by Robert White
My fear throbbed in my throat despite my effort not to betray it.
I broke down blubbering, spewing obscenities.
Lindell continued uninterrupted. “The pain is exquisite and horrible to contemplate.”
He grabbed me under the chin. “And you will contemplate it, Haftmann. You will see it in his eyes. You will see his body distort until this yard of space separating you is taken up with the baggage of this human balloon, and be assured, I have calculated the flow of water into the vessel, and timed the amount of absorption into a body his size, with absolute precision. I know to the minute when the saturation point is reached. He will explode. You will be covered with human gore.”
My mouth was too dry to spit. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I could feel the onset of shock; my mind was trying to find a way out of the labyrinth. His words etched themselves into my brain, but it was as if his voice had become disembodied and hovered in the air.
“Your mind is telling you right now that this isn’t happening or that it isn’t possible. Let me tell you that it quite definitely will happen as I say. That is what medicine is all about—fooling nature, defeating the body’s systemic reactions.”
He held a syringe in front of my eyes. Then he stuck it in my right nipple. “Relax. I could have put it in your lingual nerve behind the tongue. A little injection to thwart those histamine blockers from gathering in your own system.”
He took a long needle from a small case inside his blazer pocket.
“Don’t move, Haftmann, or I’ll blind you,” he said as he stooped to look me in the face. I felt the needle go through my right eyelid it and then through a fold of skin he pinched over my eyebrow. With quick fingers he sutured my other eyelid to my eyebrow. “There. A little salve around the corners to work in some moisture later on. There won’t be anything but pink gore on the walls when I return. Believe me, we stood behind a glass partition when the peon exploded and the entire shed was sodden with such human filth that it took a steam pressure hose to clean it afterwards. Not even enough to give Garcia’s pigs a good feed.”
He touched my face gently and said, “I’ll return at dawn to give you the coup d’grâce myself. But first I shall cut all the skin away from your face with a scalpel—”
He etched my hairline and traced the contours of my face. “Then I’ll gently peel it back, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly. You’ll beg me to kill you, Haftmann. You will beg me to die just as she did when I inserted an extra-large dildo in her anus. It triggered a vagal nerve reaction. When that happens, the heart stops, you see. I tried to bring her around, alas.”
I heard the hiss of the kitchen tap being turned on, footsteps, then the front door shutting. The car started and drove down the driveway.
Gallatine tried to rock himself free, but the ropes were too tight. I could see what looked like a cat’s cradle extending from the legs of his chair in opposite directions, and I knew that he could never free himself that way. My own must be the same, although I could see nothing except the grotesque apparition of a man tied to a chair in front of me, the black tubing lolling obscenely out of his mouth.
Gallatine struggled. The tube dangling from his mouth pulsed like a king snake with a rodent in its belly. He was trying to make himself vomit. I attempted to nod my head to him, but even that was impossible.
How many hours to daybreak?
Time split into a thousand fractured pieces, and each piece fragmented itself as many times. I began talking just to talk. I must have told Gallatine the whole story of my life. I don’t know why. I was babbling. My skin sweat rivulets and then dried and burned to the touch. The merest draft from the kitchen windows gave me excruciating sensations; my skin felt as if it had been turned inside out.
Gallatine’s eyes blinked back the tears that streamed down his face. My exposed eyeball was drying out and itching so badly that I wanted to smash my face against something to stop it. My mind contracted and expanded with images and flashbacks so often that I hoped I was going insane. I remember lucidity coming and going like the systaltic beatings of a heart; in these interludes of insanity and clarity, I would laugh hysterically, gibber whatever came out of my mouth—words, sounds, animal noises—I couldn’t recall. I was reduced to a level of feeling that I did not know human beings could experience. Like finding yourself in a deep pit, babbling in a foreign tongue and wondering how you got there. As terrifying as the descent into madness was, it was nonetheless a brief interlude of escape from the present scene, a small respite from hell.
The hours passed, but I could not tell from the blackness of the windows. Five minutes meant no more to me then than five hours would have.
