“I’m running out of room,” she says. Brenda slowly turns around, letting me view the extent of her carvings. “I don’t want to cut above my waist, but it’s getting harder to keep myself from it.” Then she reaches out and thrusts her left arm toward me. I don’t understand what it is she wants me to see, and then I spot the small scar on her forearm. A single ski track on virgin snow. I remember the Band-Aid on her arm from last week. When I had asked her about it, she told me she was cut by a nail sticking out of the wall in her apartment.
“I’ve been cutting since I was a teenager, but my scars are nothing compared to yours. You are the queen of scars, Alice.” She steps into her jeans, pulls them up, and buttons the waist. “And then I found…found the community.”
“The website.”
“Yes. The website. I realized I wasn’t the only one interested in you.”
Yes. Interested is the right word.
“Brenda, this is crazy. You drugged me. You’ll be arrested. You need to stop this now before you make things worse for yourself.”
“You’re the queen of scars, Alice,” she repeats. “But I’m the queen of you. I get to be next to you all the time. Do you know how exciting that is?”
I won’t be able to reason with her; that is quite clear now. But maybe I can keep her talking until I figure something out.
A fresh wave of vomit stench attacks my nostrils, and I suppress a gag.
“You moved to Manchester just to work with me?”
She smiles. God, she’s excited. “From upstate New York.”
“So, what, you just want to be close to me? Take pictures of me so you can tell your fellow online psychopaths what I’m doing?”
The smile disappears. I don’t care for her serious face.
“You don’t understand, Alice. I’m the number two fan. I’m very important.”
“So you’re the one who draws all the pictures?” I feebly nod toward the drafting table.
“Some. But Mr. Interested does most. I do the inking. He’s in charge of everything, though.”
He’s in charge of everything.
“Like Jimmy? He told you to kill him? Showed you how to do that?”
She lets out a frustrated sigh, almost angry that I don’t immediately understand her delusions.
“I didn’t do that. I mean, I had to help. I followed my instructions, found Jimmy, got him high, and put the strap on his chest. Gave him the wireless. But I didn’t kill him. That was Mr. Interested. It wasn’t my privilege. Mr. Interested is the number one fan, after all.”
“Why? Why do you let him be in charge?”
She looks as if I just asked her the most basic question in the world. “Because he was there from the beginning. And he’s always been there.”
Does she actually know who Jack is?
“So that makes him the number one fan?”
“Of course.” She takes a deep breath of satisfaction. “But tonight, he’s letting me be in charge.”
Her voice—so pleasant, almost singsongy—makes this pronouncement all the more horrifying.
“Is he here? In Manchester.”
“He was. He’s back in London now,” she adds. “He relies very heavily on me for things.”
“Like placing a gun in my planter box,” I say.
“That. And other things.”
“So…so you take pictures of me, send them to him to draw, then he sends you the artwork to ink?”
“We are very busy.”
Keep her talking, Alice.
“Why? What’s the point of any of this?”
Brenda takes a step toward me, and for a moment, I smell her perfume rise above my own stench. Then she leans down and kisses me on the lips, the lips with remnants of my own puke still on them. It’s little more than the slightest brush on the lips, but it’s sensual and disturbing.
“The point,” she says, “is tonight.”
Brenda leaves the room.