‘Where is he, then?’
The woman was speaking, but Dee wasn’t hearing her. She was staring, open-mouthed. The woman before her, the one who used to be Dee Sloane, was completely naked.
‘Where is he?’ Screaming now.
Dee managed to recover enough from the sight in front of her to force some words out. ‘He’s … busy. He sent me.’
‘Busy? Busy?’ Body vibrating in anger. ‘Too busy to see me? Bastard … ’ The words were spat out. She moved closer to Dee. ‘Too busy.’ She smiled. ‘Like what you see? Do you?’
Dee was trying not to look, wanted to turn her head away, close her eyes. Anything. But she kept on staring, eyes drawn to the sight before her as to a car crash. Wanting to see the mutilation, the destruction. Wanting to say, thank God that’s not me there.
‘This is what it looks like. When you’ve been brought back from the dead … ’
Her body had once been female. There was only one breast, and even that looked mangled. In place of the other one was a collection of grafted skin and scar tissue, by turns smooth and ridged, in varying shades of red. The scars stretched down the side of her body, creating a swirling vortex of flesh on her side.
But it was her face that was the worst. Her face and her head.
She was bald but for a few odd tufts of hair sprouting in between healed scars and grafts. Her skull was uneven, misshapen, covered in crests and craters, like a shattered egg that had been put together again without the instruction manual. Without make-up, the lines on her patchwork skin were vivid and throbbing. She had taken out the partial palate that held her false teeth, letting her mouth collapse in on itself on one side. One ear was just a curled stub.
And her hand, clawed and gnarled, was shaking as it held the gun on Dee.
‘This is what he did to me … Take a good look, go on. Stare. This is his creation. This is what he made of me.’
Dee’s mouth worked furiously but no sound emerged. No words seemed adequate.
‘And he’s not coming … ’ Amy shook her head. ‘Not coming … ’ She dropped her head and with it the light.
Dee thought she would be thankful that the beam had been taken away from the deformed body, but the shadows it cast made the sight even worse.
Amy looked up once more. ‘Why you? I don’t want to see you. Why you and not him?’
Dee felt she had to answer this time. ‘Because I … I wanted to see you.’
‘You wanted to see me?’ Her voice was getting louder. ‘You wanted to see me?’ She stepped closer. ‘Well now you’ve seen me. Look. Go on, look.’ She swung the torch over her body again. ‘And don’t stop looking.’ Her voice reduced down to a hiss now. ‘This will be you. Oh yes … this will be you’
‘When he gets bored of you. When he wants rid of you.’
Amy stepped closer. Reached out a hand.
‘I want to touch you … ’
Dee tried hard not to scream.