by Paul Kane
“Oh,” Jake said, not interested.
She put it back in the bedroom.
At dinner they ate the borscht and Jake asked if there was something else to eat, something more substantial, like a brisket. Lindsay felt that strange, horrible pull she often experienced when in the presence of two strong personalities: Danai’s wacky, magical artiness; Jake’s linear, stolid serenity. Jake believed in hard work and good habits, and they had the financial security to show for it.
Danai had once begged them to take Desdemona, a floppy-eared puppy he had impulsively purchased at a pet store. Because of his unpredictable schedule, the poor thing was cooped up for hours. Desdemona scratched the door of his walk-up and he needed money to get that fixed, too, before his landlord saw her. Then she started having seizures. Lindsay wanted to take her; Jake said no way. There was something wrong with her and she would be expensive to take care of. Then Desdemona was gone. Lindsay didn’t know what had happened to her, but there was a part of her that always wondered and fretted about her. She would have taken Desdemona on. Jake had stood between them.
I could have insisted. I’m not his slave, she thought, not for the first time. He was just . . . firmer in his answers.
Lindsay knew how many strikes she had against her: her alcoholic parents were dead; her father when she was nine, her mother just before she turned sixteen. She had lived with an aunt and an uncle who didn’t want her. She had moved out when she was eighteen and got raped. It had gotten worse, for a long time.
“Jake is exactly what you need,” Dr. Everson had informed her. Over and over. But she was miserable. Lonely.
“You’ve got this list,” Jake told her once. “It’s a hundred miles long. And it’s all the things that have to be okay before you’re okay. You are incapable of being happy.”
He had apologized. Even Dr. Everson said it was a mean thing to say, unlike Jake himself, who was patient and uncomplaining. As she should be. But their life was so vanilla, so boring.
It’s a cage, she thought, as she served the borscht. Danai was barefoot. Jake was disapproving. She was trying very hard not to cry.
Dinner was strained. Danai seemed to enjoy the tension. Jake was quiet; Lindsay wondered if something had happened at work or if he was just really angry at her for letting Danai come over. She wasn’t supposed to.
The meal was over quickly, since all there was, was purple soup. Chairs pushed back, the three went to the door, where Danai defiantly kissed her forehead. It was raining and he had no coat, no umbrella. He refused to borrow anything.
“You’ll catch pneumonia,” Lindsay argued.
Danai flung his hands over his head, two lightning rods. “It would be worth it.”
When the door shut behind him, Jake snorted and tsk-tsked. “Lindsay,” he began.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t sure she was. She didn’t know what she was feeling. “It’s just . . . he . . .”
“He didn’t have any money, did he?” Jake said flatly. “He was hungry.”
“No, he’s doing great. He’s in a show.” She was lying to him.
He studied her. And then she smiled faintly. “That’s great. But you agreed not to invite him over. He upsets you.”
He touched her cheek. She laid her hand over his but she couldn’t actually feel his skin on hers. Then he headed for his home office, which they had actually planned to be a nursery. That hadn’t happened, either, and Dr. Everson said maybe that was really why she felt so teetery all the time.
After he shut the door, she burst into tears. She ran into their bedroom and flopped into Danai’s nest. Damn him to hell and back again. Damn them both. Why did Danai have to make her admit how lonely and nothing she was? He was a snake and she was going to stop seeing him. And as for his stupid box—
She grabbed it up. It was warm to her touch. Startled, she gazed down at the etched sides, at the metallic runes and sigils, which seemed to be moving.
Lindsay thought she saw a little section that extended from the top of the box, like a lever. Her palm seemed to melt around the sharp corners; she hissed, sensing a cut being made; feeling pain, but at a distance. Feeling.
I don’t feel anymore, she thought. Not really. Sex? She faked all of it, timing her gasps and her writhing so that Jake would be pleased and finish sooner. Sex was beige, like her bedspread.
