Chapter Text
Part One.
She sat straight up, forehead mottled with a red smudge from where she had sleepily rested against the car window. The sign they just drove past cut through the lull in her head. The words burned as a sigil in her brain. Made up of gray and bleak and crumbling wood letters.
“Karen?”
But Karen, at the steering wheel, kept driving on as though nothing was the matter. She didn’t answer her, she didn’t even look her way. Rain pattered against the glass, the outside world was bleached and soggy as they drove on the lonely winding road of the country. It meandered over hills and between valleys of patchy grass and abandonment. The day was dark and gloomy as evening. It was not yet even mid-morning.
Over the next hill, a metal gate poked up, and advanced. The car idled to a stop before it. Black and barred, with flourishes of fleur-de-lis. Beyond its sharp points, in the distance, there lived a tall, black building, striking against the pale, deserted country-side sky. Sarah stared at the back of Karen’s bobbing head as she rolled down the window in five rough, arm-jerking motions. A man in a gray uniform stooped his head down from his little station to see inside the car.
“Business?” he said. He took a good look at them both. Karen, with her lank, tired hair, and Sarah, in the passenger seat, in the dress she’d been forced to put on, and a blanket slipping from her lap. He had a fluffy mustache that twitched.
Karen spoke crisply, though her bony fingers clenched white over the steering wheel. “Patient dropoff. I spoke to Mister Jones, he’s expecting us.”
“No!” Sarah scrambled for seatbelt. “Karen, you can’t! You can’t!”
The man hardly noticed her. He nodded, and then handed Karen a white paper slip. “You’ll return this to me on your way out.” He gestured toward the dark stain of the building beyond the gate. “Park wherever’s free.”
By then, Sarah had successfully unclicked her seatbelt and was flinging off the blanket from her lap, and grasping at the door handle, her heart painfully thundering in her throat. Locked. She yanked it again. Locked. She yanked and yanked. The rain and her panic drowned out and muffled the noise of the car. “Thank you,” Karen was saying to the man. And then the car was moving again.
“Sit back down, Sarah,” Karen said.
Her breathing was now quick, fast, and difficult. The building came closer and closer, loomed taller and taller, and the rain louder and louder. “How could you?” she grasped Karen’s sleeve. “How could you? Daddy would never forgive you! He’d hate you for this–”
Karen dragged her wrist back from Sarah’s grip. Her face had that pinched expression so typical of her. Her mouth and nose coming to a puckered little point, displeased. Yet, it was different that day, with pallid skin and dark under-eyes where she was usually so prim and proper. “You’ll see that this is what’s best for you.”
“How?” Sarah shrilled.
Karen shook her head a little too quickly, staring fixedly at the road ahead. It was shortening where Sarah wished it would lengthen. Ending while Sarah thumped about in her sudden panic.
Mouth dry, Sarah grabbed at the window lever and rolled it with her own painful jerking motions. Rain poured inside, soaking her hands and her face. She slammed against the door with her shoulder and it creaked, but it was all for nothing. They had arrived. Karen pulled into the building’s dingy parking lot, soggy from the rain. It was tall, old-fashioned. In the storm, it rose up like a beast. Turrets the tusks, and dark-paneled and arching windows the hundred eyes staring her down. A large front door, its gaping maw, had cobbled stairs for a tongue spilling out. Two men in white stood under the awning, waiting.
Sarah’s mouth was open, a red bud of fear. She sucked at the air around her as Karen parked, stopped the car, opened her door, stuck her umbrella out into the windy, musty world, and clicked it open.
With white and wide eyes, she tracked the men as they ambled down the steps, and she fumbled at her door with slick fingers as Karen slammed shut her own behind her. A few stray tears welled in her eyes and fell, but even with blurry vision, she lunged for the driver’s side door before Karen could get to hers.
With a grunt, Sarah tumbled out of the car, landing hard on her hands and knees. The wet gravelly asphalt scraped them hard, that feeling so like being a little kid on a playground, youthful clumsiness. But this was serious. Adult. For all the fear she felt, she knew she would never again feel like a child.
Her soft flat shoes were instantly soaked, her dress and her hair too. She scrambled to stand, glancing repeatedly behind her, blinking rapidly against the pouring rain, at Karen who stared at her with wide eyes and mouth, and at the men who advanced faster than before. Thunder cracked. A shrill scream sounded, but from where? Her heart was on the verge of an attack. She bolted. In the direction of the gate they had come from, back to the life only an hour before she had known.
Distantly, she heard the screeching of her name. And the sounds of louder, heavier footsteps and some deep bellow, from a man. But the rain whooshed in her ears and her face and she was practically running blind, teeth chattering so violently her head had begun to hurt.
She had barely left the parking lot when she was grabbed.
“No!” she screamed. “Let me go!”
It took both of the white-dressed men to subdue her, for she kicked and screamed and cried. They grabbed her by both arms and shoved her to her knees. She fought so hard that her knees scraped again. Torn up. Skin and blood all about. She didn’t know what she yelled, only that she did.
A heavy hit to her side had her stunned. She sobbed, recoiled. The breath of one man on the back of her soaked neck.
“Put her in the jacket,” she heard. A slam of thunder. She flinched. God was playing a bowling game, celebrating a strike while she was wrenched like a doll into a paralyzing position.
Her arms were yanked into place so that she couldn’t move. Her face was red and her entire body thrummed. The buckles behind her strung together. Head hung low, and hair dripping in wet ropes, she made out Karen’s shoes, then her legs in their prim panty-hose and skirt, her jacket, her face, all shadowed beneath the bright pink umbrella.
Sarah was yanked up to stand. She stumbled, but the hands of the men were heavy, and steady. The rain made it difficult to see but even through the sheets of chilling rain-storm that separated her and her step-mother, she saw the way Karen looked at her. Tight lines formed around her mouth and eyes, and her lips parted slightly, in shock, but then, as they locked eyes for that brief moment, there was a grim closing of her face, a determined setting of her brow.
Sarah screeched, loud and warbly, as if she really were insane, as she was picked up and flung over the shoulder of one of the men. He restrained her ankles with one large hand, fingertips digging into the delicate bones. She heaved on her empty stomach, but nothing came up. She tried to jerk and flail, but there was no use. She saw the white shoes and pants of the other man, upside down, and the moving of the pavement, and Karen’s canvas shoes, like hers, and felt the bobbing of herself as the shadow of the monster swallowed them whole. Her cries were tinny to her own ears, and the adrenaline born energy fading fast. A hand strayed up the back of her thigh. On the door, there hung a sign like the first one she’d seen, on that lonely winding. She read it upside down. Lennox Home for the Mentally Insane. She screwed her eyes shut. It was all a dream, it was all just a dream.
There was a metallic sound, and the rain faded away to a muffled roar. Into the belly of the beast. The large door creaked shut behind them. A drip drip of rainwater against the gray stone floor was all that remained of the storm. The paddings of footsteps. The stuffy-musty air and all her tears had her choking. The hand strayed again, this time, higher. She jerked as best she could, but he was stronger.
“Karen,” she moaned. “How could you?” Like a little bird caught. Only the moving floor received her words. Her stomach twisted. No one answered. Instead, movement paused. A moment passed and then there was a high-tuned noise loud enough to make her flinch. Then a screech of metal. A gate had slid open. They moved again, and on the other side, when the screech came again, Sarah just managed to catch Will Automatically Open for Fire, painted in red, bold, chipping letters against the slate, grimy gray of the gate.
They walked for a while and it was an eternity as they stopped and started and stopped and started. They stopped again. A swift rapping of knuckles against a door.
“Come in.” a voice muffled by a door said.
Then they were in a room. She was deposited onto her feet in one swift motion, but her knees collapsed underneath her and she dropped right to her knees. Pain radiated up her legs, stung at her skin and clanged up through her bones. She blinked hair and tears from her eyes. It was as if the storm was also inside, though it couldn’t be heard for how deep inside the building they now were, for how seeped with gray and sadness it was. An office surrounded her, stone-walled, with a large black desk in the center. It existed without windows, but a tinny yellow light dangled from the ceiling. Sarah coughed, a wet sort of thing. The cold rain had done her in. She coughed again.
She became aware of the new presence. The voice from behind the door. The sharp clack of leather shoes on the floor, the swoosh of finely pressed trousers. She looked up and up.
A man stood before her, and to her he was old, but really wasn’t very. Thirty-something or other, he was clean-cut and handsome. A mustache decorated his upper-lip but unlike that one of the guard at the gate, his was thin and carefully groomed. He had dark, gelled hair and heavy, serious eyebrows. He wore a suit of deep gray, and it maintained the expensive look of a shop-sheen of silk or satin.
She stared at him, mouth open, and wet and salivating full of fear. He observed her lengthily. Her pulse jumped as he reached for her. She cringed away but it didn’t stop him. He brushed wet hair out of her face. She felt the lingering of his fingertips on her face, but she had turned into her own shoulder, away as far as she could manage. One of the men in white grabbed her shoulder to stop her as she wobbled.
But then, the suited man dropped his arm easily and turned to Karen. He held out his hand and kissed her knuckles as she offered him hers. “Mrs. Williams, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name.”
“Likewise, Mr. Jones.” Her hands fluttered nervously back to her sides. “We had some trouble on the way in, as you can see.”
Mr. Jones glanced briefly at Sarah, at her dripping, clinging clothes and hair, her red, tear-stained face, and the grimy no-longer-white jacket that held her arms prisoner. “I can,” he said, looking back at Karen. “Don’t you worry. We’ll get her sorted. This will be good for her, you’ll see.”
Karen wrung her hands. “I sure hope so. I’ll say… I was just at my wit’s end… I didn’t know what else to do.”
Sarah stared now at the floor. Silent tears dripped down her cheeks, like the rain that still soaked her. “Karen–”
But Mr. Jones spoke before she could get any further. To the men in white, he said, “Go and get her situated while Mrs. Williams and I go over some paperwork. Put her in the input room for now. We’ll come see her in a bit.” He handed one of them a key, and then Sarah was yanked to her feet again and whirled away before she could so much as make a noise. She stumbled weakly between them both. Gray halls with gray doors and gray people passing by. More men in white, and then men in those gray collared uniforms, black belts with blobs of weapons on them. There were many turns, the dull yellow lights in the ceiling seeming to flicker. The deeper they walked, the darker was the world. They were in the intestines now. Would she be defecated whole, she wondered, or in torn up pieces, bloody and poisoned. Or would she be absorbed into these walls, never to leave them?
“I’m not crazy,” she said, to them or to herself, she didn’t know. They didn’t react. Only continued leading her through the corridors as confusing as a maze. She would know.
Eventually they reached another door which was unceremoniously opened and then slammed shut behind them. It was a small room, all gray stone walls and flooring, with a tiny little barred window set into the wall opposite the door. You could hardly see outside of it. There was a small bed on a metal frame. Open leather cuffs dangled from each of the four corners. A folded stack of drab clothes had been left on the bed’s thin coverlet. In the corner of the room, right out in the open, was a toilet and a sink.
The man who had carried her earlier, and touched her, left after saying something she didn’t hear. The other remained. He began undoing the straps of her hacket. One of the buckles caught her hair and she hissed, jerking away. It was musty, unaired inside this building, but she was cold. Her teeth continued chattering, audibly. Her arms fell free and she clutched them tight to her chest. She skittered away as soon as she could, back to the furthest wall for safety. The man saw the way she glanced at him.
“Behave,” he said, pointing to the bed. “Or I’ll tie you up. You won’t like that.”
She looked quickly away.
The door opened again and the groping man returned, holding a towel. He dropped it on the bed. “Dry off and change into these. Mr. Jones will bring your mother to say goodbye soon.”
Sarah’s chest constricted. “She’s not my mother.”
He raised a patchy eyebrow, but didn’t say anything except, “Change.”
They both exited the room, one after the other. It slammed shut behind them, resounding. A lock then clicked into place. Alone now, for the first time since that morning, hiding in her own bedroom, unaware of what would come only a mere few hours later. She drooped into the corner wall. As if all the energy had seeped from her, she slid down, down, down. She held onto herself, arms wrapping around her knees, and shoulders heaving with the force of her orphaned lungs.
The cold, harsh stone floor dug into the bones of her bottom, and the same of the wall into her spine. She was thinner than she used to be, thinner than she was not long ago, before everything had changed.
She cried, so hard.
It wasn’t long before the door opened again. The man with the patchy eyebrows. She looked up at him with bloodshot eyes. He crossed his arms. For one insane moment, she imagined herself running at him, dropping, and then sliding between his legs and making her grand escape. She had faced harsher odds in the past, hadn’t she? He seemed to know what she was thinking and dropped his arms, widened his stance. “Hey,” he said, “Change now, or I’ll do it for you.”
With that, he left, slamming the door shut and locking her in once again. She flinched. It was then that she noticed the small square window set into the door, a little taller than her eye level perhaps. He watched her through it and rapped on it as if to say, hurry it up.
Shaking like a mouse, she forced herself to get up. Shuffling over to the bed nervously, she glanced every few seconds at the window. He now faced away, his large white shoulder filling the square. Nose stuffy enough she had to breath through her mouth, she took the towel. Still crying, she fumbly patted dry her hair, and the exposed skin of her arms and legs. She kicked off her shoes and then her socks, wet toes curling into the frigid stone beneath her. Little piggies, as her dad would have once teased, appeared to her a sad purple-blue color like, she imagined, the bloated color of a corpse’s skin.
Swallowing convulsively, she grabbed the folded clothes and scooted all the way to the door. She flattened herself against it, just underneath the window (she was sure this was the only way to not be seen). It took her a while, her limbs feeling heavy and sloppy and weighed down by everything, but she dressed herself all the same. She did it in spurts, carefully, to make sure that no part of her was bare at any moment. Sliding on the new stockings while still wearing her dress, flinching at the feel of coarse fabric over torn knees. Pulling the new plain dress over her first, only to maneuver her arms and torso in such a way that she could slip off her own stiffly wet one from underneath. She dabbed her hair with the towel again. It had become a knotted mess. And try as she might, her skin, even now clothed in clean, dry fabric, felt damp to the touch. Cold and scratched up.
Her canvas sneakers were still wet but she slipped them on anyway, to protect her feet, for she hadn’t been given any new shoes. Once finished, she stood there in the middle of the room, arms wrapped around herself in a mockery of a hug. Her hair hung limp past her face. The shock came back to her all at once.
She sat hard down onto the center of the small bed. The metal frame creaked and squealed as if it were old termited wood. Her hands shook on her lap, the fingers and knuckles a bright red color and swollen-looking. She could feel the bones inside aching, as if she were old and arthritic, not young and innocent. Her palms smarted, red and indented from the gravel. Her mind raced and raced, but it only worked to confuse her and disorient her.
She hid her face in her hands. Tears stung them, slid past. She thought desperately for a way out. The room was so silent, only the sounds of her own breathing, her own heartbeat. Rain hit the window, but it was muffled, the window so thick and warped. She curled up on her side, knees into her chest, and the bed screamed again. She shut her eyes, for to look around herself would make it real.
She didn’t know how long went by before the door opened again. The small window into the outside world was still bleak and gray, and revealed nothing about the time. She sat up defensively when the door unclicked again and the suited man, Mr. Jones, walked in. Karen followed behind him in her nervous way. A man in white remained in the doorway, waiting.
Mr. Jones, with his dark eyes, looked at her and her new outfit. He stepped carefully over the wet clothes she’d left on the floor. “Take these away,” he told the man, who did just that.
The door closed behind him, and Sarah sat, hardly breathing, on the bed, looking up at these two adults as if they were large animals about to eat her, to tear her apart, as if her staying as still as she could would protect her from harm. It wouldn’t.
“Perfect,” Mr. Jones clapped his hands together and smiled. It appeared to her a slick, mean smile. “You’ll settle in nicely.”
He turned to Karen, who stood there, hands clasped carefully in front of her. “What do you think, Mrs. Williams?”
She took in the room, and then Sarah, who gazed at her widely, imploringly. They caught eyes for a split-second, before she looked quickly away. Then she jerked her chin in a stiff nod. “She will be well taken care of?” she asked.
“Incredibly well,” said Mr. Jones. He stepped closer to Sarah and clasped a hand over her shoulder. “We have a great success rate for our girls here. They live to be happy and healthy.”
Sarah cringed away. The words fell from her mouth. “Karen, please– I’m sorry. Please don’t leave me here. Please, please, please–” She tried to stand up but Mr. Jones’ hand on her shoulder stopped her. The man in white stepped forward, and Sarah cringed back.
She choked on her own tears. “I never meant for any of it to happen,” she cried. Karen didn’t look at her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It wasn’t my fault, you have to believe me!”
Mr. Jones patted her once on the shoulder before letting go. To Karen, he said, “This is common. It will take a while for her to accept her new life, but once she does, she will be all the better for it.”
“I don’t belong here!” Sarah shrieked. “I don’t, I don’t!” She stood up this time and tried to reach out for Karen. The man in white was quicker this time, grabbing her arm tightly. She tried to yank it from him, but his fingers bit painfully into her muscle.
But her stepmother took a sudden step back. She turned to Mr. Jones. “I should go,” she said quickly. She wouldn’t look at Sarah.
“Of course,” he said. He turned to Sarah. “Say goodbye to your step-mother.”
Sarah’s voice caught in her throat for a long moment. Then, smally, she tried, “How… how long do I have to be here for?”
Mr. Jones smiled that same smile, apparently reassuring. “As long as it takes,” he said. “Now are you going to say goodbye?”
The words wouldn’t come. She stared hopelessly at the floor, at the man, and at Karen.
“Please don’t leave me here,” she cried. “I’m not crazy. I’m not. What happened with Toby–”
Karen seemed to gather herself up, then. A hard look filled her eye, her mouth thinned out. “Goodbye, Sarah. I hope this helps you.”
She turned to leave. But Sarah was angry again, screaming. Frothing at the mouth, her face turned bright red. “No you don’t! You just want to get back at me, don’t you! You just want to hurt me! But it wasn’t my fault–!”
She tried to lunge at her, but the orderly’s grip on her arm just meant that she stumbled on her own feet. But by this time, Karen was already through the door, face firmly directed away, never looking back, and then Mr. Jones was following her. As they walked further and further away, Sarah felt her stomach drop to her feet. “I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate you!”
The man in white shoved her onto the bed and left her. The door shut in front of her with a terrible clang. The lock sliding into place was like a death knell. Now free from restraint, she threw herself at the door, slamming at it, pounding. She hit and scratched, until she was exhausted and limp. Crumbled to the floor, she murmured to herself, in a despairing, tragic voice, “I wish the goblins would come take me away. Right now.”
“Please,” she whispered.
And yet, the room remained silent, except for her soft breathing sobs, and the patter of rain on the thick barred window. She was on her own.
Mr. Jones returned late, with an orderly, to find a Sarah who was exhausted and dehydrated, all-cried out. He saw her curled up on the bed, barely reacting to his presence, and cocked his head. “It’ll be alright, princess. You’ll see.”
Sarah shuddered, and turned away as best she could.
He snapped his fingers and the orderly was picking her up and depositing her on her feet.
Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, Mr. Jones led her to the door. “Let’s go meet the other girls,” he said. “It’s much nicer with them than in this depressing room, hmm?”
She was nearly limp as he walked them out of the room. His arm dropped from her, but not before brushing back a piece of hair from her face. “No time to waste.”
With the orderly walking just behind her, she was forced to shuffled along after Mr. Jones like a sad little puppy. More gray stone halls. Scary, locked doors every so often had her tensing. “Mr. Jones–” she said, voice coming out scratchy and tired and very, very young.
“Ah,” he clasped his hand on her shoulder. “Call me Blue. I like to think you and I will be friends here. It makes for a much better… environment, I find. What do you say?”
It felt cottony on her tongue. “...Blue,” she tried.
“Thatta girl.” He continued walking. They turned a corner and walked through a large set of doors. It was an entirely different place. Wood-paneled walls and golden-lit sconces dotting them. It matched the outside, the old-fashioned sort of manor home. She felt that a monster might just be lurking in the bowels of this castle-asylum. She had been in a castle before, a real one – but had it been? – yet this one was much, much scarier.
In a small voice, she ventured, “... Blue?”
“Yes, princess?”
“I’m not really crazy,” she said. “I don’t belong here, honest. Karen… she made a mistake.”
He nodded in a perfunctory way. Then, “Sarah Williams,” he recited, as if straight from a file. “Age sixteen. Orphan. Believes she can see magical creatures. Believes magical creatures are the reason for her brother’s suspicious disappearance over a year ago when she was meant to be babysitting him.”
Sarah stumbled. He glanced back at her and the orderly pushed her along.
“Personally,” Blue said with a grandiose sort of shrug. “I don’t amuse myself with the reasons for why my girls are here, only that they are. If you want to believe in magical creatures, don’t let me stop you. You can discuss that with Dr. Gorski. She’ll want to see you soon, by the way.”
He waved his hand. “Regardless,” he said, “you are here, and you’re not going anywhere. So there’s really no use trying to convince me of anything otherwise, is there?”
Sarah felt any bit of her last dwindling hope shrivel right up in her chest. They approached a large arched door. They stopped in front of it. “But–”
“Ah ah.” He held up a finger. “What did I just say?”
Her mouth snapped shut, with a click of teeth. He pushed open the door, and Sarah was flooded with the sounds of voices and people and music. Blue ushered her in as she nervously eyed her new surroundings. It was a large room, with a tall ceiling. There weren’t any windows, but dim circular lights hung from the rafters. Tiny tables sat scattered about the place, this way and that, no pattern to it. At these tables and between these tables were clusters of young women and girls. A few glanced in their direction, but just as quickly turned back to what they were doing. Some sat in the chairs and ate, others perched on the table-tops and chatted. A sort of platform, really a stage, on the other side of the room, rose up. A few girls stood there along with a severe-looking older woman with dark hair who was gesturing to them as she spoke. One of the girls took a place at the center of the stage and the rest of them cleared off. A tinny, scratchy bit of music floated around from that direction. The girl began to move, to dance. She wore tights and a tightly fitted dark leotard. Her hair was tied simply in a tail at the base of her head.
Sarah frowned deeply at the sight.
Blue leaned in close. He pointed to the severe woman who stood by the large, bulbous gramophone and was nodding along with the beat of the dancing girl. “That’s Dr. Gorski. She says that regular creative expression is good for you girls.” He waved his hand… a whatever sort of motion.
Sarah hugged herself. The more she looked around her the more a dis-ease grew. A new sort of discomfort. Most of the girls wore something similar to the one on the stage. Short-skirted, with stockings or tights. A set of towering heels clacked past them, a girl with sharp black hair cut as short as a boy’s striding across the room, a tray of food held in hand. She wore a one piece that exposed the cheeky curve of her bum.
Sarah noticed Blue surveying the room with a satisfied glint of the eye.
She shivered. A lingering moisture from the rain and from her tears had left a film on her skin. Blue clasped his hand on her shoulder and brought her closer to the stage, in between a set of tables. The young women and girls nearby glanced curiously up at Sarah.
“Hey, Honey-Bee!” Blue called. A girl standing up on the stage, to the doctor’s left, turned. She raised an eyebrow.
He gestured grandly and spoke loudly. The chatting and noises of life continued despite it. “Come here a second, will you?”
After turning to say something to the severe doctor-woman, Honey-Bee descended from the stage in a spritely manner. She, too, wore tights. A costume of sorts adorned her. An overly-lacy corset in the color of ballerina pink. She had bright, pale blond hair tied into pigtails and a black ribbon snug around her neck. Her heels clacked against the harsh floor as she crossed the way, maneuvering between girls and tables and everything. Half-way to her destination, she reached up and – oh, it was a wig – pulled away the blond, dropped it on an empty table, and reached to the back of her head and tugged out a hair-tie. A mass of golden-brown hair, the sweet color of honey or caramel or both, with hair-tie kinks in it, fell past her shoulders. She was shaking it out as she came to a stop in front of them.
Her eyes lingered on Sarah for a moment. Then she turned to Blue. “New girl?”
“Be a dear and show this little princess around. Get her up to speed. You know the drill.”
The girl sighed. Her hands went to her waist. “I’m busy. We’re in the middle of practice.”
“Oh, you can spare an hour or so, can’t you?” Blue smiled, hand still clasped over Sarah’s shoulder, who stared miserably at the ground.
The girl snapped her hair tie over her wrist. She looked at Sarah. “Fine,” she said. “Why not?”
“Perfect.” Blue let go of Sarah’s shoulder and rubbed his hands together. Affectionately, he said, “I can always count on you.”
The girl smiled. “Don’t forget it.” Then she leaned forward to press a kiss to his cheek.
She crooked a finger at Sarah. “Come on, Princess. Lots to see.”
She headed off in the direction of the stage, leaving Sarah to hesitate in her spot for a long moment. She glanced back at Blue, but he stood there solidly, arms crossed over his finely pressed suit jacket, and watched her with his chin tilted down ever so slightly. The look in his eyes under dark eyebrows. His overly-pink mouth. Close as they were and under the lighting of this room, with its stage and all its people, his eyes appeared shadowed, lined with a sinister kohl black.
Sarah didn’t need to be told twice, and she scampered after the girl.
The girl led the way through a door by the stage and into another dark hallway. Sarah trailed after her. This corridor wasn’t bare like the others had been. Richly colored, there were framed posters and the occasional painting. She noticed one in particular, a woman with blond hair, sitting daintily on the edge of a bed, her bare breasts thrust out in an exaggerated manner, her mouth pouty and full, and her eyes heavy with long, thick lashes. And her finger crooked in the same way Honey-Bee’s just had.
She must have stalled in place, her eyes caught on the poster, an uneasy look upon her face, because the girl guiding her, really a woman, turned back round and stopped to stand with her. They contemplated it silently.
Sarah felt a different kind of dread creeping up into her, a shiver in her spine, her neck. The little hairs all over her body were at attention, little military men, desperate to protect her, but really, what could they do?
She swallowed again, and this time her throat was so tight that it hurt, and then looked sideways. Honey-Bee was watching her, and this close Sarah could see the details of her eyes. Heavy makeup over eyelids and lashes, glittering and dark. Pupils large and swollen in the low light, surrounded by the warmest, goldenest brown Sarah had ever seen.
“This isn’t an asylum, is it?” Sarah finally whispered.
The woman kept looking at her. “It is,” she said. Then she sighed, turning away. “And it isn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come,” the girl said, and she took Sarah’s hand, “I’ll show you.”
They walked down the corridor, which seemed endless, hand-in-hand. Sarah, feeling vulnerable and tender and young and missing fiercely her mother who was dead and had been dead, clung to the other girl’s hand, even as her own trembled and went damp with her clammy, sweaty fear.
“Princess, was it?” the girl said.
“My name is Sarah.”
Honey-Bee squeezed her hand. “Better keep that to yourself from now on. That life– when you were Sarah– is over with now. It’s easier this way. Put it into another part of your head, somewhere just for you.”
She nudged Sarah with her shoulder. “I’ll keep your secret, promise. Cross my heart.” And to prove it, she crossed an X over the center of her chest. The skin there was smooth and soft-looking, bare from the low-cut one-piece she wore. It was a quarter sleeve sort of thing, falling just past her elbows. She towered over Sarah in her tall black heels. Sarah had to bend her head back to look her in the eye.
“They call me Honey-Bee,” she continued and then pulled Sarah into a room with an open door. “Or Honey.”
“For your hair, and eyes?” Sarah said, but she was distracted. It was a dark room, just like it had been a dark hall. A large, luxurious bed sat in the center of the room, with rich fabrics for blankets rumpled all over it. There were pillows abound. Nightstands on either side of the bed, and an open door off to the side through which Sarah could just see the edge of a clawfoot bathtub.
Honey-Bee laughed and then let go of Sarah’s hand to plop herself onto the foot of the bed. “That and I have a mean sting.” She threw herself back onto the blankets and wiggled a moment, seeming to get comfortable. She patted the spot beside her. “Let’s talk.”
