The Musician

by Douglas Gardham

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” hollered the electronic-voiced Madonna mask.

  Ethan took his first shot to the head. It hardly registered. If anything, it made real the crushing rage inside him. More spit flew from the hole in the tape and into his face. He pushed his tongue against the tape, trying to push through the hole. His rocking and shaking didn’t let up.

  The music played constantly. While the victim was incarcerated, William wanted his soundtrack. It was disrupting, disorienting. He heard the calm serenity of Andy Williams’s “Moon River.” Meant to confuse the victim’s emotions around what was taking place. It now served to drive Ethan on.

  The Madonna’s open palm slammed hard into the side of his face. Ethan’s head whipped sideways, numbing his cheek and tearing some of the tape from his face.

  Ethan screamed again. It took his breath. The size of the hole in the tape, compounded by his saliva, made it all but impossible to catch.

  He blew out, spraying spittle around like an exhausted athlete.

  Then, as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped, as if reaching the eye of his tempest. The calm lasted for all of a second, maybe two, as he played dead, and then the uncontrollable shaking took over. Whether by performance or reaction, his art was now his life.

  His plan, like before, was to bleed the victim to death’s door and then suffocate them. Stay with the plan, William. Deviations will be punished.

  Ethan knew what William was thinking. He knew what masked Robbie would do.

  The capture. The room. The wood chair. Ethan knew it was bolted to the floor. It wasn’t going anywhere. The brackets were strong, stronger than the wood legs.

  As Tylenol was to the medical doctor, duct tape was to the handyman. Shave their heads. Take their clothes. Complete and utter vulnerability. There was to be nothing the captee could attach meaning to, nothing of value. He had to be driven to the lowest level of depravity, Maslow’s lowest level of physiological need—air, water, food. The victim must realize he is nothing. Like air, he must believe himself inert.

  The words he remembered were his thoughts, William’s thoughts, but they didn’t still his tirade. Real or not, it was all or nothing. He had to disrupt the plan, the plan he knew—William’s plan, his plan, the plan the Madonna mask was carrying out.

  It had murdered Mila.

  Every decision is an emotional one. Decisions are based on the emotional level one is at, their apparent logic. As if going through a checklist, the brain’s living tissue is constantly reconfiguring its input based on emotional state. Excite or depress those emotions changes the checklist and the decisions, creating different actions, first one thing but later another.

  Ethan knew this because William knew it. He was the real William Avery; he had become William to perform the role, his role. William used what his wife, a nurse, brought home or what he picked up from her medical journals to take charge of his victims. Each deserved what he had coming.

  Ethan remained locked to the chair but shook with every fraction of movement he could manage. His broken left foot was on fire but fed the fight still in him. The more he shook his head and twisted his face, the more saliva worked its way out. The tape became less stuck to his skin. The gaps grew, adding loudness to his screaming.

  They can’t know who you are. Black boots, a mask, and a new voice. Only you know them, a one-way street. Extraordinary circumstances do not mean things go unplanned. All is not spontaneous. We must engineer our success—your success. No mistakes.

  Ethan knew the black boot was coming. He anticipated the move as the Madonna’s natural defense to something unexpected. What he didn’t expect was where it would come from or the agony.

  He was shaking and rocking his head back and forth. His numb arms pulled at his shoulders as he jerked himself around. His right shoulder still burned where the X-Acto knife remained stuck in his bicep. Then, on a downward thrust of his head, the black boot slammed into his shin with a force he was sure broke his tibia. The pain brought him to the edge of his consciousness.

  The heavy door was behind him. He was inside and not about to leave.

  His head flew backward. The top of the chair back caught him just below his shoulder blades. He hardly noticed. His hips thrust forward, forcing him hard against the restraining belt secured to the chair. He didn’t have much left. Something had to give soon.

  “You will pay with your life!” the electronic-voiced Madonna screamed, its madness extending beyond its mask and into Ethan’s craziness.

  But something felt different to Ethan, as if the chair had shifted. Somehow, he kept rocking, ignoring the agonizing shrieks of his legs and arms to stop. To stop was to die. Its control was gone. It wanted Ethan dead.

  “You bastard!” the Madonna mask screamed above Ethan’s yells behind the tape. Ethan heard John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” between gasps to catch his breath. “You’ve fucked with the wrong person this time.”

  Ethan saw Mila, her body limp, in the monster’s arms, her shirt unbuttoned.

  That monster didn’t look like Robbie.

  Rage took over.

  Ethan turned his head as he rocked hard backward again. Something let go. He couldn’t tell whether it was part of him or the chair. His screams were not an act. He thrust his head forward.

  The crack was loud. He could feel it in his torso. The pain was exquisite. His shin was broken. He was shrieking.

  CHAPTER 81

  Eyes Stay Open—Surreal Clarity

  Unbearable agony was deteriorating his consciousness, yet he had magnificent clarity. He was sinking like the ground beneath him and the chair was disintegrating.

