Page 87 of The Devil

Fairbairn.

I turn to look at Jameson who is watching me.

“Fairbairn,” I read aloud. “Who is he?”

“He?” Jameson raises his eyebrows.

I wait.

“She, my dear. Who is she.”

30

JET

The room is empty. I know it before I even step inside.

I reach for my gun, instinct, but remember both the Glock and the small pistol are gone.

“Amal?” I speak. Maybe she’s in the bathroom.

But the silence is wrong.

My towel is still on the foot of the bed from where I’d tossed it when I got dressed. I knock on the bathroom door.

“Amal?” I ask again, my voice sharper, my heart beating in slow thuds.

Still no answer.

I open the door and just as I thought, the bathroom is empty. I see where she discarded her towel after her shower. I look around the room. I wasn’t gone more than ten minutes. Fifteen at most. Shit. I shouldn’t have left her, not for a second.

I’m about to stalk out to find Jameson and demand to know where my wife is when I see the bed’s been disturbed. One of the pillows is askew. I move it and behind it, I find her mother’s diary. She must have shoved it here quickly because it’s open and a page is bent. I know how she took care of this. How important it is to her. Someone must have surprised her for her to shove it under the pillow like this. She was hiding it.

I straighten out the bent page with the intention of closing the diary when something in the passage catches my eye. A single sentence the ink of which is smeared by droplets. Tears. I’m sure.

I knew before I took the test. Knew before I peed on the stupid stick. I know my body although ever since that night, it hasn’t been mine. I can tell you exactly how far along I am, too. I tried to get the test sooner but it’s not like I’m free to come and go as I please. Thank God for Kelly.

Two months.

Two months I’ve been carrying their monster in me. Growing another monster.

A baby, not a monster. That’s what Kelly says. It’s half mine. I have to stop calling it a monster. But every time I think about it, I’m sick to my stomach. I think of him, of all of them, touching me. Their hands on me. Inside me.

God I want to throw up and it’s not nausea from the pregnancy. Shit. Shit. This is a nightmare except that a nightmare has an ending, and this is only the beginning. And I will never wake up from it.

It takes my brain a few minutes to process what I think I’m reading.

I check the date of the entry and although I can’t see the month or day, I see the year. The entry is from twenty-three years ago.

Feeling a chill, I turn a few pages and read another:

I can’t get rid of it. I thought I could. But when I got there, I couldn’t go through with it. It’s not for any reason I can make sense of. I don’t believe in any god. If one existed, he’d have struck the beasts down. If there was a god, he wouldn’t have allowed this to happen to me! But it happens every day, doesn’t it? Women are raped every fucking day, aren’t we? But like this? Like they did me?

But she’s my baby too.

What if she has the monster’s face? What will I do? No, I can’t think about that so instead, I imagine tiny hands and feet and a little face. Half her blood is mine. That means something.

Oh! Oh! I feel her! There. Again.