Sarah hesitated but then quickly crawled onto the bed beside Honey-Bee. With trembling-still, weakened limbs, she turned herself over onto her back. Her chest was tight despite the relative calm. Imminent danger had gone, leaving a new sort, a hidden, unknowing sort. Just the two of them laying on their backs and staring up at the wood-paneled ceiling. A golden chandelier hung from it, with dripping crystals like leaves on a tree, but it was the flicked-on light from the ensuite bathroom that made it possible to see.
“Princess,” Honey-Bee started. “How old are you?”
“... Sixteen.”
“You’re young,” Honey-Bee sighed and reached out again to take her hand. “Listen… this place is a front. You know what that means?”
Sarah screwed her eyes shut. A tear leaked away from her. It trailed warmly over her temple, and then into her hairline. “Yes.”
“Blue is clever,” Honey-Bee said. “This place is real on paper, but it’s only a way for him to run his real business. To keep us here. To cater to the… desires of his customers.”
The low light cast a glow on the chandelier and the other, rich furnishings around them. Against her the skin of her arms, a smooth blanket was treasonously lovely. A glass bowl on the nearest nightstand was filled with colorful foil packets. “What business?”
They looked at each other then, in the dim light of the room. Honey’s face was shadowed. She said, “He runs a club. For gentlemen. With us as his merchandise. We dance for them and… we pleasure them.”
Sarah looked away. “But that’s illegal.”
“Yeah, it is.” Honey-Bee huffed a breath. “But too bad for us, there is no law in here except Blue’s.”
Sarah gripped onto her hand, hard. “But– it’s not fair, it’s not right! There has to be something we can do. ” Indignation courts through her, a thinly veiled cover for what she knew to be helplessness.
“Be careful,” Honey-Bee said quietly. “Girls who talk too much about getting out, who try to get out… it never ends well for them.”
“Anything is better than this!”
Honey-Bee sat up quickly, leaned on her elbow and turned to face Sarah. She grabbed her face and made her look at her. Sarah stilled. She was so close that their noses nearly touched, and Sarah noticed a faint perfume on her, mixed with the scent of sweat.
“Do you want to live?” Honey-Bee demanded of her.
“I- I-” Sarah stammered.
“Do you?”
Tears were streaming down Sarah’s face again. She scrunched up her eyes, tightly, as if all the world would fade away. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Yes.”
“Look at me,” Honey-Bee said. “If you want to live, and if you want to keep your mind yours, you need to learn, you need to be useful, and you need to not rock the boat. Okay?”
Sarah let out a choked sort of, “Okay.”
Honey let go of her face and sighed, but still remained leaning on her elbow above. “I sound harsh, I know I do. I’m sorry. But no one in here is going to help you but yourself, no one.”
Sarah covered her face. “You’re helping me...”
Honey looked at her a long moment before puffing a breath out the side of her mouth, like Sarah’s father used to do when he was smoking. There was no smoke here, but for the faint lingering smell of it in the bed covers and in the air. It was stale and stuffy, even among the lavish and lovely. The grime underneath it all… Sarah could sense it.
“Well,” Honey-Bee said, almost resigned. “Sue me, but you just looked so tiny and young and innocent in the mess hall. You’d hardly last a week without me.”
Sarah’s heart thumped hard inside her chest. “This is horrible,” she sniffled. “Horrible, horrible. I hate it here, I want to go home.”
She sat up and pulled her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around herself. She began rocking back and forth. Her shoes were on the bed, tracking mud and rain, but who cared? A hand came up and patted her bonied back.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Honey-Bee said. “You’ll learn and you’ll be okay with it, eventually. It just takes some getting used to. I had a hard time when I first got here too.”
Sarah’s belly quivered. “How-” she started, “- how long have you been here?”
Honey hummed. “It’ll be nine years soon.”
Nine years. Nine. The prospect of it stretched out long ahead of her. Nine years ago she was only seven. She could hardly remember being seven, or eight, or even twelve. It was so long ago and she was so little. Her heart, still little in truth, crushed.
“Is it easier for you?” Sarah worried. “Now?”
Later on in her life, still there in that place, Sarah would know that Honey had lied to her. Had lied to make her less scared, to help her. To her innocent question, Honey had answered, had lied, “Yes, it is.”
They sat there together for some time longer. Honey didn’t speak, and Sarah could think. But she got lost in her own head. The occasional clack clack of heels in the corridor beyond caught her attention. The creaking of the old, old mansion. The storm somewhere out in the real world, which was governed by laws of physics and of government. Inside here there were only the distant sounds of music, talking, laughter. How could there be laughter in this place?
Sarah didn’t think she would ever laugh again. Not ever.
Chapter 2
Notes:
:) I'm back. Sorry for the long wait, y'all. I've been doing a summer study abroad!! It's been incredible but I'm so tired haha. Going back home today. Hopefully to be getting back into the swing of things! Thanks for your comments, and I hope you enjoy where this goes. <3
Chapter Text
Honey-Bee urged her up and out of her weepy silence so they could continue with the tour. She brought her through the hall of bedrooms, where they– Blue’s girls– would take their clients on weekend nights. They took a quick peek into the club, a huge arched room, dark and glamorous, with a stage, red velvet curtains, a crystal bar, and plenty of tables. “This is where we entertain,” Honey explained. “Before… you know.”
Then, Honey showed her the kitchens, and the laundry room. The girls were all assigned chores, which rotated according to the month. Sarah would receive her schedule soon.
Honey led her back through the hall where Blue’s office was, and Sarah’s pulse jumped for that they were so close to the exit of the place. But not really. She remembered how, slung over the shoulder of the groping man, they had traversed through gate and gate and door and gate before they had reached Blue’s office. It had taken forever. This realization wilted her, as she gazed down the corridor that never ended. “Sometimes Blue will bring you here,” said Honey, pointing to the office door. They didn’t go inside. Sarah’s chest seized at the thought that he was there, just behind those doors.
They skirted the outside of the mess hall, where the practice stage was. And then Honey brought Sarah to the dormitory, where all the girls slept and lived when they weren’t working at Blue’s behest. Dr. Gorski’s office was here, and she would meet with Sarah soon. To determine whether Sarah was actually nuts, said Honey. Don’t let her think you are.
“What happens then?” Sarah asked in a whisper. “If she does really think that?”
Honey glanced sideways at her, lips pursed into a pout. Then she mimed some sort of gesture in front of her face. A closed fist turned so that the hole created by her fingers was right in front of her eye, and her other hand miming a hammer. “There goes your mind.”
Sarah’s mouth went dry.
“Really, though,” said Honey, nearly conspiratorially, tapping the side of her nose. “Who you really want to be smart around is Blue. If he thinks you’re more trouble than you’re worth… then, it doesn’t matter what the doc thinks. He’ll have you lobotomized before you can blink.”
Honey opened a few more doors, showing Sarah what her life would be like there. There was the dance room, a large space with light brown wooden floors, mirrored walls and a ballet bar spanning the halfway point across the whole place. A chandelier of sparkling crystals hung from the ceiling. The lighting in there was greater than in any of the previous rooms. This was where they practiced. It was pretty and delicately decorated, but Sarah could not find much in herself to appreciate it.
“But I don’t know how to dance,” Sarah said as they stood in the doorway, peering in. The place was deserted, though according to Honey, they were in there a lot, with Dr. Gorski, who happened to have been a dancer in her youth.
Honey directed her away from the door and shut it again. “You’ll learn.”
Then there were the sleeping quarters. A single, expansive room with three long rows of tiny cots, all facing the same direction. The room was without personality, nothing on the walls, nothing comforting, gray and sad like everything Sarah had seen that day, and yet it was full of living. Rumpled beds and clothes strewn about. Little metal chests at the foot of each bed must have held clothing. The opposite side of the room gave way to a large arched opening into a shadowed something.
“This is mine,” Honey said, pointing to a bed against the wall. Then she looked around contemplatively. “Let’s see… ah, this one is free. And this one too. Why don’t you pick one.”
Sarah stared at her two choices, head lowered. Her hair, now dry, but feeling itchy, hung past her face. One of the cots was in the center row, wedged closely between others. The other was against the same wall as Honey’s, but a few cots away. She chose that one.
“Nice,” Honey said. She grabbed Sarah’s hand and brought her to the large arched opening. “Now you have to claim it.”
They crossed the threshold and Sarah looked around in wide-eyed nerves. To the left was a large communal bathroom. Grimy gray-white tiled floors and open showers. There were toilets too, and sinks. Honey clicked on the light. There was the steady sound of a drip of water, but no privacy. When Sarah glanced at Honey, she saw her brow and mouth set in an uncomfortable sort of expression.
“It’s not great,” she said. “But at least we have running water, right?”
Sarah grimaced, but followed as Honey turned her to face the other side of the enclave.
“And this,” Honey said, gesturing. She smiled, now. “Is the closet.”
And it was unlike any closet Sarah had ever seen. There were racks and racks of things, hanging things, and folded things. Shoes too. It wasn’t neat but it wasn’t messy either. There was a large mirror propped up against a free wall. Sarah accidentally caught a glance of herself in it. Just as quickly did her eyes skitter away.
“We share here,” Honey said. “But the doc will have you fitted for a few things of your own. Costumes and corsets and stuff. Costumes are usually kept in the dressing room by the club. We’ll circle back there in a few. For now, pick some things to put at your bed. You should probably change, too. Blue will expect it, sorry to say.”
Sarah frowned at Honey’s outfit, which was so adult, so revealing and tight and just beyond her comfort. Sarah was dreamy, fantasizing of princesses and magic and all that, yes, but she was also practical. She liked comfort. Jeans and a nice flowing shirt, and sensible shoes. One never knew when it was necessary to run through rainy streets or to dance through the twists and turns among hedges and stones of a labyrinth. Her fingers twitched at her sides, the dress she currently wore an itchy wool sort of fabric, and her sneakers stiff around her feet. She ached for her old blue jeans, which her father hadn’t minded her wearing, but Karen had. It wasn’t proper for a young lady, she had always said. If you’re going to wear pants, they should be trousers.
Honey saw the look. She bit her lip. “I’m sure we can find something a little… less… ”
Then she approached the racks of clothing, fingers touching her chin as she considered the options. Sarah followed her lead, only to waffle for a long time in front of the racks of clothing, arms held tight around her middle. Eventually, she mustered up enough courage to thumb through a selection of the hanging items. They were mostly tiny dresses or skirts. Some cardigans. She grabbed one, because it felt soft to the touch, and was long-sleeved. It was a mossy-minty green color, which she liked.
“What about this?” Honey said. She held up a pale pink dress, nearly cream. And saw the cardigan that Sarah held nervously in hand.
“Perfect,” she grinned. She handed it to Sarah, and then opened a nearby drawer. “Here are some undies and things. Pick what you want. And some stockings– it can get cold in here. And then go change.” She pointed to the bathroom. “I promise I won’t look.”
Mutely, hands clenching tight into the fabric of the clothing in her hands, she shuffled to the drawers. She was indecisive again, feeling Honey’s eyes on the side of her face, and unsure what to pick. Eventually, she grabbed a black pair of stockings but then she realized they ended mid-thigh. She dropped them back into the drawer like they were scalding and then groped desperately for something, anything else.
When finally Sarah had in hand her dress, her cardigan, a pair of proper tights, some undies, and camisole-cum-bra, she dragged herself in the direction of the bathroom. Honey remained behind in the closet.
The bathroom was so open, and so large. As expansive as the sky. It left her mightily exposed, and gave off a chill that pricked at her skin. She kept glancing at Honey, to make sure she still wasn’t looking, but she never was. Sarah brought herself to a corner, the most modest, most shadowed spot in the place, and began peeling off her clothes. It was all a farce, this modest gray dress and stockings Blue had her wear to say goodbye to Karen. It was a performance. If only her step-mother knew… But, then, would she even care? Tears bit the delicate flesh of her inner eyes as she switched out her undies, thighs pressing tight together against that chilled, depressed air as if there was someone there watching her. Not Honey! As quickly as she could, she pulled on her tights and her dress and then wrapped herself up in her cardigan with a shudder. It was like a blanket, which she was thankful for.
The only mirrors in the bathroom were the grimy rectangular ones above each of the sinks. There were five of everything. Five sinks, mirrors, shower-heads, and toilets. For the number of cots, it didn’t seem nearly enough.
She stared at herself in one such mirror. The dismal light of the place cast dull yellow shadows over her face, which swathed under her eyes, her cheekbones, bringing them out from somewhere beneath her still puppy-fatted face, her neck. She became aware that the light was flickering softly, barely, and the drip drip of the somewhere-leak sounded like thunder to her ears. The girl staring back at her was gray in the face, with dark smudged and hollow eyes. Her hair fell lank around her face, and she looked sad. The dress, she realized, was lower cut than she was used to and so she wrapped the cardigan even tighter around her.
She looked away from the mirror.
“… Honey-Bee?” she said, very quietly. But the room was cavernous enough that it sounded loud and clear. There were toiletries littered about the sink tops all over. Toothpaste smears inside the sinks and little splotches of white-yellow and black against the gritted surface of mirrors.
“Yeah?”
“... Is there something I can comb my hair with?”
“Oh yeah. Just grab whatever. We share pretty much everything.”
Sarah’s lip curled, but she ducked her head and grabbed the wide-tooth comb which had been left carelessly in a puddle of water on the nearest sink. She missed her bedroom, and her home, where she had things that were hers, and hers alone. She had always been possessive over her things. Never liked sharing. It was a source of contention. Part of the reason she had never been great at keeping friends. Why Karen had pestered her to go out, have fun, meet boys, and then had been irate with her when she hadn’t wanted to. Why Karen likely so easily believed that it was Sarah’s fault, when it really wasn’t.
… Was it?
It didn’t matter anymore. She rinsed the comb under the faucet and wiped it on her dress before bringing it up to her matted, tangled hair and beginning the process of combing it out. She yanked and yanked, without regard to the ripping sounds nor the pain in her scalp. She got stuck in it.
“Hey, hey,” Honey said. She came up behind Sarah. “Let me.”
Reluctantly, she passed Honey the comb. Sarah stood there, feeling tiny, as the woman behind her gently gathered her hair and carefully began to comb out the knots. “Hair is a woman’s pride,” she said. “Or at least that’s what my mother told me. Treat it gently.”
It was the kindness that brought the tears back. So, with the soft touch of fingers raking through her hair, against her scalp, she wept. She covered up her face with her hands, and Honey kept on silently combing out her hair, but she cried all the while. Tears streamed and her heart and belly quivered, the kindness ached.
Finally, Honey finished. Sarah’s cries had slowly petered off, turning into sniffles hidden in the sore palms of her hands.
“There,” she said. Sarah looked up with wet, droopy, red eyes. Her face was tear-streaked, but her hair was nice and neat, falling down smoothly, if a bit frizzily, over her shoulders. Honey stood at her shoulder. She was quite a bit taller in her heels, but Sarah could still see her expression in the mirror. It was one of pinched pity. But it was sincere.
A groaning of the pipes somewhere behind the dirty stone walls was like the grumbling of a stomach after a long day. Sarah blinked dolorously.
“Better now?” Honey said.
Sarah bowed her head in response. Was she?
Setting down the comb, Honey took her hand again. “Okay. Now, shoes.”
They returned to the closet. Sarah looked askance at the shoes she was handed. A pair of black patent leather heels, with a strap around the ankle. The heel was thick, and maybe it wasn’t that tall, but it was a heel. Sarah was sixteen, she had only ever worn little kitten heels once or twice in her life, to those silly school dances that seemed far, far, far from this universe she had so suddenly been thrust into. “I can’t walk in these!”
“Babe,” Honey said. “Those are the lowest ones we’ve got.”
“Can’t I just wear my sneakers?” She looked sadly back where her discarded clothes and shoes lay rumpled on the bathroom tile floor.
Honey shook her head. “You’ll get used to them.”
Sarah sighed, and there was a flash of a moment, where this could be normal. That Honey was her friend or her mother or her older sister and Sarah was trying to get away with wearing simple, easy sneakers to a wedding or a five-star restaurant or somewhere sufficiently fancy. But then the flash was gone and Sarah’s shoulders drooped.
A cushioned stool by the tall mirror supported Sarah as she sat and got to fastening up the shoes. When she stood up, she wobbled. Honey caught her.
“Ugh,” Sarah said.
“Stand up straight,” Honey said. “Put your weight into the ball of your foot.”
Sarah did as she said.
“Now walk a little.”
She tried, slightly wobbly, of course, but she did not topple over.
“See?” Honey said. “You’re a natural.”
Sarah frowned. She stood there, feeling all tall and gawky and quite very wrong. Like she took up too much space in the world. Cardigan held tight enough around her torso to be a corset, she stepped around the closet. Honey, though still quite a few inches taller than her, no longer towered over her. She was no longer a giantess, or now Sarah was one too.
Still uncertain in her steps, Sarah followed along, the heels clacking clumsily against the floor, as they grabbed a few more things from the closet, including pajamas, and as they went to shove it all in the trunk in front of her chosen bed, along with the clothes she had changed out of and left discarded on the bathroom floor.
“It’s yours now,” Honey said.
They left the large, empty, gray dormitory and returned to the halls which had red velvet carpeting and walls, and rich brass and gold accented decor. Their pace was slower, as Sarah was still getting used to her shoes. Her perspective of the world was all wrong, now. Just a few inches off. Enough to throw her for even more of a loop.
“And last but not least,” Honey said, opening a door. It was empty as well. “The dressing room.”
Sarah stepped inside with one small step. It was pink in there, salmon-ish, with bulbously outlined mirrors with those Hollywood light bulbs she knew from the dressing room or two she had been allowed to see her mother in, before her untimely death. Like the dormitory bathroom, it was kind of a mess, boxes and tins all over each of the vanities. Clothes strewn this way and that, over chairs and on the floor too. An armoire hung open, shoes tumbled out. It was just on the verge of being an unfunctional mess. But just on the verge. Random posters of illustrated girls were pinned to the walls. Bodacious and sultry, these recalled the one she had seen in the corridor previously. That one had been framed, however, and these not. Torn at the edges and smucked with dirt and dust in creases that had not yet fallen away.
“Shows?”
“You know,” Honey said. “The dancing. The club.”
Sarah’s mouth quivered. Then her stomach grumbled, a loud ripping roar like those pipes enfolding the dormitory bathroom. She pressed her hand to the source.
Honey noticed. “When’s the last time you ate?”
Sarah shrugged.
“We better get back to the mess before the food runs out. Then Blue is going to want to see you.”
They returned. There were still dancing girls on the mock stage, there were still people milling about, chatting, eating. Social time, Honey told her. Dr. Gorski insisted. The tour had had the impression of having lasted forever. Coming smack dab back to where Blue had brought her first, time seemed to have stilled.
Sarah, now a giant, saw the room in a new light, at a new height. She thought everyone was staring at her, judging. She was a mockery in her outfit, which was too womanly and too revealing. Honey pointed her in the direction of the food, a long table laid out with plates and trays.
Sarah tottered her way there, then stood high over it, staring. The trays were mostly bare. A few bananas, overly brown, lingered on one. A piece of toast or two. Her stomach revolted at the idea of eating any of it. She turned away, glanced back at Honey, who was now talking to some other girl. Another towering, statuesque woman, with fire-red hair and her own skimpy little outfit.
She grabbed for a piece of toast and nibbled at the edge, but it tasted like nothing, or like ash on her tongue. She sniffled.
“Hey, new girl,” someone called. It was the red-haired woman, walking alongside Honey and coming toward her. They stopped in front of her. “What are you called?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say her name, Sarah, who she really was, but she caught Honey’s look, and instead, in a tight, unsure voice, said, “... Princess.”
Honey smiled. “This is Bunny. She’s been here as long as me.”
Sarah set down the toast. “Who even comes up with these names?”
“Usually Blue,” Bunny said, with a tilt to her head.
Sarah tensed at the name and even more so when Honey let out a breath. “Speaking of the devil…”
Her face crumpled. She could feel the eyes of Honey and also Bunny on her. “I don’t want to,” she said, and it came out warbly and high, like a child nigh on bursting into tears. “He scares me.”
“You and me both, sis,” Bunny said. Honey cut her a look, and she lifted her hands in surrender. “Listen, nice to meet ya, Princess, but I’ve got to get back to practice.” She waved and then she was off.
“Not hungry?” Honey asked. But she didn’t seem to really want an answer for it, instead looking at Sarah contemplatively. “Blue isn’t so bad,” she said finally. “Just do what he says and you’ll be fine.”
Sarah tightened her hands into the fabric of her dress, which was so short and quite tight around her ribs. She tugged at the hem.
“But he’ll have my ass if he’s kept waiting for too long,” Honey said. “And maybe it makes me a bad person, but I have a whole lot of self-preservation. Sorry, babe.”
Sarah looked away.
“Plus,” Honey said, “You’re young and you’re pretty. And that means you’ve got some leeway. He’s going to make a lot of money off you. He won’t be too harsh.”
Despite herself, Sarah could not muster up enough energy in her heart to be upset at Honey. It was a kill or be killed sort of world in this place, she was realizing. And she was brave, she could take care of herself. Couldn’t she? Couldn’t she?
“... I understand,” she said finally.
Was it her imagination or did Honey’s shoulders droop, then, in relief?
But just as soon as she had thought it, they were off, heading once again through the maze-like corridors. They were beginning to make sense to her, the turns and the layout. She had a lot of practice with that sort of thing, you see. Their heels clacked out of unison, discordant, as they walked. “Um,” Sarah said quietly. “I wanted to say thank you… for all your help.”
Honey glanced sideways at her. She smiled a little. But then she shook her head. “Just don’t get used to it.” It wasn’t said meanly, just warningly. Sarah locked it away in her heart. She was on her own.
Outside Blue’s office, Sarah felt her pulse quickening, too fast, her chest becoming tight. She wondered if this was what her father felt, that heart attack which seized him up one night and took him away from her forever, leaving her an orphan and under the guardianship of her stepmother, who didn’t trust her, who didn’t love her. Who, really, thought her insane and the cause of something so terrible and hurtful, but from which her father had defended her until his untimely death.
“Good luck,” Honey whispered. She pulled her in for a hug. “Remember what I said.”
Sarah nodded into her shoulder, eyes wet. They pulled apart. “See you soon,” Honey said.
“See you.” Her voice wavered.
Sarah approached the door and knocked softly. Honey stood there in the hallway, waiting until Sarah was called in. Then, her heel-steps could be heard fading away down the corridor, back to her routine life in this dreadful place, which Sarah would be joining shortly. Joining too soon.
But first, a meeting with the devil.
Her first night in Blue’s world was the hardest of her short life. Laying curled up with her head and body all under the thin covers of her cot, surrounded by the soft, slowed breathing of all the prisoner women around her, she cried and cried. She tried to muffle it, but she must not have been successful. The woman sleeping in the cot just to her left shifted and hissed, “Shut up! Jesus.”
Sarah flinched. She pressed her fist into her mouth. Her face became red and choked with difficulty breathing. Somehow, it was the harsh tone of a woman who must have once been in her same place, the complete void of sympathy, or understanding, that made it all the worse. Like her heart would break in half. The tears came harder and harder, too strong for her to handle. And she had no choice but to fling off her blanket and flee across the dormitory, toes sore and cold from the heels of the day and the freezing stone floor, and hide in the closet. She fell to the ground and huddled, against a wall, knees pulled up tightly to her chest. Hanging fabrics swung around her head and shoulders, all with the same stale smell of plain detergent that couldn’t quite wash away the clinging, persistent scents of sweat and perfume and so many women. She hid her face in her knees.
Honey found her some time later. Sarah didn’t look up, but felt her crawling into the space beside her. An arm curled around her shoulders, held her tight, like a mother.
“I hate it here,” Sarah whispered.
All Honey said was, “I know.”
Sarah burst into tears. Honey shushed and soothed and pet her hair and her arm, but even this comfort couldn’t distract Sarah from where she was. What her life was now. Her meeting with Blue had shaken her thoroughly.
Sarah was given one and a half weeks to get accustomed to the place before she was to start earning her due. Blue had told her this in his office with a gracious, sympathetic sort of tone of voice. And he had looked at her expectantly, so Sarah had smartly said, “Thank you,” even though, inside, she wanted to scream and scream and scream.
Then, “You’re a virgin, yes?”
Sarah flushed all over, a red hot feeling seeping from her chest all the way to the tips of her ears.
“Well?” he said. “Don’t make me ask twice.”
It came out nervous, young, and girlish. She couldn’t look at him. “Mm-hmm.”
A slick smile spread across his face. It tugged at the thin, inky mustache and stretched out his overly pink lips. His dark, shadowed eyes ran over her, again and again, with something satisfied glinting there.
“You’re going to make me so much money,” he said, delighted. It was the same as what Honey had told her.
Sarah shifted. She sat with her legs pressed tightly together, her arms wrapping the cardigan as fully around herself as she could. Blue scared her, and he seemed to know it. He enjoyed it. He looked her over and didn’t hide it. Sarah wasn’t used to this sort of attention, not really. It set her teeth on edge, and her heart. He chatted about a few things here and there, her schedule, what he expected, etc, etc. Sarah sat there, staring at her lap, the entire time. She made no noise and didn’t speak. He didn’t seem to mind.
At one point, he stood up from his chair and made a turn round his desk. He sat against the front edge, and leaned forward, hands behind him, like a gentleman. Then he reached out. Sarah tensed when he touched her chin. He tilted her face up and Sarah stared up at him wide, petrified, glossed-up eyes. Her face was drained of all color, or rather made up of all the color in the world, perfectly reflective and sheet white. He looked her right in the eyes for a moment, and then slyly looked down her front.
“Aw Princess,” he said. “Don’t be so scared.”
He pecked a kiss to the tip of her nose and let go of her. He backed up and Sarah bowed her head. “It’s not so bad here,” he said. “Just be good.”
Her mouth quivered. She dared to look up, but then just as quickly she flicked her eyes away. They landed on his leather shoes. A silver chain on each decorated them. His ankles were crossed. “Please,” she said, “I want to go home.”
He didn’t say anything to this. But then the ankles uncrossed. Feet planting themselves more firmly on the floor. She sat up straighter. “I… I’ll do anything. Please, I don’t want to be here. I don’t belong here. Please let me go.”
He clucked his tongue. “No.”
Sarah flinched.
“Do you know why?” Blue said.
A tear leaked out, and then another. “... because I’ll make you so much money?”
“Bingo!” he said loudly, strikingly, making her flinch, and with a clap of the hands to accompany it. A cymbal clang to the beginning of a symphony that would only grow scarier and darker from here. “You’re going to make me very, very rich, Princess. So why would I let this opportunity go to waste? It’s not everyday that I get pretty young things like you brought here.”
Sarah swallowed. “I’ll-I’ll pay you back, if you just let me go– Okay? I’ll give you everything I make–”
He laughed. It was sinister, and dark. “And how are you going to make money, Princess? Out on the streets? Alone and, what, sixteen? Twenty bucks for a blowy and fifty for more? I don’t think so.”
Sarah’s face burned red.
“Besides,” he said, stepping away from his desk. She leaned back. He turned away, and there were a few sounds. He had pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He breathed out his first puff with the rest of his sentence, “You know too much already.”
“...Please–” it came out as a whisper, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand.
“You’re boring me,” he said. “I don’t like being bored.”
He dragged on the cigarette again, blowing it out. It filled the room, pungent. Her eyes watered, though the smell was one she was used to. Her father had smoked those, she thought. How cruel it was that this man should enjoy them too.
“But since it’s your first day I’ll give you a break. Now go find Dr. Gorski. She wants to meet you.”
