Unspeakable

by Graham Masterton

"Well that's not really an option, I'm afraid," Judge Boynton told her.

  "If you want me to forget this ever happened, I'll forget it, I promise you. Just give me my daughter."

  "In all fairness, no can do. We've kind of committed ourselves, haven't we? You know who we are now: You've seen our faces."

  "But what do you want me for? What's this all about?"

  Judge Boynton said, "Come here, let me show you something."

  "What?"

  "Come here, I won't touch you, I promise."

  The other men stepped aside as he walked toward the window at the far end of the room. Holly looked around for any sign of sympathy or support, but all she got in return were the same shameless smiles.

  Judge Boynton stood by the window. She could see his reflection, and hers, but she could also see beyond the parking area, where there was dark scrub and rocks, and a ghostly white figure that appeared to wave in the wind.

  "You know what that is?" said Judge Boynton. "That's the spray from a waterfall, and whenever the wind gets up, it takes on the shape of a woman dancing. The Indians think that it's the spirit of Akula, the woman wonder-worker whose magic was so powerful that any man who crossed her was emasculated. That's why they call this place Phantom Woman Falls.

  "It turned out to be very appropriate that I built a weekend house here, because my friends and I have been seeing for many years how women have been emasculating men in all walks of professional life, and in the judiciary in particular.

  "These parties-they started as a way for us stuffed shirts in the legal profession to let our hair down. We called ourselves the Justice League, after the comic books. We used to hire a girl or two, drink a lot, do some fishing. But then one day one of our members complained about the way in which a woman in the Judicial Department had been promoted over his head, for no other apparent reason except that she was a woman.

  "He said, 'I'd like to bring her out here for a weekend and show her what it'sreallylike to get screwed.' So to cut a long story short, we fixed it for him."

  Judge Boynton sipped his wine and smiled at the memory. "That's how it started. Instead of hookers, we brought high-flying women to our parties and, to put it simply, we gave them an object lesson in why God created women. To serve, and to be obedient, and to give pleasure whenever required."

  Holly stared at him, appalled. "What happened to all these women?"

  "Whathappenedto them?" Judge Boynton didn't seem to understand the question.

  "Oh my God," said Holly. She felt as if she couldn't breathe.

  Judge Boynton said, "Believe me, if you're a good sport, you might even enjoy yourself. Now, why don't you relax, and have a drink, and we can all share an evening of grown-up entertainment."

  "I'm leaving," said Holly. "Mickey, drive me back to Portland-and if you won't drive me back, give me your keys."

  Mickey took off his coat and flung it over the back of an armchair. Then he unbuttoned his cuffs. "Holly my whole life I've been rejected or insulted or looked down on by the women I really want ."

  "What?"Holly stared at him in disbelief. She thought that she must have made some ridiculous misinterpretation in reading his lips. But he came right up to her, standing so close that she could feel his breath on her face.

  "It means that I've had enough, like all of my friends here have had enough." He pronounced his words very slowly and clearly, so that there was no mistake.

  "Mickey?"She felt like hitting him with her fists in frustration. This couldn't be Mickey, talking like this. Not the Mickey who told Daisy a bedtime story. Not the Mickey who had brought her lilies. And to think she had sat in the Japanese Garden only this afternoon and thought about starting an affair with him. She almost felt as if she were going mad.

  "Iwantyou," he said. "I know for sure that Kennie wants you; and Mark; and Randolph; and so what we're going to do is: We're all going to have you. You can make this easy and decide that it's going to happen anyhow, so you might as well have a good time. Or else you can make it difficult, and if you make it difficult, the odds are that one or two of us might have to slap you to get you in line."

  "Mickey, for God's sake, tell me this is some kind of joke."

  "No joke, baby. This is where the guys and me get what life has denied us."

  "You said you liked me. You said youlovedme."

  "Idolove you, Holly, don't doubt it. I've loved you ever since I first saw you standing at that barbecue with those two hot dogs, one in each hand, wondering what the hell to do with them. I always flirted with you, didn't I? I always took care of you, didn't I? Fetched and carried? But what did I ever get in return? A peck on the cheek and a plateful of pork and peppers."

  "Mickey, don't. Please, Mickey. This isn't you."

  Mickey gave her a slanting, Harrison Ford-playing-a-psychopath smile. "Sorry, Holly. I've never really been the sympathetic sort.Patient,maybe, when patience is called for. Sometimes you can get what you want by knocking somebody's teeth out. But other times you have to play it more subtle. Like fly-fishing, you know? Casting, waiting, and reeling them in. And that's what I've been doing to you: casting, waiting, and reeling you in. And here you are, landed."

  "You're not going to ," Holly began, but everything was rapidly beginning to make sense.Thiswas why she had been feeling that the world around her had altered so much, and that bad luck was sniffing so close to her heels. She hadn't been able to understand what was wrong, but of course it had been much too close to her, so close that she couldn't focus on it. It had been Mickey all the time. His lips had said that he loved her but his eyes had been watching her with nothing but dispassion. A raven's eyes. A predator's. In a way, it was worse than discovering that he had been killed.

