Dark Lie (9781101607084) (20 page)

“Candy, it really is you, my love. I can only just barely believe it. . . .” Shakily he reached toward me. “You were supposed to stay, stay young forever with me in a red embrace, and you didn't obey, you were punished, we were both punished, but we're still . . .” He put his arms around me, embraced me, making the knife wound hurt like fire. “I'm sorry,” he whispered, although I think he was not referring to my blood on his arm. “I'm so sorry. You're still my Candy, my first true Candy.”

As he hugged me, I could feel the knife blade pressed to my back.

* * *

I am a skinny, trembling, shy teenager sitting on the sofa in the librarians' lounge, my naked thighs clamped together. In my shaking hand I clench the razor-sharp hunting knife. Blake kneels before me, his pale underarm presented to me. That creamy skin looks as soft as his penis does. I have never touched his penis with my hands, but I can feel it right now fingering my knees. Presumably it's his penis that I feel. I don't look. I don't want to look at his arm either. I keep my gaze fixed on his face.

“Cut me, Candy,” he whispers.

His voice is pleading and hypnotically powerful at the same time. And his eyes—the passion and importunity in them—his gaze is so naked that now I can hardly bear to look at his face either.

“Cut me. Do it, Candy! If you love me, do this to me.”

I whimper, “I can't.”

“Once you do it, you'll love it, Candy. Do it!”

When his voice takes on that vehemence of command, I cannot resist him, even though I must use both quaking hands to lift the knife. Barely able to control the wavering blade, I place its grinning edge against the petal-soft skin with its blue shadow of a vein on the inner side of Blake's elbow. Wincing, I slide the blade about an inch. Bright, bright cherry red drizzle wells up from Blake's vanilla skin to spiral in candy cane stripes down the side of his arm, then drip to the dull linoleum floor. And the low sound that trickles from Blake's wet mouth—I have never heard anything that stirs me so deeply, not even the way he moans when he comes in me.

He is right. I love cutting him. I want to cut him again. I want to hear that cry of utterly passionate, injured ecstasy again.

And the fierce feral grinning knife, I want it for my own. I want to take it home and make my parents cry out in a red ecstasy that will have nothing to do with love or nakedness. I want to open them up and see whether they have blood inside them. I want to make them scream and be real.

I want to kill them.

I am terrified.

Not of Blake.

Terrified of someone savage and fearsome whom I have never met before.

I am terrified of my primal self.

* * *

This was what I had not wanted to remember.

Standing at the dead end of the dark passageway in Blake's embrace, with my lifeblood trickling from my arm while Pandora's blade pressed to my spine, I flashed back to that last day with Blake before my parents took me away, and I shuddered. That scene of the story, that brief red interlude, was the part I had blocked out with a white light in my mind. It was the reason I had wrapped myself in shining dreams of a true love all my life. It was the reason I had fantasized Blake as my prince, my darling, my angel, for all these years.

Because, if he was my prince, then I remained a princess, no matter what my parents called me.

And if he was my rebel angel, then, bearing his child, I was a rebel angel too.

But if he was—what he really was . . .

If I had done what I had done, and felt that sick thrill, and that even more fearsome urge to kill—then what was I?

Even now, I could barely face it.

Yet now I needed it as never before. As Blake held me close. As Blake eased his hands to my shoulders, his knife blade caressing the side of my neck, while he gazed into my face.

God only knows what he saw in my eyes. The red memory, intimation of the unthinkable, knifed through me for only one slashing flashback moment, then left me dazed and stupefied, like an accident victim attempting with difficulty to remember who I was and where I was and how I had gotten there.

* * *

Sam's first impulse was to obey Walker's summons, to go tell the Appletree police and the FBI guys about finding Dorrie's flashlight.

But then a leaden, stubborn feeling stopped him. Had they come running when he called? No. So why should he come running when they called?

Keeping his distance, Sam crab-walked his way back toward the building, casting about like a beagle hunting for rabbit spoor. He saw a clear plastic candy wrapper on the gravel, then another. They meant nothing to him, but in the ironically golden sunshine they sparkled, caught his attention, and led him on a kind of trail toward the back of the old library, where the antiquated concrete cellar entrance jutted out from the foundation. Near it, something else glinted in the sun. Sam headed over there to see what it was.

Standing beside the old-fashioned cellar entrance, a stairway into the ground covered by a metal door, Sam bent to see what the sparkly thing in the gravel was.

