Three Times a Lady

Chapter 4

Claire Bishop moaned groggily as the date-rape drug she’d been given wore off and she came to, but her moans sure as hell weren’t coming from sexual anticipation this time. Not even close. After all, it was pretty hard to feel horny when you were tied spread-eagle and standing up, barefoot on a cold metal floor in the middle of a walk-in freezer with a boy you’d just met half an hour ago behind a dumpster at McDonald’s. Especially not when the boy you’d just met half an hour ago behind a dumpster at McDonald’s was holding a meat cleaver in his right hand, wearing a dress and smiling at you like a maniac while the two of you were surrounded by huge chunks of bloody red meat that hung from sharp steel hooks positioned all around the room.

‘You’re going to be up there pretty soon too, you know,’ the boy said, gesturing idly to one of the empty steel hooks with the sharp silver cleaver in his hand. ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you to never take rides from strangers, Claire? You really should be a lot more careful in the future, my dear. Not that you have much of a future left any more, I’m afraid. At least, not one that extends much past the next ten minutes or so.’

The boy paused and corrected himself. A sardonic smile crossed his blood-red lips. ‘Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. I suppose you have a future when you get to heaven. Or to hell. To tell you the truth, Claire, I’m not quite sure which one you’re heading for at this point. But I’ll bet you have a pretty good idea of the answer to that question, don’t you?’

Claire’s breath hitched in her throat as the boy leaned down and adjusted the hem of his designer dress, affording her a clear view of the false breasts tucked away inside a delicate black-satin bra, small lace bow positioned in the middle. Lifting up his stare to meet hers, he froze her in his icy gaze. ‘So which one’s it going to be, Claire? Chilling out with God for eternity or sweating your ass off in the ninth circle of hell with Satan? Which one of those two fates do you think you deserve?’

When Claire didn’t immediately answer him (mostly because she lacked the requisite breath for it) the boy looked down at the floor mournfully, as though the responsibility that had fallen squarely upon his slender shoulders was almost too much to bear. Shaking his head sadly, he said, ‘For now, I suppose I’ll have to be your god and your devil. Which one do you think it should be, though? To be perfectly honest with you, I’m a little bit stumped on this one and I could really use your input. I can either have horns and a pitchfork or I can have a long white beard. Totally up to you at this point.’

He paused again and looked down at the wickedly sharp cleaver in his hand, shifting the thick black handle back and forth in his palm and studying the glinting edge. ‘Seems to me that I already have the pitchfork handy, though.’

Claire Bishop finally screamed then – screamed as loudly as she possibly could – and she didn’t stop screaming for thirty solid seconds, until her throat had been rubbed as raw as the beef all around them. Not that it did her any good. The walk-in freezer was like a soundproof booth.

The boy watched her silently until she’d finished. Then he laughed disgustedly. ‘Just shut up, Claire. Just shut the f*ck up or I’ll chop off your disgusting little tongue for you with this handy pitchfork of mine. Nobody’s going to hear you anyway. I’ve made damn sure of that.’

Claire tried her best to take in a deep breath for a second round of screaming but couldn’t manage it. It felt like a thousand-pound weight was pressing down hard on her chest, strangling her lungs into submission and making it impossible to get enough oxygen into her system. Worse, what little breath she did manage was painfully cold; hurt her insides; froze them together.

‘But why?’ she finally sobbed as the drug-induced fog in her brain cleared and the first tears of horror began to leak out of her big blue eyes, streaking her heavy mascara in thick rivers of dirty water on her smooth cheeks. Saltwater droplets slid down her face before falling to the metal floor at her feet like the first raindrops of an impending storm dotting a sidewalk. ‘Why me? I didn’t do anything to you. I don’t deserve this. I was nice to you.’

The boy shook his head and waved the cleaver distractedly in the air, like an irritated professor who’d just been asked a very inconvenient question from an ignorant student that seemed to poke holes in a theory upon which he’d just taken great pains to expound. Light from the network of noisy fluorescent bulbs overhead bounced off the cleaver and stabbed Claire’s brain through her glistening eyeballs.

‘Did you just ask me why?’ he asked incredulously. ‘You actually have the nerve to ask me something like that after everything I’ve done for you, you ungrateful little brat? And if you think that being nice to me has anything to do with this, then you’re even stupider than you look.’

He paused and shook his head. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, Claire. Judging from the look of you, that’s quite the feat to accomplish. Quite the feat to accomplish, indeed.’

