Intensity (18 page)

Each, at the mention of his name, is filled with such joy that he would roll on his back and bare his belly and paw the air and grin at death—if he weren’t still on duty. Part of the fun for Vess is watching the struggle between training and nature in each animal, a sweet agony that makes two of them pee in nervous frustration.

Mr. Vess has rigged electrically operated dispensers inside the kennel, which in his absence automatically pay out measured portions of food for each Doberman. The system clock has a backup battery to continue timing meals even during a power failure of short duration. In the event of a long-term loss of power, the dogs can always resort to hunting for their sustenance; the surrounding meadows are full of field mice and rabbits and squirrels, and the Dobermans are fierce predators. Their communal water trough is fed by a drip line, but if it should ever cease to function, they can find their way to a nearby spring that runs through the property.

Most of Mr. Vess’s expeditions are three-day weekends, rarely as long as five days, and the dogs have a ten-day food supply without counting rabbits, mice, and squirrels. They constitute an efficient and reliable security system: never a short in any circuit, never a failed motion detector, never a corroded magnetic contact—and never a false alarm.

Oh, and how these dogs love him, how unreservedly and loyally, as no memory chips and wires and cameras and infrared heat sensors ever could. They smell the bloodstains on his jeans and denim jacket, and they push their sleek heads under his open raincoat, ears laid back, sniffing eagerly now, detecting not merely the blood but the lingering stench of terror that his victims exuded when in his hands, their pain, their helplessness, the sex that he had with the one named Laura. This mélange of pungent odors not only excites the dogs but increases their respect for Vess. They have been taught to kill not merely in self-defense, not just for food; with a degree of iron self-control, they have been taught to kill for the sheer savage pleasure of it, to please their master. They are acutely aware that their master can match their savagery. And unlike them, he has never needed to be taught. Their high regard for Edgler Vess soars higher, and they mewl softly and quiver and roll their soulful eyes at him in worshipful awe.

Mr. Vess gets to his feet. He picks up the shotgun and slams the door of the motor home.

The dogs spring to his side, jostling one another to be close to him, alertly surveying the rain-shrouded day for any threat to their master.

Quietly, so the woman inside cannot possibly hear the word, he says, “Seuss.”

The dogs freeze, looking up at him, heads cocked.

“Seuss,” he repeats.

The four Dobermans are no longer on attack status and will not automatically tear to pieces anyone who enters the property. They shake themselves, as if casting off tension, then pad around in a vaguely bewildered fashion, sniffing at the grass and at the front tires of the motor home.

They are like Mafia hit men who, following their own executions, have now regained a baffled self-awareness after being reincarnated, only to discover that they are accountants in this new life.

If any visitor were to attempt to harm their master, of course, they would leap to his defense, whether or not he had time to shout the word
Nietzsche
. The result wouldn’t be pretty.

They are trained first to tear out the throat. Then they will bite the face to effect maximum terror and pain—go for the eyes, the nose, the lips. Then the crotch. Then the belly. They won’t kill and turn at once away; they will be busy for a while with their quarry, after they have brought it down, until no doubt exists that they have done their job.

Even a man with a shotgun could not take out all of them before at least one managed to sink its teeth into his throat. Gunfire will not drive them away or even make them flinch. Nothing can frighten them. Most likely, the hypothetical man with the shotgun would be able to wipe out only two before the remaining pair overwhelmed him.

“Crib,” says Mr. Vess.

This single word instructs the dogs to go to their kennel, and they take off as one, sprinting toward the barn. Still, they do not bark, for he has schooled them in silence.

Ordinarily he would allow them to stay with him and enjoy his company and spend the day in his house with him and even pile up like a black and tan quilt with him as he sleeps away the afternoon. He would cuddle them and coo to them; for they have been, after all, such good dogs. They deserve their reward.

The woman in the red sweater, however, prevents Mr. Vess from dealing with the dogs as he usually would. If they are a visible presence, they will inhibit her, and she may cower inside the motor home, afraid to exit.

The woman must be given enough freedom to act. Or at least the illusion of freedom.

He is curious to see what she will do.

She must have a purpose, some motivation for the strange things that she has done thus far. Everyone has a purpose.

