“You do value living longer,” said the voice proudly, like a professor demonstrating proof of his hypothesis to a class of naive students. “You have listened, obeyed, and, to some extent, learned. Congratulations.”
Again, the voice went quiet. Ethan wondered how long the silence would last this time. He didn’t have to wait long.
“Your reward for completing the first lesson,” the electronic voice said, “will be movement.”
Ethan’s internal warning flags went up. This was a trick.
“Movement, however, will be restricted,” the voice said. “Your success with lesson one puts you at the top of the class, Ethan, and gives you the gold star that the child in us secretly craves. Remember sweet Miss Honeysuckle, with her special smile reserved only for those gold-star pupils who answered her questions correctly? Those who wore all the right clothes and said all the right things but were really no different from the rest of us.”
Ethan was certain he could hear a sneer in the electronic voice’s tone.
“She’d lick the back of that little gold star with the tip of her glistening tongue and place it beside the gold-star name she’d so neatly printed on the card—your name, Ethan. That gold-star pupil would then get to pin the card on the blackboard at the front of the classroom for everyone to see.
“And, Ethan,” the voice screamed, unleashing a world of hate, “you!” Another primal scream came before the calm. “You, with your cute little smile and freckly nose, get to pin your gold star up there too.”
The voice went quiet before a short burst of witchy titter-cackle.
“Only Ethan,” the voice said in its instructive tone, and Ethan pictured the voice’s hand coming up over its mouth, as if the voice were feigning embarrassment. “Poor Ethan—you’re the only one in the class.”
The last words oozed hatred Ethan could feel even through the voice’s electronic synthesis.
“But, Ethan,” the voice said, losing its menacing tone, “I don’t have Miss Honeysuckle’s ruby lips or sexy tongue to lick your gold star.”
The hair on the back of Ethan’s neck prickled. It was coming, and it was not a gold star.
He stared at the beige wall and green carpet with his left eye. He prayed for his life and prayed the pain would be quick.
Skin touched his arm. It took everything he had not to move. He pictured a mangy rat—whiskers twitching on his skin and repugnant, beady eyes waiting—ready to chew into his arm.
“That’s right, Ethan,” the voice said, a whisper coming through the hum of the electronic gadgetry. “Remember, I am your hope, your fear, and your truth.”
The last word was followed by something like a flat piece of cardboard placed on the side of his head. Something hard pressed in behind it.
There was a moment when he thought that was it; something had been added to his restraints, and nothing more was going to happen.
Then the hard thing pressed even harder against his head. A gun? A shot went off. The pain was instant in the side of his head.
It’s over, he thought, expecting darkness to follow. His eye had closed. He opened it quickly. He could see.
His pain was fading. Shot?
“Your first gold star, Ethan,” said the voice. “You’re my top student. You can stay at the front of the class, stapled gold star and all.”
Something was stuck to his head. It hurt, but it wasn’t killing him.
“Thus ends lesson one,” said the electric voice. A damp cloth that carried the sweet, sick smell of rot covered his face.
This time, the light did go out.
CHAPTER 71
Eyes Open—Fourth Time
He was in the back seat of his father’s white Chevrolet. His face was scrunched up against the rear passenger-side window; his hand was on the silver handle used to roll down the window. Carlyn was sitting on the blue vinyl bench seat beside him, curling strands of her strawberry-blonde hair around her index finger.
He was lost in thought, intrigued by how his nose formed to the flatness of the window glass, when a flash of red caught his eye. A lone cardinal, bright fire engine red, hopped out on a guardrail post, yet its surroundings lacked color, like a black-and-white photograph. It seemed strange to see a cardinal at the open roadside, as their song was usually the only thing that gave them away amid the tall conifers of the forest.
As they drove past, the bird turned to Ethan and fluttered its red wings. “Look at me. I’m free,” it seemed to say, and then it flitted from the post and flew away.
His face was hard against the glass when he realized it wasn’t so smooth and felt scratchy on his cheek.
His eyes opened. He knew where he was at once as the dream vanished.
But something was different.
The left side of his face was on the green carpet. He was lying on his left side and could feel his right arm lying along his right side. Now his left shoulder was the uncomfortable one. His left arm, underneath him, now hurt. No doubt it would soon become numb, as his right one had. The weight of his left arm pulled on his right, the reverse of before, his wrists still bound together. His dried vomit and blood were gone.
In front of him was a bed, as the voice had described. He held his right eye steady, although it had surely moved upon opening. A white porcelain toilet sat to the right of the bed—the commode.
Still concentrating on not moving, he heard Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting” playing. It was one of the first songs that had excited him about music. Like before, at the bottom of his peripheral sight, he saw the edge of a large white bowl. He didn’t try to look farther. His stomach hurt. He needed to pee. Awake, he could do little to hold back the push. His pants were down, if not off; his lower half was naked, with his penis exposed. The bowl was close enough to pee in. He could feel the side against his thigh. He hoped he wasn’t being watched, but he knew better. Hearing the sound of his splashing pee in the bowl was like listening to water from a hose flow into a metal bucket. The relief was marvelous.