I was aware of the changes in Gallatine. He was condemned to an ongoing living horror that my mind could not conceive of. I felt the shock of feeling his stomach touch my knees and involuntarily tried to jerk backwards. His eyes were still bright with fear at that point, but the terrible strain had begun to show: red-rimmed, bloodshot—eventually a glazing waxed over them. My own vision was clouding despite the grease Lindell had dabbed around my eye.
Time continued to split and fracture. The periods of lucidity grew further apart. My jaw grew slack. At one point I recall a pushing sensation from Gallatine’s bulging flesh that irritated me. I could not comprehend what it was. There was a sour smell of Roquefort cheese gone bad in the room. I was having trouble gathering air into my chest at one point.
Then someone else was screaming, a sound that echoes my own from far off. I shook myself back to consciousness and realized there was a vast, gelatinous lump smothering me. I could still hear the faint hiss of water moving through the hose, but I could barely see anything in front of me. Where had Gallatine gone? I thought that Cooney must have returned and cut him loose, taken him away, but left me here for some reason.
It was light out. The first beginnings of dawn. There was a woman standing outside and she was screaming. I saw papers fluttering from her hand. She stood there screaming.
Christ, Gallatine’s wife had come home.
The next thing I knew she was inside the house because a wailing sound such as I never heard was trailing behind her like a stream of flying ants. I heard footsteps running from room to room—a phone. Lindell must have cut the lines—she was in the room, although I could not see her clearly.
“You’re that man,” she said at me. “What in God’s name? Where is my husband?”
She doesn’t recognize him.
“Help me,” I said, but my lips were cracked and my throat was so raw that the sound came out differently. I tried again, “Help me. Cut . . . ropes.”
“No, no!” she screamed, and ran out of the room. I heard the front door slam, and I thought, now I am going to die. I willed myself to lose consciousness, to blank out. But my instincts fought my will, and every agonizing pain I had endured during the night flooded over me.
Then a sound. Footsteps returning. One pair. She was back. She stood in front of me, but this time I could see she was holding a .22 rifle in her hands.
“Help me,” I said. “Please, please.”
I kept repeating the word. It’s one of two words that every murder victim has on his lips before dying; the other word is No.
I heard her set the gun down.
“Shut . . . water . . . off,” I managed to squeak between my lips. She ran back to the kitchen and turned the tap.
With a butcher’s knife she began working at my ropes.
“No, no!” I gagged out in what passed for a scream. “Call police, police!”
“I can’t,” she sobbed. “The phones don’t work. Where’s my husband? What is going on in my house? What have they done?”
I was so numb that I couldn’t tell whether her hacking at the ropes was working. I could see more light coming through the window.
“. . . hurry,” I gasped. “Coming back. Men who did this—”
I heard the knife clatter to the floor.
“It’s too hard to cut!”
she wailed.
My voice returned, “Try or we’ll all die.”
She went back to fretting at the ropes, and this time I could feel the loosening effect as my feet were able to move for the first time all night. She stopped sawing and put her face in front of me. “What—who is this?”
“Don’t look,” I pleaded. “Just cut.”
Another wrench and my feet were completely free; she went to work with both hands on the ropes binding my thighs.
“No,” I screamed. “Cut the ropes from the chair first!”
She sliced them through and that enabled me to stand free of Gallatine’s bloated stomach. “My hands,” I urged her. “Hurry . . . hurry.”
“I can’t get through these ropes,” she said. “The knife won’t cut them. Oh God, I’m afraid. Where’s my husband?”
“Get in your car. Now! Drive around to the back of the house! Then bring me the key. Do it!”
She left, and for long, terrified moments I was afraid that she was going to leave me. I heard the sound of gravel crunching, and the door opened again. I nearly vomited from fear.
She came back into that room of horror stumbling like a drunk into traffic, her face so pasty-white I was afraid she was going to drop to the floor right there.
