Page 30 of Unlikable

It’s him.

Junior R.

He is illuminated by the moon that has emerged behind the clouds. The blizzard subsides as if he planned it that way. As if he wanted me to see his face this time. Even if I hadn’t seen his face, I would still have recognised him by his constitution: menacing, tall, lean. His blond hair looks almost white but stuck together with blood.

And his eye…One eye is turned away and stares sideways, as if he can keep an eye on everything that way.

He is terrifying.

And suddenly I realise I know him. From long, long ago. I’m just not sure from where exactly.

“We meet again,” he begins liltingly.

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. I am too bewildered. Too anxious.

“How’s your friend? The guy who drank your drink?”

I can do nothing but stare at him.

Junior R moves slowly. He almost seems to be floating. “He’s still alive, isn’t he? You must be happy.” Still not responding, I see his mouth depart into a thin line. Then he turns and walks towards Cecile, retrieving something shiny from under his cloak.

“No!” I cry out and take a step forward, my hand outstretched desperately.

Junior R comes to an abrupt halt and turns to me, grinning. His long cloak flutters around him. “You’ve found your voice.”

Cecile continues crying silently and starts uttering words that are no longer intelligible. I feel so immensely helpless.

“What do you want from her?” I ask him with all the courage I can still muster.

He chuckles. “From her?” He looks at Cecile with disgust on his face. “From her nothing anymore. She can’t be trusted. She doesn’t keep her promises.” He exchanges the knife in his hands for a smaller object. A hypodermic needle. Then he bends over Cecile and holds the needle above her throat. “But I do, little one. Despite your betrayal, I will deliver you. Isn’t that kind of me?”

Cecile starts crying even harder and floundering like a fish on dry land. “Please,” she begs him. “Do it.”

Junior R brings the needle down, but before he can pierce her skin, I run towards him and jump on him. I don’t know what possesses me, but I do know that I would do anything to keep Cecile out of his clutches. We fall to the ground. My head hits his. He moans, I groan. He grabs at my hair, I grab at his throat.

“Why are you doing this?” I shout in his ear as loud as I can. “Answer me!”

My fear of Junior R has not disappeared; it has only increased, but it is currently overpowered by anger.

“Why not?” he shouts back. “Why does everyone always want me to make a statement?”

I bring my head back and bang my forehead as hard as I can against his again. As he still holds my hair, I feel hair being pulled out of my skull.

“You stay away from her!” I shout through my pain. “You don’t touch her with a finger!”

Suddenly, I feel something sharp prick my neck, followed by a vicious pain invading my veins.

I roll off him as if stunned and land with my back in the snow. My hands cramp, my lips go dry.

Junior R scrambles upright and takes a few staggering steps backwards. I keep following him with my eyes, but I am too paralysed to take action.

“What did you…”

“ Unlikable .” He almost spits out the word and throws the hypodermic needle into the snow behind him. “I give the people I know loathe me my revenge. I give them the feeling they give me: humiliation.”

I groan.

“All my life I’ve been looked at like I’m a monster.” He points to his eye. “Because of this.”

My gaze is drawn to his lazy eye, and for a moment I feel a surge of pity, but it soon disappears when I remember what he has done, what he is capable of.

“People find it strange that I take lives, but don’t dwell on the fact that this is their own fault,” he continues, his voice calm again. “I take the eyes of my victims, so they have to stare at me forever. Have to look at my face, knowing that I am the one they will see forever. Begging, they came to me after I made them as hideous as they always saw me: a horror.”

The skin around my body begins to contract. I stare at my hands, as far as I can. My vision deteriorates, and when I vaguely perceive that my hands are beginning to wrinkle, a pained sound crosses my lips. It sounds hoarse, old.

“This time you will die, Eleonora Prime.” I watch him kneel down beside me and bend over me. “This time you won’t get off so easily. The drug has been strengthened. The bloodline has been shortened to just me.”

I wonder if the blurred outline of his face is the last thing I am going to see.

“Your brother and you used to look at me like that too, you know?”

And suddenly I am no longer in this maze, but in Aunt Colette’s. I see Everett running ahead of me, and I shout for him to slow down. We are young, very young. Children.

Running behind us is Nicholas, the son of our aunt, mother’s elder sister. I am afraid of him. Not because he has a lazy eye, but because I am afraid he will catch me and I will lose the game.

“Yes…” He brings his fingers to my face and starts stroking my cheek. “Even back then.”

“You’re wrong,” I say gratingly. I swallow and shudder under his touch. “I was never disgusted by you.”

