36

THOUGH barefoot, I couldn’t feel the ice between my toes. I imagined that the sliver of moon lit our faces blue and baleful. The night was surreal, and I thought, I am not here. I am not walking with him to that shed. Orson kept close, grunting with each breath, as though it were a struggle for him to stay with me. Withdrawal or frostbite, or both. I reached the back door of the shed, stopped, and turned. He shuffled toward me, pointing the Glock waveringly at my head. In the moonlight, I saw his face—the tips of his ears blackened, his cheeks, lips, and forehead corpse-white from the cold.

“You’ve been guzzling your buttermilk,” he said, grinning. “Go on in. It’s unlocked.”

I pushed my shoulder into the door and it opened. Terror weakened me when I saw what he’d done. The interior of the shed was filled with candles—dozens of them placed on the floor and the shelves. Innumerable shadows jitterbugged along the concrete, up the walls, into the rafters. I saw the pole, the leather collar, the sheet of plastic spread out on the floor to catch my blood.

“All for you,” he whispered. “A candlelight death.”

“Orson, please.…” The tip of the knife pricked my back, urging me through the doorway. As I walked across the concrete, I stared at the hole in the far corner of the wall, presuming he’d crawled in out of the snow sometime after dark. The missing panel of pine lay on the floor.

“On the plastic,” he said. When I hesitated, he took three steps in my direction and pointed the Glock at my left knee. Immediately, I moved to the plastic and knelt down. “On your stomach,” he said, and I prostrated myself as instructed. I smelled the leather collar as he slipped it over my head and cinched it around my neck—the scent of misfortunate strangers’ sweat and blood and tears and spit. I felt a terrible, intimate kinship with those doomed souls who’d worn this putrid collar before me. We were blood now—Orson’s hideous children. Papa dragged the stool out from the corner and perched on it, just out of reach.

Shoving the Glock into the waistband of Walter’s jeans, he took the sharpening stone from his pocket and began drawing the blade across it: schick, schick, schick. Watching him work in the dim, jaundiced light, candles surrounding the plastic, I grew sensitive to the cuffs that dug into my wrists.

They were mine. I’d owned them since a Halloween party in 1987, when a friend presented them as a gag gift to me and this woman I was seeing, Sophie. It embarrassed us at first, but I cuffed her to my bedpost that night. I’d tied up other women with these cuffs and allowed them to shackle me. I’d bound Orson. Now he bound me. Fucking durable metal.

I sat up, facing him. Desperately and discreetly, I tried to pull the cuffs apart, and when my hands turned numb, I strained even harder. A man-burner named Sizzle in The Scorcher breaks the chain between a pair of cuffs while sitting in the back of a police car, and goes on to slay the arresting officer. Still pulling my hands apart, I recalled that deft little sentence: “The chain popped, O’Malley’s neck popped, and Sizzle climbed behind the wheel and shoved the officer into the wet street.” It’s that easy. So break.

“You’re wasting precious energy,” Orson said offhandedly as he studied a ding in the blade. “I couldn’t break them when you held the flame under my eyeball.” He resumed stroking the blade, and his eyes fixed now on me. “A guy does favor after favor for you, and this is how you repay him. This betrayal.”

My mouth ran dry; I had no spit.

“I don’t know what your definition of favor en—”

“It was all for you,” he said. “Washington. Mom. We could’ve been amazing, brother. I could’ve freed you. Like Luther. I held the mirror up for him, too, you see. Showed him the demon. He didn’t spit in my face.” Orson began pinching his cheeks and scraping the skin off his face with the knife, as if amused with the lack of feeling in his brittle epidermis. He bled in several places. “You came in my house,” he continued. “While I slept in my bed. Tortured me.” He stared into my eyes. “You scare me, Andy. And that should not happen.”

“I swear—”

“I know—you’ll never come after me again. Andy, when a person knows their death is imminent, they’ll say anything. I was carving this guy up once, and he told me his grandfather had molested him. Just blurted it out between screams, like it might change something.” He laughed sadly. “You gonna talk to me while I open you? Nah, I’ll bet you’re just a screamer.”

Orson stepped down off the stool. The largest candle in the shed was a red cinnamon-scented cylinder of wax with the girth of a soup can. It sat on the shelf beside the back door, and he laid the knife blade over its flame and pulled the Glock from his waistband.

“Pick a knee,” he said.

“Why?”

“Disablement. Torture. Death. In that order. It begins now. Pick a knee.”

An extraordinary calm enveloped me. You will not hurt me. I came to my feet and found his eyes, invoking that irrevocable love that was our entitlement.

“Orson. Let’s talk—”

The hollow-point bored into the meat of my left shoulder. On my knees, I watched blood drizzle across the plastic. I smelled gunpowder. I smelled blood. I blacked out.

I stared up into the rafters, flat on my back on the plastic, hands still cuffed behind my back. I attempted to move my feet, but they were tied crudely with thick, coarse rope. One hundred and eighty-five pounds crushed into my ribs, and I moaned.

Straddling me, Orson took the knife off the red candle, which now oozed wax onto the plastic. The carbon blade glowed lava orange, and the metal secreted smoke.

I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a shabby burgundy sweater. Starting at my waist, the blade cleaved easily through the layers of scorching fabric, all the way up to the collars at my throat. Then splitting the garments, he exposed my bare torso, the chest hair swaying in the tiny drafts effected by candles in this icy shed. Above the thudding of my heart, I thought I heard something on the desert, a distant whine, like mosquitoes behind my ear.

“Wow. Look how fast your heart’s palpitating,” he said, placing his hand on my shuddering chest. He tapped my breastbone. “I’m gonna saw through that now. Anxious?”

When the knife point met my left nipple, I chomped my teeth and flexed every muscle, as though the tension might thwart the penetration of the fiery blade.

“Easy,” he said. “I want you to relax. It’ll hurt more.” Orson moved the knife two inches to the left of my nipple and inserted the blade an eighth of an inch. The metal was brutally cold, and I shivered as I watched him slit a sloppy circle, four inches in diameter. Blood pooled in my navel, and Orson spoke to me while he carved, his voice flowing psychotic peace.

“Two-thirds of your heart lies to the left of your sternum. So I’m giving myself an outline to work with.” He sighed. “I’d have taught you this, you know. On someone else. Look at that.” He held the tip of the knife under my eye so I could see my blood sizzling on the amber blade. “I know you don’t feel anything yet,” he said. “That’s the power of adrenaline. Your pain receptors are blocked.” He smiled. “But that won’t last much longer. They can only mask so much pain.”

“Orson,” I pleaded, on the brink of tears now. “What about the gift?”

He looked down at me, puzzled; then, remembering, he said, “Ah, the gift. You nosy bastard.” He put his lips to my ear. “Willard was the gift.”

He braced his left hand against my forehead and gripped the knife in his other. “Sometimes I wonder, Andy, what if he’d picked you?”