by Jack Ketchum
“You really sure you want to ask me that, Sandy?”
He laughed again. “Nah. What’re friends for, right?”
“It’s nothing illegal. I can tell you that much.”
“Did I ask if it was illegal? So. Anything else?”
And that was the extent of Sandy’s curiosity.
“Yes. Two names. Annie Graham at 914-332-8765. And I guess this is a sister or maybe an aunt—Linda Schap. 603-434-9943.”
They were the only two names listed in the book without an accompanying address so he guessed she must know them by heart. That meant these two were probably close to her. He needed people who were close.
“That last one’s a New Hampshire exchange,” Sandy said.
“Okay, but I need the addresses and anything else you can find out for me. I also need her teaching schedule at Winthrop. And a list of her students if possible.”
“Easy. School computer. Hey, just like old times, buddy boy!”
“Just like old times.”
He hung up and joined Kath on the couch for the tail-end of the movie. Gory shit.
Not bad.
She’d finished the goddamn chips though.
The Second Day
SIX
June 9, 1998
4:02 A.M.
She dozed and woke, dozed and woke again over and over as though she were in the grip of a high fever, her mind shut down to expectations, possibilities, danger, even to the reality of where she lay. It was as though she were waiting for something, some sign that life could once again return to normal. Until then she would remain dreamless, thoughtless, suspended in the moment. It was not something her will imposed. Her body imposed it for her.
On the last of these wakings she heard a sound, dim yet oddly familiar, seeming to come from directly above her, yet so low it might have come from anywhere in the house over whatever distance to eventually reach her here in her coffin.
A rumble. Something trembling. Yet she felt no vibration.
She pressed her ear to the rough wood.
Continuous, almost musical.
She listened. And when finally she identified the sound she fell back into the first true sleep of the morning. Her body and mind finally settling in, attempting to replenish themselves after a day in which both had burned to exhaustion.
Until well after dawn the cat remained lying just above her heart atop the Long Box.
And for most of that time continued purring.
SEVEN
3:30 P.M.
At least she was drinking and eating a little. American cheese on white bread. Hunger kicking in, jarring loose the survival systems. At least she wasn’t going to die on them.
Like the other one.
Stephen had her tied to the chair, just blindfolded this time so she could eat, not inside the headbox. He said it was time Kath made her presence known, time for her to begin. So that was what she was doing.
Light from the single bare 100-watt bulb that dangled from the ceiling made weird ugly shadows in the corners as though things were crouching there, hemming them in. She would never get to like this room. No matter how much time she spent here.
She took the empty plate and patted Sara’s hand.
“Good,” she said. She walked to the back of the room and put the plate on the worktable and sat down in the director’s chair in front of her.
“Who are you?” Sara said. “Why am I here?” The voice wasn’t strong but it wasn’t exactly meek either.
“The Organization wants you here. Same as me.”
“You?”
“That’s right.”
She watched the woman consider it.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe in any Organization.”
She laughed and bent over and took her hand in both of hers, a little surprised when she didn’t try to pull away. Maybe this was going to be easier than she’d thought.
It was still too early to tell.
“You’d better believe. Look, I’m not supposed to be saying we know this but I will. Your father’s a retired high school principal. I forget what year he retired. Your mother never worked again after you were born. Strictly a homemaker from then on. She took care of you and your sister Linda who lives in Hanover, New Hampshire. She’s forty-three and single and works as a nurse on the pediatrics ward in the hospital there. You have a good friend named Annie Graham who lives in Harrison, New York, not far from where Greg lives. Greg runs a travel agency in Rye with his wife, Diane. They have a son, Alan I think his name is, who’s ten. We know your teaching schedule at Winthrop and we know all your students’ names and addresses. They’re upstairs on the kitchen table. Want me to go get them?”
She saw that Sara was crying softly, could tell by the way she was breathing. Scared crying.
“I don’t understand,” she said. And now the voice was small.
Kath gently squeezed her hand.
“You will. It’ll take a little while but trust me, you will.”
“He said something about a baby.”
“There’s plenty of time to talk about that. Just remember that the Organization’s been watching you real close and for a very long time. Same thing with us, even though we’re a part of it. They’re watching us too, see, not just you. They want to find out how this goes. It’s important. Believe me, Sara, I know exactly what you’re feeling. I felt the same way once. I really did. It’ll pass. You just have to give it time.”
“Why do I have to be naked? Why did he beat me?”
She withdrew her hands.
“It’s the way the Organization wants it to be. I already told you. You’ve got to go with whatever they want from you. Really, truly submit. With all your heart and soul. Just like I did. Then nobody else will get hurt. Nobody. Not even you anymore.”
“But I don’t…”
She got up. “We’ll talk again soon, I promise. But right now I’ve got a billion things to do. The place is a goddamn mess. So you just sit there awhile and think about what I said. Think real hard.”
“I don’t…I don’t even know your name.”
