Steve peered more closely at the photograph. There was a certain desperation on Cheryl’s face: a haggard, wild look. The way she stared at the beef she could have been trying to hypnotize it.
“She looks sick.”
“She’s tired, that’s all. She slept a lot, as it happened, but it seemed just to make her more exhausted than ever. She doesn’t know now if it’s day or night. And She’s hungry of course. It’s been a day and a half. She’s more than a little peckish.”
Thirteen: she sleeps again, curled into an even tighter ball, as though she wanted to swallow herself.
Fourteen: she drinks more water.
“I replaced the jug when she was asleep. She slept deeply: I could have done a jig in there and it wouldn’t have woken her. Lost to the world.”
He grinned. Mad, thought Steve, the man’s mad.
“God, it stank in there. You know how women smell sometimes: It’s not sweat, It’s something else. Heavy odour: meaty. Bloody. She came on towards the end of her time. Hadn’t planned it that way.”
Fifteen: she touches the meat.
“This is where the cracks begin to show,” said Quaid, with quiet triumph in his voice. “This is where the dread begins.”
Steve studied the photograph closely. The grain of the print blurred the detail, but the cool mama was in pain, that was for sure. Her face was knotted up, half in desire, half in repulsion, as she touched the food.
Sixteen: she was at the door again, throwing herself at it, every part of her body flailing. Her mouth a black blur of angst, screaming at the blank door.
“She always ended up haranguing me, whenever she’d had a confrontation with the meat.”
“How long is this?”
“Coming up for three days. You’re looking at a hungry woman.”
It wasn’t difficult to see that. The next photo she stood still in the middle of the room, averting her eyes from the temptation of the food, her entire body tensed with the dilemma.
“You’re starving her.”
“She can go ten days without eating quite easily. Fasts are common in any civilized country, Steve. Sixty per cent of the British population is clinically obese at any one time. She was too fat anyhow.”
Eighteen: she sits, the fat girl, in her corner of the room, weeping.
“About now she began to hallucinate. Just little mental ticks. She thought she felt something in her hair, or on the back of her hand. I’d see her staring into mid-air sometimes watching nothing.”
Nineteen: she washes herself. She is stripped to the waist, her breasts are heavy, her face is drained of expression. The meat is a darker tone than in the previous photographs.
“She washed herself regularly. Never let twelve hours go by without washing from head to toe.”
“The meat looks. . .”
“Ripe?”
“Dark.”
“It’s quite warm in her little room; and there’s a few flies in there with her. They”ve found the meat: laid their eggs. Yes, It’s ripening up quite nicely.”
“Is that part of the plan?”
“Sure. If the meat revolted when it was fresh, what about her disgust at rotted meat? That’s the crux of her dilemma, isn’t it? The longer she waits to eat, the more disgusted she becomes with what she’s been given to feed on. She’s trapped with her own horror of meat on the one hand, and her dread of dying on the other. Which is going to give first?”
Steve was no less trapped now.
On the one hand this joke had already gone too far, and Quaid’s experiment had become an exercise in sadism.
On the other hand he wanted to know how far this story ended. There was an undeniable fascination in watching the woman suffer.
The next seven photographs — twenty, twenty-one, two, three, four, five and six pictured the same circular routine. Sleeping, washing, pissing, meat-watching. Sleeping, washing, pissing —Then twenty-seven.
“See?”
She picks up the meat.
Yes, she picks it up, her face full of horror. The haunch of the beef looks well-ripened now, speckled with flies’ eggs. Gross.
“She bites it.”
The next photograph, and her face is buried in the meat.