Intensity

7

Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, after dealing with the woman and washing the flatware, Mr. Vess sets loose the dogs.

At the back door, at the front door, and in his bedroom, there are call buttons that, when pushed, sound a soft buzzer in the kennel behind the barn. When the Dobermans have been sent there with the word crib, as they were sent earlier, the buzzer is a command that at once returns them to active patrol.

He uses the call button by the kitchen door and then steps to the large window by the dinette to watch the backyard.

The sky is low and gray, still shrouding the Siskiyou Mountains, but rain is no longer falling. The drooping boughs of the evergreens drip steadily. The bark on the deciduous trees is a sodden black; their limbs — some with the first fragile green buds of spring, others still barren — are so coaly that they appear to have been stripped by fire.

Some people might think that the scene is passive now, with the thunder spent and the lightning extinguished, but Mr. Vess knows that a storm is as powerful in its aftermath as in its raging. He is in harmony with this new kind of power, the quiescent power of growth that water bestows on the land.

From the back of the barn come the Dobermans. They pad side by side for a distance, but then split up and proceed each in his own direction.

They are not on attack status at this time. They will chase down and detain any intruder, but they will not kill him. To prime them for blood, Mr. Vess must speak the name Nietzsche.

One of the dogs — Liederkranz — comes onto the back porch, where he stares at the window, adoring his master. His tail wags once, and then once again, but he is on duty, and this brief and measured display of affection is all that he will allow himself.

Liederkranz returns to the backyard. He stands tall, vigilant. He gazes first to the south, then west, and then east. He lowers his head, smells the wet grass, and at last he moves off across the lawn, sniffing industriously. His ears flatten against his skull as he concentrates on a scent, tracking something that he imagines might be a threat to his master.

On a few occasions, as a reward to the Dobermans and to keep them sharp, Mr. Vess has turned loose a captive and has allowed the dogs to stalk her, forgoing the pleasure of the kill himself. It is an entertaining spectacle.

Secure behind the screen of his four-legged Praetorian Guard, Mr. Vess goes upstairs to the bathroom and adjusts the water in the shower until it is luxuriously hot. He lowers the volume of the radio but leaves it tuned to the swing-music program.

As he strips off his soiled clothing, clouds of steam pour over the top of the shower curtain. This humidity enhances the fragrance of the dark stains in his garments. Naked, he stands for a couple of minutes with his face buried in the blue jeans, the T-shirt, the denim jacket, breathing deeply at first but then delicately sniffing one exquisite nuance of odor after another, wishing that his sense of smell were twenty thousand times more intense than it is, like that of a Doberman.

Nevertheless, these aromas transport him into the night just past. He hears once more the soft popping of the sound suppressor on the pistol, the muffled cries of terror and the thin pleas for mercy in the night calm of the Templeton house. He smells Mrs. Templeton’s lilac-scented body lotion, which she’d applied to her skin before retiring, the fragrance of the sachet in the daughter’s underwear drawer. He tastes, in memory, the spider.

Regretfully, he puts the clothes aside for laundering, because by this evening he must pass for the ordinary man that he is not, and this reverse lycanthropy requires time if the transformation is to be convincing.

Therefore, as Benny Goodman plays “One O’clock Jump,” Mr. Vess plunges into the stinging-hot water, being especially vigorous with the washcloth and lavish with a bar of Irish Spring, scrubbing away the too pungent scents of sex and death, which might alarm the sheep. They must never suspect the shepherd of having a snaggle-toothed snout and a bushy tail inside his herdsman’s disguise. Taking his time, bopping to song after song, he shampoos his thick hair twice and then treats it with a penetrating conditioner. He uses a small brush to scrub under his fingernails. He is a perfectly proportioned man, lean but muscular. As always, he takes great pleasure in soaping himself, enjoying the sculpted contours of his body under his slippery hands; he feels like the music sounds, like the soap smells, like the taste of sweetened whipping cream.

Life is. Vess lives.

Chyna came out of Key West darkness and tropical thunder into a fluorescent glare that stung her bleary eyes. At first she mistook the fear that drove her pounding heart for the fear of Jim Woltz, her mother’s friend; she thought that her face was pressed to the floor under the bed in his seaside cottage. But then she remembered the killer and the captive girl.

She was sitting forward in a chair, slumped over the round table in the dining area off the knotty-pine kitchen. Her head was turned to her right, and she was looking through a window at the back porch, the backyard.

The killer had removed a seat cushion from one of the other chairs and had placed it under her head, so her face wouldn’t press uncomfortably against the wood. She shuddered at his thoughtfulness.

As she tried to lift her head, pain shot up the back of her neck and throbbed in the right side of her face. She almost blacked out, and decided not to be in a rush about getting up.

When she shifted in the chair, the clink of chains indicated that getting up might not be a choice either now or later. Her hands were in her lap, and when she tried to lift one, she lifted both, for her wrists were cuffed.

She tried to pull her feet apart — and discovered that her ankles were shackled. Judging by the noisy rattling and clinking that her small movements generated, there were other encumbrances as well.

Outside, something as black as soot bounded across the green lawn, scampered up the steps, and crossed the porch. It came to the window, jumped up, put its paws on the window stool, and peered in at her. A Doberman pinscher.

Against her breasts, Ariel holds an open book as if it is a shield, hands splayed across the binding. She is in the enormous armchair, legs drawn up beneath her, the only perfect doll of all those in the room.

Mr. Vess sits on a footstool before her.

He cleans up well. Showered, shampooed, shaved, and combed, he is presentable in any company, and any mother, seeing him on the arm of her daughter, would think that he was a prize. He is wearing loafers without socks, beige cotton Dockers, a braided leather belt, and a pale-green chambray shirt.

In her schoolgirl uniform, Ariel looks good too. Vess is pleased to see that she has regularly groomed herself in his absence, as she was instructed. It is not easy for her, taking only sponge baths and shampooing her glorious hair in the sink.

He constructed this room for others, who came before her, none of whom was in residence longer than two months. Until he’d met his Ariel, and learned what an engagingly independent spirit she was, he’d never imagined that he would insist on anyone staying this long. Consequently, a shower had seemed unnecessary.

He had first seen the girl in a newspaper photograph. Though only a tenth-grader, she had been something of a prodigy and had led her Sacramento high school team to victory in a statewide California academic decathlon. She had looked so tender. The newspaper had trembled in his hands when he had seen her, and he had known at once that he must drive to Sacramento and meet her. He’d shot the father. The mother had owned an enormous collection of dolls and had made dolls of her own as a hobby. Vess had beaten her to death with a ventriloquist dummy that had a large, carved-maple head as effective as a baseball bat.

“You’re more beautiful than ever,” he tells Ariel, and his voice is muffled by the soundproofing, as if he were speaking from inside a coffin, buried alive.

She does not reply or even acknowledge his presence. She is in her silent mode, as she has been without interruption for more than six months.

“I missed you.”

These days, she never looks at him but stares at a point above his head and off to one side. If he were to stand up from the footstool and move into her line of sight, she would still be looking over his head and to one side, though he would never quite be able to see her eyes shift in avoidance.

“I brought a few things to show you.”

From a shoe box on the floor beside the footstool, he extracts two Polaroid photographs. She will not accept them or turn her eyes to them, but Vess knows that she will examine these mementos after he leaves.

She is not as lost to this world as she pretends to be. They are engaged in a complicated game with high stakes, and she is a good player.

“This first is a picture of a lady named Sarah Templeton, the way she looked before I had her. She was in her forties but very attractive. A lovely woman.”

The armchair is so deep that the seat cushion provides a ledge in front of Ariel on which Vess can place the photograph.

“Lovely,” he repeats.

Ariel doesn’t blink. She is capable of staring fixedly without blinking for surprisingly long periods. Now and then Mr. Vess worries that she will damage her striking blue eyes; corneas require frequent lubrication. Of course, if she goes too long without blinking and her eyes become dangerously dry, the irritation will cause tears to spring up involuntarily.

“This is a second photograph of Sarah, after I was finished with her,” Mr. Vess says, and he also places this picture on the chair. “As you can see if you choose to look, the word lovely doesn’t apply any more. Beauty never lasts. Things change.”

From the shoe box he takes two more photographs.

“This is Sarah’s daughter, Laura. Before. And after. You can see she was beautiful. Like a butterfly. But there’s a worm in every butterfly, you know.”

He places these snapshots on the chair and reaches into the box again.

“This was Laura’s father. Oh, and here’s her brother…and the brother’s wife. They were incidental.”

Finally he brings out the three Polaroids of the young Asian gentleman and the Slim Jim with the bite missing.

“His name is Fuji. Like the mountain in Japan.”

Vess puts two of the three photos on the chair.

“I’ll keep one for myself. To eat. And then I’ll be Fuji, with the power of the East and the power of the mountain, and when the time comes for me to do you, you’ll feel both the boy and the mountain in me, and so many other people, all their power. It’ll be very exciting for you, Ariel, so exciting that when it’s over, you won’t even care that you’re dead.”

This is a long speech for Mr. Vess. He is for the most part not a garrulous man. The girl’s beauty, however, moves him now and then to speeches.

He holds up the Slim Jim.

