Katie
She keeps asking me questions, but I can tell she isn’t expecting an answer.
“…You know what I mean?”
…Is the refrain. I don’t, most of the time, but I keep quiet.
“…It’s not a dream, quite, because I’m awake when I’m picturing it. Except sometimes it is a dream. I’m in the middle of a cemetery… a vast graveyard. One of the old ones, with new markers near the path, and crumbling grey stone deeper in.”
She paces. I sit.
“The place is silent, except for the noise the breeze makes in my ears.”
She stops talking for a second, standing still, eyes closed, head tilted to the dark ceiling of the warehouse, as if trying to replicate the sensation.
“It’s good that you came.” She says quietly, eyes still closed, and for a second I’m not entirely sure she’s talking to me. Then she abruptly starts pacing again, and talking louder, animated.
“Then, somewhere nearby, I hear a muffled THUD. Almost not sure I heard it, really, but then there’s another. And another. Persistent, rhythmic.”
She turns to look at me, closer by than before.
“It was time for someone to find me. But they had to come and find me. There’s no value to a message like mine if it’s volunteered. There should be witnesses, but to seek them out seems crass.” She pauses, considering something. “You have called them, yes?”
I nod, because it makes sense to do so, but I haven’t called anyone. I don’t know who she thinks I am, but I’m just a guy, really. Thinking I’m smart, over my head, and too dumb to call for back-up before entering possibly hostile territory.
She turns away, already losing interest in me.
“I’m feeling the sound in my shoes, you understand? And then there is another thudding alongside it, from somewhere else in the cemetery, under another grave. And another.” She stares past me, exalting. “Before long, I’m spinning, trying to find the site of the next beat, until the whole place is full of a hundred hundred pulses underground. The dirt resonates.”
Her head moves to one side, and I have the sudden insight that she’s tasting that last word somehow.
She rounds on me, and practically spits the next thing in my face.
“You think they’re trying to break free, don’t you?”
Despite myself, I pull back from her. The chair under me scrapes, and creaks, and threatens to break under me.
“They aren’t, though. They don’t need to escape from anywhere – they’ll come through the dirt soon enough and easy enough. They have time. What they’re doing is applauding me. Thanking me for what I’ve done.”
I remember the shapes that I noticed, evenly distributed shadows around the dim edges of the room, and then try to forget them again. They won’t help me right now.
“The beating fills me, and then I come to, and I know what I need to do. The same every time.” She moves very close to me, now, and that’s when I truly realise what is going to happen. That this is the place and the time where I’m going to die. Her mouth moves to my ear, and she whispers: “You see, at the end of the road, God brings us all close to him, but the dead go first.”
Something happens. It feels like she punches me in the stomach, three times and fast, and it feels like she hit me with a hammer, but I don’t move enough in the seat.
“I’m giving you all a head start.” She whispers again, before kissing me softly on the cheek, and stepping back away from me.
I look down and see the damage that the blade – that she must have pulled from concealment and now has hidden again – has done. The pain I feel bears no relation to the meat that spills around my lap and onto the floor between my feet, where they are bound to the legs of the chair. It is an abstract thing that swims toward and away from me, giving strange relief from the facts of my situation.
It is sharp and constant and unremitting, and as such is the most stable thing happening to my body, now, as so many of the things that I never really understood inside me evacuate.
Through the sea of pain, I watch her. I’m oddly super-aware of two small spots of my blood that have settled on her summer dress, the only sign on her of what she has done. She moves carefully away, far enough that the pooling gore doesn’t quite reach her, and she sits, legs wrapped under her, on the floor. Watching me closely, with no shortage of care on her face, waiting.
With a mental reflex that astonishes me with its absurdity even as I’m thinking it, I wonder how long she’ll stay sitting there, waiting for the police, before she realises that I lied and they aren’t coming. Before she leaves this place, and goes wherever a person like her might go, to do whatever a person like her might do next.