Mr. Vess’s purpose is to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to seek ever more outrageous experience, to immerse himself deeply in sensation.

Whatever the woman
believes
her purpose to be, Vess knows that in the end, her true purpose will be to serve his. She is a glorious variety of powerful and exquisite sensations in human skin, packaged solely for his enjoyment—rather like a Hershey bar in its brown and silver wrapper or a Slim Jim sausage snug in its plastic tube.

The last of the racing Dobermans vanishes behind the barn, to the kennel.

Mr. Vess walks through the soggy grass to the old log house and climbs a set of fieldstone steps to the front porch. Although he carries the pistol-grip 12-gauge Mossberg, he makes an effort to appear otherwise nonchalant, in case the woman has come forward from the bedroom at the rear of the motor home to watch him through a window.

The bentwood rocker has been stored away until spring.

Trailing silvery slime across the wet floorboards of the porch, several early-spring snails test the air with their semitransparent, gelatinous feelers, hauling their spiral shells on strange quests. Mr. Vess is careful to step around them.

A mobile hangs at one corner of the porch, from the fascia board at the edge of the shake-shingle roof. It is made of twenty-eight white seashells, all quite small, some with lovely pink interiors; most are spiral in form, and all are relatively exotic.

The mobile does not make a good wind chime, because most of the notes that it strikes are flat. It greets him with a flurry of atonal clinking, but he smiles because it has…well, not sentimental but at least nostalgic value to him.

This fine piece of folk craft once belonged to a young woman who lived in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. She had been an attorney, about thirty-two, sufficiently successful to live alone in her own house in an upscale neighborhood. For a person tough enough to thrive in the combative legal profession, this woman had kept a surprisingly frilly—in fact, downright girlish—bedroom: a four-poster bed with a pink canopy trimmed with lace and fringe, rose-patterned bedspread, and starched dust ruffles; a big collection of teddy bears; paintings of English cottages hung with morning-glory vines and surrounded by lush primrose gardens; and several seashell mobiles.

He had done exciting things to her in that bedroom. Then he had taken her away in the motor home to places remote enough to allow him to perform other acts even more exciting. She had asked
why?
—and he had answered,
Because this is what I do.
That was all the truth and all the reason of him.

Mr. Vess can’t recall her name, though he fondly remembers many things about her. Parts of her were as pink and smooth and lovely as the insides of some of these dangling seashells. He has an especially vivid mental image of her small hands, almost as slender and delicate as those of a child.

He had been fascinated by her hands. Enchanted. He had never sensed anyone’s vulnerability so intensely as he’d sensed hers when he held her small, trembling, but strong hands in his. Oh, he had been like a swooning schoolboy with her hands.

When he had hung the mobile on the porch, as a memento of the attorney, he had added one item. It dangles, now, on a piece of green string: her slender index finger, reduced to bare bones but still undeniably elegant, the three phalanges from tip to the base knuckle, clinking against the little conch shells and miniature bivalve fans and trumpet shells and tiny spirals similar to the whorled homes of snails.

Clink-clink.

Clink-clink.

He unlocks the front door and enters the house. He closes but does not lock the door behind him, allowing the woman to have access if she chooses to take it.

Who knows what she will choose to do?

Already her behavior is as astonishing as it is mysterious.

She excites him.

Vess turns from the shadowy front room to the narrow enclosed stairs immediately to his left. He quickly climbs the steps two at a time, one hand on the oak banister, to the second floor. A short hallway serves two bedrooms and a bath. His room is to the left.

In his private chamber, he drops the Mossberg on the bed and crosses to the south-facing window, which is covered by a blue drape with blackout lining. He doesn’t need to draw the drape aside to see the motor home on the driveway below. The two pleated panels of fabric don’t quite meet, and when he puts his eye to the two-inch gap, he has a clear view of the entire vehicle.

Unless she slipped out of the motor home immediately behind him, which is highly doubtful, the woman is still inside. He can see down through the windshield at an angle into the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, and she has not advanced to either.

He takes the pistol from his pocket and puts it on the dresser. He shrugs out of the raincoat and tosses it atop the chenille spread on the neatly made bed.

When he checks at the window again, there is as yet no sign of the mystery woman at the motor home below.

