Old Flames

by Jack Ketchum

Sometimes just watching him would make her shudder.

  She took Sara by the shoulders and turned her toward the box and gently pushed her forward. She still wore the gag and blindfold. Her steps were small, tentative. Almost childlike.

  “Okay. Stop here.”

  The box was open but she still needed to slide out the runnered panel. Stephen had used three-in-one oil on the wheels and runners just this morning so it slid out easily.

  “Guess what?” she said. “You get a treat to night. Three treats actually. First, no gag. You saw last night—there’s nobody around anyway. Plus the walls are soundproofed.”

  She untied it and lifted the rubber ball out of her mouth. She never liked this part. The ball was slimy. She didn’t even like the feel of it when she had to take it out of her own mouth. Much less somebody else’s.

  “Second, you get this. Hold out your hand.”

  She handed her a thin faded cotton nightgown. It used to be her mother’s. Her mother was dead three years now or would be in December and she’d ransacked the house for anything that might be of use to them before they sold the property. No sense wasting. Most of what she took turned out to be less useful than she’d thought. The nightgown, for instance, had sat in mothballs along with a bunch of other stuff in a box in the attic ever since. It was much too big for her. And much too big for Sara. But it would do. After a washing it still smelled faintly of mothballs but that hardly mattered.

  Thanks, ma.

  “You can put it on.”

  She said nothing, not even a thank you, only found the neck of it and then the bottom and pulled it on over her head. Kath guessed she’d have to tell Stephen about her lack of gratitude.

  “But the real treat, because of the mark and all, is you get to sleep on a mattress tonight. An air-mattress. Otherwise you’d never get any sleep, you know? Stephen pumped it up for you. See? Here, lean down and feel.”

  She took her arm and guided her hand.

  “Nice and soft, right? You need to use the toilet or anything?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Okay, move over here and lie down and I’ll scoot you in. Careful not to scrape the ban dages or it’ll hurt like a bitch. Plus I’ll have to do you up all over again.”

  She watched her ease herself down, favoring her right hip, then move her legs in along the mattress and lie slowly back, once again favoring her right side.

  It still wasn’t going to be an easy night, she thought. Air mattress or no air mattress. Burns hurt. And what was it that they said? you bang your elbow once, you’ll probably bang it again. She’d roll over on the burn at some point for sure. None of that was her problem though and Stephen was waiting for her upstairs in the bedroom. She knew he’d want to fuck tonight. She didn’t know if she could handle it if he got as energetic as he had the night before. She’d be wearing the bruises from that little session for days.

  They also said that killing makes you horny.

  She supposed she had the proof of that one.

  “ ’Night,” she said and pushed the panel into the box and swung the headpiece shut and threw the lock. As she stood again she smelled her own perspiration wafting up at her.

  If they were going to fuck she was definitely going to need a shower.

  Sara felt it immediately down at the end of the box.

  The cat lay curled at her feet.

  She wondered when it had crept in and how it had avoided getting hurt by the sliding panel and thought that well, cats were very agile. She’d known that since she was a girl.

  She’d learned the hard way.

  Her cat Tiggy was then just a kitten. She was only five or six herself and loved him to distraction. She probably drove him crazy half the time, always wanting to pick him up and hold him, chasing him around the house trying to pet him. But he was patient with her in his catlike way and tolerated her hugs and kisses until his own enjoyment began to wear thin, at which point he’d signal that enough was enough with a little meow and more often than not she’d let him drop then and let him go his way.

  Sometimes though she wouldn’t, not right away and the reason was his breath. His breath was one of her guilty pleasures. His fur smelled wonderful. But in some ways his breath smelled even better. It smelled to her like the seashore. It always did, whether it was fish or chicken or meat-flavored food he’d been eating and this she found amazing. It was warm and rich and its salty tang reminded her of summers by the shore. So sometimes she’d wouldn’t let him go at the first meow. Instead she’d hold onto him, nose up close to his mouth for a whiff of his breath on the second meow. She wouldn’t let him squirm away.

  And just this one time he bit her.

  They were out on the back lawn sitting in the grass and she was holding him, holding him too long and probably too tightly and instead of meowing the second time as he usually did he nipped her nose instead. Not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to hurt and make her angry, actually suddenly furious at him and when she thought about it later as an adult she realized she must have seen the bite as a kind of rejection. A rejection of her love just like her father’s rejection because she was a girl and not the boy he wanted. Like her mother’s merely qualified acceptance. Like other kids’ rejection because she was fat and not yet pretty.

  The cat sensed her fury instantly and began to snarl and spit, a small bundle of teeth and claws and though she’d never seen him angry before and it scared her, she held him away from her and let him writhe and struggle and she squeezed until the cat let go with an ungodly wail of abject fear and she realized what she was doing, terrorizing a small animal, taking out her anger at somebody on an innocent kitten. And heartsick, attacked by sudden tears, she dropped him to the grass.

  He ran. But she couldn’t let it go at that.

  She had to get him back. Hold him, pet him, stroke him. Reassure him that it would never, never happen again and let him know how sorry she was and that she loved him.

