by Dahlia Adler
“He’s a werewolf!” Aaron Lutz shouted from the balcony, and he got a few laughs that withered and died under the implacable glower of the FBI agents on the stage.
“He’s not a storybook monster,” Fields countered, almost quietly, her voice full of dark foreboding. “He’s a man. He’s flesh and blood like everyone in this room, and if you see him? You won’t know it.” She let that sink in, until the vast room rang with silence. “Go ahead and make jokes, if that’s what you need to do, but take this seriously. Because for everything we know about the Judge, there are a million things we don’t—and despite what you see on TV, serial killers change their MO all the time. The Judge could be anyone, and he could be after anyone. Including people in this room. And it’s only nineteen days until the next full moon.”
* * *
Surfacing from oblivion, the first thing I become aware of is the unmanageable weight of my limbs, as if my skeleton has been removed and my body filled with sand. My head throbs, and it takes a century to fight my eyelids open; it’s like the time that Shauna and I got her older brother to buy us wine coolers. They were cloyingly sweet and went down like fruit punch, and the next morning it took every ounce of willpower I had just to get off the floor long enough to vomit into a half-empty bag of Doritos.
But this is worse. Blinking my eyes, my thoughts still fogged and my vision an untrustworthy kaleidoscope of doubled images, I know I’m in trouble before I know anything else. A light bulb hangs from the ceiling, backed by a metal shade, casting down a dim glow of sulfurous yellow—the same color of the streetlamps that are supposed to keep the alley behind the café safe. For a while I stare, herding the scattered fragments of my thoughts, gradually coming to realize that I don’t know where I am.
When I push into a seated position, thin metal bites the palms of my hands. The room dances, a swirling centrifuge of blackness, and I battle down a wave of nausea. Rippled and soft, the walls seem to melt like wax pouring down from the ceiling, and it takes me a long, disorienting moment to realize that what I’m looking at is curtains—great swathes of thick, inky fabric that ring the room, blocking out any windows, anything that might give me a sense of my surroundings. I could be in a warehouse, a penthouse, or a tomb, for all I can tell.
At the opposite end of the room from where I lie, I can make out a steel table, its silvered edge gleaming yellow in the bilious light from above. My stomach pulls and then wrenches, and I turn with difficulty on to all fours, convinced I’m about to be sick. Where am I? A wet and musty basement smell coils around me like vapor as my vision finally starts to coalesce and I take in the wiry lattice that surrounds me. My mouth goes dry at the same time a chilling realization sets in.
I am in a cage.
Panic sweeps back over me in a bright wave, my heart galloping into my throat. Gripping the walls of my enclosure, I give the metal a hard shake, hearing it rattle. I shake harder, fear making me desperate, some feral remnant of my brain ascending. I’m in a cage. My muscles start to burn, flop sweat rolling from under my arms, and the sturdy wire begins to cut into the soft flesh of my fingers; but my efforts are useless. The mesh won’t bend, the joints won’t give, and frantic tears spangle my vision as my chest heaves.
The Judge. It has to be the Judge. My ears ring with the memory of Agent Fields, standing on the edge of the stage, trying to scare us—“abducts his victims,” “holds them in captivity,” “still alive”—and bile rushes up my throat. My eyes are finally adjusting to the dark, and I can make out the steel table with more clarity now. I can see the shallow gutters along its sides, the locked wheels on its feet, the drain set into the concrete floor just beneath it. It’s meant for surgical procedures.
“Help!” I shout. The word sounds pathetic, denied resonance by the heavy curtains that gobble up sound with a vengeance. But once I’ve begun screaming, I find I can’t stop. “Somebody please help me!”
Falling back, I start slamming my feet into the walls of the cage, trying to find weaknesses—trying to create some—shouting until my throat is raw. Just beyond the cacophony of my struggle, I hear a click and a creak of hinges, and I freeze. It’s absurd; I made the noise hoping for attention, but as heavy footsteps thump against wood somewhere behind the folds of the black curtains around me, I go utterly still. Because I know. With every fiber of my being, I know it’s him.