She ran her fingers along the top, the side, of the cube. A droplet of blood ran into a channel, and she saw the steps she must take to open it. Saw how she had closed the box of her life around herself:
If I hadn’t moved in with Jake, I would dream of dying from pneumonia. But I did move in. And so . . . who wants to die of anything? That’s so crazy. Danai can talk like that because his mind won’t fixate on it like mine. Mine is scrambled.
Danai’s free to be as silly and irresponsible as he wants. Oh, how I wish . . .
She jerked, seeing that she had pressed a circle on one of the sides. The top of the box rose up, star-shaped, and began to rotate counterclockwise.
A bell tolled, low and deep, and the room filled with light. No, the light slanted, glowing stripes of blue light, cyanotic. The stripes became rectangles—doors, widows. Her hands shook as she whirled in a circle.
Am I really seeing this?
“Jake,” she whispered, wrapping her hands around the puzzle box; the bell tolling as if from deep inside her rib cage, Bring out your dead.
The blue-white color stretched and bloomed. Shapes began to form—human figures, outlined with purplish black auras. She heard the clanking of chain and snap-crack of a whip.
Then a man stepped out of the icy blue light. His skin was dead white and his eyes were two wounds; his eyelids and lips were wrenched back by hooks. He wore a black robe, like some kind of monk, as the light swirled around him like mist.
She had gone crazy, really and finally. Psychotic break. Dr. Everson had threatened her with it. Jake had fretted about it. Danai told her to embrace it, learn from it, and move back out of it. He hadn’t understood. He had never understood.
The man focused on her, moving toward her. He didn’t smile, just kept coming. She backed away, her calves grazing her solid bed frame.
“You’re not here,” she whispered.
“Oh, but I am. What is your pleasure?” he asked her. His voice was icy hot, like frost and lava. His mutilated eyes were red-and-black circles. What had happened to his lips? And there were chains in his skull, inside the bones . . .
Two more figures materialized in the blue. One was a bald woman in a stiff black gown with a wide, belled skirt, the bodice cupping her breasts. The ends of needles gleamed on either side of her swollen nipples. Black leather fabric crisscrossed her torso, revealing flesh sliced open with myriad cuts from beneath her sharp chin to her sex, which was shaved. Hooks pierced her stark flesh and folded it back in intricate folds, like origami, the underside a scintillating crimson.
The third was a creature that was nothing but an open sideways mouth on stiltlike legs, chittering and gibbering through clacking fangs. It was six feet tall and as it skittered toward her, mucus dribbled over the rows of sharp white teeth. Mucus and blood.
Lindsay trembled as the coppery odor of blood slid over her face. She was swaying, reeling. Unbelievably, the blare of the TV permeated the room. Jake had turned on the football game. Jake was close by.
“What is your pleasure?” said the man again. His voice was a caress across her cheek . . . and then a slap.
And then a kiss.
She jerked and backed away.
“This isn’t happening. This isn’t real.”
“You summoned us,” said the man. He raised a hand and pointed to the box gripped in her hand. Blood was running down her forearm and dripping off her elbow. “We came. Now you belong to us.”
Then a fourth figure appeared in the room, a man wearing a half mask of black leather that appeared to be sewn to his face. The black leather mask molded features hard and leonine, with s
ensual, pierced lips curved in a smile. His black hair was pulled so hard into a ponytail that oozing cracks had formed along his scalp line. His nipples were pierced. Large multifaceted stones, like rubies, dangled from them. Ornate scars ran beneath his navel to his penis, which had been sliced open; two silver spheres dangled from the bifurcated head; and when he walked toward Lindsay, they chimed in unison—the tolling bell she had heard. Was still hearing.
“I didn’t summon you,” she croaked. Her lips were numb; she wasn’t sure how she could manage to speak.
“We’re here. You’ll be coming,” said the first man, with the jeweled head.
The naked man in the mask laughed and came toward her. He was erect. His smile was hellish.
