to the open French doors and leaned out to let the girls know that lunch would be ready in five minutes, and stopped to watch them play, taking genuine pleasure in their spirited haphazard waltz.
‘I’ll eat you all up!’
Shouted the youngest girl, making a grabbing gesture at her fleeing sister and baring her perfect white baby teeth.
‘No, I’ll eat you all up now!’
The slightly bigger girl suddenly switched roles and whirled back around, catching her laughing breathless sibling by the wrists and tumbling onto the warm dry grass with her, giggling fit to burst.
‘Your lunch will be on the table in five minutes girls; that’s if you’ve got enough room left for it when you’re done eating each other all up?’ she enquired, still smiling benevolently. The girls looked at each other and laughed some more, before the eldest assumed position as spokesperson.
‘We’re being a greedy Granddad who eats little girls.’
‘Just like a giant!’ Chimed in the other one and giggled.
‘Okay, well I’m off to start putting lunch onto plates in a moment, remember to wash your hands when you come back inside please.’
Her smile remained fixed in place, but an adult would have noticed that it took more effort now. She was thinking about the dead girl again, as she often did when her husband’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. She wished for the thousandth time that she’d never played any part in making the girl disappear forever.
Chapter 25
Do the people who believe they know us best really know us at all? How well do we even know ourselves until we take the time to explore those hidden recesses that house our darkest desires? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking moments, and I wonder whether they trouble other members of my species in the same way, but I strongly suspect not.
Doctor Alan Hardwick believed that he knew me from a hand full of snapshots of a single facet of who I am, and from that he believed that he could predict my actions when we finally came to meet. Yet with all of his years spent dissecting his fellow human beings, when push came to shove he was still wrong.
I took his eyes and tongue because they were wasted on him, Zara. What do you suppose that you could live without?
I stopped reading the Grey Man’s latest note and jotted down my immediate impressions, aiming to capture my gut reaction before my deeply ingrained need to analyse everything took over. Lee was away slowly working his way through the details of Hardwick’s comings and goings over the last six months, looking for anything that might help our unofficial composite profile. I wrote down three words in auto-pilot before I had to stop and re-read what had come out. They were simply: WE HAVE MET in thick black capital letters, not exactly the depth I’d been looking for. I tried to dig underneath the thought, to expose the roots of where the notion had come from, and I leafed back through transcripts from the other seven cases to try to pinpoint exactly what it was.
Do you still retain the ability to feel for them Zara? If it’s true that repeated exposure to horror blunts the human emotional response as a coping mechanism, then we’re not really so very different after all. I wasn’t always a monster.
I’ve never known what it was like to be entirely ‘normal’, and in a different way you too turned your back on normality to pursue your chosen path in life, Zara. Did they tell you how much it would cost you when you started out? Nobody was there to tell me how every single small step was another step away from the rest of the human race either.
It’s almost funny to contemplate now, but the first time out I was physically sick with fear. I lived in agony for the longest time afterwards. The second one was better. They seemed to be playing a role, and I have to say they were perfect in it. Don’t you find in life that some people are born victims, Zara?
I
‘I’ll eat you all up!’
Shouted the youngest girl, making a grabbing gesture at her fleeing sister and baring her perfect white baby teeth.
‘No, I’ll eat you all up now!’
The slightly bigger girl suddenly switched roles and whirled back around, catching her laughing breathless sibling by the wrists and tumbling onto the warm dry grass with her, giggling fit to burst.
‘Your lunch will be on the table in five minutes girls; that’s if you’ve got enough room left for it when you’re done eating each other all up?’ she enquired, still smiling benevolently. The girls looked at each other and laughed some more, before the eldest assumed position as spokesperson.
‘We’re being a greedy Granddad who eats little girls.’
‘Just like a giant!’ Chimed in the other one and giggled.
‘Okay, well I’m off to start putting lunch onto plates in a moment, remember to wash your hands when you come back inside please.’
Her smile remained fixed in place, but an adult would have noticed that it took more effort now. She was thinking about the dead girl again, as she often did when her husband’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. She wished for the thousandth time that she’d never played any part in making the girl disappear forever.
Chapter 25
Do the people who believe they know us best really know us at all? How well do we even know ourselves until we take the time to explore those hidden recesses that house our darkest desires? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking moments, and I wonder whether they trouble other members of my species in the same way, but I strongly suspect not.
Doctor Alan Hardwick believed that he knew me from a hand full of snapshots of a single facet of who I am, and from that he believed that he could predict my actions when we finally came to meet. Yet with all of his years spent dissecting his fellow human beings, when push came to shove he was still wrong.
I took his eyes and tongue because they were wasted on him, Zara. What do you suppose that you could live without?
I stopped reading the Grey Man’s latest note and jotted down my immediate impressions, aiming to capture my gut reaction before my deeply ingrained need to analyse everything took over. Lee was away slowly working his way through the details of Hardwick’s comings and goings over the last six months, looking for anything that might help our unofficial composite profile. I wrote down three words in auto-pilot before I had to stop and re-read what had come out. They were simply: WE HAVE MET in thick black capital letters, not exactly the depth I’d been looking for. I tried to dig underneath the thought, to expose the roots of where the notion had come from, and I leafed back through transcripts from the other seven cases to try to pinpoint exactly what it was.
Do you still retain the ability to feel for them Zara? If it’s true that repeated exposure to horror blunts the human emotional response as a coping mechanism, then we’re not really so very different after all. I wasn’t always a monster.
I’ve never known what it was like to be entirely ‘normal’, and in a different way you too turned your back on normality to pursue your chosen path in life, Zara. Did they tell you how much it would cost you when you started out? Nobody was there to tell me how every single small step was another step away from the rest of the human race either.
It’s almost funny to contemplate now, but the first time out I was physically sick with fear. I lived in agony for the longest time afterwards. The second one was better. They seemed to be playing a role, and I have to say they were perfect in it. Don’t you find in life that some people are born victims, Zara?
I
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