Some sort of kid's toy or bauble. Little, about the size of a triple-A battery, with some kind of blue cut glass—heck, probably molded plastic—some kind of lens or ornament on the end. It meant nothing to Sam. He didn't even bother to pick it up. With a grunt he began to straighten—

And found himself looking directly at the edge of a rusty old cellar door hinge. That is, the sloped concrete cellar entryway at this point rose to the level of his eyes, and the hinge lay on top. Mostly horizontal, because the heavy door—two doors overlapping, really—lay on top to keep snow and such out of the stairwell. They didn't make cellar doors like that anymore.

The remarkable thing about this hinge was that it had big round screwheads on top, but Sam didn't see any screws going through the metal into the concrete.

No screw shafts.

Just shadow.

The hinge was kind of hovering about an eighth of an inch above the concrete.

Sam blinked, peered, then looked at the other hinge on this side. But even before he moved his eyes, he knew.

The door looked like it was doing what a door was supposed to do, but actually it was just lying there on top of its concrete base.

Firmly padlocked, of course.

A wordless roar erupted from Sam's chest. He lunged, gripped, and flung the entire double door, padlock and all, off the cellarway in one heave, like a grizzly bear attacking a deadfall.

FOURTEEN

B
ert saw Sam White begin to straighten, then freeze into a rigid fishhook, peering at the side of the cellarway.

Then he saw Sam White surge up like a tsunami, seize the door that lay on top of the cellarway, and hurl the whole damn thing to the side. He threw it on the gravel of the parking lot with a crash worthy of a demolition derby. Heads turned. Men shouted. Paula, the constable, screeched, “Oh, my
God
!”—her soprano voice the only one Bert could understand. Not that he understood much at the time. He just reacted, running forward.

He got there before anyone else, in time to see Sam White plunge down a steep flight of concrete block steps and slam into a closed door.

A vertical door this time, made of metal painted a dirty dark green, army green. Otherwise, featureless. Standing at the top of the cellarway, Bert scanned that door as Sam clawed at the damn thing. The poor guy literally couldn't get a handle on it. There was none.

Bert felt people, cops mostly, pressing all around him to gawk like a troop of monkeys, and he heard their voices unprofessionally babbling:
Holy shit, would you look at that, damn thing was just lying there all the time, wait till DC hears about this, neighbor lady said she thought somebody's been going in and out, who the hell is that civilian in there, where's the judge when we need a warrant.
Static. Static of radios and static of bureaucracy.

“Bert!” bellowed Walker's voice in his ear. “Get Mr. White out of there!”

Staring at the gloomy green door, Bert did not immediately respond. Not that conflicting orders bothered him—come here, go there—but the door at the bottom of the cellar stairs was not the entry he remembered from when he was a kid and worked at the cigar factory. And he couldn't imagine why the library would have put in a massive metal door like that, worthy of a fortress, just to keep people out of the basement—

“Bert!”

Asshole,
Bert thought as he started to move, walking forward to wince his way down the concrete block steps, which were too steep for his aching old bones. Walker should do some of his own shithead work sometimes. At the dank, dim bottom of the stairs with Sam White, Bert laid a hand on the younger man's upper arm. “Come on, Mr. White. Out of the way, now.”

Sam barely seemed to notice. Didn't even look at him. Just shook off the hand like a horse shaking off a fly, stood back, launched himself from the bottom step, and rammed the door as hard as he could with his shoulder.

He might as well have been ramming Hoover Dam. The metal door took no notice of him whatsoever.

Sam White looked a bit shook-up, though, and Bert took the opportunity to grasp him by the arm again. “Come on, Sam. Let the professionals—”

From some small distance above and behind him he heard Paula's voice yell, “The light just came on!”

Bert heard the hubbub up there increase. Heard Walker yell, presumably at Paula, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“In that room with the broken window!” Paula screeched in reply. “I'm telling you, an electric light just came on in there!”

* * *

“We do it to each other,” Blake was telling me huskily, a drizzle of tears on his combat-scarred face. Inches apart, we gazed into each other's humid eyes, and any sense of the real world receded into haze and shadows.

“Yes,” I breathed. “Yes, darling. You and I.”

“And Pandora.”

“Yes. Yes, with Pandora. We do it together.”

He nodded, blinking; tears trembled like dew on his eyelashes. “We take turns. I open your wrist. The left one, because that's where the blood runs straight from the heart. Then I give Pandora to you, and you open my left wrist. Then we press them together so the blood mingles.”

“Oh, how beautiful,” I whispered, gazing into his eyes, so close to him that I should have been able to see his soul if he'd had one.