“The missing bite was taken by Fuji just before I killed him. His saliva will have dried on the meat. You can taste a little of his quiet power, his inscrutable nature.”

He puts the wrapped sausage on the chair.

“I’ll be back after midnight,” Mr. Vess promises. “We’ll go out to the motor home, so you can see Laura, the real Laura, not just the picture of her. I brought her back so you could see what becomes of all pretty things. And there’s a young man too, a hitchhiker that I picked up along the way. I showed him a photograph of you, and I just didn’t like the way he looked at it. He wasn’t respectful. He leered. I didn’t like something he said about you, so I sewed his mouth shut, and I sewed his eyes shut because of the way he looked at your picture. You’ll be excited to see what I did to him. You can touch him…and Laura.”

Vess watches her closely for any tic, shudder, flinch, or subtle change in the eyes that will indicate that she hears him. He knows that she hears, but she is clever at maintaining a solemn face and a pretense of catatonic detachment.

If he can force one faint flinch from her, one tic, then he will soon shatter her completely and have her howling like a goggle-eyed patient in the deepest wards of Bedlam. That collapse into ranting insanity is always fascinating to watch.

But she is tough, this girl, with surprising inner resources. Good. The challenge thrills him.

“And from the motor home we’ll go out to the meadow with the dogs, Ariel, and you can watch while I bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe the sky will clear by that time, and maybe there’ll be stars or even moonlight.”

Ariel huddles on the chair with her book, eyes distant, lips slightly parted, a deeply still girl.

“Hey, you know, I bought another doll for you. An interesting little shop in Napa, California, a place that sells the work of local craftsmen. It’s a clever rag doll. You’ll like it. I’ll give it to you later.”

Mr. Vess gets up from the footstool and takes a casual inventory of the contents of the refrigerator and the cabinet that serves as the girl’s pantry. She has enough supplies to carry her three more days, and he will restock her shelves tomorrow.

“You’re not eating quite as much as you should,” he admonishes. “That’s ungrateful of you. I’ve given you a refrigerator, a microwave, hot and cold running water. You’ve got everything you need to take care of yourself. You should eat.”

The dolls are no less responsive than the girl.

“You’ve lost two or three pounds. It hasn’t affected your looks yet, but you can’t lose any more.”

She gazes into thin air, as if waiting for her voice-box string to be pulled before she recites recorded messages.

“Don’t think you can starve yourself until you’re haggard and unattractive. You can’t escape me that way, Ariel. I’ll strap you down and force-feed you if I have to. I’ll make you swallow a rubber tube and pump baby food into your stomach. In fact, I’d enjoy it. Do you like pureed peas? Carrots? Applesauce? I guess it doesn’t matter, since you won’t taste them — unless you regurgitate.”

He gazes at her silken hair, which is red blond in the filtered light. This sight translates through all five of Vess’s extraordinary senses, and he is bathed in the sensory splendor of her hair, in all the sounds and smells and textures that the look of it conveys to him. One stimulus has so many associations for him that he could lose himself for hours in the contemplation of a single hair or one drop of rain, if he chose, because that item would become an entire world of sensation to him.

He moves to the armchair and stands over the girl.

She doesn’t acknowledge him, and although he has entered her line of sight, her gaze has somehow shifted above and to one side of him without his being aware of the moment when it happened.

She is magically evasive.

“Maybe I could get a word or two out of you if I set you on fire. What do you think? Hmmm? A little lighter fluid on that golden hair — and whoosh!”

She does not blink.

“Or I’ll give you to the dogs, see if that unties your tongue.”

No flinch, no tic, no shudder. What a girl.

Mr. Vess stoops, lowering his face toward Ariel’s, until they are nose-to-nose.

Her eyes are now directly aligned with his — yet she is still not looking at him. She seems to peer through him, as if he is not a man of flesh and blood but a haunting spirit that she can’t quite detect. This isn’t merely the old trick of letting her eyes swim out of focus; it’s a ruse infinitely more clever than that, which he can’t understand at all.

Nose-to-nose with her, Vess whispers, “We’ll go to the meadow after midnight. I’ll bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe I’ll put you into the ground with them and cover you up, three in one grave. Them dead and you alive. Would you speak then, Ariel? Would you say please?”

No answer.

He waits.

Her breathing is low and even. He is so close to her that her exhalations are warm and steady against his lips, like promises of kisses to come.

She must feel his breath too.

She may be frightened of him and even repulsed by him, but she also finds him alluring. He has no doubt about this. Everyone is fascinated by bad boys.

He says, “Maybe there’ll be stars.”

Such a blueness in her eyes, such sparkling depths.

“Or even moonlight,” he whispers.

The steel cuffs on Chyna’s ankles were linked by a sturdy chain. A second and far longer chain, connected by a carabiner to the first, wound around the thick legs of the chair and around the stretcher bars between the legs, returned between her feet, encircled the big barrel that supported the round table, and connected again to the carabiner. The chains didn’t contain enough play to allow her to stand. Even if she’d been able to stand, she would have had to carry the chair on her back, and the restricting shape and the weight of it would have forced her to bend forward like a hunchbacked troll. And once standing, she could not have moved from the table to which she was tethered.

Her hands were cuffed in front of her. A chain was hooked into the shackle that encircled her right wrist. From there it led around her, wound between the back rails of the chair behind the tie-on pad, then to the shackle on her left wrist. This chain contained enough slack to allow her to rest her arms on the table if she wished.

She sat with her hands folded, leaning forward, staring at the red and swollen index finger on her right hand, waiting.

Her finger throbbed, and she had a headache, but her neck pain had subsided. She knew that it would return worse than ever in another twenty-four hours, like the delayed agony of severe whiplash.

Of course, if she was still alive in another twenty-four hours, neck pain would be the least of her worries.

The Doberman was no longer at the window. She had seen two at once on the lawn, padding back and forth, sniffing the grass and the air, pausing occasionally to prick their ears and listen intently, then padding away again, obviously on guard duty.

During the previous night, Chyna had used rage to overcome her terror before it had incapacitated her, but now she discovered that humiliation was even more effective at quelling fear. Having been unable to protect herself, having wound up in bondage — that was not the source of her humiliation; what mortified worse was her failure to fulfill her promise to the girl in the cellar.

I am your guardian. I’ll keep you safe.

She kept returning, in memory, to the upholstered vestibule and the view port on the inner door. The girl among the dolls had given no indication that she had heard the promise. But Chyna was sick with the certainty that she had raised false hopes, that the girl would feel betrayed and more abandoned than ever, and that she would withdraw even further into her private Elsewhere.

I am your guardian.

In retrospect, Chyna found her arrogance not merely astonishing but perverse, delusional. In twenty-six years of living, she’d never saved anyone, in any sense whatsoever. She was no heroine, no mystery-novel-series character with just a colorful dash of angst and a soupçon of endearing character flaws and, otherwise, the competence of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond combined. Keeping herself alive, mentally stable, and emotionally intact had been enough of a struggle for her. She was still a lost girl herself, fumbling blindly through the years for some insight or resolution that probably wasn’t even out there to be found, yet she’d stood at that view port and promised deliverance.

I am your guardian.

She opened her folded hands. She flattened her hands on the table and slid them across the wood as if smoothing away wrinkles in a tablecloth, and as she moved, her chains rattled.

She wasn’t a fighter, after all, no one’s paladin; she worked as a waitress. She was good at it, piling up tips, because sixteen years in her mother’s bent world had taught her that one way to ensure survival was to be ingratiating. With her customers, she was indefatigably charming, relentlessly agreeable, and always eager to please. The relationship between a diner and a waitress was, to her way of thinking, the ideal relationship, because it was brief, formal, generally conducted with a high degree of politeness, and required no baring of the heart.

I am your guardian.

In her obsessive determination to protect herself at all costs, she was always friendly with the other waitresses where she worked, but she never made friends with any of them. Friendships involved commitment, risks. She had learned not to make herself vulnerable to the hurt and betrayal that ensued from commitments.

Over the years, she’d had affairs with only two men. She had liked both and had loved the second, but the first relationship had lasted eleven months and the second only thirteen. Lovers, if they were worthwhile, required more than simple commitment; they needed revelation, sharing, the bond of emotional intimacy. She found it difficult to reveal much about her childhood or her mother, in part because her utter helplessness during those years embarrassed her. More to the point, she had come to the hard realization that her mother had never really loved her, perhaps had never been capable of loving her or anyone. And how could she expect to be cherished by any man who knew that she’d been unloved even by her mother?

She was aware that this attitude was irrational, but awareness didn’t free her. She understood that she was not responsible for what her mother had done to her, but regardless of what so many therapists claimed in their books and on their radio talk shows, understanding alone didn’t lead to healing. Even after a decade beyond her mother’s control, Chyna was at times convinced that all the dark events of all those troubled years could have been avoided if only she, Chyna, had been a better girl, more worthy.

I am your guardian.

She folded her hands on the table again. She leaned forward until her forehead was pressed to the backs of her thumbs, and she closed her eyes.

The only close friend she’d ever had was Laura Templeton. Their relationship was something that she had wanted badly but had never sought, desperately needed but did little to nurture; it was purely a testament to Laura’s vivaciousness, perseverance, and selflessness in the face of Chyna’s caution and reserve, a result of Laura’s dear heart and her singular capacity to love. And now Laura was dead.

