Death Trance

by Graham Masterton

  Marmie screamed, ‘No!’ but another man stepped up behind her and gripped her arm, so tightly that the sleeve of her dress tore. He pressed the muzzle of his shotgun to the side of Marmie’s head; its roughly filed-off edges dug into her temple, and it was then she suddenly realized that these men in their bland ice-hockey masks had come not for money, nor for shelter, nor for anything else she could possibly offer them. They had come to kill, and that was all. Because who would travel twenty miles through the forests of the Laurentide Provincial Park, to a cabin that stood by itself, armed with sawed-off shotguns and disguised with masks, but killers?

  Marmie said, ‘I beg mercy of you.’ Her voice was proud and clear. Issa whimpered and covered her face with her hands, but John stared at Marmie as if amazed that she was not able to protect him from these intruders. Mark looked up at the man standing over him and with a strangely hypnotized sense of obedience, stood up and followed him to the other side of the room.

  The man with the axe pointed to the arm of the sofa; his colleague forced Mark to kneel so that his head was resting on top of the arm, like an executioner’s block.

  Marmie half rose and said falteringly, ‘You can’t do that. Listen, that’s my son. He’s only eleven. Please, if you have to kill somebody, kill me. But not my children. Please.’

  The man with the axe stared at her. Then he looked around at his colleagues, but it was clear that he was in charge and that the others had no say in what he was about to do. None of them spoke. They could have been deaf and dumb for all Marmie could tell.

  ‘Listen,’ she insisted, ‘my husband is a very rich man. If you leave us alone, if you save our lives, I will personally guarantee that he pays you very well. Just leave my children alone and I will personally guarantee you a million dollars. I mean that. A million dollars. And you can take me as hostage to make sure the money is paid.’

  The man with the axe said nothing but grunted when Mark tried to raise his tousled head from the arm of the sofa. His associate forced Mark down again.

  ‘A million dollars,’ Marmie repeated. ‘No tricks, no police tip-offs, nothing; I guarantee it with my own life.’

  The man with the axe lifted the axe head up, licked the ball of his thumb and ran it down the edge of the blade to test its sharpness. Blood mingled with saliva; the axe must have been as sharp as broken glass. It was impossible for Marmie to tell whether the man was smiling or scowling, but she had the uncanny feeling that he was actually amused and that he was going to kill them and enjoy it.

  She felt that she had to go on talking. The longer she talked, the longer her children would live. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she could barely speak, but she knew that her children’s survival depended on her. Randolph wasn’t here - Randolph was way off in Memphis - and she cursed him for having left them in this isolated cabin on Lac aux Ecorces when they could have been safe and sound at home, eating barbecued ribs, watching television and worrying about nothing more important than what they were going to wear for the Cotton Carnival.

  ‘You could be wealthy men, all of you,’ she said, hoping to appeal to their sense of greed. After all, why had they come to kill her except for money? ‘I could make each of you a millionaire; four million dollars, to be split four ways. I know the company could stand it, and I know my husband would be only too happy to pay it. Please, think about it, one million dollars, in cash, for each of you. No questions asked.’

  With terrible disinterest, the man with the axe raised his weapon high above his head. For one split second, Marmie thought: This is a nightmare, I’m dreaming this, it can’t be real. If I hit myself, I’ll wake up and we’ll be back in Memphis, opening our eyes at dawn at Clare Castle, nestling up to designer sheets, with the fragrance of flowering azaleas drifting in through the shutters and the maids singing as they mop up the tiled patios outside, preparing for us to come out to breakfast.

  But then the nightmare became real and the axe whistled down. Mark screamed like an animal when the axe blade cut only a third of the way into his neck. Most of the force of the blow had been cushioned by the arm of the sofa. All the same, his carotid artery had been severed and bright red blood came spurting. The man with the axe had to hit him again, and yet again, and then suddenly his head dropped off his shoulders and tumbled onto the carpet with a noise like a falling salad bowl.

  Marmie stared down in horror as Mark - her precious eleven-year-old son -stared back at her from under the table with a face anguished and white, and utterly dead.

