Tit for Tat

by Steven King

  He tried the door and it slid open. “You really oughta lock your doors, Murial.”

  He slipped in silently and noted she had her back to him as she sat curled up in the corner of her leather couch, watching a large screen TV.

  The show she was watching seemed violent, with screams of anguish filling the stale, temperature controlled air. Wisps of cigarette smoke wafted in congregating billows that seemed unable to dissipate.

  He crept closer and was amazed that she was actually watching a tape of a torture session she had obviously gotten from off the internet. And then it dawned on him that with Henry, Jefferey, Andre, Peter and Y man out of circulation, there would be no live sessions for her to watch. She flicked the remote and a different torture session filled the room with screams. Chris flinched at the sounds. It was…it was…

  “That’s me your watching!”

  The words just seemed to flow unchecked out of Chris’s mouth, but the TV was up

  so high, Murial at first didn’t hear. Instead she began laughing uproariously as Henry slid the carpet knife along the centre of Chris’ throbbing cock.

  Chris slithered closer, his anger mounting and his breath building into quickened, savage pants.

  Henry was larger than life on the TV screen, whacking the brutally bruised, bleeding feet of Chris with a jagged edged piece of hickory.

  “The funny thing about that,” spoke up Chris loudly. “Is that Henry told me to be a man and take it, but he couldn’t take it when I dished it out!”

  The sound of his voice startled Murial and sent her into a frenzied panic. She leapt up off the couch and turned to face the hideously disfigured Chris.

  “Who the hell are you!? How the hell did you get in!?”

  “Don’t bother running for the door or trying to call for help,” spoke up Chris, pulling the gun out of his coat pocket. “I’m a really good shot with this. As to your question about who I am, I am the guy you are watching on TV. I am one of those you paid to see tortured.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? What do I want? Look at my face, my hands and my mangled body! If only you knew of the pain I have endured, of the suffering I have been through. I have only a short time left to live. You made me like this, you paid to make me like this and now you too shall pay.”

  “I…I…didn’t know it was real. I thought they were play acting…I…I didn’t know they were actually getting hurt.”

  “Liar! Nobody pays such large amounts of money for play acting. You are one sick, sadistic bitch, but that is neither here nor there. I am only here for revenge, for my pound of flesh so to speak.”

  “What…what are you going to do to me?”

  “That is entirely up to you,” panted Chris, pulling five pics out of his pocket. He tossed one onto the couch for her to look at. “Pick it up, it’s a pic of Mr Y, the man you paid to have me looking the way I do.” He tossed four more next to it, and she glanced at them carefully.

  “One of them is a pic of Henry after I got through with him. He’s the one making me scream on the TV right now. I can assure you I made him scream a hundred times worse. The others are pics of Jeffery, now little more than a carved up turkey, Peter stretched out twice as long as he used to be, and Andre, missing his face, of course.”

  “You’re…you’re not going to hurt me, are you, and make me look like them?” she

  whined, tears starting to flow as she trembled violently, and stared at the pics in disbelief and anguish.

  Chris dumped his sac of tools out onto the coffee table and spread them out. “I will use every one of these on you and keep you alive for hours in an agony you can’t imagine unless you do exactly as I say.”

  “Anything,” she agreed, her entire body trembling violently with fear.

  “Take hold of that thin steel wire and tie it tightly around your neck. Don’t leave any space in between the wire and your neck. Make it very tight.”

  “And if I do? What will you do then?”

  “If you do it for me, I won’t torture you, I promise.”

  She did as she asked, petrified of the consequences should she not.

  “Now what?”

  “Tie the other end of the wire around my neck, equally as tightly, with no room between the wire and my neck.”

  “For what reason? Why would you-”

  “Just shut up and do it. Do it now,” Chris instructed.

  She did as he asked, still trembling violently.

  “Now, walk out to the balcony with me.”

  “The balcony? I don’t understand.”