I am your guardian.

In Laura’s room, under the dead gaze of Freud, Chyna had knelt beside the bed and whispered to her shackled friend, I’ll get you out of here. God, how it hurt to think of it. I’ll get you out of here. Her stomach knotted excruciatingly with self-disgust. I’ll find a weapon, she had promised. Laura, selfless to the end, had urged her to run, to get out. Don’t die for me, Laura had said. But Chyna had answered, I’ll be back.

Now here came grief again, swooping like a great dark bird into her heart, and she almost let its wings enfold her, too eager for the strange solace of those battering pinions — until she realized that she was using grief to knock humiliation from its perch. Grieving, she would have no room for self-loathing.

I am your guardian.

Although the clerk had never fired the revolver, she should have checked it. She should have known. Somehow. Some way. Though she could not possibly have known what Vess had done with the bullets, she should have known.

Laura had always told her that she was too hard on herself, that she would never heal if she kept inflicting new bruises on the old in endless self-flagellation.

But Laura was dead.

I am your guardian.

Chyna’s humiliation festered into shame.

And if humiliation was a good tool for repressing terror, shame was even better. Steeping in shame, she knew no fear at all, even though she was in shackles in the house of a sadistic murderer, with no one in the world looking for her. Justice seemed served by her being there.

Then she heard footsteps approaching.

She raised her head and opened her eyes.

The killer entered from the laundry room, evidently returning from the girl in the cellar.

Without speaking to Chyna, without glancing at her, as if she didn’t exist, he went to the refrigerator, removed a carton of eggs, and put it on the counter beside the sink. He deftly broke eight eggs into a bowl and threw the shells in the trash. He set the bowl in the refrigerator and proceeded to peel and chop a Bermuda onion.

Chyna hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours; nonetheless, she was dismayed to discover that she was suddenly ravenous. The onion was the sweetest scent that she had ever known, and her mouth began to water. After so much blood, after losing the only close friend she’d ever had, it seemed heartless to have an appetite so soon.

The killer put the chopped onion into a Tupperware container, snapped the lid tight, and placed it in the refrigerator beside the bowl of eggs. Next he grated half a wedge of cheddar cheese into another Tupperware container.

He was brisk and efficient in the kitchen, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. He kept his work area neat. He also washed his hands thoroughly between each task and dried them on a hand towel, not on the dish towel.

Finally the killer came to the dinette table. He sat across from Chyna, relaxed and self-confident and college-boy casual in his Dockers, braided belt, and soft chambray shirt.

Shame, which had seemed on the verge of consuming her, instead had burned itself out for the time being. A strange combination of smoldering anger and bitter despondency had replaced it.

“Now,” he said, “I’m sure you’re hungry, and as soon as we have a little chat, I’ll make cheese omelets with stacks of toast. But to earn your breakfast, you have to tell me who you are, where you were hiding at that service station, and why you’re here.”

She glared at him.

With a smile, he said, “Don’t think you can hold out on me.”

She would be damned rather than tell him anything.

“Here’s how it is,” he said. “I’ll kill you anyway. I’m not sure how yet. Probably in front of Ariel. She’s seen bodies before, but she’s never been there at the moment itself, to hear that last scream, in the sudden wetness of it all.”

Chyna tried to keep her eyes on him, show no weakness.

He said, “However I choose to do you, I’ll make it a lot harder for you if you don’t talk to me willingly. There are things I enjoy that can be done before or after you’re dead. Cooperate, and I’ll do them after.”

Chyna tried unsuccessfully to see some sign of madness in his eyes. Such a merry shade of blue.

“Well?”

“You’re a sick sonofabitch.”

Smiling again, he said, “The last thing I expected you to be was tedious.”

“I know why you sewed shut his eyes and mouth,” she said.

“Ah, so you found him in the closet.”

“You raped him before you killed him or while you killed him. You sewed his eyes shut because he’d seen, sewed his mouth shut because you’re ashamed of what you did and you’re afraid that, even dead, he might tell someone.”

Unfazed, he said, “Actually, I didn’t have sex with him.”

“Liar.”

“But if I had, I wouldn’t have been embarrassed. You think I’m that unsophisticated? We’re all bisexual, don’t you think? I have the urge for a man, sometimes, and with some of them I’ve indulged it. It’s all sensation. Just sensation.”

“Maggot.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said amiably, clearly amused by her, “but it just won’t work. You’re hoping one insult or another will set me off. As if I’m some hair-trigger psychopath who’ll just explode if you call me the right name, push the right button, maybe insult my mother or say nasty things about the Lord. Then you hope I’ll kill you fast, in a wild rage, and get it over with.”

Chyna realized that he was right, although she had not been consciously aware of her own intentions. Failure, shame, and the helplessness of being shackled had reduced her to a despair that she had preferred not to consider. Now she was sickened less by him than by herself, wondering if she was a quitter and a loser, after all, just like her mother.

“But I’m not a psychopath,” he said.

“Then what are you?”

“Oh…call me a homicidal adventurer. Or perhaps the only clear-thinking person you’ve ever met.”

“‘Maggot’ works better for me.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “Here’s the thing — either you tell me all about yourself, everything I want to know, or I’ll work on your face with a knife while you sit there. For every question you refuse to answer, I’ll take off a piece — the lobe of an ear, the tip of your pretty nose. Carve you like scrimshaw.”

He said this not threateningly but matter-of-factly, and she knew that he had the stomach for it.

“I’ll take all day,” he said, “and you’ll be insane long before you’re dead.”

“All right.”

“All right what — conversation or scrimshaw?”

“Conversation.”

“Good girl.”

She was prepared to die if it came to that, but she saw no point in suffering needlessly.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Shepherd. Chyna Shepherd. C-h-y-n-a.”

“Ah, not a cryptic chant, after all.”

“What?”

“Odd name.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t spar with me, Chyna. Go on.”

“All right. But first, may I have something to drink? I’m dehydrated.”

At the sink, he drew a glass of water. He put three ice cubes in it. He started to bring it to her, then halted and said, “I could add a slice of lemon.”

She knew he wasn’t joking. Home from the hunt, he was working now to recast himself from the role of savage stalker into that of accountant or clerk or real estate agent or car mechanic or whatever it was that he did when he was passing for normal. Some sociopaths could put on a false persona that was more convincing than the best performances of the finest actors who had ever lived, and this man was probably one of those, although after immersion in wanton slaughter, he needed this period of adjustment to remind himself of the manners and courtesies of civilized society.

“No, thanks,” she said to the offer of lemon.

“It’s no trouble,” he graciously assured her.

“Just the water.”

When he put the glass down, he slipped a cork-lined ceramic coaster under it. Then he sat across the table from her again.

Chyna was repelled by the prospect of drinking from a glass that he had handled, but she really was dehydrated. Her mouth was dry, and her throat was vaguely sore.

Because of the cuffs, she picked up the glass in both hands.

She knew that he was watching her for signs of fear.

The water didn’t slop around in the tumbler. The rim of the glass didn’t chatter against her teeth.

She truly wasn’t afraid of him any more, at least not for the moment, although maybe later. Certainly later. Now her interior landscape was a desert under sullen skies: numbing desolation, with the angry flicker of lightning toward a far horizon.

She drank half of the water before she put the glass down.

“When I entered the room a moment ago,” the killer said, “you were sitting with your hands folded, your head bowed against your hands. Were you praying?”

She thought about it. “No.”

“There’s no point in lying to me.”

“I’m not lying. I wasn’t praying just then.”

“But you do pray?”

“Sometimes.”

“God fears me.”

She waited.

He said, “God fears me — those are words that can be made from the letters of my name.”

“I see.”

“Dragon seed.”

“From the letters of your name,” she said.

“Yes. And…forge of rage.”

“It’s an interesting game.”

“Names are interesting. Yours is passive. A place name for a first name. And Shepherd — bucolic, fuzzily Christian. When I think of your name, I see an Asian peasant on a hillside with sheep…or a slant-eyed Christ making converts among the heathens.” He smiled, amused by his banter. “But clearly, your name doesn’t define you well. You’re not a passive person.”

“I have been,” she said, “most of my life.”

“Really? Well, you weren’t passive last night.”

“Not last night,” she agreed. “But until then.”

“My name, on the other hand, is a power name. Edgler Foreman Vess.” He spelled it for her. “Not Edgar. Edgeler. Like ‘on the edge.’ And Vess…if you draw it out, it’s like a serpent hissing.”

“Demon.”

“Yes, that’s right. It’s there in my name — demon.”

“Anger.”

He seemed pleased by her willingness to play. “You’re good at this, especially considering that you don’t have pen and paper.”

“Vessel,” she said. “That’s in your name too.”

“An easy one. But also semen. Vessel and semen, female and male. Would you like to craft an insult out of that, Chyna?”

Instead of replying, she picked up the glass and drank half of the remaining water. The ice cubes were cold against her teeth.

“Now that you’ve wet your whistle,” Vess said, “I want to know all about you. Remember — scrimshaw.”