  She tried to drop to her knees, to collapse, to crawl across the carpet to save her son. That couldn’t be Mark, that couldn’t be real. Even though it must be a trick, he needed her. He was hurt, he was killed, and he needed her. But the man behind her pushed the muzzle of his gun even more fiercely into the side of her head so that she cried out in pain, and she knew beyond any doubt that he would kill her if she moved again.

  Somewhere on the edge of her consciousness she was aware that Issa was screaming: a long, drawn-out scream that seemed to stretch like a band-saw blade, cutting through all sanity and sense. One of the men stalked stiffly across the room towards Issa, twisted her arm behind her back and thrust his gun up underneath her chin. But she was hysterical now, and all she could do was to scream.

  ‘Leave her alone! Leave her alone!’ John yelled in a shrill voice. He pushed over one of the armchairs and leaped over the coffee table to protect Issa as if he were jumping hurdles in a track meet.

  The man holding Marmie did not hesitate. He was so deliberate and calculating about what he did that Marmie did not even feel his muscles tense. He lifted his gun from her temple for a moment and fired one barrel straight into John’s stomach. The shot was earsplitting. John doubled up in midair and tumbled heavily against the edge of the sofa.

  Sour blue smoke hung in the room like a hideous omen. John lay flat on his back, his face shocked and desperate, his legs shivering catatonically, his stomach torn into a tangle of T-shirt and glistening blue intestines. Marmie stared at him and couldn’t think of anything except How am I going to explain this to Randolph? What am I going to say?

  ‘Mom …’ John whispered. He was looking at her and his lips were shuddering.

  ‘Mom … help me … my stomach hurts … Mom …’

  Marmie tried in a disconnected way to stand up, but the man turned his shotgun around and pointed it straight at her right eye so that she could see the engulfing darkness inside the barrel and smell the powder that had killed her firstborn son.

  ‘The police will come,’ she said with a dry throat.

  The men said nothing. Marmie looked from one to the other and repeated, ‘The police will come. Then you’ll be arrested. You’ve … killed people. We’re ordinary people. What have we ever done to you? Why do you want to kill us? We don’t even have anything worth stealing! Oh, God, Mark. What did you do to Mark? Where is he? Mark!’

  She sank heavily into a chair, her fingernails clawing distractedly at the upholstery, her mind blindly seeking ways in which she and Issa might escape. Perhaps they could run for the door. Perhaps she hadn’t offered them enough money. Perhaps Randolph would call, realize that something was wrong and send for the rangers.

  After all, the men hadn’t spoken, had they? And since they hadn’t spoken, it could only mean that they didn’t want her to recognize their voices, and that meant that they intended to spare her life.

  ‘If you let me call my husband,’ she said in a faint, off-key tone, Til see if we can’t raise the money to eight million dollars. That’s two million dollars each, in unmarked bills or banker’s drafts.’

  Issa had stopped screaming and was quietly sobbing, her free hand held across her face. The man with the axe walked across to her and carefully but forcibly pulled her fingers from her face so he could look at her. He inspected her for almost half a minute through the menacing slits of his mask, breathing slowly and heavily. Marmie could see his chest rise and fall. Issa did not look back at him. Her e
yes wandered wildly as if she were drugged. Her cheeks were streaked with tears.

  After a while the man lifted his hand and ran his fingers through Issa’s long, tangly hair. She tried to twist her head away but he savagely gripped her hair and tugged it upward, so fiercely that he lifted her feet off the floor and Marmie heard the skin of her scalp crackle. Issa shrieked piercingly and thrashed her legs.

  ‘She’s only thirteen!’ Marmie screamed. ‘Leave her alone, she’s only thirteen! For God’s sake, what kind of people are you? Leave her alone! If you want to hurt anyone, hurt me, but for God’s sake, leave her alone!’

  She clawed at the man’s face and snatched at the swinging dogtags around his neck. He tried to twist her away, but the string holding the dogtags snapped, and they dropped on to the floor, and disappeared into the wide crack between two of the floorboards.