  So she ran too.

  There was a woods behind her house and a brook, narrow and fast-running after a rain like the one they’d had the night before and the cat ran away from her back through the grass and scrub, the cat small but incredibly fast and nimble for its size and she couldn’t catch him, he kept avoiding her, she was running as fast as she could and scaring him even more she knew by chasing him but her guilt was huge and overwhelming and she couldn’t stop. Not until she had him home again, until she was sure he wouldn’t run away for good from the monstrous awful thing she’d done and suddenly, there was the brook.

  The cat ran along the stones by its bank but he was in full panic by now and he slipped and fell right in front of her eyes too far away to reach. She screamed and saw him try to scale the rock he’d fallen from but his claws could get no purchase and he began to drift downstream, his meow a piteous thing now tearing at her heart, an infant calling for its mother, the cat’s eyes terrified, astonished, as he started moving fast away from her in the deep pull of the stream.

  She plunged through the brush trying to get ahead of him. Trying to go faster than the stream, refusing to take her eyes off him for a second, unmindful of the branches scratching at her face or the brambles tearing at her legs but only watching as though her gaze alone would stop him from drowning. She saw him go under and come up again and claw at a rock and whirl in the current, scrabbling with his paws, trying to stay afloat and all the while his wailing in her ears and the sounds of the rushing stream and finally after an eternity it widened, slowed and she stumbled into the water and had him in her hands, Tiggy so cold and wet and fragile, she could feel his heart racing against her own chest as he clung to her for dear life and went suddenly silent, looking every which way out through the woods as though he’d never seen them before. As though the whole world were new and frightening and she couldn’t even say words to comfort him she was crying so hard, she could only stroke and pet him. And then the miracle, the absolute miracle happened.

  At the steps to the
ir porch he started to purr.

  As this cat here in the box with her was purring.

  She didn’t know if it was this cat or remembering Tiggy’s forgiveness that started her crying but they were the first tears she’d shed that were not in fear or pain for a very long time. She couldn’t move much inside the box but she bent her knees until they pressed against the top and shifted sideways until her shoulder hit the right side and reached out in the dark and wiggled her fingers.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on. Come here.”

  The cat fell silent. She was aware only of the throbbing burn and the unyielding wood and the dark until in a little while she felt the soft short silky fur beneath her fingers and felt it nuzzle and mark her with its lips and cool wet nose and the warmth of its body as it lay down to settle in against her thigh. The cat immediately began to purr again and she thought there was no better sound in the breathing world.

  “There’s a good girl,” she murmured. “There’s a good little girl. There’s a girl.”

  And then another miracle occurred.

  She smiled.

  He dreamed that he sat in the basement on a folding chair with his ear pressed to her swollen belly. She was huge now, her navel protruding and he was speaking to the baby not to her. He could feel his lips move over the tight smooth flesh of her belly. She was naked, her arms and legs spread wide against the X-frame and inside her the baby was listening. Understanding each and every word but unable to answer him, not yet fully formed for speech.

  That didn’t matter.

  He told the baby about the world, about its cruelties, its ability to slight even the most talented, the most honest, the most sincere the human race had to offer. He told it about war and killing and hypocrisy and foul tainted passion and the baby listened, understanding each and every word even if the mother didn’t—couldn’t—understand him at all. It was as though he were speaking a foreign language as far as the mother was concerned. That annoyed him. Then angered him. He was going to have to punish her.

  He stood up and didn’t recognize her at all. Who the fuck was this woman? Who did she think she was? The woman was smirking at him, a superior look on her face and that angered him further and he went to the worktable for a pair of pliers. He was going to work on the nipples, open them up with pliers so that when the time came the baby could feed not just on mother’s milk but blood too which was richer and more nourishing and suddenly he was stepping into a huge wide open field in the middle of the night and there were stars all around above and he felt very small and very much younger and very afraid of being alone at night under such a crowded sky.

  And then the pliers were gone from his hand and he was lying in his bed asleep next to Kath, something tormenting his sleep, something forgotten or left undone that was making him sweat and toss in a half-sleep, on the cusp of wakefulness, trying to remember what it was he’d omitted to do when suddenly he felt something hit the window-screen behind him and push it out from the inside, something escaping and he thought, the cat, goddammit and he bolted upright in his bed expecting to see exactly that, the cat escaping through the window but all he saw was the fluttering curtain, pale white lace drifting slowly, hanging in the summer air.

  Three Weeks

  THIRTEEN

  On the sixth day of her captivity she recognized him. It was a gesture he made, holding his arm out, his hand palm-up toward the X-frame. Directing her there. In the gesture and in the smug self-satisfied smile she saw the man on the street in front of the clinic the day of her examination, the pink plastic foetus in his upturned hand.

  She knew Kath to be the woman who’d followed them inside.

  She said nothing nor did she allow her eyes to register what she saw. She was not yet a week in his basement but already she’d learned how to mask her feelings unless those feelings involved pain and terror. Those she couldn’t master.

