Duke Dolce
“I need to make one stop while we’re here,” Baron says, turning off the highway.
“How long will it take?” I ask, my mind already hurtling ahead faster than the car, out of Tennessee, to the moment when I’ll see her, touch her, again. It’s like a craving that never goes away, only momentarily sated when I cross a line, push my limit further than it’s ever gone.
“Not long,” Baron says. “I just need to grab a few things for the trip.”
He glances at me from the corner of his eye. He’s been doing that. He thinks I don’t notice.
“And?” I press.
“And check on my projects,” he says, slowing on a quiet, tree-lined street where old, two-story colonial houses are set back from the road and spaced more widely than modern neighborhoods. A pair of fifty-something ladies with sensible bob haircuts topped with visors power-walk along the sidewalk, fluffy little dogs scampering along on their leashes beside them.
“You live here?” I ask. “Looks lame as fuck.”
“You’ll see,” Baron says, turning into a narrow alley with privacy fences on either side. It runs between rows of backyards and provides entrance to the driveways and garages that are hidden from the street view. “I’ll show you what I’ve been working on since December.”
“You picked a hell of a location,” I grumble as he hits a button to send one of the tall wooden gates swinging inwards. The house isn’t quarter the size of our house in Faulkner, but it couldn’t look less like a drug lab if it tried. Baron pulls up to the back of the house and turns off his car. The gate swings closed automatically behind us, enclosing us in the privacy fence. It’s perfect, but I don’t want to admit it. I know why Baron did what he did, but I’m still pissed about it. Once we get Mabel, everything will be good again.
Baron puts his hand to a keypad at the back door to unlock it, and we step from the warm May sunshine into the air-conditioned cocoon of the house he chose over the one where our family lives. It isn’t anything special, but I see my twin everywhere, from the automatic gate to the keypads to the orderly interior filled with sparse, utilitarian furniture and tasteful but soulless pieces of art. He once said he doesn’t see anything when he looks at art except the market value.
“Down here,” he says, placing his hand on another keypad. The door is thick and sturdy, an exterior door that he must have installed to replace one of the usual interior doors inside the house. He swings it open, and dank, moist air wafts from the darkness within, along with a smell that makes my stomach curdle. The other side of the door is padded, and I think of Mabel in her padded room, and for one second, I’m sure he was lying to me all along.
“What is this?” I ask, a sudden certainty that I don’t want to know the answer filling me even as I ask. I grip the edge of the door, my feet weighed with cement like some poor sap who pisses off a mafia boss. Behind the door isn’t a room, it’s a beckoning mouth that will swallow me, a hell where only demons go. Once I take that step, once I know what’s waiting in the dark, I can’t go back. I can’t unsee, can’t unknow.
“It’s one of my projects,” Baron says. I can see the gleam of excitement and pride behind his glasses, but I still can’t pick up my feet. I hear a rustling, scrabbling sound below, like rats or bats lurk in the basement.
He sees my hesitation, my trepidation, but unlike Dad, he doesn’t call me a pussy. He flicks on the light for me because he knows only light can dispel the monsters in the dark. Then he steps inside the door and smiles. “Come on. I want you to meet Jane.”
“Jane?” I ask, following him down the stairs into the basement. I watch my feet on the stairs, not trying to see past my brother’s tall form in front of me, to what’s waiting below. “Is that your new formula? Alice, and now Jane?”
He chuckles. “No. Alice in Wonderland is complicated. Like Mabel. Jane… Jane is plain as cocaine.”
We reach the bottom of the stairs, and he flips on another light. The sight that greets me is the furthest thing from the cooking operation in Faulkner, all industrial stainless steels tanks and chutes. Here, there’s only a dirt floor and cement walls. Two rusted iron rings are bolted into the wall, and attached to each of them, an equally rusty, thick iron chain. On the end of the chains, iron cuffs anchor a filthy, huddled creature. She’s crouched with her bony knees pointed out, her hands on the floor between them, her head hanging down, strings of greasy hair and shadow obscuring her face.
My stomach rolls over. “Is that… Mabel?” I ask under my breath. It’s hard to tell. Everything is the color of the dirt she’s covered in—her hair, her skin, the tattered underwear clinging to her skeletal hips.