“Don’t lie.”

“You whispered it to yourself. Everett and I cared for you.”

Junior R, Nicholas Huxley, the cousin whom I have been told died of influenza at a young age, begins to tremble. “It doesn’t matter anymore. This is my last move, and then I am done. It is time for Frankenstein’s monster to surrender.”

I feel my neck hairs begin to stand up on hearing the title of the book.

“By the looks of it, you’re familiar with that story.” He smiles without using his eyes. “The lovely Cecile traded it in for that sweet Jane Austen book. I thought it might be polite if I announced myself.”

He really is insane.

“You could have known I was here.” Nicholas breathes a sigh. “The night I stretched my legs and went to explore my surroundings, you looked straight at me.”

I get even colder than I already am thinking back to the evening on the balcony when I thought I saw someone standing at the entrance to the maze. It was him.

Nicholas’s grin widens as I am putting the puzzle pieces together. Behind him, above the hedges of the maze, a soft light looms in the darkness. The light flickers.

Someone is coming.

My first impulse is to scream, but I realise that if I do that, my chances of survival diminish. Nicholas is too unpredictable. I need to keep him talking so that whoever is hopefully looking for me has time to approach him from behind.

Above us, Cecile starts moaning again. I feel my heart break into a thousand pieces at hearing that sound. My sweet, innocent friend. How scared must she be? How much more pain can she endure?

Nicholas seems to hear it too because he gets up and turns back to her, giving me a better view of the ever-approaching light. I hope with all my heart that the person in the maze will not call my name.

“I’m sorry, dear Cecile,” I hear Nicholas whisper sweetly. I turn my head and watch him bend over her. His hands caress her face. “I have given the last dose to Eleonora. You will die painfully, and it is her fault.”

Cecile moans.

“But that’s what you’re used to, right? Serving Miss Prime. Miss Prime will always come first.”

“That…” Cecile’s high-pitched voice sounds hoarse. “I’d love to do that.”

Tears roll down my face on hearing those words. It is so tempting to give up, to just lie back and wait to see what will happen. I am so tired, and I am so broken.

But I would never forgive myself for that. Cecile is lying here dying, all thanks to me. If she hadn’t been my lady’s maid, she wouldn’t be lying here now. If she hadn’t been my friend, she’d still have her eyes. If she had loved me a little less and done what Junior R had asked of her, then…

There is absolutely no time for this, Eleonora. Cecile has always been there for you. Now it’s your turn.

I close my eyes and try to sort things out. I need to distract Nicholas, keep him away from Cecile and let him concentrate on me. That’s how I can stretch time. It’s the least I can do.

“Why were we told you were dead?” I ask Nicholas.

Nicholas turns to me and blinks his eyes a few times. His hand remains hovering in the air above Cecile. “Because my “mother” was disgusted with me and wanted me out of the way,” he then says. The expression on his face is hard and indifferent.

“She would never do that. Aunt Colette had a heart of gold.”

“You speak of her in the past tense. Is she finally dead?” My silence confirms his suspicion. “About time.” Nicholas walks away from Cecile and starts circling the fountain, like a hyena, playing with his prey. “No, she didn’t have a heart of gold,” he says. “She was afraid of me. In her eyes, I was strange. She locked me in my wardrobe so many times because she wanted to punish me. Because she was afraid of other people’s opinions if they saw me. When she got the chance to send me to an orphanage, she grabbed it without any hesitation.”

“That doesn’t sound like Aunt Colette.”

He laughs out loud, mockingly. “You know what’s even more bizarre?” He stops walking for a moment and seeks my gaze. I try my hardest to keep looking at him. “She wasn’t even my mother. She was also my aunt Colette.” He must see the confusion on my face because he starts walking again and says, “My real mother was Gemma Jones, Mary and Colette’s sister. Your mother’s sister.”

The world around me blurs upon hearing those words. It can’t be. Mother would have told me that Mrs Jones was her sister. Why would she lie about that?

“Hurts, doesn’t it? Being lied to.” Nicholas snaps his fingers. “Do you want to know what it’s like?” He doesn’t even give me a chance to answer that. “Your father first impregnated my mother even though he was already engaged to Mary. A disgrace and Mary was devastated, but she couldn’t risk losing her status, after all, she had nothing. When I was born, all sorts of things seemed to go wrong. My umbilical cord was tied around my neck, and I came into the world with a disfigured face.”

