The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  I should ask her what was happening in her life before the “murder” occurred, Nat absently thought. About the relationship with her father. Did she feel isolated, perhaps, removed from life? But there was a shining intelligence in her eyes. Let’s play the game her way for a moment.

  “Who was the man who killed you?”

  She looked at her hands. “I’d never seen him before.”

  “Describe him to me.” Nat suddenly felt the urge to rough her up a bit verbally with a full-blown interrogation. She’d unnerved him—this whole house had unnerved him—and he wanted to get control of the situation.

  “Dark hair, long hair, mustache. Sunburnt. And his eyes were . . .” It all came out in a rush, as if she’d memorized it.

  “Were what?”

  “All black.”

  “Interesting.”

  She shook her head jerkily and took a sharp inward breath, as if she’d just seen the man standing behind Nat.

  “Becca . . .” he said quietly.

  “Yes?”

  “Is there anyone else living in this house besides you and your father?”

  Her eyes went cold. “I told you—”

  “He’s not your father. Yes, I remember. Anyone else besides the old man, then?”

  “I don’t thi-iink so.”

  “Then why do you double-lock the door?”

  “Because the black-eyed man came once, so he might—”

  “But I thought you’re already dead.” Checkmate, little girl. Nat smirked to himself.

  Her forehead was cut with two worry wrinkles. “But I feel things, Dr. Thayer. The sensation of his grip . . .”

  Her right hand detached itself from the left and began to reach slowly upward. Nat watched it, an ivory, blue-veined hand with a bracelet of green stone falling down the arm as it rose. The hand came up, the fingers slightly bent. Her hair slid soundlessly off her shoulder until it fell in a glossy bunch and hung straight down.

  Nat watched the hand rise as if it were floating of its own will. It finally touched the hollow where the neck met the breastbone, touched lightly the cords of Becca’s throat that stood out through the fabric of the turtleneck, and then began to close on the neck itself. Becca’s eyes rolled back in her head as her eyelids started to close. As Nat watched, her chin rose and she gave a little choking sound.

  “Okay, I think I get it,” Nat said. So she was a dramatic girl. She wanted to win their little game.

  Nat could see the right finger press into the pale line of the carotid artery and the thumb press on the windpipe. He had never seen a patient reenact her own choking before and found himself paralyzed with fascination. He went to speak but no words came and he felt suddenly weak. The flesh of her thumb went white as she pressed down on the windpipe, and he heard her breath drawn inward in a gasp.

  “Okay, Becca, you made your point.”

  As if through a fog, Nat reached out for her arm. He half stood and took a step toward the bed. His fingers closed on her thin arm, and he found the muscles were tensed, remarkably strong. He tried to pull them down from his crouched position but was startled to find that the arm stayed locked where it was, the hand pressing her neck harder and harder. Nat caught his breath and reached his fingers around for a better grip, the tips digging against the soft wool of her turtleneck and pushing into her right breast. Her whole body seemed to be filled with tremendous excitement.

  “Enough!” Nat cried, his voice sounding drugged in his ears.

  What the hell was going on here?

  He stood up fully now, his body tingling as if he were standing in an electric field, to give himself a better angle. Becca’s skin was going even paler, and it looked as though the flesh surrounding her eye sockets was turning blue. Angry now, Nat twisted his hand into her breast.

  “Becca!”

  She shook her head violently, and her lips parted but no words came out. With a grunt of effort, Nat wrenched her arm away. Becca’s eyelids suddenly fluttered open. The arm went limp in his hand. No, not just limp but dead, the muscles going so slack that he could feel the bone.

  He let her go. Becca’s hands dropped to her lap. Her face was even paler now, not a transparency where the blue lines of her veins were visible but a kind of chalky pallor that seemed to glow with an unhealthy luminescence.

  Nat sat back down, a little out of breath.

  Her head was bowed in front of him, the back of her neck a patch of whiteness between the parted waves of her brunet hair. She looked as if she were waiting for an axe to clip into her spinal column. Docile.

