A Question of Will

by Craig Spector

  Across the room, heads nodded. Neither had they.

  Paul ran out of words then; he looked to Nina, who directed him to the table, where a virgin candle awaited. As he touched flame to wick, he wished a wish so deep it might have been prayer: let me find it, please... let this show me, somehow...

  The candle flared. Paul saw its light reflected in the eyes of the others, knew that their pain was his pain, their anguish amplified in his own. But the candle was just fifty cents of wax and string in a cheap glass holder, from the housewares section of Target. There were no epiphanies there.

  He’d have to find them elsewhere.

  ~ * ~

  Outside it had started to snow -- a fine white dusting, luminous in the streelight glare. Paul drove carefully, keeping to just under the posted limit. Making his way not home, but to Marley Street. It was just after nine.

  He had stayed to the end of the meeting, sharing tears and hugs with the other grieving souls; promising to come again to those who asked, accepting telephone numbers from those who offered, should he need to talk.

  Nina, in particular, had wished him well. "You’re a good man," she said, and gave him a hug. He had thanked her, and meant it. The tears and hugs were genuine enough; his reasons for staying, slightly less so. He had waited with engine running, as the last of the group had piled into their vehicles and pulled away. He had done what needed to be done in public.

  And now it was time to do the rest of it.

  ~ * ~

  Darkness. Silence. The sound of ragged breathing.

  The boy stirred, eyes fluttering open, then coughed violently. For a moment, he thought he was dreaming. It took him another four seconds to figure out that, though his eyes were open, he could not see.

  "Wha..." he began to sit up. His head throbbed; his brain felt like cotton gauze soaked in tar. "What the fuck...?" he managed, tongue thick and swollen. Groggy, disoriented, he tried to piece memory together...

  ...he’d gone outside, was walking to the bodega two doors down, to buy some smokes...still within the hundred yard limit... suddenly an unmarked sedan, dash light strobing... pulling up beside him... cop...

  The boy reached out, felt a rough wooden bunk beneath him, solid and unyielding. He stood, legs weak and wobbly; as he did, he realized, the ceiling was close enough to touch...

  ...the driver motioned him, get in... getting rousted, fucking pigs, whatever ...he climbed inside...

  The boy reached for his shoulder, felt it throb; suddenly, he realized the walls were close, too close -- with arms spread he could almost touch either side. Pitch black space, surrounding, confining.

  A moment of shocked recognition... not a cop, not at all... struggle... sudden jab of pain... rush... burning... blackness...

  "What the fuck?" he said again, louder, his heart starting to pound. He took a blind step forward, banged his shin on something hard. The pain jolted him, even as he lost his balance, toppled forward.

  The crash was deafening in the tiny space; the boy reached out, felt stout wooden legs: a chair, secured to the floor, thick leather straps attached to its arms and legs. Panicking now, the boy crawled forward. His head smacked something cold and ceramic: desperately he clawed at it, adrenaline flooding his consciousness. He recognized the shape: a toilet. Lidless. Sloshing.

  "Hey!" the boy cried out. "HEY!!!!!"

  His own voice battered his ears. He turned and felt his way, Braille-like, in the opposite direction, past the chair and the bunk, until he came to another wall. Like everything else, it was solid, unyielding. He could vaguely make out the seam of a door, but no handle. He pounded it with his fist, tried to kick it. As his foot reared back, the thing on his ankle he thought was the tracking bracelet clattered. He reached down and felt his naked leg, a cold metal shackle secured to a length of chain against his skin.

  And that was when William Wells fully woke up.

  "Where am I?" The boy yelled hoarsely. "Somebody? Anybody!!!" He pounded the walls.

  "Where the FUCK am I????"

  ~ * ~

  Paul Kelly stood in the red brick bowels of 514 Marley Street. There was a small sink before him, a sooty mirror hanging over it. He felt bad about the lying, the inevitable deception of his wife, his friends, the world at large. Everything had worked so far -- surprising how people see what they wanted or needed to see. But it was all necessary, under the circumstances -- terribly, regrettably necessary.

