Old Flames

by Jack Ketchum

  The sounds had stopped.

  The trembling didn’t.

  What do they want with me? she thought.

  Am I going to die here?

  Why me?

  There was no answer she could think of to any of these questions that wasn’t frightening and nothing to do but ask them over and over again while she waited for whatever deliverance would come in whatever form, in however vast and slow an eternity.

  The scratching sounds did not return. The cold did not relent.

  Greg, she thought. Somebody. Find me.

  I’m here.

  THREE

  1:05 P.M.

  Was it day or night?

  She was so cold. Colder every minute. She was thirsty. Her throat was sore from screaming, her hands and knuckles raw from pounding.

  What time was it? How long had she been here?

  Inside the box there was no benchmark for time, nothing to do but wait and think, thoughts turning in on themselves like the track on a model railroad, like the double-ring symbol for eternity, the snake swallowing its tail.

  Why me? bled seamlessly into what do they want from me? which dovetailed into is anyone looking for me, searching or when will I get some water or see some light or a thousand other questions which all came down to one question, how will I get out of here? Alive. Sane.

  She felt permanently stunned to find herself here. The feeling colored all reality. As though suddenly she were not even who and what she thought herself to be anymore. The Sara Foster she knew had come unstuck, uprooted from everything that grounded her. The Sara Foster who taught English and drama to LD kids at the Winthrop School on 74th Street, who was daughter to Charles and Evelyn Schap of Harrison, New York, lover to Greg Glover and pregnant with his child, who was once the mother of a wonderful beautiful boy drowned in a lake, who was ex-wife to Samuel Bell Foster and best friends with Annie Graham since childhood—all these people who had cradled her identity in embraces loving and not so loving for as long as she could remember meant nothing here. Were now almost irrelevant. What mattered was not the known world but the unknown world beyond the box.

  These people.

  They mattered.

  What the dark held mattered. The meaning of the box.

  And when she heard the footsteps on the wooden stairs they mattered. So that her heart began to race and the air seemed to thicken so she couldn’t seem to get her breath, worse as she heard them on the landing and then move toward her, shoeleather scraping concrete and she began to twist and turn inside the box in a frenzy to get out of there to whatever freedom or whatever fate those footsteps might imply, clawing at the box, slapping at the box, her voice a shrill high-pitched squeal in her ears and while still she gulped for breath. And when she heard the man’s laughter at the sounds of her fear and struggle and heard his fingers rattle the lock outside the headboard, rattling it again and again, playing with her, her body betrayed her utterly and she saw a sudden burst of red and fainted away.

  He lifted her out and placed her on the bare stained mattress. Studied her a moment.

  She didn’t move. She wasn’t faking.

  He lifted her head and set it carefully into the headbox.

  Then he clamped it shut.

  The headbox was half-inch plywood about the size of a hatbox, split in two and hinged at the top, with semicircular neck-holes carved into its base on either side and a padlock to secure the halves together. It was insulated and carpeted inside. It muffled all sound, shut out nearly all light.

  He’d tried it on himself.

  It was scary.

  The red plush carpeting pressed close to your face, sending your breath right back at you no matter how shallow your breathing. It was hot and claustrophobic. About ten pounds of weight sitting on your shoulders. And once it was on there was no way in hell you could get it off again. It was sturdy. You could bang it against a concrete wall all day long and do nothing but buy yourself a concussion.

  He’d done a good job on this one.

  The first two tries were failures. The problem was mostly weight, too much or too little. He’d built the first out of quarter-inch ply and when Kath tried it on she pointed out to him that if you pressed your face into the carpeting and held it that way, making space between your head and the back of the box so you didn’t bash your brains in, one good slam against a wall could crack the plywood.

  She proved this by demonstrating.

  Back to the drawing board.

  He built the second box of three-quarter-inch ply and it was tough as nails. But the damn thing also weighed about twenty pounds. You fell with that on, it could snap your neck.

  The new box halved the weight. Ten pounds was still a lot and he’d have to watch for that but he felt satisfied it was manageable.

  Kath had worn it all day long once just to see. She hadn’t wanted to but he explained to her that a trial run was a necessity. He knew she hated the thing from the minute he put it on her. Knew it scared her, made her dizzy and sick to her stomach and later she said it pinched her neck all the time she was in there but that was just too damn bad in the long view, somebody had to try it and it wasn’t going to be him. Besides the point was could a woman wear it all day long, not a man. Could a woman stand it.

  When he let her out at dinnertime her collarbone and shoulders were chafed red and sore and she complained about a stiff neck for nearly a week. Nothing that wasn’t going to go away. The point was that yes, it was manageable.

  He smiled. If Miss Sara Foster here thought the Long Box was scary—and she obviously did—wait till she woke up again and found herself in this one. He’d have put her in the thing in the first place but he was afraid she might vomit from the pentothol. And vomit was easier to clean off the base panel of a pinewood box than to get out of carpeting.

  He’d have to keep an eye on that too. On the vomiting. Kath had said the headbox was stifling and made her queasy in and of itself, never mind the Pentothal.

