Chained Girl

by Joseph B. Major

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

You probably heard about it on the news, but I was there. Not the whole time, of course, but right near the end, as Lacretia Moore inhaled her last, pained breath, and Richard Cull’s reign of terror was put to an end. The media would’ve left my details out. I was only a child. That, too, ended.

Here’s what happened.

On a grey afternoon in late December, I was riding my bike along the sidewalk of my quiet suburban neighborhood. The first floor of our house was open, so my mother, busy with Christmas preparations, could see the whole cul-de-sac through the long bay windows in our connecting dining room. She kept me snug in her periphery as she chopped onions for the Halupki and kneaded the pyrohy dough. She liked to hum along to Nat King Cole, likely nursing a thimble of sherry—to loosen her joints, she would say.

I always adored that time of year. The way people’s faces chapped in the cold air, then quickly flushed red in the sweltering heat of the fireplace, their blood vessels swelling. I frankly enjoyed that more than the presents or the starchy foods.

I would stare at that chemical reaction on their faces for as long as it lasted. If anyone thought it peculiar, they didn’t say. Perhaps they assumed I was just excited to see them, or they simply didn’t take notice with all the holiday elation and alcohol percolating about.

I love other things about the holidays, too, like the look on someone’s face when they pretend to like a present, and the look on the giver’s face when they believe it. Or when someone doesn’t purchase batteries for a toy and feigns surprise, forcing the host (my mother) to supply them. Or when something awful occurs outside of your bubble, and you try your best to ignore it. Because it’s the holidays.

Also, being off from school and riding my bike in our quiet cul-de-sac. I rode on the sidewalk because I wasn’t allowed in the street. That was a part of the deal. That, and staying within the confines of our cul-de-sac, within the purview of my mother’s watchful eye, her little girl safe from the dangers of the outside world. I held my end of the bargain always, dutifully turning around once I hit the corner, continuing my infinite loop. I pedaled, pelvis pressed to the vibrating seat, studying the decorated houses. They looked so menacing in the naked light of day, garlands sagging like entrails wrapped in the endless spikes of bulbs.

I planned to ride one or two more laps, allowing my face to blanch in the frigid air before returning home and staring at my blooming cheeks in the mirror.

I sped up at the final stretch as I often did. It was a straightaway leading to my house, tucked in the deep heart of the cul-de-sac, pulsing with warmth as I approached. I counted down the houses as I passed them: six, five, four, three… and then I heard her.

I heard a muffled yowl, like an injured animal crying for help. It was almost imperceptible over the rolling hum of my bicycle tires, but it grew louder. The back of my neck began to tickle, and I became curious. I knew stories of wild animals in the neighborhood, coyotes mauling family pets in broad daylight. Perhaps a pair was circling a pregnant cat. I squeezed the handlebar brakes.

Once the skidding ceased, all other sounds on earth seemed to be vacuumed away, and only wailing remained. I turned my head to the wail.

It was a woman, or something that might have been, long ago. She scurried toward me on all fours through my neighbor’s front yard, so rapidly I could barely register what I witnessed.

Her feral eyes squinted, struggling to hide from the minute sunlight that leaked from the sky. A steel collar squeezed her neck—brown with rust and dried blood—a broken chain still attached. It trailed behind her, slithering through the grass. 

I’m aware of memory’s reconstructive nature. Some of these details are from a past of my own creation. But some I’ll never forget. They altered me, like little mutations. For instance, I froze there, but not from fear. From another feeling I can’t fully articulate. Perhaps fascination, longing. And I recall she was fully nude as she crawled toward me, her skin a sickly pallor. Her breasts removed; her chest a topographical map of scars, pink and distended. I stood frozen solid on my bike as she closed the distance.

Quickly, so quickly, she was on me, grabbing my jacket and pulling me to the ground. Her toothless mouth emitted a sulfuric stink of bile. It was hot on my face, so foul I thought it would cling to my skin permanently, like cigarette smoke sticking to walls. She stared into my eyes, and all became silent. Her stare flickered as if recognizing the long while since she had seen a human, and she was now recalling what we were. What I should have recognized is that she had become something else.

Perhaps exhausted, or maybe having given up, she kept staring at me, and we stayed like that for what felt like forever. I became lost in the grey sea of her eyes. I went willingly, letting them draw me in. They told me all the things she could no longer speak, things beyond my understanding.

She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Her eyes shimmered in the glare of the fading sun. A wave of warmth seeped into me, permeating flesh and sinew.  I could’ve lain on my back for an eternity, drifting into those endless, amniotic waters, knowing her and becoming truly known.   

A crack from above, a sudden rupture. I couldn’t pull my gaze from her. But her eyes bulged and glazed over. Her mouth slackened. Blood poured from her head, rushing over my face through my open lips and into my mouth. With it came her pain, her thoughts, her past. I could taste them. It felt electric, like being reborn.