  ‘You total bitch!’ the man told her, and punched her in the mouth with his gloved fist.

  One of Marmie’s front teeth was knocked down her throat and the bridge on the right-hand side of her jaw was snapped in half. As her mouth filled with blood, she began to choke and gag.

  Without even turning to see what had happened, the man with the axe hefted the weapon so that he held it close to the blade. Then, with three crunching slices, he cut through Issa’s hair. Issa moaned, staggered and almost fell but the man holding her arm behind her back hoisted her to her feet again.

  Now the man with the axe slid his right hand into the front of Issa’s yellow- and white-striped T-shirt. He cupped Issa’s breasts for a moment, his chest rising and falling heavily. Then he lifted the axe blade again, sticky with blood and hair, and used it to slice the T-shirt open from neckline to hem.

  Marmie, weeping, her mouth running with blood, tried to protest. But the man turned and came over to her, indicating with an upward jerk of the axe that she should get to her feet. She did so unsteadily, almost to the point of collapse.

  The man ripped open Marmie’s blouse too, with rough, sawing tugs. Although Marmie closed her eyes, she could hear the irregular harshness of his breathing behind his mask. She felt the roughness of his gloved hand tugging at her bra and then the coldness of the axe blade against her skin. She kept her eyes closed as the axe sawed into the waistband of her jeans and cut the elastic of her panties.

  She could scarcely move her feet as the men half-pushed, half-carried her into the bedroom. She could see the nightmare for herself in the full-length mirrors in the closet doors, the masked intruders as faceless and frightening as characters in a Japanese No play, her own white, nude body held between them. She cried, ‘Dear God, don’t kill me!’

  Issa was dragged into the bedroom too. Then both of them were forced onto the bed, guns pressed so hard against their foreheads that they imprinted scarlet circles in their skin. One of the men disappeared briefly and then returned with a length of nylon cord snatched from the clothesline outside. They tied Marmie and Issa face-to-

  face, their arms clutched around each other, and their necks, arms and ankles ferociously and painfully lashed with cord.

  ‘Issa, don’t cry, my darling. They’re not going to kill us,’ Marmie promised. Issa’s naked body felt so cold as it pressed against her, she was so close that all Marmie could see of Issa’s face was one madly staring eye, red-rimmed with tears. Her shorn hair was in clumps, sticky with her brother’s blood.

  ‘Don’t cry, darling. Whatever happens, they’re not going to kill us.’

  She felt the weight of the first man press down the springs of the bed behind her.

  She strained her neck against the binding cords and saw a second man climb onto the bed behind Issa. She could see that he had taken off his tracksuit pants and that he was brandishing himself in his fist as if he were holding a cudgel.

  She cried aloud as the first man penetrated her but the silent cry she uttered inside herself when the other man penetrated Issa was by far more painful. For a few minutes there was a terrible, intense quietness in the room, interrupted only by the grunting of the men and the jostling sound of the bedclothes. Issa held her mother tight, every muscle in her body as rigid as high-tension wire, and Marmie prayed that the girl was too deep in shock to understand what was happening to her.

  The men finished their ritual with shuddering climaxes and climbed off the bed but Marmie knew it was no use to hope that the defilement was over. She seemed to be falling down some echoing corridor into complete darkness, where there was nothing but humiliation and fear and terrible agony. Yet for Issa’s sake, Marmie knew that she had to remain conscious and had to stay sane. The grappling, heaving, terrifying foulness of it went on and on, so that she came to believe that it would never end.

  At last, however, there was silence. It must have been almost dawn because the bedroom was illuminated in a ghostly blue light. Issa seemed to be either asleep or unconscious, but Marmie could feel the girl’s heart beating and feel her breath on her shoulder, so she knew that at least Issa was alive.

  Marmie tried to lift her head. It seemed as if the bedroom were empty and that the men had gone. She listened but there was no sound, only the early morning sapsuckers tapping at the trees outside, only the thin whistle of the wind across the lake. She thought about her ordeal but her mind refused to organize it for her.