He emerges through an invisible gap in the thick drapery, at the far end of the room where the metal table waits, still in the same strange costume he wore in the alley. The robe that swirls about him hangs all the way to the floor, a dull crimson beneath the jaundiced light of the single bulb. He approaches my cage on soundless feet, and I scuttle backward, a whimper escaping my lips.
“The accused is awake,” he intones, stopping when he’s only a few feet away. The hood he wears covers his face completely except for two small holes for his eyes.
“Who are you?” I ask, even though I know the answer. “Where am I?”
“The accused has been brought before the Judge for the crimes of pride and lust,” the man states in a grandiose way. “Does the harlot wish to make a confession?”
“I haven’t done anything.” My voice is scarcely above a whisper. “Please let me out. I’m not a … a harlot! So, just let me out, okay? I won’t tell. I promise, I—”
“The accused offends the Judge with begging and false claims of innocence.”
“They’re not false!” Adrenaline squeezes my heart like a vise, and my pitch rises. “I’m not a harlot! I’m a fucking virgin, okay? So you’ve obviously—”
“Vulgarity!” He stumbles back as if he’s been struck, gloved hands flying to his ears. Even through the hood I can see him blink, his eyes dark and shiny like beetle shells. “She pretends innocence, but defiles the very air with her shameful tongue!”
“She has a name, asshole!” I retort without thinking, my instincts driving me to claim some sort of ground. “And I’m not pretending anything—I’m a virgin, so you’ve made a fucking mistake!”
He moans, swinging away, hands clapped over his ears. “The putrescence of her soul exudes from her mouth like the stench of rot, foul and unclean!”
“The putrescence of my soul?” A switch flips, fear turning to reckless anger in a heartbeat. “You’re a sick fuck who kidnaps girls and cuts them open, and you’re calling me foul?” He reels backward, mumbling something under his hood. “Let me the hell out of this fucking cage, you fucking … fuck!”
Each profanity drives him another step back, his mumbling growing louder and more plaintive. I catch snatches of it—“meorum peccatorum,” “summum bonum,” “omnia diligaris”—and realize he’s speaking Latin. I’m not Catholic, but Mark has dragged me to church with his family on several occasions (“If God tries to strike me down for being gay, I’m throwing your heathen ass in the way of the lightning bolt,”) and I recognize the prayer. My sins, the highest good, all my love … he’s saying the Act of Contrition.
I start to swear at the top of my lungs, every curse I can think of, and every variation I can possibly devise. The Judge takes each word like a bullet, falling back a step at a time, and I shout harder. I have no plan, but he’s acting like it hurts, and that’s good enough for me.
When he reaches the table, his Latin prayer loud enough to compete with my screamed obscenities, he wrenches something free from the darkness behind the curtains and begins stalking back in my direction. I falter, fearing the worst, and when he reaches the cage again, I scuttle as far from the door as I can get. Eyes gleaming through the holes in his hood, his voice gruff, he snarls, “The accused will learn to show respect for the divine court, and to regret the filth that spews from her vile mouth.”
He holds something in his hand, aiming at me through the walls of the cage, and I have no time to plead for mercy before a torrent of icy water sluices through the mesh. It’s a hose, the end fitted with a nozzle that makes the spray focused and painful, tattooing my skin through the black pants and w
hite shirt I wore for work.
I’m drenched from head to foot, shivering with cold by the time he cuts the nozzle off, and I uncover my face just in time to see him fixing metal clamps to the wire lattice of my prison. Attached to fat cables, they snake their way to a large black box with exposed terminal posts. The truth of what’s about to happen hits me in a brutal instant, and I choke out, “No—please!”
“The accused will learn respect!” he thunders, and throws a switch on the box.
Electricity hums along the cables, streaks through every wire of the cage, and crackles through the water that pools underneath me. My body seizes, every muscle locking up like a fist, pain fitting itself to all of my nerve endings in the space of an instant. Everything shakes, my heart stops and starts, and my eyes roll until they throb.