  "God, you're evil," she said.

  "No," said Mickey. "Just tired of you treating me like some kind of second cousin." Before she could stop him, he ducked his head down and kissed her forehead. "You're mine now. You'reours."

  She swallowed. The men all shuffled in closer now, still smiling. When she spoke, her throat was so constricted that she couldn't stop herself from coughing. "If I"-cough-"if I let you do this will you swear to me that nothing will happen to Daisy?"

  Judge Boynton beamed and lifted his glass. "Now, that's one of the things that I really like in a woman: maternal instinct."

  Raven's Revenge

  "This is the arena," announced Judge Boynton proudly, leading the way into the bedroom. In the center of the room stood a four-poster bed with carved pine pillars and headboard, hung with heavy orange-and-gold brocade curtains and covered with a matching throw. The floor was carpeted in cream shag pile, and on the walls hung a series of erotic oil paintings that might have been titledNudes of All Nations.It looked as if it had been designed for aPlayboyspread, circa1973.

  Mickey ushered Holly into the room. Close beside her, Martin A. Brimmer said, "Forget about your inhibitions, Holly. This is a special place. Private. Nobody else will ever find out what happened here."

  "This is nothing to do with inhibitions," Holly retorted. "This is nothing but gang rape by a group of losers who are too old and too ugly to find a woman who wants to go to bed with them."

  "Holly," warned Mickey. "We're thinking of Daisy now, aren't we?"

  "Oh, sorry, Uncle Mickey. And to think I let you sit on her bed and tell her a bedtime story "

  "That was a story about somebody who did somebody else a favor-and got rewarded for it."

  "That was a story about men who get what they want by deception, and if they can't get it by deception, they get it by force."

  "Come on, now, Holly," put in Randolph Bruckman. "We're all friends here, aren't we?"

  "How can you call yourself a friend?"

  Randolph gave her a private little smile. "To tell you the truth, I've always wanted to ask you out to dinner. Never had the nerve, I guess."

  "Well, this will save you the price of a meal, won't it?"

  It was then, however, that Judge Boynton said, "Okay, gen
tlemen. Let's do it."

  Mickey and Martin seized Holly's arms while another man came up behind her and tried to gag her with a silk scarf. She kicked and struggled and thrashed her head from side to side, but two other men grabbed her legs and they were far too strong for her. Mickey seized her chin and held it in a clamplike grip while the scarf was pulled tight between her teeth and fiercely knotted at the back of her head. She stared at Mickey with bulging eyes, trying to appeal to him to stop these men from hurting her and to let her go."Unnnffffff!"she grunted at him, but all he did was grin and turn away. The next thing she knew, a dark woolen scarf was tied over her eyes so that she was blinded as well as deaf.

  She was suddenly swamped in total helplessness and absolute terror. She felt as if she had been swept away from the shore by an icy wave, in darkness, and that she was drowning, with nobody to see her and nobody to hear her. She had always been able to cope with her deafness, because she could still see, but her blindness made her deafness even more overwhelming than ever.

  She was going to die. Her whole world was cold and black and chaotic but utterly soundless. She couldn't even manage a muffled scream, and if she had, she couldn't have heard it. It had been frightening enough when she was a child, seeing Margaret fall from her bedroom balcony in flames, but now death was afterher,and she had never realized how heart-clenchingly terrifying it was going to be, to know that the end of her life had almost arrived.

  Her arms were forcibly lifted and her sweater was pulled over her head. Her bra catch was unfastened by fumbling fingers. She violently twisted her hips, but two men unbuttoned her jeans and dragged them down to her ankles, and at last her panties were pulled down too.

  She had no idea of what the men were saying- whether they were silent or whether they were laughing or whether they were whooping with excitement. She was so panicky now that she found it difficult to breathe, but there was no way of begging them to stop.

  She was heaved across the bed. Four or five men turned her over onto her back, raising her arms over her head and opening her legs. They held her pinned down until she felt narrow nylon cords being tied around her wrists and ankles, leaving her spread-eagled and helpless.

  She thought:Now, now they're going to do it,and braced herself, biting hard on her gag.

  But then there was a long pause. Thirty seconds went by almost a minute.

  What are they doing? Maybe they've changed their minds. No, they haven't changed their minds. They're going to rape me and then they're going to kill me. They'llhaveto kill me, won't they, because I know who they are. Oh God, I hope they don't do the same thing to Daisy. Please don't let them hurt Daisy.

  She tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and steadily, the way her yoga instructor had shown her, but it was almost impossible with her mouth so tightly gagged. She kept swallowing saliva, almost choking.

  Still nothing happened; none of the men touched her. She lay completely still, trying to feel them, trying to sense what they were doing. Were they still in the room? Maybe theyhadchanged their minds. Maybe they would let her go if she promised not to tell anybody what had happened here tonight.

