Neon Angel

  “SHUT UP!” he screamed. He looked at me, and screamed “SHUT UP!” again, spraying me with spit. I cowered away from him, terrified that he was about to start hitting me. “I’m taking you to the party,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “But I gotta pick something up first.”

  The he got out of the car, slamming the door after him. He walked around and pulled my door open for me. Oh yeah, this bastard was a real gentleman. I peered up at him and said, “I can stay here until you come back. . . .”

  It was a long shot, but I figured it was worth a try. Unfortunately, he had no intention of letting me off that easy. Instead he told me, “You’re coming with me,” and reached into the car. He grabbed me by my arm, and dug his painfully strong fingers into it. He dragged me out into the driveway. It wasn’t cold, but I was shivering all over, my entire body trembling with shock. He dug his fingers in harder, and I screamed “STOP IT!” as loud as I could. He started toward the house, dragging me by the arm, his grip getting harder till he threw me out in front of him. “Walk!” he commanded. There was no one around. I considered just screaming at the top of my lungs, but he could have beat me to death right there before anyone would be able to save me. More than anything in the world, I didn’t want him to hurt me. He shoved me up to the dark front porch, and pulled me onto it. With his free hand, he fumbled with his keys in the dark.

  The front door opened. He pushed it in, then continued to shove me through his huge black house. Inside, I noticed the smell first. A rank odor of fermenting garbage, dampness, and mildew. The lighting was dim, but a quick glimpse around provided all of the evidence I needed that this guy was totally unhinged. Black garbage bags, full and spilling, propped up in one corner in the living room. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls, exposing rotting lumber. Every surface was full of crap of all descriptions, and the carpet looked stained and dirty. Food was ground into it, and I couldn’t tell what color it had been originally, but it was now an array of dark, bleeding smears. He pulled me past all of this and into a small, shabby kitchen. When he turned the flickering fluorescent light on, I saw that the sink was piled with dirty dishes. Cockroaches scattered when they were exposed to the light, scurrying away into the cracks in the tile, hiding away in shadowy corners. The countertops were smeared with discarded food. There was an open jar of peanut butter with a butter knife sticking out of it. He brought me over to a drawer, which he wrenched open. He fished around in there for a while before he pulled out a pill. I had never seen this particular kind before; it was huge, like something you’d give to a fucking horse. Then he turned and gave me an I’m-not-fucking-around look.

  “Open your fuckin’ mouth,” he demanded.

  I shook my head, tightening my lips. He grabbed my face and squeezed till the pain was unbearable. He jerked at my jaw. My vision blurred, and the world turned gray. The pain was so intense that I automatically opened my mouth, crying out. He shoved his fingers in my mouth, forcing the pill down my throat. “Swallow!” he commanded, twisting my face till my eyes pooled with tears. “Fucking swallow it!”

  I gagged, and the pill went down painfully. I started to cry. Nobody would know where to find me. There was no way out. I had been put into a position of total and complete helplessness. I had never felt fear like this.

  “Good girl,” he said as he shoved me up against the wall. I was wearing a jumpsuit, and he started unzipping it slowly. His brow furrowed in concentration and he looked for all the world like an artist drawing a fine line. I shook my hands free of him and managed to shove him away. With a crack, he smacked me across the face again. He smiled as he did it. He puffed his chest out. I could see that he was loving every moment of this. I screamed because I knew that this man was insane.

  “You wanna scream?” he said. “No one can hear you! Go ahead and SCREAM!” And I did. I screamed as loud as I could, as hard as I could. He joined in, with a scream so loud and so primal that my blood turned cold. I cowered away from him as he stood over me.

  “You see, bitch? No motherfucker can hear you . . . so SHUT THE FUCK UP!” He raised his fist as if to hit me, then burst out laughing as I cowered away. “You shouldn’t have left me,” he said. “We were so happy back in Dallas. Why did you do it? Why did you have to join that band? You humiliated me! Can you imagine what it felt like to see you on TV, to see you onstage, parading around like that? You ripped my heart out!”

  The whole time I was thinking, Dallas? I had never lived in Dallas. This guy had never even met me before. He was totally and utterly deranged. The realization shook me to my very core.

