forty-six

The floor is uneven, the narrow cavities in the rocky floor making it difficult to walk. But I can hear the faraway screams of a woman’s voice. The scream is of pure thin pain. A sound where language has become irrelevant, replaced by the body’s direct expression of agony. The nakedness of the sound arouses me. It pierces to the centre of my soul.

I turn the corner. Justine, naked, is chained to the black walls of rock. Her white flesh is bleeding as if someone has drawn a map of an unknown country, in red ink, on her body. The walls of the dungeon are sweating water, and I can smell the sweet stench of decaying flesh.

The abductor is bent down over her. I can make out from the movement of his back and the crack of a whiplash that he is whipping her. Justine’s face, which is turned in my direction, is contorted by need and desperation, wet with tears. Her face has concaved and her eyes have disappeared into a grimace of pain. But when she sees me her face lights up. She stretches out her arms towards me in supplication.

‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ I say to her.

On hearing me speak, the abductor straightens up, lets his whip drop to his side and turns around. He looks straight into my eyes. But I am looking back into my own eyes, the abductor has my face. He looks like an angel. I step back in fear, turn, run back through the passageway hearing his footsteps running behind me, the same arrhythmic limping, chasing me, knowing that if he is to catch up with me it means my death. For it is impossible that the two of us can co-exist in the same world.