“I told you, it’s Jane,” Baron says, strolling over to her.
“Who the fuck is Jane?”
“This is Jane,” he says, gesturing. “No last name, just plain Jane. Isn’t that right?” He fists her matted hair, lifting her head so I can see her face.
She stares at me for a second, eyes unfocused, jaw wired shut, patches of hair missing on one side of her head. Baron’s fingers tighten in her greasy strands, and she nods a fraction of an inch. I can’t tell if she moved on her own, or if he moved her head for her.
“I found her on my way here,” Baron says. “I’ve had her almost six months. I like to practice on her.”
“Practice what?” I ask, eyeing the grisly scars and sutures on various places on her body. “Harvesting organs?”
Baron chuckles. “Good idea. I’ve done a few surgeries on her, but I haven’t taken an organ yet. Just extracted a few teeth with pliers when she bit me.”
She makes a sound and bares her teeth, what’s left of them. I notice the dark splotches on the dirt around her, realizing they’re probably blood. Against the wall is a five-gallon bucket with a lid, probably the source of some of the putrid stench. There is also a pile of empty plastic bottles, sports drinks and juices and sodas.
“Are you hungry, little bird?” Baron asks.
Her eyes widen, and she nods eagerly.
“I knew you’d be okay for a week without food,” he says. “Those drinks have plenty of calories. But I bet you don’t feel too well.”
She grips his leg, staring up at him with a mixture of pleading and fear, her head nodding and nodding. I can see every bone in her skull, in her clawlike fingers, standing out against the back of her neck and straining against the skin of her shoulders.
“This is what we came for?” I ask. “To feed your pet?”
“How shall I have her sing for her supper?” Baron muses, looking pleased with himself. “I can cut into her abdomen and let you fuck her intestines. I did that a few times. It’s easier than you’d think. You have to make sure not to slice through the muscles, but go between them. It feels just like a pussy, but the blood and the screaming are so much better than what you can get from even the roughest anal.”
She whimpers, hugging one arm to her middle while she hangs onto him with her other hand. I can’t tell which set of grisly stitches on her abdomen are from the experiments he described, and which are from other surgeries he’s done on her. Baron always did want someone he could perform his sickest fantasies on. I always thought he found it in Mabel.
“Who is she?” I ask again. “Where did you get her?”
“She’s no one,” he says with a shrug. “A runaway. I found her hitchhiking. She said she doesn’t have a home or a family. I looked up the news every day and told her what would happen if I found out she was lying, but she never changed her story, and there was never a missing persons report filed, so I got to keep her. She’s all mine.”
“What about Mabel?” I ask.
“This has nothing to do with Mabel,” he says. “I’m Dr. Frankenstein, and Jane is my monster. I made her. I put her together, like what we did with Gloria, except this time it’s physical instead of psychological. No one misses her. No one’s looking for her. If someone found out she was here, they’d probably thank me for getting a homeless person off the street and feeding her all these months. If she dies, it doesn’t matter, because no one cares.”
“Jesus Christ, Baron.”
“I needed something to keep me occupied,” Baron says, giving me a hard look. “Would you rather I’d been with Mabel all these months?”
“No,” I admit, glowering at the crusty, black scabs on several of the girl’s toes where her toenails should be.
“Exactly,” Baron says. “This kept me from giving in when I was tempted, and it kept me from doing anything stupid, like that Black Widow Killer. That’s too public. No one will ever find out about this. I can do whatever I want to her.”
“And that’s what you wanted to do?” I ask, trying not to gag when a string of drool trickles from the corner of her mouth and drips onto her filthy chest. There’s a set of stitches there that looks newer than the others, an angry reddish purple that shows through the dirt coating. I’m pretty sure it’s leaking puss, but maybe it’s just the drool running down her.
She tugs on the fabric of his pants again, and he kicks her away, looking disgusted. She makes a horrible mewling sound as she crumples to the floor, her head still anchored by Baron’s grip on her hair. He releases it and picks loose strands from his fingers, his lip curling, before he drops them onto her.
