The Swansong Of Jane Doe

The Swansong of Jane Doe

Overture

The wounds are deep. 

So deep in fact, that I am certain I can see a piece of myself left behind in there. 

Or is that just bone? I’m not too sure, all I am sure of, is that through my attempts to find someone, to find the one, to find anyone, I opened myself up to the world at large and now, there I am. A seeping, bleeding lesion, with a fractured clavicle and a wounded heart. 

I can feel the cold beneath me. My chest cavity pulled open. 

I wonder, how will I look when he stitches me back up? 

I feel his cold fingers wriggling and pulling inside me. I guess you don’t need warm hands when you work with the dead. 

Is that body 21 grams lighter now that I’m free of it? He’s weighing my heart. I can tell that it’s heavy because it still feels like lead inside me. It would seem that the sensation of a broken heart is not limited by bodily constraints. Even a ghost can feel the heft of it. 

I don’t know why I stuck around to watch this. Floating in the ether, a voyeur of my own necropsy. My stiffened lifeless body, splayed out on a steel gurney and slowly, methodically eviscerated. Opened, picked apart, refilled and resealed by a stranger with cold hands.  

A stranger with cold hands, if an undone soul can shudder, well, that’s what I just did. Strange that the thing that brought me to my end, would be the thing that tots up the final sum of all my parts. Yes, a stranger, with cold hands and eyes with no light behind them. That is the last thing I remember. I don’t even remember my name, but I remember his hands, and his eyes, and the ferocity with which I was ejected from my body. 

I begin to feel a pull now, from all around me, wrenching my gut, pulling skin from bones. I am being called, but not by name, not audibly, physically, viscerally. 

I am blinded by the brightest light, that shines a spotlight on my cavernous empty body beneath me. ‘I have to go’, the realization crashes at me. I realise I must go, right now, but I don’t want to, not yet. Moving up towards the light all I can think, all that’s screaming inside my head is, ‘I still have so many questions.’

Motet

Somewhere, above the world and all around it. Where shadows float through the souls of the recently deceased. Both above and beyond the unfathomable thickness of eternity, the black emptiness gives way to a single island of light. There are two people standing inside the light, suspended in dark matter. two glowing bodies of celestial brightness, forcing us to adjust our eyes so that we can see them. As we near them we can see, that right there, out in the middle of the great expanse, these two beings are locked in suspended animation, and a conversation ensues: 

Jane Doe: “Look at me down there, all closed up now, stitched up tighter than a nuns’ twat. Hehe.”

St. Peter: “Wow what a thing to say to St. Peter”

J.D: “Um, sorry, I didn’t see you there, where am I anyway?”

S.P: “Oh, you don’t know? Well technically nowhere, or everywhere, whichever you prefer.”

J.D: “Limbo?”

S.P: “Sort of. ‘A girl of questionable character’, that’s what it says on my clipboard, and questionable language too it seems.”

J.D: “I said sorry”

S.P: “Quite. Well here in nowhere, or everywhere, or Limbo, whatever, we put you through some tests to see which direction to send you.”

J.D: “Which direction?”

S.P: “Up or down dear, up or down.”

J.D: “How is my character questionable?”

S.P: “You have to ask? Booze broads and bullets my child.”

J.D: “Bullets, booze? I don’t even dirnk!”

S.P: “Well, it’s just a turn of phrase isn’t it, anyway, let’s not get hung up on semantics, here shall we? Now, I don’t have the details here, you only atone for your sins after you get through the pearly gates, if you make it that is. Here you just have to prove your worth.”

J.D: “So, what happens if I don’t want to take your tests or whatever?”

S.P: “Down you go then.”

J.D: “Oh”

S.P: “Indeed. So, shall we begin?”

J.D: “Ok, I mean, no, just, just wait I just want to look at myself a little longer.”

S.P: “Ah one of those are we? Well I think that’s part of the problem, vanity is a sin you know.”

J.D: “I know, that’s not why I want to look, it’s just, I don’t know, isn’t it fascinating to you? To look upon your own dead body?”

S.P: “No, my dead body is over 2,000 years old dear, it’s nothing but dust now.”

J.D: “Did you watch yourself decay?”

S.P: “No! Why on earth would anyone want to do a thing like that?”

J.D: “I want to, but then again, while I was alive I watched myself decay from loneliness daily.”

S.P: “Hmm…Self-pity isn’t exactly a sin my dear, but it is frowned upon. Now come along, it’s time for us to begin.”

Crescendo

With no words left on her tongue and a growing, rumbling emptiness in her head, our Jane Doe fell victim to the trickery of St Peter, and while he bamboozled her with trick questions and unfair assessments, she knew in her hollowed-out heart which way she would be sent. 

Such a shame, such a beautiful young thing. She had such promise. So often the victim of treachery it seems. 

You see it turns out, that it is our very humanity that renders us irredeemably tainted in the eyes of our final magistrate. So long have they spent in the company of saints that anything  less than angelic seems wicked, foul and full of sin.  

Not only do they punish for wrong doings, but for lack of good deeds too. They demand answers and justifications for simple naivety, impurities, big sins and small ones.There is no atonement, no ultimate purification of the soul in that endmost hour.  All the parts of you that make you who you are, they see as intrinsically flawed. Fragility and vulnerability are not welcome in the kingdom of Heaven. 