  He slipped her wrists through the black leather manacles and pulled each of the straps tight and threaded the ropes through the silver rings attached. The ropes depended from the a pair of pulleys at the top of each arm of the brand-new X-frame he’d constructed for her. Taking the two ropes together he slowly and carefully hauled her up until only her feet rested on the floor, legs slightly bent beneath her. Her head lolled forward heavily so that the box now rested on her breastbone. That probably hurt but as yet, not enough to wake her. He tied the ropes off quickly to the the climbers’ pitons hammered into the concrete floor and then stepped forward and slipped a small brass hook screwed into the headrest he’d attached to the X-frame through the corresponding eye at the back of the box so that her head would stay upright and take the weight off the back of her neck.

  He’d thought of everything.

  He stood back and looked at her. All his creation.

  You couldn’t see her face and that was good. Control was important. And she was very pretty.

  He needed to control himself now.

  The only thing that remained at this initial stage was to finish undressing her but he’d wait until she woke for that and was able to feel the cold blade of the knife cutting away her slip and pan ties. That kind of control was very important too.

  Afterwards he and Kath could come down and have some dinner and watch her, see how she took it all and he could go over again with Kath what the next step was supposed to be so there’d be no fuck-ups, no misunderstandings. This he’d do daily. There was a progression of events to this that he needed to be sure Kath would follow. They could speak as freely down here in front of her as they could upstairs. Sound not only didn’t get out of the box it didn’t get in much either.

  He watched her stir. A wrist move slightly, a squeaking sound inside the new leather manacle. The box shifted an inch to the right about as far as it could shift.

  She was waking.

  FOUR

  1.:15 P.M.

  And now there was not
hing in her life but terror.

  Her legs and arms were manacled and she knew what that meant. She’d read enough in papers and magazines. Seen enough on the evening news. She was in the hands of some sex freak and dear god, she was probably not the first. Not the way he’d worked this out. There was somebody out there beyond her own vivid dark who liked to hear screams and pleas and whimpers. Before they killed.

  Invariably they killed.

  She knew that too.

  She was aware of the terrible frail vulnerability of her body, of her cold nearly naked breasts, her exposed bare arms and legs against the scratchy wooden beams. Inside the box her eyes could not accommodate the dark. The heavy air was suffocating. She could smell her own breath. Sweat stung her eyes. She blinked to clear them and finally closed them while her body heaved with sobs that were wholly beyond her control wrenched from deep inside her. She heard her own quick gasps for breath. They never seemed to satisfy her aching lungs or still her pounding heart.

  She felt the heavy weight at her collarbones.

  The chafe of leather on wrists and ankles.

  Then the cold touch of metal just below her right wrist, sudden, seemingly out of nowhere. Felt it travel from wrist to elbow-joint and stop there. Then from elbow-joint to armpit, slowly, a sharp prick at the delicate flesh there of a knife or sharp scissors and then travelling again, exploring the slope of breast to pause and prick once more at her fear-swollen nipple, her body jerking back then and the blade moving down again sliding over her trembling stomach to her navel and stopping to poke her harder this time at the tender fleshy remains of what once had linked her to life and then moving on.

  She felt rough fingers graze her shoulder pulling away the strap of her slip and then felt that side go slack against her breast and fingers on the other shoulder and then the slip falling softly away across her thighs. The blade inserted itself thin and cold between her pan ties and the flesh of her hip on the right and she felt it pull and cut and now she was completely exposed to the room and the knife and the man who was doing the cutting, the fingers were a man’s fingers she thought, felt herself choking inside the box on tears and mucus, then felt the left side go.

  She was naked but for the box. But for the insanity of the box.

  Naked and against all reason ashamed to be.

  She was glad he couldn’t see her face reflect her shame.

  And feeling that shame despite the fact that her body had done nothing to cause it, that she had done nothing to cause it, feeling that made her angry. So that the first harsh access of fear began to bleed and blend and fade into stubborn black anger and finally to a strange defiant pride which was the other side of shame.

  She hung suspended. Open.

  Waiting.

  “Lady’s got guts,” he said.

  Kath agreed. Though she said nothing, merely watched him take a bite of the half-eaten tuna sandwich, chew and swallow. And then munch at the potato chips which surrounded it on his plate.

  The cat sat in front of them near the X-frame, glancing back at the woman naked on the frame and then ner vously at each of them, interested in their sandwiches, wondering who to try to hit up for a bite of tuna, but also clearly interested in this strange new arrival standing here. Stephen was eating while Kath as yet was not. She figured the cat would eventually make her move on Stephen.

  It was just The Cat. It had no name. Last summer there’d been moles in the back yard ruining the lawn and they’d noticed the occasional water rat down by the brook. So they’d got the cat from the ASPCA to drive the moles and rats away and the cat was successful at that in an amazingly short time so they decided to let her stay, figuring that if moles tried once they might just try again. The cat was the color of champagne with streaks and spots of white, with one almost-perfect circle of white behind each of her front haunches. Neither of them really cared much for cats but they fed her and paid for her shots and put up with the dead or dying birds or mice she brought home now and then, dropping them on the back porch like some disgusting present.

