She had us boxed in between old desks, boxes, and just a calamity of dusty old junk that would serve as our tomb. So I did the only thing I could think of doing.
I flung that screwdriver as hard as I could at her.
It clocked her hard in the head so hard I could hear the metal ting off her skull.
It did not stop her pursuit to garrote us, but it slowed her down enough that I could push over everything in my path, toppling it down on her.
Then and there I wanted to grab the knives, disarm her, but when I got close, she began flailing them around, desperately keeping a distance between her and me.
She knew what she was doing.
I practically dragged Abi down the attic steps, clamouring toward the end of the hall. Just before my feet could touch the top of the stairs, a searing, piercing pain slid into my upper back. I dropped Abi, who crashed down the stairs, battering herself against the rails while I dropped down to a knee.
She stabbed me.
The moment I inched my neck around to face that psychopath, she was already in mid swing with her other knife, aiming to slice at my throat.
I raised my arm to defend myself from the fatal blow. I can still vividly see the spurt of crimson splash against the drywall beside me. The stinging sensation from my arm was so bad I remember clutching onto the wound, weeping in pain.
It all had happened so fast.
She swung again, I managed to tuck and roll myself down the steps, I could feel the knife scraping around inside me, pushing further and further into me. The pain was immense. Even with the knife still in me, protruding out, the wound was bleeding badly. Even the knife handle had now started to supress itself into the wound.
At the top of the steps, she looked down at me, her smile still wide, her eyes wide, those dark pupils like a cat when it is about to pounce.
The crazed woman looked as if she would jump from the top step if it meant getting to me. She ran at me, knife raised, desperately trying to kill me.
I was on my hands and knees when she reached the final step. I could feel her shadow swallowing me whole.
In a moment of muscle memory, maybe adrenaline, call it whatever you like, I slid onto one side, grimacing from the pain of my wounds, and kicked her legs out from underneath her.
She splayed out on the floor, her hand like a death grip on that damn knife.
Frantically I stumbled away, making for the office. I tried to open the door, but it was locked, and my keys and phone had likely fallen out of my pocket.
I smashed on the door, begging for Ami to open it. She hadn’t been at the bottom of the stairs, so I knew in the back of my mind that she must have crawled in here for safety.
The sounds of a knife clattering and groaning came from the stairs in the hallway. She was getting up. That distinct sound of her joints popping, like groaning wood against heavy wind. It was stomach churning. Then, she started laughing. Her feet clapping against the floor, moving toward me.
I was losing time.
The door opened a crack, and I shoved my way through, pushing over poor Ami, who by the looks of her dreary eyes, had passed out from pain as soon as she got into the office.
I slammed the door closed, locking it. As soon as I did the doorknob rattled and shook. Then the sounds of a key sliding through the lock made Abi and I look at one another in fear.
Desperation turned to a full-blown panic. I had to do something and fast or we were both done for. Abi grabbed the doorknob and clasped her other hand around the lock, refusing to allow it to twist.
That’s when the knife blade began to stab into the door. Abi screamed, yet despite her fear and her injuries, she did not budge from her spot. Bravery in the most simplistic of actions, yet in the most desperate of times.
With everything in me, I somehow managed to push the bookshelf in front of the door. Dropping to the ground right after.
The doorknob turned and unlocked. Abi backed up, bracing herself for what may come. The door opened slightly, then stopped from the weight of the shelf.
I expected a frenzy of rage or an onslaught on insult. Instead. She casually closed the door, and from the other side, laughter. That taunting, sadistic, calm laughter.
She had control over this situation in its entirety. She knew both of us were battered, and me, I was bleeding heavily. At worst Mrs. Faulkner had a bruise. Abi had several cuts and bruises all over her body, along with dehydration, I had a knife imbedded in the top of my back, and a bad gash running on my right wrist.
I needed to dress my wounds, but the first aid kit was not here. It was in the kitchen, and another in the bathrooms. It was so close, only a few meager steps, but blockaded by a cruel, cunning woman with no regard for either of our wellbeing.
The flames of adrenaline had now turned to feelings of deliriousness and dizziness. My body was overwhelmed, and my eyelids were starting to fail me.
I turned to Abi, who looked as exhausted as I felt. “I need to grab that first aid kit, or I will die.”
Tears began to well in her eyes. “I won’t go back out there.” She mumbled, shoving her hands in her face, weeping into her palms.