Some reserve of strength made her grab for the knife and go to work at the ropes binding my hands. The light coming through the windows was reddened now. Full daybreak. No more time. She had one hand, then my left arm loose. I snapped it back and forth to get sensation into it, but it was like shaking a ragdoll. I couldn’t make a fist.
“Hurry,” I said. “They’ll be here any second!”
She sobbed, dropped to the floor on her haunches, hunkered there exhausted, so I took the knife from her and went to work on the cords, but I kept dropping it.
I heard the sound of gravel. She looked at me in panic.
“Give me the rifle,” I said.
She handed it to me by the barrel. I worked the bolt action by jamming it against the palms of my hands and the edge of the chair; then I cradled the stock in my midriff and rested the barrel over the chair’s arm; it might look convincing.
The front door opened and my stomach nearly heaved as I recognized Cooney’s voice calling my name. They hadn’t seen the car and didn’t know. If I could squeeze off one shot, I thought, that might hold them off until I can get free. I signaled Mrs. Gallatine to keep silent and leveled the gun at the doorway. Cooney was first.
He stopped cold when he saw me. I had a face that I hoped looked as bizarre as it felt. He kept his eyes on me and inched his hand inside his jacket. “Don’t do it, Cooney,” I said. “I can’t miss you from here. I’ll put three in your belly before you get off a shot.”
To Gallatine’s wife, I said, “Cut the ropes now.”
She whimpered but did as I said.
“Where is he, Cooney?” I asked him without letting my eye drift from his face. I could feel the barrel slipping downwards because I hadn’t the strength to hold it steady at him. “He’s in the car waiting for me.”
“Just stay where you are and I might let you live.”
For the first time I felt hope surge through me. I could see fear in Cooney’s eyes, see him calculate the odds now. It gave me power. The ropes around my legs binding me to the chair were free, but I didn’t trust myself to try to stand up yet.
“Now my head,” I said to her.
Her face was a mask of fear but she responded. Cooney watched her. The wrapping of nylon cord fell away. I felt tingling in my fingers and my eyes burned as if someone had jabbed their thumbs into them. I wanted to rip the sutures from my eyelids, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Cooney. I was going to kill him as soon as I could get the pressure to do it, but I had to keep him distracted, so I began talking about his chances of getting out of this, turning state’s evidence, tried to keep him off balance.
“It’s Lindell they’ll want,” I said. “You’re just a flunkie. They’ll see that. You can go into the witness program, testify against him, start over somewhere. You can put him away, Cooney. You’re the only one with credibility.”
Cooney’s eyes darted from my face to hers and cut to the window. His hands twitched. Going to make his move soon.
“Cooney, listen to me. He’s a lunatic. He’s got to be stopped.”
“Fuck you, Haftmann,” Cooney muttered.
“I’ll kill you if you move again.”
“It’s too late, it’s way too late,” he said. His stare switched from me to Gallatine and a twisted smirk crossed his expression. “He’s going to blow any second.”
Gallatine’s wife ceased whimpering and looked at the sodden hulk that was her husband. She would have recognized him only in the eyes. When I last looked, he was still conscious.
She whispered, “Oh no,” and then said, “Oh God,” and a long, high scream tore itself from her throat.
“He’ll come in for me any second, Haftmann. The man keeps a timetable like a Swiss watch. I’m going to walk out. You enjoy the party because alla you assholes are fucking dead!”
“Cooney, don’t,” I said.
I felt the tingling more acutely, but I still didn’t know if I could apply enough pressure.
He took a step backwards and then another. I kept squeezing the trigger, willing the necessary pressure to be there. Cooney wasn’t going back outside to tell Lindell he had failed. He took another step, pivoted around so that his back was to me.
Any second now.
Cooney’s right hand was already on his shoulder holster.
Now, now, I begged.
Cooney planted himself like a wide receiver making a cut and spun as he came around in a two-handed shooting stance.
The rifle cracked twice to Cooney’s single shot. A deafening roar inside the small, empty room. I felt the bullet pass my cheek and a slight moan behind me.