So down she went, all the way down, as far as anyone can ever go. Where she would spend eternity at the mercy of spectres, and shadow people. When it was his time, these devilish strangers would be replaced with the cold hands and dead eyes of one she already knew. Then, she knew she would spend the rest of forever trapped in her killers’ soliloquy. 

Coda 

The internet chat had started innocently enough. He was looking through a Pusheen the Cat fan account on instagram and he noticed her. Her profile picture was so sweet. All of her instagram posts were sweet. Photos of desserts and coffees from various quaint cafes in Dublin filled her profile wall, accompanied by images of odd little japanese toys and figures that she would caption ‘so kawaii’ and follow it with 50 heart eyes emoji.  She was 18, but she didn’t look, or act, day over 14. She lived alone in a bedsit while she attended college. She was the perfect choice for what he had planned. 

He knew he was handsome, he knew he could have any woman he wanted really, but it had taken him a long time to admit to himself, that any woman wasn't what he wanted. In recent months he had finally come to the conclusion that what he was after was something far more...niche. Since having this epiphany it was all he could think about, and from the moment he sparked up a conversation with his special little sunshine he became totally obsessed. It was the freshness of her, the way youth seemed to drip from her skin. She seemed to embody the very essence of purity, delicacy, innocence. It was such an unbelievable turn on. 

He knew he had to have her, to possess her, to take that innocence for himself, take it in such a way that no one could ever have it again after he was finished with her. 

She was a bit chubbier than he usually liked, but it actually made her look younger than she was, and as far as he was concerned the younger the better. Tonight, he had arranged to pick her up after college and bring her to a ‘special place’, she wasn’t really one for nights out she had said, so that sounded perfect, the perfect night, the perfect crime. 

It was a massive step for him of course. He had his fantasies, his porn, his online chats, but he had never actually had the guts to go through with anything this daring in real life. But she was so easy this one. She was practically begging for it, and he was more than happy to oblige. 

The thought of it sent hot shivers up his spine and sent him into a sweat. Oh, tonight would be the night alright. He could nearly taste her terrified, frantic quivering on his tongue. He couldn’t wait. 

His company had recently been assigned to demolish a broken-down warehouse out in the middle of nowhere. No one ever went near it and all the security had been laid off. It was set for demolition in two days’ time. He would take her there. It was perfect. No one would stumble upon them accidently, there was plenty of space and most importantly, no one would ever hear her scream. 

He had everything he needed in the boot of his car, all tucked neatly into a picnic basket. Rope, duct tape, a Stanley blade, a taser and various sex toys in various sizes. He was going to live out every fantasy he had ever had tonight. He had even planned where he was going to dispose of the body when he was done with her.

He kissed his wife goodbye. She thought he was going on a business trip for the weekend. He ruffled his sons’ hair, told him to be good for his Mammy, got into his car, and drove away. A wry smile snaked its way across his face as he entered the coordinates of the girls’ bedsit into his satnav. 

He could barely sit still from the moment she got into the car, his concentration was shot. He couldn’t focus on driving. He was glad of the distraction when she turned on the radio. After a long dark drive, filled with the vacuous conversation of every young college student, they pulled into the car park of the warehouse. He let her go on ahead of him. He didn’t want her to see anything in the boot. He was all fingers and thumbs as he tried to open his basket of toys. A nervous excitement was welling up from the pit of his stomach and he had to stifle a laugh in case she heard him. 

She looked around the condemned building with a childlike wonderment and as he walked in, she spun on her heels and looked up at him with those big doe eyes of hers. The way she looked in the bleak surroundings gave him an instant hard on. She was so helpless, he thought. His hands began to shake with anticipation as he placed the picnic basket on the ground. He had hidden the taser up his sleeve. He called her over to him. She came willingly. As he took her in his arms, and swooped in for a kiss, he slid the taser out of his sleeve behind her head and got her right at the back of the neck. She fell limply into his arms. Now the fun would really begin. 

He stripped her and tied her to an old chair that was already in the warehouse. Bound with duct tape, she looked good enough to eat. He didn’t gag her though. He contemplated it, but decided he wanted to hear her scream, wanted to savour the sound of her fear. He took the blade out of the basket and began to slice into her bare abdomen. Delicate sweeping motions made light bloody cuts across her stomach. She woke up and began to scream. Her tear streaked face gazing at him, her fear palpable. He moved in close, right up to her face so their noses were touching, and he began to laugh hysterically. Until she spat, right in his face. 

The hot anger that bubbled up from inside him caught him off guard. Who did this little bitch think she was? All he could do was stare at her. Boiling rage seethed under his skin, making it crawl. He felt as though he was on fire, and when she spat at him again, he lost all composure. He lunged at her, arms flailing and slashing at that repugnant little mouth of hers. He knocked her over in the chair. Her head crashed loudly off the floor and lost consciousness again. In his rage he almost ended her there and then, just slit the little bitches throat, but he stopped, breathing heavily over her. This needed to wait. She had to be awake for what he was going to do to her. So, he untied her from the chair, laid her out on the floor and stood over her, blade in hand and waited for her to open her eyes. Waited to hear her swansong of screams reverberate off the walls of this desolate waste ground. As her chest would heave in its final death rattle, the exquisite agony of ecstasy he would feel would create an Aria in his head. A song of violence and blood lust, and his hands would be the last to touch her frailty, these walls the last to hear the sounds of an angel calling for home. 

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