  “Follow me out to the balcony. Don’t make me tug on the wire, or it will cut the skin on your neck.”

  “Okay,” she agreed, terrified, yet walking tentatively, as though on egg shells, out to the windy, rain soaked balcony.

  Chris climbed out onto the ledge, the pain in his body a thousand times greater then that which was tolerable. “I have chosen you, Murial, to pay for the sins of all. I shall jump off this balcony and the resulting fall will snap my neck like a twig. I will be put out of my misery, but you…but you…”

  “You’re crazy! You’re sick! Why jump, why hurt me?”

  Chris smiled. “You can’t get away can you Murial, not with that wire tied so tightly around your slender, tender neck. Once I jump off, your neck will also snap. You might be able to grip the wire with your bare hands, but it will surely eat quickly through your flesh, causing you great pain, causing you to let go, causing you to fall over the balcony with me. We shall fall together, and if you don’t fall with me, if you try to hang on, the weight of my body dangling so heavily from the balcony will cause that wire to sever your head. You can stay on the balcony and lose your head, or you can splat on the ground with your head still attached to your body.”

  Keep your head Chris! Don’t lose control. If you keep your head you may just survive. You may not lose your mind. The long forgotten voice of Jefferey, suddenly remembered, as he pierced and tore away the already brutalized nipples off of Chris.

  “If you can keep your head Murial, if only you can keep your head!”

  Try not to choke on your own blood Chris. I don’t want you to croak in the middle of the session. The long forgotten voice of Andre, suddenly remembered, as he poked at the rat with a long needle, angering it as it munched on the disappearing nose of Chris.

  “If you can keep your throat free from blood, then maybe, just maybe you can stay alive until you hit the ground.”

  “Why are you doing this? I never hurt you…I …I wasn’t the one.”

  “Your dollars paid for my suffering,” answered Chris as he turned and dove off the balcony.

  The rain felt cold on his hideously scarred face. He closed his eyes and waited for his neck to snap or the sickening thud of his body hitting concrete, witch ever were to come first. He closed his eyes and hoped that heaven would be in Scotland.

  He heard bagpipes again, their melodious whine so soothing to his missing ears.

  The last thing she heard before she lost her pretty head, were the screams of a fully insane man, “tit for tat Murial, tit for tat!”

  Chapter Seven

  The sounds of a hundred Canadian geese, their windings flapping effortlessly, while their long beaks remained ajar, honking and yakking away in bird language. Were they flying south, or just looking for a nice body of water to congregate in?

  Chris was groggy, even in response to the large dose of smelling salts pressed close to his nose.

  “Wakey wakey, Chris.”

  The sound of Doctor Brian Petersons squeaky, high pitched, irritating voice was

  unmistakable.

  “Come on sleepy head, time to rise and shine. But not time of course to look in the mirror. You still really are one nasty looking sonoafbitch, especially after what your four friends here did to you. But you got ‘em all back didn’t you Chris. And all of them are still alive Chris, except of course for poor Peter. You stretched his body so long and
so hard, his heart gave way and his limbs ripped out of their sockets. But you’ll be happy to know that in addition to Henry and Andre here still hanging on, Jeffery is also still alive, but just barely. Did you know you left the hot plate on under Jeffery’s balls. They just roasted to ashes and I had to operate and remove what was left to save the turkey man’s life. Not that there was much left of him to save mind you.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in my place. Safe in my basement, along with weeping Henry, bug-eyed stumpy Jeffery, dead as a door nail Peter, and oh, some pain filled wretch I think was once Andre, only I can’t tell because his face is missing. What did you do to Andre’s face, Chris?”

  “Why don’t you ask his rat?”

  “Oh, and by the way, there is one new guest I think you should know about, it’s the head of your girlfriend Murial, sitting on a silver platter. I retrieved the head after I followed you to her condo.”