He patted her cheek before returning to his seat, which he leaned back into. He stared at her over the desk, dark shadowed eyes. He continued sucking on the cigarette, the bright orange end of it glowing hotly in the dim gray office. He raised his eyebrow at her and then she came out of it, rushing up, heart pounding, and shuffling for the door.
She just had it halfway open, when he said something. “Oh, and Princess?”
She paused, and turned back halfway. She waited, hands clutching the edge of the door so hard that her still-torn palms began to hurt. “Try showing a little more skin next time.”
Sarah ran.
She returned to the mess hall in a panic and a daze, the only place she really remembered where it was. But slamming open the large door, she found it empty, deserted. Sarah stood in the large doorway, little hands fisted at her sides. A moment later, she left, doors swinging shut behind her. She had half a mind to try to escape. It couldn’t be that hard. But then, like a sign, just as she had the thought, a large man in a gray collared shirt came walking down the corridor in her direction. He wore a gun tucked into a notch on his belt. Her step stuttered. Images flashed through her mind, of her being shot, of all the men guarding this place catching her and throwing her to the ground and killing her, or something else. Something worse? She was beginning to get an idea of that something worse.
He stopped in front of her. “Are you supposed to be out and about?” His eyes raked over her. Sarah leaned away as far as she could.
She stumbled over her words. “I- I’m trying to find Doctor Gu- Gu- Um, Blue– he said- well, I tried looking in the mess hall, but–”
The man cut her off. “It’s Dr. Gorski. Follow me.”
She did. And as she followed behind him through all the dim, vaguely recognizable corridors, all the while she stared at the gun at his belt. She imagined herself reaching for it, and shooting him, and tucking it away into her bodice. She would then run through the halls, she would shoot anyone who got in her way. She would force someone to open the big gates for her, and if all else failed she would hold up the barrel to her head and she would pull the trigger. Her fingers twitched along with her thoughts, pulling invisible triggers.
They were at another gray door before she could get any further into her fantasy. He knocked on the door and then opened it without waiting for an answer. He shoved her inside and the door shut behind her.
The severe woman, from the mess hall, looked up from her desk from behind low-set eyeglasses. Her dark hair was carefully polished into an updo and eyes heavy with makeup and age too. She looked annoyed by Sarah’s unceremonious entrance to the room.
“S-sorry,” Sarah said. “I- there was a guard, and I couldn’t find you- and-”
“You must be Princess,” the doctor said. She had an accent. “Come closer.”
Sarah crept forward, still feeling gangly and uncomfortable in the heels. Dr. Gorski stood up as well. Like Blue, she came around her desk and stopped in front of Sarah.
“Hmm.” It was a contemplative sort of noise. Sarah fidgeted in place as the woman strolled around her in a circle, observing her. The blush returned to Sarah, creeping first up her chest and then her face. The doctor stopped again in front of her. “Good.”
Sarah held her hands stiffly at her sides, like blades she didn’t know how to use. “Blue wants you ready in ten days. That is not a lot of time. I will do my best with you, but you must put the effort. Your training begins tomorrow. Yes?”
When Sarah didn’t respond quickly enough, the doctor repeated, “Yes?”
So Sarah nodded.
“Good,” she said again. Her English was imperfect. Or too perfect, rather. It lacked the fluid sound of a native speaker. The vowels just slightly off. The consonants too sharp. “I looked at your file. I will meet with you in here tomorrow also. We will talk about why you are here. Yes?”
Sarah hesitated before nodding again.
Dr. Gorski looked her in the eyes. “You will be okay,” she said sternly, but gently.
That’s what everyone kept telling her. They were all liars.
Chapter 3
Notes:
Hey :) be warned that it's just going to get darker and darker from here.
Chapter Text
Honey and Bunny took her under their combined wing. They were some of the oldest girls in the place, and their attitude about everything made Sarah sad. But… she supposed she could understand it. Nine years and counting in this place. The resignation in Honey’s eyes made sense when she really thought about it. And Bunny could be kind of mean, harsh in her words and in her glances, but Sarah learned not to let it bother her too much. She was trapped there too.
The first few days passed in a sort of hell. The halls became familiar, the bland foods reluctantly eaten. The thin blankets of the cot at least offering some measure of warmth and privacy in the nights as she cried to herself for her home and for her freedom and for her mother and father, and most of all for someone, anyone, to please, please help. No one answered these cries. No matter how much she wished for it, she was all alone.
Honey let Sarah follow her around, lost little puppy. There was dancing. There was eating. There was practice. There was sleeping.
The schedule of Lennox Home was ingrained in her only three days in.
For Sarah the hardest part, besides of course the overwhelming dread for what was coming – ten days, nine days, seven, six– was the bathroom. The communal one in the dormitory. She had been afforded a lot of privacy in her home, a luxury from her well-to-do father. Her own bathroom, her own bedroom. She’d had gym class in school, yes, but even that locker room had stalls. The bathrooms too.
She thought it disgusting the way the toilets were just out in the open, in their little section across from the showers. That first day, released from Dr. Gorski to go join the other girls in whatever it was they were doing –chores, at that time of day–Sarah had hung around Honey until it was curfew. It was a slow trickle of girls back into the large room with all the cots, the bathroom, and the closet. Sarah had sat nervously on the edge of her claimed bed and, without the courage to change into her pajamas, she just froze there for a very long time, observing. Girls meandered to and from the bathroom and the closet, now in more reasonable clothing– their pajamas. But when Sarah crept into the bathroom herself, her bladder twinging, she could only bring herself to brush her teeth. In the corner of her eye, one girl with blond hair sat on the toilet, just out in the open, while a few others milled around. A trickle came from between her legs. She flushed it just as Sarah was spitting out the strange-tasting tooth-paste.
Then it was with a sense of terrible unease, a sort of violation, that she retreated to her bed and curled under the covers, fully dressed. It felt like hours to Sarah, who fidgeted in her bed, needing to use the toilet, that everyone was awake still and talking and giggling. How could they giggle?
It was only when the sounds of sleep surrounded her that she forced herself up from the bed and tip-toed to the bathroom. Sneaky just to go pee. She returned to her cot to cry.
Come the weekend, there was performing. Somewhat to Sarah’s surprise, Blue was not around very often, only popping in and out as the week was drawing to a close. This was when the club opened. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The rest of the week was mostly practice and preparation. Blue wanted to be sure that his girls were ready for the upcoming shows. That first weekend, Sarah was not yet required to do anything, so she sat around in the dressing room with the other girls as they got ready for the first show of that week. Honey put back on that pale blond wig and painted her eyes and lips with dark colors. Glitter adorned her eyelids and a plummy red-purple made a spectacle of her mouth. Her outfit was a glittery thing consisting of a tiny skirt, a laced up auburn corset, and gartered stockings. And, of course, the towering heels. Little bows cutened up the toes of them.
Sarah thought Honey was gorgeous, but even more so when she was in her natural state. In the morning, before she got ready for the day, with her real hair left loose over her shoulders, which was a mix of straight and wavy and curly pieces, and her lips a pale pink color, and her eyes small but warm. She felt kind of in awe of her, maybe a sort of hero worship, because Honey was so nice to her and kind. She never saw her like that with anyone else, maybe except Bunny herself. How had Sarah gotten so lucky?
Sarah perched on a stool that had been pulled up to Honey’s vanity and watched as she put on her costume. The other girls milled about in the bathroom, equally glittery and sexy, and somewhere in the back of her mind– go away, go away– she knew that soon she would be among them. She couldn’t imagine herself like that, even though Dr. Gorski had already fitted her for an outfit and had already begun beating it into her how to dance. Tomorrow, the severe woman had told her that morning, we will make your routine.
Sarah had watched the other girl’s routines, she’d seen them over and over. Standing off in the corner of the dance room as Dr. Gorski counted the beat and played music and corrected whichever girl was moving in the center of the floor. And that was the other worst part, Sarah thought, the dancing in front of everyone.
It hadn’t been too long ago that she had imagined herself a famous actress, like her mother, with the attention of the whole world. The Hollywood starlet of the century, Sarah Williams! Now, the thought of the attention of these girls, and even worse, the faceless, nameless men of the future-club, made her cringe. When the doctor forced her to move in the dance room, among all the other girls, all watching, all a little curious about the new girl, who was the youngest of all of them, Sarah had to close her eyes tight and imagine herself somewhere else. Her body moved on its own, and her mind strayed to places she couldn’t control. The music that the doctor played faded out in her mind, replaced with something else. A smooth, lordly voice, promising her things. The taste of overly-ripe peach on her tongue lingered even when all the food from this evil place remained ash, and gloved hands held her and spun her.
She had begun to fear that she really was crazy. That Karen had been right all along. That he never existed. That Toby was gone, vanished, and probably dead, not because she’d never made it to the castle at the center of the labyrinth, but because she had done something awful in this world, this horrible, real world, that she could not remember. That she had dreamed it all, in awake and in sleep.
That night was with her at all times, images of it flashed in her head so vividly, and yet, whenever she whispered her wish out loud, desperate and obsessive, there was never, ever any answer.
Her hands fisted in her lap. She clenched her knees together, awkwardly perched. She tried not to dwell on it, and continued to focus on Honey instead as she made herself up for the show.
“Well?” Honey said, pressing lips together to spread lipstick, and running her fingers through the wig pig-tails. “What do you think?”
“You’re beautiful,” Sarah said truthfully.
“Thanks, hun,” the woman smiled.
Sarah blushed, pleased. A deep fondness welled up, a gratefulness she had never so much as felt toward anyone else, at least never until it was much too late.
But then Blue was entering and he was clapping his hands together loudly and asking all the girls to gather round, and so they did and so he gave a little pep talk about the dancing and performing and doing well for him. Sarah lingered in the background, peering over the shoulders and between the heads of all the women.
Then his speech was over, and Blue was excited and flushed with opportunity, bouncing on his feet, and then the show was on. He left and then, at an interval of every few minutes, give or take, one or two or three, even, of the girls would leave the dressing room, all dolled up and strutting her heels confidently against the floor.
And then it was Sarah all left alone in there, even Honey having departed for the sleazy work behind those doors that Sarah could only imagine. She sat in silence for a long time, back on her stool, before she stood up and, with a moment’s hesitation, sat herself down in Honey’s chair. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was lank, her face wan. She felt grimy, dirty. And she was a little ripe, but nobody had said anything yet. Her main chore this week was cleaning the public bathrooms, which had a lovely set of private stalls, but no showers. She always seized this opportunity to relieve herself in privacy, but then she had to get on her hands and knees to scrub the floor, no proper mop. It did quick work of dirtying her up. But she still hadn’t gathered up the courage to use the showers, instead favoring a quick wash, clothes still securely on, with a cloth at the sinks. Honey gave her a look sometimes. Sarah knew what it meant. She would not be able to get away with this forever.
The dressing room was very pink, and gold in its lighting. Without everyone bustling about, it had a softer feel to it. It cast a certain color over her. It shadowed her skin, and saddened it, but it brought out the auburn tones in her hair.
She remembered her own vanity, from back at home, the place she had been ripped from, completely unaware. Tears pricked at her eyes so to distract herself, she poked around the cosmetic tubes and palettes left askew on the scratched wood surface. She uncapped Honey’s plummy lipstick, stared at it for a moment, and then brought it up to her mouth. She’d never seen anyone wear such a color before. She smeared it on her lower lip, but it came off thicker than she expected, kind of messy and clumped. There was a constant quiver in her hands these days. She brought the stick to her upper lip and made an open-mouthed sort of expression to stretch the skin tight and then smeared the color there too.
Then she put away the lipstick and dabbed her lips together. It was a mess, a little clunky, a little smeary. A bit of color had gotten onto her front tooth. She put her thumb in her mouth, closed her lips around it, and then tugged her thumb free, just like she had seen Honey do. A ring of plum was left round the knuckle of her thumb, the nail and the finger-pad shiny with spit. She wiped it off on her dress but just as soon brought the sleeve of her sweater to swipe the lipstick from her mouth. It looked all wrong.
But the color stained the skin around her lips. It gave off a swollen impression, like she had been hit in the mouth. She looked away, and her eyes caught on the wall directly behind her. Her bruised lips parted and she stood. She kicked off her heels to cross the room.
The pin-up posters were old and dusty, the corners peeling from the wall. She reached out to one, pinned up at an angle. The illustrated woman, glamorous with her pitch-black hair and full red lips and gemstone green eyes and her curvy, soft body. Linda Glinda, the poster proclaimed in flirty letters across the woman’s breast. Sarah’s throat tightened up. Her fingers came up to caress the surface of the poster, her mother. It was an old illustration, from when Sarah was much younger, from when her mother had just shot up into her stardom. Sarah had been enamored, had collected all the posters and all the things. And she’d gone to the pictures always, to see her mom on the big, silver screen. Karen had hated that.
Did the girls here know that the starlet was dead and gone? No news came here, Sarah realized, and the girls worshipped the looks and the glamor of a woman long dead.
Sarah furiously wiped at her eyes and then, with crystal-dripping finger tips, she pulled out the pins in the wall, grabbed the poster, and pushed the pins back into their place. The paper fell limp in her hands, her mother stared back at her, smiling. She shook away the dust before folding it up and tucking it into her sleeve. It was hers, she made it so.
After that, she left the dressing room. Walking through the dim halls, she could hear the distant sounds of music, vaguely familiar. It was one of the dances of one of the countless girls. She returned to the dormitory in a sort of daze, touching every few seconds to check that the poster was still there, no matter that its constant itch and scratch against her skin made sure of it.
Crickets seemed to chirp in there, among all the beds, entirely empty. Sarah’s heart jumped up into her chest and she hurriedly tucked the folded poster away under her pillow. She scrambled to get herself some pajamas and ran to the bathroom without hesitation.
She kept her eyes and ears peeled for any slight sound or movement, but she was single-minded. She picked a shower near the back and turned the water on to as warm as it would go. Soon she was bare under the hot, hot stream of water. It tinged her skin pink, it hurt in its heat, but Sarah loved it. She scrubbed herself, near frantic, not wanting the moment to end, but knowing it would eventually. She washed her hair and she washed her face and her body. And she stood under the stream for some minutes longer, even as the water became warm and then cool and then freezing, shiverin, biting cold. A towel was in arm’s reach the whole time.
She jittered from the cold as she dried off and got dressed, but she was more content right then than she had been since she’d gotten there. Small pleasures, small mercies. She returned to her little cot and curled up under the covers, but for once feeling like she could actually sleep. The room was still empty, and it was so quiet, except for the leak in the bathroom. Sarah clutched her poster as she drifted off to sleep.
But she woke again, sometime later, she wasn’t sure how long. Sounds of hushed voices somewhere near had pulled her out of her sleep, a wish on the tip of her tongue. Her eyes were heavy with sleep and the room was even darker than it had been before, and she turned onto her other side. She peeled an eye open. There was a small group of a few girls huddled together on the other side of the room. One of them noticed her, and gestured sharply. The others went quiet, all turning to look at Sarah, who just blinked dazedly at them.
But she was so tired, so exhausted, finally clean, that her eyes just drifted shut again, to the sounds of whispered voices.
The contentment was not to last. The very next morning she woke up, heavy-limbed, with Honey hovering over her. “Princess. Princess,” she was saying. “Got to get up now.”
Sarah blinked at her and slowly the rest of the world came filtering in. Girls were milling about, getting ready. She shot up to sit, and then groaned. A crinkle of paper caught her attention and she looked down. The poster.
Honey’s eyes lingered on it for a moment, but she didn’t say anything, except, “Big day today.” She looked excited.
“What?” Sarah mumbled, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and rubbing her face.
“Your routine!” she said excitedly. “It’s going to be great.”
“Oh,” Sarah said. She grimaced. “Right.”
Honey sat on the edge of the bed. She was already dressed and ready. “Be excited,” she said, nearly commanded, “Dr. Gorski is an amazing choreographer. Your routine will be beautiful. She makes them so they will say something about you and you alone.”
“What?” Sarah bit out. “Like I’m sixteen and stuck here in this- in this place and about to get my virginity sold off to some gross old man? Like I’m probably insane and my step-mother hates me enough to hand me off– off here?”
Honey’s face fell. “Princess-”
Sarah’s face crumpled. She stood up. “I hate that name,” she said. And she strode off toward the bathroom, leaving Honey behind.
It was only when she got there that she realized how much of an idiot she was. All her clothes were in her little trunk at the foot of her little bed in the midst of her little, growing-smaller-by-the-day life, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to change anywhere except under her covers and half-in and out of her pajamas. But when she peeked back out, she saw Honey still sitting on the bed, gazing at the opposite wall with a sort of blank expression. The guilt hit her hard. She returned to her bed like a kicked puppy, avoiding Honey’s searching gaze at all costs.
She spent the rest of the day alone, too ashamed of herself to seek out Honey and Bunny. She sat alone at breakfast, picking at her food – a banana and something that looked and tasted like slop – and she walked to the dance room for practice among all the other girls, but for once alone.
She was center-stage that day, everyone watching, Honey included. Dr. Gorski had immediately descended on her upon entering, chop chop! Practice was grueling. The embarrassment of tripping and falling and moving her body like this in front of so many people made her face beet red and pulled sweat right from her. But she didn’t have a choice, and she knew that.
The first day she’d been expected in the dance room, Dr. Gorski had assessed her abilities – minimal, Sarah had thought – by putting on music and commanding her to dance. Just like that, in front of everyone. No practice, no direction, no nothing. Sarah had stood there in the center of the room, hunched up and all uncomfortable, eyes directly on her.
And then Blue had walked in, two men in suits with him – employees – and his dark eyes had landed immediately on her. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms and Sarah froze even more than she ever had before. Dr. Gorski stopped the music, walked over to her and clamped onto her arm with a claw-like hand. “Are you useful?” she demanded, leaning close. “Or are you a burden?”
Sarah stared at the floor. She felt Blue’s eyes.
“Don’t be a burden,” the woman whispered harshly into her ear. “We have no use for burdens. So dance.”
Sarah cringed into herself and she caught Honey’s eyes where she sat cross-legged to Sarah’s left. She looked at her so seriously and she nodded, urgingly. Sarah remembered her warnings. A bitter taste coated her tongue, like she had vomited.
Her stomach rolled and she glanced again at the shadowed look of Blue in the corner, the thin set of his mouth. This is what propelled her into awkward, ungainly motion when the music played again. She closed her eyes, tight, to pretend none of it was real, and when she opened them again, Blue was gone, and Sarah was still alive and here, and relatively okay. The girls clapped diligently for her.
Now, as she was drilled on the routine that Dr. Gorski had custom-made for her, she found it difficult to fade away into her head. The routine itself was not intricate, instead something slow, and rolling, as Sarah was not very good at dancing – “Not yet,” Honey had reassured her, “but you will be one day” – but she struggled with the turns and with the movements of her hips. Dr. Gorski was an exacting teacher.
“Why are your fingers spread like that,” she would snap. “You look like a child.”
And, “Posture, posture! Are you an old man?”
And, and, and, and–
By the end of it – this day had been much harsher than any of the previous days, when Dr. Gorski’s focus had remained on the more seasoned girls rather than her – Sarah wanted to cry. Not in the least because the guilt about Honey still lingered in her heart. It affected everything she did, every movement she made.
Her stumbles brought titters and whispers from some of the other girls, and all through it, she knew Honey watched with a serious, intent expression.
The guilt chewed away at her until she was forced to do something about it. That evening – during an early, plain dinner before preparations for another club night went underway – Sarah approached the small table where Honey and Bunny sat together. Holding her tray of slop in tight, sweaty hands, with her head ducked, she shuffled to a stop behind the chair she had taken to sitting at lately. The conversation at the table stopped, and the two women looked up at her.
“Hey, Princess,” Honey-Bee said. She made an easy gesture. “You going to join us?”
Sarah’s face flushed, but she carefully placed the tray down and sat. The chair scraped loudly on the stone floor, but the sounds of chatting around them, and music from the fake-stage continued on uninterrupted.
“Tough day?” Bunny said. It came across a little sarcastic.
Sarah glanced at Honey, who was watching her. She frowned deeply. Her voice came out scratchy, a little timid. “I just– I wanted to say… I’m sorry.” She couldn’t quite get herself to hold Honey’s gaze.
Bunny remained quiet, just watching the interaction, and spooning up – they weren’t allowed forks – a bite of the oddly colored meat every few moments. But Honey’s face softened. “I get it, Princess,” she said. “I’m not mad.”
Sarah’s shoulders drooped. “Still…”
Honey shrugged a single shoulder, and her mouth tilted up in a half-smile. “Please. I was just like that when I first got her. Worse, even. Remember, Bun?”
Bunny raised her eyebrows, but nodded concedingly, chewing all the while.
Sarah blew out a breath, and slumped. She wiped her eyes discreetly. “I just– I’m so scared, and you’ve been so nice, and–”
She was waved off. Honey reached out and patted her hand. “You don’t have to explain. I get it,” she stressed again.
A topic change must have been in order because Honey smiled a little too brightly. “So what did ya think about the routine?”
“It was awful,” Sarah said, scooting closer to the table. “I was awful.”
“You were not,” Honey said sternly. “We were just talking about you, you know. Bunny was saying how good you were. Hmm?” She nudged her friend with her elbow.
Bunny pursed her lips, but nodded again when Sarah looked at her in surprise. “It’s true,” the other woman said. “You’re all innocent and sweet, even when you’re clumsy. Did you see Blue’s face? He was ecstatic.”
But this did not reassure Sarah one bit. She dragged her spoon through her plate, stomach turning. Bunny didn’t seem to notice and continued, “But careful you don’t get any enemies here, Princess. The girls are going to start getting jealous.”
Sarah tried to take a bite of her food, but it tasted so bland and dry that she wanted to spit it back out immediately. “Why would they be jealous? I don’t want anything to do with him.”
They both gave her a look, like she was a little baby who didn’t know any better, like she was a dumb little child. Sarah grimaced. “What?”
Honey sighed. “Princess…” then she shook her head.
“What?”
“What she’s trying to say,” Bunny said, “Is that you’re being stupid.”
A bit stung, Sarah leaned back and away.
“That is not what I’m trying to say,” Honey snapped, annoyed. “Ugh.”
Bunny raised her hands in surrender.
She turned back to Sarah and spoke a little more gently this time, “What I was trying to say was that… well, keeping Blue’s attention and his interest… that is what you want. He’ll give you things, if you ask, and he’ll loosen up the rules, if he likes you enough.”
Sarah did not like this at all. “Why does it matter,” she ended up saying, sounding defeated, “I’m going to be stuck here forever anyway. And I’m going to have to- to-” She couldn’t finish the sentence. In fact, she could hardly even think it. Her jaw clenched tight, teeth grinding. She felt a nerve jolt in her belly, a horrible feeling born from the terrible, vague flashes in her mind of nakedness and sex and the foreign thing that was a man and the violent ‘r’ word and prostitution and would she go straight to hell, she wondered, once she had been used and abused at Blue’s bidding?
“Look at it this way,” Bunny said in a very business-like manner, “You’re never getting out of here, we’ve settled that, but aren’t there things that will make it a little bit better for you. Like a new pillow, or a movie night, or some real fucking food–” At this she shoved her own tray of food away and propped her elbows on the table with a bang. “Think of him as your genie, Sarah. Just rub him a few times–” she made a crude gesture that made Sarah recoil, “--and he’ll make your wishes come true.”
“Within reason,” Honey added with a sigh, but she had been nodding all along.
Bunny conceded, “Within reason.”
Sarah joined them again in the dressing room that evening, watching as they went through the same routine to get ready. Same makeup, same costumes.
“Is it always the same?” Sarah asked.
“We switch it up every couple weeks,” Honey said, shrugging. “And we get new routines too.”
“For the regulars,” Bunny added. “It would get stale otherwise, of course.”
Sarah leaned her head on her hand, elbow propped up on Honey’s vanity table edge. “Of course,” she echoed.
Honey was applying false eyelashes when her gaze flickered for a second. “Idiots,” she said under her breath. She nudged Bunny and jerked her head. Bunny glanced in the direction, as did Sarah. It was a group of girls, huddled around one of the vanities. They were speaking lowly together, glancing around themselves surreptitiously.
Bunny shook her head and returned to brushing her hair. “How stupid can you get.”
And that seemed to be that. Sarah looked between the two of them and the group of girls, confused. “What is it?” she said.
Honey cut a glance in her direction, just as a delighted giggle floated up and out from that huddle of girls. Sarah’s brows pinched together.
“They’re trying to be sneaky,” Honey muttered, shaking her head. “They think they can get out of here.”
Sarah’s mouth formed into a small o, and her eyes drifted back over them. She remembered the night before, something she had thought to be a dream. “Oh my god,” Sarah said, clapping her hand on the edge of the vanity. Cosmetics rattled.
Bunny hushed her so she dropped her voice quickly to continue in a whisper, “I just remembered. Last night, when you all were–” she made a rushed, vague gesture with her hand, “-- I went to bed early, but I woke up at some point and those same girls were there too, talking like that! It was only us there.”
Honey pressed her lips together. “Like I said: idiots.”
“Good for them,” Sarah said obstinately. “Maybe they know something we don’t and they can actually escape. Maybe….” She gazed at them with longing. But it was just now that they had disbanded, to go about their usual tasks. “Maybe… it’s impossible for one person or even two, but with everyone?” She was impassioned now. She pumped her fist. “We could totally overthrow this whole place! That- that rat bastard would never even see it coming!”
Bunny abruptly got up from her seat and walked away. Sarah watched her back as she went far enough to be obscured by the armoire and the other vanities. She glanced at Honey, who was watching her with guarded eyes.
“Don’t be stupid, Princess,” she said, “And don’t drag us into it. Blue doesn’t like girls who talk like that.”
Sarah’s lip curled. “What’s he going to do?”
“You haven’t seen nothin’ yet,” Honey said quietly. Then she too got up, leaving Sarah lingering on the stool she had claimed for herself. She sat there, hands clenching and unclenching in her lap. Her eyes flickered around the place, and she felt lost again. Stranded in the strange island of all this forced glamor.
The rest of the week dragged on and on. The next weekend approached, her weekend, nearer and nearer, and looming dreadful. Sarah couldn’t sleep, she could hardly eat. For it had been that same evening, once Honey and Bunny and all the other girls had gone to the stage, leaving Sarah alone in the dressing room, that Blue found her again, personally.
“Ah,” his eyes lit up as he walked in, flanked by two men. “Just who I wanted to see.”
Sarah hovered closely by the wall, watching him with wide eyes.
“How’s the dancing going?” he asked, coming closer, but stopping a foot or so away.
She shrugged.
He tsked. “Words, Princess.”
Her lips tugged far, far down, and she hugged herself tightly. The two men behind him were nondescript, but their gazes on her were heavy. “It’s… fine.”
“Don’t be bashful,” he said, with a large smile. “We saw you. She’s a natural, isn’t she, boys?”
The boys didn’t respond, but Sarah got the gist. She remembered Honey and Bunny’s many words on Blue, and she tried to smile, but it came stiff and wooden and painful.
Blue clapped his hands abruptly. “Okay,” he said, walking over to the armoire stuffed full of costumes. Sarah watched him bemusedly as he yanked out random bits of fabric. He threw them at her. She scrambled to catch it all. “Get dressed.”
She clutched the bundle to her chest and stared at him, mouth agape. “What?”
“Pretty please will you get dressed, my dear pretty princess?”
Her heart raced. “But you said I didn’t have to dance until–”
He waved her off. “And I meant it. Not till next week. But a few of my customers want a sneak peek before the bidding begins, hmm? Now, get dressed for me. We don’t have all night.”
When she still stood frozen, face stricken, he snapped his fingers at her. She flinched, blushed, and looked away. Shyly, she whispered, “Can you… give me some privacy? Please.”
When she looked back up, Blue was watching her with that slick smile. “Alright,” he said. He held up his index finger and shook it. “Don’t dawdle. Or we might just catch a peek.”
