Feeding the Demons Read Online Free

wasn’t Will after all.’ She picked it up and slipped it back over her wrist.
    ‘What a sick rabbit,’ said Gemma, ripping the huge poster from the wall. ‘How dare he do this to you.’ She tore the picture into strips and bits of breasts and genitals, twice the size of life, littered the floral carpet. ‘In spite of all this,’ she said, pointing at all the images of her sister, ‘there’s no feeling of this place being lived in. It’s like a gallery.’
    In the living room cupboards they found more boxes containing photos of Kit, some of them duplicates, printed in different tones of contrast. Kit seized up one of the photos and stared at it. ‘That’s weird,’ she said.
    ‘What is?’ asked Angie.
    ‘That jacket I’m wearing,’ she said. ‘It’s one of Will’s.’
    ‘So?’ asked Gemma.
    ‘He was wearing it the day he left home. I will never forget that day.’ She paused a moment to let the painful memory subside. ‘Adrian Adams started seeing me after Will left.’
    The three women looked at each other as the implication sank in. ‘I would never have taken him on if I’d known about this,’ said Kit. ‘This really is most disquieting.’
    Gemma laughed, despite the situation. ‘Caboodle,’ she said, the rarely used childhood nickname taking Kit by surprise, ‘sometimes you sound like such a therapist. “Disquieting.”I’ve never heard a human say that word in my life, only read it in books.’
    In one of the boxes, they found the original pornographic nude study that had been the basis for the huge image of Kit in Adrian Adams’ bedroom, and many smaller prints of it. Kit grabbed as many of them as she could find and tore them up, then she flushed them down the toilet.
    ‘He seemed gay to me,’ said Angie eventually.
    ‘He wasn’t sure,’ said Kit. ‘About a lot of things. We were just starting to look at the invasiveness of his mother.’
    ‘Sure of one thing, though,’ said Gemma. ‘His bloody obsession with you.’ The three of them stood in silence surrounded by grotesque images of Kit.
    ‘I want to get out of here,’ Kit said, hurrying back to the door. Gemma and Angie followed her out, Angie locking the door behind them and following as they went down the staircase to the ground floor.
    ‘What will happen with all that?’ Kit indicated the flat behind them as they walked through the ground floor foyer.
    ‘It’s his property,’ said Angie. ‘I guess his relatives will clean out the place. He’s not going to be living here for a while.’ After the claustrophobic black and white images upstairs, it was a relief to walk outside into the clean sunshine and coloured brightness of the blowy October day.
    ‘I showed you this,’ said Angie, ‘so’s you’d know. It didn’t seem right somehow that you didn’t know about it.’
    On the way home, Kit wished she didn’t know.

 
One
1998
    Gemma woke, bewildered, because the grey dawn light was coming from the wrong side. Then she remembered she wasn’t at home. She lay there for a moment listening to the early morning sounds; the lifts clunking, the hotel’s plumbing, the hum of the air-conditioner.
    The digital clock showed 5.12 am, and above it on the veneer and particle board console stood the empty champagne bottle and the two glasses. He’d gone very early as he said he would and she was hung-over and feeling guilty about Steve. He was the reason she never used her place when she picked someone up. Even though Steve was away on a job and didn’t live with her anyway, she didn’t want a stranger at her place, another man in the bed she shared with Steve.
    She was wide awake now and swung out to have a bath. Through the door to the lounge room of the suite, she caught a glimpse of her clothes lying on the floor where she’d undressed last night, oddly neat considering how fast they’d come off. She was about to take a closer look when she caught sight of herself in the bedroom mirror and stopped, frowning.