Although she knew that she ought to be afraid, she had no fear. She felt relaxed. She yawned.
If the first brother was evil – and no doubt he was – then the second must be good, so she was not without a protector. In movies and often in books, moral character was distributed in exactly that ratio between identical siblings: one evil, one good.
She’d never known twins in real life. If she ever met any, she would not be able to trust both. Your trust ensured that you would be bludgeoned to death, or worse, in Act 2 or in Chapter 12, or certainly by the end of the story.
These two guys looked equally benign, but one of them slipped loose a rubber-tube tourniquet that had been knotted around Jilly’s arm, while the second appeared to be administering an injection. Neither of these interesting actions could fairly be called evil, but they were certainly unsettling.
‘Which of you is going to bludgeon me?’ she asked, surprised to hear a slur in her voice, as though she had been drinking.
As one, with matching expressions of surprise, the twin salesmen looked at her.
‘I should warn you,’ she said, ‘I know karaoke.’
Each of the twins kept his right hand on the plunger of the hypodermic syringe, but simultaneously each snatched up a white cotton handkerchief with his left hand. They were exquisitely choreographed.
‘Not karaoke,’ she corrected herself. ‘Karate.’ This was a lie, but she thought that she sounded convincing, even though her voice remained thick and strange. ‘I know karate.’
The blurry brothers spoke in perfect harmony, their syllables precisely matched. ‘I want you to sleep a little more, young lady. Sleep, sleep.’
As one, the wonderfully synchronized twins swept the white handkerchiefs through the air and dropped them on Jilly’s face with such panache that she expected the cloths to transform magically into doves before they quite touched her skin. Instead, the damp fabric, reeking with the pungent chemistry of forgetfulness, seemed to turn black, like crows, like ravens, and she was borne away on midnight wings, into darkness deep.
Although she thought that she’d opened her eyes an instant after closing them, a couple minutes must have passed in that blink. The needle had been withdrawn from her arm. The twins no longer hovered over her.
In fact, only one of the men was present, and she realized that the other had not actually existed, had been a trick of vision. He stood at the foot of the bed, returning the hypodermic syringe to the leather satchel, which she’d mistaken for a kit of salesman’s samples. She realized that it must be a medical bag.
He droned on about his life’s work, but nothing he said made any sense to Jilly, perhaps because he was an incoherent psychopath or perhaps because the fumes of nepenthe, still burning in her nose and sinuses, rendered her incapable of understanding him.
When she tried to rise from the bed, she experienced a wave of vertigo that washed her back down onto the pillows. She clutched the mattress with both hands, as a shipwrecked sailor might cling to a raft of flotsam in a turbulent sea.
This sensation of tilting and spinning at last stirred up the fear that she knew she ought to feel but that until now had been an inactive sediment at the bottom of her mind. As her breathing grew shallow, quick, and frantic, her racing heart churned currents of anxiety through her blood, and fear threatened to darken into terror, panic.
She had never been interested in controlling others, but she’d always insisted on being the master of her own fate. She might make mistakes, did make mistakes – lots, lots – but if her life was destined to be screwed up, then she’d damn well do the job herself. Control had been taken from her, seized by force, maintained with chemicals, with drugs, for reasons that she could not understand even though she strained to remain focused on her tormentor’s line of self-justifying patter.
With the surge of fear came anger. In spite of her karaoke-karate threat and her Southwest Amazon image, Jilly wasn’t by nature a butt-kicking warrioress. Humor and charm were her weapons of choice. But here she saw an ample backside in which she emphatically wanted to bury a boot. As the salesman-maniac-doctor-whatever walked to the desk, to pick up his cola and three bags of peanuts, Jilly tried once more to rise in righteous rage.