He and the two men left the room, the door thudding shut behind them. She could hear the muffled, un-understandable sounds of them speaking behind the door. Sarah’s hands shook and still she felt frozen. A moment later and a bang on the door had her jumping. Hurriedly, and clumsily, she removed her current outfit, another small dress, tights, and sweater number, and kicked off her shoes.
She held up the clothing Blue had thrown her and she grimaced. Her stomach rolled hard. A disgusted taste coated her tongue. The voices on the other side of the door seemed to grow louder and Sarah quickly, in her panic, pulled on the new outfit. It was better than nothing, but hardly. It was a tiny skirt, pleated, and a tiny top. It left her middle bare. She hooked her arm around herself so as to hide, but she still shivered from the chill of the damp innards of that building. With her other hand, she tugged back on her heels. Her tights she kept on.
Blue walked back in just as she was finishing the buckle of her left shoe, only one of the men trailing behind him this time. Her head snapped up and she crossed her arms around her middle. He had a cigar in his mouth now, smoke swirling off the end of it. The smell was thick in the air.
“Cute,” he said, when he had made her stand up and spin around for him, her face flaming and her terror thrumming in her ears. Then, he gestured to the nearest vanity. “Sit.”
Sarah did, and he came up behind her, his cigar now mysteriously gone, and set his hands on her shoulders. She tensed, and fixed her eyes on the table top. His hands moved into her hair and when she glanced up, his mouth was pursed in thought, and then he was gathering her hair into pig-tails.
His fingers against her skin, in her hair, it made her skin crawl, but she sat through it. “There,” he said, when her hair had been tied back, like she used to wear as a little girl.
“It’s not my thing,” he said, shrugging. The cigar had made a reappearance, hanging from his mouth like something she felt embarrassed to think. “But you know how some men are.”
Sarah stared at herself.
Distantly, she heard Blue chuckling. “Oh right. I guess you really don’t.”
She swallowed painfully. “Put some mascara on,” he told her, and he perched on the edge of the vanity right next to her.
With nervous hands, she did. Karen had never let her wear makeup, not like this, and nothing beyond a little bit of lip gloss. It wasn’t proper for a nice young girl such as herself. She didn’t want to look like a trollop, did she? It had always rankled. Her mother would have let her wear makeup, and her dad too, he didn’t care. Her step-mother was no-good, evil. That had been the proof. And now, with her being here, in this situation, dressed as a whore and about to be whored, all because of her stepmother…
When she was finished, the mascara coated her eyelashes, but was a little bit clumped. And she had accidentally got some on the bridge of her nose. She wiped it away with her thumb but it just smeared a black stain on her skin.
Blue made her get up and he pulled her in front of him. He looked her up and down, and then again. He licked his thumb and wiped the smudge of her nose off. Sarah’s mouth drooped.
“Perfect,” he said. He held out his elbow to her. “Let’s go.”
She clenched her fists. “Blue, I–”
“None of that,” he said, and he took her hand and hooked it into his elbow. “Just a little look-see.”
He patted her hand and then she had no choice but to follow along as he walked her to the door, through the door, and down the hallway to the club. The music grew louder, and stronger. It was a heavy, thudding beat. The corridor was opulent and red, like blood, with fine carpets and golden crystal lighting. They reached the door and the music was loud enough that Sarah could no longer hear her own breathing, but she could feel her heartbeat, both in her toes and in her head. The lackey-man held it open for them and Sarah tottered along beside Blue as he brought her inside.
She had not been in there yet, not when it was in full swing. It was dark and sumptuous. Lights flashed and the music rolled. It was some illicit rock song, and a girl she didn’t know the name of yet swayed her hips on the stage in her itty-bitty outfit. Sarah’s eyes flickered around, large and white like a scared little animal’s, at all the men lounging around in their nice chairs and tables. The bar shone under lights as a tender in a three-piece suit did some fancy maneuver with a thick, clear bottle of sloshing alcohol.
The cigar smell was stronger in here, even thicker. And it obscured the vision. There were girls milling about, here and there, giggling and chatting with the men. Sarah saw Honey perched in the lap of one such man, who had stark gray hair and a full mustache. She leaned in to kiss the man open-mouthed on the jaw. Sarah looked away quickly. She hoped she hadn’t seen her.
It was dark enough that no one noticed Blue or Sarah, all absorbed in their sins and vices. She couldn’t help but to tighten her fingers into Blue’s arm as he directed them straight through the place. They reached a little enclave, darkened further. “For VIPs,” he murmured right in her ear. She shuddered.
The lackey had fallen away at some point, Sarah noticed this when she looked behind herself across the great pulsating club room, as if there would be someone to help her. To save here. No one.
She resisted for only a second, but Blue didn’t care. He pulled her into the enclave. A small group of men, finely dressed, cigars abound, sat round a table. There was one empty chair. Poker chips and cards were scattered about, and the view of the stage was unmatched. Sarah saw the way the dancing girl contorted her face into some sexy thing and rubbed her hands down her body, over her hips. Then the music perked up and she made a cheeky gesture, covering her nearly bared breasts with her hands in mock shyness. Distantly, Sarah heard rumbling laughs raising up from the crowd.
“Hello, Gentlemen,” Blue said. He brought Sarah further in, right in plain view. “Our little princess, as you requested.”
There were three men. And they all looked the same to Sarah in her panic. They looked besuited and official and important. They reminded her of her father, that time she had been seven or eight and it had been bring-your-kid-to-work-day and she’d seen him commanding the attention of a whole meeting room, perfect suit and clicking shoes. Cigars too, even in a lawyer’s office. Her heart thumped. She missed her father so much. She hated that she saw him among these men, these horrid, horrid creatures. What kind of men would come to a place like this, where young girls were sold and kept enslaved. Did they know the truth? They must have.
They looked at her through the cloud of smoke. One smiled, one remained impassive, gazing at her over his cigar, and the last leaned back and hooked his arm over the head-rest of the round cushioned couch seat. Sarah swallowed.
“She is very pretty,” this last one said.
“Oh, yes,” said the first. “What I wouldn’t give to pop that little cherry.”
Sarah took a nervous step back, her heart thundering up in her throat. Blue grabbed her. He took a seat in that empty chair, leaving her standing beside him, but held tight onto her wrist. “She’s a bit nervous, you understand,” he said conversationally. There was a fourth hand of cards laying face-down in front of him. “We only just got her a week ago.”
Had it already been a week?
“Hmm,” the last one said. “Sixteen, you said?”
Blue nodded. The impassive one remained impassive.
The first one, with the smile, grinned even wider. “Why don’t you come over here and sit on daddy’s lap, princess?” He patted his lap.
Blue let go of her wrist, and Sarah looked at him in a panic. He just raised his eyebrow.
“Come on,” the man laughed. “Don’t be shy. I won’t bite.”
She was standing frozen but then Blue pushed her, hand heavy on the back of her thigh. “Listen to the nice man, Princess,” he said, and his tone was so warning that Sarah felt her heart drop splat all over her feet. Her toes curled as much as they could in her restrictive shoes.
She stumbled over to the man and, as he grinned sleazily up at her, she slowly lowered herself to perch on one of his spread legs. Her body quivered with the force it took to make herself obey. He immediately wrapped his arms around her waist and tugged her closer, fully on his lap. She tensed up so tight she thought she might implode. She almost hoped she would, to burst into a puddle of blood and bone and brain all over these disgusting people. So they could choke on it, scream, and never ever come back to give Blue the satisfaction of their money. They all deserved it. And yet, she remained perfectly whole even as one of the man’s hands stroked her hip and the other her thigh. She was glad for her tights, offering even just the smallest measure of separation from his touch.
But it was a bandaid on a gaping, bleeding wound. Sarah had to hold onto his shoulder to keep her balance, her feet dangling over his legs. And in that position, she was facing the rest of them head on.
The man without an expression was now sipping at a glass of dark liquid. He just watched her and when they caught eyes, Sarah looked quickly away.
They spoke over her head, voices muffled to her ears. All she could focus on was the touches on her skin. On her hip, her lower back, her belly. The man’s hand crept up her thigh, and came closer, and closer, until–
Blue threw down his cards and put out his cigar. “Well, my friends, I’ve got to get this little thing tucked away. It’s past her bedtime,” he said with a smirk. He made a gesture to her, a crooking finger, and Sarah was grateful for it. She jumped up quick as can be and hurried to his side.
The man she’d been sitting on sounded put out. “What a tease you are!”
But Blue kept up his smile. “Can’t spoil the goods yet, Jim. If you want more, you know the drill. See you gentlemen later. I’ll send Buttercup in.”
He placed a hand to Sarah’s shoulder as the man sat back against the cushion. There was a flush to his cheeks, like he was drunk. He was grinning again, distracted by the prospect of a new girl to fondle. “Yes, please.”
The other two men kept their eyes on Sarah as Blue steered her out of the room. It was only when they were halfway across the main floor, among everyone, that Sarah let out a big, big breath.
“Gotta get over that fear,” he leaned into her, as they were walking. “And quickly.”
She jerked away at the insinuation of his mouth on her ear. Sarah noticed the key dangling from his neck, around his tie. His hand seized on her shoulder tighter and he laughed a very, very breathy laugh. All she could do was stare at the key, even as they walked.
He let her go when they reached the main door. She snapped out of it, looking up at him, startled. “I won’t always be there to tell you what to do. Now go on to bed.”
It was a warning, but he delighted in it. She could tell. He sent her off with a light slap on her butt.
That night, huddled under the covers, Sarah could not, and would not sleep. Her eyes remained closed, but her mind raced and raced. Her chest and shoulders shuddered with each and every breath. She felt the phantom press of something against her bottom, which was foreign to her, but would be known to her soon if she stayed in this place. She had seized on the opportunity for another shower in the privacy of the deserted place, but still, the scent of cigar and alcohol and besuited men had soaked into her very being.
The group of whispering girls returned in the deep of night, and she heard every single sound they made acutely. If she strained her ears enough she could just imagine that she could hear what they were saying. The sheets were scratchy and loud against her skin as she tugged it down oh so slowly, uncovering her head. It was only two of them, out of the four, this time. They were scouring over some sheets of paper scattered on the little cot they sat on.
Honey’s warnings played in her mind. Don’t cross Blue, do what he says, there’s no getting out of here. And above all, don’t be stupid.
“Hey.” Her own scratchy, whisper of a voice surprised her. It seemed to echo through the cavernous, grumbling place.
The girls immediately looked over to her. One had large, frightened eyes. The other a strong, stubborn set to the jaw. The three stared at each other for a long, long moment. Then Sarah, with her lips twisting and turning in her nerves, sat up and hugged her knees into her chest. The room was dark and shadowed. She could hardly make out the looks of the other, brave girls. She swallowed tightly. And very, very lowly, almost obscured by the sounds of shifting sheets and that leak in the bathroom, she said, “Please…” Her voice cracked on the word. They stared at her. “Let me help. I want out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the girl with the stubborn countenance. The fearful one looked back and forth between them.
Sarah felt tears in her eyes. “Please. I’ll do anything. I can’t be here any longer. Please. Please. Please–” She held her hands out in front of her in a prayer-like motion.
“Just go back to sleep, new girl,” the stubborn one snapped. “Don’t make me go get Blue. Talking about getting out of here. Hah! As if!”
Sarah flinched back. The girl stared her down so strongly, so meanly, that she had no choice but to cower back away under her thin and depressing covers. The whispering had stopped, the shuffling of papers too. Sarah cried and cried, for she felt more desolate than ever.
But it was the next day, in line to grab her tray of food at mid-day, that a paper note was slipped into her hand. She couldn’t stop her spine from zipping up straight in surprise, couldn’t quite keep the look of shock from her face. It was the obstinate girl from the night before, the mean one, who had maneuvered in line behind her and slid her the note and still looked at her so severely. She jerked her chin in such a way as to say, get on with it. Sarah clutched it in her fist, tightly. Her hands began to sweat around it.
When she found her seat with Honey and Bunny, Sarah must have had a peculiar, pinched expression on her face. She felt a tremor of adrenaline, panic, as Honey regarded her. She dabbed at her upper lip nervously.
“What’s got you all nervous?” Bunny said.
“W-what? I’m not–”
Bunny raised both her eyebrows.
Honey chewed on the inside of her cheek. She leaned forward slightly. “I heard you saw the VIPs last night.”
Sarah looked away, acutely aware of the folded up paper clutched in her palm. She kept it fisted on her knee. She remembered the touch of that man, and the looks of the others. She nodded, gaze downward, and with her free hand brought up her spoon to pick at her food. She grimaced at the slop and dropped it back on the tray with a splat.
Honey pursed her lips. “... how was it?”
Sarah shrugged morosely. Her neck had grown tense. A throbbing in her jaw from where she had been clenching her teeth together, grinding them. Her stress was too much. “It was…” She licked her lips, searching for words. “Nothing… happened.”
And then, in a much smaller voice, she whispered, “Blue– he mentioned a… bidding.”
Honey said, “Oh?”
When Sarah looked up, Honey had an uncomfortable expression about her, but she did not seem terribly surprised. Bunny listened impassively as she ate. Robotic movements of her hand, from plate to mouth.
Sarah made a warbly sort of sound, in confirmation. “Honey,” Sarah said then, her voice coming out high-pitched and scared and wavering. “I don’t want to be sold.”
Honey’s brows furrowed and she looked at her with kind, but resigned eyes. There was nothing she or anyone else could do. Sarah looked in her eyes for a moment before it became too much and she had to look away. She blinked back tears, swallowed, and tightened her fist around the note. None of them said anything for the rest of the meal. They walked to the dance hall in silence, a young Sarah in between the two most grown women of this place. She felt lost with them, the weight of their experiences weighing on her. She didn’t dare tell them about the note, she knew they would never understand.
She had to hide the paper-scrap in her bodice during dance practice. It scraped against her breast endlessly, a constant reminder. She was so caught up in her head that even the doctor noticed. She dismissed her early. “Don’t waste my time and I don’t waste yours,” the woman had snapped at her.
And so Sarah had run from the room, feeling the eyes of everyone on her. But once outside the oppressive place, where she had been surrounded always by spies and harlots and gestapo and things, the air felt cleaner. Sarah made a beeline to the nearest bathroom and she hid herself in the stalls. Fumbling in panic, she sat on the toilet seat and ripped the note from out of her bra cup. Her fingers shook and shook but she managed to unfold it.
Her eyes ran over and over the words. Wait for the signal. And at the bottom, in large capital letters, it said, DON’T BE A RAT.
Sarah clutched the note to her chest, which heaved with the force of her surprise. Friday next. It was one week away, the weekend she would begin dancing in the club, working, bidded for. Sarah hoped to God that the signal would come before then, or else it would be too late. Sitting on the toilet, her teeth chattered and the world felt fuzzy, her senses muffled.
But then it all came rushing back with the sound of the bathroom door slamming open and the sharp, smart clicking of shoes. Sarah gaped when she saw Blue’s nice leather dress shoes, with their silver chains, pass right under the gap in her stall. He whistled. And Sarah held her breath as he walked into the stall next to her. The metal frame shook when he shut and locked the door behind him. His feet planted wide, he stood facing the toilet. There was a zipper sound, the rustling of fabric. And then a stream of peeing. Sarah flushed hot.
The block heel of her shoe accidentally scraped against the tile floor and it made a sound, overly loud. The peeing continued, but Sarah heard the rustling of movement.
Then: “This is the men’s bathroom, you know.” He sounded amused, dangerous, and a little curious.
Sarah tightened her grip on the note.
“Shouldn’t you be in class?” he said. And the stream was finished, and the sound of a zipper again.
She didn’t answer.
He banged on the shared wall, it rattled. Sarah flinched.
“Don’t tell me you’re hiding,” he said. His shoes clacked and Sarah watched his feet as he exited the stall and rounded to stop right in front of hers.
“N-no,” she said in a rush. She stood up and flung the paper in the toilet and she flushed it. Her palms were so sweaty. “I- I just wasn’t feeling great.”
She unlocked the door and it swung inward with a squeak. She peeked around the edge with wide eyes. Blue looked at her through hooded eyes, darkened. “Ah,” he said. His arms were crossed. His look penetrated her. “Princess.”
“Sorry,” she said, and she tried to rush past him, towards the sinks, but he grabbed her arm.
Sarah tottered right in front of him, unbalanced on her heels. He reached up and brushed back a piece of her hair. “You’re sick?” he said, too close to her.
“I- I don’t know,” she said. “My– stomach. Dr. Gorski– she let me leave early.”
“Hmm.” He was so close that his eyes appeared to her crossed. She was sure hers did too. She leaned back as far as she could, but he had her arm firmly in hand.
“I want you to know,” he said, tilting his head, “that the one thing I hate above all else… is a liar. You’re not lying to me, I hope.”
Sarah stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Cat got your tongue?”
She felt as if her mouth, her whole body, was numb. “No!” she burst out. “Blue– I promise.” She contorted her face, brought her free hand over her stomach. “Really. I…”
His eyes raked over her face, and his eyelids were half-lowered. His eyelashes were dark and inky. This close to him, Sarah thought he had the eyes of a girl.
“Alright,” he said then, simply, and released his grip on her arm. His fingers raised to skate over her shoulder, her collarbone.
She blinked at him.
“Did you vomit?” he then said.
“...No?”
The sly smile was back, thin. His likewise thin mustache curved with it. He tapped his mouth with his free finger. “Give me a kiss.”
Sarah stared at him, her eyes flicking all over his face, including his mouth. “You- you–” Her words stuttered to a halt at his look. She looked between his eyes and his lips and, stomach twisting up in nerves, she leaned forward, clenched her eyes shut, and pecked him quickly on the lips. She darted back as quick as can be, but he did not seem to want anything else from her. “Go wash your hands,” he said and he strode toward the main door. He whistled on his way out.
When he was gone, Sarah hunched over the sink, the faucet running loud in her ears. When she looked up at herself in the mirror, she saw a pale girl, with pink lips. Was she any different now? Having kissed a man. She felt different. She felt scared, scared, scared.
Chapter 4
Notes:
bros, this chapter is dark
graphic violence in this one:/
Chapter Text
The days between the note and the weekend were difficult. Her nerves and her anticipation were too much. Her eyes were constantly peeled for some signal, the signal, whatever that would be. But time was running out. Sarah feared that the signal would come too late, once she had already been sold off to the highest bidder.
It all passed in a dreadful daze. Dr. Gorski constantly drilling her on her dance routine, to be debuted Friday night, and working to finalize her costume, and Honey given the task to prepare her, and Blue poking about more than usual.
He called her into his office two nights before The Friday. He bid her sit down across his desk and he leaned back into his own chair. “You look better,” he said.
Sarah’s brows knitted together.
“Your little stomach problem,” he said. “It’s gone, then?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. I think so.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Then things can go as planned.”
Dread pooled in her gut. Her fists and jaw clenched up.
He lit a cigarette. He started to speak, “This is how it’s going to go: you’re…”
And as Sarah sat there, miserable and shrinking and terrified, he explained to her the plan. Friday night she was going to dance, she would go on after Sugar, and she would wow the crowd. She would then go back to the dormitory for the night – got to keep that little cherry intact, he said, and my little princess untouched. That’s where the big bucks are, you know.
And the bidding would commence, lasting through the weekend. She would dance Saturday night and Sunday night, too, and on Sunday, the highest bidder would finally be chosen. She would spend the night with the faceless, nameless man who would own so much of her, and Blue would make a fortune off of it. After that, she would be put into the rotation like the rest of the girls, and every weekend following, she would spend her evenings with the man who wanted her the most, the man who paid for her the most.
“In the meantime,” he said, “have Honey get you ready for the big night. Tell her that. She’ll know what I mean.”
Sarah’s face had slowly crumpled this whole time, turning red and sad and terrified, as he spoke to her. But now, at this… her chin dimpled and her face wrinkled. It came so quick and she couldn’t breath, couldn’t control herself. She covered her face and tried so hard to muffle the sounds of her sobs. Blue didn’t say anything but she was so acutely aware of his presence there, his being the cause of this overwhelming feeling.
He let her cry for a minute or so, but then he got impatient and he waved her off. “Don’t forget to ask her.”
Sarah returned to the sleeping quarters, red-faced and shivering. The signal hadn’t come, it still hadn’t. She worried it never would, or it would be too late and she’d be ruined, just like Honey was, and just like Bunny was.
She fell quiet in these days, in her fear and her dreadful anticipation. Honey and Bunny continued on as they always had, at least to her knowledge, chatting and resigned, and maybe bitter, but there was nothing they could do about it. She waited a whole day to finally get Honey’s attention and to embarrassedly ask her about how Blue wanted her ready for Friday.
Honey whistled a breath, and then, among all the other girls preparing for bed, she said, “Better get it over with.”
Sarah didn’t like the sound of that, but Honey held out her hand and Sarah took it. They walked to the bathroom, and a few of the girls still milled about.
It surprised Sarah when Honey raised her voice. “Everyone, out!”
The girls looked at Honey. But she clapped her hands twice. “Come on. Hurry it up! Clear the room.”
One of the girls tried to put up a fight, her lip curling in distaste. Yet she was obviously younger than Honey and if Sarah had noticed anything since she had gotten here, it was that there was a sort of hierarchy. The younger ones had a certain power and the ones who had been there the longest had an even different power. These powers clashed, contradicted each other even. But Honey jutted out her chin and stared the younger girl down.
They all hustled out.
Honey snapped at their retreating backs. “And stay out!”
Sarah watched bemusedly.
Honey turned to her and grinned wryly. “What did I say about that sting of mine?”
Sarah let out a little laugh, so strange in this place that it made her throat grow tight, but then Honey was rustling through a cabinet and grabbing supplies and her smile faded. Since she had first arrived there, she had seen many things in this bathroom. The calm way that a girl or two or three at a time would prop her leg up on toilet seats, smear wax on her leg or between her legs, then rip body hair out without even flinching. Sarah always looked quickly away, the uncomfortable glances of bodies unwelcome to her young eyes. “Is it… going to hurt?”
Honey clucked her tongue. She shrugged. “A little. But it’s not so bad. Go sit.” She jerked her head at the nearest toilet. “Take your stockings off. We’ll start easy.”
Sarah had never liked pain, and it was indeed painful. What made it even more painful was the fact that she did not have any choice in the matter whatsoever. The only okay thing about it was how nice Honey was. Sarah’s fondness for her grew even more, a tender feeling that made her eyes bead with tears beyond the pain of body hair being ripped from her legs, her armpits, and then…
“I don’t want to,” Sarah said resolutely.
Honey crouched in front of her, her chin resting on Sarah’s now smooth and pinked knee, and she looked up at her with gentle, patient eyes. Sarah’s skin smarted, but she clutched her short little dress as far down her thighs as could be.
“Blue’s gonna ask,” Honey said. “You have to.”
Sarah fidgeted, mouth twisting up uncomfortably. “I know,” she whispered. She was too aware of all the girls on the other side of the wall. Could they hear?
Honey sat back. “Here,” she said, and she handed her the tub of wax. “You do it. I’ll walk you through it.”
Sarah rolled the tub between both hands, staring at it with anxiety. “You won’t look?” she asked.
“I promise.”
Afterward, she was sore and smarting and feeling a little bit violated over it. But Honey took her hand and led her through the darkened room of all the little cots and to her own bed. There was hardly any room but they curled up together, with Sarah’s head on Honey’s breast, and Honey’s arm wrapped around her. It was the picture of mother and daughter, or at least that was how Sarah liked to imagine it. The wrinkled bit of poster of her true mother still lay crumpled under her pillow, but even Linda had never held Sarah like this, not even the bonds of blood or womb strong enough to affect this tenderness between them.
The rest of the place was quiet, everyone having drifted off in the long time it took Sarah to get the courage to follow through in the bathroom. It was a dark and simple feeling. Honey’s chest lifted and fell under her cheek as she breathed. Sarah’s arm hung over Honey’s middle, and her fingers clenched in the fabric of her loose pajama shirt.
“Honey?” she whispered
“Yes?”
“Will you tell me your real name?”
Honey traced fingers over the skin of Sarah’s arm. It caused goosebumps of happiness. That affectionate, safe touch.
Sarah waited. Then she glanced up in the dark, though she couldn’t see much. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Honey let out a breath and it made the little baby hairs around Sarah’s forehead flutter from the wind. There was a long moment and then… “April.” It sounded strange to the ear, unpracticed, new, like maybe it wasn’t real. But it was. Sarah blinked as she thought of how long Honey had been here in this place, hidden away, called something other than her true name.
“April?”
“Mm-hmm.” Honey smiled a little at this, Sarah thought. “What? Does it not suit me?”
Sarah hugged her tighter. “No, it does. It’s pretty, and sweet. You’re like that.”
Honey was quiet for a moment, then: “Thank you.”
“... Can I ask you another question?”
“Sure, hun.”
Sarah rubbed her lips together. They were a little chapped, dry. They carried the reminder of Blue on them. “Do you have a family… out there? People who miss you?”
Honey’s hand continued in that soft back and forth motion over Sarah’s arms. She sighed a lengthy sigh. “Somewhere out there… yes.”
“Who?”
“Well, my parents, my sister. My brothers…”
Sarah felt troubled. “Did they put you in here?”
Honey shook her head slowly, which Sarah felt but did not see. “No,” she admitted quietly. “When I was young, not too much older than you, really, I went a little wild. Ran away from home. I… got into some trouble with the bad sorts of men and, well, … here I am.”
Sarah scrunched her eyes tight. “It’s so unfair.”
Honey hummed, but didn’t say anything more. Sarah thought that her resignation to her fate was terrible, a little bit pathetic. But she shoved those thoughts away.
“My stepmother put me in here,” Sarah said then, quietly. “Not here. But… the Lennox Home for the insane. She thinks I’m insane, has for a year. I don’t think I’m insane, but I guess… I– I don’t know.”
“You guess what?”
Sarah curled up tighter around Honey. “I… guess it makes sense why she would think I am.” Her heart thumped once, hard. “Maybe I really am insane.”
“You seem pretty normal to me.”
Sarah swallowed. “I did something bad, Honey. Really bad. I must have.”
“... You don’t remember?”
“I do, but…” Sarah clenched her eyes tight. “It’s impossible. It couldn’t have been real. So it must have been me.”
“What was it?” Honey sounded very perplexed.
Sarah looked up at the ceiling. They were silent for a long while. Sarah felt overcome. She sat up. Looked down at her lap. “I don’t think I want to tell you. You won’t like me anymore.”
Honey did not protest, but continued laying there on the little bed, looking up at Sarah with calm, slightly tired eyes which were adjusted now to the dark surrounding them. “That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
Sarah dropped her chin, her hair falling all around her. “You’re not worried?”
“Nah, Princess.” She took Sarah’s wrist in her cold hand. “We’ve all got demons here.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said vaguely. And she lay back down into Honey’s side, which was warm.
Sarah felt her eyes drooping after a while, but something pricked at her consciousness, which kept her awake. “Honey.”
“Yeah, babe?”
“I’m going to leave here,” she whispered, so under her breath that there was no chance anyone would hear her. “Really soon.” She wasn’t even sure if Honey had heard her, for she did not respond at all.
“Will you leave with me?” Sarah prodded, stretching her neck in such a way that she was looking at the underside of Honey’s chin. The older woman stared at the ceiling, blinking slowly.
Then she looked down at Sarah, squeezed her. In a sorry sort of voice, she murmured, “No, I won’t.”
Sarah felt her chest tighten. “Why not?”
“You know why.”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “But I don’t understand. How can you live like this?”
And oh so simply, Honey said, “It’s better than dying.”
Sarah could tell that Honey was fading, sleep tugging at her mind. She was so calm about it all, accepting. It hurt Sarah to think of and she whispered desperately into her friend’s chest, “I wish the goblins would come take us away. Right now. Please.” She imagined the face of the king, and of her friends, and the mischievous little goblins. She must be insane, for when she said it, deeply, resolutely, Honey’s breathing stuttered in her chest for a second, hearing this, but nothing, nothing, nothing, happened.