“I’ll take this off her while you make something to eat,” he says, tapping her jaw. “Then she can suck you off while I fuck her. She always has to work for her food.”
“Fuck no,” I say. “I’m not touching that crusty carcass. She looks like she’s got maggots about to hatch out of several holes.”
“This one does look a little inflamed,” Baron says, poking at the stitches on her chest.
She moans despondently.
I gag when a drop of something bubbles up from between two of the stitches and oozes down her chest in sluggish trail.
“Just needs an antibiotic,” Baron says. “We’ll stay here tonight. You go fix us something to eat while I take care of her.”
I force myself to walk normally across the floor, up the stairs, into the kitchen. I sit at the table, trying to catch my breath between heaves, but every time I think about it, I almost puke again. Finally, when she screams and then breaks off with a gurgling hiccup, I’m jarred from my trance. I slam the padded door closed and hurry to the stove. I figure out how to turn it on, and then find a cabinet full of different kinds of organic canned soup. One of them has a pull tab, but I’m not sure how to open the others. I figure I’ll ask Baron when he comes up.
I put them on the burners and wait. The labels smolder and smoke, and one of the cans swells up. Clearly, having a cook all my life puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to making shit myself.
The open can is boiling, so I turn off all the burners. It’s smoky in the room, but the smoke alarms haven’t gone off, so I figure I did good. The smell starts an itch in the back of my mind, though, a craving I haven’t filled for too long.
As it does so often, my mind goes back to the worst fire I ever started, the blue-hot flame of the blowtorch we used on Colt. I can still hear his roars of pain as it ate up his skin, can see the way he writhed with inhuman strength, so both my brothers had to hold him still. Some part of me wouldn’t let me go more than skin deep, just like Mabel wouldn’t let us go on. She broke first, begging us for mercy—for him. He kept telling her not to, even when the skin on his arm was a smoking, blackened ruin. He never caved.
She caved, agreeing to do anything we wanted, even when he told her not to. She screamed for us to stop, even when he wouldn’t.
I hated him for that. I still do. He could have stopped it at any time, but he made me keep going, even when I was shaking, my eyes watering and my stomach clenching with revulsion. He made me disfigure him, make him ugly, rather than letting us have his sister. That’s how much he loved her.
And she agreed to be our slave so we would stop. That’s how much she loved him.
He didn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve anything. I wish I’d burned his entire body, until it was all ugly and no one ever wanted to fuck him again.
After a while, the door opens and Baron comes through with his monster, now naked and leaking fluid from a few more places. He always called Mabel that. I wonder if he’d have done the same to her if he could.
But no. Baron admires beauty in a woman. He wouldn’t make Mabel ugly. He wouldn’t debase her that way because he respects her name, her status, everything she stood for in Faulkner, even as he tried to destroy it. Mabel was a psychological experiment, like Gloria but more personal. And even then, he was more careful with Mabel because she was more valuable than Lo. She was valuable to society, and therefore to Baron.
This girl is worthless to society, and worthless to Baron except as a way to practice, to hone his craft, his depravity, his will.
“Go clean up,” he tells Jane, who is huddled and shivering and working her jaw open and shut. She slogs off to the bathroom, and Baron turns to me.
“Aren’t you afraid she’ll go out the window?” I ask.
He chuckles. “No. I told her I’d fuck her with a saw next time she tried to run.”
“She ran away?” I ask, surprised.
“She tried a few times at first, but she learned quickly that I always follow through on my punishments,” he says. “The last major infraction was when she smarted off, so I broke her jaw with a pear of anguish. I did a good job setting it. It seems to be healed up perfectly.”
“What’s your plan for her?” I ask carefully.
“I figure I’ll keep her around until something goes wrong and she doesn’t make it. I’d really like to open up her head and do some things in her brain, but I haven’t gotten further than drilling a hole in her skull once. And electrodes, of course. Those are interesting.”
“No, I mean, when we go get Mabel,” I ask. “You’re going to bring her back, and we’re all going to live here with Jane in the basement?”
“I don’t see why not,” he says. “Jane is a specimen, not a girlfriend.”