  Chris reached for his throat. “Then why am I still alive. I thought for sure the wire would-”

  “When, you jumped off the railing, it pulled her forward and over the balcony as well, but on the way down, you immediately hit one of the stone gargoyles jutting out from the building. It broke your fall and bounced you onto the fourteenth balcony floor, but the wire began wrapping around the gargoyle so when she went by, the force of the wire, running out, severed her head. The rest of her body fell into some bushes. I managed to get you and her head out of there before anyone could notice. I still don’t think they’ve found her body yet.”

  “I don’t understand. Why did you follow me? Why-“

  “Why? Why did I follow you? Why did I bring you here? Why am I keeping you alive? Money my dear friend, money. Andre, Peter, Jeffery and especially that cheap bastard Henry here, never paid me much money for keeping you and the other poor torture victims alive. They were the ones raking up all the dough. But the thirty grand you gave me, you know, the money you took from Andre, well, it got me thinking. Where there is smoke, there is undoubtedly fire, and so I took it upon myself to quietly break into the houses of Henry, Peter and Jeffery, and do you know what I found? More money. Lots more. Their drawers and safes held cash that was garnered, at least in part, from your suffering. And that in turn got me thinking about Murial. Just how much would she have paid you NOT to tie that wire around her neck had you given her the chance. And what about the five hundred or so other paying viewers that watched you suffer. How much would they be willing to pay to have you NOT torture them.”

  Chris did not have the outer ears to perch attentively upon the tempting words of the good doctor, and yet he could at least hear most of what he was saying with the remnant of hearing that Andres previously hideous work had left him with. More delicious revenge. More getting rid of the overwhelming anger that entangled his every thought and yet, and yet…and yet…

  “I’m tired of it all,” moaned Chris. I know my hate for them is still there but so is an intense hatred for what I am, for what I have become, for what those sadistic bastards made me. I just want to die. Nothing to live for. My body a cruel joke. Every inch of it covered in permanent scars, bruises and cuts. Much of me missing forever. Wall to wall pain. Wall to wall misery. Wall to wall-“

  “Scotland.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Chris. Scotland. I heard you moan and mumble of it over and over while you slept. You obviously want to go there. And there’s another thing for you to live for.”

  “There is nothing. There is nothing! There is nothing!! There is nothing!!!”

  “There is your mother.”

  “Mother. Yes, my mother! Oh but she hates me now. She…she…don’t you think she

  hates me now? Just look at the head of Murial sitting on that platter, with the eyes wide open. Something so disgusting would infuriate my mom. To hurt a woman! No, I’m sure my mother hates me. She told me so, up here.” Chris pointed to his own head, to the mind that was now fully insane.

  “Hates you? Don’t be ridiculous. She loves you! You mean everything to her. I heard you mutter that she lives in Scotland. The home of your birth.”

  “Yes, Scotland.”

  “The home of your mother’s open arms, ready to embrace you once more, even the monster that you now are. You can still be with her. With enough money to buy her one of the castles that overlook the vast array of lochs or bays or island streams that so beautifully saunter by. You can shower your mother with money, with cash, with presents and make her so gloriously happy. You can buy her that castle Chris. You can be with her. I can fly to Scotland to live in a castle of my own, a castle near to yours, to keep you alive, to minimize your pain through drugs, with operations, with special care. We can hire a nurse to help you be so much more comfortable.”

  “You paint a nice picture doc but it’s all lies. A thousand here, ten thousand there. That certainly won’t add up fast enough to the millions we’d need. And to visit all five hundred on the list would take months, no years and we would eventually get caught. The police are no doubt looking for Henry, for Andre, for Peter and for Jeffery, the turkey man. And let’s not forget the still alive Mr. Y. I’m sure they found what was left of him by now. The cops will be looking for me. They will-”

  “They will do nothing,” spat out Peterson, his beady black eyes squinting with purposeful thought.

  “How do you figure the cops will do nothing” managed Chris, his mind suddenly not insane, but for a brief moment intensely lucid, purposeful, thoughtfully engaged, and calculating bits of incoming information with lightning efficiency.