Tears dripped from Sarah’s eyes onto Honey’s breast. Eventually, Honey’s breath began evening out, deepening. They remained tangled up in each other the whole night. The conversation troubled Sarah. So many things troubled her.
And then it was Friday and the dread was unimaginable. That night would be her first night at the club. Her debut as Blue so grandly put it. She spent the morning in a right state of nerves. Jittering and uncomfortable and queasy.
Every single second more that there was still no signal made Sarah want to shrivel up in her bed and never come out. The fear was palpable. The dancing, okay, she could do that. But the bidding, and what would come after… this was what really, really scared her. Sunday night would be there all too soon.
She was like a puppet the whole day, marionetted about by Honey, by Dr. Gorski, by Blue, even. They ushered her to and fro where she needed to go, when she was too listless and nervous and scared, and they dressed her and primped her and prepared her.
Sarah felt the world crashing around her when evening fell and she was in the dressing room, among all the other girls, getting ready. Honey did her makeup, heavy, glittering colors on the eyes, false eyelashes, shimmering lip gloss, and lots and lots of blush. Her hair was done with great care and she was wrapped up in her costume which Dr. Gorksi had gotten made specifically for her.
It wasn’t too unlike the costumes of the other girls. Blue had a business to run, which demanded a certain level of vulgarity. It was skimpy and sexy and showed off her body. It was personalized, however. Princess was her name in this place and it showed in this costume. Pretty pink and soft, with a corset which, though daring, recalled ages past. Her hair was done in soft tight ringlet curls, those which were common among the youthful and rich young and little girls of previous centuries. A floating skirt, down to her ankles, but sheer, it gave a peek of her thin, nude underclothes. The makeup was blushy, but the eyes were glittered heavily, dark lashed. Her eyelids drooped from the weight of it. And satin opera gloves on her arms in the color of an innocent, shimmering white. Wearing it for the first time, she looked at herself in the mirror, Dr. Gorski hovering over her shoulder. The appearance was odd, her at once looking like the young girl she was, and even younger, in her princess dress up and flower crown days, and yet it was a grown version of this that the doctor had evoked in her. The sheer skirt gave the impression of nudity underneath, the corset pressing her still budding breasts up and up and in direct eyeline. Her hair was smooth and girlish but it fell in such an artful way over her collar bone, around her still chubby cheeks, that she looked like her mother had in all her limited memories of her. She felt pretty even as she felt whorish, and evil by association.
But if she had thought the dread and the fear was bad then, she would soon be thoroughly dissuaded from that notion, for what happened next was so horrific that Sarah would never forget a single second of it for the rest of her life, however long that may be.
The signal finally came.
It came in the dressing room, before the show, in one of the few moments that Sarah was left alone. She was all dolled up and ready and she was sitting on the stool, wringing her gloved fingers together in her nervousness, watching all the other girls getting ready and chatting. She looked around almost absently, her mind focused inward and futureward. But then her eyes skated over one of the girls who was a part of the brave, escaping group, and her attention was caught.
The girl locked eyes with her across the room. She nodded slowly, barely. Just a lowering of the chin. She mouthed a word and Sarah knew it was to be tonight. And then the girl turned back to her vanity mirror and continued powdering her face. Sarah’s lips parted slightly, and she stared at the back of the girl’s large pompadour hair which exposed her dainty neck, and her heart jumped up into her throat. She could feel it in her jaw. The little hairs all over her body stood to attention, pricked from the anticipation. Sarah could hardly control the jittering stress of herself during that lull of time between when all the girls were ready and waiting and when they began to be funneled out onto the stage of the man. Her eyes kept darting over to the girl who had signaled her, over and over, waiting, anticipative, but she, and the other girls of the group, gave no more indication of what was going on.
Sarah had a hard time keeping it together when Honey found her to wish her luck. She pulled her in for a hug. “Just close your eyes and pretend you’re by yourself, or better yet, you can imagine you’re dancing for your crush. You got one of those, yeah?”
Sarah offered her a small, wobbly smile, but didn’t answer. Honey seemed to be in good spirits, excited for her, or at least attempting to ease Sarah’s discomfort. She laughed. “Sure you do,” she said. “Whenever I’m up there, I always imagine it’s my childhood best friend watching me, all grown up. We were inseparable from five to thirteen, and I had such a crush on him, but then my family moved.” She shrugged. “And I never saw him again. But he’s a safe memory for me.”
“That’s sweet,” Sarah said quietly, thinking all the while how she wished she had something like that. Some tender feelings toward someone, a boy or a girl, whose presence in her head could protect her from the leering gazes of Blue’s clients. She considered Honey to be that person for a second, but it wasn’t like that. She cast her mind back to childhood crushes but none were significant enough. Then, she thought of the reason why she was here…
Her eyes darted again to the girl with the signal and lingered there. When she glanced back at Honey, the woman had followed her gaze. Her lips were pursed and the corners of them wrinkled oddly under the heavy makeup she wore. She looked at Sarah with something like fear in her eyes but she didn’t say a single word.
Sarah got into her head in the minutes following. The clock over the armoire in the distance ticked and it seemed to her very loud. Her heart rate picked up with it, seconds going quicker than could be real. When when when when when. Her eyes and her hands went ansty, shifty. She imagined what she would do once she was free. There was no one out there for her, not anymore, not like there was for Honey. She would leave this place and this city, she decided, and this country. She would travel downward, to Mexico– that was where all the fugitives went, to stay safe, away from their pursuers– and she would herself find a job. She was only sixteen but she had aged a decade in a week in a half. She could pretend, wear grown-up, sexy clothing– she had a lot of practice with that now– and bat her sweet little eyelashes at some kind men and they would just have to oblige. Let her waitress his cabana cafe, or answer the phone at his mechanic office, overlooking the ocean. And she would spend a few years there, learn Spanish, laze on a beach, maybe make some friends, and then once she had saved herself up a bit of money, she would go off to Europe. Ireland. Yes, she had always wanted to go to Ireland, where her family had once come from. The prospect brightened her up. The dream of it made her tingle with possibility. She was at once numb to the nervous anticipatory energy of the dressing room.
But then Blue walked in and the dream of hers broke.
“Gather ‘round, ladies,” he said. His suit was dark, pin-striped silk. Two men in suits, less fine than his, followed behind him. There was a sheen to the fabric as Blue strolled through the room among all the yellow vanity lights. His Cuban-heeled shoes clicked with his every step. “Let’s talk a little.”
The room was packed, bustling. There was hardly any room for all of them. The clutter of the vanities and the cosmetics and costumes all around. But despite it, everyone was quick to move at his word. There was rustling and clacking as all the girls, plus the harried Dr. Gorski, came close and gathered round as he had bidden.
Sarah remained somewhere on the outskirts, behind some of the more important, more intimidating, older girls. Honey had touched her shoulder before going to sit on the edge of her own vanity table, some distance away. Sarah just caught the look of her still pursed, twisted mouth and tightened skin around the eyes, before her face was obscured from view. Even once everyone was settled, Blue remained silent. He looked among them. Vague, dulled music could be heard through the door and the hall, along with muffled voices. The club going into full swing.
Blue, after a long moment of silent observation, in which most of the girls had begun shifting and glancing at one another, sighed and brought his hand up to rub at his mustache.
Sarah fidgeted, nervous. She glanced over at the girl with the pompadour and the signal, before her eyes darted back over to a silent Blue. She stilled when she noticed his eyes resting on her. There was a loaded moment where she hardly breathed. But then it was over and his gaze was gone from her, back to looking around at them all.
He sighed again, tilting his head. Then his face contorted into a frown. “I give you girls a good life, don’t I?” he said. “I try to, at least. I really do. You know I do. Right, Lady?”
He looked at Lady, a girl with bright red hair, who stood closest to him. She nodded quickly, with a smile of assurance. He smiled back and raised his hand to touch her shoulder gently. He let it linger.
A menacing air suffused the room.
“Yes,” Blue continued, “I’ve given you all a home, food to eat, friends, a job. A lot of you would be on the streets without me, as you well know. And in return for my generosity… all I ask is that you RESPECT ME!”
It turned into a roar so loud, the room seemed to rattle. Everyone flinched. He let go of Lady, whose face had gone white as a sheet. She stumbled back a step or two as he took a deep, heavy breath. Like a puffing, violent animal, with his cheeks tinged red, he turned to one of his men, standing tall behind him.. He pulled out a gun from the other man’s inside suit pocket.
Sarah’s heart jumped painfully all the way up to her throat. She went pale amid the gasps that rang out all around her. Girls and women alike shifted in fear. Blue didn’t seem to care, not as he walked a few steps in the little center circle that had been made in their huddle. He held the gun aloft, tilted up to the ceiling, like he was observing it, showing it off like he liked to show them off. It glinted in the light, with its gold handle and slick black shaft.
“So WHY,” he said, walking among them, looking at them all, “has it come to my attention that there’s a group of you… PLOTTING AGAINST ME?”
Her palms began to sweat, she wanted to back away, to run. Why wasn’t anyone running? She took a quick step back, but someone caught her wrist. It was Bunny. When Sarah looked up at her, panicked wide eyes, almost imperceptibly, her friend shook her head. She, too, was scared. And it was this that made Sarah shiver for Bunny was always so strong, so strict. She never flinched. But now she was pale and sweating like the rest of them. Sarah cast her gaze desperately around, trying to see Honey, but she was still hidden from view. Bunny kept a hold on her wrist.
Blue’s heels clicking a final time brought her attention back to the danger which lurked too close. Her eyes snapped to him quick as can be. He had stopped in front of the pompadour girl, the signal girl. Sarah was far away, on the outskirts of their group, but the room was small enough that she could see the tears glinting inside of that girl’s eyes. The clench of her jaw, the strung-taut tendons of her thin, breakable neck. Sarah couldn’t breathe. No no no no no… Another girl, a member of the escapist group, stood near Sarah. Her knees visibly shook.
Blue stared deep into the girl’s eyes. “Would you like to explain that to me, Sugar?” he asked her, leaning in too close, gun still held in hand, now lazily, not cocked, but waiting.
“Blue–” her voice came wetly, shakily. “We didn’t– I didn’t–”
“Oh dear,” Blue said, a mocking, overly-exaggerated tilt to the head. He raised the gun, and Sugar finched, full-bodied. “You poor thing–”
Dr. Gorksi took this moment to rush up to Blue’s side. “What are you doing?” she said in a sharp, nervous whisper. She touched his shoulder. “Please, stop this. You have caught them, you have won. You have won..”
The doctor was whispering furiously to them, the whole room strung up on tenterhooks. “This dream to escape… it is all zey have. Let them–”
Blue, quicker than could be possible, turned to the doctor and grabbed her by the collar of her dress with his free hand. Sarah breathed in sharply, hand flying into Bunny’s. She clenched it tightly, sweatily, as Blue shoved Dr. Gorski back into a vanity. It shook and rattled. Tubes of makeup rolled off and to the floor. He was spitting furious, his words building and building until they were so loud it stung at her ears. “You’re suddenly not aware what it is we DO HERE? Really?”
The doctor’s face had gone pale in her fear, and she gasped out raggedly as he shoved her again into the vanity, hard, and stepped back. She collapsed to the floor, clutching her throat with bony, white fingers.
At that, Blue turned back toward Sugar, stretching his neck left and right. It was an unpolished, odd move from him, the man of clean-cut, silken, gelled, pimpificaiton. It was deathly silent now, except for the doctor’s gasps.
Sugar was shaking. “Blue, I– I’m sorry- I–”
He tsked, raising a single finger. Almost gently, he touched her lips and then her hair. “It’s okay,” he said, softer now. “You lead this little thing, yeah?”
Her breath came in short, insufficient bursts. Sarah could hear it across the room, scratching against the pin silence. At Blue’s look, Sugar nodded quickly. He sighed, but nodded back in response. Sarah swallowed back the tightness in her throat.
He walked around her, pausing behind her where the wall with the pin-up posters was. “One of these is missing,” he said quietly, almost to himself, but not quite. “Shame.”
Sugar, facing away from him, was crumbling into herself, all wet-faced and red.
“It’s okay, Sugar,” Blue said again, turning back to face them all. He came closer, poised just behind her. “Thank you for owning up to your actions. You saved me a lot of trouble.”
It happened so quick, it didn’t seem real.
He raised the gun to the back of Sugar’s head and before anyone could realize, pulled the trigger. The gunshot was so loud that Sarah jumped, hands coming up to her ears, her eyes flinching shut. The world rang and rang, like sirens at the end of the world. A loud wail came through to her just as Sugar’s body thudded heavily to the ground.
Sarah, frozen in shock, heard the screams that came next, the sobs, even through the protection of her hands at her ears. She kept her eyes desperately shut, the world racing on around her, too fast. She could hear her own breathing, over loud, and the terror all around her. Her knees shook so much she thought she might collapse. She stumbled back, thumping hard into a vanity edge.
When she opened her eyes again, it had felt a year had gone by, but really it had merely been seconds. Blue still held the gun. But he held it dangled between his index finger and thumb, away from his body, like he was disgusted by it. His face was contorted, and he handed the gun back to the man he had taken it from, muttering something Sarah could not hear. And then he was wiping his face and adjusting his suit jacket. Dr. Gorski was screaming incoherently, but it sounded distant to Sarah. Like underwater. Or what she imagined it was like up in outer space, in that vast darkness. The noisy silence. She wished she was there.
Blue gestured impatiently at Dr. Gorski. To his men, he commanded, “Get her out of here.” And as the one with the gun grabbed the sobbing woman from the floor and began half-carrying-half-dragging her to the door, Blue’s attention returned once more to the rest of them. His lips were pressed into a tight line.
“I assume I don’t have to make myself any clearer, hmm?” His voice rang out, biting, and Sarah, for the first time, really, truly understood what Honey had meant. This man was dangerous. More dangerous than anything, or anyone, she had ever come across before.
“Good,” he murmured, but everyone heard him as if he had screamed again. “Now get to work.”
They scattered. It was a mass of moving bodies as everyone made a rush for the door, away from this man, and toward the others who were waiting, the lusty, lecherous ones. And though Sarah was supposed to remain in the dressing room until her debut on stage that night, she cast her eyes around desperately, trying to find an out, any out.
Her hopes were crushed.
She caught a glimpse of Bunny stumbling through the door with a quickness. Sarah made to follow, feeling blind and gambling. Honey was nowhere to be seen– had abandoned her, how could she? A smell seemed to rise up in the room.
“Princess,” Blue said. “Not you.”
Sarah froze, her breath too. The last two remaining girls, on their rushed way to the door, turned back to glance at her, wide-eyed, before they, too, fled out the door. She clenched her eyes shut. They were alone now. Behind her, somewhere, was the body. In the rush of the escape, Sarah had caught only a glimpse or two of a limp, bejeweled arm on the floor amidst all the towering ankles and heels and shaking-stockinged legs surrounding it. The smell became overpowering to her, metallic, and her heart raced. Too alive in the presence of death. It was cold around her, like a dungeon, an oubliette, really, as Blue’s shoes clicked behind her. Slow. Sarah didn’t dare look.
Then, he said, “Nasty business, isn’t it?”
When she didn’t respond, too busy holding herself together, keeping herself from screaming and crying all over the floor, he made his presence known. She cringed into herself when he touched her shoulder blade. She choked out a gasp when his fingers trailed up to her neck. They were cold, burning cold against her skin. He then touched her hair.
“You should know,” he began, something crooning to his voice. He was closer now. She could feel the warm presence of another person right behind her. “That I don’t make a habit of this sort of thing, but…”
Sarah grit her teeth to stop them from clattering.
He touched her ear, as if curious. “But,” he said again, “It’s not… usual… either that you girls try something like this. Disrespect me like this.”
His breath on her neck was next. Her eyes snapped open, staring blindly at the opposite wall. He breathed in, loudly, through the nose, and then made some sound. Her legs felt weak under her, she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to keep herself standing. He touched her neck again, and her skin crawled, but she was too terrified to move.
“I see it in you,” he said. “That… rebellion. You’re no damsel, are you. No, you’re the hero type, I can tell. Since your step-mother threw you away here, you’ve dreamed of nothing more than escaping me…”
Sarah sucked in a breath. He made a sympathetic noise, very close to her ear. “Is it a little cock envy, honey?” he asked. “You think you’re meant for more than this, hmm?”
“B-Blue–” her voice wobbled like her knees. She could have pissed all over herself. And she looked down at her legs, half expecting a ruined costume, hot liquid trickling down the insides of her thighs and down to her ankles. But it was pink-pristine as ever.
His hand seized on the back of her neck, hard, and he yanked her around. It was so quick that she could barely keep an even footing, her ankles rolling in her too-tall heels for one heart-stopping second. But he didn’t let her fall, holding her up and still. Facing in the direction of the body, held right beside him.
Sarah let out a sob, her whole face twitching as she closed her eyes tight. He leaned in, too close again.
“You think anyone would want you for more than their pleasure? Huh? Is that what you think?” He laughed right in her ear. “Silly princess. You’d be lost out there without me. Open your eyes.”
When she didn’t, he shook her, fingers digging hard into the sides of her neck. Her eyes flew open, tears making her vision blurrier and blurrier. Wetting her face. Snot stuffed up her nose, touched her upper lip. But still, she could see. The body there before them was unreal. So much blood pooled around it. The limbs splayed. There was a flash of bright red-laced panties at their angle, between pale and dead legs. The back of the head with its gaping red, blown-out hole. Sarah couldn’t breathe. She closed her eyes again, she had to. He pulled her right back into him, so his front was lined all down her side. The cologne and cigar-smell of him choked her.
“See,” he said, pointing at the body with his free hand. Sarah’s shuddered, blinking weakly. “Sugar had these grand ideas too. And you can see how that turned out, may she rest in peace. But the difference between you and her though…” He sucked his teeth. Leaned in to whisper in her ear as if it were a secret. “Well, she was getting up there, you know, in age. Not as many clients were wanting her. You, on the other hand…”
Sarah could feel the heaviness of his gaze on the side of her face, boring right into her. He brought up a hand to stroke her hair. And then it went straying.
“You,” he said, “are going to make me very rich. But something you need to realize… now… is that your worth to me decreases with each man you’re going to let between your pretty little legs.”
When she just shivered, he made another sympathetic sort of noise. “It’s okay,” he murmured, “It’s scary, isn’t it? A sweet young princess like you didn’t need to see all that, huh? Because she already knows what I’ll do to her, and all her little friends too, if she ever tries to go against me again. Isn’t that right?”
Sarah nodded her head frantically, tears blinding her.
“Good girl,” he said. “That’s what I thought.”
And he loosened his grip on her neck, leaving her to stumble from the force of it, catching herself only barely on the nearest vanity edge. The wood corner dug hard into the palm of her hand, making her gasp and yank the hand up to her chest. She slumped over the vanity like that, catching her breath. But her peace was not to last, and he came up behind her.
His hands went to her hips and he leaned into her with his whole body. Sarah stiffened, held her breath. He pressed his nose to the side of her head, right in her hair.
“I don’t usually like little girls,” he said. “I like a real woman.” His hands were swift as they slid over the still-growing curve of her hips, up her front, and as they palmed over her corsetted breasts. Sarah cringed, jerking as much as she could, hands coming up to yank at his wrists. But he was strong, their little tussle ending in her bent even further over the vanity, more prone. Sarah stared at herself in the mirror, pinched, red, terrified expression. His dark eyes caught hers and he squeezed her breasts, fondled them, one for each hand, as he whispered into her ear, like a confession, “You know… A woman… one with experience and some actual tits on her. Mmm.”
Sarah felt her pulse right in her head, throbbing. He was unhinged right then, but she saw the body in the corner of the mirror, unexpectedly, and she went recoiling back into him. He let out another sound, soft, and yet rough, as if he was tasting something good.
“But you…” he said, “you are something else. Do you know how jealous I am that some rich gentleman out there is going to be the one to pop that little cherry of yours, huh, Princess? It’s like letting another kid play in my sandbox. It’s just,” he sighed, “not fair.”
At that he pressed his hips into her bottom. She clenched up tight, tears coming faster now, terrified. He laughed a little, then. “It was you, wasn’t it? Who took that poster?”
“What?” she choked out. She had to close her eyes to pretend it wasn’t real.
He smiled into her hair, breathed in again, before pulling back and hooking his chin over her shoulder. His dark, lined eyes caught hers in the mirror. The whites of them were shocking against the wild, splotchy red which surrounded them. A sort of bloodshot. He laughed again, breathlessly. “Linda Glinda’s own daughter, under my care. I couldn’t believe my luck when I got that call. And I really didn’t believe it until I saw you that first time, even as soaked and insane as you looked.”
Her eyes widened. His hands moved to her ribs, her hips. He rubbed back and forth over them. “I was so sad to hear of the accident, everyone was… What a treasure to the American people, she was. I used to think she was the most gorgeous woman in the world.”
Sarah swallowed convulsively when he continued, “You look so much like her. Mm. And you’re going to be a real woman soon, just like her.”
This conversation of her mother frightened her, her eyes darting desperately around. She had half a mind to hit him over the head with some cosmetic casing, but the bloody iron scent that wafted up from near the drained out body told her no, no, don’t.
“But you keep the poster,” he said, magnanimous as ever. Sarah cringed away.
Then there was a timid knock on the door before it opened. It was Honey who peeked her head through the crack in the door. Sarah, still in the grips of the devil, stared wide-eyed across the room at her. Honey’s lips parted as she caught sight of them, pale and nervous as her eyes then skirted over the still-sprawled body. They returned to where Blue had Sarah trapped against the vanity. This all passed in the span of a single second.
“What?” he snapped. Honey flinched. She stammered, sounding younger than Sarah had ever heard her. “I’m– Sorry– I-” Then, she jerked her head in the direction of the still muffled thumping of the club music. “I was looking for her… she’s on in fifteen.”
Sarah’s gut dropped right to her feet. Honey caught her eyes for a moment, apologetically, before saying in a rush, “I’ll just.. Be out here.” Then she was gone.
And then Blue was releasing Sarah with a sharp pat to the bum. She jerked into the vanity, hard edge digging into her hip bones. He stepped back, as he smoothed out his suit jacket, adjusted his bowtie, and fixed his hair. A red tinge remained on his cheeks but he was as serious as ever. “You heard the lady,” he said.
He pulled out a cigarillo and a match, and he lit it. Back to the Blue she knew. Weakly, she turned around to face him. Arms tight around herself, she sat against the edge of the vanity. His touch had left an echo all over her. Bruised, emotional feeling ached at the fleshy parts of her.
“Clean yourself up,” he said, slick smile. “It’s showtime.”
When he was gone, and in the moments before Honey came to get her, Sarah stared at the body, numb. She did not even try to wish for the goblins, for she knew that they would not come, not ever, not for her.
Chapter Text
Backstage was pale and silent, even among the harsh and heavy beats of music and laughter and clinking glasses on the other side of those thick red curtains. The few girls who had not yet performed huddled together, withdrawn and ill-colored. Sarah stood alone, Honey having had to leave her, to return back to the men on the floor.
She watched from stage-left, as if in someone else’s body, as Blue introduced her to the crowd. On the stage, under the spotlight, he was clean cut, handsome, and charismatic once again. Not a single speck of blood to be found on his clean pressed shirt or bowtie. He smiled at his crowd full of money-makers and money-givers. Sarah didn’t hear a word he said, only got the vague impression of it. And then, before she knew it, he was extending his arm in her direction and looking at her expectantly and she was standing there dumb as a doornail until there was a shove at her back and she stumbled out onto the stage.
Blue gave her a look and she was certain, at that very moment, there was another gunshot ringing in her ears. He left her on the stage, numb all over. And then the music was playing and the panic liquified. She remembered the body in the room and what Blue had said, and everything Honey had ever told her. She squeezed her eyes shut, under the heavy, warm spotlight which blinded her, and began to dance.
Really, she was fighting for her life. A matter of survival. She could do it. The music then floated into her limbs, her hips. She was aware of the individual instruments of the song and then also the feeling of her skirt against her bare legs, and nothing else. She was her body. She went somewhere else beyond the world that had kept her down.
The clamor of applause brought her out of it– whistling and clapping, hooting and hollering. Her eyelids slid open and she blinked. The light was lower now, softer. Her breath was quick with exertion and her skin, especially her underarms, was damp with sweat. Frozen in her final pose, sat delicately on her only prop– an ornate wooden chair– and with her own, unfamiliar hand resting atop her heart.
She stumbled off the stage, having given an embarrassed curtsy– as Dr. Gorski had demanded– to find no one but the sad girls from before. They stared at her impassively, and she at them. The moment rushed at her, full of uncomfortable feeling, and then she was bending over and retching her guts out onto the floor. Exclamations of disgust rang out from behind her, but Sarah didn’t care. She heaved up water which splashed round her ankles. The process of it all only made her want to vomit more. But she didn’t, her stomach was empty again. She fell against the nearest wall and crumpled to the floor, eyes clenched shut. A moan escaped her.
Honey found her like this. “Oh, Jesus.”
Sarah blinked open teary eyes to see her friend grimacing from where she stood a few paces away. The smell wafted up.
“‘m sorry,” Sarah breathed heavily. “I didn’t mean to.”
Honey sighed. “I know, babe. But you gotta get up now.” She reached out for Sarah’s hands, pulling her up to stand.
“What,” Sarah said thickly, wobbling once back on her feet, too tall. Honey caught her. “Why?”
“... Blue, he wants to see you,” she said, wrapping an arm around Sarah’s waist.
“Why?”
“Beats me,” Honey said, after a moment. “But he wants you soon. We’ve gotta clean you up.”
Sarah grimaced and brought up a hand to wipe at her mouth. She looked down at herself. “I– my costume…”
“Yeah,” Honey said quietly, “Need to change that too. Come on.”
So Sarah let Honey lead her through the backstage area, her eyes all heavy, blinking. She felt drowsy, tired. Like it all needed to end. But then Sarah figured out their destination, and she dug her heels into the ground. “I can’t go in there again,” she shrilled.
The dressing room door hung ajar in front of them, Honey’s hand resting on the frame. The woman licked her lips. She, too, had dark circles under her eyes. “It’s back to normal.”
But Sarah shook her head furiously. “I cant– I can’t…”
Honey hesitated a moment before nodding sharply, almost to herself, mouthing something, and then disappearing behind the door, leaving Sarah alone in the corridor. The silence got to her, only the muffled music to be heard– the white, fuzzy noise of nothing.
The door clattered with Honey’s return. She smiled at Sarah smally, and pale, holding a stack of clothing. She grabbed her hand again and led her down the hall and through another door. It was a single bathroom, with a tub and a shower, a sink and a toilet. Plain but private. Sarah’s sniffles echoed in the enclosed place as Honey slammed and locked the door behind them.
“What– ?” Sarah said.
“It’s meant for the staff,” Honey shrugged. “But Blue will let you in here sometimes– if you ask nicely.”
Sarah’s mouth formed an o-shape. She stood in the center of the bathroom, shifting in place as Honey walked around, turning on the shower and dropping the stack of clothing onto the sink edge.
“Come on, babe,” she said, sounding tired. “I need you to get with it. We don’t have long.” She gestured to the shower. “Don’t get your hair wet, kay?”
Sarah swallowed and whispered a little half-hearted sorry. She pulled off her costume, tied up her hair, and stepped under the stream. The tub was large enough that there wasn’t a need for a curtain and, in her state, it barely bothered her. The water streamed near boiling, turning her skin pink, but her teeth chattered anyway. Honey handed her a bar of soap, before turning to the sink.
“What’s this about?” Sarah murmured as she cleaned her body. Her mouth felt numb. “I thought that was all for tonight…”
Honey didn’t answer, her back to Sarah as she rifled through the medicine cabinet.