  Instead, it told her with protective logic that she had suffered terribly and that it would take many years before she would be able to come to terms with what had happened. She knew that John and Mark were dead, but her tear ducts refused to indulge her grief. She knew that she and Issa had been grotesquely bound and raped, but she could think of nothing other than How are we going to cut ourselves free?

  ‘Issa,’ she whispered. ‘Issa, darling.’

  Issa opened the one eye that Marmie could see.

  ‘Momma.’ That simple word bore all her suffering and sadness. In one night, Issa’s family had gone, her innocence was lost, everything the world had given her had been stripped away.

  ‘Issa, listen to me. Everything’s going to be fine. All we have to do is untie ourselves.

  Then we can call the rangers and have the plane sent out.’

  ‘Momma, they killed John.’

  ‘Yes, my darling. They killed Mark too. But don’t think about it. Everything’s going to be fine, just as long as we take it easy and don’t panic.’

  ‘Momma,’ wept Issa, close to hysteria.

  Marmie shushed her, hugged her tight and called her all the pet names she could remember. ‘Come on, baby, it’s over. It was terrible, but now it’s over. Come on, baby, don’t cry.’

  It was then, however, that the bedroom door abruptly opened and Marmie froze.

  From where she was lying, with her neck tied to Issa’s, she could not see who had stepped into the room. But after a tense pause, the man with the axe came into sight and bent over them, his eyes glinting inside his mask. Marmie said nothing; she felt too vulnerable and too frightened. Besides, the man was unpredictable. He did not speak even now but only stared at her as if relishing her predicament. He lifted the axe blade and held it close to Marmie’s face, and although it was impossible for her to see his face, she found it easy to believe that he was smiling.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, her voice a gasp.

  The man stood up and beckoned one of the others from the doorway. This man came forward with a coil of barbed wire, one end of which had been fashioned into a noose

  ‘Momma, what is it?’ begged Issa. ‘What is it? What are they doing?’

  Marmie knew then that she would not be able to bear what the men were going to do to them. ‘Shoot us,’ she said hoarsely.

  The man with the axe slowly and deliberately shook his head.

  ‘Shoot us!’ screamed Marmie. ‘Shoot us, for the love of God! Shoot us!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Memphis, Tennessee

  Randolph called Marmie as soon as he awakened at six-thirty that morning, but there was no reply. He sat at the smal
l white cast-iron table on the bedroom balcony, overlooking the walled garden that Marmie had planted with roses and magnolias, drinking strong black coffee, eating buttered toast and reading the early morning edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which announced, ‘Clare Blaze “Not Arson” Opines Police Chief.’

  He picked up the white cordless telephone beside the silver coffee pot and asked for a second time to be put through to the cottage on Lac aux Ecorces. There was a radio-telephone link from Hebertville, although that was nearly thirty-five miles to the north of the lake and reception was sometimes fuzzy and erratic. After ten minutes the operator called back to say that she could rouse no response from Lac aux Ecorces but that she would keep trying at regular fifteen-minute intervals and let him know when she had managed to get through.

  Randolph finished his toast, swallowed the last of his coffee and brushed off his white summer trousers. A Tennessee warbler, green-backed and white-fronted, perched on the balcony railing, cocked its head to one side and sang chip chip chip before suddenly flying away.

  Randolph’s valet, Charles, came in, a grey-haired black man who had served Randolph’s father for almost thirty years. Charles, as far as Randolph was concerned, was part of the family, even though Charles himself liked to live in the past and distanced himself from his employers with petty courtesies and unsolicited attentions. Randolph often teased Charles by saying that he would have been the despair of Martin Luther King, Jr., but Charles in return would make a show of not thinking that this was a funny joke at all, particularly since the civil rights leader had died in Memphis, at the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street.

  ‘Are you going out now, sir?’ Charles asked. He rarely smiled. He reminded Randolph of Dred Scott, or at least of the history-book picture of Dred Scott. Charles, however, would never have such an influence on American life. As far as Charles was concerned, there was a way things should be done: the old way, prior to freedom marches and school bussing and James Meredith.