“Yes.” He swallowed hard. “It's my own dream of the . . . the ultimate way for two to become one, better than lovemaking, better than intimacy. Since I was a kid, I dreamed wet dreams at night and I dreamed this dream all the time. We press our slit wrists together and we press our bodies together. We join in blood and we join in flesh.”

“It's poetry,” I murmured.

“Yes. Yes, it's poetry. And to make it complete we slash the right ones as well, and join them in blood, and we embrace. . . .”

I heard a clashing, metallic noise from outside somewhere. At the far end of the building.

Blake heard it too. His gaze grew vague, worried, shifting away from mine. He said, “No. No, it's not right. We should be naked and we should be lying down.”

“There's no time. They're coming.” My God, were they coming? Not daring to believe that help could really be on the way, I stayed in role as the mother of all Candies, lifting my hand to Blake's face. I touched. Harsh wet skin, scars, hard flesh, hard bone. I pressed my palm to his chin, urging his gaze back to mine. As long as he looked into my eyes, deep into my eyes, gazing only at my eyes, bypassing my lupus-ravaged body and face, he seemed to know who I was. And he was mine again. Or I was his. And everything depended on my keeping it that way until Juliet was safe.

Blake begged, “But this is my last chance to do it right. Sweet, sweet Candy, help me do it right.”

I actually felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to change my plans. Keeping my Candy eyes wide and misty and innocent of any cynical thoughts, I said, “It's all right to keep our clothes on, because we have to hurry. The gestapo's coming, Blake. Hear them?”

He heard. Thumping sounds, and a metallic pounding.

I said, “Give me the knife. Give me Pandora. Quick.”

“No, that's not right. The man has to do it first.” He was crying again, my brutalized, vulnerable, wretched so-called prince. “It's like dancing. The man leads. Candy, give me your left wrist.”

Thinking,
For Juliet,
I lifted my arm, palm up, and presented my wrist to be slashed.

* * *

When Sam White ripped the metal doors off the cellar entryway, both Sissy and Gerardo stood with their mouths open—
Airing my molars,
Sissy thought as she tried to get her jaw under control—staring as Sam plunged into shadows.

Wham
, came the sound of his shoulder against— Jogging closer, Sissy could see green doors, metal ones, judging by the sound the impact had made.

And made again.

Wham.

Sissy saw Bert limping down what appeared to be steep steps, going after Sam.

Wham.

“No handle!” shouted somebody—a man's voice, and she never knew who. But Gerardo was the one who caught her by the arm to stop her, saying, “Better stay back. We don't know what the hell is going on.”

Sissy for once did not bristle, did not mind that an authoritative male was protecting her, because she was in a sense his guest, and having been hustled out of bed in a hurry, she wore no uniform, no bulletproof vest, and carried no weapon. She stopped, but she had gotten close enough to stare down at the steep concrete block steps leading to the green door. She barely noticed Bert or Sam. Her perception caught on the massive metal barrier and the building behind it.

“He's in there,” Sissy whispered.

Gerardo stared at Sissy the way she was staring into the shadows. “What did you say?”

“Blake Roman! He's
in
there.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The door. Plus my gut. The way I read him. He's a creep, a twisted specimen of slime mold, but he thinks he's an outlaw. This place is an outlaw hideout he's made for himself—it's his hole-in-the-wall, his fortress. He's in there with his big bad knife, waiting.”

“Why wait? If he's in there and he's a killer, how come he isn't shooting at us?”

“He
so
prefers his knife.” Sissy was doing the shooting, firing thoughts straight out her mouth, trusting her instincts to hit a target she could not yet see. “And just an ordinary knife wouldn't be good enough for this guy, you know? He's conflicted. A knife's up close and personal, all face-to-face, bloody, and for some reason that appeals to him. But, being a psycho, he's also distant. Cold. Remote. Egotistic. A legend in his own mind, but at the same time he can't quite shake the feeling he's really a creepy pervert, so he'd like more respect, he'd like to be king, you know? Off with their heads. A sword is just an oversized knife.”

“The light just came on!” some woman screamed.

Voices babbled. Agent Gerardo swiveled away from Sissy to see what was going on. “In that room with the broken window!” the woman screamed. “I'm telling you, an electric light just came on in there!”

Sissy's eyes widened, the light came on in her mind, and she grabbed Gerardo by the sleeve, shouting at him, “Remote control! That's why the door won't open, has no handle on the outside. That's why the light just came on for no reason. Your unsub has his hideout rigged so that everything is operated by remote control!”

