bottom of a ditch while the blood that had kept her alive for all of her twenty-four years pulsed away into the grit and rubble beneath her.
As she drifted in and out of awareness, she contemplated the irony of it all: how she was going to die now—having survived so much, and thinking that freedom was so close—at the hands of the only man who had ever really loved her and shown her kindness. He stood at the edge of the ditch above her, his face in shadow as the sun shone through the bright green leaves and cast dappled light over him, his hair halo-bright. Waiting.
The blood filled her lungs and she coughed, blowing scarlet bubbles that foamed over her chin.
He stood motionless, one hand on the shovel, watching the blood flow out of her and marveling at its glorious color, a liquid jewel, and at how even at the moment of death she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
Once the flow slowed to a mere trickle he turned away, casting a glance across the derelict no-man’s-land between the back of the industrial park and the beginnings of farmland. Nobody came here, not even dog walkers; the ground was rough and scarred with manufacturing refuse accumulated over decades, weeds growing through empty cable reels, brown fluid leaking out of rusted oil drums, and at the edge, beneath a long row of lime trees, a six-foot ditch that accumulated dirty water when it rained, draining a mile away into the river.
Several minutes passed.
She was dead.
The wind had started to pick up and he looked up through the canopy of leaves to the clouds chasing one another across the sky.
He scrambled carefully down the rough slope into the bottom of the ditch, using the shovel for support, and then without hesitation drove it into her skull, bouncing roughly off the first time, then with a dull crack breaking the bone and splintering it into her flesh. Again and again, gasping with the effort, smashing her face away, breaking teeth, bone and flesh into one ghastly mixture.
After that, she wasn’t his Naomi anymore.
He used the knife again to slice away at each of her fingers in turn, her palms, until nothing identifiable was left.
Finally, he used the bloody shovel to cover her over with the rubble, sand and trash that had collected in the ditch. It wasn’t a very good job. The blood was everywhere.
But as he finished—wiping away the tears that he’d been shedding from the moment she’d said his name in surprise, just as he’d sliced her throat—the first spots of rain fell from the darkening sky.
Wednesday 31 October 2007
Erin had been standing in the doorway for almost a minute; I could see her reflection in the darkened window. I continued scrolling through the spreadsheet on the screen, wondering how it could be that it was dark when I left for work this morning and now it was dark again already.
“Cathy?”
I turned my head. “Sorry,” I said, “I was miles away. What?”
She leaned against the door, one hand on a hip, her long russet hair wound back into a bun. “I said, are you nearly finished?”
“Not quite. Why?”
“Don’t forget it’s Emily’s going-away party tonight. You are coming, aren’t you?”
I turned back to the screen. “I’m not sure, to be honest—I need to get this finished. You go on ahead. I’ll try and get there later if I can.”
“All right,” she said at last. She made a show of stomping off, although she didn’t make much noise in those pumps.
Not tonight, I thought. Especially not tonight. It was all I could manage to agree to go to the damn Christmas party, let alone a night out to celebrate someone’s departure, someone I scarcely know. They’d been planning the Christmas bash since August; as far as I’m concerned the end of November is too bloody early for a Christmas night out, but it’s the date they all chose. They’re all partying from then on, right up to Christmas. Early or not, I was going to have to go, otherwise I could see comments being made about me not being a “team player,” and God knows I need this job.
As soon as the last person left the office, I closed down the spreadsheet and turned off the computer.
Friday 31 October 2003
Friday night, Halloween, and the bars in town were all full to the cauldron’s brim.
In the Cheshire Arms I’d drunk cider and vodka and somehow lost Sylvia and Louise and