What would YOU do if you had to choose between the life of your untrue lover and the life of a complete stranger, and your choice was watched by millions of your fans LIVE?
NUPTIALS OF DEATH
If you didn't read the previous part, click here.
She's laying on a marble table in a giant hall. Her naked body is only covered in a white sheet. She may be burning from fever, still she couldn't warm the cold stone up under herself, her teeth are hurting from the constant chattering. She tries to move, but her arms and legs are tied. A male choir is humming in the distance. The ceiling is covered in a giant fresco in which the painter composed day and night, planets and stars into a single picture. That makes her feel like if she was in space.
Some quiet noises are heard. She lifts her head. Figures in white hoods arrive, their faces covered by scary masks. The singing gets louder, but the lyrics seem to be a nonsense jabber.
Suddenly all becomes dead silent.
One of the figures steps up to her. Under his mask a pair of eyes flares up with hatred. He's just staring at her, won't say a word. He's holding a golden bowl.
She starts to toss herself around, the rope biting into her flesh.
She feels a sharp pain in her wrist, her hot blood drizzles into the ice cold bowl.
– You can sacrifice me, it won't be a salvation for your sins, for I am a sinner too – she yells.
The man leans to her face as if he wanted to whisper her something, but he remains silent.
She already knows, he won't speak because she knows him. The scent of his deodorant suddenly hits her nose.
It's him!
She screams.
With a sudden move she knocks over the bowl half-filled with blood, it hits the ground with a loud thump.
The sound of the phone dropping to the floor was still echoing as Orsolya Manner came back from her dream. She was laying on the floor of the study, still in her clothes, the phone cord somehow got twisted onto her wrist. Her back was cold and her whole body was shivering, even though the sun shone through the window. She rubbed her eyes and looked on the clock. It was just past one. She feverishly tried to remember what happened last night - to no avail. She got up and looked around in her apartment. She was alone, the door carefully locked from the inside, with all three deadbolts. At least this time she didn't carry an unknown man with her.
It's been a year since the hostess of the tabloid magazine show Snapshots was kidnapped by her own boss and kept in inhuman conditions in an underground hole. János Márkus, the programming director of Channel Three, tried to take revenge on the unsuccessful television career and suicide of his only daughter in this way. His mind, falling to pieces after the loss of his child, made him think that the other show hosts, especially Orsolya Manner were responsible for barring her daughter of realizing her life-long dream of becoming the star of one of the most watched TV shows, Snapshots. But Melinda Márkus was just simply too tight for a show host. She may have known all she needed to know about the trade, she may have been radiantly intelligent and beautiful, it just didn't come through on screen. Orsi couldn't reach up to her in many means, but still, if her face turned up anywhere, she could glue millions of viewers to the screens.
Márkus has killed other women too before he could catch Orsi. Luckily the police and one of the editors from Channel Three traced her down so he didn't have enough time to finish off the kidnapped hostess. Máté Farkas lured him into a trap, and police sharpshooters killed him. In a few hours they found the lair where the hostess was hidden and she was freed.
Since then, Manner has had constant nightmares, reliving and reliving the time kidnapped. She has even tried drugs before it all happened, and after her rescue she got totally hooked. She knew she would need help, but a star can't show weakness, so she rather just locked herself into her home and every night she drank and stuffed pills into herself, but she would also shoot, sniff, smoke anything else possible if she could find a source that she thought to be untraceable. She wasn't afraid of harming herself, but she was panicked from being discovered.
She quickly took off the previous day's clothes and stood under the shower. She let the cold water run on her until the icy pain shook even the last frames of the nightmare away from her brain. Then she turned the water hot, and she laid down in the tub.
After her kidnapping, she moved the 1pm topic meeting to 3pm, claiming that she wasn't able to fall asleep until early in the morning, so she still had time to get herself together. From seven till seven-thirty she has to look like it's expected from the best known star of the country. And she met these expectations day by day, even though she felt it more and more often that the bottom of the hole is nearing, and from there she won't have a way back anymore.
She tried to put the phone together when she noticed that her computer was left on. So she again dozed off whilst surfing on the web. She didn't even dare to think whom she chatted with, and of what. She took a peek into her outbox, maybe there was a trace of what she did. She was relieved to see she didn't write any emails. That's when she pointed out a new message. The first part of the sender's email - mate.farkas – hid the name of the editor who saved her life at that time, and who became the editor-in-chief for Snapshots, but its second half was from a free email server that he has never used before.
She clicked the icon to read the message.
I need you, I want to meet tonight at midnight by the City Park Lake. You get me in deep trouble if you talk about it to anybody.
Máté.
Her stomach got tight. Máté Farkas knows it exactly that she's terrified by lonely places ever since she was kidnapped. Why would he still invite her to a night meeting behind the back of God? And in addition, the editor-in-chief has taken a week off and traveled out of the country. How did he get home?
She grabbed her cell phone and looked up Máté's secret number in her directory.
The number you dialed is currently unavailable.
She expected nothing else.
She quickly answered the email:
Why do you do this to me, you know how scared I am ever since...She sent the letter without a signature. She glanced on her clock. She will be late again. She quickly turned off the computer, locked the door carefully and ran off.