  Was she paralyzed with fear? What was she reenacting?

  “Becca?”

  She sat unmoving.

  “Was this a nightmare that you had?”

  Nothing.

  “Becca, did you dream this?”

  Her head swung back and forth, the hair following a half second later in a long swing, the light playing over its surface.

  “It really happened?”

  She nodded her head yes.

  He had to consider there had been some attempt to strangle her. And the only person in the house was her father.

  “The man who did this. Are you sure it wasn’t someone you know?”

  Nat felt like he was looking down a deep well at a girl who sat stock-still, surrounded by a circle of the blackest darkness. She wasn’t moving, barely breathing, as he watched from above. What forms did she watch in that circle, their claws an inch from the band of light, circling her, waiting to tear her throat out if she so much as uttered a sound?

  The shake of the head again, the face covered by gleaming shafts of hair.

  “Did he have anything else in his hands?”

  This seemed to catch her unawares. “Wh-aat?” she whispered.

  The murder of Margaret Post had come into his thoughts, unbidden. He leaned in and lowered his voice. Their heads were now bowed together as if in prayer. “You showed that this man was choking you only with his right hand. Why? What was in his left? Was he holding something there?”

  Nat felt a cold breath escape her lips and bloom against his face. It had no odor. It smelled of the house.

  “NNNnnn . . . ,” she said, the sound trailing off.

  “What was that?”

  She looked up and her eyes were pleading. “NNNnnnnn . . .”

  “Tell me—”

  “Knife.”

  Nat felt danger close now. A flash of dread. He reached out and put his hand over hers.

  “Okay. Okay, a knife. But he didn’t cut you?”

  She shook her head. “He pressed. Here.” She tilted her neck away, baring the flesh of her throat exposed above the turtleneck. She pushed a point on her neck just above her collarbone, her eyes closing as if the spot was still tender. Then she regarded Nat again.

  A voice seemed to speak clearly in his mind. Leave now.

  Nat blinked rapidly. He stood up and looked around the room. The voice had sounded as if it came from someone standing a few feet away. But there was no one in there with them. No one at all.

  “I’ll need to see you again,” he said finally.

  When she looked up, he detected something new in her eyes. Gratitude. Or maybe sympathy for him, for what he’d just committed himself to.

  The two emotions could look very similar, Nat had found, when written on a face.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The door closed softly behind Nat, and he heard the snick of the metal arm entering its socket, followed by a hard click in the silence. He hadn’t realized Becca had a lock on her side as well. He imagined her on the other side of the door, her hand pressed to the painted wood, waiting to hear if Nat would call to her. Then, when that hadn’t happened, the grating of a bolt being pulled across and locked into place. And then silence.

  The yellow light out he
re was still burning, and it cast a circular cone of solid amber that ended about three feet away from Nat, as if there were a black velvet curtain there. A choking sensation filled his throat, and suddenly he was sure that a hand was about to reach down and place its cold flesh on his neck. He felt the urge to run blindly toward the stairs. But instead he shivered and began to walk purposefully, his right hand feeling blindly against the wall. He touched the slick surface of an oil painting—could even feel the ridges of the painter’s strokes under his finger. When he touched a patch of fur—Jesus, it must have been a mounted deer head—he dropped his hand, a cold sweat breaking out across his back.

  A fucking horror house. The prison of the Prescott clan.

  Nat reached the stairs, and his right foot went pitching over the first step before he caught himself.

  “Mr. Prescott!” he called angrily. Damn it. Why did he leave me out here to break my neck?

  Silence.

  “Prescott!” he yelled.

  He heard footsteps from directly below. Mr. Prescott walked into the center of the foyer, then looked upward, his face blank.

  Nat glared at him and came down the stairs to the landing, then three more steps to the dark hardwoods of the foyer. He marched up to the old man.

  Prescott waited, his eyelids half closed, for Nat to speak.

  “Becca needs treatment. I’d like to see her tomorrow morning at my office.”

