I stepped off the road and into the woods. Part of me wanted to go home, back to The Hollows. I had seen enough and I couldn't get those images of Ray cowering in his boxer shorts before his father out of my head. He seemed a completely different person to the one I had seen hurting Melody and the person who had stolen my coat. But it wasn't just Ray and his father that I couldn't get from my head - it was Melody, too. What had happened to her today? Why hadn't she turned up at the lake?
Wondering - or was that secretly hoping - that she might be there, I headed away from the hole in the ground that led home and started through the woods to the lake. I sat alone on the sandy shore, and as the white winter sun touched the edge of the lake on the horizon, and the water took on the appearance of black coloured velvet, I heard a rustle in the trees behind me. The sound was so sudden in the stillness of the approaching evening, that I jumped to my feet, half expecting to see that cop once again. To my relief it was Melody who appeared from within the dense foliage. My delight at seeing her was short-lived, and my sense of annoyance at having to wait for her the entire morning raced to the fore. Melody must have sensed my irritation, as before she had even reached me, she was offering an apology.
"Isidor, I'm sorry."
"I waited all morning! I was freezing, Melody!" I moaned. "Where were you?"
"I'm really sorry," she said, gently placing a hand on my forearm. "You are cold."
"So you gonna tell me what you've been up to?" I asked her.
"Your ears are almost purple!" she tried to joke and change the subject all at the same time.
"What do you expect; it must be at least three below zero out here, and stop changing the subject!" I moaned.
"Aw, c'mon, I've said I'm sorry, haven't I?" she half-smiled at me, and when she did, her face looked real pretty.
"It's not the fact that I was left waiting in the cold. I ran into Ray and his friends and they stole my coat."
"He stole your coat?" she gasped. "Poor Isidor. No wonder you're so cold." Then, she came forward and gently wrapped her arms around me as if trying to warm me. I met her gaze and those blue eyes of hers glistened in the cold. It was impossible to be angry with her. "Do you want to talk about it?" she smiled.
"I should be getting home," I said, feeling a little uncomfortable as she held me. It wasn't that I didn't like her holding me - it felt nice - and that's what made me feel uncomfortable.
"You can stay awhile, can't you?" she pleaded, looking up into my eyes. "I don't want to go home just yet. Mother is there, but she will be going to a prayer meeting later. Stay with me a little while. I've got some cigarettes."
"I don't want to smoke," I told her. "I don't like it. But I'll stay with you if you really want me to."
"I really want you to," she said, taking my hand and leading me up the shore to our camp.
The thick bushes and branches offered some protection against the chilly wind that blew in off the lake. Taking a box of matches from her apron, Melody bunched together a small pile of dry leaves and twigs and lit a small fire. Huddled together, we warmed ourselves in front of it. I crossed my arms over my chest to hide those scars. As the smoke circled up from the fire in a thin stream, I told Melody about my adventure. It felt kinda magical to be sitting beside her in front of the fire because at last I was telling a story and that's something I'd always wanted to do. Just like all good storytellers, I made up my own ending. I didn't tell Melody what I had seen through the window of Ray's house. I didn't think it would be right or fair. Not because I owed Ray any favours, but because I wasn't meant to have seen that. That was Ray's secret.
"So you got into all that trouble because you went to get me a book?" she said, pushing a loose piece of hair back under her bonnet.
"Yes," I said, watching her light a cigarette.
"Why?" she asked, looking confused.
"Because you said that your mum threw your other book into the fire," I explained.
"What was the book about?" she asked me, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth.
"It had a rose on the front."
"Okay," she said with a curious frown. "So what was it called?"
"I don't know," I told her and looked into the fire - anything so I didn't have to stare into her eyes. "I just got it because it had a rose on the front - just like your name."
"So you don't know what the book was about or what it was called," she giggled.
"Are you laughing at me?" I whispered, not taking my eyes off the flames.
"Well, it's kind of a dumb thing to do, don't you think?" she giggled again. "Who would choose a book if they didn't know what it was called or what it..."
"You're just like the rest of them," I moaned.
"Sorry?" she said, her smile fading.
"You think I'm stupid, just like the others do - my friends back home. Yet they're not really my friends." Then, turning to face her, I added, "Real friends don't call you stupid because you can't read or write."
As if realising the mistake she had made, Melody's mouth dropped open, and she said, "Oh my God, Isidor, I didn't realise. You didn't know what the book was about because you couldn't read the title, could you?"
"No," I whispered, looking back into the fire. "So now you know, I'm thick, stupid, a joke."
Melody threw her cigarette into the fire and gently placed her hand on my shoulder. "I don't think you're stupid," she whispered.