She almost laughed. “Don’t worry. There’s time for that too. Think of it as being on a need-to-know basis. Like in the movies, right?”
She picked up the plate and flicked the wall switch and left her there in darkness thinking, first step taken. Stephen will be pleased.
It was important to please him.
EIGHT
4:45 P.M.
The headbox seemed to have gotten smaller. That was impossible she knew but the damp darkness seemed more enclosing than before. The musty-carpet smell thicker. She tried to move her head as though movement could clear the air, circulate the air inside but she could only move it slightly, half an inch or so in either direction because the back was latched to the X-frame. She was spread-eagled on the X-frame. Facing outward to whatever, whoever was out there.
She had been here about half an hour now. That was what she guessed. Guessing the time was her one form of recreation. It held no rewards because she never knew if she was right or wrong. But it was better than thinking.
Images kept skittering like night-crabs across a moonless beach.
Rushing to the plane that day, late as was usual in those days after Danny died, so late leaving her parents’ winter home in Sarasota that she almost missed the flight, a packed Freddy Laker flight where you had to seat yourself, leaning over a man in an aisle seat way in the back, breathless, saying to him is this seat taken? and the man who was Greg Glover she learned after two vodka tonics to sooth her nerves, the man then taking off his sunglasses and smiling saying no, it’s all yours.
The frozen ice. The hole in the frozen ice so small she could barely believe he’d slipped through. The surface of the ice for yards and yards around. Searching the pale bright face of it for a hand, a boot, a glimpse of clothing.
She and Annie little girls, kissing each other goodbye at her dad’s car because Annie went to Catholic school and
Catholic school started earlier than public school did and it was the end of the summer so Annie had to go back, leave Rockport and Sara who wouldn’t see her now for another whole two weeks. Both of them crying the innocent tears of little girls who are wholly in love with one another and unashamed.
The ice. The face she had never found but had imagined countless times pressed up to the ice from beneath. Cold ice and drifting water.
All these memories. Good and tender. Bad and worse. Leveled somehow onto the same plane now. Each a heavy weight upon her heart as heavy as the headbox on her shoulders. Racing unbidden through her consciousness to torment her.
It was better to guess the time. How long she had been in this or that position. The exact time of day. The hour, the minute, the creeping passage of seconds.
The only game she herself had devised and not them.
She flinched when he touched her.
He smiled and mentally noted it for later. Flinching was grounds for punishment. Of course she didn’t know that yet but she would.
He strapped the leather belt around her waist and buckled it. From the belt depended half a dozen wide silver rings but he wouldn’t be needing them just now. He adjusted the belt so that the second, vertical buckle was in the center of her back and the second leather beltstrap hung directly between her legs in front. He opened the jar of Vaseline and lightly greased the thick four-inch leather dildo in the center of the belt. Opened her up and greased her too. She tried to squirm away from his fingers inside her but there wasn’t far she could go on the X-frame.
Another breach of conduct duly noted.
He held her open and inserted the dildo and even with the Vaseline she was dry and tight but by moving it back and forth, in and out he got it into her up to the hilt and then ran the strap up through the cheeks of her ass and through the second buckle and tightened it firmly and buckled it off.
He could hear her faintly squealing inside the box.
He stood back and watched the roll of her hips, she was trying to scrape the thing off against the X-frame but both belts were buckled up tight, they were there for the duration, the belts were going nowhere.
For as long as he wanted.
To remind her exactly who was who in this relationship of theirs.
He walked over to his worktable and opened a drawer and took out the Polaroid camera.
All she could think of from then on was this thing inside her.
This lifeless thing fucking her. This constant violation.
She couldn’t begin to guess how many minutes, how many hours it stayed there.
NINE
6:10 P.M.
The two of them stood behind her as he lifted off the headbox and tied the black scarf over her eyes. Kath could see the raw spots where the box had rested on her collarbones. She wondered how the harness and dildo felt. It was new. He’d never made her wear one. She felt a twinge of something that was almost like jealousy but of course it wasn’t that because jealousy in this case would be ridiculous. They were probably damned uncomfortable. She watched him gag her.
They moved around in front of her, Kath following behind, giving him space. Knowing he’d need it.
“Here’s the story,” Stephen said. “The rules are that I do anything I want with you and you don’t flinch, you don’t pull away. You don’t resist in any way whatsoever. You understand me? Even when I put my fingers inside you like I did before. All I was doing was opening you up, lubricating you so it wouldn’t hurt so much. And you try to pull away. A that’s stupid and B it breaks the rules. So I guess you can figure what comes next. Sorry.”
The whip had eight long leather tongues, each tongue ending in a twisted ball.
She had felt it on her own body. An evil old acquaintance. The tongues stung you, raised instant welts if he whipped you hard enough. The balls bruised you, punched at you like tiny fists. Which was worse she couldn’t say.
