Still, what if Melody coming back with no memory required Victria herself to be a totally different person than who she was? I can't do that, Victria thought. Fucking Lifetime channel movie of the week, My Fair Slave, a power hungry sadist sacrifices the person she is to free her slave and create an endless love from nothing, I don't think so. That would be just a bit too Pavlovian for me. It would be like, Bride of Frankenstein or something. Yet truth was stranger than fiction. The truth, what Victria feared the most was the possibility that Melody would forget the love they'd forged, the domination she'd exacted, the obedient deference she'd earned, sweetly painfully intimate, shed psychological skin, never to be remembered again by the slave she'd fallen so deeply for.
It had been a dark, moonless, lonely morning, a quarter to three, when Victria pulled onto her drive, drove around the back of her farm house, and then parked by the patio doors. She let Spanky out for a little run and to relieve himself. Then she'd called him back to the Explorer and locked him inside with Melody. At the back entrance into her garage, Victria used the pen light on her key chain to find the right key. She looked once over her shoulder before finally opening the door and slipping inside.
Her big Lexus was there, she having instructed Vance to park it inside the garage once the driveway was cleared of snow. Quickly, restricting herself to the small flashlight of her key ring, Victria made her way around the vehicle, and then into the house proper. She advanced up the stairs, studying the shadows, listening hard to the silence, feeling the fast thub thump of her heart and controlling her breaths.
At the landing in the foyer, Victria thought she saw a wide splash of blood stain on the front door. But, it was only a trick of her mind, a superimposed shadow of a stranger's death. She'd had Vance hire a specialized crew to do the necessary cleaning. Victria shined her light along all the surfaces she distinctly recalled had been awash with carnage. Where there had been blood and brain matter, lots of it, there was none. Crossing into the hallway to the kitchen, she saw the bullet holes in the walls and the pellet divots in her wood flooring.
Victria stood in the kitchen for a moment and looked around, following the eye of her pen light. There wasn't anything in the room she wanted to take. It was only that she wanted to feel being there, to safely reflect, like a holocaust survivor touring a leveled death camp or a burn victim looking over the charred remains of the place she'd once called home. Then she saw it, the crow mask, its hooked black beak pointed in her direction, the twin shine of her little light reflected in its knowing, ominous smooth latex eyes. It had sent a brief tingle down her spine. Expecting it as much, instantly aware of the thing's harmlessness, her fear faded in seconds. Victria took a deep breath, tightened her jaw and defiantly stared into the mask's eyes. She flexed the muscles beneath the scarred skin of her legs and relaxed them again. We won't be back, she thought. When I'm ready, I'll sell the place. But that was way too much to think about, too far ahead to ponder.
"Fuck you." She whispered to the mask, to its ghosts, "You walked into it and that's what you got. Think of it as my saving your mothers from any further disappointment."
Victria turned on her heels. From the kitchen she retraced her steps back to the foyer, and then hiked up the stairs to the second floor. There, she turned into Melody's room, grabbed the duffle, and then headed into the master bedroom. After grabbing the gun safe from beneath the bed and gathering up a few items, she made her way back down the stairs. Back on the first floor, Victria felt drawn, pulled in two directions: down the last flight of stairs and back out the garage or back toward the kitchen and around to the hall that led back to the living room. Spaced, trying to understand her confusion, Victria headed back toward the kitchen. Still using the pen light for the meager beacon it was, she entered the living room and looked toward the Christmas tree that stood there just beyond the end of the sofa.
Victria scanned and scrutinized. Red and gold balls and strands of tinsel passed in and out of her light. She cast the light slowly downward until it shined upon the tree's skirt. There, laid upon it, was Melody's broken collar. She could only guess that Vance or the detective, Cassy or Kathy maybe, she couldn't remember which, had it returned to them by Peebles: the psychologist in the hospital who most certainly had Victria pegged. Only people I love should have me so pegged, you pompous shit. But, why there though, she wondered, under the tree. Why not? She was suddenly sure then. Vance had put it there because it was there that Vance had found Melody's sealed poem, her lovely, lovely poem, which he'd brought into the hospital for her to read and keep and read again and again and cherish.
