The pain was terrible. It stopped even a voice coming out from him. Or was that her again, changing his throat, his palate, his very head? She was unlocking the plates of his skull, and reorganizing him.
No, he wanted to say, this isn’t the subtle ritual I had planned. I wanted to die folded into you, I wanted to go with my mouth clamped to yours, cooling in you as I died. This is not the way I want it.
No. No. No.
They were at the door, the men who’d kept her here, beating on it. She had no fear of them, of course, except that they might spoil her handiwork before the final touches were added to it.
Someone was hurling themselves at the door now. Wood splintered: the door was flung open. The two men were both armed. They pointed their weapons at her, steady-handed.
“Mr Pettifer?” said the younger man. In the corner of the room, under the table, Pettifer’s eyes shone.
“Mr Pettifer?” he said again, forgetting the woman. Pettifer shook his snouted head. Don’t come any closer, please, he thought.
The man crouched down and stared under the table at the disgusting beast that was squatting there; bloody from its transformation, but alive. She had killed his nerves: he felt no pain. He just survived, his hands knotted into paws, his legs scooped up around his back, knees broken so he had the look of a four-legged crab, his brain exposed, his eyes lidless, lower jaw broken and swept up over his top jaw like a bulldog, ears torn off, spine snapped, humanity bewitched into another state.
“You are an animal,” she’d said. It wasn’t a bad facsimile of beast hood.
The man with the gun gagged as he recognized fragments of his master. He stood up, greasy-chinned, and glanced around at the woman.
Jacqueline shrugged.
“You did this?” Awe mingled with the revulsion.
She nodded.
“Come Titus,” she said, clicking her fingers.
The beast shook its head, sobbing.
“Come Titus,” she said more forcefully, and Titus Pettifer waddled out of his hiding place, leaving a trail like a punctured meat-sack.
The man fired at Pettifer’s remains out of sheer instinct. Anything, anything at all to prevent this disgusting creature from approaching him.
Titus stumbled two steps back on his bloody paws, shook himself as if to dislodge the death in him, and failing, died.
“Content?” she asked.
The gunman looked up from the execution. Was the power talking to him? No; Jacqueline was staring at Pettifer’s corpse, asking the question of him.
Content?
The gunman dropped his weapon. The other man did the same.
“How did this happen?” asked the man at the door. A simple question: a child’s question.
“He asked,” said Jacqueline. “It was all I could give him.”
The gunman nodded, and fell to his knees.
Vassi’s Testimony (final part)
“Chance has played a worryingly large part in my romance with Jacqueline Ess. Sometimes it’s seemed I’ve been subject to every tide that passes through the world, spun around by the merest flick of accident’s wrist. Other times I’ve had the suspicion that she was masterminding my life, as she was the lives of a hundred others, a thousand others, arranging every fluke meeting, choreographing my victories and my defeats, escorting me, blindly, towards this last encounter.
I found her without knowing I’d found her, that was the irony of it. I’d traced her first to a house in Surrey, a house that had a year previous seen the murder of one Titus Pettifer, a billionaire shot by one of his own bodyguards. In the upstairs room, where the murder had taken place, all was serenity. If she had been there, they had removed any sign. But the house, now in virtual ruin, was prey to all manner of graffiti; and on the stained plaster wall of that room someone had scrawled a woman. She was obscenely over-endowed, her gaping sex blazing with what looked like lightning. And at her feet there was a creature of indeterminate species. Perhaps a crab, perhaps a dog, perhaps even a man. Whatever it was it had no power over itself. It sat in the light of her agonizing presence and counted itself amongst the fortunate. Looking at that wizened creature, with its eyes turned up to gaze on the burning Madonna, I knew the picture was a portrait of Jacqueline.