He heard Lansing crunching and the pungent smell of apple flesh filled his pinched nostrils.
You crazy freaking murdering bastard came out as a muttered gargle behind the binding tape. I could kill him. If I were free, I could kill him now...
The footsteps circled him once, as if Lansing were looking him over. Crunch, chew, crunch. He is eating fruit from my refrigerator, Sully thought. He stabbed Frannie, he cut the Bunsuns into pieces, he slit Mike's throat, he bound Carla to her bed, he thumped me, goddamnit, on the head, and tied me up to lie squirming on the floor like an animal he's readying for gutting. I will not be done this way. I will not die helpless...
The footsteps receded, a door slammed. A real door made of wood, hung from brass hardware, closing away the obscenity in a walled box.
While I kick and squirm helplessly on the tile. While I listen to the refrigerator hum and the crickets chirp. While I stare into a black pit that is my soul, dear God, that is my soul...
#
He moved around the kitchen doing what damage he could until he was too tired to do it anymore. With his bound legs he hooked kitchen chairs and brought them crashing onto the tile, into the walls, onto himself. He kicked loose the bottom panel on the refrigerator and upset the drip pan beneath. Stale water soaked the cuffs of his pajamas. He found the table legs and pushed until the table scooted and hit an obstacle with a loud crash. He broke cabinet doors, knocked pans and skillets everywhere, kicked over the plastic garbage pail. When breathing was so hard it hurt, he waited for his wind to return.
He felt with his feet and determined where he was on the kitchen floor. He had lived in this house ten years, he should know his way, but he had never tried navigating blindfolded, bound, on floor level. Finally, he judged where the doorway might be leading into the den and aimed for it. He inch-wormed on his side by pulling his legs up and pushing forward. He bumped his head on the downed chairs, had his face smeared with coffee grounds and eggshells from the spilled garbage, but he found the door after an interminable time.
He did these things to make noise, to try to create a diversion, in order to save Carla. And he did them to keep from thinking. If he thought about what was going on in Carla's bedroom, he would lose the tiny string playing out his mind.
As he wormed across the carpeted den, he wondered how long it would be before he completely lost his sanity. Already he could not say what was real and what was illusion in the world he had been thrust into. He identified objects and sounds and odors, but were they real or had he been forced to make them up so that he would know he was real?
He felt the carpet because it burned him, and scraped his upper cheekbone and forehead and nose. The outside of his left arm burned as he scooted along. He smelled the carpet. It gave off dust and foot smell and carpet shampoo deodorant smell. But was he on the deep brown carpet of his den in a house he called home in the dark of a hellish night, or was he lost in one of those nightmares where you can't tell you're dreaming? He had dreams like that before. After Frannie--life was divided between Before and After Frannie--after a maniac walked into the house while passing through town and sliced her into strips with his switchblade, well, nightmares became very, very real for Sully. None quite so petrifying as this one, but there had been others.
Couldn't he have fallen asleep and dreamed he got up to check the doors once more and decided to look in on Carla? Couldn't his talk with Mike combined with the shots of Irish whiskey set him up for this horrid stage play? Maybe Mike's warning made him feel guilty he had not secured the house as soon as he knew Lansing had killed again. Maybe it was his conscience torturing him with a guilt-ridden nightmare. That would explain why he dreamed Mike sat on the sofa in the dark with his throat cut. It was Sully's subconscious wish--though pretty drastic if you asked him--that Mike pay for the reminder.
He slammed headfirst into the baseboard of the upholstered rocker and the shock jolted his spine. He laid his cheek on the carpet and counted to ten, cursing silently between the numbers to help dissipate the pain. His head was in poor shape, really poor shape. Running into the rocker shouldn't have hurt him that badly. There must be a bump the size of an orange on his head from the hit he took in Carla's room for it to be so sensitive. That is, if this was real and not a dream.
He scooted to the left and inched past the rocker. He had been concentrating so desperately on moving himself the length of the twenty-four-foot room to Carla's bedroom door, he had not been paying attention to the sounds around him.