The music’s tempo changed as the raspy, gurgled voice of Louis Armstrong singing “Mack the Knife” came on. Unexpected emotion overtook him. His stomach tightened as a tear trickled from his open right eye over the bridge of his nose to fall silently to the green carpet. The song brought his mother back to mind, but the tear was for Mila. He couldn’t conjure her image—her dark brown eyes, loving smile, and soft skin. Her face was gone. Loneliness fell upon him like the onset of darkness after sunset.
Ethan, this is not a game. Stop playing.
Her voice seemed real, right next to him. Her face felt close to his, near enough to kiss. Hands, impossibly soft, touched his face, comforting in their familiarity. His heart ached at not being with her. He felt her warm skin on his, as if they’d never parted. Fingertips stroked his lips, which were aching to be kissed. Her lips were ready to kiss his, the soft sex of her tongue there and wanting. It was a moment. He moaned.
Just as a single snore could wake him, his moan stopped him. His right eye focused. For an instant, he felt safe. It was still and silent, and for a moment, hopeful, he imagined the sound he’d made had not been audible. But that hope took seconds to extinguish. The soft fingers that had traced his face and lips moments before were wrapped around the baby finger on his right hand. The grip was firm. His right arm stiffened on reflex. A moment later, he realized what was coming—punishment for his indiscretion.
What started slowly went by quickly; time seemed to stretch and contract sharply. He tried to clench his fist in defense, but the effort was futile. The voice had the advantage of two hands and free movement. His finger was forcefully straightened. He imagined the fists that held it. The digit was bent backward. For a moment, long enough for him to hear Duran Duran’s “Hungry like the Wolf” surface in the background, nothing happened. Then, like a dry stick breaking, came the crack. T
he agony came fast, sharp and hot. His hand went numb.
On the edge of consciousness, he didn’t resist. In what seemed like accumulated moments rather than a smooth passage of time, the pain subsided. Remembering Harrison Ford’s Deckard from Blade Runner moved his mind from the situation. His captor’s voice, as if aware of his thoughts, snuffed out the image a second later.
“You messed up, Ethan dear,” said the electric voice, modulating between levels of evil screaming. “You will pay for that every time. We’ll go lightly this time, as it really wasn’t your voluntary self. But you must learn control—if you want to live longer.”
There was a lengthy pause before the voice spoke again. At times, the electronic sound made it difficult to believe a human could really be behind it.
“Let’s start this over again,” said the voice. “I don’t like starting a lesson this way.”
Ethan still hadn’t seen the black boots or any sign of the voice in his new position. His hand throbbed.
A hand moved in front of his face. It poked a straw through the slice in the tape and into his mouth again. Ethan hadn’t noticed he was breathing through his mouth until the straw was inserted; his nose was still plugged.
Another bowl of clear liquid was set in front of him.
“Drink, Ethan,” the voice demanded. “You must be thirsty. You haven’t drunk anything in eight hours.”
Again, it used an empathic tone—real or contrived—that was strangely comforting. He was beginning to think of the voice as his, meant only for him, his little piece of evil.
His thirst was enormous. He sucked on the straw without thinking that the fluid would be anything but water. The taste was glorious—what water must have tasted like in heaven, he thought.
“New view today, Ethan,” the voice said while Ethan swallowed. “Your reward from yesterday.” The voice stopped, seeming to wait for him. “What you see before you will become your goals. Maybe even your friends.”
Ethan heard the voice but was rejoicing in the delicious water flowing into his mouth and down his parched throat. It was liquid hope, like sunlight breaking through a cold gray sky. The pain in his hand had become a hard ache. It felt better now that he was lying on his left side.
“If you make it that long.”
The voice was behind him. The bowl of water was removed. He sucked air until the straw was pulled away. Worry fell upon him. He wondered what he might have missed the voice say. He was mad at himself for being so easily swayed with the water. He had to stay attentive, no matter how enticing the distraction. He braced himself for what might come: another penalty for what he’d missed. But all that came was fear.
“Lesson two will be it for a while,” the voice said, and Ethan was sure he heard a smile. “I have to get you up. It’s too much effort to have you on the floor.”
Pay attention, Ethan reminded himself as the sense of knowing what was going to happen returned. He had the déjà vu feeling again.
“Your fear and your truth,” the voice said, coming back to his ears.
Fuck, he thought, wincing at his own error. You can’t stay focused for even a few seconds.
Before he thought further about what he’d missed, agony lit up his right calf. Bright light flashed behind his eyes. The pain was so intense he was certain that if he could have looked, he would have seen the blade of an ax stuck in his calf. He waited for the pain to recede, but before it could, more pain struck the front of his shin. The capacity for thought left him. The disturbing image of the bottom of his leg bent unnaturally forward was all that remained.
“We made such progress yesterday!” the voice said, yelling the last word so loudly Ethan thought he could feel it resonate through his damaged leg. “What did I say? You can’t move! Move, and I will kill you.”
Like the words the voice screamed, pain seemed to shriek through his body. The steel-toed boot drove into his back, surely cracking ribs. Even with the hole sliced in the tape covering his mouth, he couldn’t breathe.