Claire sobbed and pulled hard against the thin ropes that were biting deep into her wrists and ankles like poisonous snakes, at the same time looking around frantically for any possible avenue of escape. There was none. The only way in was the same way out and the boy was blocking it. All she could do now was wriggle around like a worm that had been impaled on a sharp steel fishing hook. But doing that only tightened the knots and cut off her circulation even more, turning her fingers and toes a deathly blue.

The boy pressed his lips together into a tight line while he watched her squirm. Then he shook his head again. ‘Well, since you insist, Claire, I guess I’ll tell you exactly why I’m doing this to you. I’m doing this to you because you’ve been a very naughty boy here today, that’s why I’m doing this to you. You’ve committed a great sin in the eyes of God and now you need to be punished for it. Tell me, son, are you ready for what you deserve? Are you ready for me? I know that you and your brother like it. Don’t pretend you don’t. I’ve seen the way that you two boys have been looking at me lately. Disgusting, foul little perverts. Don’t you know that little boys aren’t supposed to look at their mothers that way? It’s unholy.’

Claire Bishop stared in amazement at the figure standing before her. Not only was he wearing a dress, but jewellery and make-up too. Bright red lipstick covered his mouth. Rouge coloured in his cheeks. Expensive silver bracelets dangled from his delicate wrists. His fingernails had been painted the same dazzling shade as his lips.

And the kicker about the whole thing was that he actually looked good that way.

Claire sucked in a sharp breath through her nostrils, freezing all the tiny hairs lining the inside of her nose and catching the unmistakable scent of Chanel No. 5 floating softly on the cold air. Her tortured breaths materialized as puffy white clouds of swirling vapour in front of her face. ‘Why are you dressed like a woman?’ she breathed.

Without warning, the boy sprang forward and lifted the knife as an almost inhuman glitter twinkled in his sparkling emerald eyes. Claire jerked back in horror as he sliced deftly through a spaghetti-thin strap on her halter-top with a quick flick of his right wrist, exposing the top of her right breast.

An angry look flashed across his face. ‘I’m dressed like a woman because I am a woman, you f*cking idiot,’ he snarled. ‘Can’t you f*cking see that? I’m a woman and you’re a boy. What part of that equation don’t you understand? You’re almost nine years old, for Christ’s sake. Get your shit together already, why don’t you? I’m a patient woman and all, but you’re really starting to get on my nerves, boy. I swear to God, sometimes I can’t even see straight because of you.’

Claire Bishop closed her eyes as tightly as she could, tried to squeeze the eyelids right off her face, attempted desperately to transport her body to another place. Anyplace but here. Try as she might, though, her confused brain refused to even consider the possibility that this could be real. This was just a bad dream – a horrific nightmare – and pretty soon she’d soon wake up from it. If she closed her eyes as tightly as she could, maybe when she opened them up again everything would make sense and she’d be safe at home in her own bed. She didn’t even care if her mother’s boyfriend forced her to give him blowjobs every day for the next month. Anything was better than this.

But when Claire opened her eyes again she saw that she wasn’t back home in her bed. Far from it. She was still standing in a walk-in freezer with an insane boy she’d just met half an hour ago behind a dumpster at McDonald’s. An insane boy who was dressed up in women’s clothing, smelled of an expensive perfume made famous by Marilyn Monroe and who was now slicing through the other strap on her halter top.

The boy smiled and pulled down Claire’s destroyed shirt around her waist. Her nipples immediately hardened into painful diamond points as they made contact with the frigid air. No doubt a well-placed flick of a finger would have shattered them clean off into a million tiny pieces.

‘Nice tits, Claire,’ the boy said after a moment, running ran his gaze admiringly over her naked chest while wave after wave of painful goose flesh danced across her bare skin and stitched it up tight. ‘Real nice tits, as a matter of fact. Some of the best I’ve ever seen.’

The boy reached out his free hand and tested the firmness of her breasts, squeezing gently and lifting first the flesh of her right breast, and then her left. ‘Much better than I thought they’d be. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t think boys were supposed to have tits. What are you? Some kind of freak? Some kind of transsexual or something?’

Claire fought back the overpowering urge to vomit. Stomach acid crept up her throat and burned the thin lining of her esophagus. ‘I’m not a boy,’ she whimpered, swallowing back the acrid fluid she tasted in her mouth and finally reduced to acting her age now. ‘I’m a girl. You’re a boy.’

The boy sneered and lifted the hand that he was using to hold the meat cleaver, rubbing tear-streaked mascara gently from beneath her left eye with the pad of his thumb. As he did so, the cold metal of the flat side of the blade pressed softly against Claire’s cheek and left an impression that she knew she’d be able to feel for the rest of her life – however long or short that might turn out to be right now. ‘Well, now,’ the boy said. ‘I’m a boy, huh? I guess we’ll just see about that, now won’t we?’