Chyna told him everything, beginning with the moment that she had heard a scream while sitting at the guest-bedroom window in the Templeton house. She delivered her account in a monotone, not by calculation but because suddenly she could speak no other way. She tried to vary her inflection, put life into her words — but failed.

The sound of her voice, droning through the events of the night, scared her as Edgler Vess no longer did. Her account came to her as if she were listening to someone else speak, and it was the voice of a lost and defeated person.

She told herself that she was not defeated, that she still had hope, that she would get the best of this murderous bastard one way or another. But her inner voice lacked all conviction.

In spite of Chyna’s spiritless recitation of events, Vess was a rapt listener. He began in a relaxed slouch, lounging back in his chair, but by the time Chyna finished, he was leaning forward with his arms on the table, hunched toward her.

He interrupted her several times to ask questions. At the end, he sat for a while in contemplative silence.

She could not bear to look at him. She folded her hands on the table, closed her eyes, and put her forehead against the backs of her church-door thumbs, as she had been when Vess had come out of the laundry room.

She wasn’t praying this time either. She lacked the hope needed for prayer.

After a few minutes, she heard Vess’s chair slide back from the table. He got up. She heard him moving around, and then the familiar clatter of any cook being busy in any kitchen.

She smelled butter heating in a pan, then browning onions.

In the telling of her story, Chyna had lost her appetite, and it didn’t return with the aroma of the onions.

Finally Vess said, “Funny that I didn’t smell you right away at the Templetons’.”

“You can do that?” she asked, without raising her head from her hands. “You can just smell people out, as if you were a damn dog?”

“Usually,” he said, taking no offense, and with what seemed to be utmost seriousness. “And you must have made a sound more than once through the night. You surely can’t be that stealthy. Even your breathing I should have heard.”

Then came the sound of a wire whisk vigorously beating eggs in a bowl.

She smelled bread toasting.

“In a still house, with everyone dead, your movement should have made currents in the air, like a cool breath on the back of my neck, shivering the fine hairs on my hands. Your every movement should have been a different texture against my eyes. And when I walked through a space where you’d just been, I should have sensed the displacement of air caused by your passage.”

He was stone crazy. So cute in his chambray shirt, with his beautiful blue eyes, his thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and the dimple in his left cheek — but pustulant and canker-riddled inside.

“My senses, you see, are unusually acute.”

He ran the water in the sink. Without looking, she knew that he was rinsing the whisk. He wouldn’t put it aside dirty.

He said, “My senses are so sharp because I’ve given myself to sensation. Sensation is my religion, you might say.”

A sizzling arose, much louder than the cooking sound of onions, and a new aroma.

“But you were invisible to me,” he said. “Like a spirit. What makes you special?”

Bitter, she murmured against the tabletop, “If I was special, would I be here in chains?”

Although Chyna hadn’t actually spoken to him and wouldn’t have thought that he could hear her above the crisp sputtering of eggs and onions, Vess said, “I suppose you’re right.”

Later, when he put the plates on the table, she raised her head and moved her hands.

“Rather than make you eat with your hands, I’m going to give you a fork,” he said, “because I assume you see the pointlessness of throwing it and trying to stick me in the eye.”

She nodded.

“Good girl.”

On her plate was a plump four-egg omelet oozing cheddar cheese and stippled with sautéed onions. On top were three slices of a firm tomato and a sprinkling of chopped parsley. Two pieces of buttered toast, each neatly sliced on the diagonal, were arranged to bracket the omelet.

He refilled her water glass and added two more cubes of ice.

Famished only a short while ago, Chyna now could hardly tolerate the sight of food. She knew that she must eat, so she picked at the eggs and nibbled the toast. But she would never be able to finish all that he had given her.

Vess ate with gusto but not noisily or sloppily. His table manners were beyond reproach, and he used his napkin frequently to blot his lips.

Chyna was deep in her private grayness, and the more Vess appeared to enjoy his breakfast, the more her own omelet began to taste like ashes.

“You’d be quite attractive if you weren’t so rumpled and sweaty, your face smudged with dirt, your hair straggly from the rain. Very attractive, I think. A real charmer under that grime. Maybe later I’ll bathe you.”

Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.

Uncannily, after a further silence, Edgler Vess said, “Untouched and alive.”

She knew that she had not spoken the prayer aloud.

“Untouched and alive,” he repeated. “Is that what you said…on the stairs earlier, on your way down to Ariel?”

She stared at him, speechless.

“Is it?”

Finally: “Yes.”

“I’ve been wondering about it. You said your name and then those three words, though none of it made sense when I didn’t know that Chyna Shepherd was your name.”

She looked away from him, at the window. A Doberman roamed the backyard.

“Was it a prayer?” he asked.

In her desolation, Chyna hadn’t thought that he could scare her any more, but she had been wrong. His intuitiveness was frightening — and not entirely for reasons that she could understand.

She looked away from the Doberman and met Vess’s eyes. For one brief moment, she saw the dog within, a dark and merciless aspect.

“Was it a prayer?” he asked again.

“Yes.”

“In your heart, Chyna, deep in your heart, do you truly believe that God really exists? Be truthful now, not just with me but with yourself.”

At one time — not long ago — she had been just barely sure enough of what she believed to answer Yes. Now she was silent.

“Even if God exists,” Vess said, “does He know that you do?”

She took another bite of the omelet. It seemed greasier than before. The eggs and butter and cheese, too rich, cloyed in her mouth, and she could hardly swallow.

She put down her fork. She was finished. She’d eaten no more than a third of her meal.

Vess finished the food on his plate, washing it down with coffee that he didn’t offer her — no doubt because he thought that she would try to throw the hot brew in his eyes.

“You look so glum,” Vess said.

She didn’t reply.

“You’re feeling like such a failure, aren’t you? You’ve failed poor Ariel, yourself, and God too, if He exists.”

“What do you want with me?” she asked. She meant, Why put me through this, why not kill me and get it over with?

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” Vess said. “Whatever I do with you, it’s got to be special. I feel you’re special, whether you think you are or not, and whatever we do together should be…intense.”

She closed her eyes and wondered if she could find Narnia again after all these years.

He said, “I can’t answer your question as to what I want with you — but I have no doubts about what I want with Ariel. Would you like to hear what I intend to do with her?”

Most likely, she was too old to believe in anything, even just a magic wardrobe.

Vess’s voice came out of her internal grayness, as if he lived there as well as in the real world: “I asked you a question, Chyna. Remember our bargain? You can either answer it — or I’ll slice off a piece of your face. Would you like to hear what I intend to do with Ariel?”

“I’m sure I know.”

“Yes, some of it. Sex, that’s obvious. She’s a luscious piece. I haven’t touched her yet, but I will. And I believe she’s a virgin. At least, in the days when she still talked, she said she was, and she didn’t seem like the kind of girl who would lie.”

Or there was the Wild Wood beyond the River, Ratty and Mole and Mr. Badger, green boughs hanging full in the summer sun and Pan piping in the cool shadows under the trees.

“And I want to hear her crying, lost and crying. I want to smell the purity of her tears. I want to feel the exquisite texture of her screams, know the clean smell of them, and the taste of her terror. There’s always that. Always that.”

Neither the languid river nor the Wild Wood materialized, though Chyna strained to see them. Ratty, Mole, Mr. Badger, and Mr. Toad were gone forever into the hateful death that claims all things. And the sadness of this, in its way, was as great as the sadness of what had happened to Laura and what would soon happen to Chyna herself.

Vess said, “Once in a while, I bring one of them back to the room in the cellar — and always for the same purpose.”

She didn’t want to hear this. The handcuffs made it difficult to cover her ears. And if she had tried, he would have shackled her wrists to her ankles. He would insist that she listen.

“The most intense experiences of my life have all taken place in that room, Chyna. Not the sex. Not the beating or the cutting. That all comes later, and it’s a lagniappe. First, I break them down, and that is when it gets intense.”

Her chest was tight. She could breathe only shallowly.

He said, “The first day or two, they all think they’ll go out of their minds with fear, but they’re wrong. It takes longer than a day or two to drive someone insane, truly and irrevocably insane. Ariel is my seventh captive, and the others all held on to their sanity for weeks. One of them cracked on the eighteenth day, but three of them lasted a full two months.”

Chyna gave up on the elusive Wild Wood and met his gaze across the table.

“Psychological torture is so much more interesting and difficult to undertake than the physical variety, although the latter can be undeniably thrilling,” Vess said. “The mind is so much tougher than the body, a greater challenge by far. And when the mind goes, I swear that I can hear the crack, a harder sound than bone splitting — and oh, how it reverberates.”

She tried to see the animal consciousness in his eyes, which she had glimpsed unexpectedly before. She needed to see it.

“When they crack, some of them writhe on the floor, thrash, rend their clothes. They tear at their hair, Chyna, and claw their faces, and some of them bite themselves hard enough to draw blood. They maim themselves in so many inventive ways. They sob and sob, can’t stop for hours, sometimes for days, sobbing in their sleep. They bark like dogs, Chyna, and screech and flail their arms as if they’re convinced that they can fly. They hallucinate and see things more frightening than I am to them. Some speak in tongues. It’s called glossolalia. Do you know the condition? Quite fascinating. Convincingly like a language yet meaningless, a ranting or pleading babble. Some lose control of their bodily functions and wallow in their filth. Messy but riveting to watch — the true base condition of humanity, to which most people can only admit in madness.”

