He seemed pleased with this answer, skipping down the stairs and smiling broadly at her.
“We’re having dinner,” he said. “I fixed it myself.”
Alice was normally picky about whose food she would eat, but these were not normal times. She was at the point that she’d fight a crow over a rabbit carcass. Whatever he laid in front of her, short of human flesh, she’d eat.
“Great,” she said. “I’m starving.”
Boyd pulled the knife from the back of his belt and pointed the blade at her. “I am going to cut you loose. I have a gun in my pocket. If you try to escape, if you fight, or even if you just piss me the fuck off, I will kill you. Do you understand?”
Alice nodded, not trusting her voice, certain it would betray her terror.
Boyd edged the hunting blade closer to her. Alice watched it, afraid that even the slightest twitch would result in the blade slicing into her flesh. Boyd met her eyes and stared into them, enjoying the effect that the blade had on her. Fear fed the monster inside him.
He found the gap between her neck and the black zip tie and slid the knife into it. Turning the knife slowly until the blade was against the plastic, Boyd sliced and the tie fell away. Alice felt the tension drain from her body. She could have fallen over if she wasn’t so afraid of provoking his wrath.
His knife hand swept into a gesture directing her toward the stairs. Alice rose unsteadily to her feet, slightly dizzy from the lack of food. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Taking the handrail, she climbed toward the upstairs, finding it brighter than the last time she’d passed through here.
“To the right at the top of the stairs,” Boyd said from behind her.
She followed his directions and found herself in a cluttered kitchen that clearly was the domain of an elderly lady. It was decorated in a manner that only an old lady could do, with little tea towels, framed embroidery, and decorative plates on the wall. Everything was old enough to be considered vintage, even though it was clearly still being used, from the chunky aluminum canister set, to the crackled ceramic cookie jar, to the 1950s electric range.
“Excuse the décor,” Boyd said. “My mother’s touch.”
Alice nodded as she looked around. “Mother? We haven’t met,” Alice said. “Is she still around?” Translation: Don’t be telling me that someone has been in this house with you the whole time that your psycho ass has had me tied up in the basement because that would really piss me off.
“No,” Boyd said. “She passed…suddenly.”
“Hmmm,” Alice said. She didn’t even want to know how that happened. She would not have been surprised to find that Boyd had his mother in a back room making a suit from her dried flesh. He definitely had that vibe going on.
“So, sit down,” Boyd said, gesturing toward a Formica table. It was also vintage 1950s, and Alice decided that Boyd’s mother had probably purchased it new.
She seated herself. In front of her were a variety of open cans, the lids jagged and still attached, folded back and exposing the room temperature contents of the cans. There were black beans, corn, tuna, and beets. There was also a jar of store brand peanut butter, the jar open and a spoon stuck in it.
“It’s not much but it’s what I’ve got,” he said. “Go ahead.”
She didn’t have to be told twice, understanding that the tides could turn at any moment. Boyd could suddenly and irrationally become angry with her and send her back to the basement. She needed to cram in as many calories as she could. She took a can and held it over her plate. She picked up a fork and started to scoop some tuna out.
Boyd cleared his throat. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
She looked up at him, still standing beside her. She wasn’t sure what he meant. “The prayer?”
“No, silly,” he said. “The man. You haven’t fed your man first.”
She bit her tongue, not wanting to make some sarcastic comment that would result in the food being taken from her. “How silly of me,” she laughed. “I’m not thinking clearly. I get that way when I’m hungry.”
My man? Acid rose into her throat. The thought was almost more than her stomach could handle.
“Damn right you’re not thinking clearly,” he said, joining her in her laugh. “Cause this is a fucking test and you were pretty damn close to failing it. I won’t be giving you any more of the answers. That was a freebie right there.”
Boyd took his seat and handed her his plate. She dutifully filled it from each can. “That’s more like it.”
She smiled at him. “I sure don’t want to fail any test, Boyd. But what happens if I do fail?” She had been unable to keep that thought from coming out of her mouth. She had not wanted to ask, but now it was out there. She looked at him, waiting for an answer.
Boyd scraped together a forkful of corn and tuna. “Let’s not dwell on the negative,” he finally said. “Let’s just assume that you’re going to pass. The alternative is unpleasant and makes me sad.”
She scraped beans from the can and began eating some of them. They were cold and had not been rinsed of the liquid that they came in. She’d never eaten them that way, but her body needed whatever protein she could get. She ate them eagerly.
“Focusing on the positive instead, what happens if I pass?” Alice asked.
A strange expression settled on Boyd’s face. He looked down at his lap. He could not meet her eye. He pointed to a coffee cup on the table, overturned on a saucer.
She looked at it. “What is it?”
Boyd still didn’t meet her eye. “Look under it.” He had a smile on his down-turned face. It was a bashful expression, though Alice could not be sure if it was genuine or not. She didn’t know what to think or what to do.
“Go ahead,” he urged.
She lifted up the coffee cup. Underneath was a wedding ring. The gold band was dull yellow and worn thin. Someone had worn it for many years. The stone was small, barely a chip. “Can I?” she asked, gesturing at the ring.
He nodded.