Whirling around abruptly, the boy reared back his right arm and with all his might flung the cleaver into a side of beef ten feet away, a baseball pitcher dialing up the speed on his very best fastball. The fabric of his dress wrapped around his legs from the sudden motion. An audible whoosh concluded with the grotesque hacking sound of metal biting deep into flesh and bone. Then he lifted his dress over his head.

Claire widened her eyes in shock and horror.

The boy wasn’t wearing underwear, and there wasn’t anything between his legs, save for a mass of ugly scar tissue where his boy-parts should have been.

‘Do you see a penis here?’ the boy asked incredulously, lifting his hands high into the air and staring down hard between his thighs. ‘Do I look like a boy to you, Claire?’

Claire Bishop stopped crying then, much too stunned by the gruesome sight in front of her to feel anything but revulsion and pity. Despite her bizarre circumstances – despite the fact that this boy had kidnapped her and had her tied up half-naked in the middle of a downtown freezer – she actually felt sympathy for the pathetic figure standing before her. How could she not? Never before in her life had she witnessed anything even half as gruesome.

Claire lifted her burning stare to meet his. ‘What happened to you?’ she breathed. ‘Who did this to you?’

The boy dropped eye contact with Claire first. A look of sorrow crossed his down-turned face. ‘I did this to me, Claire,’ he said mournfully. ‘I did this to me because I was a disobedient little boy who didn’t listen to my mother. And I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to do it to you now, too. That’s just the way it has to be. Since I’ll never be a real man, I can’t let you be one either. Fair is fair, after all.’

Stepping forward again, the boy slid Claire’s shorts down her hips, all the way to her ankles. His sparkling green eyes narrowed into accusing slits when his gaze landed on the feminine triangle nestled between Claire’s trembling thighs.

He lifted his disbelieving stare and trapped Claire in his freezing emerald eyes once more. ‘What the f*ck’s this?’ he snapped. ‘Where’s your f*cking dick?’

Claire tried to answer him but couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. What in the f*ck could she say at this point? The boy was clearly insane, and all she could do now was pray. In her mind, the religious mantra she’d spent countless hours repeating in catechism class echoed over and over again:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths.

‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ the boy said after a long moment, dropping his stare between Claire’s thighs again and continuing to study her genitalia with great interest. ‘I guess you’re not a boy after all, huh? I guess you were telling me the truth.’

Shaking his head in confusion, the boy slid Claire’s shorts back up over her naked lower half before he turned away and teetered on his three-inch heels over to the side of beef into which he’d flung the cleaver a moment earlier. Working out the blade with a few hard back-and-forth tugs, he then walked back over to Claire and slipped the sharp metal through the thin ropes restraining her wrists and ankles. Then he put his dress back on and went over into the corner of the room.

He tossed Claire a brand-new T-shirt from a cardboard box full of them and kicked her socks and shoes over to her feet. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘Just get dressed and get the f*ck out of here. I need some time to think. This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.’

Claire did as she was told, hastily pulling the T-shirt over her head and balling up her socks in an effort to save time. Cramming her bare feet into her beat-up Keds, she was halfway out of the freezer when the boy suddenly sprang forward and yanked her backward by her hair, jerking forcefully enough to temporarily lift her newly re-sneakered feet off the slippery metal floor. The roots of her hair screamed as though they were on fire. More tears of pain and fear flooded into her eyes.

‘Wait just one goddamn minute, there,’ the boy said, still holding Claire backward by her hair and staring down hard into her eyes. ‘You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you? You can never tell.’

Claire looked up at the boy and shook her head the best she could in his viselike grip, too terrified to even whimper the wrong way, much less provide him with an incorrect answer. And it was the truth. Jaded as she was, Claire Bishop wasn’t the only one who life owed. Apparently, there were some fates in this life worse than death. Some fates in this life worse than living in a shitty third-floor walk-up with an uncaring mother and an alcoholic child molester who was constantly copping ‘accidental’ feels whenever your mother was away at work.

‘No, I’m not,’ Claire said; choking out the words around the jagged lump of fear lodged in her throat. ‘I’ll never tell anyone, I swear it.’

And Claire Bishop never did tell anybody – not even when she grew up and got married and had kids of her own. At that exact moment, she didn’t know she’d live to regret that decision one day. Regret it with her whole heart and mind and body and soul. Because the decision Claire made in the freezer that day would wind up costing more than half a dozen innocent people their lives.

Still – selfish as it sounded – at least she hadn’t been one of them.