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“T-take the mask off.” I continued to back up until I ran out of space to retreat. He sounded so inhuman, his voice warped behind the rubber.
“No.” He said the word slowly as if pausing to taste it first before giving me his decision. “It makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” I knew there wasn’t a lot in those eyes, not usually. But I still wanted to be able to see them. Because as inhuman as Shannon might be, he was infinitely more human than a rubber gorilla mask.
“You broke my rules. I’ve been very good to you. I’ve protected you and kept you safe. Except for the night we met, I’ve kept all the darker business of my life away from you, including this. You are the one who opened the box, my little Pandora. Now we can’t close it. All the evil inside can never go back in. It’s in the air now. Can you smell it?”
What I smelled was sex and alcohol.
He ripped the clothes out of my hands and dropped them on the floor. “Do you know how much I’ve had to rearrange my life for you? My schedule? My routine? All so I wouldn’t have to kill you? I’ve asked myself... Why, Shannon? Why even bother? I knew why, but I wanted to keep you pure and untainted by all the dark things that crawl around inside me. But now you’ve seen too much of it, though not nearly the worst of it. You know what? Fuck it. I kill people, Elodie. For a living. But I bet you already knew that, didn’t you? You’re smart. Maybe too smart.”
I thought I’d known, but hearing it out loud was a whole other thing. There was a part of me that had thought it was pure invention, my imagination running wild, my mind playing tricks on me.
“Shannon, please stop.”
He was never letting me go now. Not only had I seen his freaky little sex party, but we couldn’t pretend anymore that I was ignorant about how he financed his life.
He wanted it that way... for me to know... to be sure that I knew how he made his living so he could justify keeping me locked up in his house. I didn’t know why he wanted to keep me here, but I knew that he did. The way he’d acted just now with that other man wasn’t the indifference I’d thought I mostly inspired in him.
“Do you know what else?” he prodded, just gaining steam. “I reallylikemy job. A lot. You can’t believe how much job satisfaction I have. It’s a shame guidance counselors in school aren’t allowed to suggest this career path. Robbing young minds of their callings, I say. But hey, more fun for me.”
“You’re drunk,” I said.
He laughed. “No. I haven’t had a drop. This is all me, baby.”
“You’re no better than Trevor.” In fact, Shannon was probably worse.
“In general, you’re right, but where you’re concerned...” He took a step back and released a heavy sigh. “You might still be right.”
He hadn’t lied to me. At least not overtly, not that I was aware of. Maybe he lied by omission, but everybody did that, and in truth, he owed me nothing. He hadn’t kept me prisoner in an abandoned theme park, thinking the entire world had ended and almost everyone in it had died. But he’d kept me prisoner in a nice house. Was it that much different?
I had begun to think of my life in two chunks of time: the theme park captivity and the monochromatic minimalist house captivity. The world may as well have ended for all I’d seen of it during both imprisonments.
When Trevor took me, and my face was splashed all over the news, he’d ended the world for me. Shannon was keeping the same cycle going. Though I couldn’t imagine any reality in which everything wouldn’t be completely fucked. The moment some part of my brain had shut down and locked up all my memories was when things had gone to shit. Because from that point there was no option of heaven, just different circles of hell.
My eyes kept straying downward unable to stop looking at Shannon in all his glory. He just chuckled.
God, why was I so attracted to him? On the looks scale, both Shannon and Trevor were very appealing—certainly neither of them looked like the monsters they were. But from the first moment I’d seen Trevor in the pirate ship, there had been an active revulsion. It was only desperation and fear and isolation and the need to survive that had brought me around to finally sleeping with him, then to convincing myself I actually loved him.
But Shannon? I’d been trying to pretend I wasn’t attracted from the beginning because our story didn’t start with the fuzzy lie that he was my loving husband. I’d known what he was. I’d known the moment he started chopping up my fake husband and throwing him in the flames.
With Trevor I’d had to force myself to feel things; with Shannon I’d had to force myself not to. Think of him as a big brother. Think of him as a sexless bodyguard. Think of him as a distant guardian angel. But God, whatever you do, don’t think of him as a potential lover.
It had been easy before tonight. He hadn’t tried to take anything from me. There had been no overtures, no innuendos. I’d had safety and warmth in my own room. I’d had food and shelter and running water. I’d had someone who didn’t demand anything from me at all. I’d been convinced he was this asexual being, that the hunt and the kill were all that mattered to him. That the only way he interfaced with a human body was by destroying it and chopping it into pieces.
And now, that one safety had been ripped away because Shannon was the worst possible man for me to want or fall for. He might be a much more sexual being than I initially thought, but whatever kernel of an emotion the cat made him feel or I made him feel... I knew it was continents away from love. It was the barest glowing ember, ready to die at any moment. And what happened when the ember smoldered out? All bets were off, right? Then what would keep him from disposing of me when I became too inconvenient? What kept him from it now?
“I’ve tried to keep you at a distance,” he said, echoing my own thoughts back to me. “You make me feel normal. Like a real person. When I saw you in the castle, I felt this warmth I didn’t know was possible. I felt something like that but with less intensity with the cat. But never before with another person. I have these idiots around me who think they’re my friends who can’t see behind the mask. But it’s all surface shit with them. They don’t notice because they’re just that shallow. I can’t give you what you probably deserve, but for my own self-preservation, I can’t let you go, either. I thought if I thought of you like another pet in the house it would be fine, I could keep you compartmentalized. And now... I can’t anymore.”
This was the most Shannon had talked to me in the weeks I’d been living here. Normally it was a perfunctory robot sentence here or there, nothing of much depth or value. I tried to determine if he was being honest or just belatedly turning on some sociopathic charm to chase his own selfish impulses. But that stupid gorilla mask was still between us.
“Please take the mask off.”
He ripped it off and tossed it on the floor, then his hands went back to pressing against the wall, framing either side of me.
“W-what are you going to do with me now?” It must be a special talent of mine to always ask the most wrong questions—things I didn’t really want the answers to.
“Everything.”