* * *

Standing in that dark, dead-end passageway to nowhere, I felt more than saw the blood flowing from my slit wrist, aware of it as a fluid I gave for Juliet, much as I would have given milk if I had ever breast-fed my baby girl.

The unspeakable man who had once been the love of my teenage life gazed into my eyes. Salt water ran down his face; tears were the fluid he gave. “Good, Candy,” he said, his voice clotted with emotion. “Good.”

The words meant nothing, but a sweet taste filled my mouth simply because I was still alive, aware, on my feet and able.

Blake demanded of me huskily, “You know what to do, don't you?”

I nodded. This was more deeply true than he could possibly imagine.

“Be my blood lover, Candy.” Intent on me, he gazed into my face. “Help me. Help me finally do it right.”

There is no telling what he saw in my eyes.

Or dreamed he saw.

And needed. No telling the depth of that need.

Hesitating, he reached toward me, the knife lying in his slack hand.

Pandora.

The mother of all knives.

The weapon with a woman's name.

I reached out for her, took her in my hand, and her thick black handle fitted into my palm like a fat baby into a cradle. Hefting her, I felt more than heard something click as my hand tightened around her hilt. I saw a golden glow spring up like a candle flame at the far end of the dark passageway. No, more than candle flame, far brighter, greater. It was as if God or some angel had turned on the sun down here.

Let there be light. Electric light in the room where Juliet sat helpless.

Juliet. Kidnapped, abducted, captured, imprisoned. Duct tape binding her to a chair. Duct tape sealing her mouth.

Juliet, my daughter.

Our daughter.

Blake startled as the light flowed onto us from behind us, and for a moment I cringed. But Blake kept his focus; his face grew yet more rapt. “Good, Candy, good!” he breathed. “I need to show you something before we die.” He grabbed the knife back from me.

Oh, God, I hated my own clumsiness. I felt all my strength quite literally bleeding out of me. I'd lost my chance—

Swiftly Blake slit his left sleeve from wrist to shoulder, then opened it, throwing it over his back like a hero's cloak. Then he turned slightly so that I could see—a tattoo.

Sickening.

Dedicated to me.

I had never liked tattoos, and I found this one even more hideous than most. Into the flesh of Blake's upper arm were inked red lines in the shape of a bloated, oversized mouth, wide open like that of a hungry suckling. Within the mouth melted a red heart. And in dark blue script across the heart flowed the word “Candy.”

“Candy, do you see? Do you understand?” Speaking, he almost sobbed. “It's always you. All my life, it's always been for you, my Candy, my sweet, my love. Now do it. Join us. Join us in the final embrace.”

And he handed the knife back to me.

Once more, almost in disbelief, I hefted the deadly weapon in my hand.

Villain in silhouette, Blake might have been a youth again, masterful and romantic, as he reached toward me, presenting his naked left arm to me, his wrist awaiting me, his hand turned up toward heaven.

Was there a heaven?

Was there a hell?

In that moment I knew what it meant to have a soul and I knew what it meant to face judgment. A red river of Jordan flowed from my wrist and I felt faint. Reeling, I lifted the knife in my right hand, and yes, yes, I knew what I must do, but I didn't know whether I was going to be strong enough.

* * *

Dark cellar entryway. Green metal door, no handle. Dorrie was in there, Sam knew without knowing how he knew. He didn't understand much of what was going on. Barely comprehended the bony hand on his arm and the gritty voice in his ear:

“Mr. White, you're trespassing. You can't get in there and you don't know what's in there if you did. You're in danger of getting yourself killed.”

Oh. Bert.

“Go away,” Sam muttered, lurching toward the remorseless metal door to tackle it again.

Bert's grip on his arm tightened with surprising force for such an old guy, restraining him. Bert's voice turned stern. “Mr. White, you come on out of here before I have to put the cuffs on you.”

Sam shook his head, tried to shake away Bert's steely hand. “I have to get in,” he said thickly, struggling against Bert's grip, straining to launch himself against the door again.

“Mr. White—”

Inside, someone screamed so horribly that it cut off all the noise from Bert and the others, slicing through the moment like a knife. Sam felt his heart stop. The shriek ended too sharply, bursting into silence like a bubble of blood, and the very silence screamed. For a moment Sam stood as rigid as a pillar of salt. He couldn't move. He couldn't tell whether that awful noise had come from a child, a woman, or a man. But it had sounded human and it had sounded like someone was dying.