  The tug on his arms came first. As his body continued to shake, no longer in control, his arms took on his weight. Spittle flew from the open gaps in the duct tape across his mouth. His thighs were loaded with weight they could not support. Like a collapsing bridge, the chair he sat on came apart. His legs, clamped to the chair’s front legs, pulled back. The back legs of the chair collapsing twisted his arms backward and left him hanging from the chains fastened to the wall. The steel cuffs cut even deeper into his skin.

  First, they must not be fed, to slow the body’s metabolism. Slow the blood flow and its manufacture. Then let them bleed. Become their hope, their fear, and their truth, their life and death. They’re shit. They won’t leave the room alive.

  Ethan knew what William expected—or had come to expect.

  Hanging by his wrists, he couldn’t lift himself. His arms, elevated for so long, were of little use, just numb appendages attached to his body. He put everything he had into pushing back with his legs. His right leg exploded in agony, blurring his ability to think. How he supported any weight with his broken left foot, he didn’t know; his right leg was all but useless to the fight. The black boots had done their job, but it wasn’t only his leg that was broken. The front leg of the chair seemed damaged. He pushed again with his left leg and moved sideways. His right ankle went with it, along with a jolt of pain that went all the way up his leg. He would have grabbed it if he could have. He then realized the black boot had done even more. The front chair leg seemed dislodged from the steel bracket that anchored it to the floor. Hope and idea came together. Normally, such pain would have prevented him from any movement, but his leg was free. Nothing else mattered.

  His right leg shot up into something hard and fleshy.

  William, how could you let this happen?

  They were his words, and it was his scene to make right. He could defeat William because he knew William. He had been William.

  As he hung from the chains bolted to the cider-block wall, the masked Madonna’s swiping palm connected with his nose, igniting another firestorm inside his head. Ethan found his own madness. He had rocked and shaken before like some kind of convulsing marionette in a forced seizure, but he now was out of control and wild like a rabid animal
.

  He turned, and as the chair leg fastened to his right foot came away from its mount in the floor, he drove his leg upward. His hips rolled sideways, giving him leverage to drive his limp leg forward. Thought wasn’t possible. It was happening. The agony of his broken right leg amplified the intensity of his actions. He burst into a flurry of kicks and thrusts that could only occur when a young man was on the cusp of death and knew it. It was the action that won wars and rewarded average men with medals for their extraordinary courage.

  The Madonna was on him, not punching but flailing with the heels of its palms. The eyes behind the mask looked lit up by high-intensity lightbulbs. Madonna-Robbie thrashed its fists into Ethan’s body for the kill.

  “You’ve fucked with me for the last time!” the voice hollered, the electronics faltering as it hammered yet another flat palm into Ethan’s face. Each hit seemed to add might to Ethan’s will to survive. His head fell backward, missing some of the strikes, but he was unable to defend himself with the arms he couldn’t feel still chained to the wall.

  “This is better than killing her!” it yelled as the side of its fist came down across Ethan’s nose. Ethan felt the crunch inside his head as much as he heard the crack.

  Her. Her!

  The Madonna thing didn’t stop; its madness reached new levels of insanity.

  “Seeing you, you dumb fuck, screwed up everything!” it shouted, its electronic voice failing and becoming someone else. “It was supposed to be you, you fuck!”

  Numbness had taken over Ethan’s entire face. The heel of the Madonna’s hand connected hard above his right eye.

  “I killed her,” the Madonna mask seethed into Ethan’s face, “and then I fucked her.”

  It was time. Control was his to take. It was William’s turn. It was his room. Justice must prevail against such evil. No one gets a pass for crimes against the meek and less fortunate. Not on his watch they didn’t.

  Ethan knew the scene like the back of his hand. He knew what William was thinking. No one there was going to jail, but somebody was going to die. It wasn’t William Avery.

  With strength summoned from a place inside reserved only for such atrocities, Ethan planted his bare left foot on the carpet. With an instant of balance, the short muscles in his legs firing at once, his right knee shot upward. His legs were so weak that the force with which his leg came up flipped the lower part of his leg below the knee forward. The wood chair leg still fastened to the steel bracelet around his ankle turned. The leg of the chair swung sideways and connected. Ethan not only heard it but felt it. The Madonna’s swinging palm dropped, falling short of Ethan’s face.

  Blood poured onto Ethan from whatever gash the chair leg had ripped into its head. The Madonna slipped sideways like a heavy bag of wet cement, all but immovable.

  Ethan hung from the chains in the wall. The Madonna’s masked head settled against his arm, its right eye no longer visible; blood was consuming its rubber whiteness. Ethan couldn’t move away from the blood that poured on him. He had nothing left.

  He closed his eyes.

  B. J. Thomas was singing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” from the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid soundtrack.

  Didn’t that beat all, as if the tune were making fun of him?

  * * *

  Ethan didn’t know how long he’d been out.

  Again, he awoke without opening his eyes and thought. Twenty-nine. It was the twenty-ninth time he’d awakened. He was still alive and still thinking. But something was different this time. He hurt everywhere.

  Something heavy lay across him. He wasn’t sitting on a chair. He was hanging by his arms. He tried to move. The pain nearly tipped him out again.