As hard as she tried, Chyna could see no beast in his eyes, only a placid blueness and the watchful darkness of the pupil, and she was no longer sure that she had ever seen it. He wasn’t half man and half wolf, not a creature that fell to all fours in the light of the full moon. Worse, he was nothing but a man — living at one extreme end of the spectrum of human cruelty, but nonetheless only a man.

“Some take refuge in catatonic silences,” Vess continued, “as Ariel has done. But I always break them out of that. Ariel is by far the most stubborn, but that only makes her interesting. I’ll break her too, and when her crack comes, Chyna, it’ll be like no other. Glorious. Intense.”

“The most intense experience of all is showing mercy,” Chyna said, and had no idea whatsoever where she had found those words. They sounded like a plea, and she didn’t want him to think that she was begging for her life. Even in her despair, she would not be reduced to groveling.

A sudden smile made Vess look almost like a boy, one given to puns and pranks, collector of baseball cards, rider of bikes, builder of model airplanes, and altar boy on Sundays. She thought that he was smiling at what she’d said, amused by her naiveté, but this was not the case, as he made clear with his next words.

“Maybe…what I want from you,” Vess said, “is to be with me when I finally make Ariel snap. Instead of killing you in front of her to drive her over the edge, I’ll drive her some other way. And you can watch.”

Oh, God.

“You’re a psychology student, after all, almost a genuine master of psychology. Right? Sitting there in such stern judgment of me, so certain that my mind is ‘aberrant’ and that you know exactly how I think. Well, then, how interesting it would be to see if any of the modern theories of the working of the mind are undone by this little experiment. Don’t you think so? After I break Ariel, you could write a paper about it, Chyna, for my eyes only. I’d enjoy reading your considered observations.”

Dear God, it would never come to that. She’d never be a witness to such a thing. Though in shackles, she would find a way to commit suicide before she would let him take her down to that room to watch that lovely girl…to watch her dissolve. Chyna would bite open her own wrists, swallow her tongue, contrive to fall down the steps and break her neck, something. Something.

Evidently aware that he had jolted her out of gray despair into stark horror, Vess smiled again — and then turned his attention to her breakfast plate. “Do you intend to eat the rest of that?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll have it.”

He slid his empty plate aside and pulled hers in front of him. Using her fork, he cut a bite-size piece of the cold omelet, put it in his mouth, and moaned softly in delight. Slowly, sensuously, Vess extracted the tines from his mouth, pressing his lips firmly around them as they slid loose, then reaching with his tongue for one last lick.

After he swallowed the bite of eggs, he said, “I could taste you on the fork. Your saliva has a lovely flavor — except for a faint bitterness. No doubt that’s not a usual component, just the result of a sour stomach.”

She could find no escape by closing her eyes, so she watched as he devoured the remains of her breakfast.

When he finished, she had a question of her own. “Last night…why did you eat the spider?”

“Why not?”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s the best answer to any question.”

“Then give me second-best.”

“You think it was disgusting?”

“I’m just curious.”

“No doubt, you see it as a negative experience — eating an icky, squirmy spider.”

“No doubt.”

“But there are no negative experiences, Chyna. Only sensations. No values can be attached to pure sensation.”

“Of course they can.”

“If you think so, then you’re in the wrong century. Anyway, the spider had an interesting flavor, and now I understand spiders better for having absorbed one. Do you know about flatworm learning?”

“Flatworm?”

“You should have encountered it in a basic biology course along the way to becoming such a highly educated woman. You see, certain flatworms can gradually learn to negotiate a maze —”

She did remember, and interrupted: “Then if you grind them up and feed them to another batch of flatworms, batch number two can run the same maze on the first try.”

“Good. Yes.” Vess nodded happily. “They absorb the knowledge with the flesh.”

She didn’t need to consider how to phrase her next question, for Vess could be neither insulted nor flattered. “Jesus, you don’t actually believe you now know what it’s like to be a spider, have all the knowledge of a spider, because you’ve eaten one?”

“Of course not, Chyna. If I were that literal-minded, I’d be crazy. Wouldn’t I? In an institution somewhere, talking to a crowd of imaginary friends. But because of my sharp senses, I did absorb from the spider an ineffable quality of spiderness that you’ll never be able to understand. I heightened my awareness of the spider as a marvelously engineered little hunter, a creature of power. Spider is a power word, you know, though it can’t be formed from the letters of my name.” He hesitated, pondering, and then continued: “It can be formed from the letters of your name.”

She didn’t bother to remind him about her mother’s precious spelling. Only spyder could be found in Chyna Shepherd.

“And it was risky, eating a spider, which added considerably to the appeal,” Vess continued. “Unless you’re an entomologist, you can’t be sure if any particular specimen is poisonous or not. Some, like the brown recluse, are extremely dangerous. A bite on the hand is one thing…but I had to be sure that I was quick and crushed it against the roof of my mouth before it could bite my tongue.”

“You like taking risks.”

He shrugged. “I’m just that kind of guy.”

“On edge.”

“Words in my name,” he acknowledged.

“And if you’d been bitten on the tongue?”

“Pain is the same as pleasure, just different. Learn to enjoy it, and you’re happier with life.”

“Even pain is value neutral?”

“Sure. Just sensation. It helps grow the reef of the soul — if there is a soul.”

She didn’t know what the hell he was talking about — the reef of the soul — and she didn’t ask. She was weary of him. Weary of fearing him, even weary of hating him. With her questions, she was striving to understand, as she had striven all her life, and she was tired to death of this search for meaning. She would never know why some people committed countless little cruelties — or bigger ones — and the struggle to understand had only exhausted her and left her empty, cold, and gray inside.

Pointing to her red and swollen index finger, Vess said, “That must hurt. And your neck.”

“The headache’s the worst of it. And none of it’s anything like pleasure.”

“Well, I can’t easily show you the way to enlightenment and prove you’re wrong. It takes time. But there’s a smaller lesson, quick to learn….”

He got up from his chair and went to a spice rack at the end of the kitchen cabinets. Among the small bottles and tins of thyme, cloves, dill, nutmeg, chili pepper, ginger, marjoram, and cinnamon was a bottle of aspirin.

“I don’t take this for headaches, because I like to savor the pain. But I keep aspirin on hand because, once in a while, I like to chew on them for the taste.”

“They’re vile.”

“Just bitter. Bitterness can be as pleasing as sweetness when you learn that every experience, every sensation, is worthwhile.”

He returned to the table with the bottle of aspirin. He put it in front of her — and took away her glass of water.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Bitterness has its place.”

She ignored the bottle.

“Suit yourself,” Vess said, clearing the plates off the table.

Although Chyna needed relief from her various pains, she refused to touch the aspirin. Perhaps irrationally — but nonetheless strongly — she felt that by chewing a few of the tablets, even strictly for the medicinal effect, she would be stepping into the strange rooms of Edgler Vess’s madness. This was a threshold that she didn’t care to cross for any purpose, even with one foot solidly anchored in the real world.

He hand-washed the breakfast plates, bowls, pans, and utensils. He was efficient and fastidious, using steaming hot water and lots of lemon-scented dishwashing liquid.

Chyna had one more question that could not go unasked, and at last she said, “Why the Templetons? Why choose them of all people? It wasn’t random, was it, not just the place you happened to stop in the night?”

“Not just random,” he agreed, scrubbing the omelet pan with a plastic scouring pad. “A few weeks back, Paul Templeton was up this way on business, and when —”

“You knew him?”

“Not really. He was in town, the county seat, on business like I said, and as he was taking something from his wallet to show me, a set of those little hinged plastic windows fell out, you know, with little wallet-size photographs, and I picked them up for him. One of the pictures was his wife. Another was Laura. She looked so…fresh, unspoiled. I said something like ‘That’s a pretty girl,’ and Paul was off and running about her, every inch the proud papa. Told me she was soon going to have her master’s degree in psychology, three-point-eight grade average and everything. He told me how he really missed her away at school, even after six years of getting used to it, and how he couldn’t wait for the end of the month, because Laura was coming home for a three-day weekend. He didn’t mention she was bringing along a friend.”

An accident. Photos dropped. A casual exchange, mere idle conversation.

The arbitrariness of it was breathtaking and almost more than Chyna could bear.

Then, as she watched Vess thoroughly wiping off the counters and rinsing the dishpan and scrubbing the sink, Chyna began to feel that what had happened to the Templeton family was worse than merely arbitrary. All this violent death began to seem fated, an inexorable spiral into lasting darkness, as if they had been born and had lived only for Edgler Vess.

It was as if she too had been born and had struggled this far only for the purpose of bringing one moment of sick satisfaction to this soulless predator.

The worst horror of his rampages was not the pain and fear that he inflicted, not the blood, not the mutilated cadavers. The pain and the fear were comparatively brief, considering all the routine pain and anxiety of life. The blood and bodies were merely aftermath. The worst horror was that he stole meaning from the unfinished lives of those people he killed, made himself the primary purpose of their existence, robbed them not of time but of fulfillment.