  Paul ran some cold water, leaned down to splash his face. As he came up he caught a glimpse of his reflection. The face staring back through murky glass looked the same as it did the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that.

  "A good man," he murmured. "You are a good man." His reflection offered no argument.

  In the background sounded muffled rage. Paul glanced at his watch -- nine twenty-three. Coming off the drugs, right on schedule, he thought. I’ll have to dose him again soon.

  Paul turned, and gazed at his creation. Standing amidst the crumbling brick and exposed wiring of the basement was a box, sitting nearly a foot off the ground, measuring some eight feet wide by ten feet long by six feet high. Sturdily built, heavily reinforced, sheathed in insulation and ventilated, the box was soundproof, lightproof, completely impenetrable. A door was cut into the side facing him, snugly fitted with recessed hinges and a slot through which food might be passed. Power lines and plumbing snaked from the basement proper up through the box’s raised subfloor. It was a sensory deprivation prison, a self-contained universe for one.

  And William Wells was trapped inside it.

  Paul stepped up to a little control panel, pushed a button neatly marked mic. Wells’ muted voice instantly blared from a mounted speaker. "HELLLLP!!" he cried tinnily. "LEMME OUTTA HERE!!!!"

  Paul flipped the intercom off. Sans amplification, Wells’ cries and thrashing were tiny, distant things. He would not be heard from the street, not be heard by anyone but Paul.

  He looked down, saw his abraded knuckles. Punching the wall at the firehouse was a bit over the top, but what the hell -- he’d read it in a novel, once upon a time, and it had seemed an appropriately dramatic touch.

  It was surprisingly easy, in retrospect -- once you made up your mind, the rest was mere choreography. Faking a breakdown. A rented sedan. A portable dashboard fire chief’s light. A hypo of sedative pilfered from the firehouse’s secret stash. Dumping the tracking bracelet had been the trickiest part, because of the time factor -- but Paul had cut it off his ankle and tossed it into the lot with mere minutes to spare. Again, necessary. To throw them off the scent. So far, it appeared to have worked beautifully.

  And now, here they were.

  Paul turned; his tools were laid out on the workbench. He had his spare medbox, books on psychology, medical and psychopathology texts, and the "how-to" books he’d ordered, which inclined toward other types of projects entirely: cheaply reprinted bootleg manuals on CIA and KGB interrogation techniques, courtesy of an obscure press in Northern California that expressed its First Amendment imperative by publishing things like manuals for hit men and mercenaries.

  Paul smiled grimly, not from joy but from a sense of renewed purpose. As a firefighter and paramedic, he had years of experience bringing people back from death’s door; taking someone there would not be a problem. Again and again, if need be.

  We’re the good guys, remember? He had told Stevie Buscetti. You’re a good man, Nina had told him.

  And it was true. Paul didn’t want to punish. He didn’t want blood, or vengeance. He wanted the answer to the question that had seared his mind since he watched his daughter’s casket being slowly lowered into the earth. He wanted to know why.

  And Paul was willing to do anything to find out.

  Anything.

  PART FOUR

  CONTROLLED BURN

  TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER III: BASICS

  Though the following chapters deal with interviews necessarily conducted outside the scope of rec
ognized legal authority, all points reflect back to one major theme: control. It is imperative that the interviewer establish absolute control immediately and decisively over the subject, and seek to reinforce or enhance control at all times as the interview progresses. The exact amount necessary will vary greatly from subject to subject: pain thresholds, fear of bodily harm, and overall unwillingness to cooperate can greatly influence the duration and severity of the interview.

  Time is also a factor: longer captivity allows for greater ability to ‘build’ the requisite atmosphere; shorter sessions often require a more immediate escalation to achieve peak cooperation. But proper establishment of initial dominance assures the interviewer the best possible chances of success, and must be achieved without fail.

  ~ * ~

  Paul stood over his daughter’s grave. "Hey, kiddo," he said softly. "How’s it going?"

