by Jack Ketchum
He showed her some of her father’s mail, two circulars and a phone bill, told her that they’d been brought to him by their own mailman, who was part of the Organization too, for her to see. So she’d understand just how easy it was to get to him any time they cared to.
He showed her a roster of her students’ names and addresses.
On the eleventh day, a Sunday, he ordered her to suck his cock. It was the first time she’d refused him anything in several days. He tied her to the bolted-down chair, pulled off her blindfold and produced an over-and-under double-barrel shotgun. He ordered her to open her mouth and when she would not forced the shotgun into her mouth, the cold metal cutting her lips and grinding past her teeth. She had no way of knowing if it was loaded or not until he pulled the trigger.
Which he did.
He replaced the shotgun with his cock and this time she did as he said. She wondered if he’d have dared had Kath been in the room. Two nights later she assumed she had her answer when he rolled her blindfolded out of the Long Box, told her to lie right where she was, tied her hands behind her back and shortly thereafter a naked Kath descended upon her face. She suspected this was not Kath’s idea because she seemed reluctant at first but eventually began to buck and moan. And then she must have said something to him about Sara’s smell because she was finally allowed upstairs to take a shower, both of them standing in the bathroom looking on so she wouldn’t try to squeeze her way out the window.
In the shower as she soaped her naked belly she realized she was showing.
She wondered if they noticed.
On the twentieth day she felt the baby move inside her.
The beatings continued.
For Stephen the days passed working at his shop in town or out in the garage. Gluing down veneer, repairing legs of chairs and tables, finishing and polishing old wood. He created a pine bookshelf, a nightstand, an oak desk. He was fast and efficient and charged reasonably for his work and time. He brought each job in on schedule which was a rarity these days. He was affable, friendly, listened carefully to his clients’ needs and was good at what he did. No master craftsman but then this was not New York City either. He had no lack of customers.
Either he was working with wood or he was working on Sara.
He wasn’t sure if it was Sara or the shop or the struggle with McCann that had given him the case of ten-donitis. But the elbow was swollen into a little marble at the joint and twinged constantly. He was left-handed and now his grip was considerably weakened and the elbow hurt miserably if he used the hand too much. There were mornings he’d have a hard time digging his keys out of his pocket and an even harder time locking the door behind him. He was popping two ibuprofen every four hours and one progesterone a day, the latter on Doc Richardson’s prescription. If it didn’t help in two weeks, the doctor said, if the swelling didn’t go down he’d have to inject a steroid directly into the tendon. It wasn’t a prospect he looked forward to.
Every time he used that arm to swing the whip or drive a nail it hurt him.
He began to have fleeting headaches and strange, frequent memories of his mother’s funeral.
At the service they’d set six metal folding chairs at the gravesite, one for each of her chief mourners. His father, his mother’s sister June and brothers Bill and Ernie plus himself and Kath. Kath had a stomach virus that grey September day so she elected to stand behind the chairs and he to stand with her. At eighty-two, with heart disease and emphysema Uncle Bill found it easier not to sit only to have to stand again so he stood too. Which left three of the six chairs empty.
His father sat in the middle. Aunt June and Uncle Ernie sat together to the far left. There was no love lost between his father and either of them. So that one chair remained open to the left of him and two remained open to the right. The minister invited any other members of the assembly to have a seat but not a soul among the twenty-five people or so attending really wished to sit with him. The mourners were there for his mother, not for him. He realized his father had not a single real friend among them and no family of his own left and thought with some amazement that he’d never seen anyone look quite so lonely.
That his father should sit unattended wasn’t right, wasn’t even proper and disconcerted by this, embarrassed, the minister asked again.
Again there was hesitation. Why he didn’t sit with his father himself he didn’t know but instead he stayed with Kath. Finally two old women Stephen had never seen in his life took pity on him or perhaps they took pity on the minister and filled the vacant seats on either side. The sixth chair remained open throughout the ceremony as though for some departed guest.
Why this memory should come back to him now so frequently puzzled him. But it came at the strangest times. When he was going for the whip. When he was emptying her bedpan those few instances Kath wasn’t around to do it. When he manacled her to the X-frame. The time they allowed her upstairs for a shower. He would see his father sitting alone and stony in that folding chair.
One day over dinner he realized that he was disappointed with Sara in some ways. Or disappointed with his own responses. It seemed to him that his fantasies were never quite matched by reality when he acted on them. Her sufferings were never quite as provocative as he’d imagined, her helplessness and nudity never quite as stimulating, her submissiveness never as fulfilling. He probably needed to be more spontaneous, he thought. To plan less and imagine less. That way he wouldn’t always be forced to match his thinking to reality.
He also recognized early on the need to escalate. At least for now.
To push his limits as well as hers. That was what the strangling was about and the heat lamp and the studded whip.
