Spider - Michael Morley [30]
I’m choking! Oh my God, I’m choking!
Some form of cloth is jammed in her mouth and held in place by sticky parcel tape wound around her face.
Panic grips her. Her heart is racing dangerously and she knows that unless she calms down she will suffocate.
Come on girl, get your shit together. Get it together or you are one dead bitch.
She concentrates hard on breathing slowly through her nose and gradually manages to dip her pulse rate and control herself.
And then, as she lies there, staring at the strangely black ceiling, she sees him again. Leaning over her.
His face is so big and so close to her that she can see the pores on his skin. She can see the hairs in his nose and feel the heat of his breath.
Not so fucking harmless now, is he, girl?
‘Hello, my little Sugar,’ he says softly, smelling her skin, rubbing his face against hers like a pet dog sniffing out a new visitor. ‘Don’t worry, my little darling, Spider’s here. Spider’s right beside you.’
She isn’t as pretty as the other Sugars, Spider thinks to himself, but he can tell she is just the same as them. They all thought that they were strong and didn’t need anyone, could play the game by their rules, could come and go in people’s lives as and when they wished. Well, they were wrong. All wrong. No one leaves Spider. No one. Ever.
He pulls over a leather-topped, wooden stool so he can sit facing her. ‘How long you stay – alive – depends upon how well you listen,’ he says.
Spider has a stack of digitally printed photographs in his left hand.
‘Poor Sugar. I know you live in a world of lies,’ he says pityingly, ‘but don’t worry, I’m not going to deceive you. I think relationships should be based on honesty between couples, and I promise you now, right at the beginning of our relationship, that I will always be honest with you.’
He pauses for a moment and then almost tenderly brushes away some strands of black hair that are plastered to her sweating brow and streaked across her eyes. ‘I’m going to show you some photographs, some family snaps,’ he says, ‘so you know that everything I am about to say to you is the truth. Would you like that? Would you like to see my pictures?’
Lu thinks she’s going crazy. She’s naked and tied up and now some perverted wacko wants to show her his family album. Man, they get weirder by the fucking day.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says Spider sarcastically, laying the photographs face down on her chest. ‘I should loosen your noose; that rope must be really cutting into you.’
Lu hears him fumbling with the rope and feels the tension ease around her neck. Man, that feels good. She never realized that one of the sweetest feelings in life was that of simply not being choked to death by a rope.
‘Better?’ asks Spider.
Lu manages a small nod.
He lifts the photographs off her prostrate body and rearranges them in some kind of order, almost as though he’s just drawn a hand of cards. ‘The photographs that I’m about to show you are of other women, women who’ve been in the same position as you. If you read the newspapers, then you may well even recognize one or two of them.’
He leans closer to her. ‘Do you read the papers, Sugar? You sure don’t look like you do. Well, maybe the funnies, but I guess that’s about it.’
Lu visualizes spitting in his arrogant face, kicking him in the balls for being a mouthy swoloch, leaving him rolling in agony on the sidewalk to watch her cute Russian butt wiggle off in the distance.
‘Let’s play a little game of “Before and After”,’ says Spider, shuffling the photographs and then holding one out in front of Lu’s face. ‘This is “Before”,’ he says.
Lu focuses on a red-headed girl with sunglasses; she’s wearing a flowing floral green dress and strappy sandals. It’s taken in a shopping mall; the girl’s on a cell phone and in the background people are riding an elevator