For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

wondering how far you’d flutter. I lit that flame and you didn’t disappoint.’ She grabbed Sandie’s hair and held her head in place, then wiped off the Vicks. The numbness in the teenager’s nose began to fade. ‘Yes, Miss Rye. It’s about your father. He used me as an experiment, used my pain to inspire his work.’

The smell hit the girl.

‘I’ve been the experiment,’ Renata continued, ‘like the moth in the pheromone trap. Now it comes full circle.’ Sandie retched. Her eyes watered. ‘Now you’re the experiment. Your pain is igniting the pages of my gift to him. As he intended for me, I intend for you. We’re all monsters, you see, but your father and I truly are the same breed.’ The girl’s bloodshot eyes met Renata’s. ‘He made me his muse. Now, child, you are mine.’

She rammed a crumpled sheet of paper into Sandie’s mouth, forcing her to breathe through her nose, then strode to the back of the cellar, kicking a mouldy Henrietta Reid paperback out of the way. She opened the rotting wooden hatch in the wall. ‘Poor little moth, flew too close to the flame. Let’s see what scent awaits you.’

The shape Renata dragged to Sandie could have been a bloodstained sack filled with randomly shaped objects, a leak in the exterior leaving a trail of liquid in its wake. She pulled it by two long, floppy handles. Funny, the girl may have thought incoherently, never seen a sack with those kinds of handles.

Renata dumped the shape at Sandie’s feet like a cat’s doormat offering.

Her eyes focussed. The body took form.

The supposed handles were arms, the objects organs still liquefying, seemingly detached from their internal fastenings and knocking around freely. The corpse had marked its route like a slug, leaving a trail of sludge leading to Sandie. It lay at the girl’s feet, the remains of its face slumped crookedly.

It stared at her.

Had she not been compelled to determine whether the corpse was her father, she could never have brought herself to regard its twisted, traumatized features, pulped by decomposition, but she had to know.

There were no eyelids. The orbs within the exposed skeletal sockets were completely red except for single white globules in the centre of each eye. Its cheeks were shrivelled inwards, clinging to what little was left of the gaping mouth, the outline of its teeth apparent through the tight, thinning skin. There was little hair, but what strands she saw were white, glued to the grey face over heavily wrinkled skin.

It wore a clerical collar. This wasn’t Daddy.

She swung her head away and clenched her eyes shut so tight that it hurt, but it was no use. The monstrosity was burned in her mind. There was a terrible reality to this thing for which none of the dummy corpses from her father’s films could have prepared her. This had been a person. She hadn’t known the person, but it had been someone, as she was now someone. There weren’t many arguments against the probability of Sandie soon becoming the next inanimate sack to leak across this concrete floor.

The girl could hold her breath no longer; she inhaled the puddle of death at her feet. Her stomach convulsed. Renata held her hand against Sandie’s mouth, stopping the crumpled paper from shooting out, then winced as vomit sprayed from between her fingers and bubbled from the teenager’s nostrils.

Renata wiped her hands on her skirt and returned to the typewriter, where she let her fingers hover over the keys. She listened to the weeping, choking, whimpering, and incoherent blabbering. She listened to the agony and the anguish, to the despair and the rage.

She listened, fingers poised. She listened to the suffering that would provide the only fist she would ever need. She’d never thrown a punch, and she never would. All she needed to wreak true revenge was in that chair, and within these pages.

She wrote.

The human-sludge by Sandie’s feet had been her only company all night after Renata finished her tapping and left, but finally the door opened. Sandie’s swollen, red eyes burned as the fluorescent strips blazed the cellar with light.

Renata descended.

Her glare on the girl remained unwavering as she stepped through the putrid puddle that had been her father, taking care not to slip. It parted noisily under her feet. Keeping her distance, she cut the cable tie binding Sandie’s left wrist and set the open diary upon the girl’s lap, then placed the pen on an empty page. ‘Time to write.’

‘Tuh-truh…’

Renata leant down. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Truh-uh…’

‘Speak up, girl.’

‘Truh-truth…’

‘Yes, child,’ said Renata, ‘that’s right, but here.’ She placed the pen in Sandie’s hand. ‘Please, you must write.’

The girl’s fingers went limp. Her head dropped, then flew to the side under the impact of Renata’s open hand. ‘Get a hold of yourself! Write.’ She reset the pen.

‘Truh…tuh…’ It fell.

‘WRITE, damn you.’ Renata set aside the scissors and tightened Sandie’s fingers around the pen, manoeuvring her hand so as to remind the girl of the necessary motions.

‘The tuh-truh…’

She eased Sandie’s hand over the page. ‘Come on, you’re a grown girl. Snap out—’

‘TRUTH.’

The penetration of Renata’s cornea took some moments to register. At first she thought the lights had gone out, until she felt the cocktail of ink and ocular fluid weeping down her cheek. Her hands flew to her face as she screamed into the lights above, the pen sticking from her eye socket like a dart from a bullseye.

She dragged her remaining eye reluctantly into focus, only to find she’d fallen into the blackened viscera of her father’s remains. She looked at Sandie just in time to see the girl freeing herself with the scissors.

Both froze as their eyes met.

They lunged.

Sandie immediately fell as her shattered kneecap crumbled under her weight. She tumbled from the