Now that he was as close as six feet from where her door should be, he stopped moving, and lifting his head, listened.
She was crying, the poor baby was crying so piteously. His little Carla, his wife's beautiful, proud, brave little sister.
Sully tucked his head toward his groin, curled into a fetus ball, and wished fervently not to be able to hear, to be stone deaf, to be sleeping and dreaming, dreaming, only dreaming this horribly unreal godless time.
His nose clogged and he had trouble breathing. His testicles shriveled, and hair stood out on the nape of his neck. His ears rang as if sirens were blowing down the ear canals. His fingers dug into clammy palms.
Sully lifted is head and banged the floor to make the crying go away. He kept banging the floor until he passed into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 8
"Hey, it's time to wake up. I want to talk."
Sully heard: "...to talk."
"Huh?" Sully responded, but it was little more than a grunt.
"Wake the fuck up, Torrance. Sit, sit, that's right, straighten out your legs, I'll help."
Sully snapped into full wakefulness, but the disorientation he suffered earlier in the night was not as bad as it was now. His throat was parched and raw so that he could hardly swallow. He whiffled when he breathed, as if a valve had shut down in his lungs. Everything was black. His head and body was one big mass of skyrocketing pain.
He felt rough, calloused hands on his face. Suddenly the tape was painfully ripped off his mouth, and his lips flapped like rubber. He yelped.
Lansing patted his cheek. "There, now, isn't that better?"
"Whayoudo...?" Sully tried again. "What. Did. You. Do to Carla?"
Lansing's voice moved away. "That's for me to know."
And you to find out, Sully finished for him. "Lansing, in God's name..."'
"We're not going to talk about God. I don't know one thing about the bum. No one I ever knew ever met him." He laughed aloud at how clever he thought he sounded.
Sully cleared his throat. He considered how to go about staying alive until he could see Carla. He said, "Will you take the tape off my eyes so I can see?"
"No deal."
"You killed Mike." That just popped out. He didn't mean to say it. He had to control what he said.
"Yeah, I killed Mike. He's your friend, right? Right?"
Sully nodded his head up and down. It seemed the darkness he was locked into bobbed with the motion, tiny pinpoint dots of lights, photons, he'd read somewhere, drifting across his closed field of vision, flooding his retinas like a field of stars in a miniature universe.
"So he's dead. Right over there on your fucking sofa."
He paused and Sully imagined him looking at his friend's body. "Looks good, your friend, with his frigging smart mouth shut down for the long haul."
"Did you kill Carla?" Sully wanted to hear she was alive, and then he wanted to hear she was dead. Either way it was hell.
Lansing completely ignored him. He said, "Listen, you made a goddamn mess in the kitchen, you know that? Person could get roaches and rats living like that. You ever have rats, Sully? Not little mice, even nice folks get mice. I mean those huge mean grizzly things that could take off your toes. You ever get them?"
"No."
"I got one once. It kept fucking around under the sink. One night I caught it with the hammer. Smashed it to paste. Never did get another one. Like they're smart, right?"
"Yeah, they're smart."
/> "Don't be agreeing with me if you don't mean it. I'm not some damn psycho with an I.Q. of twenty. You don't think I'm dumb, do you, Sully? Tell the truth."
"You've outsmarted the cops in about six states; I guess no one would call you dumb."
"Right. I know how to survive. Like that dead rat's friends, I don't go where the hammer falls."
"You came here."
"And you're the one tied up, your buddy's dead, and..."
"Carla?" Sully asked and held his breath.
"Uh-uh. We'll talk Carla later."
Sully let out his breath, shifted his weight onto his right rump.
"You want some water?"
"I...yes, I'd like a drink of water." Sully listened to him leave the room and walk across the tile floor of the kitchen. He heard the tap run, the footsteps return. "I'm not going to clean up that mess you made in there," Lansing said petulantly. He pressed the rim of a glass to Sully's lips.