"No?" I snapped. "So what do you think?"
"I think you are the sweetest guy that I've ever met," she said, gently placing her hand against my cheek and turning my face towards her. "You are the only person in this town who doesn't avoid me because of the way my mother makes me dress. Even the people in church keep away from us. No one dresses the way we do. You didn't judge me, Isidor, and I'm not judging you. You helped me mend my necklace, you went and chose a book for me - it had a rose on it just like my name. No one has ever done anything like that for me."
"Why did you laugh then?" I asked, looking into her eyes.
"Because I wanted to cry, but I just couldn't let it show," she whispered and looked away.
"Why did you want to cry?" I asked softly.
"Because I just can't stop hurting....that is..." she trailed off.
"What?" I pushed gently. "What stops you hurting, Melody?"
"You do, Isidor," she said. "When I'm with you, I stop thinking."
"Thinking about what?"
Then, taking my hand in hers, she stood up and said, "Come with me and I'll show you."
Melody led me through the fading daylight. Both of us bent forward against the cold, icy wind that had crept up and twisted itself around the streets. It was gone eight p.m. and the town had closed down for the night. We were the only people on the streets apart from the occasional car which drove slowly past, the tyres crunching over the cobbled roads.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked her.
"Home," she said, not letting go of my hand.
"Will your mum mind me coming over?"
"She won't know. She's at a prayer meeting tonight."
Although I had never met Melody's mother and I only had the snippets of information that she had told me about her, I still felt incredibly apprehensive about going to her home. Even though I knew she wouldn't be there, I couldn't help but get cramps in my stomach with nerves. Just as we reached the outskirts of town, Melody took a sudden turn to the right off the main road and led me up a narrow track and into the darkness. We walked silently in the dark for several minutes, until I could just make out the shape of a squat-looking house on the horizon. Melody steered me towards this and I guessed it was her home. The sudden sound of a startled bird screeched and flapped its wings against the night as it soared out of the trees that lined the path on either side of us. I jumped.
"Jeezus, Isidor! I'm meant to be the girl here," Melody laughed nervously.
I could sense that she felt anxious, but I suspected it wasn't the dark or our current surroundings that made her feel like this, but the act of taking me back to her home for the first time and whatever it was that she wanted to show me.
Melody's house sat in a small plot of land which was surrounded by a waist-high wooden fence. She swung open the gate which whined on its frozen hinges and led me across the front yard to the porch. Although it was dark, and the moonlight only shone intermittently through passing clouds, I could see that Melody's home from the outside looked well-kept. It was only when Melody pushed open the front door and flipped on the hallway light that I immediately got the feeling something was odd about it.
"Holy moly!" I whispered through my teeth as I stepped inside and looked around in bewilderment. The short hallway was covered in an array of pictures, twelve in all. Like I've already said, I knew a little about the man named Jesus, and each of these pictures was of him. They weren't beautiful pictures, they were ugly. They depicted him suffering in a way that I hadn't contemplated before when I had heard stories about him. In each picture, he had been drawn in a skeletal and emaciated fashion. His eyes looked odd, and it was only as I stared at them, I realized they had been penned deliberately to look too big for his face. This gave him an almost alien-looking quality, which I found haunting. These were in stark contrast to paintings that I had seen of Jesus before, in books brought down to The Hollows by those who had adventured above ground. Those books had illustrations of him with a loving smile, locks of honey coloured hair, and angel-blue eyes.
"This way," Melody whispered, her voice dragging me out of the weird trance the pictures had placed me in. Beneath the stairs there was a door which Melody opened. I peered over her shoulder and could see a set of wooden stairs leading down into darkness.
"I'll show you what's down here," she whispered, making her way down into the pitch black. I silently followed. I held onto a rough feeling banister with my left hand and held my other directly out in front of me. The stairs cried out beneath us as we placed our weight on them. At the bottom, my hand struck Melody on the shoulder as she suddenly came to a halt in front of me. For a moment there was silence, stillness, nothing. Then I heard a 'click' as Melody pulled on the light switch which hung from the ceiling just above us. My new surroundings appeared dimly before me in the murky glow of the naked light bulb.
My throat made a shallow wheezing sound as I sucked in a mouthful of air in complete shock at what had just been revealed to me. The basement had been turned into a tiny chapel. The smell of melted candles and incense hung heavy in the air. There were two small pews in front of an altar which had been covered with a crimson cloth. There were rows of candles down the length of each wall, and at the end of the rows there was a large statue of Jesus. Positioned behind the altar was a huge cross which hung about four foot from the floor and protruded by about a foot from the wall.
"This place is creepy," I whispered.