She picked the ring up and examined it. There was dirt on it and something else. She scraped it with her fingernail.
“It was my mother’s,” he said.
She realized that it was blood she was scraping off. Dried, brown blood.
“Oh, it may need to be cleaned,” he said, observing the look on her face as she rubbed her fingers together. “I had a little trouble getting it off.”
The hunger had slowed her thinking to the point that she had not been able to put the pieces together. Those pieces slammed together suddenly, though, and she realized what this meant. This was his mother’s ring and somehow he had taken this ring off and it had involved both blood and dirt. Had he cut it off her dead finger? Was she buried outside? Alice didn’t want to know.
Then the last piece hit her as Boyd looked up from his lap and his eyes met hers. It was broadcast from his expression, a mixture of shyness, adoration, and confusion. He wanted her to be his wife. That was the test. Was she wife material? Her immediate thought was to throw the ring at him, to get the vile thing out of her hands as quickly as she could, but she could not know what reaction that might provoke. Her life depended on handling this matter delicately.
She leaned forward and set the ring gently down on the saucer. “That’s a beautiful ring, Boyd,” she said, her voice rigid as she fought to control it. She was not certain if she was convincing or not.
Boyd shrugged. “You’ll probably find this surprising, but I’ve never been married,” he said. “I never needed to be. For most of my life it was just me and my mom. My dad died when I was a kid and I don’t really even remember him. My mom took care of me for most of my life.”
Alice tried to eat calmly, taking large bites, trying to shove in the calories. “You must miss her,” she said.
“Sometimes,” Boyd admitted. “She’d probably still be here if she’d continued to do her job and love me instead of turning against me.”
Alice felt a chill
. She’d unwittingly steered the conversation into dangerous territory. Now she had to find a way to navigate back out. Reflective listening, she recalled. That’s what the counselors did at work when they wanted to acknowledge a person’s feelings without necessarily agreeing with them. “She turned against you? That must have been very hard for you,” she said, staring down at her food.
Boyd set down his fork and looked across the table at her. She could not meet his eye, instead focusing on the fork she was bringing to her mouth. “It was her job to take care of me. I was her son, her little boy, and she sent me away. We sat right here at this table and I looked at her just like I’m looking at you now. She went from loving me unconditionally to fearing me. What am I supposed to do with that? How can a person cope with the idea that their mother is scared to death of them?”
Alice was silent for a moment, carefully contemplating her answer. “I have no idea, Boyd. I don’t know what to say.” She reached for the peanut butter, hoping to get at least one spoonful of the calorie-dense food in her mouth.
Boyd suddenly grabbed her wrist and she raised her eyes to his. “You aren’t afraid of me, are you, Alice?”
Alice could not pull her eyes from his. She could not say anything. She felt totally exposed. Could he see it? Could he see the terror?
“My mother sent me away, Alice,” Boyd said. “She told the court that I was crazy and they sent me away. I had been sent off before, when I was younger, but this time was different. My mother had bought a gun, the same one I have in my pocket now, and she told me that she would use it to kill me if she had to. Can you imagine? Your own mother threatening to kill you?”
Alice didn’t ask what he had done to provoke that reaction from his mother. She didn’t want to know.
“Then she hid the knives,” Boyd continued. “Both to keep them away from me and to make sure she always had access to a weapon. I kept finding them taped behind doors, hidden in the laundry, under the couch cushions. She told me it was so I couldn’t use one to kill her and so she had one nearby if she had to defend herself against me. That’s a bunch of bullshit. I think she was the crazy one. If I was crazy, I inherited it from her.
“So they locked me up,” Boyd spat. “They sent me to Central State Hospital. I stayed there until the lights went out. When they had trouble getting food for the patients, they started letting some of us go. I was only considered at moderate risk to harm myself or others so I was released. I was on my way home from there when I met up with you ladies.”
Boyd let go of her wrist and Alice tucked her hands into her lap. She clutched them together tightly, wishing that she could wash his icy touch from her skin. It occurred to her that perhaps his mother had taped a knife under this very table, concerned that she might have to fight Boyd off. She casually brushed her hand along the underside of the table but found nothing taped there. What she did find, though, was a thick wire lever. She had seen these kind of tables before. The lever was for releasing the two sections of the table so that they could be pulled apart and a leaf added to the center.
“When I got home, my mother and I had to… work out our differences,” Boyd said.
Though he continued to talk, Alice paid no attention to his words but instead focused on the wire lever in a manner that would not allow him to notice what she was doing. While it was not as handy as a knife taped there and waiting for her, she wondered if she might be able to break it loose and use it as a weapon. She pushed it experimentally with a finger, trying not to let the effort show. The lever yielded to her touch, bending slightly.
That was encouraging. It meant the old steel was soft enough that she might be able to break it loose if she worked it back and forth a few times. While Boyd spoke, she continued to look at him, doing her best to look interested and conceal her movements. Beneath the table she bent the steel lever one way, then the other. Back and forth. When she felt the movements were requiring less effort, she knew that she had weakened it sufficiently and it was ready to come loose. She could only hope that what came loose was in some way helpful to her. It was all she had.
