ONE MONTH TO MIDNIGHT: Opening scene

From the novel ONE MONTH TO MIDNIGHT
By C. William Boyer


WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3rd

THE WOMAN LAY ON THE FLOOR OF HER HOME, naked and waiting, when morning came and the maid arrived. Through the whole of the terrible night she had lain without moving or flinching or speaking, nailed fast to a wooden floor by tent stakes fashioned from high-carbon steel.

Following an evening of too many drinks, too much intense conversation and little genuine laughter, the man drove stakes through her shoulders and into the boards of her polished hardwood floor. A third stake was driven into her hip and despite the handcuffs clasping her hands behind her, the woman struggled mightily for her life; it was because of this terrified thrashing that the man’s hammer-blow missed the stake entirely and instead crushed her ribs, a blow so painful it plunged the woman into a pit of unconsciousness where she would abide unknowing while he continued his cold ministrations. Systematically, he drove stakes through each ankle until she lay pinned to the floor like a dying butterfly. Calmly, then, he cracked a vial of amyl-nitrite beneath her nose and revived her, bringing her frayed consciousness into focus, focused on her own terrible, agonizing destruction.

Over the next several hours, the man carved scores of incisions into the woman’s body while she groaned muffled pleas for mercy. Occasionally, she would pass out from the excruciating pain and each time she did, the man would patiently pause to revive her. By the fourth revival, the woman’s mind began to fracture as pleas for mercy became pleas to angels. When she passed out the fifth time, after he'd finished the cutting on her legs, the man nailed her limbs to the floor in an approximation of crucifixion.

The woman slept beyond sleep, her mind hidden within a haven of unconsciousness, hidden until the man once more waved the vial beneath her nose and awakened her to the storm of her own dying reality. She was of course by now blessedly oblivious to her own destruction, secluded within the crumbled ruins of her broken mind. Dreaming, she floated weightlessly with an angel whose eyes were flat and soulless as a doll's. Inexorably dying, she hummed childhood tunes while above her the angel hovered, smiling and cutting, smiling and cutting, an angel she loved because of his smile.

Sometime after she died, the angel put part of her in a bag and left.