  But she knew with iron-cold certainty they wouldn't. How could they? A judge, a police commander, several respected attorneys, a police lieutenant, and a court official.

  How could they afford to let her live?

  Judge Boynton had boasted that none of their previous victims had complained, and there could be only one reason for that. She thought of Sarah Hargitay and Jennie McLellan and Kay Padowska and Helena Carlsson. All of them independent, strong, and very attractive women, and all of them had disappeared without a trace, except for Sarah Hargitay's shoe, which had been discovered at Bridal Veil, only a few miles from here.

  Oh God, Daisy. Oh God, let them do what they like to me but don't let them kill me. What will little Daisy do if they kill me?

  Holly felt something soft and heavy touch her cheek, like plums. Instantly she jerked her face away, but then something else brushed her other cheek, something harder, and then her shoulder. She felt a man climb onto the bed beside her, then another, and another. She could feel them, she could feel their weight and she could feel the heat of their bodies, and she could smell them too: a strong, rank smell, stale sweat and Gucci aftershave and alcohol. They were all naked, all of these men, all hairy, and they were rolling and massaging their penises all over her body, even the soles of her feet, as a way of exciting themselves.

  Wildly she kept on jerking her head from side to side, but that only encouraged them to press their penises against her even harder. Even though she was tied so tightly, she managed to twist her hips and buck herself up and down on the bed, but again that only seemed to excite the men even more.

  She felt warm slime against her left cheek, and she was so disgusted that she retched. She knew that she couldn't break free, but she wasn't going to let them think that she was ever going to give in to them. She was trembling uncontrollably with effort and she could feel the blood banging inside her head, but she kept on struggling and grunting and more than anything else her soul screamed out,No!

  Fingers started to stray all over her, tugging at her nipples and sliding right inside her, single fingers at first, then three and four fingers at a time. There was nothing she could do but shake her head and let out furious noises, like an animal.

  Oh God, let this be over. Oh, please, God, let this be over.

  There was another pause. She tried to catch her breath again, but the smell of sexually aroused men was so repulsive that she gagged again, and bile ran down the back of her throat. Then a heavily built man climbed onto the bed and positioned himself between her legs. She could feel his hairy thighs against her skin. He opened her up with his fingers, and then she felt the swollen head of his penis pressing against her.

  Please God.

  Something happened-something so jumbled and unexpected that she couldn't work out what it was. The man bounced on the bed and struggled off her urgently, as if he had found a snake in the sheets. Some of the other men started to struggle around too: She felt three or four of them collide with the side of the mattress. She couldn't imagine what was going on, but they all seemed to have totally lost interest in their orgy in a matter of seconds.

  She thought she faintly saw two or three flashes through her blindfold, and then she smelled something smoky and acrid.Don't tell me the house is on fire and they've just left me here, all tied up,she thought. She grunted and pulled at the ropes around her wrists, but the men had knotted them so tight that she couldn't even begin to loosen them.

  Then she felt a hand placed on top of her head, firmly but very gently, as if somebody were trying to reassure her to stay calm. Her head was lifted from the pillow and the blindfold tugged free.

  To her surprise, the house was in darkness, except for a dim illumination from the windows. A shape was standing over the bed, something huge and very black. She stared up at it, still gagged, unable to cry out. Her heart almost melted with fear. This was a hundred times more frightening than the Justice League. This was the thing that took all of your happiness away. This was bad luck incarnate, and now it had caught up with her at last, and it was greedy for her misery.

  Outside the bedroom window the lightning flickered on the peak of Mount Hood, and she saw black shiny feathers and eyes that glittered in the darkness like beetles.

  Another black shape appeared in the doorway, and then another. The lightning flickered again. She should have known that the mountain would eventually draw her to her death.

  It was then, though, that her gag was untied, and one of the black shapes approached the foot of the bed. She saw a knife shine, and her ankles were released, quickly followed by her wrists. The huge black figure picked her up off the bed and wrapped the throw around her.

  Only a second later all the lamps came back on again, and Holly found herself sitting on the bed next to George Greyeyes. He was dressed in a black leather jacket, but the black gleam
that she had imagined were feathers were simply his greased-back hair. At the end of the bed, folding up his jackknife, was another Indian whom she didn't recognize. He was twentyish, broad-faced, good-looking, with a plaid shirt that didn't conceal his bodybuilder physique. A third young Indian appeared, slighter and skinnier, with glasses and with a leather tool pouch attached to his belt.

  George Greyeyes took hold of Holly's hand. "Are you okay? Look: Your clothes are all here. Why don't you get dressed?"

  She nodded, numbly. "Oh, George. Oh, God. They were going to-"

  "Shh, everything's okay now. But we have to get out of here."

  Holly stared at him. She still couldn't quite believe what had happened. "I have to find Daisy."

  "Daisy's fine. Apparently somebody nabbed her while she was walking home and drove around with her for a couple of hours. But after that, they dropped her back at the end of the street, safe and sound."