Page 23 of Twice as Twisted

She whimpers, hugging one arm to her middle while she hangs onto him with her other hand. I can’t tell which set of grisly stitches on her abdomen are from the experiments he described, and which are from other surgeries he’s done on her. Baron always did want someone he could perform his sickest fantasies on. I always thought he found it in Mabel.

“Who is she?” I ask again. “Where did you get her?”

“She’s no one,” he says with a shrug. “A runaway. I found her hitchhiking. She said she doesn’t have a home or a family. I looked up the news every day and told her what would happen if I found out she was lying, but she never changed her story, and there was never a missing persons report filed, so I got to keep her. She’s all mine.”

“What about Mabel?” I ask.

“This has nothing to do with Mabel,” he says. “I’m Dr. Frankenstein, and Jane is my monster. I made her. I put her together, like what we did with Gloria, except this time it’s physical instead of psychological. No one misses her. No one’s looking for her. If someone found out she was here, they’d probably thank me for getting a homeless person off the street and feeding her all these months. If she dies, it doesn’t matter, because no one cares.”

“Jesus Christ, Baron.”

“I needed something to keep me occupied,” Baron says, giving me a hard look. “Would you rather I’d been with Mabel all these months?”

“No,” I admit, glowering at the crusty, black scabs on several of the girl’s toes where her toenails should be.

“Exactly,” Baron says. “This kept me from giving in when I was tempted, and it kept me from doing anything stupid, like that Black Widow Killer. That’s too public. No one will ever find out about this. I can do whatever I want to her.”

“And that’s what you wanted to do?” I ask, trying not to gag when a string of drool trickles from the corner of her mouth and drips onto her filthy chest. There’s a set of stitches there that looks newer than the others, an angry reddish purple that shows through the dirt coating. I’m pretty sure it’s leaking puss, but maybe it’s just the drool running down her.

She tugs on the fabric of his pants again, and he kicks her away, looking disgusted. She makes a horrible mewling sound as she crumples to the floor, her head still anchored by Baron’s grip on her hair. He releases it and picks loose strands from his fingers, his lip curling, before he drops them onto her.

“I’ll take this off her while you make something to eat,” he says, tapping her jaw. “Then she can suck you off while I fuck her. She always has to work for her food.”

“Fuck no,” I say. “I’m not touching that crusty carcass. She looks like she’s got maggots about to hatch out of several holes.”

“This one does look a little inflamed,” Baron says, poking at the stitches on her chest.

She moans despondently.

I gag when a drop of something bubbles up from between two of the stitches and oozes down her chest in sluggish trail.

“Just needs an antibiotic,” Baron says. “We’ll stay here tonight. You go fix us something to eat while I take care of her.”

I force myself to walk normally across the floor, up the stairs, into the kitchen. I sit at the table, trying to catch my breath between heaves, but every time I think about it, I almostpuke again. Finally, when she screams and then breaks off with a gurgling hiccup, I’m jarred from my trance. I slam the padded door closed and hurry to the stove. I figure out how to turn it on, and then find a cabinet full of different kinds of organic canned soup. One of them has a pull tab, but I’m not sure how to open the others. I figure I’ll ask Baron when he comes up.

I put them on the burners and wait. The labels smolder and smoke, and one of the cans swells up. Clearly, having a cook all my life puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to making shit myself.

The open can is boiling, so I turn off all the burners. It’s smoky in the room, but the smoke alarms haven’t gone off, so I figure I did good. The smell starts an itch in the back of my mind, though, a craving I haven’t filled for too long.

As it does so often, my mind goes back to the worst fire I ever started, the blue-hot flame of the blowtorch we used on Colt. I can still hear his roars of pain as it ate up his skin, can see the way he writhed with inhuman strength, so both my brothers had to hold him still. Some part of me wouldn’t let me go more than skin deep, just like Mabel wouldn’t let us go on. She broke first, begging us for mercy—for him. He kept telling her not to, even when the skin on his arm was a smoking, blackened ruin. He never caved.

She caved, agreeing to do anything we wanted, even when he told her not to. She screamed for us to stop, even when he wouldn’t.

I hated him for that. I still do. He could have stopped it at any time, but he made me keep going, even when I was shaking, my eyes watering and my stomach clenching with revulsion. He made me disfigure him, make him ugly, rather than letting us have his sister. That’s how much he loved her.

And she agreed to be our slave so we would stop. That’s how much she loved him.

He didn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve anything. I wish I’d burned his entire body, until it was all ugly and no one ever wanted to fuck him again.

After a while, the door opens and Baron comes through with his monster, now naked and leaking fluid from a few more places. He always called Mabel that. I wonder if he’d have done the same to her if he could.

But no. Baron admires beauty in a woman. He wouldn’t make Mabel ugly. He wouldn’t debase her that way because he respects her name, her status, everything she stood for in Faulkner, even as he tried to destroy it. Mabel was a psychological experiment, like Gloria but more personal. And even then, he was more careful with Mabel because she was more valuable than Lo. She was valuable to society, and therefore to Baron.

This girl is worthless to society, and worthless to Baron except as a way to practice, to hone his craft, his depravity, his will.

“Go clean up,” he tells Jane, who is huddled and shivering and working her jaw open and shut. She slogs off to the bathroom, and Baron turns to me.

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll go out the window?” I ask.

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