He’d promised Kath he wouldn’t fuck her but he didn’t say anything about her using her mouth. No promises there. Even so she’d been angry about the blowjob and he thought that telling her was probably a mistake. But for some reason he couldn’t help but tell her. He needed her to know. It was part of being Kath’s master as well as Sara’s. So was having her sit on Sara’s face. She hadn’t wanted to do it. He’d had to threaten a whipping.
Escalate.
It was actually a little scary. On the twelfth day he had her on the X-frame and inside the headbox and he’d taken a Swiss Army knife off his worktable. His idea was to use the corkscrew on her clit. See what it did to her. But instead he automatically opened to the long blade. He always kept it sharp. He thought, fine, I’ll use that first on her nipples and then the corkscrew on her clit but when he approached her with the knife in hand he started to shake. He started circling the areola which seemed to be darkening as the pregnancy advanced but the shaking got worse. He had to stop.
You’re afraid you’re going to kill her, he thought.
You really could some day, you know that? You could go too far much too soon if you let yourself.
Which made him a little afraid of her.
Not that she’d get away somehow because that was damned unlikely and besides, the Organization stories were working, he could tell. No, you’re afraid of her because she might just make you want to kill her one of these days just by being available for the killing and that would be very spontaneous and very much an escalation, wouldn’t it?
Then he thought about the baby. It would be terrible to harm the baby. She was just beginning to show.
He felt sure she’d have made a good mother.
In some ways he actually admired her. She had guts and will and stamina. The will he’d have to break, was already breaking but he wanted to let her hold onto the stamina. She’d need it for what they had in mind.
He folded the sharp blade back into the Swiss Army knife and pulled out the corkscrew and when the shaking stopped finally he went to work on her the way he’d planned to.
Kath wished she could call Gail. Her best and oldest friend. They’d met way back in nursing school and stayed friends even though these days Gail lived in the City working at Bellevue. But Stephen was always afrai
d of somebody dropping by unexpectedly. She wasn’t going to be allowed to encourage friendships for the duration. The duration was turning into a damned long time.
It wasn’t fair.
She hated the isolation.
She thought that Sara wasn’t the only one imprisoned here.
Sure she had work at the hospital to get her out of the house five days a week but she didn’t really have any friends among the staff there. He wouldn’t let her go to any meetings or rallies either. He didn’t want them to be seen, he said, till it was over. So she was stuck with the house and the basement and the television and that was it.
He’d almost completely stopped fucking her. That was another thing.
On the sixth day she drove home from work in a blinding summer rainstorm and ran directly upstairs to run a good hot shower and change out of her drenched clothes and when she came back down toweling her hair, wanting to get a Coke from the fridge, she saw that the door to the cellar was open. She felt a moment’s panic thinking that somehow she’d managed to get out of the Long Box, to get free. Until she looked out the window and saw that Stephen’s pickup was parked behind her own car in the driveway.
She walked downstairs and saw that he hadn’t even bothered to change out of his work clothes which were just as wet as hers had been. Wet sawdust caked the legs and knees of his jeans.
He already had her out of the box and up on the X-frame and was beating her ass with a paddle. He had the paddle in one hand and his cock in the other and she turned and went upstairs. Grossed-out and furious at both of them.
She knew perfectly well why she was mad and disgusted with Stephen.
Her feelings for Sara were more complex.
On the one hand it was as though Sara were a kind of rival. He sure as hell had never run home to have sex with her five minutes after walking through the door.
But she was also aware that Sara was her savior too in a way. That if it weren’t for Sara up there on the X-frame it would be her. And if her sex life was practically non existent these days so were the kinky games he always needed to play.
So why was she so mad at her? Why so disgusted?
The disgust part was easy. The dull unwashed hair. The stink of sweat and sometimes urine. She could guess that the mad part was just plain jealousy. Jealousy over the baby she carried inside and jealous that he wanted her—wanted to use her in spite of the dirtiness and the smell. But she kept coming back to the fact that it was Sara or it was her up there and why in the world would anyone in her right mind be jealous of the way he was using her because it hurt for god’s sake. It was fucking degrading and it hurt. It confused her.
Anyone in her right mind, she thought.
Maybe she was crazy. She’d considered it seriously from time to time.
Maybe you’d have to be crazy to live with him.
But she’d stuck thus far. She knew she’d play it through. She’d lie to Sara and befriend her—she was turning into a world-class liar—take her side in little things like the shower and the cat, talk to her quietly and seriously about the Organization. All of it an act. See where things went. That was what she’d do.
And then the oddest thing happened.
She hadn’t wanted it. Stephen had kidded, cajoled, yelled and finally threatened so that eventually she gave in and went down and shed her clothes and straddled her and at first nothing was going on. Certainly Sara wasn’t cooperating. Her tongue and lips just lay there under her wet and slack and then Kath started to move, not expecting much at first but doing it all on her own with no direction from Stephen and even with no cooperation coming from below soon she thought she was going to fucking explode, she was moving back and forth and side to side and directing it all herself, total power over her body and over Sara’s, wholly in command of the pace and the action until finally she found herself shuddering, quivering in the grip of the most powerful orgasm of her entire life.