“But you fucked her,” I point out.
“I have needs like anyone,” he says. “Mabel is rational. She’ll understand.”
“I don’t know about that,” I mutter. Even rational people get jealous. And if we want Mabel, we have to offer her more than a house she could easily afford for herself, two men she hates, and a crazy side chick that one of them is probably still fucking, judging by the noises I heard downstairs.
“You underestimate Mabel,” Baron says, not sounding at all concerned as he goes to the stove. “You have to open the cans, dumbass. You’re lucky they didn’t explode. And you put them in a pan to heat them up, or a bowl in the microwave.”
“I didn’t know,” I protest. “I’ve never cooked anything before. I’m not gay.”
Baron takes the cans off with an oven mitt and proceeds to puncture a hole and let the steam out, then open them with an instrument that looks like it’s from the 1800s before dumping them into three bowls.
“Damn. Cooking’s a lot of work,” I say, searching for a spoon. “How’d you learn all this?”
“To work a can opener?” he asks, holding up the thing he used and giving me a look.
“I’m not stupid,” I say. “I’ve heard of a can opener. I’ve just never had to use one, so how would I know what it looked like?”
Baron just shakes his head and hands me a bowl. I sit down, and he sits opposite me, and a minute later, Jane walks in. She’s clean now, which makes her about a million times less hideous, but I still wouldn’t fuck her. She looks one skipped meal away from death, and I was never really into the whole anorexia thing girls did in high school. Plus, she shaved her head while she was in there, so all that’s left of her hair is a half inch of fuzz, which makes her look kinda dykey.
“Jane, sit,” Baron says, in exactly the voice people use for their dogs. He kicks out a chair, and she pauses before approaching warily and slipping into the chair.
“Should I get dressed, Master?” she whispers to her bowl.
“No,” Baron says. “You can eat like that.”
“Master?” I ask, giving my brother a questioning look.
“That’s what I am to her,” he says. “Her owner, her ruler, her god. I give her life, and I’ll take it away when I’m ready.”
“Can I eat, Master?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “You can watch us eat. When we’re done, if we don’t want seconds, you can eat what’s left.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Isn’t she good?” he asks, taking a bite of soup.
I’ve lost my appetite, and I start to push my bowl away, but I know my brother. He won’t say we’re done until we’ve both eaten our fill. So I slurp down my bowlful fast enough to burn the fuck out of my mouth. I want to leave half of it for Jane over there, who’s obviously starving to death, but Baron would call me on it and probably dump it down the drain rather than let me show her mercy. Mercy is weakness in his eyes.
When I’m done with my bowl, Baron’s only finished half of his. He’s talking to me like everything is normal, like we’re not dining with A Nightmare Before Christmas .
I must be answering adequately, because he doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss. My knee is bouncing under the table, and I want to tell him to hurry up because I don’t want to watch this chick keel over while she waits patiently, her head bowed, her scrawny little tits barely more than nipples, a bandage over the gruesome wound on her chest.
Baron finally finishes, and I let out a sigh of relief, but then he hooks his finger into the top of her bowl and drags it over. “Want more?” he asks me.
I shake my head no.
A fat tear rolls down Jane’s cheek, but she doesn’t move, not even to wipe it away. Baron stirs his spoon slowly around the bowl. “This is Jane’s favorite kind,” he says. “Chicken and wild rice. Isn’t it, little bird?”
“Yes, Master.”
Her shoulders shake slightly, and tears drip onto her lap, but she doesn’t lift her head.
“It’s not bad,” Baron says to me. “You sure you don’t want some?”
“I’m sure,” I say, trying not to snap at him, or lunge across the table for the food. I don’t know how Jane controls herself. If I were her, I would have bitten his hand when he reached for it. But then, it’s probably not worth having another tooth pulled out with pliers.
I shudder. I know better than to think humans are good at heart, but you don’t really know what someone is capable of behind closed doors, when no one is watching. When there’s no rules, no consequences, no accountability. Maybe I’d do the same thing. Dig deep enough, and we’re all monsters.
I watch Jane watch Baron slowly make his way through the first quarter of her food, then the next, then the next.
