closed, perhaps unaware of how flimsy the wood was. The lock, along with the piece of the door it had been affixed to, had both broken off.
He slipped the lock into his pocket and pressed “stop” and then “eject” on the tape deck. The tape inside was made of white plastic that had yellowed with age. It had one of those hand printed labels. They used to sell these in bulk, before CDs took over for good. Big packages filled with tapes, shrink-wrapped in plastic. Donni had sometimes used them for her auditions.
This one had been labeledLITTLE DEATHS.
???????
Donni thought about calling the police again but the idea of dealing with Officers Lambert and Corcoran left her feeling exhausted. Every time they came over, she had the sense that they resented being dragged out to her property, out in the middle of nowhere. That they thought she was wasting their precious fucking time. Animal blood, or no.
She still remembered the snide little remark Lambert had made when someone had literally broken into her house and tried to set it on fire. They’d treat her like she was hysterical until she wound up with a knife buried in her back. If she called in a tizzy over some paint in the driveway, they’d probably just tell her it wasn’t a “credible threat” and go back to their fucking coffees and doughnuts.
Bastards. She slammed a door, just because she could. The windows rattled, and a few paintings shuddered on their nails, but the house was otherwise silent. Rafe didn’t appear to be home and she had already noticed that the Mercedes was gone. That annoyed her, even though she wasn’t driving it and the car needed to be run. She hadn’t exactly given him permission.
She looked at the note in her hand, which had crumpled in her fist. She relaxed her fingers, smoothing it out on the granite counter. How long had it been there? Long enough for someone else to see it? Not that someone would. She didn’t get many visitors and the mail carrier usually crammed whatever he or she could in the mailbox, rather than make the trek to the house.
Leaving the note on the counter, she went outside to spray off the front porch, watching the paint circle into the gutter like that scene fromPsycho.Those emails were sent to our family account, she thought.The one we used for all of our regular correspondence.It was the reason Rafe had access to it in the first place; they’d used it to stay in contact with their son whenever they went on a trip.