Blood roars in my ears, a steady pounding like a hunter’s drum flushing prey to its doom, until oblivion wraps its fingers back around me and pulls me away.
* * *
“I’m a virgin!” I’d insisted two weeks earlier, whispering in the back row of the theater, feeling Agent Prescott’s creepy doll eyes all over me as I snickered with my friends. “Pure as the driven snow.”
“Plowed as the driven snow, is more like it,” Mark riposted under his breath, and Brandy clutched her stomach, trying not to cackle out loud.
“I’m being serious,” I told them primly.
“Come on, Laura.” Brandy fixed me with that no-nonsense look she had—the one that said she knew more about me than I did. “You and Zane were together for nine months, and I know you tried his … snow cone.”
Mark succumbed to another fit of snorting laughter, and my face heated. I could feel Shauna on my right side like an exposed nuclear core, radiating heat and invisible disapproval. Summoning my dignity, I stated, “There are things I did with Zane and things I didn’t, and that’s all I’m going to say.”
Even to my own ears I sounded uptight, but I had reasons. My ex-boyfriend, Zane, had been a jerk more often than he wasn’t—but he’d never pressured me to do anything I didn’t want to. We’d done mouth stuff and hands stuff, but I’d been cautious about the final frontier, and he’d respected that. And then we broke up, and Shauna and I got drunk on wine coolers, and we kind of did some Things together, too; and then she got weird about it afterward, and we still hadn’t told Brandy or Mark. And, honestly, I wasn’t entirely clear on what constituted “losing your virginity” when there were no penises to be had, anyway, because they absolutely did not cover that stuff in sex ed.
“The Judge could be anyone, and he could be after anyone. Including people in this room. And it’s only nineteen days until the next full moon,” Agent Fields declared ominously from the stage, filling the awkward silence I’d created. “So, here’s a little practical advice: don’t walk around alone at night; keep your phone charged, and keep it handy; make sure your friends and family know where you’re going to be at all times, so that if you don’t show up, someone will notice; and keep an eye out for one another. Six girls have died because the Judge caught them when they weren’t expecting it. Make sure you’re always expecting it.”
“Fuck, why don’t we all just lock ourselves in our bedrooms until we’re thirty?” Mark rolled his eyes, seeking our agreement, but we left him hanging.
It wasn’t his fault. He’s gay, but he’s a boy, and he hasn’t heard that exact same advice spewed at him about every activity that might get him out of the house. Going to the mall? Make sure people know where you are! Staying out late? Keep your phone with you at all times! Going to a party? Don’t you dare leave your drink unattended!
“The Judge is an organized killer,” Fields continued. “He sticks to a schedule, he approaches his victims when he knows they’ll be alone, and he chooses dump sites where the bodies will be found soon but where he won’t be caught in the act.
“Something else he does is depersonalize his victims.” She moved back and forth across the stage. “His letters to the press deliberately avoid using his victims’ actual names. Behavioral profiling is an inexact science, so take what I’m about to tell you with a grain of salt, but we believe the Judge is personally familiar with his victims. We believe he knows the women he kills, and that dehumanizing them is how he escapes the guilt he feels over what he does to them.”
The theater was silent.
* * *
This time, I claw my way back to consciousness like someone buried alive, dragging themself up from the grave. My body hurts all over, every muscle stiff and aching; even my eyelids feel bruised as I peel them open against the dull burn of the overhead light. I’m freezing cold, my clothes and the floor beneath me still wet from the hose, and I wonder how long I’ve been out.
Looking around, I see that I’m alone again with the surgical table and the stifling curtains, and I swallow something that tastes like relief. Propping myself up on a shaky elbow, however, I realize that the Judge has placed a few things inside the cage with me: a dented metal bedpan, a plastic cup of water, and a paper plate with a hunk of bread. It horrifies me how grateful I am; my mouth is as dry as the surface of Mars, and being electrocuted has left me with what feels like an extremely untrustworthy bladder.