His base sins were envy — of beauty, of happiness — and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.

Hand-drying the plates, pans, and flatware in the drainage rack, returning each piece to the proper shelf or drawer, Edgler Vess looked as pink-clean as a freshly bathed baby and as innocent as the stillborn. He smelled of soap, a good bracing aftershave, and lemon-scented dishwashing liquid. But in spite of all this, Chyna found herself superstitiously expecting to detect a whiff of brimstone.

Every life led to a series of quiet epiphanies — or at least to opportunities for epiphanies — and Chyna was washed by a poignant new grief when she thought about this grim aspect of the Templeton family’s interrupted journeys. The kindnesses they might have done for others. The love they might have given. The things they might have come to understand in their hearts.

Vess finished the breakfast clean-up and returned to the table. “I have a few things to do upstairs, outside — and then I’ll have to sleep four or five hours if I can. I’ve got to go to work this evening. I need my rest.”

She wondered what work he did, but she didn’t ask. He might be talking about a job — or about his dogged assault on Ariel’s sanity. If the latter, Chyna didn’t want to know what was coming.

“When you shift around in the chair, do it easy. Those chains will scrape the wood if you’re not careful.”

“I’d hate to mar the furniture,” she said.

He stared at her for perhaps half a minute and then said, “If you’re stupid enough to think you can get free, I’ll hear the chains rattling, and I’ll have to come back in here to quiet you. If that’s necessary, you won’t like what I’ll do.”

She said nothing. She was hopelessly hobbled and chained down. She couldn’t possibly escape.

“Even if you somehow get free of the table and chairs, you can’t move fast. And attack dogs patrol the grounds.”

“I’ve seen them,” she assured him.

“If you weren’t chained, they’d still drag you down and kill you before you’d gone ten steps from the door.”

She believed him — but she didn’t understand why he felt the need to press the point so hard.

“I once turned a young man loose in the yard,” Vess said. “He raced straight to the nearest tree and got up and out of harm’s way with only one bad bite in his right calf and a nip on the left ankle. He braced himself in the branches and thought he would be safe for a little while, with the dogs circling below and watching him, but I got a twenty-two rifle and went out on the back porch and shot him in the leg from there. He fell out of the tree, and then it was all over in maybe a minute.”

Chyna said nothing. There were moments when communicating with this hateful thing seemed no more possible than discussing the merits of Mozart with a shark. This was one of those moments.

“You were invisible to me last night,” he said.

She waited.

His gaze traveled over her, and he seemed to be looking for a loose link in one of the chains or a handcuff left open and unnoticed until now. “Like a spirit.”

She was not sure that it was ever possible to discern what this thing was thinking — but right now, by God, it seemed to be vaguely uneasy about leaving her alone. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine why.

“Stay?” he said.

She nodded.

“Good girl.”

He went to the door between the kitchen and the living room.

Realizing that they had one more issue to discuss, she said, “Before you go…”

He turned to look at her.

“Could you take me to a bathroom?” she asked.

“It’s too much trouble to undo the chains just now,” he said. “Piss in your pants if you have to. I’m going to clean you up later anyway. And I can buy new chair cushions.”

He pushed through the door into the living room and was gone.

Chyna was determined not to endure the humiliation of sitting in her own waste. She had a faint urge to pee, but it wasn’t insistent yet. Later she would be in trouble.

How odd — that she could still care about avoiding humiliation or think about the future.

Halfway across the living room, Mr. Vess stops to listen to the woman in the kitchen. He hears no clink of chains. He waits. And still no sound. The silence troubles him.

He’s not sure what to make of her. He knows so much about her now — yet she still contains mysteries.

Shackled and in his complete control, surely she cannot be his blown tire. She smells of despair and defeat. In the beaten tone of her voice, he sees the gray of ashes and feels the texture of a coffin blanket. She is as good as dead, and she is resigned to it. Yet…

From the kitchen comes the clink of chains. Not loud, not a vigorous assault on her bonds. Just a quiet rattle as she shifts position — perhaps to clasp her thighs tightly together to repress the urge to urinate.

Mr. Vess smiles.

He goes upstairs to his room. From the top shelf at the back of his walk-in closet, he takes down a telephone. In the bedroom, he plugs it into a wall jack and makes two calls, letting people know that he has returned from his three-day vacation and will be back in harness by this evening.

Although he is confident that the Dobermans, in his absence, will never allow anyone to get into the house, Vess keeps only two phones and secretes them in closets when he is not at home. In the extremely unlikely event that an intruder should manage to sprint through the attacking dogs and get into the house alive, he will not be able to call for help.

The danger of cellular phones has been on Mr. Vess’s mind in recent days. It’s difficult to imagine a would-be burglar carrying a portable phone or using it to call the police for help from a house in which he’s become trapped by guard dogs, but stranger things have happened. If Chyna Shepherd had found a cellular phone in the clerk’s Honda the previous night, she would not be the one now languishing in shackles.

The technological revolution here at the end of the millennium offers numerous conveniences and great opportunities, but it also has dangerous aspects. Thanks to his expertise with computers, he has cleverly altered his fingerprint files with various agencies and can go without gloves at places like the Templeton house, enjoying the full sensuality of the experience without fear. But one cellular phone in the wrong hands at the wrong time could lead suddenly to the most intense experience of his life — and the final one. He sometimes longs for the simpler age of Jack the Ripper, or the splendid Ed Gein, who inspired Psycho, or Richard Speck; he dreams wistfully of the less complicated world of earlier decades and of killing fields that were less trampled, then, by such as he.

By feverishly pursuing high ratings, by hyping every story steeped in blood, by making celebrities out of killers, and by fawning over celebrity killers, the electronic news media happily may have inspired more of his clear-thinking kind. But they have also alarmed the sheep too much. Too many in the herd are walleyed with alertness and quick to run at the first perception of danger.

Still, he manages to have his fun.

After making his calls, Mr. Vess goes out to the motor home. The license plates, the blunt-end screws and the nuts to attach them to the vehicle, and a screwdriver are in a drawer in the kitchenette.

By various means, usually two or three weeks prior to one of his expeditions, Mr. Vess carefully selects his primary targets, like the Templeton family. And though he sometimes brings back a living prize for the cellar room, he nearly always travels well beyond the borders of Oregon to minimize the chances that his two lives — good citizen and homicidal adventurer — will cross at the most inconvenient moment. (Though he didn’t employ this method to get Laura Templeton, he has found that clandestine browsing, via computer, through the huge Department of Motor Vehicles’ records in neighboring California is an excellent method of locating attractive women. Their driver’s license photographs — head shots only — are now on file with the DMV. Provided with each picture are the woman’s age, height, and weight — statistics that assist Vess in identifying unacceptable candidates, so he can avoid grandmothers who photograph well and plump women with thin faces. And though some people list post office boxes only, most use their street addresses; thereafter, Mr. Vess needs only a series of good maps.) Upon nearing the end of his drive, when he gets within fifty miles of the target residence, he removes the license plates from the motor home. Later, because he makes a point of being far away from the scene of his games by the time anyone finds the aftermath, he could be tracked down only if someone in the victim’s neighborhood happened to see the motor home and, though it looked perfectly innocent, happened to glance at the plates and — that damn blown tire again — happened to have a photographic memory. Therefore, he leaves the tags off his vehicle until he is safely back in Oregon.

If he were stopped by a police officer for speeding or for some other traffic violation, he would express surprise when asked about his missing license plates and would say that, for God knows what reason, they must have been stolen. He is a good actor; he could sell his bafflement. If the chance arose to do so without putting himself in serious jeopardy, he would kill the cop. And if no such opportunity presented itself, he would most likely be able to count on a swift resolution of the problem by calling upon professional courtesy.

Now he squats on his haunches and attaches one of the tags to the frame in the front license-plate niche.

One by one the dogs come to him, sniffing at his hands and his clothes, perhaps disappointed to find only the scents of aftershave and dishwashing soap. They are starved for attention, but they are on duty. None of them lingers long, each returning to its patrol after one pat on the head, a scratch behind the ears, and a word of affection.

“Good dog,” Mr. Vess says to each. “Good dog.”

When he finishes with the front plate, he stands, stretches, and yawns while surveying his domain.

At ground level, anyway, the wind has died. The air is still and moist. It smells of wet grass, earth, moldering dead leaves, and pine forests.

With the rain finished, the mist is lifting off the foothills and off the lower flanks of the mountains behind the house. He can’t see the peaks of the western range yet or even the blanket of snow lingering on the higher slopes. But directly overhead and to the east, where the mist doesn’t intervene, the clouds are more gray than thunderhead black, a soft moleskin gray, and they are moving rapidly southeast in front of a high-altitude wind. By midnight, as he promised Ariel, there might be stars and even a moon to light the tall grass in the meadow and to shine in the milky eyes of the dead Laura.

Mr. Vess goes to the back of the motor home to attach the second license plate — and discovers odd tracks on the driveway. As he stands staring at them, a frown pools and deepens on his face.

The driveway is shale, but during a heavy rain, mud washes out from the surrounding yard. Here and there it forms a thin skin atop the stone, not soupy but dark and dense.

In this skin of mud are hoof impressions, perhaps those of a deer. A sizable deer. It has crossed the driveway more than once.