*
Anita kicked off her heels right in the doorway and ran to the study barefoot to turn her computer on. After she filed the report, she excused herself by saying she had a debilitating headache. She felt she would go crazy if she couldn't check her blog. Whilst the antivirus was loading, she peeled off her uncomfortable business suit too. She stopped in front of the mirror for a second. Her thirty-five-year-old body was perfectly toned, her tummy flat as if she never had a child, her skin tanned. That's what her husband expected from her, and she did everything to live up to these expectations. She tormented herself every other day in the gym, in the weekends she was biking and rollerblading with the kid, she spent fortunes in salons and spas. And what did she get in exchange? A fattening body, a beer-belly of the size of pregnancy, constant alcohol-breath, a less and less performing manhood.
The bra was too tight, so she dropped that too. Her breasts, careful work of surgeons, were standing up nice and firm as in her teenage years, but now she was sorry for letting herself be talked into the painful procedure. True, her breasts sagged a bit from breastfeeding, but they remained full, round and smoothly swinging, and now they are like if they weren't hers, living their own life like two huge watermelons. Not even to mention the scars that remained. And she hated how the silicone pressed the veins to the surface of her skin.
Whilst she was looking for her worn T-shirt saying Be Cool that she wore for home, she remembered the minutes of rebellion.
At that point she has been blogging for weeks. It was the blog that changed her life. Even though she didn't even know what the word meant when on a girl party one of her girlfriends was explaining how awesome it is to keep a diary online.
– Hiding behind your anonymity, you can tell about even those things that you would never tell to those living near you – she was convincing the company. – Unlike a regular, old-fashioned diary, this one your partner will never find, so you can even share your sidetracks with others. And also, your readers will tell you what they think about you, and you can ask for advices too. Even though it's all unknown folks, you'll never be alone again.
Anita was nodding as if she liked the idea, but then she thought she would never be able to admit her secret desires, she would be ashamed to open up for complete strangers.
Then one night when she was really upset about an unfinished presentation, she snuck out of the matrimonial bedroom and into the study and turned on the computer. Work didn't want to flow, so she started to surf around for no particular reason until she somehow bumped into a blogging portal. She started reading others' diaries with growing interest. Around 2am she took the courage to put a few lines of a comment to one of them. She was surprised to see that within ten minutes there was an answer. They started a long discussion. It was dawning when they finished. The person convinced Anita to send them her email address in a private message. They have been mailing for days until the blogger finally convinced her to open her own blog.
At first nothing has changed, it was only the online friend commenting on her entries, but as she started to open up the miseries of her marital life with a more and more cruel honesty, more and more readers found her blog. In less than a month she had a pretty little community built up. Others told too how they suffer from their husbands, lovers, and Anita learned how to drop her taboos.
A blogger called Psychofairy was the first to encourage her not just to write about her pain but to do something against it.
That's when she revolted.
On a hot Sunday they went to take a bath at the lido. After they got bored of laying in the sun they went for a walk on the lakeside. First their son, then her, her husband last, smoking as he walked. She wanted to put on a dress, but Sanyi told her not to, just stay in her bikini bottoms and put on her little white top for it, and for his sake, wear her high heel sandals instead of the flip-flops.
She was wavering on the 4-inch heels as if she was on the catwalk. The men, of course, stared after her as if their heads were all connected on a line. She turned her eyes down and cursed herself for letting her husband get her into such a humiliating spot again. Her eight-year-old son was running to and fro happily. He didn't notice the hungry gazes or her mother's discomfort.
– Don't run around like that, you retard! – the father yelled at him. – You will end up trotting over some meathead's junk and I can go having a fight because of you.
– Now what is your problem? Why do you hurt Rómeó? – Anita turned back angrily.
That was the last drop in the glass.
Whilst she was marching around, putting her body into the shop window, her husband pulled his khaki muscle shirt over his beer-belly as if he wanted to show off all his fat. His jersey shorts slipped down to his hips, lit cigarette in one hand and opened beer in the other, he was trotting behind her in his worn-down cheapie flip-flops.
She felt like spitting on him.
Men weren't quite staring at her body, they were more mystified by how can such a beaten bum have a woman like her.
– You should just pull that shirt down on your belly rather than fucking with the kid! – she groaned at her husband who in turn slapped the back of her head. He called this maneuver a bitchslap, he learned it at the Army and found it amazingly funny.
Her hand was shaking from humiliation and anger as she rose it for a hit, but Sándor stopped it with an easy motion.
– Don't make an act here, baby, or you get another one! – he said with a stupid grin.
She started crying. She was just about to rise her knee in a desperate kick when the child said something.
– Are you playing now? Everybody is watching us!
Sándor held her arm even tighter.
– Yeah, retard, we're playing mom-and-dad – he answered Romi.
She just wanted to disappear in shame. She yanked her arm out and rushed ahead. The whole afternoon she didn't say a word to her husband who compensated himself with more and more beer.
On the way home Sándor cunningly started to mention what all he wants to buy for the kid. She answered with not much willingness. She didn't want Romi to be the one suffering from the parents' fight.
At night she could barely wait to sit down to write her blog, but first her husband had to go to bed. She just kept opening the beers for him so he would pass out faster, but Sándor sobered up completely from the dinner, and got all perked up. He was trying to be funny, treated her to cocktails, he seemed to be trying to make up for the afternoon slap. After the kid went to bed, he immediately tried to get his reward for all the kindness and started to pushily court her.
No comments:
Post a Comment