  His head was back against a hard surface. Barbra Streisand was singing “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”

  His mind started to race, suddenly remembering, chased by pain that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It surpassed anything he’d ever known, yet he could still think. He opened his eyes, or thought he did. He could see slits of light from the overhead lights, but it took him a minute to focus. He’d not seen much of the ceiling before, as he’d almost always been facing the floor. His face felt huge and tight, balloon-like. He didn’t move, not that he could have from the position he was in.

  The rules remained present in his head. There was no moving. But that was before.

  He pulled his head forward with everything he had.

  He started to shake.

  The Madonna mask had shifted on its owner’s face. He recognized the face.

  It wasn’t Robbie. It couldn’t have been. Robbie was dead.

  Sean Wayland lay on top of him.

  Sean beside Mila. Sean at Charly’s. Sean Mila’s killer. The monster. Get him off! Get him off!

  Ethan tried to scream, but his mouth was still covered with the duct tape.

  The little he could see didn’t matter. It was enough. His body shook.

  He remembered Sean at Another Color Blue—Sean at the show after killing Mila.

  His leg shrieked. Pain had replaced his blood.

  Like a claustrophobic man caught in an underground drainpipe, Ethan shook, trying to rid himself of the dead monster that lay atop his withered and raw body.

  Sean at the gravesite. Sean.

  He could not lift his head again. It was as if the mad creature had somehow attached itself to his body like a giant leech sucking what remaining life he had left.

  He had no strength in his arms to lift himself. His left foot was still held to the floor, bolted to whatever was left of the chair.

  He shook. He didn’t try. His body had taken over.

  Through the thin slits his swollen face allowed, he could see blond hair. The last of the Madonna mask was almost off. The monster’s weight seemed all but immovable. Still, Ethan shook. As if hyperthermia had set in, he shivered uncontrollably. His body needed to rid itself of the virus that lay on top of him.

  The longer he shook, the more violent his shivering became. Sean’s head—repulsive enough to make him dry heave—slid off his shoulder. The top part of the torso slid with it to the floor. But it wasn’t far enough.

  The rest of the corpse remained slung over Ethan’s upper left thigh and stomach, its legs on one side and its body and head on the other.

  Ethan continued to shiver until his adrenaline was spent. Exhaustion took him by force while pain held the upper hand.

  It brought him to a throbbing stillness—and a new realization.

  The monster had been right. He’d known what he was doing all along.

  Sean would have his way again.

  Nobody knew where he was.

  He was not going to leave the room alive after all. His eyes rolled up into the top of his sockets. It felt better.

  Aerosmith’s “Dream On” began to play.

  Mila’s killer had won.

  CHAPTER 82

  Tuesday, February 19, 1985

  Eyes Open—The Nightmare is Real

  Ethan would never be able to explain what followed, as he would never be able to separate fully what had been real and what hadn’t been.

  Hearing Christa’s voice and seeing her face made him think he could tell the difference.

  “Ethan?” Christa asked.

  He could feel her fingers through the thick white gauze bandages around his arm. His face hurt and felt bigger with the hardness of the bruised and swollen tissue. With only slits for sight, he could barely see her. Tears stung his cheeks.

  “Yes,” he answered, unable to manage anything more than a low whisper. The stiffness of his face made opening his mouth difficult and clear speech impossible.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he heard someone say in an efficient, professional-sounding voice he didn’t recognize. “I’ll need you to step away.”

  “I
t’s okay; I’m a nurse,” Christa replied, her fingers leaving his bandaged arm. He watched her bite her lip and then her knuckle. Her cheeks were wet.

  “We have to get him to the hospital,” another voice said, an urgent speed in his words.

  Ethan heard a number of things; most were indecipherable as he tried to keep the thin spaces he looked through open. He was tired. Christa disappeared from view. It was a dream. Strong hands grabbed his arms as he tried to move. He couldn’t let her go again, dream or no dream. He could utter little more than anxious grunts.

  “Whoa, cowboy,” said the first unfamiliar voice he’d heard. “You’re not going anywhere. Ya gotta take it slow.”

  Ethan shook, trying to move his arm, his hand reaching to find his beloved Christa’s hand.

  That was when he noticed. He heard sirens, moving feet, and voices, but the music was gone.

  EPILOGUE

  “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

  —Ernest Hemingway,

  The Old Man and the Sea

  Thursday, February 21, 1985

  “Good morning,” Christa said as she walked into the room Ethan had occupied for a day and a half and would get to know well over the coming weeks.

  “Good morning yourself,” Ethan replied to the smile that always made him feel better. It still hurt to move his mouth.

  He knew before she spoke—there’d not been much improvement in his swollen face. Something in her face revealed it—a slight furrow of her brow or a minute narrowing of her brown eyes. It was only an instant, a flicker, but it was enough. He doubted she was even aware of it. He refused to look in a mirror, scared of what he would see. He wondered whether getting old brought a similar feeling.

  “How’s Syd?” he asked. He’d asked about her before, and hesitation had followed, with Christa skirting anything more than a vague answer. “I still don’t know.”