could see nothing beyond the violence.
He hit her again and again, shredding the skin of her face, shattering the bones of her skull, and yet still she continued to chant those words, through mashed, bloodied lips, and even when her broken teeth began to fall from her mouth.
...to scare her into loving him again.
When Erik stopped she was lying on the floor, curled up like a baby. There was blood everywhere. Still she chanted the rhyme, taunting him.
He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just done a tough workout. His gun hand ached, the knuckles were swollen. He raised his face to the ceiling and let out a wordless wail, an animal sound of pain and self-hatred. Then he returned his attention to the room, and what was in it.
Abby continued to mumble from the floor. She’d stopped chanting and was now trying to speak, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“Look what you’ve done,” said Erik. “This is your fault – you did this. I only wanted to scare you. You’ve made me into something that I despise.” He raised the gun and stared into the barrel. It would be so easy to end it all now: one bullet for her, one for him. Maybe that’s what had been coming all along. Neat and tidy: a smooth little suburban death. He pressed the end of the barrel to his cheek, and then moved it across to his temple. After a second, he pointed the gun at Abby, his finger tightening on the trigger.
“Please...” Her voice was weak. She was speaking through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth. “Don’t kill me...”
“No, I’m not going to kill you. I love you... all I’ve ever done is love you. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve loved you ever since I first met you, and when we lost our baby I would have kept on loving you, but you wouldn’t let me. Instead you went with other men and told me about it. You rubbed my nose in it, like a fucking dog that’s puked up on the carpet.”
“Sorry... hurting... everything hurts.” Her voice was unrecognisable.
For a moment he was acutely aware of the selfishness of his actions, the intensity of his feelings, but then he shoved that insight aside, ignoring it. Why the hell shouldn’t he be selfish? There was no one else to look out for him, to protect his interests. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been forced to look after himself. That made a man hard; it toughened him to the point that nothing could penetrate the armour he had worked so hard to put in place.
“You bitch... look what you did. Look what you did to us. We could’ve been happy. We were a family... a proper family...”
He could no longer bear to look at her, so he raised his eyes and stared across her collapsed body.
Behind her, there was movement. Thin silver branches, leafless and grasping, were slowly emerging from between the gaps in the conical mound of Tessa’s belongings. Like long, thin arms, the branches slid out, swaying in the air; gnarled twig-hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.
Erik tightened his grip on the gun. He approached the mound. The branches appeared to sense him and twitched towards him, turning from silver to brown. He raised the gun and took aim. His hand was shaking so he used the other one to steady the gun, just like he’d seen in the movies.
“No...”
Abby, still on the floor, was speaking to him. He turned around.
“Don’t kill it... our baby... our Tessa... she’s come back...” She spat out blood. There were gaps where a couple of teeth had been.
He swivelled and watched the branches. There were now patches of skin on them, like pale pink bark. As he watched, the patches grew, the skin, spreading like a stain to cover the rest of the branches. The branches became thin arms; the spindly twigs at the ends turned into small hands. Pieces of the construction fell away from Abby’s sculpture – jumpers, paintings, a My Little Pony duvet cover – and parts of a body were visible beneath. The sapling child was quickly transforming into flesh and blood, as if the process were speeding up because he was watching it happen. Like a low-rent Pinocchio, the lifeless simulacrum was gaining sentience.
His finger twitched on the trigger – a reaction that he was unable to control – and the gun went off. He managed to twist his wrist