Jess

Jess

I wake in darkness. There’s a heavy weight on my chest, a horrible taste in my mouth, my tongue dry and heavy like it doesn’t belong to me. For a few long moments, everything that happened to me before now is a total blank. It feels like peering forward and staring into a black hole.

I grope around, trying to make out my surroundings. I seem to be lying on a bed. But which bed? Whose?

Fuck. What happened to me?

Gradually I remember: the party. That disgusting drink. Victor the vampire.

And then I see something I recognize. Some little green digits, glowing in the blackness. It’s Ben’s alarm clock. Somehow I’m back here, in the apartment. I blink at the numbers. 17:38. But that can’t be right. That’s the afternoon. That would mean I’ve been asleep for—Jesus Christ—the whole day.

I try to sit up. I make out two huge, glowing, slit-pupiled eyes a few inches from my nose. The cat is sitting on me—so that’s the weight on my chest. It starts kneading its claws into my throat in painful little darts. I push it away: it hops off the bed. I look down at myself. I’m fully clothed, thank God. And I remember now, in flashes of memory: Victor was the one who got me down here after I blacked out in Mimi’s apartment. Not the date-raping predator I suddenly thought he might be. In fact he’d seemed scared by the state I was in—left as quick as he could. I suppose at least he tried to help.

A flicker of memory. I found something last night. Something that felt important. But at first everything that happened only comes back to me in hazy, disjointed fragments. There are big missing patches like holes in a jigsaw. I know my dreams were really trippy. I recall an image of Ben shouting at me through a pane of glass; but I couldn’t see his face clearly, the glass seemed warped. He was trying to warn me of something—but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. And then suddenly I could see his face clearly but that was much, much worse. Because he didn’t have any eyes. Someone had scratched them out.

Now I remember the paintings under Mimi’s bed. Jesus Christ. That’s what I found last night. Those tears in the canvas, like she’d ripped them all apart in some kind of frenzy. The slashes, the holes where the eyes should have been. And Ben’s T-shirt, wrapped around them.

I haul myself out of bed, stumble into the main room. My head throbs. I might be small, but I’m not a cheap date—one drink is not enough to get me in that much of a state. It might not have been Victor, but I’m pretty sure of one thing: someone did this to me.

A loud trilling, so loud in the silence it makes me jump. My phone. Theo’s name flashes up on the screen.

I pick up. “Hello?”

“I know what that card is.” No niceties, no preamble.

“What?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

“The card you gave me. The metal one, with the firework on it. I know what it is. Look, can you meet me at quarter to seven? So—in about an hour? The Palais Royal Metro station; we can walk from there. Oh, and try and look as smart as possible.”

“I don’t—”

But he’s already hung up.