Page 66 of If Looks Could Kill
I’d gotten Pearl, Freyda, and Cora to safety and had done what I could for them amidst their suffering, at least for tonight. I’d done the best I could on the worst, the absolute worst, day of my life and managed to keep Pearl’s hideous change a secret. Mostly.
And here was Mike, after a cold, lonely, dangerous hour, waiting for me.
Tabitha Woodward, you’ve been a good girl.
So good, I felt I’d earned a little spot of fun.
Pearl—Dreams(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
In the dark of night, in the warmth of her bed, Pearl Davenport dreams.
He is here.
Heis here. In a dark room. She can’t see him. She smells him.
For four long years, he has haunted her waking moments, and her night terrors. Of course he must appear tonight. Whenever her life is ripped in two, there he is. The first time, he stole her body, its privacy, its innocence. The kind regard in which she had once held it, and herself. He stole her peace. He all but stole her soul.
The second time is now.
Cold dread and confusion envelop her. Where is she? Why? How has he found her again?
Her heightened senses find his scent immediately. There he is. Her new tongue, long and supple, can taste the air and pinpoint his location, and describe him in detail. The stench of his sweat. The foulness of his breath. The tang of liquor and the aura of mildewed hay that surrounds him just as it does in her memory of that horrible morning when he saw her through a doorway, milking a goat, and bolted the door to her father’s barn.
In the cold air, he radiates a large mammal’s heat. It surrounds him in a dark red cloud.
Not him. Anything but him. She should run.
Instead, her snakes rise up and hiss a warning.
Oh, how she loves them then. They will fight for her. Defend her. Who else ever has?
Murderer,they hiss.Killer. Destroyer.
Metaphorically correct, at least.
“Who’s there?” he says.
The note of terror in his voice throbs with weakness, with vulnerability. Like an artery in the throat, begging to be cut. She inhales his fear. It tastes like nectar. This time, she is not alone.
Sing, she tells her snakes. Sing for me.
Their hisses rise to a buzzing drone.
“Who’s there?” he cries again. “Who is it?”
It cracks. His voice actually cracks in a high-pitched whine. He’s terrified. Petrified. A frightened child. Oh, how the tables do turn.
Again, she tells her darlings. Again.
They sing. They scream. She didn’t know snakes could do it. Not a human scream, nor even a loud one, but in chorus, the shrieking from so many tiny throats makes the man’s brain forget it’s human and twitch to run, to bolt for cover, to dive into a hole in the ground like a startled rodent. She can smell the moldy colors of his fear. These were not the colors when he saw himself as some great stallion claiming whatever filly crossed his path. Then, though he was pathetic and puny of psyche, he was still powerful enough in body and in cruelty to end a part of her. A young, naïve, trusting part of her.
Just listen to him whimper now.
Though it’s dark, the hot red glow around him illuminates the space. She can see, just enough. Do her new monstrous eyes give only her this sight, or can he see her too?
He cowers on the ground in the corner of a rough-hewn room. A barn, in fact. The barn. The very barn she once would visit several times a day to see what her father was up to. Until the day she stopped entering the barn, ever, unless there was no way around it. And there he is again.
She pauses. He is different. Older. Paunchier. Hair thinner. Face yellower. Nose blotchier. More real in his faded personhood. Something about him seems bloated—perhaps an illness—yet he is still a large and powerful man.
