Jeremiah Quick (12 page)

She wasn't even speaking to him when he
died.

And that might have had more to do with all
of the other boys than Pretty cared to examine.

She missed her husband. He was the person
who knew her the best, who never judged her, never made her feel
like she had to pretend about anything. If she had some way to call
him, she would, and she'd tell him about Jeremiah Quick. She
probably wouldn't mention right away about the weird sex, but it
wasn't something she'd keep secret from him, either. They didn't
have secrets or lies or masks. She was the vessel, always reaching,
stretching outward, giving herself away, and he was the source,
always filling her up. His love was consistent, stabilizing. He
helped her be more than she could have been otherwise. He let her
grow, and never seemed afraid of the growing.

He'd found her, pursued her, convinced her,
and she was lucky for that.

And the truth was – he was the one who
simply let her be herself. He never ridiculed her, almost always
agreed with her. He gave her space to figure out who she was,
whether she was Pretty or Letty or someone else entirely.

He made her feel safe without any masks at
all.

He loved her basic, internal self.

And that was the part of her that would
change only through experience, life, love, and loss.

Before this detour with Jeremiah Quick,
she'd been looking forward to a quiet weekend all by herself. Alone
weekends happened so rarely that her mind was free-falling before
she even got home. She’d been looking forward to the silent house
for a month, and decided to stop for the groceries now so the chore
wouldn't be hanging over her. She hoped the boys placed in their
tournament, and would stay another night to compete in final
events. That would be just… bliss. Her daughter, Sarah, was furious
with her about something or other, and would stay gone for as long
as allowed. Pretty kept hoping Sarah would get easier, but at
fourteen, no luck yet.

There were days when Pretty wondered how
she'd come to this, this quiet existence where what she looked
forward to the most was time alone in the house to take a long
bath, to masturbate for an hour – with toys, no less – to read or
write without constant interruption.

Most of the time, between kids, dog, and
electronics, she could hardly hear herself think.

And yet… when she could think, what she
thought was how boring her life must look, from the outside,
although she never felt bored.

Her vivid imagination and rich inner fantasy
life made its way into books, and her usual state of mind was
waiting in aggravated anticipation to get back to writing the
stories.

They were alright, her little family. There
was enough money to pay the bills, and Pretty had a part-time job
that forced her out of the house a few times a week. Every year the
kids got more grown-up and more independent. Before long, Pretty
and her husband would be back where they started – just the two of
them, letting each other go, then breathing each other back in
again.

Sometimes she remembered a time when she'd
hoped to change the world.

At this point she didn't see that happening,
and decided she'd have to look to Sarah to do that. And Sarah
would. That girl was a force.

And how lucky was Pretty, to have stumbled
into all of this? A husband who loved her beyond all others, who
consistently provided for them so well she worried about almost
nothing. Healthy kids to raise up and try like hell to make sure
they knew what was important in the world.

Perhaps she suffered from restless boredom, but the
seasons changed and the kids were off school for the summer, and it
was all late nights, sleepovers, bonfires, and mom's taxi service.
And when she couldn't bear it for another minute, school would
start again. She dreaded the oncoming winter, but adored the time
alone. She was always melancholy in the fall, but the time was good
for writing novels, even if she suffered a minor depression each
year, dreading the appearance of those first sharp white flakes of
winter.

And maybe she was wrong, to be so accepting of her
easy life. Maybe she needed to find some injustice to fight, some
cause to stand for, to keep looking for her chance to change the
world.

Maybe that's why she was here, now, with Jeremiah
Quick. To find the fire, to re-ignite her passion for bigger
things. Maybe there was a purpose much bigger, much higher, than
her family or herself.

It was time for paying attention,
time for change.

Jeremiah would surely start the changing.

She couldn't bear to think or remember more.
She ran song lyrics through her head to stop the mess of noise and
memory. The Who
… no one knows what it's like to be the bad
man.
And Lifehouse…
how long have I been in this storm?
Guns-N-Roses'
Patience
. And she waited for Jeremiah, wide
awake, staring into the dark.

The silence was deafening, so pronounced she
started imagining sounds, a click, a rustle, a ringing in her
ears.

The darkness was as total
as the silence, and she stared up at the rafters where she knew
chains were hanging and…
the scrap of black materiel swayed
in the dark, she
knew
it did, black in the dark, swinging
back and forth, black on black, impossible to see, and yet she
saw.

Her mind started playing tricks on her,
imagination running wild from too much dark, too much silence, too
many questions in her head.

She thought she heard a muffled
sob.

It startled her to attention, the
way a noise interrupts a dream, and she strained to hear more, to
hear a real sound past the silence, but there was only ringing in
her ears, and nothing else, and time dragged by until she thought
maybe it hadn't been a real sound at all. But as soon as she gave
up listening on purpose, she thought she heard it again, and a
minute later thought she heard her name.

And this time, the more she
listened, the more she heard. Murmurs and mutters that were barely
audible, unintelligible, although there was a cadence to the sounds
that she could almost imagine were sentences and words. Sometimes
she thought she was hearing a chant:
Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick, Jeremiah Quick.

Then again, sometimes her brain took up that chant
all on its own, so she couldn't be sure if it was internal or
external.

It had to be internal.

Of course it did.

She didn't hear voices, didn't believe in
ghosts.

She didn't hear crying or feel the
room pulsing with any regret other than her own.

Chapter 10

S
he.

She has a family.

I know this of course, but for some
reason it didn't occur to me they would look for her.

