Ellen stared at him in horror, unable to move or speak, trying frantically to think how to escape him. She thought of the darkness outside, and of the long, unpaved road with no one near, and the deserted beach. Then she thought of her aunt’s room, which had a heavy wooden door and a telephone which might still work.
He watched her all this time, making no move. Ellen had the odd idea that he was trying to hypnotize her, to keep her from running, or perhaps he was simply waiting for her to make the first move, watching for the tell-tale tension in her muscles that would signal her intentions.
Finally, Ellen knew she had to do something – she could not keep waiting for him to act forever. Because he was so close to her, she didn’t dare to try to run past him. Instead, she feinted to the left, as if she would run around him and toward the front door, but instead she ran to the right.
He caught her in his powerful arms before she had taken three steps. She screamed, and his mouth came down on hers, swallowing the scream.
The feel of his mouth on hers terrified her more than anything else. Somehow, she had not thought of that – for all her fear of him, it had not occurred to her until now that he meant to rape her.
She struggled frantically, feeling his arms crush her more tightly, pinning her arms to her sides and pressing the breath out of her. She tried to kick him or to bring a knee up into his crotch, but she could not raise her leg far enough, and her kicks were feeble little blows against his legs.
He pulled his mouth away from hers and dragged her back into the darkness of the hall and pressed her to the floor, immobilizing her with the weight of his body. Ellen was grateful for her jeans, which were tight fitting. To get them off – but she wouldn’t let him take them off. As soon as he released her, even for a moment, she would go for his eyes, she decided.
This thought was firmly in her mind as he rose off her, but he held her wrists in a crushing grip. She began to kick as soon as her legs were free of his weight, but her legs thrashed about his legs, her kicks doing no harm.
Abruptly, he dropped her hands. She had scarcely become aware of it and hadn’t had time to do more than think of going for his eyes, when he, in one smooth, deceptively casual motion, punched her hard in the stomach.
She couldn’t breathe. Quite involuntarily, she half doubled over, knowing nothing but the agonizing pain. He, meanwhile, skinned her jeans and underpants down to her knees, flipped her unresisting body over as if it were some piece of furniture, and set her down on her knees.
While she trembled, dry-retched, and tried to draw a full breath of air, she was aware of his fumbling at her genitals as scarcely more than a minor distraction. Shortly thereafter she felt a new pain, dry and tearing, as he penetrated her.
It was the last thing she felt. One moment of pain and helplessness, and then the numbness began. She felt – or rather, she ceased to feel – a numbing tide, like intense cold, flowing from her groin into her stomach and hips and down into her legs. Her ribs were numbed, and the blow he had given her no longer pained her. There was nothing – no pain, no messages of any kind from her abused body. She could still feel her lips, and she could open and close her eyes, but from below the chin she might as well have been dead.
And besides the loss of feeling, there was loss of control. All at once she fell like a rag doll to the floor, cracking her chin painfully.
She suspected she was still being raped, but she could not even raise her head and turn to see.
Above her own laboured breathing, Ellen became aware of another sound, a low, buzzing hum. From time to time her body rocked and flopped gently, presumably in response to whatever he was still doing to it.
Ellen closed her eyes and prayed to wake. Behind her shut lids, vivid images appeared. Again she saw the insect on her aunt’s dead lip, a bug as black, hard, and shiny as Peter’s eyes. The wasp in the sand dune, circling the paralyzed spider. Aunt May’s corpse covered with a glistening tide of insects, crawling over her, feasting on her.
And when they had finished with her aunt, would they come and find her here on the floor, paralyzed and ready for them?
She cried out at the thought and her eyes flew open. She saw Peter’s feet in front of her. So he had finished. She began to cry.
‘Don’t leave me like this,’ she mumbled, her mind still swarming with fears.
She heard his dry chuckle. ‘Leave? But this is my home.’
And then she understood. Of course he would not leave. He would stay here with her as he had stayed with her aunt, looking after her as she grew weaker, until finally she died and spilled out the living cargo he had planted in her.
‘You won’t feel a thing,’ he said.
DOLLBURGER
When she listened hard, Karen thought she could hear the men downstairs searching for dolls. Although she didn’t know what they looked like, she thought of them as hairy troll-like men with the large square teeth of horses. She glanced at the attic door. All her dolls were safe in there. Surely the men would never come upstairs into her room?
The thought made her clutch the blankets to her chin, her body rigid with the effort of not breathing. The bed was safe, it had always been a sanctuary, but she didn’t know the powers or limits of these doll thieves and could only guess at protection. She’d learned about them just that morning, from her father.
‘Daddy, have you seen Kristina?’
‘Let daddy read his paper, sweetie – he doesn’t know which doll Kristina is,’ her mother said, flipping pancakes.
Daddy dipped a piece of toast in his coffee and looked at it thoughtfully before biting. He replied with his mouth full.
‘Did you leave her downstairs?’
‘Yeah – I think.’
Daddy shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t have done that. Dangerous. Don’t you know what happens to dolls that get left downstairs all night?’
Karen glanced quickly at her mother. Catching the half smile on her mother’s face, Karen raised her eyebrows sceptically.
‘No,’ she said, in a tone that dared him.
Daddy shook his head again and consumed the last of the piece of toast.
‘Well, if you leave your doll downstairs, you can just expect that when those men come looking – ’
‘What men?’
He looked surprised that she should need to ask. ‘Why the men who eat dollburgers, of course!’
‘Dollburgers?’
‘Just like hamburgers. Only, of course, made out of dolls.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘People don’t eat dolls, and dollburgers are just tiny hamburgers, like what Mommy made on my last birthday, which you feed to dolls.’
‘But dolls don’t eat – people do.’
‘You pretend,’ Karen said, exasperated with him. He was shaking his head.
‘I don’t care what you call little hamburgers – but I happen to know about dollburgers. People eat them, and they’re made out of dolls. There are people who just love them. Of course, they’re illegal; so they have to sneak around, looking for houses where little girls have forgotten to put their dolls safely away. When they find abandoned dolls, they pop them into a sack until they collect enough to grind up into dollburgers.’
‘That’s a story,’ Karen said.
Her father shrugged. ‘I’m just trying to warn you so when you lose a doll you’ll know what’s happened to it and maybe you’ll be more careful in the future.’
Her mother came to the table. ‘No dollburgers in this house. Pancakes though. Karen, get your plate if you want some.’
Karen suddenly remembered where she’d left Kristina. Of course – last night before she went to bed, she and Kristina had been lost in the wilderness and had crawled into a cave to rest for the night – Kristina must still be in the cave.
‘In a minute,’ she said, and went purposefully into the living room.
The bridge table was the cave, but there was no doll underneath. Karen dropped to her hands and knees. Kristina was gone. Something gleamed in the corner by a table leg, and she picked it up.