Alice could sense that when Boyd’s monologue was over, this dinner was over too. If he had sensed the fear in her, as she suspected, her whole trip home might be over. He would feel betrayed by her, as he had by his own mother. She needed to turn the conversation back to the future he imagined the two of them having together. She wondered, though, if that was the right step to take. If she calmed him down, she’d no doubt go back in that basement for another day and continue to live only at his whim. She could not let herself go back down there in the darkness. Gun or not, this had to end today. She would not spend another day at the mercy of someone so completely unhinged.
She continued to work the lever, the movements requiring less effort. The end had a loop on it that acted as a handle. She threaded her fingers through it, hoping that she would not drop it when it broke loose. That would be devastating. When she finally felt the thick wire sag into her lap, she knew she’d been successful. She could feel that it was about ten inches long. With her fingers threaded through the loop handle, she knew that she could stab with it if she had to. While it was not an ideal offensive weapon, it was something. She hoped it would be enough.
She thought about the weapons he had on him. There was the gun in his pocket, which he could not get to easily while seated at the table. There was also the sheath knife behind his back, which he could get to pretty readily. That could be her biggest problem, besides his strength. She had not fought anyone physically since she was a child, although she was raised with brothers and that toughened a girl. She had never killed, though.
Could she even do that?
There was not a single doubt in her mind.
Boyd violently shoved his chair back, slammed his fist on the table, and stood. “You’re not even fucking listening to me!” he shouted at her.
“I am, Boyd,” she replied, smiling and pouring as much honey in her voice as she could.
“You are not!” he screamed. “You think I haven’t seen that look before? That ‘humor the crazy man’ look!” He towered over, his face reddening, slobber spraying from his mouth as whatever demons lived in there rose to take control of him.
He was at her side in an instant. “Stand up,” he commanded.
“Boyd, you’re scaring me,” Alice said, trying to buy herself time to think. She didn’t know what else to do. Her mind was racing. His vital areas were too high with him standing and her seated. His throat, his heart, they were all out of her reach. Before she could get the wire that high, he would grab her arm and hold it while he drew his own knife. He would kill her then and that would be the end of her journey.
“You’re going back to the basement,” he said. “You need more time to think.”
“But what about the ring?” she asked desperately. “What about our engagement?”
His expression turned cold. He looked at the ring in the saucer, then back at her. “You want the fucking ring?” he asked. “You want it!”
He grabbed the ring from the saucer, turning over cans and knocking things from the table. Cold corn spilled into Alice’s lap. She recoiled from his rage. Boyd lashed out and grabbed Alice by the jaw, pressing his thumb into her cheek until her mouth opened. He shoved the ring into her mouth then closed it, pressing so hard to close her mouth that he pressed her head against the wall, mashing her lips hard against her teeth. She tasted blood.
“Swallow it,” he hissed. “You want the fucking ring, take it.”
Her hand clutched the wire she’d found. His hand over her mouth and nose made it difficult to breathe. She thought the pressure of his hand would crush her skull. The pain was intense, nearly blinding. She knew something was going to break. In the midst of this, trying to come up with a plan of attack, she somehow recalled her Uncle Howard, who bled to death at the sawmill where he worked. A large sliver of wood had shot out from the three-foot circular blade, penetrated his leg, and severed his femora
l artery. She knew what she had to do then.
As Boyd mashed her face into the wall, screaming at her to swallow the ring, she grasped the wire and stabbed it between his thigh and groin, hoping beyond all hope that the broken end was sharp enough to penetrate clothing. Apparently it was. When Boyd froze with the shock of pain, she plunged the wire around, repeatedly jabbing and tearing, hoping that she had found the artery and somehow managed to cut into it. She was rewarded with a warm gush as his blood sprayed onto her body.
Boyd screamed and exploded upward from her, his face a mask of rage and surprise. Alice instinctively sensed that her only hope for survival was to latch onto him in a bear hug that he could not escape. She spat the ring from her bloody mouth, then wrapped her arms around his chest, locking her hands tightly behind his back, twisting her body to get her legs around him. Boyd still rose, trying to get his hands on his knife, but the manner in which she gripped him limited his range of motion.
Boyd lifted her from the chair. He staggered, his balance thrown off by the addition of her body weight. He crashed into walls, clearing them of pictures and knick-knacks. Realizing that he could not get to his knife, he began raining blows down on Alice’s head. He was attempting to drop his powerful elbows onto the top of her head, though with her body pressed against him he was not getting the effect he wanted. Still, with each blow, Alice saw stars and knew that he would eventually knock her loose. She would die when that happened.
Boyd staggered again and made a move for his gun but it was crushed between their bodies. He could not get his hand into his pocket. Alice felt him weakening, then he slipped in the growing puddle of his own blood and fell hard to the ground. Together they writhed on the blood-soaked linoleum, Boyd attempting with less and less effort to pry her from his body. As they rolled, she felt her grip giving way. The blood made her hands slippery and she couldn’t hold on much longer. Although weak, she was afraid he could still kill her. He pushed on her and she slid down his body. As she did, her hands fell upon the sheath of his hunting knife.
Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series Page 8