It was somewhat startling to
remember that normal families don't just let people
disappear.

I'm browsing a news site, and
somehow the video, an interview with her husband, startles me with
its very existence, and threatens to make me feel terrible. Maybe
even guilty. I want to promise him I won't hurt her, but it's much
too late for that.

I can't watch more than a few seconds of that video.
It's one thing to know they're looking, wholly another to see the
husband's baffled face and hear his quiet, steady plea - "Come
home, Letty. Please come home."

There is no one else who can do what I need her to
do.

It needs to be here, and it needs
to be right, and it needs to be
HER
.

No one else.

I looked and looked for someone else, trying not to
disrupt her life.

I don't want to hurt or destroy
her, but fate or magick led me to her now, and the fact that I'd
known her in the past, already hold high regard for her – is no
coincidence.

It's a command that originates from beyond
myself.

It's magick.

And there is a price to be paid for denying magick,
same as there is a price to be paid for creating and using it.

I am stuck.

She.

She's the other half of this spell, whether she
wants to be or not.

There is nothing for it but to forge ahead.

I close the browser and turn off the computer.

Try to decide what comes next.

It's hard to leave her alone in the dark. I want to
play with her, like one plays with a new kitten, dangle and snatch,
learn her more, get to know who she is now. Find out what makes her
extend claws, what makes her purr.

She needs to trust me, for real, a bond deeper than
shared chocolate.

I have to be in charge.

In control.

And, for now, I have to leave her alone in the
dark.

Chapter 11

I
n the
morning, if it was morning - Jeremiah was silent. He clicked on the
dim light from the switch by the door, and when he loomed over her,
she almost screamed.

His face was so much a mask in makeup that
in another circumstance she wouldn't have recognized him. His eyes
were lined in smooth thick black, lids a combination of bright blue
and smoky gray, the gray smudged under his lower lashes. His lips
were also outlined in black, the soft surface flesh stained a
similar blue.

He didn't look feminine so much as
foreign.

He released her from her bonds and walked
her through the playroom space to the bathroom. She stumbled and
needed him to steady her more than once, a combination of her body
clumsily stiff and her head swiveling to stare at his face. She was
wearing yesterday's clothes and felt grimy and unattractive. He
motioned to the toilet, and turned away only after she gave him a
steady glare.

When she was done, he grabbed her hands and
stopped her from fastening her pants. Tugged her back into the
playroom, back to the bed with the ugly brown plastic mattress. He
kept her on her feet next to it, positioning her with sharp
movements, motions and pats, and stripped her of her clothing.

She shivered, not from cold, but because she
was so vulnerable, so bare, in contrast to his black t-shirt and
jeans, and still the boots clear up to his knees. The makeup
changed his face to that of a stranger. She didn't know this
Jeremiah. She'd never known
this
Jeremiah.

She didn't like the silence and wanted to
hear his voice, but clearly he'd changed the rules.

A gesture and a stern look commanded her to
stay where she was while he toured the room with a slow pace that
eventually led to a small refrigerator. The moment Pretty noticed
it, she found herself with a desperate hope he would bring
water.

He did.

He tilted her chin and set the bottle to her
lips, and allowed a few small sips. When he took the bottle away,
she lifted her hands to clutch at it (always clutching), but he
shook his head, and if there was any expression she could read in
his painted mask, it was patience. He moved her hands back down,
one at a time, so they hung at her sides, and shook his head at
her, a gentle admonishment.

Was he torturing her with silence on
purpose?

She sighed and let her shoulders relax,
looked into his eyes, and waited.

Friendly eyes, today, despite the makeup
that made them even more dramatic. So pretty. So unlike the
Jeremiah of her memory. Yet she felt like she was seeing more of
his real self than she'd ever seen before.

She wondered about his past, his hurts, why
he needed to be the one so much in control. Not that it mattered -
it was easier this way, because there was something in her,
something timid that refused to be demanding, had always refused to
be demanding. Some part of her that whispered,
Don't need
anything.
He won't like you anymore, if you have needs
.
Always this whisper, this little voice that quelled her, made her
scared, made her give up emotional power.

And she suffered. Always grasping,
clutching, begging inside her head
please love me, please don't
leave
.

And Jeremiah himself, silent, as if he knew
exactly how to make her suffer most.

He fed her sips of water every few minutes,
and in between looked at her, touched her, and turned her to smooth
fingers down her back. Perhaps the switch marks were already faded,
because there was no pain for her to flinch away from.

When the water was gone, he coaxed her with
firm hands to lie on the bed, facedown, and cuffed her wrists and
ankles to the four corners of the bed.

She started to cry, and tried to hide it.
You can't have these tears. You won't even know about them, so
you can't eat them
.

But she was wrong. Maybe her breath hitched,
maybe she inadvertently released an almost too-small-to-hear sob,
because he did know. He pulled her head up by her hair – this
becoming so familiar it was almost a comfort - and his lips were
hot against her cheek, parted just enough to kiss a tear into his
mouth, and then his tongue traced first one eye and then the other,
poking hard into each tear duct, and this, this still revolted her
on some level, and stopped her from crying. She wondered if it
always would have that effect, or if even that particular weirdness
would become something familiar, something normal.

He let her go, and she rested her damp cheek
against the sticky plastic mattress, and waited for whatever would
be next.

She waited through a silence so tense that
the whistle and the searing hot pain across the backs of both upper
thighs was a relief, even as it shocked a scream out of her.