The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

my ankles and arms – not much, but enough so they could carry me easily even as I tried to kick free. Some material was put in my mouth and taped to my jaw. They took me down the old servants’ stairs at the back of the house and out the kitchen door into the grounds. In the garden, by the fountain, they made me sit on one of the benches and then one of them brought out a knife. A thick, hunting knife. I can honestly tell you, in that moment, I thought I was going to die. I thought they were going to cut my throat and let me bleed to death on a bench in the garden, to be found by my mother or one of the gardeners.’

He stopped for a moment, then went over to the drinks table and poured himself some more whisky and took a sip. When he put the glass back down, I could see his hand was trembling.

‘They used the knife to cut off my boxers. Slashing at the material, so I had scratches down my thighs. But aside from these few scrapes, they didn’t hurt me with it. Instead, they humiliated me. Laughed at me. Made threats about what they were going to do to me. Jeered at me, as I sat naked and trembling, shining the torches they were carrying in my face then turning them off and on so I couldn’t properly see. Then, when I thought they’d finally follow through on one of their sickening threats, one of them – the man with the fox mask – produced a bag … like a freezer bag. One of them held a torch to it so I could see what it was. It was a bag of cocaine.

‘Two of them held me down, while the fox and the badger covered the blade of the knife in the powder and then put it to my nose. Because my mouth was gagged, I had no choice but to breathe in. They held it there, the blade digging into me, as I tried not to hyperventilate, knowing the more harshly I breathed, the more cocaine I would take in. I’m not sure how much I ended up consuming, but they dipped the knife into the bag a number of times. It was the fox who kept making me take the stuff. And on one of the doses – the second or third, maybe – he said to me, ‘Mess with your sister’s life again, and we’ll fuck you up worse than this.’ Whether it was the drugs, or from trauma, or a cumulative effect as a whole, I felt my heart beating faster and faster and I began to feel extremely sick. I thought I was having a heart attack. The world had already been spinning, but at that point it felt like it had properly turned upside down. I couldn’t tell what was happening any more. I may have had a small fit, or just blacked out, because I awoke to them lowering me into the fountain head-first, one of them shrieking in my ear; I’m not even sure what it was he was saying. It may have been just a long continuous moan to disorientate me. They kept pulling me in and out of the water, each scrape of the stone fountain against my flesh sending stinging pains all over my body. It may have lasted a few minutes or a few hours. I ended up passing out again. Perhaps they thought they’d killed me and fled. Maybe they just got bored. Or felt they’d completed what they set out to do. I could have easily drowned or died from the cold, left there half submerged and naked in the fountain for the rest of the night.’

I leaned forwards, astonished by his words and, strangely, compelled by them. I was gripped by this hidden chapter in my husband’s life and how it had shaped him as a person, whilst all this time he kept it hidden from view. Like a bad dream you filed away and tried not to think about. Except this hadn’t been a dream. This had been true brutal trauma. And I didn’t know whether to hug him close and tell him nobody would ever hurt him like that again, or let my anger boil over and make it clear to him how betrayed I felt by him refusing to let me in on such a momentous part of his life.

When I opened my mouth, I paused a little, unsure of what to say. Then I asked the question at the forefront of my mind. ‘How did Collette react when you told her what her boyfriend had done?’

A small tear fell silently from Matthew’s right eye. ‘I think that’s the part that upsets me most, to this day.’

Chapter Thirty-Eight Charlie

Less than a week to go

I struggled to see how Matthew’s ordeal could have become any more upsetting than it was already. I was wrong, of course.

‘Did Collette find you, after the attack?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘When I woke, I imagined it was her. That she’d come to rescue me. But it wasn’t. It was just the teenage boy who worked with our head gardener on the estate. I’d gone through too much at that point to feel anything other than a dull relief. The lad – to my shame, I didn’t know his name – seemed to think it was funny. The benches around the fountain were littered with vodka bottles, and one of the masks was floating in the fountain’s water. The fox mask. I think the boy thought there’d been some sort of party. He may have even made reference to a stag do or something. I didn’t correct him. I just nodded and tried to clamber out of the fountain, but struggled. He helped me out and offered me his jacket so I had something to wear on my