My skin crawls as I use the bedpan, feeling the Judge’s eyes evaluating my body, convinced he has cameras aimed at my enclosure. Finishing as quickly as I can, I reach for the bread … and pause, wondering if maybe it’s poisoned. Nineteen days until the next full moon … that had been two weeks ago, which means there are still five days to go. Maybe. Agent Fields hadn’t come right out and said that the Judge killed on the full moon, but that was the inference. To keep me alive long enough to cut my actual heart out, he’d have to feed me, right? Even so, my stomach rebels at the mere notion of eating.
Pride and lust. I shiver again, the cold, scaly sensation of his voice rubbing against my memory. What did he mean? My face warms as I think about all the times Brandy, Mark, Shauna, and I made an unkind joke at another’s expense. Looking back, maybe it was prideful behavior. We never said those things when we thought people could hear us, but maybe we’d been careless one time. Or maybe our self-satisfied attitudes alone were enough.
But no. I shake loose my shame. This dude doesn’t intend to cut my heart out because my friends and I think we’re cool; and there is no way he’s someone my age. No teenager could have this guy’s resources. I take in the concrete floor, the curtains, the shape of the space; almost definitely, I’m in someone’s basement.
But even if I’m on the bottom floor of an abandoned factory, what teenager could possibly keep me here? To set all this up, to come and go at any time? He’d been ready when I emerged from the café. I’ve got you now.
Reaching past the bread, I pick up the water, a nerve ticking inside me like a gas burner ready to ignite. Agent Fields’s voice sweeps through me again, with all her dire pronouncements, telling us the Judge knew his victims. He didn’t stumble into that alley by coincidence, dressed like a carnival worker and carrying a sedative; the asshole had been waiting for me.
My dry throat nearly crackles as I gulp down the water. I work two night shifts a week and each one ends with a trash run; how long has this guy been watching? How long have I been on his radar? His eyes burn in my memory, two glistening stones in the frayed holes of his hood, and I try to line them up with someone I know. Insects swarm through my veins at the thought that someone I’ve spoken to, smiled at, touched, might lurk behind that mask.
He hasn’t taken it off, I realize. He was wearing it when he grabbed me, and again when he demanded that confession. Why? The only reason for him to keep his face covered at this point would be the fear that I could recognize him, right? And that would only matter if there’s still a chance I could go free.
I realize the foolishness of letting myself think it could happen, but it’s a glimmer of hope and I cling to it. Maybe there’s some way, something I could do that the other girls didn’t. He wants a confession … should I fl
atter his sense of power and give him one? Or did the other girls, the six already found dead and heartless, come to the same conclusion? Maybe telling him I’m guilty will only hasten my horrible death.
In the dim light, I explore the cage, finding the joints and testing their integrity. The metal is strong, but there have to be vulnerabilities. As I examine my prison, I try to focus on the man’s voice, the way he spoke to me. The accused is awake. I roll the sound over in my mind, struggling to pinpoint anything about its pitch or timbre that might offer a clue to who he is. The mesh walls of my enclosure swim in front of me, the golden bulb overhead reels, and—too late—I realize the water in the plastic cup was drugged.
Slumping to the floor, I drag myself through the puddle of cold water to the back of the cage. My heart thudding with sluggish resistance, I barely make it to the corner opposite the door before blackness overtakes me again.
* * *
I feel him before I see him, a presence hovering at the rim of my consciousness, a feature on the dark side of the moon. Groggy and listless, my body full of sand again, I angle my face toward the front of the cage with great effort. The Judge stands watching me, his scarlet robe and obscuring hood rendered drab by the sallow bulb. Even with the light behind him, I can still see the unearthly shine in his eyes through the ragged holes.
“She awakens,” he observes.
“Yes.” My tongue is too thick for my mouth. “She awakens.”
“The appointed hour draws closer.” The Judge inclines his head slowly. “Has the accused reconsidered her refusal to confess?”
Fear makes me dizzy, and I don’t trust my limbs to support me if I sit up, so I remain on the ground. “I want to make … a statement.”
His head tips to the side, his gaze boring through the top layer of my skin. “What sort of statement? The accused has already tested the Judge’s leniency.”