  I needed to be at home. I wanted my dad. I wanted my sister. I started crying to myself. Please, Marie, please help me . . . I’m in trouble, Marie. Very bad trouble! Please FIND ME . . . !

  In my terror, images started flashing through my mind. Suddenly I was seeing the face of Winnie the Wolf, as clearly as if he were standing right there. I saw every detail, right down to his shiny braces, as he smiled at me, his zit-filled face mocking my helplessness. “Stay away from that goddamned kid!” And another face. Derek. A face that still haunted my worst nightmares, now pressing down on me all over again. “You look just like your sister!”

  What an idiot I was! What an imbecile! I should have learned my lesson when Daddy spanked me for playing with Winnie the Wolf. I should have learned when Derek raped me in my own bedroom back when I was fourteen years old. I should have learned! Now I was cowering in the house of a madman, miles away from anywhere, with no chance of escape. Compared to this monster, Winnie and Derek looked like the fucking Hardy Boys.

  This can’t be happening.

  This can’t be happening to me.

  I’m Cherie Currie. I’m invincible.

  How can this be happening?

  This bastard was strong. When he grabbed me, he had hands like a vise. He dragged me over to his filthy couch and threw me on it. I managed to hit him across the face, but it didn’t even faze him. He responded by backhanding me so hard that for a moment I wasn’t even there. It was like he had knocked me clean out of this world. He grabbed the zipper of my jumpsuit and ripped it down hard, catching my skin, tearing it. He ripped my clothes away from my body, and I felt the cold, damp couch beneath me. He grabbed me by the ankles and started dragging me toward another room. The bedroom. I knew somewhere deep down it had to be the bedroom.

  I screamed. I screamed louder than I had ever screamed in my life. My throat felt raw, torn open. I kicked, I screamed and screamed, praying that someone, somewhere would hear me. We were in the bedroom. The lights were dazzlingly bright. I was thrown onto the bed, still screaming for my life.

  “SCREAM!” he yelled, standing over me. “SCREAM ALL YA WANT! NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU!”

  I was naked, except for my panties. He climbed on top of me and put his face right up against mine. He grabbed my face in both of his hands to steady me. Then he screamed at the top of his lungs. He screamed for what felt like five whole minutes. The screams were loud, terrifying. His breath was like raw sewage as it blasted in my face. When he was done, he smiled at me and said, “How many times do I have to tell you? No one can fucking hear you, Cherie. You’re wasting your fuckin’ breath.”

  As I opened my mouth to scream again, he punched me in the stomach, knocking all of the wind out of me. He got up from the bed, and I lay there, gasping for air, sobbing and retching. I could see the bedroom door behind him, hanging open. I wondered if I could make a run for it, but realized it was impossible. Even if I made it out of the bedroom, where would I go? Oh God, oh God no, oh God. The whole world had caved in on me. The whole universe! There was nothing left for me to grab hold of. At that moment I realized that I was totally, utterly without hope. This was something beyond fear now. A place where your darkest nightmares are born from. To call this terror would have been a total understatement.

  Standing over me, James Lloyd White said something that chilled my blood even more. Something that left me no other option but to sob, to sob fr
om the total horror of it all.

  “I’ve killed before,” he whispered. “Do you understand? I’ve killed before. Six in Dallas.” He reached down, and pulled my panties off. As I lay there hyperventilating and crying, he climbed on me and put his mouth to my ear. Then in a hoarse whisper, he promised, “And you’re next.”

  The spanking that Daddy gave me for playing with Winnie took less than five seconds. When Derek raped me and I fought him off, that lasted for around ten minutes.

  This nightmare went on for six hours.

  I can’t even begin to explain what I went through. It’s hard to tell another person some of the things that man did to me. What I will say is that the terror, the horror, and the humiliation that he inflicted upon me were even worse than what I imagine hell to be like. He hurt me with his fists, and with his body. He did it again, and again, and again. He thought nothing of hurting me. Every time I screamed, and I cried, and I begged for mercy, and I bled or I passed out, he seemed to grow stronger, more hateful, more crazed by the lust and the sadism that fueled him. As the night dragged on and my hellish ordeal continued into the breaking dawn, I came to the realization that this man was going to murder me as soon as he was finished torturing me. I did not doubt for a second his boast that he had killed six others. This subhuman creature did things to me that night that proved that he was incapable of pity.