Sully drank. Water ran down his chin and neck and felt as wonderful and refreshing as standing beneath a waterfall. The glass was removed.
"My hands and feet have restricted circulation," he said carefully. "Could you...?"
"Untie you? No deal. That's for your twenty I.Q.'s, remember?"
"No, just loosen them a bit, let me work the muscles."
"Sure, I guess that's okay, why not."
Sully hated Lansing's touch, recoiled from it before bringing himself under control again. The cords were retied and felt less binding. Sully flexed his hands, his fingers, felt the tingling begin, the pain following soon after. He bent and arched his feet, shook them the way a dolphin might shake its flippers.
"Better?" Lansing's voice had become truly sarcastic. "I wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable."
"What now?"
Lansing was moving around the room. It sounded as if he were looking for something. "What do you mean. 'What now?"'
"Are you going to kill me? Play head games? Torture? What? What now?"
"I'm going to kill you probably. That's what I came for. You knew I'd come, didn't you?"
Sully cocked his head to the side trying to decipher the tone that had changed from sarcastic to menacingly playful. Did he really mean to kill them? "I thought you might."
"You got some good stuff here, Sully. Nice house. You own a hardware store, right? Build this house yourself? Bet it's paid for, right? No mortgage?"
Sully didn't know which question to answer, so he answered the last one. "There's a fair mortgage on it."
"By fair you mean middling to small, is that it?"
"That's correct."
"You people sure have a way of talking, Sully, you sure do."
"What do you want, Lansing? If Carla's all right and if you'll leave without doing anything else, I'll give you what I've got. Checkbook, credit cards, the Cadillac. Frannie...Frannie had some jewelry. It's in our bedroom. You can have that."
There was a long silence. Sweat trickled down Sully's sides. Had he made a mistake? What could he say to a madman?
"No deal," Lansing said. "If I'd wanted anything in this house, I would have taken it when I did Frannie. This is the final quarter, Sully. I walk outta here and leave you breathing, then there was no point in playing ball."
Did Frannie. Sully began to hyperventilate and then calmed himself. "Why don't we talk about it?" Sully knew he sounded despondent, hopeless. What did madmen talk about besides rats and mortgages and committing murder in cold blood?
"Right now, yeah, right, that's what I want, Sully. We're going to talk. We're going to get to know each other real good, me and you."
"Okay." He could be long-suffering. Living without Frannie proved that. He could survive, too. He was already learning how.
"I lived out in the woods behind this house, Sully, for a month. Didn't know that, did you? I came here every day. Watched over you. Fact is, I was out in your backyard just yesterday."
Sully swallowed his surprise, then remembered the prickling feeling he'd had sitting in the sunlight. He was going to be blank slate, let Lansing write all over him. "Where did you live?" he asked. "There's nothing out there."
"Right. I built a lean-to, know what that is? I used green saplings and bent them. I covered 'em with mud, like the Native Americans used to do. Then I covered the mud with sticks and leaves and mulch. You could have walked clean past it and never knew it was there."
Sully reflected on a mind that could go to such lengths. A mind--a cunning intelligence--that could cause a man to live like a burrowing animal in order to wait and watch a house for a month. For so many days. What kind of man was that? What kind of mind? Lansing was not sane or insane. He was not a madman, for that implied he was a "man" first of all. Martin Lansing was a creature. What could he do to dissuade the creature from killing them?
"What did you do for food?" Sully asked. He felt his ears crinkling against the possibilities.
"I stole," Lansing answered casually. "Your neighbors are far and scarce, but I did okay."
"Bathe?"
"What?"
"How did you wash?"
"Creek I found. Good tasting water, too. Good supply."
"I see."
"Now that you know something about me, it's your turn, Sully."
"Do we have to talk about me? Why can't we talk about killing, Lansing? How you can stop. How it can end here."
"Tell me about Frannie." Persistent.