He sees a place where it stood for a while, pawing the ground.

No tire tracks mar the mud, because they were erased by the rain that had been falling when he’d come home. Evidently the deer spoor date from after the storm.

He crouches beside the tracks and puts his fingers to the cold mud. He can feel the hardness and smoothness of the hooves that stamped the marks.

A variety of deer thrive in the nearby foothills and mountains. They rarely venture onto Mr. Vess’s property, however, because they are frightened of the Dobermans.

This is the most peculiar thing about the deer tracks: that among them are no paw prints from the dogs.

The Dobermans have been trained to focus on human intruders and, as much as possible, to ignore wildlife. Otherwise, they might be distracted at a moment crucial to their master’s safety. They will never attack rabbits or squirrels or possums — or deer — unless severe hunger eventually drives them to it. They won’t even give playful chase.

Nevertheless, the dogs will take notice of other animals that cross their path. They indulge their curiosity within the limits of their training.

They would have approached this deer and circled ever closer as it stood here, either paralyzing it with fright or spooking it off. And after it had gone, they would have padded back and forth across the driveway, sniffing its spoor.

But not one paw print is visible among the hoof impressions.

Rubbing his muddy fingertips together, Mr. Vess rises to his full height and slowly turns in a circle, studying the surrounding land. The meadows to the north and the distant piney woods beyond. The driveway leading east to the bald knoll. The yard to the south, more meadows beyond, and woods again. Finally the backyard, past the barn, to the foothills. The deer — if it was a deer — is gone.

Edgler Vess stands motionless. Listening. Watchful. Breathing deeply, seeking scents. Then for a while he inhales through his open mouth, catching what he can upon his tongue. He feels the moist air like the clammy skin of a cadaver against his face. All his senses are open wide, irised to the max, and the freshly washed world drains into them.

Finally he can detect no harm in the morning.

As Vess is putting the license plate on the back of the motor home, Tilsiter pads to him. The dog nuzzles his master’s neck.

Vess encourages the Doberman to stay. When he is finished with the plate, he points Tilsiter to the nearby deer spoor.

The dog seems not to see the tracks. Or, seeing them, he does not have any interest.

Vess leads him to the spoor, right in among the prints. Once more he points to them.

Because Tilsiter appears to be confused, Vess places his hand on the back of the dog’s head and presses his muzzle into one of the tracks.

The Doberman catches a scent at last, sniffs eagerly, whimpers with excitement — then decides that he doesn’t like what he smells. He squirms out from under his master’s hand and backs off, looking sheepish.

“What?” says Vess.

The dog licks his chops. He looks away from Vess, surveys the meadows, the lane, the yard. He glances at Vess again, but then he trots off to the south, returning to patrol.

The trees still dripping. The mists rising. The spent clouds scudding fast toward the southeast.

Mr. Vess decides to kill Chyna Shepherd immediately.

He will haul her into the yard, make her lie facedown on the grass, and put a couple of bullets in the back of her skull. He has to go to work this evening, and before that he has to get some sleep, so he won’t have time to enjoy a slow kill.

Later, when he gets home, he can bury her in the meadow with the four dogs watching, insects singing and feeding on one another in the tall grass, and Ariel forced to kiss each of the corpses before it goes forever into the ground — all this in moonlight if there is any.

Quickly now, finish her and sleep.

As he hurries toward the house, he realizes that the screwdriver is still in his hand, which might be more interesting than using the pistol, yet just as quick.

Up the flagstone steps, onto the front porch, where the finger of the Seattle attorney hangs silent among the seashells in the cool windless air.

He doesn’t bother to wipe his feet, a rare breach of compulsive procedure.

The ratcheting hinge is matched by the sound of his own ragged breathing as he opens the door and steps into the house. When he closes the door, he is startled to hear his thudding heartbeats chasing one another.

He is never afraid, never. With this woman, however, he has been unsettled more than once.

A few steps into the room, he halts, getting a grip on himself. Now that he is inside again, he doesn’t understand why killing her seemed to be such an urgent priority.

Intuition.

But never has his intuition delivered such a clamorous message that has left him this conflicted. The woman is special, and he so badly wants to use her in special ways. Merely pumping two shots into the back of her head or sticking the screwdriver into her a few times would be such a waste of her potential.

He is never afraid. Never.

Even being unsettled like this is a challenge to his dearest image of himself. The poet Sylvia Plath, whose work leaves Mr. Vess uncharacteristically ambivalent, once said that the world was ruled by panic, “panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all — the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.” But Johnny Panic does not rule Edgler Vess and never will, because Mr. Vess has no illusions about the nature of existence, no doubts about his purpose, and no moments of his life that ever require reinterpretation when he has the time for quiet reflection.

Sensation.

Intensity.

He cannot live with intensity if he is afraid, because Johnny Panic inhibits spontaneity and experimentation. Therefore, he will not allow this woman of mysteries to spook him.

As both his breathing and his heartbeat subside to normal rates, he turns the rubberized handle of the screwdriver around and around in his hand, staring at the short blunt blade at the end of the long steel shank.

The moment Vess entered the kitchen, before he spoke, Chyna sensed he had changed from the man that she had known thus far. He was in a different mood from any that had previously possessed him, although the precise difference was so subtle that she was not able to define it.

He approached the table as if to sit down, then stopped short of his chair. Frowning and silent, he stared at her.

In his right hand was a screwdriver. Ceaselessly he rolled the handle through his fingers, as if tightening an imaginary screw.

On the floor behind him were crumbling chunks of mud. He had come inside with dirty shoes.

She knew that she must not speak first. They were at a strange juncture where words might not mean what they had meant before, where the most innocent statement might be an incitement to violence.

A short while ago, she had half preferred to be killed quickly, and she had tried to trigger one of his homicidal impulses. She had also considered ways that, although shackled, she might be able to commit suicide. Now she held her tongue to avoid inadvertently enraging him.

Evidently, even in her desolation, she continued to harbor a small but stubborn hope that was camouflaged in the grayness where she could not see it. A stupid denial. A pathetic longing for one more chance. Hope, which had always seemed ennobling to her, now seemed as dehumanizing as feverish greed, as squalid as lust, just an animal hunger for more life at any cost.

She was in a deep, bleak place.

Finally Vess said, “Last night.”

She waited.

“In the redwoods.”

“Yes?”

“Did you see anything?” he asked.

“See what?”

“Anything odd?”

“No.”

“You must have.”

She shook her head.

“The elk,” he said.

“Oh. Yes, the elk.”

“A herd of them.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t think they were peculiar?”

“Coastal elk. They thrive in that area.”

“These seemed almost tame.”

“Maybe because tourists drive through there all the time.”

Slowly turning and turning the screwdriver, he considered her explanation. “Maybe.”

Chyna saw that the fingers of his right hand were covered with a film of dry mud.

He said, “I can smell the musk of them now, the texture of their eyes, hear the greenness of the ferns swaying around them, and it’s a cold dark oil in my blood.”

No reply was possible, and she didn’t try to make one.

Vess lowered his gaze from Chyna’s eyes to the turning point of the screwdriver — and then to his shoes. He looked over his shoulder and saw the mud on the floor.

“This won’t do,” he said.

He put the screwdriver on a nearby counter.

He took off his shoes and carried them into the laundry room, where he left them to be cleaned later.

He returned in his bare feet and, using paper towels and a bottle of Windex, cleaned every crumb of mud from the tiles. In the living room, he used a vacuum cleaner to sweep the mud out of the carpet.

These domestic chores occupied him for almost fifteen minutes, and by the time he finished, he was no longer in the mood that had possessed him when he’d entered the kitchen. Housework seemed to scrub away his blues.

“I’m going to go upstairs and sleep now,” he said. “You’ll be quiet and not rattle your chains much.”

She said nothing.

“You’ll be quiet, or I’ll come down and shove five feet of the chain up your ass.”

She nodded.

“Good girl.”

He left the room.

The difference between Vess’s usual demeanor and his recent mood no longer eluded Chyna. For a few minutes, he had lacked his usual self-confidence. Now he had it back.

Mr. Vess always sleeps in the nude to facilitate his dreams.

In slumberland, all the people whom he encounters are naked, whether they are being torn asunder beneath him in glorious wetness or are running in a pack with him through high shadowed places and down into moonlight. There is a heat in his dreams that not only makes clothes superfluous but burns from him the very concept of clothes, so going naked is more natural in the dreamworld than in the real one.

He never suffers from nightmares. This is because, in his daily life, he confronts the sources of his tensions and deals with them. He is never dragged down by guilt. He is not judgmental of others and is never affected by what they think of him. He knows that if something he wishes to do feels right, then it is right. He always looks out for number one, because to be a successful human being, he must first like himself. Consequently, he always goes to his bed with a clear mind and an untroubled heart.

Now, within seconds of resting his head on his pillow, Mr. Vess is asleep. From time to time his legs cycle beneath the covers, as if he is chasing something.

Once, in his sleep, he says, “Father,” almost reverentially, and the word hangs like a bubble on the air — which is odd, because when Edgler Vess was nine years old, he burned his father to death.