  He next paused, to allow the doctor to continue. “We won’t be going after the five hundred names on the list and we won’t be going after mere thousands of dollars at a time. We’ll be going after twenty million, all one shot. What does the name Ethan Murray Felder mean to you?”

  “I’ve heard that name so many times, before,” managed Chris, what was left of his horribly scarred face now a twisted mass of cuts and welts that fighting valiantly to remember a name lodged deep within a mangled mind that no longer cared what it knew or could recollect.

  “Let me give you a hint, it-”

  “Oh shit, I remember now, the multi-millionaire car parts dealer.”

  “Slight correction,” crowed Peterson. Make that the multi-billionaire car parts dealer. Twenty million to him is like a mere fifty cents would be to me or you. Just loose change. He too was on Mr. Y’s list.”

  “So if we could somehow get my bag of tools in front of him, he could either suffer with a sock in his mouth, or write us a very expensive check.”

  “Exactly,” sighed the doctor happily. “And then we could take off to Scotland with you and what’s left of your tell tale face hidden neatly and safely behind some mansion castle walls.”

  “With my mother of course.”

  “Yes, with your beloved mother of course. And as I said, with me not too far away.

  “To keep me alive.”

  “Exactly, to keep you alive.”

  “And what of them?” Chris motioned his head in the direction of his four tormentors, three of them still alive, but just barely.

  “You’ve got your drill,” managed Peterson. “You’ve got your bag of tools. You’ve also had a good night’s sleep. Have your final fun with them and in the morning we’ll wrap them in carpets, weigh them down and drive them out to my boat moored on the harbor. From there, we’ll sail out onto the lake and dump them over.”

  Jeffery began to protest vehemently, his voice straining to be heard despite the sock crammed deep into his mouth. Henry was also suddenly desperate, his chest heaving wildly in fear and his moans of futile begging filling the already torment filled air. Andre seemed not to care, drool flowing freely from what was once a mouth. Tears gushed from red eyes in bone sockets that were once part of a face.

  “Don’t worry rat man I’ll save you for last. Limb man is the one I’m really mad at.”

  Chris grabbed his drill, switched on
the furiously swirling driver bits and ran a

  straight line up the side of Jeffery’s rib cage. “Time to see what this stump is made of,” screamed Chris, his sanity suddenly vanquished to the recesses of a mind that had learned out of necessity how to come and go.

  Chapter Eight

  The whiskey felt good, and Peterson tilted his head back, savoring it slithering down his parched throat as sprinkles of melting snowflakes turned to water droplets on his nose, cheeks and chin.

  Chris was not so lucky. Andre’s brutal and wanton sessions had left him without much of a nose, cheeks or chin upon which to melt.

  There was a sun, but it just surfaced momentarily, poking it’s warm radiance out of damp, stubborn clouds that hung like a bad smell, until it once again receded to the confines of bone chilling grayish white masses that dotted the darkening sky.

  “I can drive for a bit if you like,” Peterson offered, knowing that the mere touch of bruised and battered feet on the gas or brake caused excruciating pain to stab up and down the ghastly cigarette burned leg of Chris.

  Chris didn’t answer, his one remaining eye bloodshot and hypnotized on the road ahead, his delirious mind fixated upon windswept hills bathed in emerald green, and large delicious salmon, winding meticulously upstream through legendary lochs.

  Mumbles and muffled groans of anguish sporadically broke his concentration, their unwelcome sounds drifting forward from the back seat like nauseating nail scrapes on a chalk board.

  “You’d better shut the fuck up, stump man or I’ll do some more work on you.

  Jeffery winced at his words, then turned his head in the direction of Henry, who once had let Chris escape. Jeffery was sandwiched in between Henry and Andre.

  Henry turned to face the trembling stump, realizing only then that it no longer sported eyes or a tongue. Chris had obviously done away with both.

  “Guess it wasn’t enough that he burnt your balls to ashes.”