  His eyes flicked to Nat’s. “She doesn’t leave this house.”

  “Just bring her in, please. This atmosphere . . .”

  Prescott raised his eyebrows. Nat suddenly felt that the old man was mocking him, somehow. He couldn’t account for the change in the man’s behavior from yesterday to today. Prescott was the one who had begged him to come, and then he seemed terrified that Nat had actually shown up. Now he was acting . . . vilely amused by Nat’s concern.

  “It’s not conducive to any kind of recovery, Prescott. The things that have happened here . . . She’s emotionally damaged, and vulnerable. You’ve created a kind of dungeon full of bad memories. I need to see her in a neutral environment.”

  “I didn’t create anything. I have no such abilities.”

  “You’re her father. Sign the goddamn order. I’ll get her on a daily schedule and some medication, if necessary. We can keep here there for observation.”

  “I can’t possibly do that.”

  “You wanted me to help her, right? Well, this is what helping looks like.”

  Prescott shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, Dr. Thayer.”

  “What am I dealing with, Mr. Prescott? It might help me to know if you told me.”

  “This,” Prescott said, looking around, his look encompassing the whole house. “It’s not my doing. It came about of its own accord. I suffer here, too.”

  Nat wanted to grab the old man’s thin turkey neck and shake this gothic horror batshit nonsense out of him and take his daughter away to a clean, antiseptic facility that wasn’t dripping with the accumulated paranoia of the last five fucked-up generations of the Prescott clan.

  Prescott turned and walked away.

  “I will be back,” Nat called after him. Prescott made no gesture, just shuffled until the murk of the hallway seemed to swallow him up.

  “Asshole,” Nat muttered. He moved toward the front door, knocked the metal bar left out of its sleeve, turned the handle, and jerked the door open, slamming it shut as he left.

  He felt drained and slightly dizzy as he climbed down the porch steps. Becca was clearly delusional; her father was so terrified of her joining the two brothers that he’d convinced her she was next.

  You have to get her out of here, he said to himself.

  He ripped the Saab door open, got in, and turned the key in the floor ignition. But he just sat there then, with the engine running, his foot pressed slightly on the gas. Finally, he looked back up at the house. The light was still on in Becca’s room, and the curtains were pulled tight. He thought he could detect the presence of a human form behind the ivory cloth. It had to be Becca, but the material was too thick for Nat to be sure.

  The figure moved away from the window.

  Nat drove out of the Shan with the radio pumping loud. He nearly rear-ended an old Mercedes turbo on Narragansett Avenue, and glared back at the driver—a gaping old woman with a doughy face framed by gray curls—when she stared back at him. He felt aggressive, like some strong narcotic was washing out of his bloodstream, leaving him tetchy and spoiling for a fight.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was Saturday, but Daddy had to work, so Mrs. Finlay was in her chair in the living room, watching reruns. Charlie was allowed to stay in bed as long as he wanted, so long as his room was clean by the time Daddy came home. He lingered in the bed, watching the trees dance in the backyard as the wind tossed the branches this way and that. He loved his bedroom; he felt safe and warm here, no matter what was happening outside.

  Finally, his stomach began to rumble, hungryhungryhippofeedmefeedmefeedme, and Charlie jumped off his bed. He quickly pulled the Patriots sheet, with its footballs and helmets and goalposts, all the way up to the wooden bars, then did the same with the Patriots blanket. Charlie didn’t really like football all that much—he was going to play lacrosse at Bishop Carroll, whose playing fields were just past their back fence—but his dad liked it a lot, and Charlie sat on his lap during games and wriggled when the Pats scored and Daddy squeezed him as they yelled and Charlie liked that even more. The sheet and the blankets were really for his father.

  Charlie folded the blanket back, smacked the pillow, and made the bed as best he could. He didn’t like Mrs. Finlay—she smelled like lotion and old cheese—but he had to go and say hi anyway. He grabbed his notebook and pen from under the Batman lamp on his dresser and wrote as he walked slowly into the hallway.