He is silent for a moment. “Your father didn’t even love my mother. His love for Mary was too great. After seeing his devil child, he decided to distance himself from both my mother and me altogether. Mother had nothing left. She felt I was the reason everything had broken down. She took me to Aunt Colette, who would take care of me. Not because Aunt Colette felt like it, but because her heart was so big and she felt responsible for her sisters.”

Nicholas stares at his feet in the snow as he tells his story. I can do nothing but listen in bewilderment. The shock is so great that I can hardly believe it, but what reason could he have for making all this up?

Behind him, at one of the entrances to the courtyard, looms the light I saw earlier. The person carrying the torch immediately extinguishes it when he realises what is happening in front of him. I can just see Everett tucking the torch into the snow and then pushing Felix behind him.

Hope fills my heart. I sob with relief, trying to push myself up, but I am too weak. My body won’t cooperate.

“You don’t have to cry over me,” Nicholas snarls. “That doesn’t change the situation.”

My eyes shoot to Everett and Felix, who are hiding in the darkness. I can no longer see them, but I know they are there. Why aren’t they doing anything?

“Your mother never told you this, did she?” Nicholas asks, starting another lap around the fountain. “Why should she? She hated Gemma for what she had done to her. Also, who gets it into their head to make a baby with their sister’s fiancé? Unthinkable. A disgrace.” He snorts. “But Philip Prime couldn’t bear to send Gemma away. She was allowed to stay, under the condition that she distance herself from the family and serve the Primes. Mary did not regard her as her sister from that day either.”

“How…how do you know all this?”

“Colette kept a diary,” he explained. “In your presence she played the sweet aunt, but on paper she was Kent’s gossipmonger. Whenever she left me home alone again, I would read the diary hoping to find out more about my real mother. I missed her. I wanted to understand why she had left me.”

“Then you know the reason, right? Why she left you. Then how can you still be angry with her?” I feel my heart pounding in my throat, my eyes constantly glancing over to where Felix and Everett are standing. Do something!

“Regardless of the situation,” Nicholas murmurs. “A mother should never abandon her child.”

I look at him at those last words and feel my heart breaking again. This time for him. What he has done cannot be justified in a hundred years. He is a terrible person who belongs behind bars. Yet, under this mask of his and apart from his actions, he is simply a child who has been deeply hurt. A child who has had no chance at an honest life.

And then it dawns on me who Nicholas Huxley really is. A child of my father. A Prime. My…

Junior R is my brother .

“How can you do this to me?” My voice breaks. “You are my…”

Nicholas remains standing where he is, with his back to Felix and Everett. He looks down at me and gives me a faint smile. “I feel nothing, Eleonora,” he says gloomily, and for the first time I believe he is not playing this gloom. “You had the dumb misfortune of ending up in my path. There is no reason. I just…I chose you. When my remedy didn’t work on you, I was furious and wanted to find out what caused that. You became my new target.” He laughs humourlessly. “And I always want to achieve my goal.”

Before I can give an answer and before Nicholas can say any more, Felix pops up behind him. He has the bow of my violin in both hands and throws it over Nicholas’s head, pressing it against his neck. Nicholas immediately grabs at his throat.

Felix pulls even harder on the bow, and I watch a thick red streak appear in Nicholas’s skin. Nicholas gasps for air, and Felix growls. His hands tremble from the force he puts on them.

Everett appears in my field of vision; he walks over to Cecile and lifts her out of the fountain. He lets out a cry of horror when he sees her mutilated face. Once he has placed Cecile on the floor beside me, he rushes over to Felix to help him.

Cecile starts to hyperventilate. I slide a little towards her, still unable to get up and put my hand on hers. “I’m here,” I whisper between my tears. “I’ve got you.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says softly. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I squeeze her hand and press a kiss to her temple. I try my best not to look at her face because as much as I want to reassure her, the image of Cecile without eyes terrifies me.

Looking to the side, I see Everett clamp his arms around Nicholas’s legs and pull him into the snow. “This is for Felicity!” he shouts. With a roar, Nicholas lands next to Cecile, causing the bow to detach from his throat. He takes a rasping breath and starts cursing.

Felix throws the bow aside and crawls onto Nicholas, then starts pounding on him. “How did you get it into your sick head!?”

Between blows, Nicholas starts laughing. The sound gives me goosebumps. I try to get back on my feet, but I only seem to get weaker.

Beside me, I watch Cecile work herself up. She turns onto her stomach, leans on her elbows and hastily makes her way towards Nicholas with her hands.

I get terrified. “Cecile, don’t go that way!”

“This is the right way, milady,” she exclaims with difficulty, and as her hands grip Nicholas’s hair, she gets down on her knees and lets out a cry.