“You’ll be coming,” he echoed, and she fell into his voice, low and seductive and like nothing she had ever heard in her life. It held her up as something slid along the curves of her body and she felt—
“No, there’s been a mistake. Jake!” she cried, as the crowd on his TV burst into cheers and applause.
“No mistake,” said the man in the mask. “Let us begin.”
A hook shot across the room and ripped out the darkest, bluest vein in the back of her hand. Another caught her cheek, and yanked.
“I’m sorry,” the police detective told Jake. Her name was Maile Baker.
“Thank you,” Jake murmured in as neutral a voice as possible. He stood in the detective’s windowless, airless office, reeling. Cold case. His Lindsay.
Detective Baker indicated the plain cardboard box on her desk. “These are her things. You’re free to take them. You must know how frustrated we are,” she said. “It’s been a year.”
Almost to the day. His chest was tight. “Yes, thank you.”
He took the subway home, the box in his lap. When he got home, he examined each object: some postcards and letters, her laptop computer . . . and the puzzle box, which Dan had given her the night of her disappearance. About a month later, Dan had disappeared, too. . . into insanity. He had always had a fragile hold on reality, that one. Which was why Dr. Everson and Jake had ordered Lindsay to steer clear of him.
“She’s in the box,” Danai had gibbered. To him, to the police. “Open the box, Jake in the Box, open the box.”
No one could get the box open, and the police investigated other leads. Now she was a cold case.
Thunder rolled across the ceiling. Jake sat in his bedroom, once their bedroom, and held the box up to the artificial light from a lamp beside the bed. The box felt warm in his hand. And—
“Ouch,” he said, as a static charge shot through him.
And . . . there. He saw how to open the box as clearly as if someone was standing beside him and pointing to the indentation in the center panel of wood. His lips parted. How had no one noticed it before?
He touched the panel, and the box zzz’ed with electricity. A soft blue glow emanated from it.
He pushed on the panel, and it rose straight up.
A tolling bell rang inside his hollow chest, inside his hollow heart.
He was the Ravisher, and he was Lindsay’s Cenobite. He had penetrated her and taken her and tortured her and skinned her; he had raped her and violated her and the pain was unbearable. He slid a knife under each cell of her body and pulled it back, hooking it in place; he pierced her labia and her urethra and he sounded her with lightning bolts and knives, talons, teeth, fingernails, and the screams of his other victims. He tormented her and dissected her.
Every second of every hour for centuries of time.
Hell had other clocks; the Engineer had made all of them, and they ticked too slowly to endure; clanged the alarm too fast for human hearts to catch up. The Ravisher brought Lindsay to life each time she died in sheer agony, from sheer agony; she was spreadeagled so tightly and so often that her body would explode into pieces by sheer force of habit.
The pain . . .
The pain . . .
“You’re not there yet,” he would hiss at her, and strike her, and slice her. She thought she would become numb to it; she moaned and writhed, trying to fake the worst she could imagine, so he would stop; because while he tore her apart, he fucked her apart. He had sex with every wound, incision, and fragment. He pushed and he came, all over her and often. All she felt was agony. Endless.
She panted, moaned; then, after more centuries of new and inventive torments, she fell silent.
“Yes,” he whispered into her soul.
More centuries.
And more.
Then:
She stood in the center of a labyrinth. The cold gray walls spread outward, like her arms and legs, pinioned to the torture bed of the Ravisher. She saw the road she had traveled, Jake and Danai’s road that she had not traveled, and the roads of other possibilities. Spurred into heightened self-awareness by her pain, she crawled down the passages, then staggered, then walked. Blood gushed down the corridors and striated the walls; she knew she was inside her own body, and then inside her own mind, pushing hard to be born.
Inside her own soul, tearing it apart herself. With his help. Her tormentor, her beloved. To let her out.
To let her out.
“Yes,” she whispered to the Ravisher, floating, rising to her heaven. He was her angel; he had pushed her through to the side of pleasure. Endorphins of the body and the soul, to the essential core of death. “I know who I am now. You did this for me.”