“You’re going from gold star to dunce in one lesson,” the voice growled. “Bravo. I’ll be counting the nails for your coffin sooner than I expected.”
Ethan was rendered mindless; tangible thought was nearly impossible. Pain had taken over. On the edge of consciousness, he could do little but try to remain still. He stared at the green carpet.
“Remember value, Ethan,” the voice said, screaming the word value. The voice was so close Ethan was sure he could feel its breath on his face.
“You value living by how well you listen, how well you obey, how well you learn, and, obviously, how well you remember!”
The voice was shouting so loudly Ethan wondered how someone outside of wherever they were didn’t hear it. The loudness was painful but minor compared to the terror that accompanied it. He was going to die.
“I’m disappointed in you,” the voice said, the electronic fuzz making the situation unreal while taking horrifying chunks out of Ethan’s psyche. “I thought you were made of better stuff. No, I’m lying. You’re just revealing what I already knew. You didn’t deserve her.”
The words attached themselves in his head as if he were running through a field overgrown with weeds and a few prickly burs had stuck to his pant leg.
“I have to tell you everything,” the voice said, “but that’s nothing new, I suppose.”
Though the voice was unfamiliar in its distorted form, Ethan registered something recognizable in its words. But the pain didn’t allow him to think about it long enough to tell if he was imagining it or if it was real. He hadn’t imagined “You didn’t deserve her.”
Whom hadn’t he deserved? Had that statement been a slipup? The voice didn’t seem to make mistakes, but the madness in the voice seemed to be growing. Or was he imagining that too? Had the voice gotten lost in its own rant? Ethan struggled with what, if anything, the sentence meant. The pain in his legs and back couldn’t find a place to rest and raged on. He tried to think of something else, but the words wouldn’t let him. You didn’t deserve her. There was something about how it had been said, the manner of speaking. He knew it wasn’t possible but couldn’t help himself. Robbie. It was Robbie. But that couldn’t be. Robbie was dead. He’d watched him die.
In the park.
The thought chilled him.
For an instant, he forgot the pain but not the thought. The more he tried to rationalize it, the more he realized it couldn’t be. His mind was playing games, and then, like an old acquaintance, he felt it—the heavy door. He pushed back, trying desperately to think of something else. He knew what the door offered him, but with it came another fear. Was any of this real? Was he already gone? That made some sense, but if he could think it, he was sure he wasn’t gone. He wasn’t crazy. But then again, maybe that was the truth.
Syd came to mind. Syd was real. Where was Syd? She’d been there when he woke shaking in the transport. Where was she now? And why had she said, “This wasn’t the deal”? Or had even that been a figment of his imagination?
“I would like to put this incident,” the voice said, interrupting Ethan’s scattering thoughts.
He’d done it again. He’d gotten distracted. What had he done now? He couldn’t see the black boots. Not seeing the boots seemed to allow his thoughts to wander, all but forcing him to do wrong. He stared at the green carpet, aware of holding his eye still.
“Behind us.” The voice finished at a higher pitch.
Ethan was like a dog the voice owned. He was expected to obey. That meant one thing: don’t move. He was trying to be a good dog.
“And so I will. Lesson two, Ethan,” the voice said, again close to Ethan’s right ear, “is entitled ‘Why Am I Here?’ However, lesson one will continue to be important regarding how much you value living longer with the principles of listening, obeying, learning, and remembering!” The voice shouted the last word as if it were t
he most important. “The intention of lesson two is for you to understand why you’re here. It’s not by accident. It’s not by some random event that had you in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, you are here because of what you did—because of your actions. You have made me,” screamed the voice, “have to do this to you!”
Ethan stared at the carpet, focused on a few green fibers. A black boot appeared in the bottom of his peripheral vision. His pupil jittered. He concentrated to steady his stare on the carpet fibers. He prayed his captor hadn’t noticed the movement. Ethan pictured the voice straddling him with fists on its hips, in a pose like that of a Nazi SS officer in pantaloons.
“Is that clear, Ethan?” the voice demanded. Ethan’s one-eyed stare didn’t move. “This is not my fault. This is your fault! Your doing!”
The voice seemed to get closer with each word, as if bending down from its stance.
Ethan was terrified beyond anything he’d known. Pain could come anywhere on his body at any moment—and maybe death. He was helpless to defend or protect himself, vulnerable and reduced to nothing; any second was potentially his last. He didn’t know how close he was to the limit of how much he could take, but he could feel its proximity. The heavy door was there. Maybe he was already behind it, inside. He couldn’t feel the lock anymore. But wasn’t thinking it an indication he wasn’t there yet? Maybe reentering the world he’d gone to and long feared was his only way out.
What had triggered his return?
Shit, another distraction. He’d found another temporary refuge from the insanity standing over him. He was still staring at the same spot on the carpet. The black boot hadn’t moved.
Why did he come back after performing a song?
He recalled his cousin’s diving accident in Cozumel. The story was that his cousin had been unable to write his name in the boat’s ledger upon returning to the dive boat and had wound up in a decompression chamber in a Mexican hospital, recovering from what the doctors had referred to as “the bends.” There was no explanation for what had happened—they’d followed protocol. His cousin had never dived again.
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