"It's where my mum locks me away," she said softly.
"What?" I couldn't understand what she had just said to me.
"When I was a kid, if I was bad, she would bring me down here. I had to stay for hours, sometimes days, kneeling on that little box," she said, pointing to a small crate at the foot of the cross.
"Get out of here!" I breathed.
Melody stared at me without replying. I looked into her eyes and that brilliant blue had faded. My stomach lurched with a sickening feeling and I knew that she was telling the truth.
"Why?" I tried to find the right words.
Melody settled into one of the small pews, and in a hushed and broken voice, she told me everything.
"Mum would drag me down here and make me strip to my underwear, and all the time she would be praying...almost chanting. She would rant over and over again. Her face would look as if in pain and I remember seeing spit form like foam around her mouth. She would keep me locked down here for days at a time." Melody looked in the direction of the cross on the wall and I followed her gaze.
"Sometimes I would have to kneel on the crate for so long that my knees would bleed."
"Why would she do that to you?" I asked, stunned at what she was telling me.
"Because she said I had an evil demon living within me. She would make me fast, too. My mum said she was starving the demon out of me."
"How long would she make you go without food?" I gasped.
"Until I could take no more," Melody explained. "My stomach would start to cramp and all I would be able to think about was food and water. My thirst was so bad sometimes, the pain was unbearable."
"Where would your mum go while you were left starving down here in the dark?"
"She would sit right here and pray for my forgiveness. Sometimes, I could hear her sobbing hysterically."
"When would she let you eat?"
"When I was near unconsciousness," Melody said, looking up at the cross, her face haunted as she remembered the torture her mum had put her through. "I used to hallucinate due to the pain in my stomach and throat. I could hear water rushing past me, then drowning me. But it didn't bring me any closer to God, like my mum hoped it would. It just made me believe there was no such thing. If there were a God, he wouldn't have let me suffer like that. I would finally rock forward on the crate, my knees red and raw, close to exhaustion. It was like I was falling into a well of blackness, but before I hit the bottom, my mum would catch me in her arms."
I put my arm around Melody's shoulder and hugged her as we sat on the pew and she stared up at that cross.
"Melody, I've never heard anything like that before. I don't know what to say. You've got to report this, she can't do this to you," I whispered.
"Who would believe me? I'm not sure that even you do."
"I believe you; it's just that I can't believe that any mum could do that to their kid." But then I thought of what I had seen through Ray's window and wasn't quite so sure.
"Well, believe it or not, she does treat me like that and has always done so!" she insisted.
"Haven't you got anyone else, family that you could go and live with?" I asked.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "Anyway, she hasn't locked me down here for a while."
I studied Melody's profile in the dim light of the makeshift chapel, and for a fourteen-year-old, she looked tired and haunted.
As if knowing what I was thinking, Melody stood up and said, "C'mon, the tour isn't over yet!" Throwing the chapel into darkness once more, she led me up the stairs and to her mother's bedroom.
Melody swung open the door, and her mum's room was warmly lit with two red coloured light bulbs that sat in shaded lamps. Like the hall and so much of the house, the room was decorated with haunting pictures of Jesus at various stages of his crucifixion. The room was sparsely furnished with a single bed, a dark wooden wardrobe, and a reading chair. The most dominant feature in the room was the papier-mache grotto Melody's mother had constructed in the far corner of the room. If it hadn't have been for its bizarre location, it would have been a truly impressive piece of work. It was very detailed, and from a distance, it did look like an actual stone structure. It had been painted, and a great deal of time and effort had been taken to paint plant life and flowers all around its base, and what appeared to be wild ivy growing up the length of one side. The front of the structure had been hollowed out and in this stood the most beautiful statue of a woman who I figured had to be Mary, Jesus's mother. Unlike the many pictures of Jesus which were hanging around the house, this was truly breath-taking. In the statue's hands she held a set of rosary beads just like the ones that Melody carried in the pocket on the front of her apron.
"What do you make of that?" Melody asked. She was whispering again.
"I've never seen anything like it in my life," I murmured, moving forward to get a closer look. "What's the point of it?" I asked.
"I don't know," Melody sighed. "I think it's meant to resemble this holy place in France - Lourdes."
"Wouldn't it have been easier to buy a plane ticket and visit the place for real?" I half joked.
"If you were normal, yeah. But we're not talking about your everyday pilgrim, are we?" Melody said.
"What would your mum do if she knew we had been in here?" I asked, continuing to study her abnormal handiwork.
"To her it would be like one of us taking a leak on God's robes!"
I turned away from the grotto and was just about to say, I think I should be going, when we heard it: the unmistakable sound of someone's footsteps coming up the stairs.