Ignorant to her ordeal, the girl turned, now brandishing a different brush in her left hand. The fine detailing brush had been replaced with a sibling more square and crude. Thick, coarse bristles dripped in pure white paint.
Samara tried to shrink back, but the canvas held her perfectly. She watched as the girl considered her face for a moment, before lifting the wide brush closer. Her long sleeves hid the scars Samara knew festered beneath, running up her forearm in a tally of woe. In the girl’s right hand, a glint of metal poked free, catching the only source of light in the abysmal hell.
It will come, thought Samara. The do over. It was my choice. It’s always been my choice. I reveal, little by little, until it comes time to hide it all away again. And then we start again, don’t we? Show a little more. Let them inside a little deeper. The cycle repeats.
The girl ungraciously swept the thick brush across Samara’s eyes, blanking out her own focussed face. The thick layer suffocated, like tight cellophane pressed over her nose and mouth. The creatures that longed to escape over her lips and teeth became trapped, squirming beneath the whitewash.
It would soon be over, one way or another. The reinvention. The fresh cycle.
The artist began to cut, and beneath the dripping paint, Samara screamed into the blinding white abyss.
Her misery echoed in the narrow alley.
A chill rain had begun, tentative at first, dotting the puddles left over from the last shower. Its soft beat began around the cowering figure, who dropped the art knife to wrap her arms around her shivering body. The tool clattered to the ground between her knees.
Thin lines streaked across Samara’s eyes. She blinked them away, distorting the phenomena into fuzzy bars of static. It seemed the lines marked the journey of the blade. Her face burned, still feeling the tip slide through skin and separate the firm muscle beneath, transforming her into something…better? Her addled mind now struggled with the concepts. Something…truer?
The rain notched up a gear, from a gentle patter to a forceful hum. Water gurgled down the drainpipe beside Samara, splashing onto the cobbles beneath. An empty crisp packet set sail down the alley, carried by the sudden torrent like a paper boat.
Samara’s hair clung to her face and neck like oil. She wiped running mascara from her eyes and looked up.
The girl stared back, inches away now, mirroring Samara’s position. Hunched over and on their knees, the two considered each other for a few seconds. The girl outside had brought the void with her. Darkness seeped from her slight figure, dispersing into the alley in an ever-moving cloud of ink. It hid the weathered brick on the far side of the narrow passage, swallowed the debris and dank pools that littered the cobbles. To look into its depths for too long was to invite it within, to enter the bleak landscape. Samara had been lucky to find her way back and had no desire to return. Not yet.
Instead she concentrated on the face presented amid the swirling curls of dark hair, the one she had watched in awe countless times, the spectre she had worshipped through her small television screen. Even now, more streaks of VHS distortion split her face until some unseen force altered her tracking, restoring the hideous mien.
Samara, helpless to the temperamental weather, grinned through the droplets cascading down her face. “Why must you…” She licked her lips, tasting the rain. “The painting. It’s what you wanted. It was supposed to make everything better.”
The girl returned Samara’s grin. Her jaw hung down to her breastbone, and thin teeth popped out from between dark lips. Samara felt no threat from the apparition. She simply…was. Terrible and beautiful. Never far away.
“It was meant to keep you out,” Samara continued, refusing to turn away, determined to face her own beleaguering ghost, “and let me in. In with…” Even alone in the alleyway, her confession could not be forced out. The words were insubstantial to the feeling they tried to convey. That emotion was too alien to comprehend. Samara focussed once more, the blurring image of her persecutor snapping back. “I can’t cope with this anymore. You’re a fucking curse. I’ll never accept this. Never.”
How Woe was supposed to recoil at her eventual defiance, to shrink back while the well-orchestrated finale brought her demise. The heroine faces her fear…and refuses it. Her antagonist is destroyed. Isn’t that the screenplay for a happy ending?
The girl remained, her smile locked on her face, appearing somewhat amused by Samara’s eventual defiance. A lover who knew Samara better than she knew herself. The girl would wait, watching from over her shoulder, haunting Samara in that space between her and the rest of the world. Until the cycle turned once more, perhaps a little longer next time, but certainly a little deeper. Boring a hole, down, down, into that dark world. Samara could join the girl there with all her other phantoms.
Samara, shivering from the battering rain, rolled up her sleeves. The skin of her forearms contained a score of admittance: the times she had realised that it wasn’t the world at fault. Not the popular girls in her art class. Not boys given an easy ride. Not family who couldn’t accept deviation from their narrow views. Not friends who had their own lives to live, just as meaningful as her own.
Admittance that the girl had never been outside but was an unwanted tenant long due eviction. Was the history etched into her skin an attempt to release that dark presence? To drive her out with pain?
“I can’t accept this,” she said. “I can’t accept you.”
She snatched the art knife from between her knees.
The girl shifted forwards, drawn to Samara’s intent, and watched as she brought the blade to her left wrist. Her purpose finally realised. The final reel. The movie would soon be over with no rewind. No replay.
Samara rested her left forearm along the top of her thigh for support, her upturned hand hanging off her knee. Positioning the tip of the blade at the centre of her wrist, amid the cluster of light blue veins visible beneath her cold, pale skin, she pressed downwards. Her flesh resisted for a moment before the point of the knife punctured through. The sweet caress of pain. Samara closed her eyes and sighed, the hard work over, the decision made.
“It doesn’t make any sense why she’d do something like this,” said Samara’s father, staring at the damage wrought by his daughter’s hand.
Her mother wiped away a tear. “I…I never thought she’d… I mean, the signs were there. I just thought she didn’t have it in her.”
Samara looked down at them, her right eye the only part of her face not ripped and torn. Her nose, mouth, and cheeks had come under the relentless attack of her knife and hung in loose strips. Suspended once more, she gazed out from the canvas and across the exhibition hall. The show concluded, parents helped their art student children to carefully remove the treasured pieces from the partitions and safely pack them away. Miss Jones and the other examiners would need them to determine a final grade. Down the aisle, proceedings had stopped while Vicki posed with Miss Jones beside her painting, clutching her brand new Varden Gleave prize, while her parents snapped photographs.
No celebration here. Just a semi-circle of confused faces peering up at the destroyed painting. Her sister remained quiet, her lips and tongue carved from her head, eyeless sockets staring from a skinned face. Her parents stood either side, both frowning at the picture, oblivious to their hacked throats. Even Lily and Dale had stayed.