  There was blood everywhere, and the more he hurt me the more euphoric he became. Violence was his drug and he never seemed to get enough. A part of me prayed for it all to be over, but I knew that at the end of this I would die and there was so much I had to live for. When I wanted to give up, something far more powerful pulled me back to my reality, to think of other ways to end this. To end him. He was destroying me, he was tearing me apart, but I kept telling myself that I could take it. It was my life and I had no intention of giving it up.

  At one point, he heard me muttering, half insane with fear and pain, about Marie. I was still somehow hoping that my whispered prayers to her would be heard. He snapped, “Give it up. Your fuckin’ sister is dead. I got to her before I got you,” but I knew deep down that this was a lie. He kept talking about how we had lived together in Dallas, telling me that I had just up and left. He really believed this.

  Sometime in the early hours of the morning he left me lying there while he lay next to me, exhausted and panting for breath. “I need to go to the bathroom,” I said in a tiny, trembling voice.

  He looked at me suspiciously, through slitted eyes. Then deciding that I was telling the truth, he grunted and pointed to a door. I hobbled over there, naked and bleeding, and closed it behind me. Desperately I looked around. There was a single, tiny window above the sink. There was no lock on the bathroom door, so I quickly clambered up onto the sink and tried to squeeze myself out of the window. My head and shoulder were outside when he burst in, screaming at me, and dragged me back inside by my legs. “You fucking cunt!” he screamed, smacking me in the face a couple of times. Then he dragged me back to the bedroom, and the torture continued.

  In a moment of clarity, I remembered the knife. The butter knife by the jar of peanut butter on the counter. I knew I had to get to that knife. I asked to get a glass of water. He was very stoned by then. I don’t know what he had taken, but the pill he had forced down my throat might as well have been an aspirin. It could have been a horse tranquilizer, but my adrenaline had pumped it clean out of my system. I was as sober as a judge, and his drooling mouth and heavy swollen eyes gave me an advantage. If I could get that knife, then maybe I could save myself. I’ll bet he thought I had nowhere left to run to, so he allowed me to go to the kitchen by myself. I hurried over, figuring I only had moments before he arrived to check up on me. I went over to the jar of peanut butter and grabbed the knife, wiping the excess off the blade onto the countertop. Then I waited in the darkness for my chance. Seconds later, I heard him coming. I stood there beside the refrigerator as the moon cast an eerie, cold light through the kitchen. I was trembling with the dirty kitchen knife in my hands. He came around the corner naked, the hellish silhouette I’d been waiting for. He called out to me. He saw me standing in the shadows and walked toward me, raising his arms as if to hug a long-lost friend, his eyes almost shut now. I thrust the knife upward into his gut with all of the strength I had left. My eyes were closed tight. I wanted to kill him; I wanted to gut him like an animal. I screamed as I thrust the blade into him, and he screamed as he felt it puncture his flesh. He staggered away from me, holding his hand to his belly. The knife was still in my hand, the tip slick with his blood. His eyes widened, his face contorted in incomprehension and rage.

  “YOU FUCKING BITCH!” he screamed.

  Everything began to move in slow motion as he looked down at his belly in pain and disbelief. I saw the wound. He touched it with his fingertips, removing the blood that started pooling in his navel. I realized that although I had cut him, the knife didn’t go in deep enough to do any real damage. He reached out and grabbed the knife from my hand. I didn’t even run. It was over. I dropped to the floor and covered my head with my arms, waiting for the knife blade to pierce my body. He screamed out, then I heard the knife smash against a far wall. And the blow to the back of my head turned my whole world black. It sent me sprawling to the filthy floor.

  I lay there, dazed.

  I knew that this was it, my final moments.

  He grabbed the hair from the back of my head and, with one hand, dragged me, kicking and screaming, back to the bedroom.

  I was going to die in this house, at the hands of this man, and nobody would know.

  I would never see my family again.