“You don’t have too. I will go. You stay here Abi. Just shove the bookshelf in front when I leave.”
I waited for as long as I could. Till I could no longer hear her pacing around the door. Blood continued to drip through the back of my shirt and from my wrist. I was starting to feel faint. It felt like I was going to bleed out before Mrs. Faulkner went back up the stairs.
Every drip of blood that clapped onto the floor was another second of my life draining from my wounds. I could not wait any longer. Silently I moved the bookshelf, this time with more difficulty. Then stumbled out of the door and inched toward the bathroom.
Each of my breaths were long and drawn out, sweat rolled from my hairline to my chin. My vision was blurry, and I felt heavy. My movements were sluggish, drunken even as I approached the bathroom and closed the door behind me.
It was damn near pitch black in there if it wasn’t for a box of matches, I knew about in the drawer. I flicked it till the fire blossomed from the red tip. There, in the reflection of the mirror, I could see how pale I was. I grabbed the first aid kit and began to dress my wounds with gauze. I wrapped my wound up tight, stemming the flow of blood, and circumventing the circulation to the wound in my arm, but my back was already a losing cause, if not a lost one.
My heart throbbed in fear as I pushed open the door a crack, trying to peek outside. There a saw bands of flashing blue and red light. The police had come. Ameer had made good on his word and called for the police.
In stupid excitement I made the mistake of jolting out the door. Dashing to the kitchen window to look at our saviours in blue, and there she sat crouched on the kitchen counter.
There was no other way of describing it but cat-like. She was crouching on top of the counter, just smiling. She raised a hand slowly, her joints popping as her long finger lifted toward the window.
“You’ll be dead before they come in.” her voice was different, raspy, dry, cracked.
The persona of Mrs. Faulkner had long since died, and now this beast that now stepped down from the counter stood before me. She regained that obscene smile and ran toward me.
I grabbed a chair by the table and with everything I had left in me, I struck her with it as hard as I could, she tumbled to the ground while the chair broke apart.
At the worst time possible, the blood loss finally got the better of me and I came crashing to the ground. The last thing I could recall was her crawling toward me like a snake, pupils enlarged, eyes wide, knife to my throat until Abi ran up beside her and jabbed her in the neck with a needle. Mrs. Faulkner fell off me and tried to reach for her knife, but Abi kicked it away.
The sedative in that needle knocked out Mrs. Faulkner in a matter of minutes. Abi must have remembered it in the office, dumb luck that I forgot it and she remembered it, and that Mrs. Faulkner didn’t break it or tumble across it inside the desk.
The police managed to short circuit the doors and get inside of this farmhouse or compound of sorts. My wounds were treated, along with Abi.
It was in the hospital I learned everything. Just how truly disturbing this woman I had taken care of was.
She had been an active serial killer in her youth, killing almost fifty people along the coast of South Africa. She would make them play her ‘Hide or Die’ sadist game on her farm property. Then she would cut up and dump their bodies all along the coastlines. Beaches, shores, anywhere there was a body of water.
Her uncle had brought her here to Canada in her twenties, but not for her to attend school but so he could become her prison ward. He had discovered her harrowing crimes but refused to hand her over. Instead, he sedated her for years and kept her in this home. Over time he created this intricate security system to keep her locked up in here.
For years it had worked. Sedating her. Private hypnosis sessions and therapy, all of which had been done by close friends or trusted family. In time she forgot who she was, and that’s when the uncle changed their last names to ‘Faulkner’ a more trustworthy, local last name.
It was when she began sun-downing that her true self ripped out from underneath the stains of time that had began to degrade her brain, and whenever she was in her non-sedative, sun-downing state, she would begin to draw pictures and make plans to kill again. Her most powerful memory, like a war veteran re-living his combat as if he was still there, hers was that of the serial killer she once was. That night she was re-living it, except her goal was to kill Abi and I so she could “Make fifty” as she had apparently hissed and screamed at to the police during her interrogation.
Now she sits in a mental ward somewhere here in the province of Ontario. Locked away, sedated, and never to hurt anyone again. I feel sorry for the confused woman she becomes when sedated, who trembles all alone in her room, asking anyone who passes by why she is there, but there is a deep gratification I feel, knowing that murderous, violent being that lives in the other half of her brain is locked in a room, in a scared, aging woman’s body, supressed by medication, with no hope of ever wielding a knife again.