Everett and Felix pin Nicholas down and looked at her, startled.

Cecile feels with her hands until she has placed them on Nicholas’s face.

“Get off me!” Nicholas roars. “I’ll kill you!”

Cecile cries, but a smile breaks through on her lovely face as she brings her thumbs to his eyes. Then she bends her head over him. “I’m the last thing you’re ever going to see, Junior R.”

Nicholas becomes deathly silent. He seems to realise he has no way out as he starts begging Cecile to let him go.

I watch wearily as Cecile puts all her body weight on her thumbs. She presses on his eyes, crying out. Her body trembles.

Nicholas starts to flounder, but Felix and Jonathan keep him pinned to the ground. They both look away from the horror unfolding before them. I, too, turn my face away. It takes a long time. Cecile groans, Nicholas’s scream fill the air, and I can’t think of a more grim sound to match his scream.

At Cecile’s last cry, an ominous “plop” follows. My curiosity manages to overpower me, and when I turn around to see what has happened, I see Cecile drilling her thumbs into Nicholas’s skull. If that image is not terrible enough, drops of blood splash down my face, into my mouth.

I almost have to gag when I taste Nicholas’s blood.

“My goodness,” I hear Felix whisper. He and Everett look stiffly at Cecile and the now silent Nicholas.

For a while, we hear nothing but the blowing of the wind, the rustling of leaves in the maze and Cecile’s panting.

Then she falls over. The last I see of her are two gaping holes staring blankly at me. Where once sat her cute green eyes.

“Cecile!” I exclaim hysterically. I want to go to her, but despite feeling strangely better, I can’t.

I watch Everett and Felix crawl off the body and kneel beside Cecile. Everett takes her head on his lap.

Cecile muses something and manages to put a forlorn smile on her face. She closes her eyelids and takes a few sharp breaths.

“Cecile…” I desperately repeat her name.

“I love you, Miss Prime,” she says then, and I know she would give anything to say those words to me. I can just feel it. “You are…” She swallows. “You are my best friend, Eleonora.”

I call out. “You are mine too, Cecile.”

I do not know exactly how long it takes for Cecile to finally die; I have lost all sense of time. I only know that when I no longer hear her rasping breathing and her chest rises and falls for one last time, she has found peace.

I close my eyes and swallow my sad cries. Only my tears roll silently down my cheeks. It feels like my heart is being pulled apart very slowly. Piece by piece.

Felix crawls over to me and takes my head on his lap. He presses me against him as if his life depended on it. “I was so scared.”

When I open my eyes and stare into his, I feel relief. A feeling of coming home. “I want to get out of here,” I mutter. “I want to go home.”

“We’re going to,” he promises.

“To Canterbury,” I sob softly. I close my eyes again and think back to our beautiful estate. To my room, the safe environment I grew up in.

Though I know my life will never be the same after tonight.

Felix remains silent for a moment, as if he doesn’t know what to say. Then he gently tries to help me upright. “Come,” he encourages me.

I want to cooperate, but I collapse in pain. The drug Nicholas gave me still seems to be doing its job.

“What should I do?” Felix asks desperately. “Tell me what to do.”

“Sister,” Jonathan’s voice sounds far away. “Don’t you dare, Eleonora.”

“I can’t anymore…” I mutter.

“Everett,” Felix says imperatively. “Help me.”

As Jonathan and Everett argue with each other and try to keep me awake, I wander off. In my mind’s eye, I see my mother before me. She extends her arms to me, like an invitation. I didn’t know I would ever feel so happy again. I want to stretch out my arms to her, sniff her scent, climb into her embrace like the little girl I was when she died. The light she had brought with her, she still carries with her.

Then she takes a step back. She looks at me piercingly and shakes her head.

What is it? Why don’t you want to take me with you?

She touches the side of her face with one hand.

I do the same.

And I feel blood.

But it’s not my blood. There is no wound.

Mother disappears, and I open my eyes. Felix is shouting at me, desperate.

“Say something!” he shouts at me. “Eleonora!”

“Blood…” I muse and bring my fingers to my face, as I did in my mind. When I retrieve them, I see the liquid on my fingers.

Felix shudders. “Is that…yours?”

“No,” I say soundlessly and turn my face to Nicholas’s body. I see the havoc Cecile has caused there and feel myself getting nauseous as I realise what I have to do.

“The remedy has been strengthened. The bloodline has been shortened to just me.”

“Take me to Nicholas,” I say softly.

“What?” Felix’s shoulders jerk.

“Do it.”