  It was a cold day, a thin crust of snow softening the rolling mounds of granite that comprised the cemetery. Paul knelt and placed a bouquet of fresh cut flowers into a little holder at the base of her stone, gently removing the now dead ones left by Julie. He stood and surveyed the effect: improbable color in a bleak landscape, a rumor of spring against impending winter. Distant traffic hummed in the background, but as far as Paul could see, he was the only living soul there.

  "Sorry I didn’t come sooner," he said to the stone. "I think of you all the time... I guess I just didn’t know what to say."

  Paul stopped, fighting back emotion. Kyra’s grave seemed small, somehow -- a narrow plot of sodded-over earth sandwiched between older, more established plots. The sod had not taken root, doubtless wouldn’t for months. It made her grave look unfinished, almost temporary... except for her headstone, which hammered home the unreal in granite permanence. Kyra Anne Kelly, Beloved Daughter, Forever Missed, were carved in its polished surface with mute finality, along with the dates of her birth and death.

  Paul winced. He could barely bring himself to look at it. They had never really thought about family resting places to begin with, had certainly never considered the ghoulish logic of where to bury their child. You worried about planning for a thousand other things -- about health care and day care and summer camp and college scholarships. In fitful midnight panic attacks, you laid awake stressing over crib death and poisoned Pedialyte and stranger abductions and hit-and-run accidents, about drug dealers or satanic pre-school cults or gang drive-bys, or any of the thousand and one mundane disasters Paul saw every day. In the absence of catastrophe, you worried about whether she’d be happy in the fullness of her life, whether her deepest, dearest dreams would one day come true, or what kind of creep she’d eventually bring home and call her one true love.

  But not this. Never this.

  So, when it happened, they had acted in desperation: finding the nicest place they could afford, on a scenic bit of hill at the outer edge of the cemetery. The caring staff at Blessed Rest Funeral Home had tried to seize on the opportunity to sell them a family package, and Paul had almost punched the guy’s lights out. Now he was equally sorry he had, or hadn’t.

  "We, um, got a place near you," he murmured, pointing back to the edge of the ever-expanding rows. "So we’ll always be close." It struck him then that all fanciful notions of retirement to the Keys, or taking that mystical cross country road trip, or ever leaving this place, were gone -- the future, in all its unwritten mystery, had winnowed down to this. Eternal rest on the installment plan. Paul sighed and shook his head.

  "There are so many things I wanted for you," he said, ephemeral wishes for school and college, career and marriage, children and grandchildren, all wafting away in the chill fall air. "I wish..." he paused, voice choking. "I guess I just wanted to say that Mommy and Daddy love you very much."

  Paul stopped speaking, listened to the hum of heedless noise. He brushed stray snow from the surface of the stone, mindlessly tidying the memorial, then turned and walked away.

  He never mentioned Wells, or the box.

  Some things he couldn’t tell even her.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER VII: SIGHT

  Light is an easy stimulus to control. Subjects can easily be kept in total darkness in actuality, or by use of blindfolds, heavy canvas bags (such as a mail sack), or hoods. In any event, one clear benefit is that total deprivation provides the interviewer with the option of revealing his identity, and prohibits the subject from later identifying either his questioners or location. But light deprivation is also valuable for heightening disorientation and general sense of vulnerability. Penal systems worldwide regularly employ use of solitary confinement, aka ‘the hole’, for just such a purpose.

  Similarly, intensely bright light can be equally disorienting and intimidating. "Spotlighting" subjects by use of bright lights in the face is a common feature of interviews, and intensifies the notion that the victim is both controlled by the interviewer and the center of the interviewer’s attention. Flashing lights, such as strobes, can increase disorientation, and if properly timed, can induce headaches and even seizures in certain subjects.

  Alternation of periods of total darkness and very bright light can often work where one or the other does not. Irregular alternation over long periods of time further disrupt the subject’s circadian rhythms -- the natural sleep cycle -- leading to intense disorientation, paranoia, and fear.

