As Telford continued his salacious monologue, he watched Gwyneth with the sharp stare and hunger of a wolf circling a lamb. Now she responded not merely by cringing and drawing into a huddled posture on the window seat, but also with wordless sounds of misery and tortured apprehension. When he demanded answers to his lewd questions, she strung together half-words and short clusters of syllables that meant nothing, grunts and sputters and thin mewls of distress that might have inspired pity in another man, though Telford had no pity. After a few such exchanges, he arrived at the conclusion that, although she could read, she was incapable of speech, that she was either limited by some physical impediment or by a developmental disability.
Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies. Telford stood a foot taller than Gwyneth, weighed twice her hundred pounds; he was bold where she was timid, cruel where she was gentle. When he realized she couldn’t speak to plead or to accuse, or to shame him, he was further inflamed by her helplessness. Into his eyes and across his flushed face came an expression so brutish and so carnal, Gwyneth feared that in addition to all the ways that he promised to abuse her, he would at the end of the ordeal tear into her with his teeth.
He no longer called her Gwyneth. He didn’t call her “girl” anymore, and he didn’t even deign to address her as “you.” He had several names for her, all of them coarse, many of them obscene.
At last he ordered her off the window seat and to the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. He said, “I want the nose ring for a souvenir and that red bead on the lip. We’ll scrub away all the stupid Goth stuff, so I can see the little girl beneath, the fragile bird that so desperately wants to be a hawk.”
With coltish unsteadiness, making thin sounds of distress, Gwyneth preceded him into the bathroom. Step by step, she frantically considered ways to distract him or to tumble him off his feet so that she might have a chance to run, but he was strong and made stronger by his lust, by his profound desire to commit those cruelties and ultimate transgressions about which he had previously fantasized.
In the spacious bathroom, he ordered her to undress. She feared that if she hesitated he would slap her, that the slap would open in him a door to an even darker place than the one his mind currently inhabited, that it would lead to a sudden acceleration of the planned rape and murder. Tears still slid down her face, smearing her Goth makeup, tears for her father, not for herself, and her tremors were uncontrolled. As she began to unbutton her blouse, she turned away from him, facing the vanity, eyes downcast, as if desperately modest.
She heard him pull the drain-control lever that engaged the stopper. She raised her head to look into the mirror above the vanity, not at herself but at what lay behind her, and she saw him in reflection as he leaned over the tub to crank the hot-water faucet. In that posture, he was at last vulnerable. She spun around and shoved him hard. He toppled into the bathtub, crying out in pain as the gushing water scalded him.
The elevator would be far too slow, and if she stumbled and fell as she raced down the stairs, Telford would catch her. He might snare her easily anyway. Darting through the open bathroom door, she heard him floundering out of the tub, and instead of sprinting through the apartment to the front door, she went directly to the nightstand on the right side of her bed, yanked open a drawer, and snatched up the small aerosol can of Mace.
She knew that he was almost upon her. She turned, saw him three steps away, and thumbed a stream of the chemical into his eyes, as her father had instructed. Telford cried out. As if he had collided with a wall, his forward motion became a backward stagger. She seized the advantage, squirting him in the nose and mouth.
Mace causes no permanent injury but is highly effective. Tears burst forth, vision blurs completely, and a kind of blindness-with-light ensues for a few minutes. Inhaled even slightly, it forces the target to struggle for breath, and although he is in no peril, he feels as if he might suffocate.
Even disabled, breathless, unable to see anything but smears of color that melted together without form, Telford swung both arms wildly, frantic to strike a blow or catch a fistful of her hair, or snare her by an article of clothing. She dodged, crouched, scurried away from him, out of the bedroom, through the rest of the apartment, where the delicate poinsettias, against which she brushed, scattered broken scarlet bracts in her wake, just as the promise of the season now lay broken beyond repair.
She descended the stairs two at a time, crashing to each landing with both feet, and came off the sixth flight into the foyer without once daring to look back. She hurried out into the early night, where the air was as cold and moist as that in an icehouse, although the settled soot and the hard edges of the city were not yet masked by the first snow.
Four doors to the east stood the Billingham mansion, equal to — though more pretentious than — her father’s house. The front steps were flanked by broad stone walls on which rested two massive carved-stone lions in the position of the Sphinx, heads raised and faces solemn, blank eyes gazing toward the street not as if alert for prey, but as if watching for the first rough beasts of Armageddon.
The Billinghams, known to her by their family name but never glimpsed, were on an extended stay in Europe and the street swarmed with traffic; therefore, Gwyneth made no attempt to cross the four busy lanes, but instead ran to the watchful lions. The flanking limestone walls diminished as the stairs ascended, and she scrambled onto the farther of the two, lying atop the polished-granite cap, beside the lion, which was at least twice her size. She eased her head forward to look past the big cat’s chest, west toward her father’s house.
Never did she consider screaming for help, because whoever might respond to her would want to protect her or console her, and their natural inclination would be to reach out, to take her hand or pat her shoulder or put an arm around her, and she could not tolerate being touched. They would ask questions that she must answer. She didn’t wish to hear their voices, because then her required response would allow them to hear hers. She was loath to share with strangers any part of her true self, not even her voice, which she had never shared with her father’s household staff.
As she lay belly-down, the cold granite leached away her body heat. She was not dressed for the out-of-doors, and her tremors of fear quickly became violent shudders.
After a few minutes, peering past the lion that sheltered her, Gwyneth saw Telford exit her father’s house and descend the front stairs. He wore his overcoat and carried a white bundle that must have been the scones in the bag that might have incriminated him in some way if he left it behind. To her dismay, he turned toward her.
She could tell that his vision, while improved, was not normal, because he proceeded like a man in no hurry, his face thrust forward as if in doubt of the way before him. When he passed a lamppost, he turned his head from it, the light too bright for his stinging, dilated eyes.
As Telford approached, his breath steamed from him as if he were a dragon bespelled into the form of a man. Gwyneth knew, in passing, he would instinctively look to his left and up, and in spite of his compromised vision and the night shadows in which she was lying, he would see her. What she knew proved to be only what she feared, and the curator went past, oblivious of her, cursing softly in a voice strained by fear.
Two houses farther east, he got into a car parked at the curb. Over the rush of traffic in the street, Gwyneth couldn’t hear the engine start, but a graveyard’s worth of ghosts plumed up from the tailpipe, feathering away among the skeletal branches of an overhanging tree.