Victria took a step forward, intending to retrieve the diamond studded ring of platinum. It was then that a sudden cold began to creep along the naked skin of her arms, neck and face, as if an icy fog had just been blown into the room. She stopped, turned her small light from the collar, and then slowly raised it chest high. Victria scanned her way ever leftward, casting brief illumination upon the dusty items on her entertainment center, Vance's gifted snow globe, scattered cd cases, edges of stained and polyurethane oak, the plasma's screen, the curtain that flanked the right end of the living room's bay window and the person standing there.
The cold and the weight of her fear held her utterly motionless. She might have recalled the feeling up in the woods in Vermont, outside the cabin on that moon bright night, the absolutely ascetic shiver in her sex, the feeling that her bowels were ready to release out of pure terror. In that moment, her eyes fixed, the point of her little light shaking across the dark luxurious skin of Yazmina, Victria felt a rush of urine escape, drench her jeans and drip onto the rug between her feet. She wanted to fall to her knees. She wanted to stand. Victria stared, helpless, shaking.
It was Yazmina as much as it was clearly not Yazmina, like a cardboard cut-out, but not; like a wax museum sculpture, but not. Her head was covered in dark red bristles. She was staring out the great window, searching, waiting. Then Yazmina turned to face her. Victria gaped as she watched long lines of scars and open strips of wounds materializing out of her naked skin. The room grew colder, a whole new skin of crawling goose flesh seemed to envelop Victria and then a slimy shit suddenly slipped from her ass. Yazmina smiled, her eyes unreal and smoldering, glowing black like the eyes of the zombie mask of the intruder, the man, she'd killed first on that incomprehensible night.
Victria let the duffle bag fall from her hand. Her keys and the little flashlight were still tightly clutched in her right fist. I will not kneel, she thought. Victria shook as she took her first step closer to Yazmina. She's been waiting for me. She wants a kiss good-bye. Those aren't my wounds. Someone, something, else is whipping her now. I will touch death and I will still not kneel. I do this and she will be gone, she will be free.
A sudden slave to her certainty that she needed to make contact with the ethereal figure before her, Victria's body shook as she stumbled forward. She was fighting her own good sense, the sense that was always omitted from the scripts of all those horror films where the young women just hung around, being stupid and half naked, so that they could die by the hands of one male menace or another. This isn't real. Bull shit. Of course it is. Run, you idiot. No. I have to touch her, to touch what's still caught here in the world, by her love, by her hate. How do I know this? Oh my God, how do I know this? Victria reached, her hand looming near Yazmina's terrible stare, and watched tiny gleaming flecks of ice crystals begin to cover the back of her hand. Jesus, she thought. Melody, I love you so much, she thought. And Yazmina was gone.
The roomed warmed again, though a chill lingered in her thighs and down her legs and in the sound of Spanky's sudden, frenzied barks. Victria shined her light on the floor, grabbed up the duffle bag, and then scrambled through the living room, into the foyer and back down the stairs. Back outside, she locked the door behind her as she looked toward the Explorer. She could make out Spanky sitting in the driver's seat and Melody, slump forward on the other side. Victria bolted to her side, unlocked the door, pushed the dog off the seat, and then hopped in.
As she put the key into the ignition and turned the vehicle back to life, Spanky resumed his uproar, his paws on the dash, his snarling face close to the wind shield, his eyes staring widely at the three figures standing a few yards from the front of the car. It was the Arian, his narrowed eyes set wide apart, fixing his gaze upon her, his two masked henchmen flanking him on either side. Victria felt the tepid squish of shit in her crotch, clenched her teeth, gave the Arian the finger, put the car into drive, and then put the pedal to the floor.
It was miles later, in some gas station restroom beyond the Del Water Gap that she stopped to rid herself of her stink and shit slimy clothes. She had sat in the car for a time, just staring at the gas station's rear wall, wondering if tempting ghosts or running them over with your car was a sure fire way to continue their following you. Deciding that either way, there was nothing she could do about it, Victria finally stepped out of the Explorer and locked the door behind her. After washing herself as best she could, got dressed in fresh clothes, bought herself a coffee and three cheese Danishes, she returned to the car to freshen Melody up. An hour more and they were back on the road, a new day just dawning, Melody strapped in at her side and Spanky sleeping on his blanket behind his mistress's seat.