“It was you who did it,” he told her, as they flew through black skies together, on the wings of delight. “Your pain spoke to you. Without pain, there is no growing.
“And I have given you more pain than anyone can imagine.”
Turn it this way and that way and this way, said the voice in Jake’s mind. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, and he listened to the voice as the room turned blue; as tears streamed down his face and someone moved the cube in his hands while the panels opened.
The bell tolled.
“I will come for you,” he whispered, half mad.
“I know who I am now,” Lindsay told the Ravisher, as he stretched her and racked her. As he forced her and brutalized her. “I know exactly who I am.”
“That is good,” he said, smiling broadly, as she fainted again.
When she woke, she expected to see his masked face above her. Instead she saw Jake’s. A little rounder, a little older, and his eyes huge with horror.
“Oh my God, Lindsay,” he whispered, reaching out to her, drawing back his hands. His face was white, and tears were streaming down his cheeks. “My darling, my poor darling.”
She stared at him, then down at herself. Large leather straps held her in place as she was spread-eagled on two wooden beams over a fiery pit. White-hot irons pierced her sex, and she smelled her own cooking flesh.
“I’ll get you out of here. Can you help me? Is there a key?” He looked at her restraints. Then he turned and vomited.
“How . . . ?“ she asked. And then she knew. He had worked the puzzle box.
“It took me a long time to believe,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I’m so sorry it took me so long. But I’m here now. We’ll go—” Then he broke down sobbing. “Oh, God, this is Hell.”
“Yes,” she said.
Then the Ravisher stepped from the shadows, along with his three original companions: the leader, with the hooked eyelids; the tattooed Cenobite with the jeweled pins; and the woman in the ball gown. They gazed at Jake.
“You summoned us,” said the Ravisher.
“No.” Jake shook his head as he backed away from the Ravisher, then bravely moved between the quarter and the fiery pit to wrap himself around Lindsay, as tightly as he dared. “I snuck in,” he whispered to her.
“What is your pleasure?” asked the tattooed Cenobite with his glittering jeweled pins.
“Let her go,” Jake said.
“That will not happen,” the Ravisher informed him. He extended his hand; it became a talon, and he walked toward Lindsay and Jake. Jake released Lindsay a
nd stepped away. The Ravisher ripped Lindsay’s left nipple into two equal halves. She threw back her head and screamed.
She screamed. It was she who screamed.
“You summoned us and you must stay with us,” said the woman in the ball gown. “And we will tear your soul—”
Her soul. It was hers.
The Ravisher sliced open her right nipple, then impaled himself upon her, as Jake cursed and shouted.
“Let her go!”
The Ravisher maimed her, tortured her, her, and when she knew herself as she did her own pain, hers, he stopped. He lifted up her bleeding head so that she could see her husband, who was kneeling on the floor between two more Cenobites dressed in black leather and intricate arabesques of scars and bleeding wounds. Each of them held a long piece of chain that ended in a hook. Each was bending down and grabbing one of Jake’s wrists. Jake was naked; his body gave off steam, or mist.
“You came here of your own free will,” the Ravisher told Jake. “It’s your turn.”
“Wait,” Jake begged. Then, “Wait.” His speech was halting. “If it’s my turn . . . then hers is over.”
“No,” Lindsay whispered, and the Ravisher laid a possessive hand over hers. Then the Ravisher unfastened her restraints and picked her up in his arms. Bits and pieces of Lindsay’s flesh remained stuck to the cogs and blades of their bed. And to his cheek and his teeth.
He carried her toward Jake, and stopped. Droplets of her blood sprinkled Jake’s bowed head, like a blessing.
“What exactly are you saying?” the Ravisher urged in a low, coaxing voice.
There was a long moment of silence. Lindsay heard Jake weeping. And praying. She looked down at him, remembering how afraid she had been of everything. She slid her gaze to the Ravisher, who smiled, reading her expression.
Then she wobbled. What had the Ravisher done to her?