The shower roared around Sarah. Blood rushed to her head. “...Honey?”
Her friend cleared her throat. “I don’t know,” she finally said, and then looked over her shoulder. “You almost done?”
Sarah nodded, but her lips were pressed tight together. She finished washing. And as soon as she stepped out, Honey passed her a large, fluffy towel. Sarah shivered in the chilly air, and wrapped it tight around herself, over her shoulders like a little kid.
“Quick, quick.” Honey handed her a tub of cream, which Sarah slathered over her arms and legs and middle. Then she tossed her a pair of plain white panties. She slid them on with a wiggle of the hips. And then Honey was holding a mass of white fabric over her head and urging her to lift up her arms. A thin white gown fell over the length of her body, stopping just before her ankles.
“Let me fix your hair,” Honey said quickly, urging her to stand in front of the fogged-up mirror. Sarah reached out and wiped away the condensation just as Honey released her hair from the tie. It fell over her shoulders. The ringlet-curls had gone frizzy and loose. Honey fussed with them, and Sarah stared at herself in the mirror.
The white nightgown was lovely, something she would have once imagined herself wearing as she ran through the halls of a drafty, old castle, or through the wet marshy woods under a full moon. Her old, romantic heart. But now, she saw the way the thin fabric clung to her body, all wrong.
“It’s happening tonight, isn’t it?” she said, throat tightening up. Honey caught her eye in the mirror. Her lips pursed together tight and it made the lines around her mouth all the more visible. She continued fussing with Sarah’s hair until they were loose curls around her shoulders and face, and then turned her around and hugged her without answering.
“I–” Sarah started numbly, “I can’t–”
Honey hushed her. “It will be fine. It’s not so bad, you’ll see.”
“You said that about the dancing, too.”
“... I know.”
“Are you… lying?” Sarah felt tears in her eyes. She was exhausted. “I won’t be mad. But… please tell me if it will be really bad.”
Honey stepped back and touched her cheek. It took her a minute to speak but when she did it was this, “It will be over before you know it.”
It will never be over, Sarah knew. She would never leave this place. It would never be over. But she didn’t say this and Honey busied herself with grabbing for a little makeup kit and then wiping away the streaks of eye makeup on Sarah’s cheeks. She stood there silently, blinking, as if in a daze, as her friend did this. Honey coated her eyelashes newly with mascara and then painted her lips with a little bit of gloss. Sarah’s breath had grown shaky again and her face overly pale. Honey looked so old this close.
“How did Blue know… ” Sarah whispered, “... about the escape?”
Honey’s eyes flicked from Sarah’s mouth and the lipgloss to her eyes and then back. “He knows everything,” she murmured.
“Did you…?” Sarah closed her eyes and sipped it back. Did you tell him, she wanted to ask, but she didn’t. Honey pulled back and Sarah only opened her eyes again when she heard the clatter of the medicine cabinet.
“... I didn’t have to,” Honey said quietly, a long few moments later. “He always knows.”
Sarah swallowed, and nodded, and watched as Honey kept rattling through the cabinet. She must have been looking for something in particular. Yes, because then her hand closed on something and she paused. Then she turned around, the object still in hand.
Sarah silently stared. Honey fidgeted. “Listen Princess…” she said. “I don’t know what Blue wants exactly but…”
She thrust the object toward her. Sarah took it. It was a tube of something. Sarah read the label, the skin around the eyes and mouth tightening up. She looked back up at Honey, who watched her with a certain sadness. “Just in case,” she said, “to ease the way… I’m sorry I can’t do anything more.”
And so Sarah offered a small, strained little smile. “Thank you.” And she tucked it into her sleeve. Honey smiled back for one single tender moment. Then it passed. Their smiles died as reality sunk back in. And though the affection remained between them, it was shoved away as Honey let out a tired sigh and rubbed her forehead with all the weight of the world. Sarah did not argue or fight as Honey had her brush her teeth real quick and then as she directed her out into the hall again.
But still, her heart thumped painfully and an itch settled into her all over. It didn’t matter. There was nothing Honey could do, nothing she herself could do. So, traversing the halls, she withdrew into herself.
Blue intercepted them by the club room entrance, clapping his hands together in delight. “Perfect! Thank you, Honey. I can always count on you.”
He placed a hand on Sarah’s shoulder and she felt like a wooden doll as he brought her closer. Honey offered him back a thin smile, warm eyes darting to Sarah every second or so.
“I’ll take it from here,” Blue said. “You’re wanted in the diamond room.”
Honey kept that plastic smile as she nodded dutifully. She turned to leave then, but in a fit, Sarah burst out, “Wait!” and threw her arms around her. She squeezed her friend tightly for a long few seconds, and Honey squeezed her back.
I’m scared, Sarah didn’t say. Honey knew it anyway.
“You got this,” she whispered to Sarah. “You got this. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
And then she gently detangled herself from Sarah and, leaving her with Blue, walked away. Sarah watched her as she grew smaller and smaller down the hall as she glided away, in her sexy, toppling heels and cheeky one-piece.
Blue brought her out of it, hand clasping on her shoulder again. He turned her around to face the opposite direction. They walked that way. Sarah stumbled along beside him.
“So,” he started, “How did you feel on stage?”
“Fine,” she mumbled. “What’s going on now?”
“Just fine?” he laughed. “It was more than fine! You really wowed the crowd, you know. Anyway… change of plans – a very kind and very wealthy gentleman offered me much, much more for you than I expected to receive, frankly, at all. But–” He tugged her into his side. She tensed.
“But,” he said again, delighted still, “He doesn’t want to wait. He wants you tonight. So a little switcheroo with the dates, but you’re good with that, right? I mean, what’s two nights difference in the grand scheme of things, anyway?”
Sarah stared down at her bare feet, realizing then that she had forgotten to put on shoes, and that Honey had not brought her any. They appeared small and pale against the intimidating crimson carpet.
“You look great, by the way,” he said just as they turned a corner into a lush corridor. It was the corridor of rooms, those for clients. Sarah remembered her and Honey talking in one of these rooms, on these beds, not long ago. It was where she first understood what this place really was, and what it really wasn’t. All the doors were shut. A few girls walked by. They avoided looking at Blue.
And then he and Sarah approached a door. Sarah froze when he raised a hand to knock. Before he could, she grabbed his sleeve.
“Blue, wait,” she said quickly, though thick-tongued and clumsy feeling. He looked back at her, quirking a single eyebrow, his fist held aloft and still in the air. Sarah thought she might puke all over herself again. “I can’t do this.”
He smiled a thin, unamused smile. “Sure you can.” And he went to turn back.
“No!” she burst out. “You don’t understand! I– I–”
He turned toward her fully, now staring her down. All the words spilled out of her, nervous and terrified. “It’s my… it’s my period, okay? I got it earlier and I can’t… I can’t–”
He looked her over, up and down, and crossed his arms. Then he looked her right in the eyes, for a long, long moment. “Is that so?” he said finally.
“Yes!” She nodded furiously along to prove it. She was sure her eyes must have been crazy-wide, at a risk of falling right out. She reached for his sleeve again, tighter this time, but when his eyes darkened, she knew she had made an error. His artificial smile slid away and he leaned closer, catching her wrist. Around the same sleeve she had tucked the bottle of lubrication. It dug into her arm and he felt it as surely as she did.
“Fine,” he said, nodding to her lower half. “Lift up your dress then.”
This took Sarah aback. “W-what?”
He cocked an eyebrow, his hand clenching tighter over her wrist. The bones ached, her fingers twitched. “What? What do you mean, what? Lift up your skirt. Over your waist. You’re going to show me, as I really don’t believe you. Go on.”
When she stayed stock still and didn’t do anything, he gestured impatiently. “We don’t have all day.”
She stared at him in horror. She glanced around them, at the very open hallway. Laughter could be heard behind another, nearby door. “W-wait, no– I don’t–”
He interrupted her. “Unless you were lying to me, then you won’t have any issue just allowing me to verify this small thing. That you are, in fact, menstruating, and that you are about to cost me a fortune. Hmm?”
Sarah’s heart fluttered, she tried to yank her wrist back from his grip, but he only tightened his hold. Caught between a rock and a hard place. He knew, he always knew.
“Well?” he pressed. “What’s it going to be?”
“...Nevermind,” she whispered, staring down at her feet, mortified. “‘m sorry.”
“That’s what I thought,” he snapped, releasing her wrist with force, taking the bottle Honey had given her with him. He read the label and laughed, before tucking it in his pocket. He was extra cruel that night.
“And no funny business in there. I’ll know.” He nodded at the door and then leaned in, a cruel twist to the face. “You’re going to go in there and you’re going to make all this up to me, all the lies, all the tears, all the conspiracies… and maybe, just maybe, I’ll make sure your life here is comfortable. But if you fuck it up, even just a little bit…” He tsked, shook his head. He reached out to wipe the lone tear that trailed down over her trembling cheek. He left the rest unsaid.
He reached out and knocked. The thud was loud, she felt it in her heart.
.
.
.
Later, it was the low, hushed male voices which rose her from her stunned, numbed repose. She found herself again, laying on her side, on the most comfortable bed she had ever ever been on. A wet spot under her, on the sheets, caught her attention, and she cringed, curling away to the other side. She pulled the loosened sheets up over her bare shoulder, tucked it under her chin, and closed her eyes as if to sleep. The voices nearby existed as sounds but not words. A deep, uncomfortable ache had sapped whatever energy she’d had left right out of her. It came from her belly. It made her shiver.
Then, eyes still closed, she reached blindly down for the strewn comforter blanket at the foot of the bed. She pulled it up and tucked it under her chin too.
Footsteps approached and, just at the edge of the bed, she saw the man’s shoes just in her corner vision. Not Blue’s, but The Man’s. Her eyes slid upward until it landed on the collar of his suit. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. He said something to her, but she didn’t hear it. She nodded and smiled vaguely. She closed her eyes when he leaned all the way down to kiss her with his cigar-laden breath. Then he was placing a wad of bills on the nightstand. “For you,” he said. And then he was gone. A thud of the door echoing away.
Blue remained. He couldn’t contain his excitement. “He loved you,” he said, delighted. “Well done.”
Sarah closed her eyes again, but his presence was all too evident. The bed dipped when he sat on the mattress edge, just in line with her waist. He touched her hip. She didn’t even react. He rubbed his hand over that knobby woman hip-bone of hers.
“It wasn’t so bad now, was it? Look at that gift he gave you.” He was referring to the wad of bills.
Sarah felt she had to open her eyes again, to be aware of the danger of the man nearby. His threat was much more menacing, more sinister than that of the man who had paid for her virginity. That man had only wanted to use her and abuse her. But this man…
She blinked dolorously at the opposite wall. It had a gold fleur-de-lis pattern for a wallpaper. The rest of the room was sensuous and dark, red and black accents abound.
“...yes,” she finally said, quiet as a mouse, “It was so bad.”
“Well, it’s over now.” He patted her hip in a way that reminded her of her father. An up-n-at-em, seize the day, let’s get to it, sort of thing. This resemblance caused her a vivid physical illness. He didn’t notice or care. “Next time you’ll know what to expect, eh?”
A disgusted expression overtook her. Anger. The wet itch between her legs became unbearable. Still, she didn’t dare look at him. “It should have been with someone I loved. Who loved me back.”
Blue laughed. “What. Like your king and whatever else lives in that funny little head of yours?”
Sarah went cold. He wasn’t finished. He leaned forward, and she found it crude what he said. “Why make love when you could make millions getting fucked?”
“Aw,” he cooed, when her face crumpled. The good-spirited tone of his didn’t match one bit with the coldness with which he had shot a girl in the head only hours before. It felt like a million years ago, and also, at once, like it had all just happened the second before.
“You’ll be alright,” he said.
“I’m not making millions,” she muttered. She sat up slowly, sedated-feeling, but careful to drag the sheets and the blanket up with her. She was bare under them. She crossed her legs, bowe her head. Blue watched her with a dark, hungry look. She turned her face away, frightened. “You are.”
“Well, you’ve got that right,” he conceded. “But you know what?” He snapped his fingers. “You were so good for me, and I’m feeling generous. I’ll get you a gift. Anything you want. Within reason, of course.”
Sarah fiddled with the hem of the sheets and swallowed hard.
“So?” he pressed, standing up. “What will it be?”
She thought for a second more. Her jaw worked side to side, sore, and her eyes darted all over the place, all over the room and all its evidence of its crimes. “Um…” she said thickly, “My storybooks… from home? Can I have those? Please.”
He smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.” It came out a whisper, weak and strong at once, if it could be so. This was her life now.
Notes:
End of Part One!
Chapter 6: Interlude
Notes:
A bit of a time jump here!
Chapter Text
One morning, so early and still that only the vaguest swatches of light filtered through the high-ceilinged, barred, and grimy windows of the dormitory, Sarah was awoken by a tired and fearful Honey.
Shaken furiously and princess, princess, princess, whispered harshly right in her ear. The high pitched fervor of the words was the thing that had jolted her into something resembling awakeness. Sarah blinked bleary eyes, disoriented vision still sleepy.
Honey kneeled at her bedside, hands reached out and on Sarah’s arm. The morning-dark of the place cast dull, uncomforting shadows all over her friend’s face. Sarah thought she could almost exactly imagine the skull that existed just beneath the pale stretch of her skin. The hollows of the orbital bones deep and fathomless. The gray light that made Honey-Bee, usually so warm, appear as a wilted, dying flower.
The whites of her eyes were shockingly large and bright. Red rimmed. Sarah shifted in her bed, limbs coming alive slowly. “Mmm.” It was wintertime and the heating system wasn’t so good, never had been. They were all constantly frozen and shivering, except when entertaining the clients, of course. All the manipulations of Blue, Sarah was sure, those inconveniences and hardships of theirs.
But that morning, in the cold, she blinked some more, jaw jittering, pulled her blanket up higher to her chin, and glanced around the slowly brightening room. Everyone still slept. Everyone but Honey and her.
Sarah rubbed her eyes. “What is it?”
Tears instantly beaded Honey’s eyes, which were locked wide upon Sarah. This was what made Sarah push herself into a nervous sear, her own eyes widening.
“You’re scaring me,” she said. “What is it?”
For three, almost four years, her and Honey-Bee had been thick as thieves, sister and sister, mother and daughter, best friends for life. Honey’s white eyes and mouth which fell open in a gape of fear frightened Sarah more than anything, for her friend had always been the strong one, the resilient one who knew how to do everything, who could comfort Sarah and make her feel like everything might be okay, and Sarah had always been the scared one, the weak one out of them. Now it was brave Honey who was scared. A turn on the axis of their friendly, earthly love.
“It’s– Bunny,” Honey said in a low, hoarse tone. She looked like a ghost, a frail, waify thing, as she pulled herself shakily to sit at the edge of Sarah’s tiny bed. “She’s gone.”
“What?” But she glanced over to where Bunny’s bed was, the one next to Honey’s empty one. It, too, was empty, the blankets strewn. The corset Bunny had taken to wearing lately dangled precariously off the edge of the trunk at the foot of the small, metal cot.
“But–” Sarah found herself speaking. “I don’t understand. Gone where?”
Her mouth fell open in a shock so sudden and unbelievable. “She didn’t escape, did she?”
But when Sarah focused again on her friend, she found her crumpled up, hunched, hugging her knees to her chest. “No,” Honey said, in a rush. She rocked back and forth. “It was Blue. He– he– I saw it all.”
“What did you see?” A paleness had begun to overtake Sarah, too. “What did he do.”
“He– he–” Honey seemed small all of a sudden, unlike herself. Miniature and sad. “I don’t know but he– came with some men. They… injected her. I don’t know what. They carried her out. And– I don’t know if she was– was asleep or– or dead–”
Honey burst into tears.
A lump formed itself in Sarah’s throat. She reached out quickly to hold Honey, hushing her all the while. “But why? She hasn’t done anything wrong, has she?”
Still crying as silently as she could, Honey shook her head. A honking sob escaped her. Violet, the girl who slept right by Sarah, shifted in her sleep. The two of them stilled.
Then Honey sniffled, not from the cold but from her tears. It was loud in the depressed sleepiness of the dormitory. She shook her head still, endlessly, and wiped messily at her nose once she had pulled back from Sarah’s arms.
“Honey, why?” Sarah pressed.
Honey hiccupped. “I think…”
“What?”
The beautiful features of Honey’s face curled up, ugly. “You know Bunny’s the oldest of us.”
Sarah nodded, skin of the face pinched up, go on, go on. Violet shifted in bed again, but this time neither of them cared.
“I– think that’s why,” Honey said, voice wavering, so lowly that even Sarah herself had to strain to hear. “I think Blue– she wasn’t getting a lot of requests anymore. And he had to get rid of the– of the–” it ended in a sob, “defective m-m–merchandise!”
Sarah’s heart dropped, her belly fluttered in fear. “You think he killed her?” she whispered.
“What else could he do? It’s not the first time he’s done it to one of us, we all know it, and… I– it’s not going to be the last, either.”
Sarah looked down at the covers, eyes flickering endlessly. She gripped the edge of the fraying blanket tightly. “We’re never going to see her again…”
“Sarah,” Honey said. Sarah’s eyes snapped up, wide.
Honey’s mouth trembled. “It’s going to be me next.”
And she was right.
Honey was always right.
For one and a half years, Sarah watched helplessly as her friend wasted away. Too afraid to sleep, for worry of the blue-colored bogeyman coming for her in the night, to steal her away and to kill her. Too tired to eat or to laugh. Too paranoid and too stressed to live. The clients dwindled for Sarah’s friend just as they had with Bunny. And the wrinkles around Honey’s eyes and mouth became obvious to Sarah, who feared that Blue would begin to notice.
For a time, once they both knew in their hearts that it wouldn’t be long – they rarely said it aloud, however – their roles had a permanent switch. Gone was Sarah’s strong friend who held her on the particularly sad nights, comforted her on the terrifying ones. She was wholly replaced by the woman whose sense of self-preservation made her desperate to remain in her prison even in the face of certain death. Sarah became strong for her. She held her, instead of the other way around.
It was like a grown daughter, coming to care for her ailing, dementia riddled mother at the end of her long, long, bitter life. But that was the rub: Honey wasn’t even that much older than Sarah, and it made it that much sadder.
Honey had done so much for her over the years, been there for her always, been the only good thing about that place. So Sarah didn’t feel resentful or bitter in her new role, not at all. It was about time that she could repay her debt. But it was hard to be strong when she, too, was so frightened of what would come. She knew it, and Honey knew it. There was no avoiding the dreadful future in Lennox Home for the mentally insane and sexually used, where they had been stuck for years and endless years.
And then, one morning, like that, Honey was gone. Sarah woke up and saw the empty spot right next to her, where she had months ago pushed Honey’s bed right against hers. Sarah cried and cried.
The place became hellish again, without her friend. She didn’t dare approach Blue, asking where, oh where, had her friend gone. She went on with life, more alone than ever.
She and Honey had shared a curse– that selfish, horrible desire to live. She wished death didn’t scare her, as it always had. Then she would have somewhere to escape to. But terror of her own fragile life-force kept her alive in a life worse than death.
She used to think that there was a land she could escape to, one she had been to before. But her story books had been useless and battered and her mind was scarred from imagination and wonder.
She didn’t believe anymore. And why should she? What had it, he, ever done for her?
He now lived in her head, no longer real.
Chapter Text
Part Two.
The girl, her name was Dollface, leaned in, all imploring eyes and prayer hands. “Please,” she said, “please, please, please–”
Sarah sighed and pushed her plate away. “Can’t you ask him yourself?”
“He likes you more,” Dollface said matter of factly. “He likes you the most.”
“So?” she muttered. “That doesn’t mean he’ll say yes.”
“But it’s way more likely, isn’t it?” Dollface leaned even further forward, thin, trimmed eyebrows raised up eagerly. Her features were pretty and delicate, like porcelain. “Please Princess, won’t you?”
“Fine,” she finally agreed, but then wagged a finger. “But no promises.”
Dollface beamed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“Yeah, yeah.” Sarah’s stomach grumbled and she pulled back her plate reluctantly. She picked at a piece of it with her spoon. Years in this place and she still hadn’t gotten used to the food.
“Man, what I wouldn’t give to be his favorite. You’re so freaking lucky,” Dollface said. Then she leaned forward, kissed Sarah on the cheek, and got up and left her alone at her little mess-hall table. If there was one girl of any of them who you could always count on to have a smile or a joke, it was Dollface. She’d been admitted not long after Sarah and even then, she had been almost always chipper. It had baffled Sarah, made her angry almost. She secretly thought that Dollface must have been put away for being disordered with happiness. Impaired by inappropriate cheer. But Honey had once told her that different girls had different ways of dealing.
Sarah hadn’t believed that, not till she’d accidentally walked in on Dollface crying in the kitchen pantry one day early on. Their chore schedules had overlapped that week, assigned to work in the kitchen (under the mean, leering supervision of the cook, of course, who guarded the knives and meat mallets with scrutiny). Sarah had paused in the doorway, and hadn’t announced herself to the other girl who faced the shelves, shoulders jumping. Feeling a pit of guilt in her belly, for the mean things she had and continued to think about the new girl, Sarah left her to her tears, silently returning to the kitchen and the cook who looked at her too closely. But she remembered, and she understood, in an odd way.
Sarah ate another bite of her food, eyes drifting up to the ghostly, empty seats of Honey and Bunny. Sometimes, she imagined that they were sitting there, watching her, helping her, looking out for her. A kindly ghostly haunting. But she knew they weren’t. No matter how much they’d cared for her, Sarah knew, even in death they would never ever ever return back to this place.
Her eyes lifted and she surveyed the room. A lot of the old girls and a lot of the new. “Yeah,” she sighed to herself, watching the retreating back of Dollface, her perfect hair bouncing and silky. “Lucky me.”
Later, when she had a free moment, she found herself steeling her nerves outside of Blue’s office. She raised her arm and then rapped her knuckles quickly against the door. Her bangle bracelets tinkled and clanged round her wrist.
“Yes?” came the muffled voice through the door.
“It’s me,” Sarah said. “...Princess.” To this day, she had trouble referring to herself that way.
“Come in.”
She opened the door and peered her head halfway in, curving her lips into a lovely little smile. Blue sat behind his desk, papers carefully stacked before him. The smell of tobacco was ever present, not that she noticed, for it was so permanently lodged in her nostrils and her brain that it had become part of the odor of her life.
“Hey,” she said. “Busy?”
“Not… at… all,” he said, leaning back into his chair. He dropped his pen to the desk and smiled at her. He patted a hand to his lap. “Only the usual.”
Sarah closed the door behind her and crossed the room. Somehow, despite nearly a decade of practice, even today Blue made her unsettled on her feet. Like she could topple at any moment. He leaned further back in his chair as he watched her approach, eyes heavy and dark like kohl. She rounded the desk and stepped between his spread legs, hands going to rest on his shoulders.
“What do I owe this sweet little surprise?” he said. His hands caged his waist.
“Does there have to be a reason?” she smiled carefully-crookedly. She straddled him, knees digging into the leather of this chair on either side of him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, to loop around his neck.
He smiled still, raising an eyebrow.
“Fine,” Sarah said lightly. “You caught me. There’s been a request.”
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm.” She leaned in, close enough that her lips nearly grazed his cheekbone. “There’s an urgent need for candy. Fireballs?”
He hummed. “Who for?”
Sarah pulled back just a little. She mimed zipping her lips and throwing away the key.
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he responded with a genial, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, Blue,” she said. And she pressed a kiss to his cheek because he didn’t like kissing on the mouth.
She knew a lot about what he liked and didn’t like. Though he had been her first ever kiss, so long ago, he hadn’t ever kissed her again. Not since she had started working for him. He didn’t like those illicit, whoring germs that rolled around in her mouth and body, at his bequest. He sure did know how to make a girl feel lovely.
“Anything for you,” he said, “my princess.”
But nothing ever came without a price. He made a gesture to his desk drawer that she was very used to. Still balanced on his lap, she reached behind herself and into the drawer. She pulled out a foil packet from the meticulously organized stack of them. Holding it aloft between index and middle finger, she cocked her head and said, “how do you want me?”
“I have a meeting in twenty,” he said, so Sarah maneuvered herself off of his lap and onto her knees between his legs. There was an area rug that cushioned the floor for her. With his eyes remaining fixed on her, she unfastened his belt and then the buttons of his pants. She slid the condom on with deft hands.
Blue was fastidious about cleanliness. She had learned that long, long ago. While Sarah was given to clients without protection, often – think of the money, Blue always said – he never touched her skin to skin. She was his dirty, used-up whore. Only for latex, barrier-d use.
The taste of the condom was unpleasant, but she found that she preferred it to the taste of a man she didn’t like and didn’t want to touch. She could be grateful for that, at least. Could pretend it wasn’t real. That it was a toy, inanimate and unreal.
Soon, with practiced and efficient use of her tongue and hands and lips, he finished, hands having come up to hold onto her head harshly. She was used to it. So she pulled back, a flush high on the cheekbones, and cleaned up after him while he caught his breath again.
He smiled down at her, no teeth. “Did I ever teach you well,” He said, all satisfied. Then he patted her twice on the cheek before buttoning up.
Sarah was standing up and about to leave when he said, “Actually, Princess. There is something else you can do for me.”
“Yes?”
He smoothed out his carefully slicked hair. “We’re getting a new girl in tomorrow. I need you to show her the ropes, get her settled. I think you’ll like her.” He tapped his index finger to his temple a few times. “She’s got fantasy monsters under her bed too.”
It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t even look at her to see her reaction. He rifled through some papers on his desk.
“Okay,” she said.
“Great. Thanks.” He dismissed her with a slap on the bottom, and she left, returning back to her regularly scheduled life, latex taste lingering over her tongue and seeping into her nose.
The new girl arrived the next day around lunchtime with little fanfare, silent as a mouse, a shadow of a thing all alone next to Blue. Sarah watched from her lonely table uneasily, waiting to be summoned.
Blue found her in the crowd and beckoned her over with a crook of a few fingers. Sarah set down her spoon and stood. The new girl’s eyes latched onto her as she weaved through everyone and approached the two.
“Princess, glad you could join us,” Blue said. He clapped a hand on the new girl’s shoulder, who barely reacted but to blink. She was very young.
“Meet… well, I haven’t thought of a name for her yet. How about you choose, hmm, while you give her the tour.”
Sarah nodded. She held out her hand for the girl to take, and after a long moment of wide-eyed blinking, she did. Blue bid them goodbye and Sarah headed for the door, the girl following sedately behind, not even sparing another glance back for Blue.
Once they were in the silence of the hall, where Honey had first taken her her first day there, away from prying eyes, Sarah felt uncomfortable. The girl stared up at her with big green eyes. Her warm, swarthy skin glowed in the dimly lit corridor. Plump lips slightly parted in a way that was childish, not seductive.
“Jesus,” Sarah said. “How old are you?”
The girl looked at her curiously still, wide-eyed, but didn’t answer. Sarah made to drop the girl’s hand but she clung to it and then, slowly, carefully, like she had practiced it many times, flashed ten fingers, then two. Twelve.
Sarah had been the guide for a few girls in the past. She had seen it all. Tears, screaming, sobbing. The deathly silence of the frozen response. A girl who was actually, really crazy, and ended up never to be seen again. But she had never before seen someone so young come through those prison doors, not for as long as she had been there.
Sarah herself had been on the youngside, at sixteen. Honey had told her. It was rare that parents or guardians would put little girls away into a mental institution. More common for the state to put wayward young women there, however.
A diseased feeling burned away inside her. Something disturbed. Looking at that young girl, Sarah wanted to retch all over her shoes, all over the hallway. She looked at Sarah with such naive, young, openness. She didn’t understand, Sarah realized, not at all.
But Sarah forced herself to swallow it down. With a clenched up brow, she asked, “Do you not speak?”
The girl blinked. Her mouth opened, then closed. She shook her head.