He hurries into the hallway to the bathroom. White tile, white paint, white tub, white sink, white toilet, polished brass fixtures with white ceramic knobs. Everything gleams. Not a single smudge mars the mirror.

Mr. Vess likes a bright, clean bathroom. For a while, lifetimes ago, he lived with his grandmother in Chicago, and she was incapable of keeping a bathroom clean enough to meet his standards. Finally, exasperated beyond endurance, he had killed the old bitch. He’d been eleven when he put the knife in her.

Now he reaches behind the shower curtain and cranks the
COLD
faucet all the way open. He isn’t actually going to take a shower, so there’s no point in wasting hot water.

He quickly adjusts the shower head until the spray is as heavy as it gets. The water pounds down into the fiberglass tub, filling the bathroom with thunder. He knows from experience that the sound carries throughout the small house; even with rain on the roof, this is much louder than the sound of the shower in Sarah Templeton’s bedroom, and it will be heard downstairs.

On a wall shelf above the toilet is a clock radio. He switches it on and adjusts the volume.

The radio is set to a Portland station featuring twenty-four-hour-a-day news. Ordinarily, when bathing and attending to his toilet, Mr. Vess likes to listen to the news, not because he has any interest in the latest political or cultural developments but because these days the news is largely about people maiming and killing one another—war, terrorism, rape, assault, murder. And when people can’t kill one another in sufficient numbers to keep the reporters busy, nature always saves the day with a tornado, a hurricane, a big earthquake, or an outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria.

Sometimes, listening to the news and letting the various reports spark fond memories of his own homicidal exploits, he realizes that he himself is also a force of nature: a hurricane, a lightning storm, a planet-smashing asteroid hurtling through the void, the distillate of all human ferocity in a single body. Elemental power. The thought pleases him.

Now, however, news will not set the stage properly. Hastily he turns the tuning knob until he finds a station playing music. “Take the A Train” by Duke Ellington.

Perfect.

The big-band sound brings to his mind’s eye an image of light flaring off cut crystal and luminous bubbles rising in a champagne glass, and it reminds him of the smell of fresh-cut limes, lemons. He can
feel
the notes in the air, some shimmering-bursting like bubbles and others bouncing off him like hundreds of little rubber balls and some like windblown leaves crisp with autumn: a very
tactile
music, exuberant and exhilarating.

The woman will be subtly lulled by the swing beat. It will be difficult for her to believe, really believe, that anything bad can happen to her with such music as background.

Perfect.

He hurries back to his bedroom, to the window, having been away from it no more than a minute.

Rain snaps against the glass, streams.

On the driveway below, the motor home stands as before.

The woman still must be inside. She probably won’t just burst out of the vehicle and run pell-mell; she’s likely to exit warily, hesitant on both sides of the door. Although there might have been time for her to get out of the motor home while Mr. Vess was in the bathroom, she would almost certainly be huddling against it, getting her bearings, assessing the situation. From this high vantage point, he can see around most of the vehicle, with the exception of blind spots toward the rear on the port side and at the very back, and the woman is not in sight.

“Ready when you are, Miss Desmond,” he says, referring to the Gloria Swanson character in
Sunset Boulevard
.

That movie had had a great effect on him when he’d first seen it on television. He’d been thirteen, a year out of counseling for the murder of his grandmother. On one level, he had known that Norma Desmond was supposed to be the tragic villain of the piece, that the writer and director
intended
for her to fulfill that role—but he had admired her,
loved
her. Her selfishness was thrilling, her self-absorption heroic. She was the truest character he had ever seen in a movie.
This
was what people were actually like, under the pretense and hypocrisy, under all the crap about love, compassion, altruism; they were all like Norma Desmond but couldn’t admit it to themselves. Norma didn’t give a
shit
about the rest of the world, and she bent everyone to her iron will even when she was no longer young or beautiful or famous, and when she couldn’t bend William Holden’s character as far as she wanted, she just boldly picked up a gun and
shot
him, which was
so
powerful,
so
audacious, that young Edgler had been too excited to sleep that night. He had lain awake wondering what it would be like to encounter a woman as superior and genuine as Norma Desmond—and then to break her, kill her, take all the strength of her selfishness and make it his own.