She couldn’t believe it.
It only made her feelings all the more complicated. That this should happen with a woman. When she’d never even considered having sex with a woman before. And this particular woman, their captive, Stephen’s captive and now in a way that was far more real than before, her own.
The night of the fourteenth day she waited until Stephen was asleep. She took the flashlight off its hook in the kitchen and walked quietly downstairs. She sat down in the chair and let her light play across the Long Box, annoyed with herself and uncomfortable with what thoughts and feelings had drawn her here. Annoyed with Sara and with Stephen too.
She could imagine her breathing inside the box. The rise and fall of her breasts. The slow small shift inside her belly.
Could imagine the cord like driftwood to which the baby clung, tossed in a rich warm sea.
Gestation
FOURTEEN
It was only by accident that she found the equipment.
Months had passed and by then much had changed.
She knew who they were for one thing.
Stephen and Katherine Teach. Forty-six and forty-four respectively. They’d met seven years ago on a ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sussex, New Jersey—she knew where she was now too, a small rural town hours northwest of the City—where he was a patient and she was his day-nurse. He had nearly put his eye out with a chunk of wood when his power saw hit a knot in a two-by-four. They’d dated. Married six months later.
Both were only children with no living parents. Kath was Catholic and Stephen was a Baptist though neither went to church much anymore. Stephen liked to brag that it didn’t matter, he’d read the Bible six times over cover to cover including the begats, he was his own church. They liked action movies and comedies and Chinese food and pizza. They disliked house work completely. Especially doing the dishes. As though the remains of a meal were revolting to them. They had no discernable hobbies unless you counted the anti-abortion rallies and demonstrations they could no longer go to now that Sara was with them and you counted the Organization. They read only magazines—not even the newspaper. They got their news off the TV screen. Said it was easier.
They owned a CD player and never used it. Instead they watched TV.
Katherine was barren.
That was the word they used. Barren.
They’d always been saddened by this. They felt that a baby would solidify the bond between them. At least Kath did.
Nowadays she rarely spoke to Stephen.
So she learned all this from Kath. Who was lonely. Who was bored. Who spoke to her a lot.
And who—for lack of a better, more hideous word—had become her lover.
Since that first afternoon with Kath astride her outside the Long Box she had come to her more and more frequently. Always alone. Usually at night when Stephen was asleep but sometimes during the day on lunchbreaks or on weekends when he was out of the house on some errand or other, about once a week at first and then twice a week and then nearly every night.
She seemed entranced by Sara’s body. You’d have thought it were a beautiful body but it wasn’t. Not anymore. At least not to Sara’s thinking. The body was heavy and slow. The waist was gone, the belly huge. A ragged dark line ran from the top to the bottom of her abdomen. Her legs were swollen. Blue veins mapped the surfaces of her breasts. Her nipples leaked pale nearly colorless colostrum.
All these Kath licked and squeezed and bit. Lapped at the colostrum. Caressed the swollen belly as though caressing the baby inside it. I’m a nurse, she said. I’m just going to examine you.
Kath never did bathe or shower nearly often enough.
Her insides tasted bitter.
What Kath did to her and made her do seemed to shame her and excite her all at once. When it was over she would always want to talk. Chattering away like she was talking to some girlfriend. About her patients at the hospital or the job Stephen was working on. About the weather and her car needing a tune-up and the phone bills and the payments on the house and the movie they’d seen on HBO the nig
ht before. Whatever. Ner vous talk with her eyes averted while Sara stood tied to the X-frame or more often to the chair or the sliding panel of the Long Box.
She would tell her stories of the Organization that were just as bad as Stephen’s.
One day she showed her pictures. Black-and-white photos of her father watering his lawn. Of her students playing kickball on the Winthrop schoolgrounds. Of her sister stepping out of her car with a shopping bag in her arms.
Of Greg. Walking some tree-lined street in Rye between his wife and son.
She was tied to the chair.
“He’s handsome,” she said. “I don’t blame you for wanting to make it with the guy.”
“We didn’t just make it. We were lovers.”
“What about the wife and kid?”
“What about them?”
“They’re a family. Look at them. They look happy together.”
She looked at the photos again. At least he wasn’t smiling.
“They weren’t.”
“It’s still a family. Why would you want to break up a family?”
“I didn’t.”
“You would have. You would have sooner or later.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I think it’s fucking selfish of you. You’re better off here. It’s better for everybody.”
If what Kath felt was a mix of shame and excitement Sara felt only the shame. But as with Stephen she submitted. Not to do so would be murderous as well as suicidal. The photos were proof if she even needed proof by then. The Organization existed. Whether they knew it or not, everyone she loved was depending on her behavior.
Stephen had shown her a pistol one afternoon. He said it was a .45. Spun the barrel for her. Threw the safety. Pointed it at her. Clicked.
