Intensity (30 page)

But if Vess had gone, how could it be a man?

Chyna blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater, and she blinked until the mysterious shape resolved out of tears and twilight shadows. It was an elk. A female, without antlers.

It ambled across the backyard, from the forested foothills to the west, pausing twice to tear up a mouthful of the succulent grass. As Chyna knew from her months on the ranch in Mendocino County many years ago, these animals were highly sociable and always traveled in herds, but this one seemed to be alone.

The Dobermans should have been after this intruder, barking and snarling and excited by the prospect of blood. Surely the dogs would be able to smell it even from the farthest corners of the property. Yet no Dobermans were in sight.

Likewise, the elk should have caught the scent of the dogs and galloped at once for safety, wild-eyed and snorting. Nature had made its kind prey to mountain lions and wolves and packs of coyotes; as dinner-on-the-hoof to so many predators, elk were always watchful and cautious.

But this specimen seemed utterly unconcerned that dogs were in the immediate neighborhood. Except for the two brief pauses to graze on the lush grass, it came directly to the back porch, with no sign of skittishness.

Although Chyna was not a wildlife expert, this seemed to her to be a
coastal
elk, the same type she had encountered in the grove of redwoods. Its coat was gray-brown, and it had the familiar white and black markings on the body and face.

Yet she was sure that this place was too far from the sea to be a suitable home for coastal elk or to provide the ideal vegetation for their diet. When she’d gotten out of the motor home, she’d had an impression of mountains all around. Now the rain had stopped and the mist had lifted; in the west, where the dregs of daylight swiftly drained away, the black silhouettes of high peaks pressed against tattered clouds and electric-purple sky. With a mountain range of such formidable size between here and the Pacific Ocean, coastal elk could not have found their way so far inland, for they were basically a lowland breed partial to plains and gentle hills. This must be a different type of elk—although with coloration strikingly similar to that of the animals she had seen the previous night.

The imposing creature stood outside the wooden balustrade of the shallow porch, no more than eight feet away, staring directly at the window. At Chyna.

She found it difficult to believe that the elk could see her. With the lights off, the kitchen was currently darker than the dusk in which the animal stood. From its perspective, the interior of the house should have been unrelievedly black.

Yet she couldn’t deny that its eyes met hers. Large dark eyes, shining softly.

She remembered Vess’s sudden return to the kitchen this morning. He’d been inexplicably tense, ceaselessly turning the screwdriver in his hand, an odd light in his eyes. And he’d been full of questions about the elk in the redwood grove.

Chyna didn’t know why the elk mattered to Vess any more than she could imagine why this one stood here, now, unchallenged by the dogs, studying her intently through the window. She didn’t puzzle long over this mystery. She was in a mood to accept, to experience, to admit that understanding was not always achievable.

As the deep-purple sky turned to indigo and then to India ink, the eyes of the elk grew gradually more luminous. They were not red like the eyes of some animals at night, but golden.

Pale plumes of breath streamed rhythmically from its wet black nostrils.

Without breaking eye contact with the animal, Chyna pressed the insides of her wrists together as best she could with the handcuffs intervening. The steel chains rattled: all the lengths between her and the chair on which she sat, between her and the table, between her and the past.

She remembered her solemn pledge, earlier in the day, to kill herself rather than be a witness to the complete mental destruction of the young girl in the cellar. She had believed that she would be able to find the courage to bite open the veins in her wrists and bleed to death. The pain would be sharp but relatively brief…and then she would fade sleepily from this blackness into another, which would be eternal.

She had stopped crying. Her eyes were dry.

Her heartbeat was surprisingly slow, like that of a sleeper in the dreamless rest provided by a powerful sedative.

She raised her hands in front of her face, bending them backward as severely as possible and spreading her fingers wide so she could still gaze into the eyes of the elk.

She brought her mouth to the place on her left wrist where she would have to bite. Her breath was warm on her cool skin.

The light was entirely gone from the day. The mountains and the heavens were like one great black looming swell on a night sea, a drowning weight coming down.

The elk’s heart-shaped face was barely visible from a distance of only eight feet. Its eyes, however, shone.

Chyna put her lips against her left wrist. In the kiss, she felt her dangerously steady pulse.

Through the gloom, she and the sentinel elk watched each other, and she didn’t know whether this creature had mesmerized her or she had mesmerized it.

Then she pressed her lips to her right wrist. The same coolness of skin, the same ponderous pulse.

She parted her lips and used her teeth to pinch a thickness of flesh. There seemed to be enough tissue gathered between her incisors to make a mortal tear. Certainly she would be successful if she bit a second time, a third.

On the brink of the bite, she understood that it required no courage whatsoever. Precisely the opposite was true.
Not
biting was an act of valor.

But she didn’t care about valor, didn’t give a rat’s ass about courage. Or about anything. All she cared about was putting an end to the loneliness, the pain, the achingly empty sense of futility.

And the girl. Ariel. Down in the hateful silent dark.

For a while she remained poised for the fatal nip.

Between its solemn measured beats, her heart was filled with the stillness of deep water.

Then, without being aware of releasing the pinch of flesh from between her teeth, Chyna realized that her lips were pressed to her unbitten wrist again. She could feel her slow pulse in this kiss of life.

The elk was gone.

Gone.

Chyna was surprised to see only darkness where the creature had stood. She didn’t believe that she had closed her eyes or even blinked. Yet she must have been in a blinding trance, because the stately elk had vanished into the night as mysteriously as a stage magician’s assistant dematerializes beneath an artfully draped black shroud.

Suddenly her heart began to pound hard and fast.

