Page 29 of A Taste Of Truth
His hand pulls me faster until we round a corner and he pushes a panel on a wall. “Quiet. Trust.” The old wall cracks open, just enough that a small set of stairs becomes apparent. He waves a hand at the old dirty fissure, nodding. “After you. Up you go.” I do as I’m told, oddly reassured still by this solid presence he’s becoming in my life regardless of his wife being here – his wife.
The steps creak and groan the entire way, loose wood occasionally giving slightly under my feet in the dark. His wife is here, his perfect wife. I looked over the beauty. Blonde. Tight everything. The prettiest face I’ve ever seen in my life, but dead of feeling. I could hear it in her vicious voice, hear it in her mindless giggle and the way she tried to belittle me – and him.
I keep turning in the tight upwards circle nonetheless, and eventually reach a dead end.
His hand reaches around me, pushes, does something. A click happens instantly, and light suddenly envelops the space we’re in, as the dead end opens into a room. He pushes me into it and walks straight to a closet filled with clothes, his hands pulling out an array of clothes.
“Get dressed, Alice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t need you to. Just do as I ask if you want to continue where we left off.”
My gaze skates aimlessly across the clothes, then round the opulence of the room that is clearly a woman’s – his wife’s presumably - and then back to him. Something happened to me in that room downstairs with him – something changed. I want more of that. I don’t know why, though.
He moves in my eye line, picking up the dress he’s selected and then dragging the robe from my skin. I’m moved like a rag doll again, as if there’s no say in the matter. Clothes get pushed into place, the zip and clips encasing the tight, leather look. And then he’s at my feet, as I balance my hand on his shoulder and watch him slipping my feet into heels. It’s all a shadow. Everything. From the moment I got on my knees down there to this point right here and took that pill, it seems filled with a haze I don’t quite understand.
Rising, he stares at me and runs his fingers through my hair. I feel drunk. Not trashed. Just woozy, like the world isn’t quite sitting right. It isn’t just the pills. I know that. It’s him, too. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. It’s like all the normal attack I have, all the fight and will to survive, just left when he asked me to trust him. I shouldn’t, but I do. Mostly.
But this behaviour isn’t him.
My toes push me higher until I’m in his face, the knife in my fingers close to his lips, and I search. I search his eyes, his skin, the two tight lines of wrinkles in his brow. He’s anxious, concerned about something. “What are you scared of, Malachi?” His eyes blink, the furrow getting deeper, and he goes to move. I move at exactly the same time, keeping us right where we are whether he likes that or not. “Is it your wife?” We can weave, dance, swim in each other’s vision, but I want to know who he is now – why he is. “Answer me if you want to continue at all.”
His harsh hand grabs my back, pulling me close until the knife presses into his cheek, and he stares. “Losing something before I’ve found it.”
Soft lips land on mine, both caressing and powerful. They make what was woozy tumble into an oblivion of unsteadiness, and I’m only held upright by his steel like grip. So strong. Perhaps too strong. Even his mouth seems steeled in fortitude and resilience, as if it’s never been denied anything. And I don’t want to deny it either.
Never really have.
That’s why I stayed, isn’t it?
It’s over all too quickly.
“We don’t have time for this, Alice. Not now. You’ll have to find your own way to me.”
He grabs my hand and drags me from the room again. Back down the stairs, the false door closed behind us. Into the main corridor again and along it. And then downwards again, cut rock steps leading us somewhere this time. I don’t know where, but I’m following, at speed. It’s something I remember in the back of my mind – his hand, his body moving in front of me. Lightning strikes, white stripes that kept flashing. Pretty. I think. And it’s cold down here. Cold and damp and murky.
“We’ve done this before,” I mumble, still following.
His gaze comes back to me, sharp eyes smiling, and then he moves again.
Further and further we go into the darkness. It’s all familiar, yet not. All tangible, yet not. I can feel him more with every rush of my heart to keep up. His weight on me, his presence in front, behind, around me. It isn’t until we find another door that I begin to question what’s happening to me. I’m falling, falling like a child who’s being towed in the wake of something potentially cataclysmic.
A wife.
The wealth.
This life of chaos and freakery he seems to live in.
He cut me. Licked blood from my skin.
It’s not me.
Not who I am.
I grind to a halt at the thought, hand snatching out of his. “I can’t do this.” The door he’s in front of puffs open, heavy levers clacking into place until heat and noise assaults us.
“You can. I think you’re the only one that can. Come.” He slips into the dark noise, the black shadows under his eyes zoning me into them. “Come and help me search, Alice.”