Free The Devil's Staircase by Helen Fitzgerald Page A

were no tingles. He googled several other options, even rang NHS Direct, and was left with the realisation that it must be psychosomatic, a result of the mistake he’d made.
    It was a rather big mistake, taking a girl who belonged. He thought it would be a relief, but recently, no matter how many ways he did it, he still felt oddly unfulfilled, and was now starting to feel sick into the bargain.
    He thought back to when he was ill as a boy. He’d been in bed for five days. Five days alone in the house while his Mum was out somewhere, of sweating and crying and feeling like he wanted to die. On the fifth day he began to feel better, and some time in the afternoon he found himself masturbating. Just as he climaxed he looked out of the window and there she was. A young woman, jogging on the pavement outside his room.
    She came to him each time for years, this woman, jogging past him as he pulled, sometimes all of her, sometimes just her face, sometimes only a short white sports sock.
    But after a few years she faded, and he had to get help to find her again. In the park maybe? The sports shop? Sluttysporty.com ? Images of trim healthiness returned at each window-shopping expedition and he lay in bed feeling better momentarily, just as he had when she’d jogged outside his twelve-year-old self’s bedroom window.
    It was after he moved to London he realised the window-shopping had stopped working; like a relationship gone stale, it was no longer enough. After weeks of failed attempts to climax he decided he would need to do more than browse. He would need to make a purchase.

    He knew her, had even smiled at her a couple of times. Knew where she lived, what she liked for lunch, that on Tuesday mornings she got home at around 5.15 a.m.
    He’d watched her do the same thing for two Tuesdays in a row, and had tried the old way many times, the battered curtain his mask, but he could never quite get there, so on the third Tuesday he implemented the plan he had rehearsed: At 5.15 a.m. the girl would walk, smiling, down the hill and past the hostel. She would bleed a little after the blow to the back of the head. She would be none the wiser as he dragged her from the pavement and into the abandoned house. None the wiser as he carried her through the abandoned hall, down the staircase into the basement.
    That’s where it ended, the plan, and it had gone perfectly well at first, but after that, he’d had to make it up as he went along.
    She woke up earlier than he expected, but he was ready. He was wearing his chosen face – a gimp mask – jeans and an old T-shirt. His mouth seemed to gleam through the custom-made holes in the taut, shiny black leather. Big eyes stared at her. Huge eyes, opposite her, in the corner of the room. Gagged and tied to her chair, she woke. He watched her face as the fear swept over it. Her eyes wide and white. Her forehead deeply lined from the pressure of silent yells. Her mouth dribbling. Legs red-raw with wriggling, rubbing, trying, begging.
    A few hours later he touched her gently on the side of the head. She was less rigid and the cries had moved downwards to pound in her stomach. He took to his seat again, nervous that after all the effort it wouldn’t work. He took a few breaths, in and out, slowly in and out, and then unzipped his trousers. Watching her eyes widen again, he took his soft penis in his hand and held it. Then he began. Slowly . . . make it good . . . this is it . . . up and down, concentrate, nearly there, nearly there. She was wriggling, and he liked that. He focused on her legs, clad in Lycra and ankle socks and he noticed for the first time that she only had one shoe. Fuck.
    He zipped himself up, ran up the staircase, opened the door to the hall, tripped on a floorboard, picked himself up in a frenzy, fumbled with the front door-handle, and walked onto the street. He searched awkwardly in the new daylight for the evidence, bent down and looked under a car, banging his head on the