Sully hung his head and waggled it. Desolation was not a place or a state of being or an emotion. He knew what desolation was now. He had lived thirty-four years. He had accepted kindness and goodness and understanding as a given in this world. Until Frannie was murdered, and even after, when he thought he could not go on, there had not been a time he could call by the name Desolation. But now. To speak of his wife who lay cold beneath green sod and watched over by white roses, this was desolation. It was to be alone and forsaken. It was to walk through a city devoid of human life. It was to sit in bondage with your best friend decomposing nearby and with sweet, idealistic Carla lying in the bedroom dead or destroyed or catatonic and have to tell a killer what his victim had been in life.
"Well? I'm waiting, Sully. Of course, we can always tape your mouth again, tighten the electrical wires on your hands and feet. We can always just slit your lousy fucking throat and get this business over with."
"No!" Sully interrupted. He slumped onto the floor, rested his face on the carpet. "We'll talk."
"Right. So go ahead."
"Ask me questions."
"How old was she on your first date?"
Sully sucked in a lungful of air and began to relate the past. He pretended it was someone else's and he was telling story. He could even make things up as he went along. It didn't matter what he said if it sounded believable. Lansing wanted to kill him this way, but it wouldn't work. He wouldn't get the satisfaction. He had only killed part of him. As long as there was any of him left to go on, he'd survive. And as long as he kept Lansing talking he could keep him from killing.
"What did Carla look like then?" Lansing asked next. "Who took care of her?"
Sully decided to ignore questions about Carla if he could deflect his captor from thinking about her in the bedroom. "Frannie's hair was long then, like Carla's now," he was saying, and it was the truth. "She was working as a secretary in City Hall." That was a lie. Didn't matter, who cared? Who knew?
The fabrications grew easier and he mixed them with truth. By all means Sully meant to keep the pure, good memories for himself even if they were his for only a precious little while longer.
Sully invented, added, subtracted, confessed. As a desolate man nevertheless intent on survival, and ultimately, he hoped, revenge, he felt he was sailing smoothly through the turbulent Lansing sea.
It was not until later that he knew he had been wrong.
CHAPTER 9
It was the anticipation of harm that drove them crazy. Lansing understood that as a basic. When he killed Frannie and the Bunsuns, he h
adn't had the time to indulge the theory, but with Torrance and Carla he tested it and discovered how strong the threat of pain or death could be. It was the reverse of what happened when a man had been trained in the martial arts. In karate, for instance, a man saw past the pain, saw beyond it. He focused all his energies on the other side of the wooden board or the brick he was determined to smash through. He left no room for perception of what it took to reach the goal.
Lansing personally knew how both modes of thought worked. He had expected pain before, and when it came, the experience was ten times as debilitating. And he had also trained himself to think beyond pain so that when it came, he was absent, therefore, immune.
His victims didn't know the trick of reinforcing positive thoughts, they had no experience, that was the thing. They probably didn't realize they had a choice in the matter. Like everyone else they assumed if they were hit with enough force, pain followed. On a simple everyday level, they believed if a headache occurred, they could only endure it.
During the night while he had Sully tied in the kitchen, he talked to Carla. She was tougher than her brother-in-law. She had no less to lose, but her priorities were different. Not that she wasn't terrified of him and what he might do. He was able to make her weep, though she stopped short of begging for mercy. The problem with Carla was unusual. She was willing to accept torture or slow death and that made her less pliable for his personal plans for her. She was not as much fun as Sully. In a way it was too bad he must kill them. His other victims over the years had been nameless unknowns. He tracked them, killed them, and went on his way undisturbed until he felt he must do it again. He did not talk to his victims this way or play games with them. This was new. This was good.
"Tell me about Frannie's habits," Lansing said now, prodding Sully toward further revelations. He suspected not all Sully told him was the absolute truth. Now and then what he said had a false ring to it, but he was willing to overlook the discrepancies. It was all prelude anyway, and he didn't care that much about a dead woman. He just wanted to make Sully hurt by forcing him to talk about her. Lies or not, she was in his thoughts, and that was the object of the lesson. Sully and Carla must suffer mentally and physically before dying. They had asked for it.
CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set Page 30