Chains rattling, Chyna leaned down and picked up the spare cushion from the floor beside her chair. She put it on the table, slumped forward, and rested her head on it.

According to the kitchen clock, it was a quarter till twelve. She had been awake well over twenty-four hours, except when she had dozed in the motor home and when she had sat here unconscious after Vess clubbed her.

Although exhausted, and numb with despair, she did not expect to be able to sleep. But she hoped that by keeping her eyes closed and letting her thoughts drift to more pleasant times, she might be able to take her mind off her mild but gradually increasing urge to pee and off the pain in her neck and trigger finger.

She was walking in a wind full of torn red blossoms, curiously unafraid of the darkness and of the lightning that sometimes split it, when she was awakened not by thunder but by the sound of scissors clipping through paper.

She lifted her head from the pillow and sat up straight. The fluorescent light stung her eyes.

Edgler Vess was standing at the sink, cutting open a large bag of potato chips.

He said, “Ah, you’re awake, you sleepyhead.”

Chyna looked at the clock. Twenty minutes till five.

He said, “I thought it might take a brass band to bring you around.”

She had been asleep almost five hours. Her eyes were grainy. Her mouth was sour. She could smell her body odor, and she felt greasy.

She had not wet herself in her sleep, and she was briefly lifted by an absurd sense of triumph that she had not yet been reduced to that lower level of humiliation. Then she realized how pathetic she was, priding herself on her continence, and her internal grayness darkened by a degree or two.

Vess was wearing black boots, khaki slacks, a black belt, and a white T-shirt.

His arms were muscular, enormous. She would never be able to struggle successfully against those arms.

He brought a plate to the table. He had made a sandwich for her. “Ham and cheese with mustard.”

A ruffle of lettuce showed at the edges of the bread. He had placed two dill pickle spears beside the sandwich.

As Vess put the bag of potato chips on the table, Chyna said, “I don’t want it.”

“You have to eat,” he said.

She looked out the window at the deep yard in late-afternoon light.

“If you don’t eat,” he said, “I’ll eventually have to force-feed you.” He picked up the bottle of aspirin and shook it to get her attention. “Tasty?”

“I didn’t take any,” she said.

“Ah, then you’re learning to enjoy your pain.”

He seemed to win either way.

He took away the aspirin and returned with a glass of water. Smiling, he said, “You’ve got to keep those kidneys functioning or they’ll atrophy.”

As Vess cleaned the counter where he’d made the sandwich, Chyna said, “Were you abused as a child?” and hated herself for asking the question, for still trying to understand.

Vess laughed and shook his head. “This isn’t a textbook, Chyna. This is real life.”

“Were you?”

“No. My father was a Chicago accountant. My mom sold women’s wear at a department store. They loved me. Bought me too many toys, more than I could use, especially since I preferred playing with…other things.”

“Animals,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“And before animals — insects or very little things like goldfish or turtles.”

“Is that in your textbooks?”

“It’s the earliest and worst sign. Torturing animals.”

He shrugged. “It was fun…watching the stupid thing crawl on fire inside its shell. Really, Chyna, you have to learn to get beyond these petty value judgments.”

She closed her eyes, hoping he would go to work.

“Anyway, my folks loved me, all caught up in that delusion. When I was nine, I set a fire. Lighter fluid in their bed while they were sleeping, then a cigarette.”

“My God.”

“There you go again.”

“Why?”

He mocked: “Why not?”

“Jesus.”

“Want the second-best answer?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then look at me when I talk to you.”

She opened her eyes.

His gaze cleaved her. “I set them on fire because I thought maybe they were beginning to catch on.”

“To what?”

“To the fact that I was something special.”

“They caught you with the turtle,” she guessed.

“No. A neighbor’s kitten. We lived in a nice suburb. There were so many pets in the neighborhood. Anyway, when they caught me, there was talk of doctors. Even at nine, I knew I couldn’t allow that. Doctors might be harder to fool. So we had a little fire.”

“And nothing was done to you?”

Finished with his cleaning, he sat down at the table. “No one suspected. Dad was smoking in bed, the firemen said. It happens all the time. The whole house went. I barely got out alive, and Mommy was screaming, and I couldn’t get to her, couldn’t help my mommy, and I was so scared.” He winked at her. “After that, I went to live with my grandma. She was an annoying old biddy, full of rules, regulations, standards of conduct, manners, and courtesies I had to learn. But she couldn’t keep a clean house. Her bathroom was just disgusting. She led me into my second and last mistake. I killed her while she was standing in the kitchen, just like this, preparing dinner. It was an impulsive thing, a knife twice in each kidney.”

“How old?”

Slyly playing with her, he said, “Grandma or me?”

“You.”

“Eleven. Too young to be put on trial. Too young for anyone to really believe that I knew what I was doing.”

“They had to do something to you.”

“Fourteen months in a caring facility. Lots of therapy, lots of counseling, lots and lots of attention and hugs. Because, you see, I must have offed poor Grandma because of my unexpressed grief over the accidental deaths of my parents in that awful, awful fire. One day I realized what they were trying to tell me, and I just broke down and cried and cried. Oh, Chyna, how I cried, and wallowed in remorse for poor Grandma. The therapists and social workers were so appreciative of the wallowing.”

“Where did you go from the facility?”

“I was adopted.”

Speechless, she stared at him.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Not many twelve-year-old orphans get adopted. People are usually looking for infants to mold in their own image. But I was such a beautiful boy, Chyna, an almost ethereally beautiful boy. Can you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“People want beautiful children. Beautiful children with nice smiles. I was sweet-tempered and charming. By then I’d learned to hide better among all you hypocrites. I’d never again be caught with a bloody kitten or a dead grandmother.”

“But who…who would adopt you after what you did?”

“What I did was expunged from my record, of course. I was just the littlest boy, after all. Chyna, you wouldn’t expect my whole life to be ruined just because of one mistake? Psychiatrists and social workers were the grease in my wheels, and I will always be beholden to them for their sweet, earnest desire to believe.”

“Your adoptive parents didn’t know?”

“They knew that I’d been traumatized by the death of my parents in a fire, that the trauma had led to counseling, and that I needed to be watched for signs of depression. They wanted so badly to make my life better, to prevent depression from ever touching me again.”

“What happened to them?”

“We lived there in Chicago two years, and then we moved here to Oregon. I let them live for quite a while, and I let them pretend to love me. Why not? They enjoyed their delusions so much. But then, after I graduated from college, I was twenty years old and needed more money than I had, so there had to be another dreadful accident, another fire in the night. But it was eleven long years since the fire that took my real mom and dad, and half a continent away. No social workers had seen me in years, and there were no files about my horrible mistake with Grandma, so no connections were ever made.”

They sat in silence.

After a while he tapped the plate in front of her. “Eat, eat,” he cajoled. “I’ll be eating at a diner myself. Sorry I can’t keep you company.”

“I believe you,” she said.

“What?”

“That you were never abused.”

“Though that runs against everything you’ve been taught. Good girl, Chyna. You know the truth when you hear it. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

“There’s no understanding you,” she said, though she was talking more to herself than to him.

“Of course there is. I’m just in touch with my reptilian nature, Chyna. It’s in all of us. We all evolved from that slimy, legged fish that first crawled out of the sea. The reptile consciousness…it’s still in all of us, but most of you struggle so hard to hide it from yourselves, to convince yourselves that you’re something cleaner and better than what you really are. The irony is, if you’d just for once acknowledge your reptile nature, you’d find the freedom and the happiness that you’re all so frantic to achieve and never do.”

He tapped the plate again, and then the glass of water. He got up and tucked his chair under the table.

“That conversation wasn’t quite as you expected, was it, Chyna?”

“No.”

“You were expecting me to equivocate, to whine on about being a victim, to indulge in elaborately structured self-delusions, to spit up some tale of warping incest. You wanted to believe your clever probing might expose a secret religious fanaticism, bring revelations that I hear godly voices in my head. You didn’t expect it to be this straightforward. This honest.”

He went to the door between the kitchen and the living room, and then turned to look at her. “I’m not unique, Chyna. The world is filled with the likes of me — most are just less free. You know where I think a lot of my type wind up?”

In spite of herself, she asked, “Where?”

“In politics. Imagine having the power to start wars, Chyna. How gratifying that would be. Of course, in public life, one would generally have to forgo the pleasure of getting right down in the wet of it, hands dirty with all the wonderful fluids. One would have to be satisfied with the thrill of sending thousands to their deaths, remote destruction. But I believe I could adapt to that. And there would always be photos from the war zone, reports, all as graphic as one requested. And never a danger of apprehension. More amazing — they build monuments to you. You can bomb a small country into oblivion, and dinners are given in your honor. You can kill thirty-four children in a religious community, crush them with tanks, burn them alive, claim they were dangerous cultists — then sit back to the sound of applause. Such power. Intensity.”

He glanced at the clock.

A few minutes past five.

He said, “I’ll finish dressing and be gone. Back as soon after midnight as I can be.” He shook his head as if saddened by the sight of her. “Untouched and alive. What kind of existence is that, Chyna? Not one worth having. Get in touch with your reptile consciousness. Embrace the cold and the dark. That’s what we are.”

He left her in chains as twilight entered the world and the light withdrew.