When I focused my gaze, Cooney was standing in the same position except that there was a red dot in the center of his forehead beginning to bead with blood. Still clutching the gun, he dropped on his face. I looked behind me and saw Gallatine’s wife slumped on the floor with half her face missing.
I heard a car start up. Lindell, fleeing the scene.
He must have understood the significance of the gunfire and was playing the smarter odds. I couldn’t let him escape.
I hesitated a moment between my desire to stumble toward the driveway and empty the rifle in his direction or do something for Gallatine. I looked at him. His eyes were cast in the direction of his wife’s body.
I went over to him and instinctively pulled the hose out of his mouth. His massive, elongated form was a caricature of a human shape. His head whipped back and forth above a massive stomach distorted by the rope’s pressure. He made a loud, whooshing sound like air escaping a balloon. A frothy pink spume of vomit ejected itself in geyser-like ribbons and splashed the walls and ceiling.
Without realizing it, I had backed up to escape being sprayed by the foul-smelling liquid. My legs did not work well enough to run, and I fell over Cooney’s body. I rolled off him and reached for the gun. Every muscle in my body was quivering, but I was able to crawl out of the room on all fours.
That’s how I left the house. I crawled out the front door in time to see a white Oldsmobile roar down 307. I managed a crabwalk to Mrs. Gallatine’s Cherokee behind the garage out back and clambered woozily into the driver’s seat.
I don’t think I could have gone back inside. My stomach was tossing around enough bile and acid to dissolve ten yards of railroad track. I turned the key, the engine caught on the first crank, and I was shooting gravel out the long driveway, bouncing crazily from one side of the road to the other as I missed the narrow culverts at the road’s edge. The Cherokee gave me eighty m.p.h. in a matter of seconds.
Lindell didn’t know these county roads; one error and he’d wind up on a dirt road to nowhere. My only hope.
I caught sight of him at the outskirts of the township. He was tra
veling at sixty miles per hour, not yet panicked, but too fast for some of these dips and curves. The .45 automatic bounced on the passenger’s seat. My mind held one thought and it was sweet: Revenge.
With one hand on the wheel, I plucked at the sutures until I found the knotted ends. I pulled one end through my eyelid, not much blood, but I had to keep wiping my eye to see.
We were the only two vehicles traveling the same direction at a high rate of speed. Lindell knew I was behind him. I could see him decelerate as he came to intersections, indecisive.
Soon, you fuck.
At the end of Countyline Road, he made a left and hit the gas hard. I closed the distance. In a mile or so he’d have to make a choice: the eastern fork meanders through farmland on a narrow road where, as locals say, there is nothing to be seen between Ohio and the North pole but a barbed wire fence and a lobo wolf. Lindell could gun the Oldsmobile right to the Pennsylvania state line and there would be nothing to link him to Gallatine.
He braked at the fork and took the western road. Perfect. Right through Amish country parallel to the Grand River. No place to run: the road narrows and then peters out until you’re looking up some Amish farmer’s dirt driveway.
I stepped on the gas until I had the Cherokee’s fender touching the Oldsmobile. Lindell was running out of road and I swung the Cherokee at 90 m.p.h. right up against his side. He turned his head and showed me no fear. I rammed him, and he nearly lost control, took the shoulder and then, unable to right the car from the slide, smashed through a barb wire fence and pummeled through a corn field.
I skidded to a halt as he churned the car through the corn stalks in all directions, blindly seeking a way out. As I put the Cherokee into the field I saw him blast through just ahead of me and jump the culvert that sent blue sparks from the chassis; his tires grabbed the road once more and he was off with the Cherokee burning rubber in pursuit.
I was gaining on him once more when I saw Amish buggies in the distance. I knew what he was going to do right at the moment I saw him sideswipe one of the buggies, causing the driver to tangle himself in the reins and pitch headfirst onto the road while the horse bucked and reared in panic. As I roared past on the opposite side of the road, I saw two children in dark clothes tumble out of the buggy just before it careened onto its side.