White Bones by Graham Masterton

and nursery rhymes, but she had never found out. It had always disturbed her, for some reason, especially the line about wanting to know if her shadow was following her. Supposing it wasn’t? What then?
    She was repeating the rhyme for the third time when he cut into her thigh. He cut deep, right through the skin and the fat and the femoral muscles, until the tip of his scalpel touched her bone. Blood welled out of the wound and pattered onto the newspapers underneath the bed.
    The scalpel was so sharp that she hardly felt it. She had once cut her tongue on an envelope that she was licking, and she hadn’t realized until blood came pouring down her chin. This incision hurt even less than that, but all the same she let out a long wail of despair.
    “Don’t cry,” he told her. “This is only just the beginning. You wait until tomorrow. Then you’ll know what pain is. Then you’ll not only feel it, you’ll
understand
it.”
    He sliced through all of the quadriceps, all the way around, right the way through to the femur. All the time he was breathing steadily through his nose, the way that dentists do. When he had cut around her upper thigh, he moved down and made another cut about an inch above her knee. His hands were smothered in blood now, and there were bloody fingerprints all over her leg. She let her head fall back, so that she wouldn’t have to look, but then she raised it again, her chin juddering with pain and effort. She found a terrible fascination in watching her own mutilation. He had been right: it was like a journey through an undiscovered country, a country where anything was possible, where no pain was too great and no horror was too excessive.
    Having cut one circle around the top of her leg and another circle above her knee, he then took another scalpel from his instrument-case and incised a vertical line down the front of her thigh to join the two together. This time, she felt the point sliding all the way down her bone, and she screamed so long and so loud that he stopped for a moment and watched her with a patient frown until she had finished.
    “Are you all right?” he asked her. “This won’t take very long, I promise.”
    “I can’t – you can’t – I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.”
    “I can stop if you like. Only for a while, though. The bones have to be stripped before the light of day.”
    “Please, please. I can’t bear it any more, please.”
    “I’m sorry… why don’t you try to think of something else?”
    “
I can’t take any more! I can’t take any more!
”
    She threw her head back on the bedsprings and hit it again and again, screaming and weeping, as if she wanted to knock herself unconscious. He stood with his scalpel in his hand, the ruby-colored blood congealing on the blade, and frowned at her as if she were nothing more than a toddler who was throwing a tantrum.
    At last she stopped screaming and banging her head, and lay back with her eyes rolling wildly from side to side, breathing in high, harsh yelps.
    He bent over her again, and continued to cut the rectus femoris muscle all the way down to the knee. Then he laid down his scalpel, and with the thumbs of both hands, spread the incision wide apart, until the bone was visible. The flesh glistened in the bright light of the Anglepoise lamp, as scarlet as freshly-butchered beef.
    “There,” he said, “the very substance of you, coming to light.”
    He picked up a small boning-knife, and carefully began to cut the flesh away from the femur. Fiona lay still now, her face gray, her hands gripping the bedhead, her whole body totally rigid and glistening with sweat. Apart from the scrunging of the bedsprings, all she could hear was the sound of wet flesh, like somebody quietly and persistently licking their lips.
    She passed beyond agony into a place where she could see nothing but blinding whiteness and feel nothing but utter cold. The North Pole of pain. And still he worried the flesh away from the