She watched him drag the whip up sidearm from the concrete floor and slap her heavily across the breasts, first one breast and then the other, over and over, slap, slap, his arm like a metronome. Regular and more brutal she knew precisely because of the regularity, red streaks appearing instantly on Sara’s pale flesh, she wasn’t a topless sunbather like Kath was, she was probably too modest, blotching as he crisscrossed them with new strokes and she knew that the woman would welt up soon and that if he continued long enough the welts would bleed. She heard the woman screaming inside the gag, saw the muscles of her face pinch tight with pain, the body writhing and shocked by each successive blow and trying with no hope whatsoever to avoid them, every blow aimed at her breasts, each and every one with no relief except that he was moving from from one breast to the other, not much there, breasts being a kind of thing of his, a kind of fixation with him like having babies was a fixation with him and maybe they were connected, they probably were. He liked to suck her own breasts and bite them especially the nipples, he was like a baby himself sometimes always wanting mama’s titty and she knew how this felt, she knew exactly how Sara felt under the whip. She’d been there. She could feel it in her own breasts, tingling.
She figured it must be sympathy.
TEN
9:55 P.M.
They’d let her use the bedpan but now she was back on the rack again. Mercifully, her hands were only tied behind her to the center of the X-frame instead of overhead. At least her fingers weren’t going numb. When her legs got to trembling too much she could kneel for a moment on the concrete floor but in that position her forearms slipped down and spread apart painfully over the lower V-shape of the frame and it was too much to take for very long. Still it provided some relief.
Whatever he’d used on her breasts had taken out most of the sting. She felt a kind of throbbing heat there and a raw spot in the center of her right nipple. The one which for some reason had taken the most abuse.
She was blindfolded, not inside the headbox.
Another small mercy.
There was a rubber ball inside her mouth. It was affixed to a leather gag strapped across her face.
They had traded the harness and vagina plug for another one in which small dildos penetrated both her vagina and her anus. She imagined she could almost feel them touching inside her.
She was cold. Her throat was terribly dry. A taste in her mouth like fallen leaves.
Humiliation. Discomfort. Deprivation. Pain.
The Four Horse men of her own personal Apocalypse.
Her only comfort was the cat, who had taken to her for some reason or perhaps was only curious. She would feel it now and then rubbing up against her ankles, its cool wet nose and soft haunches, and once, its calloused warm front paw-pads and the tiny sharp retracted claws on her thigh just above the knee. She imagined the cat standing on its hind legs looking up at her, though as yet she had no idea even of its color or size or the color of its eyes staring up at this strange naked human tied to a tree.
She imagined a tabby. A female. She imagined her eyes were green.
Alone in the early days following Daniel’s death and her divorce she had taken a six-week-old kitten, a tabby, out of the Humane Society shelter and sardonically named her Neely after the doomed Patty Duke character in VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. The cat lived with her until her death, of cancer, only last year. The name she had given to her, that of a fictional junkie, became ironic and practically prescient and not really very funny at all because in the almost three years prior to her death the cat had come down with diabetes and Sara had needed to give her insulin shots twice a day, into the heavy fold of skin at the back of her neck, at feeding time.
It was incon venient as hell building her entire schedule around the shots and running every morning to the litter box to check the blood-sugar levels in her urine but she did it gladly because nobody could comfort her the way Neely did. It was almost always at night that the sadness and loss and loneliness descended upon her and when they did the cat was magically always there, seemed to sense the yawning gulf
of emptiness opening up inside her even as it grew, seemed ever alert and responsive to this alien human need. The cat was right there. Curled warm and soft in her lap or lying on her chest purring until these awful moments passed and long after if she wished, asking only a stroke or a scratch behind the ear or even just the heat of her body if Sara’s soul could offer up neither of these just then. As though she knew that this was exactly her role in life, exactly what she was born for, this gentle ser vice.
Sara found her lying in the darkness of her closet one day and the cat could barely raise her head. In the vet’s office she held and stroked her and looked into the green-golden eyes as he administered the shots. One which would rocket her deep into anaesthetic sleep and the next which would kill her. She saw the head droop and fall and felt her heart break yet again.
She had not gotten another cat despite her family and friends’ advice. There was too much loss for her in the world. And then she met Greg. For a long time he’d made her—if not forget—at least put aside the losses and focus on what they had together, on the present.
She couldn’t imagine what he was going through.
Or her parents. Or her sister.
Her parents and sister didn’t even know about the abortion—or the pregnancy for that matter. She assumed they’d know everything now once she was reported missing. Her parents were strict Catholics, especially her father, her sister lapsed the same as she was. Who would tell them? How?
She was glad that none of them could know the half of this.
She had to kneel again. The muscles in her calves were jumping.
She spread her arms as wide as she could to accommodate the V-shape and sunk slowly down. The floor was hard and cold. The wooden beams dug into her biceps and they began to ache. She tried to relax her legs, to breath easily and regularly. It helped.