“You gotta leave her something,” I say at last, sure he’s going to make her watch him eat the entire bowl and leave her nothing. I don’t know how she can stay still, crying her silent tears. I already ate, and I can’t help myself. “She’s going to fall over dead when she tries to get up from the table.”
“You’d be surprised,” Baron says, taking a few more bites. At last, he pushes it across to her with less than an inch of brothy stuff left in the bottom.
She pounces, snatching it up and lifting it to her mouth, tipping it back with both hands and sucking it down so fast it’s gone in an instant.
“And that’s why you can’t eat with us,” Baron says with disgust. “Animal.”
She nods, chewing frantically.
“Spit it out,” he commands. “On the table.”
She stops chewing and stares at him, a drop of broth clinging to her lip, and something about her strikes me as familiar suddenly, though I don’t know why. Obviously I’ve never met her, but the deer-in-the-headlights expression is one I’ve seen before. It must have been in a movie.
Baron taps the table, and slowly, she leans forward and lets a stream of soup run from her mouth onto the table. He laughs. “Good little birdie. Now suck it up.”
She starts hoovering it up with her lips like it’s no different from a spoon.
“See, she’s an animal,” he says to me. “A pig more than a bird, but she had colored hair when I picked her up, and she wouldn’t tell me her name, so I gave her a nickname. I cut all the dye off though, so now she’s just my little birdie. Isn’t that right, Jane?”
He reaches over and tousles her buzzed hair, and she freezes, like she’s waiting for another command. Instead, he grabs her head and pushes it down, rubbing her face in what’s left of the soup on the table. When he releases her, she sits up, blinking broth off her eyelashes.
Baron pushes his chair back. “I’m going to fuck her one more time and put her to bed. Want to join now that she’s cleaned up? Her pussy’s a little fucked up—I gave her an episiotomy when she tried take me by surprise and knock me out one time, and I tore her open a couple other times when I stuck stuff in there, but I always sew her back up afterwards. If you don’t look at it, it still feels the same.”
“I’m good,” I say. “I’ll wait for Mabel.”
He shrugs. “Your loss. If you’re horny, it’ll get the job done. Mabel won’t know the difference.”
He pulls Jane onto his lap, and I put the bowls in the sink. I don’t even try to wash them after the cooking fiasco. I’d probably burn the house down.
While Baron’s busy, I take the keys and make a beer run. When I get back, the kitchen is clean, and there’s no sign of Jane. I was hoping to sneak her a can of soup, but Baron’s working on his laptop at the table. I’ll bring her some later. For now, I set down my twelve pack and crack my first beer of the night, opening my throat and letting the familiar bite of hops wash down the bitter taste of the evening in one long rush. When I finish, I open the next bottle.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” Baron says, the light from his screen reflected in his glasses as he leans over the computer. He looks so normal, sounds so normal, I can almost believe I imagined Jane. Maybe, if I went down in the basement right now, it would be clean and bright, with stainless steel trays of shimmering pearls drying under fluorescent lights.
“What if Mabel won’t come back with us right away?” I ask. “How long before you have to get back to feed your… Bird?”
Baron leans back and gives a rueful smile. “It must look bad to you.”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“Do you think I went too far?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I could never find the limit.”
“Then you understand.”
“She’ll die if you leave her here without food for very much longer,” I say. “You can only live so long on soda. Plus, we don’t know how long we’ll be gone. What if it smells bad, and the neighbors call the cops, and they come find a dead body?”
“No windows,” Baron points out. “It won’t smell bad outside.”
“You think Mabel wants to come home to a crime scene?” I ask. “What if it spooks her into running again?”
“I can’t let Jane go,” Baron says. “She’ll go to the cops. Even if they don’t believe half of what she says, they’ll see how cut up she is, and they’ll check out her story.”
“I’m not saying you should let her go,” I say. “Though she’s so scared of you, she probably won’t go to the cops if you threaten her.”
“Then what are you saying I should do with her?” Baron asks, frowning at me.
I crack open another beer, hoping if I drink enough, it will drown the rustling sounds from the basement, whether real or imagined. “I’m saying we take her with us.”