CODES: * means plain. The scene is unsatisfactory due to lack of length or detail. ** means average. *** means hot.
V is a warning for above average violent content. S is a warning for snuff content - the excerpt is usually from a crime novel.

Friday, August 17, 2012

S** A neighbor rapes a girl in a secret hideaway underground

From first chapter of Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold.

    "I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go."
    He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug- in steps that led to the world. "I don't know why you think you're leaving."
    I talked so that I would not have to take in this knowledge: Mr. Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was blocking the door.
    "Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home."
    "Take off your clothes."
    "What?"
    "Take your clothes off," Mr. Harvey said. "I want to check that you're still a virgin."
    "I am, Mr. Harvey," I said.
    "I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me."
    "My parents?"
    "They only want good girls," he said.
    "Mr. Harvey," I said, "please let me leave."
    "You aren't leaving, Susie. You're mine now."
    Fitness was not a big thing back then; aerobics was barely a word. Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were butch could climb the ropes at school.
    I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.
    I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped inside the earth and have no one know where I was.
--
    Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon." I guess he had had plans. I remember that his lips were chapped.
    "Don't, Mr. Harvey," I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don't. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged "please" before dying.
    "I want you, Susie," he said.
    "Please," I said. "Don't," I said. Sometimes I combined them. "Please don't" or "Don't please." It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn't or yelling "I've got it, I've got it, I've got it" as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands.
    "Please don't."
    But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.
    As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side.
    "Big white panties," he said.
    I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat's cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.

    "Susie! Susie!" I heard my mother calling. "Dinner is ready."
    He was inside me. He was grunting.
    "We're having string beans and lamb."
    I was the mortar, he was the pestle.
    "Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake."

    Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies touching, and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where worms and animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.
    I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying.
    "Why don't you get up?" Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and then crouched over me.
    His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover's voice on a late morning. A suggestion, not a command.
    I couldn't move. I couldn't get up.
    When I wouldn't was it only that, only that I wouldn't follow his suggestion?he leaned over to the side and felt, over his head, across the ledge where his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife. Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin.
    He took the hat from my mouth. "Tell me you love me," he said.
    Gently, I did. The end came anyway.

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