  Daily over the next two weeks she was beaten on the X-frame. Sometimes blindfolded, sometimes inside the headbox. Kath had contrived a double-thick bib of old dishcloths for her to wear against the chafe of the box at her shoulderblades. The bottom layer was faded blue. The top was faded green.

  Sometimes the beatings were short, lasting only a matter of minutes, pro forma. Seemingly almost passionless. An exercise in power and no more. He would use a belt or a light crop.

  Other times they were endless. He would spend the night with her devising new ways to torment her as other men might sit in front of the tele vision set nursing a beer. On these nights she could feel his excitement spreading like ozone through the basement air. There were occasions when she wore only the blindfold and could hear that he was masturbating. Light liquid slapping sounds followed by a groan.

  Her contempt for him was matched only by her need to conceal it.

  On the ninth day he seemed to realize that she could probably hear what he was doing and put rubber earplugs in her ears from then on.

  There were times when every orifice in her body was plugged except her nostrils. Ears, ass, mouth, vagina.

  He grew more inventive. Bound her in exotic ways. He hung her on the frame upside down and beat her until she nearly passed out from the blood rushing to her head. He held a heat lamp inches from her skin and watched her skin redden and burn and watched her twist in pain. He poked her with knives, pins, meat-forks. He strangled her with his hands and when she passed out he waited and when she woke he strangled her again.

  Worst by far were his rages. She’d been told to control her bodily functions but one night it simply wasn’t possible, she’d been on the rack too long and there was no bedpan in front of her so she held it as long as she could and then she just let go. Her relief at so doing ended when he came at her with the studded whip. He was very good with the whip and this time he targeted one place only, the delicate flesh of her armpits and whipped them until she could feel the blood run down her sides all the way to the hip.

  He called her a whore and a cunt and a bitch and a pig and a useless cow and whatever else he could think of. Not just when he was hurting her. He used the words constantly. Conversationally. Reminding her that he could say and do anything he pleased.

  There were days she went twenty-four hours between meals. Her only drink was water. Her food consisted of greasy cheap tuna salad or American cheese sandwiches on white bread and canned vegetable soup. It never varied. She was not allowed to brush her teeth or brush her hair. She was not allowed to wash except those parts of her he had blistered or bloodied.

  She began to stink.

  Inside the long dark box where she stayed through most of the day she began to mark the time by marking temperatures. Mornings it was always cool. During the course of the afternoon the box would warm both from the basement temperature outside and her body inside and by mid-afternoon while they were still both at work she would be slick with sweat and reeking with her own thick musky smell and would stay that way until they got around to opening it. When they let her out they would leave the box open to air out. When she got in again the temperature would drop till morning and then begin to warm again.

  Her daily cycle.

  On the tenth day Stephen noticed the cat moving into the box while it lay open and she was on the X-frame. The cat had come to her some nights and some nights it had not. She heard him shouting at it despite the earplugs which were never very efficient anyway and then heard Kath say something to him in a loud voice and then she heard them talking. When they put her back in the box that night the cat was there. They’d allowed it to stay. She didn’t know why. But she was grateful for the cat and she thought that perhaps that was the point. To make her grateful. Grateful to them.

  But she was grateful only to the cat. To her soothing presence. To have somebody to talk to even if that somebody couldn’t talk back. Grateful that the cat didn’t mind sharing with her the thick sweltering air.

  The cat seemed glad of her presence too. Brushing up against her ankles as she stood tied to the X-fra
me or walked either to there or to the chair so that a couple of times the cat almost tripped her. She didn’t mind.

  When he wasn’t hurting her he was telling her stories or occasionally reading scripture. The readings were usually about children or husbands and wives, slaves and masters. He liked Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Genesis.

  “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. And she had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar.

  “So Sarai said to Abram, ‘See now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing children. Please, go in to my maid; perhaps I shall obtain children by her.’ And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai.

  “Then Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband to be his wife…”

  The stories were always about the Organization.

  The house, he told her, was bugged. They monitored the phone. They had known she was here from the very beginning and got daily reports on her progress.

  Organization members were ever ywhere. The local police precinct. The legislature. The White House.

  He gave her a Daily News article to read about the slave trade which said that in the Mideast, Eu rope and even in the U.S. the growing interest in S&M had lately given rise to a brisk profitable business in female flesh, women kidnapped for sale or barter to the rich and powerful with no rights or recourse to law. To be dealt with as each own er saw fit. To be tracked down and punished should they dare and then actually manage to run away. He told her that it was his father who had introduced him to the Organization and that as a young man he’d earned enough money to put himself through college by tracking down runaways.

  He told her about one escapee who managed to elude the Organization long enough to actually write and publish an article about her experience. It took months but eventually they found her a second time and returned her to her own er. They pulled her fingers off one by one and then pulled off her toes. They cut out her tongue and blinded her with a soldering gun and used a stiletto to destroy her ear drums. They enlisted an Organization doctor to cut off her arms and legs without benefit of anaesthesia and then to cauterize the wounds. Finally they hung her, still alive, by her long braided hair on a hook above her master’s bed where she continued to live for three days. A trophy above him writhing in agony while he slept and read.