She made a hollow sucking sound, and her head plopped onto my chest. It was soft and lifeless. Had I recognized then what she would one day mean to me, I would’ve clung to her, let her bleed out into my mouth. I should’ve cradled her in my arms, let her bleed out onto me. But I couldn’t have known, and Richard Cull was already atop us, straddling her limp body.

At that moment, we formed an unholy trinity on his front lawn.

Her head bobbled gracelessly on my chest as he heaved her off. That’s when I got a good look at him. He was a slight man in a snug argyle sweater. Though she was a frail assemblage of skin and bones, he strained to pull her dead weight across his lawn, back into his home. I’ll never forget how dispassionately he did so, as though this whole ordeal were a minor inconvenience for him, some misunderstanding.

He dragged her like a sack of mulch. I imagined him freshening up before heading out to a company Christmas party (the news later said he was a CPA for a small local firm).

He didn’t make it inside. As he approached his front door, my hearing returned all at once, and my ears filled with the screams of neighborhood ladies, followed quickly by their husbands’ shouting. They blundered toward Cull, ignoring me and Lacretia as well. One of them in a horrific Christmas sweater. Heroes, all of them.

He didn’t fight back exactly, just implored them, almost diplomatically, to free him so he could bring her back inside. “I’m close,” he said. “She’s almost there.”

In the kerfuffle, I swore I gleaned the word, “transmogrification.” One of the apes struck him in the face as he pleaded. And the others followed suit, until Cull spoke no more. All the while, Lacretia’s body lay motionless to the side. Like a sack of topsoil.

Then, I heard my name called in a frantic staccato, and I was lifted from the prickly grass with little ice crystals clinging to my backside. It was my mother, panicked and fraught, stinking of onion and sweet sherry.

“Are you okay? Are you okay?” she repeated until she saw the blood, and then it was, “No, no, no! My daughter is hurt! Call an ambulance! Please!” It didn’t help that at that point I, too, was screaming. Not from physical harm or what the paper described as the horror of the scene but because my mother had wiped some of the blood from my face. I didn’t look at her the whole time I screamed; my eyes stayed fixed on Lacretia.

The police soon arrived, relieving the neighborhood men of their duty. They wandered dully back to their wives and families. Two of the officers actually checked on Lacretia, and the color stole from their faces at the sight of her. Simple men, unable to recognize beauty that didn’t conform to their conception of it. When they turned her over, audible gasps could be heard from the growing crowd of onlookers.

“Please, everyone, stay back,” the older one said as his partner checked her pulse. He shook his head, grimacing at her malformed body. The younger one removed his jacket and draped it over her to free themselves from the sight of her. I doubt she minded at all, but I did, the view of my darling angel taken from me. I screamed even louder, reaching out to her. My mother squeezed me, still calling out for help. One of the neighbors held me from behind.

Time slowed to a crawl, and everything went mute. More police rushed in, then ambulances. I barely registered them. They were from a different world altogether, dancing along the periphery of events they couldn’t comprehend.

I felt a hand on my shoulder—a paramedic. Another one flanked my mother, softly guiding her away from me, with a calm “It’s alright, ma’am. We’re here to help. We need to check your daughter.”

Like that I was thrust back to the cacophony. I was still hysterical, screaming uncontrollably, leaking plumes of vapor into the frigid air. The familiar, chilly tinge of night washed over me, but I still smelled only her: the bile of her breath, her rotten skin, the rust of her blood. Dusk had arrived, pressing the sun into its celestial sack, making room for dark. Most of the neighbors’ Christmas lights operated on timers and had switched on automatically such that, along with the whirling lights of all the emergency vehicles and the growing crowd, the whole scene looked, from afar, downright festive.

I imagined a family driving by, bound for their warm home, dreaming of hot cocoa in front of a crackling fireplace, a freshly chopped Douglas fir tied to their roof, sprinkling needles on the frozen asphalt. Would they see me being carried off in a stretcher, covered in the sacred blood of an angel? Or that angel’s limp silhouette lying on the front lawn? Would they see Cull’s blank face in the backseat of the cruiser, a little battered but mostly intact, his eyes downcast as if he’d dropped his keys? Would they see the faint glimmer in his eyes—imperceptible to all but me—as I passed him on the stretcher?

They wouldn’t.

They wouldn’t see his eyes lingering on mine and the words I remember him mouthing to me. Those words I could not hear at the time but would make themselves known to me in my dreams. I wish I could’ve whispered them right back to him, but I just stared, screaming until my mother joined me in the back of the ambulance, and the doors shut.

They wouldn’t see any of it.

They would drive by while my mother and father would exchange furtive glances. If the children asked what was happening, they would simply raise the volume on the radio, filling the car with the soothing melody of Nat King Cole, and ask the children if they wanted marshmallows or whipped cream in their hot cocoa.