  She watched the cat inch toward Stephen. She’d been right about the cat’s decision. Stephen looked up and saw her and kicked at the air in front of her and she was only a cat but she wasn’t stupid. She backed away. Sat back and seemed to ponder her luck with Kath.

  She took a bite of her sandwich and thought that it definitely needed more mayo. She was actually surprised Stephen hadn’t started complaining. But they were out of mayo. She’d forgotten to put it down on the shopping list again.

  She was forgetting too much lately. He was always telling her and she thought he was probably right.

  Maybe it was stress or something. She didn’t know.

  But she agreed with him that this Sara Foster person had nerve. Was probably not going to be all that easy to subdue and subvert. She knew first-hand what the headbox was like and to have calmed down so fast took guts all right.

  She wondered if he’d chosen correctly.

  Though for some reason he was sure he had. Intuition, he said. The way she walks.

  Follow her. Get her name.

  “Did you phone in all the stuff to Sandy like I said?”

  She nodded.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said no problem, give him an hour. The mom and dad’s phone number are probably a New York exchange, he thought maybe somewhere in Westchester or Long Island. The Winthrop School is definitely Manhattan. So he’ll get us the street addresses on those and trace her boyfriend’s plates. He asked was there anything else and I said I guess we’d get back to him.”

  “Good. We’ll go through the rest of her address book to night, see if there’s anything else we can use.”

  “Jeez, Stephen. I wanted to watch that movie tonight.”

  She took another bite of the sandwich. Wished it had some chopped celery in it. The damn thing was way too dry.

  He glared at her.

  “Couldn’t we go through her book after the movie?”

  “No, we couldn’t go through it after the movie. Can’t you fucking prioritize?”

  She wished he wouldn’t use that voice with her. That condescending tone.

  She knew better than to argue with him per se. But she wasn’t exactly ready to let it go at that either.

  “You were going to get the VCR fixed. I mean, I could’ve taped it.”

  “Fuck the VCR! Jesus! What’s more important, Kath? This or your goddamn movie? Do you realize what we’ve done here? Do you remember what’s going on? Do you realize how important this is?”

  Important to who? she thought. But she didn’t want to say that to him either. It was an ego thing and she didn’t want to insult him. Stephen prided himself on being a careful hunter and a good profiler of people and a very or ga nized personality. He thought that he had managed this pretty much perfectly so far. He also thought that it was important, that it wasn’t just a matter of his own satisfaction.

  She wasn’t so sure about that part.

  He saw the look on her face though and relented.

  Good. She really did want to see the movie.

  “What’s it called?” he said.

  “It’s an HBO Original Movie. It’s called COVEN and it’s based on a book I really liked a lot.”

  The cat made up its mind and walked over. She picked off a pinch of tuna and held it out to her. She didn’t much like it anyway.

  He sighed. “All right,” he said. “After the goddamn movie. But you’ve got to get more serious about this, Kath.”

  “Jeez, Stephen. How much more serious can I get? I drove the car, I brought home the Pentothal from the hospital, risked my job, risked arrest. I shot her up for you for godsakes! I’m in this up to my neck, y’know what I mean?”

  The cat was looking for more tuna. She picked off a chunk and dropped it on the floor. The cat purred and set in.

  “I know. But from here on in everything’s got to go by the book. Exactly by the book. And it’s going to be a very long h
aul. We’ve got to be diligent as hell.”

  “Don’t worry. I will be.”

  She got up and walked over to his chair and bent over and kissed him. He smelled like tuna and Old Spice aftershave. She glanced at Sara Foster five feet away, still breathing hard but managing to control it, a bead of sweat rolling down off her collarbone from inside the box. She thought that for a woman her age Sara had a damn good body. Her pubic hair was bikini-waxed, unlike her own. She thought she’d like to get that done someday but there was never enough money around for extravagances like a bikini wax. The tan-line from her two-piece was very clear. Forget about the clumsy headbox and she was very attractive. Made her feel sort of dumpy, to tell the truth.

  All this and fertile, too, she thought.

  She wondered if Stephen was going to keep his promise about not having sex with her. Not real sex, anyway. If he’d be able to do that.

  He’d better.

  “How long you going to leave it on?”

  “Well, I’ve got to get her out of the cuffs in about an hour or she’s going to have problems with circulation. But by then she’ll be hurting and compliant enough so that she won’t be hard to handle. I figure we’ll just tie her to the chair here and you can hold her head still for me while I take off the box and blindfold her from behind. I don’t want her to see us yet. I want us to stay anonymous. We’ll turn off the lights and leave her an hour or so and then I want to come back and try to feed her. I’m betting she refuses. So then we put her up on the rack again and I’ll give her her first beating. Show her what things are going to be like from now on. She’ll get the idea.”

  “What if she doesn’t? Refuse I mean.”

  He grinned. “If you were in her shoes, would you accept food from us right now? But even if she does, fine. Establishes de pendency. Either way we can’t lose.”

  She collected his empty plate off his lap. The cat tried to nuzzle her leg but she stepped away.