Page 15 of Follow Her Down
But I have to admit, the adrenaline spike after seeing Vincent and my worries that James knows exactly who I am have faded, and my mind has cleared.
“Why did you do that?”I ask, still trying to catch my breath.
No answer, but I sense him still watching me from both inside the open vent and the room at large.
I shake my head, overwhelmed, confused, but sated.My lower half and the floor is a mess of my own cum, so I rise and make my way to the bathroom, where I take a quick shower.Afterward, I find the mirror covered in steam.Written in the condensation is a single word:
CAREFUL
I stare at the warning, watching as drops of water form in the letters and streak down the glass, distorting the message.Careful of what?James?Vincent?Or something else entirely?
“Hey, uh, Shadow Daddy?”I call, but he doesn’t answer.
Back in my bedroom, I notice the glass in Vincent’s photo on the floor is now cracked.His smug face looks back at me with his cut-out eyes, oblivious to what’s coming.Or maybe not so oblivious, if James is now his eyes and ears.
Either way, the game is on.
I close my eyes, but sleep is a long time coming.When it finally does, I dream of shadows with hands that leave bruises, and men with smiles that cut like glass, and a voice that whispers all of my names from deep beneath the house.
“Sera… PrayWhileIMoan… Penny…”
6
James
I’vebeenwatchingherbreathe for three hours straight.
The monitor’s blue wash makes her skin look like something I’ve fished out of the North Sea—pale, luminous, wrong for this shite fluorescent coffin of a petrol station.My Prayer behind the counter, boxed in where I can see but cannae touch.Nae yet.
I tweak the feed, sharpen, boost the contrast.It’s no cinema, but it’s her.
“There ye go,” I whisper when she tucks her black hair behind her ear—wee tell, that.“Do it again for me, lass.”
On the second monitor I’ve got her greatest hits spooling.Her stepping out her Kansas City house for the first time in five years.Her walking from her new house to the car four days back.Her dropping her keys last week and bending—Christ almighty—to pick them up outside the pumps.I’ve catalogued every heartbeat since before she arrived in Wichita and after.Hard drive’s near bursting with her.
On the live feed, she’s half smiling at a customer, some manky bawbag buying fags and a couple energy drinks.Her mouth stretches; her eyes stay dead.It’s her deranged Wednesday Addams smile, if Wednesday worked in customer service.
“Dinnae give him that, Prayer,” I say.“I ken that smile’s nae yours.”
My pedo-looking white van reeks of cold chips and pine air freshener.Nae back windows, the front tinted to sin.Parked behind the abandoned paper mill where nae bugger comes nosing.Where I can watch in peace.
When the punter leaves and her face folds back to blank, I lean in.That’s better.Truer.
I open my laptop, my fingers on the keys by muscle memory.Her online ghost still sits there on the screen.PrayWhileIMoan.What a username, eh?Found it on the kinky erotica sites, then buried deeper in a survivors’ forum, the kind where lassies post what they cannae say out loud.
Her words weren’t like the rest.Most of them typed about healing, therapy, recovery, all that patter.My Prayer wrote about revenge like scripture.
I’m going to find him and unmake him the way he unmade me.
The second I read it, I kent her.Kent she was mine.
Tracing the IP was child’s play.Folk think the internet’s a void ye shout into, and it eats the noise.But I listen.I’m always listening.I followed her digital crumbs same as the ones she left in the real world.
It’s nae stalking.It’s knowing her first.Understanding her before she understands herself.And I ken exactly what she’s doing in Wichita.
“She called herself ruined,” I tell her frozen face.“But I see the cathedral buried underneath.”
I trace her outline on the glass.The bruised smudges under her eyes.The fullness of her body, like she’s armoring up, making herself bigger, harder to hurt.