  In extreme cases, where temporary physical blindness is desired, the subject can be disabled by suturing of the eyelids. Where permanent loss of sight is not an issue, there are a variety of techniques that can be employed, ranging from chemical to thermal to surgical. See Chapter IX for details.

  ~ * ~

  There were rules, he decided. There had to be rules.

  Paul had wrestled with this more than anything. While the building of the box could almost have been considered an elaborate fantasy, done in a virtual fugue state of grief, Paul had taken a step that could not be taken back. The list of crimes he had already committed boggled the mind -- assault, kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and a D.A.’s wet dream of other offenses -- but the awareness only served to underscore the seriousness of his quest.

  Indeed, it was weirdly clarifying. Paul was a man accustomed to dealing with situations, and never one to shy away from a difficult or dangerous task. His entire life had been dedicated to helping others, putting his own life on the line for people he didn’t even know, often didn’t even want to know. He accepted the risks willingly, even eagerly, for as much as any notion of altruism it was the chance to test his own limits. To push himself, even to the breaking point, in pursuit of something worthwhile. And what, he reasoned, could be more worthwhile than this?

  Paul descended the basement steps, a tray of food in hand. For the first time since Kyra’s death, he felt something approximating control. It was an emotional highwire act, and paradoxically, the only way across was to remain as unemotional as possible. It couldn’t be about mere vengeance, he told himself, not some Charles Bronson Death Wish fantasy writ large. Vengeance would not give him what he sought. And what Paul hungered for was something altogether harder to come by. He would find it.

  But there had to be rules.

  First, the simplest, and most obvious. No one must know. No one must even suspect. Not as hard as it might seem, given the devastation of normalcy in the wake of the tragedy -- no one really expected Paul to behave ‘normally’, or even presumed to know what such a thing would be under the circumstances.

  Public furor had largely and gradually dissipated after Wells’ disappearance. The manhunt -- for all its best-laid plans and honorable intentions -- had gone nowhere, Kyra’s killer proving more elusive than anyone had hoped. After a week, it was quietly decided that one dead girl, however popular, simply could not warrant the ongoing allocation of already limited resources; there were budget cutbacks and manpower issues to deal with. The case was left open; Detective Buscetti alone was left to carry the torch.

  Deprived of a neat finish, the news media had p
acked up and headed off to redder pastures, drawn to the next exciting installment in the ongoing cavalcade of atrocity that was its sustenance. Indeed, it was possible to watch Kyra’s memory slip from public consciousness like a ship sailing over the horizon, as column inches gradually shrank into oblivion and TV coverage was back-burnered into the America’s Most Wanted-style unsolved mysteries.

  Paul divided his time between work and home and the house on Marley Street, just as he had before. The emotional gulf between he and Julie had become a chasm: lost in her own turmoil, she rarely questioned his departures. Which left Paul that much more time to concentrate on the task at hand.

  The next part was considerably more complicated: a step-by-step wearing down of psychological walls. Paul knew from observation at the police station that Wells was well-armored against mere intimidation. So he had resolved to break him the old-fashioned way: bit by bit. The drugging, while effective at first, was a short term solution - a drugged Wells might be pliant, but Paul required full participation from his subject. And there were other ways to achieve that.

  There was sensory deprivation, to keep Wells off balance. Inside the box, there was no day or night, no clocks or way of marking passage of time. Nothing but maddening blackness. The bunk was short and narrow, to keep whatever sleep he could manage uncomfortable and fatiguing. Deprived of REM sleep, the boy would become malleable; likewise with the anxiety and fear. All designed to break through resistance. Or so the theory went.

  And then, there was hunger.

  Paul moved toward the box, set the food down on the workbench. There was a control panel mounted near the intercom button on the outer wall, a series of single pole throw switches, along with common household timers. A tape deck was wired into the system. Paul pressed the com button. From inside the box, a hiss of silence. He listened a moment, ascertained that the boy was sleeping.