“But you understand?”
The girl shrugged, still wide-eyed, blinking still. She clung to Sarah’s hand. Sarah’s jaw clenched tight, a muscle jumped.
“Alright,” Sarah said. The girl looked around them, curiously. Sarah wiped quickly at her eyes. “Can you tell me your name?”
The girl looked at her, didn’t respond.
“Name?” Sarah said quietly. “Like… what people call you? My name…” she pointed to herself, “is Sarah, but here people call me Princess.”
The girl continued to hold onto her hand, tightly, wordless.
A dormant hatred inside her rose to the surface, slowly. A deep, visceral anger and disgust that had always been there, but had rarely been expressed. Her skin crawled from the touch of men, and her skin crawled to think of all of these men who would soon touch this little girl now under her care. But most of all her skin crawled in remembrance of all the times she had been touched by one man in particular. Blue.
Lips pressed into a thin line, meant to stave off biting anger formed into nausea, Sarah squeezed the little girl’s hand and showed her around. She found herself going quiet, too, to match the silent naivety of her charge. Small fingers nestled between Sarah’s own, the girl followed obediently behind her. Her eyes were wide and unknowing and so, so young. She took in the new world around her, but Sarah didn’t think she understood at all. Not as she was walked through what would now be her life.
It was only much later, that evening, once Sarah had tucked the girl into the free cot beside her own, that fearfulness seemed to creep up into her eyes. She clung to Sarah’s hand, large eyes now darting around her not in curiosity and youthful innocence but in fear and worry. In place of words, she trembled. She was like a tiny, toy dog, scared at the groomer’s but unsure why.
Sarah sat with her until she fell asleep. It took a while, but once she drifted off, Sarah stayed. Her lips parted in her sleep from the weight of her puppy fat cheeks. A smacking sound from them too. It reminded Sarah of her baby brother from so long ago and how, despite being so tiny and innocent, she had still resented him.
The girl, the mute, whatever her name was, slept curled up against Sarah’s breast, like Honey had allowed her to do sometimes, and like her own mother had rarely ever allowed. Sarah stroked her hair slowly, dolefully. A strange and yet powerful feeling of affection overcame her. She wiped her eyes and imagined herself in another life, a mother.
She had been such a horrible sister, and a troublesome daughter, but now, at twenty-six, after having been so thoroughly humbled by the heavy course of her life, she thought maybe she could be a good mother. If only she had the freedom to find out. To live her life as it was meant to be lived, with a man who loved her, and a child, or children, she adored.
She had been pregnant twice in her life, despite the pill that was so religiously given to her each day with her midday meal. But this was no place for babies, and the growing lives inside her had been promptly snuffed out both times. She had only hazy gray memories of plain walls and the masked man with goggles and shining metal tools. Such a recollection crept up into her mind like an unwanted and feared creepy-crawly on the wall. Her whole body cringed from it, her mind doing its best to shove it all away. These half-memories scared her more than any other in her life and she did her best to never, ever think of them. It was rarely an easy task, and that night, with that girl in her arms, they welled up again like an ocean that would one day swell and drown the world, her included.
Feeling weepy now and surrounded by the sleepy murmurings and the dimming lights of all the women and girls around her, some who came here before her, and many who arrived after, Sarah found herself pressing a kiss to the little girl’s forehead. This was no life to live.
This hardened her. In a very, very low whisper, she said, “I’m going to get you out of here.” Her heart thumped heavily, fearful already. “I promise.”
Notes:
:o
Chapter Text
Blue found her the next day before she could find him. It was during her chore-shift, this week again in the kitchens, which was lorded over by the same enormous, ruddy, leering fat-man cook who, in between meal preparations, was liberal with wandering hands. The cook was on his best behavior when Blue swanned in and gestured for her to follow him out into the hall.
The mutiny she held within her must have shown on her face. He must have read her mind. Known what she had said and thought just last night, that impulsive idea which she had no plan for but desired and yearned for deeply. She might have choked on her own tongue, then, for the fear that he knew of her treacherous thoughts, and was there to punish her for them. Carefully, she set aside her mop, smoothed out her apron, and followed him out into the hallway.
“Cute,” he said, gesturing to her outfit. It was a new one. “How is she settling? Did you pick a name for her?”
“I couldn’t think of anything.” She looked down. “She’s so young.”
He rubbed his thin, trimmed mustache, but didn’t say anything. She bit her lip. “She doesn’t even speak.”
He shrugged. “Mute. Part of the reason she’s here, I guess.”
Sarah hesitated. Then she dared to step a little closer. “I don’t know how to tell her…?”
“Not my problem,” he said, now adjusting his tie. It had a tassel hanging down over the center, and he wore a silver chain. Her eyes zeroed in on the key that always dangled from the chain. Fingers twitched at her sides. He tilted his head thoughtfully and said, “Maybe we should call her Bashful.”
“Blue,” she started in a murmur, “... She’s so little. When do you expect her to start?”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he ran his tongue over his lower lip, leaving it wet and shining under the harsh fluorescent light they stood beneath.
“Tell you what,” he said with a gracious nod of the head. “I’ll give you a month. You figure out how to tell her and get her ready–”
A large smile had spread like wildfire across her face. Relief for the ignorant girl and relief also for herself, and the burgeoning, dangerous idea she had in her head. Blue raised a finger. “But one month and that’s it.”
She nodded quickly, to show she understood, and then jumped forward to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
He smiled at her, pleased, like he was a man of benediction. “Don’t disappoint me.”
“I promise.”
He touched her hair, ran a few strands between his fingers before turning to leave. He stopped. “Oh, I almost forgot. We’ve got the high roller coming in tonight. He’s asked for you, of course. You know the drill.”
The high roller was Blue’s highest paying client. He’d been coming for years, the first time having been when she was seventeen and slowly getting used to her new, dreadful life. He returned for her every few months, and despite his wealth, Sarah found him kind. She didn’t mind him so much, not like the others. She wondered when he would grow tired of her, when she would be too old for him. When she would fall out of favor, not just for him, but for Blue too. All she said in response to Blue’s expectant look was, “Okay.”
“Come see me before the show,” he said, this time really turning and strolling down the corridor. His jolly whistle echoed long behind him, leaving her to the kitchen, her duties, and her racing mind.
Sarah gave the new girl some of her old, worn story books to entertain herself with as the whole place swung into high gear, preparing for its customers to come that night. Sarah had things she needed to do, and left her with Dollface in the mess hall, before heading out to find Blue in his office. It was routine now. Before every club night – all those dreadful nights when she would dance before men and then share her body with a lucky one or few – first Blue had to leave his mark on her.
Sarah was a beauty at twenty-six, everyone told her so. When she looked in the mirror, at silky brown-black hair and at sadly jeweled eyes, at full, ripe breasts and a slender waist and a snappable collarbone, and milky soft skin, she saw her mother staring back out at her. Though she searched and searched, nothing in her face reminded her of her father. He was lost to her forever. Even the memory of him was beginning to fray.
Blue saw her mother in her. Saw only the lovely things. Those were the things he wanted. His fascination with her baffled her, always had. It had existed as long as she had been there. It gave her privileges over the other girls, yes, but it meant giving herself over to him, completely. He owned her, and there was something in him that desired to possess her, even as he relentlessly pimped her out to whoever paid the highest price.
Blue never let anything come in the way of him and his money. Sarah was his cash cow, the favorite of the high rollers and the darling daughter of the glamorously dead Hollywood starlet. But he had his self-indulgences, too, like anyone. Before he could send her off to be used by the men who would pay him loads and loads, he needed to fuck her himself, mark her, show her that who she really, really belonged to was him.
That evening, she stood in his office like clockwork, stripped off her clothing so he could grope her and kiss her everywhere but her mouth or between her legs. Sarah went along easily, for it was routine, and she knew what to expect to be sure. She undressed him just the same.
As she unbuttoned his shirt, her fingers skated over smooth chest, and no chain. The key he almost always wore was absent, as it sometimes was, especially when she or other girls were in grabbing distance. Something had happened before her arrival, she figured, that taught Blue to be extra careful with his key.
But even in his carefulness, in the years she had been confined into the walls of Lennox Home, she had learned many things.
She knew what it was. The master key.
He began fumbling open his pants. She took that as her cue and reached for the drawer for a condom. She rustled around it blindly as quick as she could – Blue was in a mood for speed and harshness – but for the first time in all her visits with her master, for that was what he was, her pinky finger nudged against something metal. Her breath caught. There it was. It was a key. The key.
She itched to grab it, just there. Her escape, plain as day. But she was spooked out of it as quick as coming out of a dream. Blue had roughly grabbed her hips and pushed her face-first over the desk. She made a noise at this, but she was used to it, so she held out for him the condom she had snatched up instead of the key.
He plucked it from her with a speed and then, not moments later, the drawer was being shoved closed with a bang, and she was flinching as he thrust harshly into her.
With a flushed face, Sarah made her noises to help him along. Her hands gripped uselessly at the edge of the desk as he pinned her down to the desk and used her relentlessly from behind. And through it all, the only thing she could think of was the key. The key, the key, the key…
He finished with her, having enforced the gaping space of ownership inside her, and sent her on her way. There was no time to shower before the show. She had to immediately go to the dressing room to get made up and ready. It was all by his design, she knew.
Leaving Blue’s office following one of these visits always left her feeling cheap and used and sad of the thought of more men using her that same evening. Though some men were gentler than others, even among the ugliest, oldest, or meanest of them, she thought she preferred them to Blue. They saw her as a fantasy woman, as opposed to an object, a thing, a possession. They saw her as a service to be bought, an act, a taboo, a character to play, whereas Blue thought of her as his property to be used and then, at some point, discarded. He did not see her as a person at all.
She was relieved, then, that it was the high roller who she would be spending that night with. He was the kindest even though he could afford to be the cruelest if he truly desired.
She took a shaky breath outside Blue’s office and continued on her way. In the dressing room, she found the young girl still sitting with Dollface. The books were abandoned on the vanity top as Dollface applied color to the girl’s smiling, and half-made-up face.
“What’s this?” Sarah said, settling at her own vanity. “She’s not going on tonight.”
“Just for fun,” Dollface said.
Sarah sighed, took in the girl’s darkened eyelashes and rouged lips and cheeks. She gave her a thin smile, which she – Bashful, as Blue had insisted – returned shyly. She looked so young, with a gap tooth grin and chubby cheeks. The makeup sat on her face all wrong.
Dollface seemed to see it too, just then. A wrinkle of her perfect brow gave her a disturbed look. She turned to Sarah.“How long before…?”
Sarah turned to look at herself in the mirror, pulling out her pallets of makeup. “A month, thank god.”
Whistling, Dollface said, “How the hell do you do it? You’ve got him pussy-whipped.”
“Please,” Sarah grit her teeth. “It’s not worth it. I’d rather he didn’t notice me at all.”
“Whatever you say,” Dollface said with a flick of her hair. She returned to touching up Bashful’s make-up at the mute insistence of the grinning young girl. “Did you ask him about the fireballs?”
Swiping a rosy blush over her cheeks, Saraha glanced sideways at her fellow prisoner. “He says he’ll see what he can do.”
“Oh, neat. Thank you.”
Humming, Sarah asked, “Do you know who you’ve got tonight?”
“The mayor? I think.”
“How’s he? He’s never wanted me.”
“I don’t think he can afford to outbid some of your fellas,” Dollface said wryly, and with only the smallest amount of a bite. “But he’s not so bad. Only, he always smokes these huge fat cigars. I can never get the smell out of my hair. And I always want to tell him it looks like he’s sucking a cock with those things in his mouth.”
Sarah laughed.
Dollface grimaced. “Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.”
A minute or so passed in silence as Dollface finished up Bashful’s look. When she was done, she pointed in the mirror so the girl could see. Her small teeth gleamed in white rows when she smiled at herself. Her gums showed, pink and shiny. Then she looked between the two women, with curious eyes.
Sarah nodded at her and then pointed over to the nearby sofa. Silently, the girl gathered up the story books and settled over on the cushions, pulling her knees up to her chest and balancing one such book atop them.
For one scary, impulsive moment, the urge to tell Dollface about her plan was all she could think of. But somehow, by the grace of the cruel God, she managed to swallow it back. She knew what happened when a group of girls planned together. Dollface hadn’t been there that night, so long ago, but she had witnessed other horrible things in the years she had been there.
“Who have you got?” Dollface asked then.
“Huh? Oh. The high roller.”
Her sort-of friend whistled again. “Now that’s why Blue likes you.”
Sarah shrugged. Then she frowned. Looking surreptitiously to Dollface, she said, “He’s really never… you know… with you?”
Dollface shook her head with perfect lips pursed. Sarah knew enough about her to know not to say anything more. They returned to preparing themselves in a silence that cascaded like shadows against the bright liveliness of the dressing room around them, and against all the other vivid girls who wore their cheer just like their glittering makeup, for what else could they all do but to move along, second by second, and if they really could, smile.
Her dance routine had evolved over the years, taken many forms. In the beginning she was the forbidden fruit, the young, untouched princess, hidden away in a dragon tower. Even after her virginity had been so soundly taken from her, she had continued to play this part. Men in droves would pay for the opportunity to take her so-called innocence, knowing somewhere in the back of their mind that she wasn’t truly a virgin, but not, when it came down to the opportunity at hand, caring. That was the power of fantasy. Then, as she matured into her womanly form, she played parts that were more risque, sexy and sweet. Every once in a while, Blue had her take to the stage as her mother, with a costume and face of makeup that reminded the aging patrons of that lovely, adored starlet of their younger days who, it just so happened, our darling Princess bears a striking resemblance to! Come and see for yourself! That was Sarah’s least favorite of all of the dances she’d ever learned, even more than the one which had her stripped entirely nude and bared so thoroughly to how many pairs of eyes.
That night her dance was a seductive number, to the beat of Arab-esque music and with long, sheer, flowing fabrics swathing her nude body. Bashful’s eyes had boggled out of her head when she’d seen Sarah all done up and dressed in her harem-girl costume, with gyspy beads draped around breasts and thick kohly eyes and bare feet and long hair straight down her back.
She didn’t enjoy the dancing, but she didn’t mind it as much as she once had. It was better than sharing a bed, for certain. So that night she fell into her dance, which lasted only a few minutes, and then she went out onto the floor, eyes of everyone lingering upon her.
The club was dark and, as a young girl, it had been confusing and terrifying. Now, she’d had nothing but time to get used to it. She strolled barefoot through the place with a hazy mystic’s smile tugging at her plummy lips. Laying a gentle, greeting hand here and there upon the shoulders of the men she recognized, she weaved her way through the other scantily-clad women until she arrived at the lounge for Blue’s very important customers.
She stepped inside. The high roller saw her and immediately smiled, arms outstretching all come-hither.
“Princess!” he crowed. He was a large man who dwarfed his besuited companions. He was kinder than he looked. As she came to perch on his lap, he held her warmly, and said, “You were wonderful, as always.”
“Thank you,” she smiled, wrapping arms around his shoulders so they could kiss. “I’m glad to see you, Tom.”
He rubbed his large hands up and down her sides. “And I, you, believe me, sweetheart.” He glanced sideways at the two well-dressed men that sat with him at the same table. “Princess, meet my business associates.”
They were younger than Tom by quite a bit, probably close to her age even. They looked upon her hungrily, and upon Tom enviously.
She leaned back into Tom’s chest, but held out a hand. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said.
“Likewise,” the closer one said, taking her hand and kissing the knuckles.
Tom began refamiliarizing himself with her body, hands all over her, even in front of his guests. This she was used to, his public touches and his leering companions. It was a show-off thing, she had come to understand a long time ago. A look what I can afford and you can’t thing.
Sarah was familiar with Tom as well, so she touched him back, ignored the looks of the other men, and asked sweetly, “Get me a drink?”
He squeezed her thigh. “Anything you want,” and gestured for one of the waitresses.
“Whatever you’re having?”
He laughed boisterously, enough that it bounced Sarah with how she was sat in his lap. “Can you handle it, little girl?”
Sarah grinned back. “I guess we’ll have to see.”
He ordered scotches for the table once the waitress had arrived in her towering heels and cinched-thin corseted waist. She was another prisoner, but one who did not get as many requests from men these days. Sarah felt sad for her. She knew what was next for her. So did the woman herself, if her deep gray hollows for eyes and her tense, puckered mouth were any indication.
Sarah watched the waitress walk away once she had taken their order for a few solemn seconds, but just as soon returned her full attention to Tom. When the waitress returned with drinks, Sarah hardly spared her a glance.
This, like her performance on the stage, was also a dance. It had a sequence, a plan. The high roller liked to do things his own particular way and Sarah liked to make sure that was what happened. It always started with a drink or two – but not so much that he couldn’t enjoy her later – alongside their whispered flirtations which were observed enviously by the other men rich enough to be Very Important but not rich enough to outbid her high roller. The waitresses and servers who came through the lounge periodically also had their jealous looks to shoot. But it didn’t matter because Sarah and Tom, really Princess and the high roller, were all eyes for only each other. Then, at some point, Blue would usually come by, to check on the satisfaction of his highest-paying customers, which Tom would always be flattered by. And finally, sooner than any of the other men and their chosen girls, Tom would ask her to join him in his rented room for the night. He always asked her, even if he knew what the answer would be. Sarah felt fond of him for this.
It was on Sarah’s first drink and Tom’s second that he asked her how she was. She stroked his cheek, smoothly-shaven, and then touched his mustache, fuller than Blue’s. It was moments like this that Sarah wondered if he knew how this place worked. That she was really a prisoner, or that there was a little girl of twelve somewhere alone and scared within these walls, but unknowing that in a month she would be thrust into womanhood by the piercing weapon of some man. That weapon that sticks up sharp and rageful out from between the legs, red with impulse and violence, wanting nothing more than to lunge itself deep into the seizing, torn innards of a little, innocent girl.
Sarah answered him with a vague sort of yes, good, thank you, and said, “But I missed you, you know.”
“Oh, yeah?”
She touched his earlobe. “No one treats me as well as you.”
He grinned at that, a little flushed in the face, but pleased. Blue would come by that night to find the high roller all smiles and laughs.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Sarah whispered once Blue had come and gone. She leaned in. The thump of the music was loud and heady, slowed down and vibrating.
“Mm?” His thumbs stroked her lower belly. She wondered, too, whether either of the babies that had been aborted from her body had been his. It was just as possible as any of the other hundreds of men who have gotten their hands on her.
“You’re my favorite,” she said. Then she kissed him.
At this, Tom was quick to make his excuses to his associates, to offer them girls for their own, to throw down a huge tip, and to ask her to join him in his room that evening. Sarah smiled and agreed, taking his hand and, to the beat of the dark, seductive music, led him through the maze of the club in the direction of the bedrooms.
They were just passing by Dollface – dancing seductively over the lap of the cigar-smoking mayor – when Sarah went cold all over, heart stopping, and then warm again with the rush of it. Then the music returned to full volume, having faded in her ear to a tinny sound of… of…
“Princess?”
Sarah blinked rapidly and shook herself out of it. Tom peered down at her curiously, and it was then that she realized she had frozen in the middle of the club floor, still holding his hand. She squeezed it, and smiled apologetically. “Sorry,” she said. “Thought I saw someone I knew there for a second.”
Whe looked back in the direction she had thought she’d seen… She shook her head. All she could see, as usual, were the club patrons and club whores. There was no one significant there. It set her teeth on edge, had frozen the stunted warmth she allowed herself to feel toward Tom. It had shaken her cold.
Sarah let him take the lead, directing them the rest of the way to the bedroom he’d rented out. All the while, the image of the pale golden hair from the corner of her eye, the sound of a laugh, unnerved her deeply. As they settled into the most lavish room, of sumptuous fabrics and the most comfortable bed, Sarah found it difficult to focus.
Tom kissed her and she kissed back, but her mind was occupied. The thought of… of… him…after so long of pushing him, it, everything away from mind, for fear she truly was insane, now boggled her. Had it been him? Had it been a trick of the light? Was she losing it again, just as the possibility of escape was on the horizon? But what if it had been true? What if he was real? But then what if he wasn’t, and Karen had put her here rightly? How could she have deserved any of this, any of this life, if she hadn’t truly done something horrible to her little brother? She just had to have done terrible, terrible things to deserve this world, to deserve Blue, and all these men, and the doctor scraping at her insides, and Bunny and Honey gone and dead, and now this little girl–!
Her still dreadfully hopeful heart couldn’t let itself believe that she had been put here unjustly. That he was truly out there, and had never answered any of her desperate, sobbing wishes. She must have done those things, and she must be insane and violent towards little helpless babies. So the vision from earlier had been just that… a vision.
He was a fiction, but even so, the bogeyman was back under her bed, in her closet, in her mind, after all these years of numb, listless acceptance.
Tom kept shooting her curious looks, for she was quieter than normal. She apologized again. “Let me make it up to you.”
Later, they lay together atop the bed, nude and sweaty and beginning to chill in the clean air. His foot touched hers and it was a reflex that she shifted away from the touch.
He turned to face her, reached out to push back a piece of her hair. His romantic, soft touch, one which she could usually find some measure of enjoyment in, now thrust upon her this unpleasant shiver in the belly. The muscles of her thighs tensed in exposure and soreness, and in an instant she found herself sitting up and against the headboard.
She must have had a troubled expression on her face. Tom sat up too. “You’ve been acting strange today,” he said. He grabbed his pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the bedside table. “Want one?”
Feeling cold, she said, “Please.”
He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and then one in hers. She held it there with her lips as he flicked on his lighter. It was a new one, novelty-looking, with bright colors and exaggerated shapes.
“Groovy,” she said.
She took her first drag of the cigarette and breathed out in time with Tom. Their combined exhales fogged up the room. It warmed her up as she had hoped. An image formed in her head, of thin, glossed lips wrapping slyly around a cigarette. She blinked it away.
“Keep it,” Tom said, tossing it to her. “I got it on a trip to Jamaica.”
Sarah glanced at him curiously. She picked it up, rolled it around in her hand, then she flicked it. It didn’t light. She flicked it again and it did. She stared at the flame for a moment, feeling powerful. She turned bodily towards him. “Was it beautiful there… in Jamaica?”
The room was dimly lit, but their eyes were adjusted to the dark, and they could see each other fully. The glowing ends of their cigarettes were like beacons, little darts of light, moving up and down, and sideways, and glowing brighter and crackling with fire along with the dragging sounds of breaths.
“Not as beautiful as you,” he said, reaching out to touch her knee.
Sarah looked away, and then back. She scooted closer so their shoulders touched. “I’m sorry I’ve been weird… I don’t know why I am.”
With one hand she caressed the lighter in hand as if it were as precious as a diamond, a crystal. And with the other she gentled the cigarette. Tom didn’t say anything to that, just touched her hair. He balanced a nearby ashtray on his knee. Sarah flicked the end of her cigarette into it.
His silence made her chatty. “Tom?”
“What is it, baby?”
She hesitated. “Do you know about this place?”
Tom laughed, a quick bursting thing that called her a foolish little girl. She felt the laughter in her body, it was so strong. “I’m here, yes?”
Sarah bit her lip.
He chuckled some more, “Then of course I know about it.”
She frowned. “I mean… do you know how– that is, Blue–”
“Honey,” he said, and didn’t that hurt. “I pay for the services you and Blue provide, just like I pay for my clothing. I don’t ask questions I don’t want the answers to.” His tone was final, firm, kindly condescending. She was fearful of him all of a sudden, uneasy like she hadn’t been in his company since the first few times he’d ever visited her.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
He finished his cigarette sooner than her, putting it out in the tray and then doing the same with hers. He turned to her and kissed her on the shoulder. “I’m ready again.”
Sarah nodded, tucked the lighter carefully under the pillow, and reached over to touch him once again. And that was the end of that. She numbed herself to the feeling of the strange betrayal, though there were a few moments in the course of their sex that her eyes stung dangerously and her throat tightened. As she took the high roller, not Tom, in her mouth and then again into her desecrated body, she gazed upon his relaxed face, eyes closed in bliss, and there was a bitter hatred inside her that was new. Or really, reignited.
Foolishly, she had let herself be swayed by the kindest man of the bunch. But she had forgotten, in her weakness, that he, too, was paying for her body, using her, attempting to own her.
So she was glad when the night ended and morning came. She returned to the drab communal living area of all of Blue’s whores, with itchy skin and sticky, dried thighs. She made sure to take the lighter with her, an item that was forbidden in this prison. The morning was so thin that the light only barely dappled into the dormitory. The place was mostly empty, but there she found Bashful curled up asleep in Sarah’s bed, fairy-tale book clutched in hand.
Staring at the little girl, Sarah flicked the lighter in hand. The sounch, the scritch, was satisfying, perfect, and dangerous. It filled her with an assurance that lasted as she crawled into bed beside Bashful and held her tight, like she would a daughter.
She had done wrong by her little baby brother, but she would do right by this little, innocent girl. She just had to.
Notes:
One more chapter after this! :o
I promise there is a point to all of this! XD
Chapter Text
Her nerves were on edge after that, more than was usual. Not only had she thought of escape, considered it, a blasphemy in its own right, but she now, by the luck of man, had herself a tool for escape. There was only one exit that she knew of, the one she had come in from, years ago, but had never seen again. It was secured with a gate that not even the master key could unlock, manned by security with a buzzer to let you through. But it would open automatically in case of fire. Now all she needed was the key to get through the doors that would lead to that gate. A labyrinth if she had ever seen one.
The plan began taking shape in her head. It was all she could think of, day in and day out.
The deadline Blue had given her, the month, counted down too fast as Sarah bravely tried to wrap her head around what she had to do. In equal measures, she found herself imagining the freedom of fresh air once she had fooled Blue and gotten out from his clutches once and for all. The freedom where she would run with little Bashful at her side, and she would give that girl the life she had never had. It all became rosy in her head, beautiful, if only to be interrupted just as easily by the bleak dread and certainty, surely, of being caught. Of the memory of the gunshut and the splayed dead body, just like that. Of the eternal blackness that must lie beyond the gates of death or the fiery hell that waited patiently for people like her, whores and sinners and the insane, vengeful girls who had lost their little brother to fictitious fairy kings.
Despite her task to get Bashful prepared, to talk to her about it, Sarah couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open her mouth and tell her that hey, soon you’re going to have to lay down and let a strange old man between your legs. And then you’re going to have to do the same exact thing for three days every single week by more strange old men for years and years until you’re old and undesirable and Blue kills you off like he did my only friends. I wish you the best of luck, my dear, you can do it.
How could she say that when the possibility of escape grew more and more enchanting and more and more possible? When there was a hope that Bashful would never be subject to these things…
It became a ritual now, whenever she was in Blue’s office and bidden to collect a condom. She would reach in the drawer and, in the few small seconds she had, she would touch the spare key that lately was always there and would tell herself: now, now, now is the time! But then she would grow fearful, the heavy-breathing Blue-beast behind her, and her fingers would quickly retract from that single item of salvation, only to grab the condom as she had been told to do.
Time passed quicker than she could imagine and she was petrified in danger. Life was precarious under these conditions. She had promised, but Bashful had never heard. She had promised, but no action had been taken. She kept the high roller’s lighter under her pillow always, coveting it like a dragon would his loot. She hoarded it but did not use it. She feared herself but Blue most of all. She feared herself going crazy again, for she remembered going crazy before.
The blond visions, for what else could they be, peppered her life now. Only on club nights did she sometimes think she sometimes saw something or someone at the corner of her eye which no one else saw. A gleam of teeth, a gloss of lips, crinkles at eyes, or the deep, lordly laughter that echoed straight from her youth. Once even, she sniffed the air and over the thick, rich, musty scents of alcohol, man, and money, there was the scent of peaches so strong. But as soon as the visions had come, they disappeared. Gone. Sarah doubted they had ever even existed.