  He threw me on the bed, and straddled his legs on my arms so I couldn’t block the blows. Then he began to beat me. He hit me again and again with his fists. With each blow my world spun. I felt my jaw go numb. Again. Again. His fists pounded against me until I couldn’t feel my own face anymore. It was as if my pain threshold had been reached, and my body could no longer process the agony it was experiencing. I could hear him in some distant place screaming at me: “You fucking STABBED me, you fucking CUNT! You’re DEAD MEAT, you FUCK!”

  I’m dead, I thought. I’m going to die now.

  When I let go of any ideas of surviving this, of escaping, suddenly a strange calm descended on me. I almost felt at peace. My consciousness was fading. I was outside of my own body now, and although I could hear the brutal blows as they landed against my face, my shoulders, my head, somehow I didn’t feel them anymore. I was outside of my body. I realized that this is what death must feel like.

  I could hear a voice, a voice I didn’t recognize at first.

  The voice was pleading with him, telling him to stop.

  From some foggy part of my brain, I realized that the voice was mine.

  Stop, James, please!

  Please, baby!

  You never used to hit me like this!

  For a second, everything slowed. He wasn’t hitting me anymore. He was looking down at me, with a strange, confused look on his face. Then he started again, but with a little less vigor than before.

  “You never used to hit me when we lived together back in Dallas,” the voice was saying. “I was only playing! We used to play like this all the time . . . I didn’t mean to hurt you . . . Don’t you remember, James? Don’t you remember . . . back in Dallas?”

  As this strange, disembodied voice came from inside of me, the blows became less and less powerful. Finally, they stopped. There were a few seconds of silence in the room. I could hear him panting from the sheer exertion of beating me within an inch of my life. I opened my eyes, slowly. They were almost swollen shut. He was sitting over me. He brought his knees off my arms and grabbed my wrists. At first I was puzzled by the strange scene in front of me. My assailant was crying.

  I didn’t know who spoke those words, but I knew that they had come from some other distant place. They could only have been channeled through me. Looking back, I know it was some kind o
f guardian angel. Whoever it was, they saved my life.

  “I’ll go back with you,” I said in a weak voice. “I’ll go back with you . . . back to Dallas. We can start over . . . Just please. Please don’t hit me anymore . . .”

  He smiled as he was sobbing. Bawling like a baby. “I’m sorry,” he blubbered. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I really didn’t. Would you really come back with me?”

  Sensing a chance to make it out of there alive, I managed a slight smile. “Of course,” I whispered through my busted lips. “Just take me . . . take me back to my apartment, I’ll pack a bag, and we can leave tonight.”

  I hoped and prayed I was convincing enough. If I didn’t convince this guy that I was for real, I was dead, no doubt about it.

  He smiled, as if nothing had happened. As if we had just had a silly lovers’ quarrel. “I knew you’d come back!” He was beaming. “I love you, baby!”

  I smiled weakly through my swollen, bloody lips.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go . . .”

  I stood up unsteadily and started to dress. James was pulling on his jeans, running his hands through his hair, whistling to himself. I dressed slowly, terrified of arousing his suspicions. As I dressed, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I had to stifle the scream that threatened to tear out of me. I looked like I had just been dragged from the wreckage of a three-car pileup. I was covered in my own blood. My eyes were black and swollen. My lips were split. My hair was matted with congealed blood. Yet James seemed not to even see this. This crazy bastard seemed to think that everything was just A-OK.

  On the drive home, he opened up his wallet and started showing me pictures of himself. He talked to me about the imaginary old times we shared back in Dallas. My mind was reeling. Wasn’t he aware just from looking at me that he had beaten me almost to death? Wasn’t he scared that a police car was going to pull alongside us, that a cop was going to peer in and arrest him on the spot? At a red light a car did pull up next to us. The driver was a young woman. I saw her look over to me, and then she threw her hand to her mouth in horror. She turned, and started telling her passenger to look at me. The light changed and we tore away. I fought the impulse to look at myself in the side-view mirror. I knew I looked like a monster. But I didn’t. I remained calm and silent. I prayed to God that we could get to where we were going as soon as possible.