  GOOD MORNING, he wrote, then walked up to the chair and tapped on Mrs. Finlay’s arm.

  “Good Lord, Charlie,” Mrs. Finlay said, jumping. She stared at him and then at the notebook he was holding up to her, and she breathed out once shakily and tried to smile, but didn’t get all the way there. Mrs. Finlay was wearing a blue sweater with a lace-looking design around the neck and watching some cooking show.

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  BREAKFAST, he wrote.

  “Do you need my help?”

  NO, he scribbled quickly. He knew where the Trix was and the milk, and he didn’t want her pancakes because she always burned them.

  “Okay, then. Scoot along.”

  He headed down the long hallway that connected the two parts of the house. The light was dim in here, the walls painted red like you were inside a blood vessel in his book This Is Your Body. Charlie’s bare feet made little pat-pat noises on the hardwood floor. He was only a few steps in when something made him stop.

  The pictures. They were lined up on the left side of the wall, two feet above his head. The right wall was blank because all his mommy’s pictures were gone now. She’d taken the photos when she’d left and gone to Portland, Oregon, to live with her sister who had a baby but no husband. Charlie was going to see his mom this summer in Oregon. He hoped she had the pictures up, because he missed seeing the faces of his other grandpa and his aunt Natascha, who lived in Australia, and all the others. It was like she’d taken one whole side of the family with her when she left. The right side of the hallway where her pictures had been was empty now, but you could still see the outlines of the missing pictures and the little holes where the nails had gone.

  But he still had his daddy’s side. Charlie approached the first picture. The man was wearing a funny hat that Daddy said hunters wore, and he was standing there with a big shotgun, leaning on it and looking into the camera with a big, tired smile.

  Grandpa, Charlie thought. Charlie had never met him; he’d died in an accide
nt when hunting deer up in the woods. That’s why people wear those orange vests, Daddy had said. So more grandpas won’t die from pure stupidity. Charlie guessed that meant that some other man had thought Grandpa was a deer and shot him by mistake. Charlie didn’t want to go hunting in the woods, ever, and he shivered when he heard the echoes of gun blasts from the Raitliff Woods that came every fall when Daddy said the deer were running and the hunters were catching them.

  He moved on, his stomach not rumbling anymore. Every time he came in front of a picture, he would whisper the name in his mind. Great-grandma and Pops were next. They were wearing dark, uncomfortable-looking clothes, and he didn’t like to look at Great-grandma’s eyes because she looked mad, but Daddy said she was just ornery. Ornery was an old-fashioned word for mean. Charlie studied Pops’s weird glasses—the frames looked heavy and odd, as if they’d been made in a fire or something. Pops was fat and bald and had a bushy mustache and bushy gray eyebrows and he was smiling, and Charlie wished he knew Pops more than anyone else on the wall. He bet Pops ate apple pie—Charlie loved apple pie—and burped afterward like his daddy and liked to play marbles or some old-fashioned game, but Charlie would have been glad to learn any game to play with good old Pops.

  Uncle Matt was next. Uncle Matt was ten years old in the picture, holding a football in his arm like he was going to make a run. He was smiling, too. Matt was Daddy’s older brother. Charlie still didn’t understand how a ten-year-old boy could be his uncle, but he liked the picture a lot because of the football and the fact that he was the only boy he knew in school who had a ten-year-old uncle.

  Next came Aunt Stephanie. Charlie didn’t know much about her. She lived in Georgia, where they grew peaches and it was hot and they spoke with funny accents. He’d never met Aunt Stephanie and he didn’t want to much, either—because his father got sad when he talked about her and Charlie guessed that Stephanie had done something mean to him when he was a kid—unless she brought a whole crate of peaches and told stories about his daddy as a boy. Daddy didn’t like to talk about the time when he was a boy, and Charlie sometimes thought that he’d never been one, that his father had been a grown-up always, ever since he was born, and a daddy, too, who was waiting for his boy to show up, which was Charlie.