Jacquelyn Beauchamp sat at the table by the window. She watched as hundreds, thousands of people passed by on the street outside. In her hand, she held the leather bound journal that had brought her thousands of miles from her home in New Orleans. It had belonged to her great-great-great-uncle Henri. Its tale was the ultimate story of privilege, debauchery, mental illness...and horror. Horror the likes of which still made headlines over a century after it began.
Jackie's own life had mirrored that of her distant relative. Like the man, she had grown up the youngest child of wealthy and educated parents. He is Calais, France and she in New Orleans. Both had been popular among their crowd of young deviants. Jackie had like her Uncle Henri terrorized her social circle with her angry outbursts and alternately intrigued them with her intense intelligence. She had always considered herself above them all. They were merely chattel to do her bidding as politically incorrect as that was to consider.
And like her uncle, all of this was merely a mask to hide the madness that festered inside of her. But unlike the man, who was not diagnosed with his illness until late in life, Jackie knew of her burden from an early age. Although the labels seemed to change with each new specialist her parents sent her to. As a child, it was ADHD, then Oppositional Deviant Disorder. As a teen, it was Bi-Polar, but was that one or two, she could never remember. The latest labels were paranoid schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder.
All of it meant nothing to her. Not like this book. This book gave her the answers. The answers that she had been searching for since she was a girl of five, playing in courtyard of the ancestral home in the French Quarter. A man had come up to her. His dark eyes had seen into her very soul. He knew things about her, things that no one else knew. He knew what had really happened to the doll that her grandmother had given her. He knew that she had cut off all its hair, taken sticks and stabbed its eyes out and torn it limb from limb, before burying it among the rose bushes there in the courtyard.
But rather than threaten to tell her parents, he had understood. He had become her friend. Her one true friend. And her co-conspirator. That day he had encouraged her to capture her cousin's cat, Jingles. She had tempted the feline with bits of her tuna sandwich, then she had pulled its tail until it hissed and scratched at it. That was not the response she wanted, so she released its tail, instead finding sticks and rocks to throw at the poor animal, pelting it until it slunk away from its tuna prize to lick its injuries.
The cat was not her favorite victim though. Her goody two-shoes cousin Raquel was that. The girl was two years younger than Jackie. And would become the brunt of all her cruelest jokes. It culminated the summer that she turned twenty. Jackie had been dating a young man from the wrong side of the tracks as the Southern saying goes. He was in his mid-twenties with a meanness that nearly matched her own. He had already done time in state prison for a bar fight that left a man paralyzed, for taking his seat on the bus.
Jackie's parents and her aunt and uncle were going away for the weekend. While the girls were to stay with their grandmother, the woman was too old to properly care for and supervise them. Jackie convinced Raquel that they should sneak out on Saturday night. She knew a party where they could have some real fun. At barely eighteen, the girl was to start college soon. She wanted to become a doctor and help the poor. It was enough to turn Jackie's stomach. Which was why she had other plans.
Rather than the fraternity party that she had promised, Jackie took her to an abandoned house outside the city. Her friend was waiting there. They had bound the girl, her friend had raped her, taking her virginity in the process. Jackie herself had used an old bottle to violate the girl and had put out her cigarettes on her ass.
But it was not enough. He wanted her dead. Not her friend, no, he had balked at the idea. Said that he was not murdering for any whore. Instead he had threatened Raquel, told her that if she told anyone, they would come back, kill her next time.
The whole thing had left Jackie frustrated, incomplete as he sing-singed in her head about not having the guts to actually do it. His voice had gone on and on, when she was awake, in her dreams, it never stopped. Of course, by now, Jackie was old enough to know that the man, whom she had met in the courtyard was not real. A figment of her imagination. A symptom of her disease. But he was real, real to her. And she wanted him to shut the fuck up.
He had to, once she killed her friend. It had been so easy. The man for all his bluster and machismo was a switch. He might enjoy dominating and breaking Raquel, but not half as much as he enjoyed being dominated by her. He thought nothing of it when she cuffed his large frame to the pipes in the basement of that abandoned house. It was just another of their sex games. She walked around him, flashing her whip and demeaning his manhood. Except this time, she did not stop when he safe-worded. She put cigarette butts out on his balls, raped his ass as she had her cousin and when it was said and done she had driven a knife through his heart.
Nothing had ever felt so good. She washed in the blood as he praised her. Told that she was his child. His true child at long last. Worthy of his name and his heritage. He had gifted her then with something special: the journal. He had told her where it was to be found, behind a loose brick in the courtyard law. And when she finally held in it, read its words, she knew that she belonged. That another person understood her, her needs. He got her. Her Uncle Henri.
His story filled the pages of this journal and what a story it was too. A story that would have fetched a handsome sum too. It was the story of a young French aristocrat, who had been forced to flee the comfort of his life and family after the brutal beating and rape of a young girl in their village. His family would send him to stay with his older brother in New Orleans, to work in their shipping business. But first they had sent him to England.
He had not wanted to go to America. He wanted to stay in Europe. If not France, Italy, Spain or perhaps Austria. He had disembarked from the ship in Dover, made his way to London where he soon squandered the funds they had given him to start afresh. He had gambled and taken up with prostitutes. But nothing had felt as good as that what he had done to that girl. Rape was so much better than paying for your pleasure.