But the shame of her inaction caught up to her when Bashful, who was quiet and brave in the day, but cried herself to sleep each night, whispered her name, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, the only word she had ever heard come from her sweet, young mouth.
What could Sarah do but fight?
Then, the two week mark. Two weeks gone and two weeks to go. Sarah was running out of time. She had always been selfish, worried more about herself than the wellbeing of her charges. First, Toby. Now…
It was in Blue’s office that a fear like none other came over her. Like always, she reached for the drawer to grab the condom and to touch the key, Blue sitting back in his chair, unbuttoning his pants and waiting for her. But then, as her fingers drifted away from the stack and toward where the key always was, there was nothing.
The first chink in the armor. She froze up and as surreptitiously as she could, scrabbled around for it.
A lump built in her throat and the hatred she had near always harbored for herself bubbled up like burning, scorching, destroying lava. She hoped it would burn her alive from the inside out. She had waited too long and now it was too late. It was gone, gone, gone. She blinked rapidly and when Blue cleared his throat, she fumbled quickly to grab what she had been sent to grab.
Making her apologies, she climbed atop his lap. But she could not quite hide away her feelings. Her fingers were clumsy as she slid the condom on. She was shaky as she brought him inside her, and uncomfortable. But the pleasure of the moment distracted him from this. His eyes closed and cheekbones flushed as she worked herself stiltedly over him. She felt nothing in her lower body but numbness, even at his wretched, unrelenting invasion. And in her upper body, which housed her heart and soul and horrible, selfish mind, she felt everything there was to feel about shame and self-hatred and despair.
Soon it would be that little girl who knew what it was to be used like this. And it would be all her fault.
When Blue finished, he pulled out and held onto her for a moment, catching his breath, before he made motions to get back to business and she took her cue to get up from him. It was this discarded feeling that compounded everything.
She was shakily pulling up her panties when – as if he had not just been having her bounce atop him like a well-trained horse jockey, as if he were not intending to sell a little girl into sexual slavery, for that was what it was – he casually asked, “How’s Bashful?”
She stared at the floor, panties only halfway up her thighs, and her jaw trembled. She finished pulling them up, the wet, mushy feeling of her own body’s natural response disgusting her.
“Well?” he said, louder. He didn’t like to be kept waiting.
Sarah looked at him, and then burst into tears. She had not cried in front of Blue for a very long time and she was horrified and mortified to find it happening now. Her face went red as honking loud sobs escaped from between her pressed together lips. She covered her face, hunched over, and turned away. “S-sorry–”
She heard him let out a sigh as she wetly stuttered, “I’m sorry– I’m going to go–”
Burning hot in shame, she fled his office, near blind with her upset. She stumbled through the hallways. Crossing paths with a guard or two, she hardly noticed. By the time she found herself in the nearest bathroom, the tears had dried but the sorrow had not. Her lungs were tight, achy. She couldn’t catch her breath as she flung herself into a stall and dropped like a stone to her knees. She heaved over the toilet, but nothing came up. The wrenching of her stomach as a result of the heaving made it happen again. Her mouth watered with gross anticipation, but nothing.
She stayed there for a long time, shifting, eventually, crawling herself up to sit slumped over the bowl. She held her heavy head in her hands. Her temples throbbed. She half-expected, or maybe half-wanted Blue to have followed her there, to see what was the matter with her, to care, in some sort of matter, even though she hated him. But he hadn’t come. She was alone.
When she had cleaned up sufficiently and rejoined her regularly scheduled life – she couldn’t find the courage to look Bashful in the eyes anymore. Her shame was too much.
Blue didn’t mention her breakdown and the key didn’t make another appearance in the drawer, nor round his neck when she was visiting. She saw it, though, when he passed her and the others in the corridors, when he visited them in their dance practice, the glimmer of it beneath his bowtie on club nights, shining and taunting. He had grown suspicious of her, he must have. Was it her imagination, or did he look at her now with a mean, distrusting glint in the eye?
Still, there was nothing she could do. He didn’t say anything, but she knew what happened to those who double-crossed him. She had seen that with her own two eyes. The memory had imprinted itself into her very being.
As the days counted down for Bashful’s month, one week, five days, four days, Sarah hated herself more and more.
“Hey,” Sarah said quietly one afternoon during lunch. “I need to talk to you.”
Bashful looked at her with those wide eyes. They flicked over her face and Sarah knew what she must see. Pale and gray and scared. It was depression again, like that she’d had after it had turned out that no, her brother hadn’t been returned to her like she’d thought. Or like that which had come with the death of her father, leaving her in Karen’s double-grieving, hateful care. Like that of her first years in this place, before she had been numbed to the invasion all around and upon her.
Sarah swallowed tightly. Her tongue was heavy in her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have explained sooner but– I hoped… Anyway, it doesn’t matter…”
The girl still stared, a little spot of food stuck at the corner of her mouth. Sarah reached out to wipe it away.
She found herself asking her the same question she’d asked the high roller. “Do you… understand what this place is?”
Sarah waited a long time as Bashful just blinked. That large blink, like a fly or a bug, or a goblin. You felt watched.
Finally, the little girl nodded. Then she took a bite of food.
Sarah looked away. “This weekend…”
Bashful stared at her still, and she nodded, as if urgingly. But Sarah didn’t know what went on behind those large eyes, if she really understood at all. She was at a loss of words. Finally, she made the same lies that Honey-Bee had, “It’ll be okay. Just do as you’re told, and you’ll be alright. Remember, it will be over before you know it.”
And, again, Bashful nodded. And blinked.
And then the weekend was there, and Sarah had once again failed a charge of hers. Though Bashful cried at night for something, Sarah thought that not one of those tears belonged to the prospect of what would soon come by the hands of the perverted. Sarah was more frightened for her charge than Bashful was for herself, how odd.
Club night preparations underway, Sarah faced it all with a pinched expression. Bashful wouldn’t be dancing, Blue had informed them a few weeks ago. She was too young for that, some of the regular clients may have moral objections. So, only a select few would see her and be able to bid upon her.
And so, that Friday night would commence as usual, with her and all the other ladies performing and then mingling with the men on the floor. But then, after the majority of the patrons had been taken to rooms for the night and the club floor cleared, the select few would remain to feast their eyes on the new, young blood. And Bashful would be bought for the night.
The dread Sarah felt was heavy as the moon. She carried it over her shoulders. It was different from the dread she had felt years ago before her first performance, and her own bidding, but it was no less dreadful. Habitually, she dressed herself, the mark of Blue as usual carved out inside her. After, at his prodding, she got Bashful ready in her own costume even though she would remain in the dressing room until the end of the night. When Sarah had first been displayed among Blue’s men, she had been dressed in a way half-innocent, half-seductive. Bashful, on the other hand, was dressed entirely innocent. Childlike. It disgusted Sarah. She could hardly bear to look at her, with her face left bare, smooth and youthful as it was.
Dollface gave a low whistle but when Sarah caught her gaze there was a mutual understanding between them. A mutual pain.
“Lovely girls!” Blue clapped, upon his entrance into the dressing room. He stood close to Sarah, sliding an arm around her waist to rest his hand at her hip. He looked at Bashful with a calculating eye. He nodded at Sarah in approval.
Sarah looked down at her feet, bare and pale and almost blue as she was still in that harem-girl costume of hers, as he called out to the dressing room at large, “Gather round, ladies!”
Bashful stuck close to her other side, even grabbing onto her free hand as all the other girls and women huddled around for the pre-show pep talk. Sarah remembered one such talk, years before, that had ended so horribly. With a little girl’s hand in hers and a man’s on her hip, and a lighter under her pillow far away, and a key so close but impossible to get, there was no hope. Sarah could see the key in the corner of her vision. Light glimmered subtly off it when Blue shifted while speaking.
When he was done, he let go of her, clapping again, and the room dispersed. Sarah hesitated, still clutching Bashful’s hand.
“I’ve got her,” Blue said. “By the way, you’re requested in the VIP lounge after your dance. The high roller.”
Sarah nodded, squeezing the girl’s hand. The touch had become sweaty and nervous and she wondered how much of that was her and how much of that was Bashful, if at all. Blue looked at her expectantly and her eyes darted downward.
It hurt but she made herself let go of Bashful’s hand. She stepped away but it hurt too. With a backward glance at the young girl, who stood tiny and frail at Blue’s side, barely taller than half his height, but blinking those wide, blank eyes, Sarah turned away. With a sickness crawling up inside, she felt it in her throat.
“Wait,” Blue said before she was even out of arm’s reach. She turned back quickly, almost hopefully. He grabbed her by the hips. “Give me a kiss, hmm? I’m feelin’ lucky.”
Sarah glanced at Bashful and then at Blue’s pink, partly-puckered lips and then at the silver key dangling round his neck, then into his half-lidded, aroused, oh-so-lucky eyes. She hesitated, unsure, but his gaze egged her on. She kissed him quickly at the corner of his mouth and he released her just like that.
As quick as she could she skittered away, like a coward. She abandoned Bashful with barely another backward glance. The hatred in her gut bubbled and boiled. And so her dance that night was clumsy. Her body was numb and the music flowed wrongly through her limbs. She was glad to be off the stage when she had finished. There had been a moment on stage when she had imagined that all the eyes from below, the men on the floor, were leering, evil ones, all lying in wait until they could see the real youthful delicacy of the night, tongues hanging out of their mouths, slobbering like dogs over a slab of meat, erections sticking out big as baseball bats and bloodied with little girl.
As the next girl took the stage, Sarah tried to catch her breath, clenching her eyes shut against the image. She took to the floor numbly some minutes later. She felt the evil lurking by, all around her. Distractedly, she hurried to the lounge.
Though her last visit with Tom had caused a sort of souring toward him, he was still the kindest of them all. She walked in, a little in a daze, an attempt at a smile pasted to her lips as her eyes sought out her client for the night.
She froze. A feeling she didn’t know filled up that space between her lungs and her guts. Standing in the lounge entryway, she lost all sense of herself.
In the room were a few men. There was Tom, as expected, and a few others off to the side, at different tables. But it was the man sitting beside Tom who had stunned Sarah into silence. She shut her eyes tight, scrunched them up like a little child who knew there was a monster under her bed, breathed heavy, stilted.
Vaguely, aware of the boisterous greeting coming from Tom, her most loyal customer, she peeled her eyes open one at a time. She blinked rapidly, for it must have been a trick of the light, a trick of her mind, even. But there he still was.
There he was, and panic set in.
Despite all the doubt that had coursed through her year in and year out, and especially lately with those visions of hers, Sarah knew now without question that he was real, that it was all real, and that she had never imagined it, and that meant he had never, not even when she had begged and pleaded and wished for him, come to save her. It was proof at last, that way he existed solidly in front of her, the way that Tom himself turned to murmur to him, and he responded, the way that everything about him, every essential part of him seemed to hone in on her and only her. He sat there calmly, with pale golden hair finely done in a pompadour style, and a sleek and vivid suit. A necklace she recognized hung down where a tie should be, over the dark button up shirt and waistcoat. Arms extended elegantly over the round table’s surface and bare, slender fingers wrapped themselves around a shining tumbler glass of ice and amber. A watch on the wrist marked him as human, but Sarah knew better. The eyes which fell upon her all the way across the room marked him as not. She knew those eyes.
From her dreams and from real life. Real life, yes, she wasn’t crazy. She knew it now. Her small world that was this asylum of lies and tragedy fizzled away as she stared and stared.
His thin, shining mouth curved into just barely a smile.
Then sound rushed back at her, too fast. She remembered herself. With a harried smile and pace, she quickly crossed the room to an expectant Tom. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up straight. Her belly twisted all around. Fairies were biting her up inside.
She perched herself on Tom’s lap like she was supposed to, carefully avoiding looking anywhere else but him, but she felt herself burning with a shame she wasn’t used to, that she hadn’t felt for years and years. The Goblin King – for that was who he was, what he was – watched her always.
She was crippled by this. Even as Tom spoke, her eyes and ears could only focus on the tap tap tap of his index finger against the side of his glass. Then, it was lifted to his mouth. Her eyes followed. He took a sip, set it down again, and slyly said, deep voice she hadn’t heard for years and years, “Hello there.”
Her lips fell apart and a tremor in her belly took hold of her, but Tom who was chuckling heartily, didn’t notice. “Should I be jealous?” he hooked an arm around her waist as he glanced at him. “Gareth’s a good lookin fella so I suppose I can’t really blame you.”
Sarah turned to Tom with a panicked apology coloring her whole body and face, and on the tip of her tongue. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I just thought– I recognized him.”
“You might just,” Tom said, still amused. “I met him here a few weeks ago.”
“Oh?” Sarah said, numb again. Gareth– Jareth– Goblin King – whatever his name may be, his eyes burned holes into the side of her face.
Tom patted her on the hip, and winked. “Don’t feel bad, Princess. He’s taken a liking to you, too, huh?”
He spoke again and it was then that she noted it wasn’t only his looks which reminded her of a lifetime before, but his voice, which was low and deep and strangely accented, too. “Yes,” he said. “How lovely you were in your dance, Princess… was it?”
Sarah flushed hot. A bead of sweat on her upper lip.
It didn’t feel real. It felt like a dream. But it was all, everything about it, real. She cleared her throat, which was scratchy and said, in a thin voice, “Who did you invite today?”
Tom waved dismissively in the direction of the group of younger men at the other side of the room. “No one as interesting as Gareth here.”
Sarah smiled nervously, not quite able to meet either of their eyes now. She turned her face so it was half hidden in Tom’s bulk. The high roller was chatty that day, but that could be ascribed to the alcohol, to be sure. “We were just talking with Gareth’s son. He’s about her age, yes?”
“Give or take,” said the Goblin King.
“He went to find a bathroom before you got here,” Tom told Sarah. “But maybe he got waylaid by a woman, the good boy!” he laughed. “Well, this is the best place for that.”
The Goblin King smiled and still tap, tap, tapped away at his glass. “Tell me, Princess... How long have you been working here?”
Tears pricked at her eyes and she glanced at him only barely, gaze flicking away just as quickly. He raised an eyebrow at her silence. Tom nudged her, “He asked you a question, doll.”
Her mouth crumpled a little, wobbling, but heavily, she managed to say, “About– about ten years now.”
“Time sure does fly, doesn’t it,” Tom chuckled. “And you haven’t aged a day, honey.” Honey, honey. The skin around her eyes wrinkled up. Her hands shook as she brushed some of her hair back, all clumsy.
“Here,” Tom said, pulling a coaster closer with a finger at the edge of it. A drink was barged atop. “Got this for you.”
“Thank you,” she said. It was the most common refrain with him, and others. She picked it up. It chilled through her skin and then the bones of her hands. The ice clattered inside the glass with her uneasiness. She took a sip, and despite its cold, warmed her. She took a larger swallow, then, painfully. And another, for she could feel those eyes still on her.
“Ah!” Tom said happily, “Speak of the devil.”
A young man, finely dressed, walked in through the lounge entryway. He approached the table. His voice was smooth and sure as he spoke. “Father. Mr. Fring, apologies for my lengthy absence. I found myself lost, if you can believe it.”
The new man took a seat at the Goblin King’s other side. When she truly saw him for the first time…
Sarah stared, pale-faced, like a ghost disbelieving at another ghost. He might just have been. The young man was her father looking back at her, but he wasn’t. For he had striking blond hair and bright blue eyes. Her father had had brown, that much she could remember. Sarah stared and stared and she stared. And she felt her world crumbling again.
The young man peered at her curiously and indeed he was close to her age. She gripped her glass in hand, the ice clattered, and allowed her eyes to slide over to those of the Goblin King.
“Allow me to introduce my son,” the Goblin King said, tilt of the head, “Tobias, this is the lovely Princess.”
Tobias.
Tears gathered quick in her eyes and she had to blink hard or else the dam would burst and she would begin crying and never ever stop. But how could it be? How?
“You don’t look anything alike,” she found herself saying, like possessed and operated by a daring, reckless ventriloquist. For she herself was barely at all in control.
The Goblin King tipped his glass. “I had the fortune of adopting him at a young age.”
A rage unlike any other shot through her, it tingled in her toes, her fingers, her very nose. The Goblin King smiled.
“Tom,” she said, forcing herself with incredible effort to look away and at her client. “I’m a little tired…. We could settle in a little early, what do you say?”
He looked at her guiltily, with a squeeze to the fleshy part of her waist. “No can do, darling. There’s a special show tonight I don’t want to miss. You understand.” Then he glanced at the Goblin King with a gesture of the hand. “Gareth here tipped me off about it. I don’t know why Mr. Jones didn’t tell me himself–”
Sarah’s face lost all color, slackened like dead.
“No,” she hushed. Her voice grew stronger. “You can’t!”
“Why, honey, there’s always the next time. No need to worry.”
And her disgust was so palpable that she jumped up from his lap. All three of them stared at her as she slammed her glass down on the table hard enough that what was left of the liquid sloshed over onto the wood and her hand.
Tom held out his hands. “Woah. What’s wrong with you?”
“I can’t believe you,” she spat. “I thought you were good, but you’re just like the rest of them!”
His face hardened as he stood. “Now, listen–”
“No!” She stumbled back and then turned on the Goblin King and… her brother who wasn’t her brother. How could he be her brother? It didn’t make any sense, but then, somehow… it made all the sense in the world.
The Goblin King looked at her placidly, one eyebrow raised. “And you– you–” she stuttered. Her fury was so great that words and sounds just dripped past her lips like the dribbles of food past a vegetable person’s mouth. She sounded slow, impaired. Soon she would smell burning hair and one side of her would seize up. A stroke was incoming, she was sure, for how could she feel so terrible otherwise.
In her frantic backward stumbling, she bumped into a body.
“What… is going on?”
The voice of Blue chilled her to her very bones. Any words she had been attempting fell away as silence descended. It echoed, too.
The Goblin King drank from his glass. Tobias, the man not the baby, watched a little wide-eyed as the high roller adjusted his suit jacket, all red in the face. “Mr. Jones,” he said. “Maybe you ought to get your girls into line.”
Quick as a bolt, Blue’s hand seized over Sarah’s upper arm, fingers biting into her skin, hard and bruising. She closed her eyes against all who would look upon her at this hour of despair.
“Of course, Mr. Fring. Please, accept your drinks tonight on the house as a token of my sincerest apologies. Now, if you’ll excuse us just a moment.”
Tom made a dismissive gesture and Sarah, staring back at him all stunned and betrayed, was dragged through the side door. It opened into an empty hallway, where the music was muffled and the light was dim. The door shut behind them with a clang, and Blue dropped her arm harshly only to grab her shoulder and shove her right into the wall.
He got real close. “Do you want to explain to me just… why… you were screaming at my highest paying customer?”
Sarah clenched her eyes shut, tilting her face as far away from his, cringing. Blue’s breath, tobacco’d, seeped into her skin, swirled up into her nostrils.
“Well?” He shouted right in her face.
She shook like a leaf. In a small voice, she tried, “B-Blue, I’m– sorry– I–”
“That’s,” he said, “not an answer.”
Tears escaped past her eyelashes. Still, she kept her head turned away. She was sobbing now, overwhelmed, stumbling over her words, “He– he was going to stay to–tonight for– for– Bashful’s auc–auction–”
“And what? You thought it was your place to give him a moral LECTURE?” The roar reverberated in her skull as he disappointedly shook his head. “Baby, you’re really not as smart as I thought you were.”
He stepped away so suddenly that she now wobbled in place, weak-kneed. She watched with blurry vision as his hand came up to smooth his mustache. His face was flushed in anger, his shoe tapped on the floor, over and over. With a barely controlled tone of voice, he said, “Now, go back in there and make it better. I’ll deal with you later–”
“No–!” she burst out. “Please, don’t make me go back!”
She reached out, grabbing onto his sleeve. “Please, that other man–Gareth– he’s the one. He’s the reason I’m here– the king! He put me here! And that boy, he’s– he’s–” A sob wrenched out of her, loudly and wetly. Her makeup was surely a mess by now.
His face twisted. “Don’t tell me you still believe in that bullshit?” he scoffed.
Sarah flinched away. He advanced on her. The movement drew her eyes to the shining key and chain around his neck, which shifted side to side. Whatever he was saying now, spitting furious, was drowned out, muffled, by her focus on the key. A fisherwoman entranced by her siren.
But then he hit her hard across the face.
Sarah snapped out of it with a gasp, as she was spun around with the force of the blow. She gripped the wall, a gasp escaping past her lips. Her cheek throbbed. A taste formed in her mouth, metallic and coppery and disgusting. She spit blood out onto the floor. He was shouting behind her to do what he told now, do you UNDERSTAND ME?
His voice and everything rang in her ears. She turned around again, weak, and slumped against the wall. The key glinted.
“O-okay,” she heard herself saying, but it was fuzzy. She found herself reaching into her hair and finding a pin, one of the ones that held together her hairstyle. She pulled it out, and then she was lunging at him.
The surprise of it was what helped her. He went down under her weight with a startled shout. If she hesitated at all, for even one split second, he would get the upper hand again and it would turn into a wrestling match that she would lose. So she acted fast. It was a rush of movement, frantic, so that later, she would barely remember what happened.
But she knew one thing, and that was that when she climbed atop him, scratching and hitting, she felt in her body at once every single time he had used her. Every single time another man had, at his behest. Every time he had hit her or laid his hands on her or kissed her, god forbid. She thought of Honey-Bee and Bunny and the girl he’d shot dead for daring to want to escape his prison, and she thought of Bashful most of all.
With a chilling scream that must have echoed – how hadn’t those in the club heard them yet? – she brought the hairpin right down onto his eye, and yanked it through as hard as she could.
Blue howled, hand flying up to to wound. Blood spurted past his fingers. “YOU BITCH!”
Sarah ripped the key off his neck and scrambled away from his sweeping and insane reach. Her heart pounded so fast, and she broke into a run down the hall, leaving him, Blue, screaming behind her.
Sarah slammed into the dressing room some indeterminable amount of time later, wheezing in her panic.
“Thank god,” she gasped, seeing Bashful sitting right where she had been left, book in her lap. “Come on, we have to go now!”
She crossed the room and yanked Bashful up to her feet. A rush through the halls, Sarah ran as fast as she could with Bashful clinging along to her hand and trying to keep up. It was a fight for their life. Sarah’s bare feet slapped against the cold tile floors and Bashful panted out of breath.
She unlocked the first gate with the key, and it worked. She let out a sob of relief. But then she skidded to a halt. “Oh no,” she moaned.
She was damp with sweat. She wiped it furiously from her eyes and face, but then she realized that her hands were covered with blood. “Oh Jesus.”
Sarah looked at Bashful in terror. “I have to get the lighter. There’s no way to get out without it. Damn!”
She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, feeling them bulge. She could hardly think. “Okay– okay–” she breathed heavily through her nose, “Stay here. I’ll be right back. DON’T MOVE!”
And so she took off again in the opposite direction, Bashful left behind. Somehow, by the grace of God, if he even existed out there, she didn’t run into anyone on the way to the dormitory. She slammed in there like a rageful bull chasing down a matador, and her heart nearly froze cold when she reached under the pillow and the lighter wasn’t there. “No! No, no, no, noo…”
But then her foot nudged something. She looked down. She gasped loudly. “Oh, god!” she cried over and over as she reached down to grab the lighter which had fallen to the floor. “Thank god.”
Without leaving any time to waste, she took off at a breakneck speed through the halls again. The key in slick, bloody hand and the lighter in the other.
The panic was palpable and all-consuming. She was so close. The question and the hope and the fear of escaping was all she could think of. Her surroundings became hazy and gray and indistinguishable as she ran and ran harder and faster and stronger. Her feet slapped painfully and her ankles went sore, but her hatred and her terror fueled her, moved–
She was just sliding the key into the first gate again when she began to hear frantic voices, not her own, echoing through the nearby corridors. Sarah slammed through the gate and rounded the corner to where she had left Bashful.
She stumbled to a stop, the gate behind her clanging shut. “No!”
Her eyes landed on Bashful, and then on the man who stood at her side, genial hand at her shoulder.
The Goblin King leaned against the wall casually. The only sounds were Sarah’s gasping, pained breaths, her panicked heart, and the distant, but coming-closer voices. And now, too, his voice.
“Drab place,” he said with some distaste, “isn’t it?”
Sarah felt she might die from the fear. Her eyes darted, bloodshot and teary, between the corridor and gate behind her, where the voices grew louder and louder, and ahead, where the gates to freedom lay, and to him, who watched her.
“Give me the child,” she found the strength to say. It wobbled from her.
He smiled. And he released Bashful. Sarah rushed to her and wrapped her in her arms.
“You didn’t much think through your escape, did you?” he said as Sarah, Bashful tucked close, made to rush past him.
At this, she stopped. “What?”
The voices were even louder. Now rushed footsteps could be heard.
The Goblin King made a pointed glance to her hand which held the lighter. “Even if you did manage to start a big enough fire in time, the next door requires a pin code as well as a key. Didn’t you know?”
Her whole body went numb. She swallowed. The hand that held Bashful’s was slick with sweat and blood. She felt the frantic beating pulse in her neck, a butterfly, for how delicate and killable it felt. Almost painfully, she looked back at him. She licked her lips, which were chapped. Her ears rang. She barely heard herself as she spoke.
“Will you…” she murmured. “Will you help us?”
His head tilted, a smile that wasn’t a smile, full of teeth. “What do you have to offer me in return?”
Her eyes closed. She was in no state to bargain. Loud footsteps were quick, coming fast. The orderlies, to catch the escaped patient. She tensed.
“Damn you,” she moaned. “Tell me what you want.”
He held out his hand. “Why, you, of course.”
Sarah stared at it, and before even the advancing men could reach the first gate, she was reaching out and taking it, useless key and lighter held snug between their palms.
The world she had known for so long blinked out of sight, and Bashful was tucked into her trembling side.
And then they were in the world that had started it all. A raucous, exuberant-creature greeting made her aware of the goblins and beings all abound. They jumped and shouted and cheered. They were in a room Sarah well knew, with its imposing chair, its pit, its dingy old oddness. She fell to her knees in her exhaustion.
“Go play,” she heard the Goblin King say. And Bashful was dropping Sarah’s hand and walking away. When Sarah looked up in the direction she had gone, eyes heavy and sad and scared but despite it all, relieved, there were nothing but goblins. Rowdy little things, they delighted over the soft beautiful fabric that had moments ago been worn by Bashful.
Her heart thumped and her gaze slid sideways and up. Up to the kind. His own look was on her, watchful. “I have saved you,” he said. “I have liberated you from those bonds that distressed you and frightened you. You’re free now, Sarah.”
To hear her name after so long. Tears swam in her eyes.
“Where is he?” she said. “Where is my brother?”
He smiled. “Shutting that Mr. Jones down for good. He shan’t be long.”
“Why–” she stuttered. “Why–” but she couldn’t form any words beyond this.
He hushed her.
Sarah let out a breath, eyes wide in fear and wonder, and wonder and fear.
“You’re wondering if your life here will be the same as in that horrible place,” the Goblin King murmured. He reached out and tenderly touched her chin. He helped her rise up to her feet. “But fear not, for I will be your slave.”
The End.
Notes:
And that's a wrap y'all!
Thanks for sticking around and reading! I know this was kind of a weird, strange, oddly paced thing that came out of left field and doesn't quite follow the typical conventions of Labyrinth fanfic. But I hope you all enjoyed and were satisfied by the ending. It's left a bit open, so we don't get too much of Jareth. So tell me: what do you think happened? What do you think will happen? :D
Also, the dialogue from: "I have saved you,” he said. “I have liberated you from those bonds that distressed you and frightened you. You’re free now, Sarah.” comes directly from the Labyrinth novelization by ACH Smith, when Jareth arrives in the bedroom to take Toby away upon Sarah's wish. I wish I could have written that myself lol as I think it's quite great.
Anyway, thanks again! Hope you all are doing well, and see you next time <3
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