“No,” she whispered in the dark kitchen, and the word was both a promise and a prayer.

Her heart like a wheel—spinning, racing—drove her out of that internal grayness in which she had been lost, out of that bleakness into a brighter landscape.

“No.” There was defiance in her voice this time, and she did not whisper. “No.”

She shook her chains as if she were a spirited horse trying to throw off its traces.

“No, no, no. Shit, no.” Her protests were loud enough for her voice to echo off the hard surface of the refrigerator, the glass in the oven door, the ceramic-tile counters.

She tried to pull away from the table to stand up. But a loop of chain secured her chair to the barrel that supported the tabletop, limiting its movement.

If she dug her heels into the vinyl-tile floor and attempted to scoot backward, she would probably not be able to move at all. At best she would only drag the heavy table with her inch by inch. And in a lifetime of trying, she would not be able to put enough tension on the chain to snap it.

She was still adamant in her rejection of surrender—“No, damn it, no way,
no
”—pressing the words through clenched teeth.

She reached forward, pulling taut the chain that led around her back from the left handcuff to the right. It was wound between the spindles of the rail-back chair, behind the tie-on pad. She strained, hoping to hear the crack of dry wood, jerked hard, harder, and sharp pain sewed a hot seam in her neck; the agony of the clubbing was renewed in her neck and in the right side of her face, but she would not let pain stop her. She jerked harder than ever, scarring the nice furniture for damn sure, and again—
pull, pull
—firmly holding the chair down with her body while simultaneously half lifting it off the floor as she yanked furiously at the back rails, and yanked again, until her biceps quivered.
Pull.
As she grunted with effort and frustration, needles of pain stitched down the back of her neck, across both shoulders, and into her arms.
Pull!
Putting everything she had into the effort, straining longer than before, clenching her teeth so hard that tics developed in her jaw muscles, she pulled once more until she felt the arteries throbbing in her temples and saw red and silver pinwheels of light spinning behind her eyelids. But she wasn’t rewarded with any breaking sounds. The chair was solid, the spindles were thick, and every joint was well made.

Her heart
boomed,
partly because of her struggles but largely because she was brimming with an exhilarating sense of liberation. Which was crazy, crazy, because she was still shackled, no closer to breaking her bonds than she had been at any moment since she’d awakened in this chair. Yet she felt as if she had already escaped and was only waiting for reality to catch up with the freedom that she had
willed
for herself.

She sat gasping, thinking.

Sweat beaded her brow.

Forget the chair for now. To get loose from it, she would have to be able to stand and move. She couldn’t deal with the chair until she was free of the table.

She was unable to reach down far enough to unscrew the carabiner that joined the shorter chain between her ankles to the longer chain that entwined the chair and the table. Otherwise, she might easily have freed her legs from both pieces of furniture.

If she could overturn the table, the loop of chain that wrapped the supporting pedestal and connected with her leg irons would then slide free as the bottom of that barrel tipped up and off the floor. Wouldn’t it? Sitting in the dark, she couldn’t quite visualize the mechanics of what she was proposing, but she thought that turning the table on its side would work.

Unfortunately, the chair across from hers, the one in which Vess had sat, was an obstruction that would most likely prevent the table from tipping over. She had to get rid of it, clear the way. Shackled as she was, however, and with the barrel pedestal intervening, she couldn’t extend her legs far enough to kick at the other chair and knock it aside. Hobbled and tethered, she was also unable to stand and reach across the big round table and simply push the obstruction out of the way.

Finally she tried scooting backward in her chair, hoping to drag the table with her, away from Vess’s chair. The chain encircling the pedestal drew taut. As she strained backward, digging her heels into the floor, it seemed that the piece was too heavy to be dragged, and she wondered if the barrel was filled with a bag of sand to keep the table from wobbling. But then it creaked and stuttered a few inches across the vinyl tiles, rattling the sandwich plate and the glass of water that stood on it.

This was harder work than she had anticipated. She felt as though she were on one of those television shows devoted to stunts and stupid physical challenges, pulling a railroad car. A loaded railroad car. Nevertheless, the table moved grudgingly. In a couple of minutes, after pausing twice to get her breath, she stopped because she was concerned that she might back against the wall between the kitchen and the laundry room; she needed to leave herself some maneuvering space. Although it was difficult to estimate distance in the dark, she believed that she had dragged the table about three feet, far enough to be clear of Vess’s chair.

Trying to favor her sprained finger, she placed her cuffed hands under the table and lifted. It weighed considerably more than she did—a two-inch pine top, the thick staves in the supporting barrel, the black iron hoops around the staves, perhaps that bag of sand—and she couldn’t get much leverage while she was forced to remain seated. The bottom of the barrel tipped up an inch, then two inches. The water glass toppled, spilling its contents, rolled away from her, dropped off the table, and shattered on the floor. All the noise made it seem as if her plan was working—she hissed, “Yes!”—but then because she had underestimated the weight and the effort required to move it, she had to relent, and the barrel slammed down.

Chyna flexed her muscles, took a deep breath, and immediately returned to the task. This time she planted her feet as far apart as her shackles would allow. On the underside of the table, she flattened her upturned palms against the pine, thumbs hooked toward herself over the smooth bull-nose edge. She tensed her legs as well as her arms, and when she shoved up on the table, she pushed with her legs too, getting to her feet an inch at a time, one hard-won inch for each inch that the table tipped up and backward. She did not have enough slack in the various tethering chains to be able to get all the way—or halfway—erect, so she rose haltingly in a stiff and awkward crouch, cramped under the weight of the table. She put enormous strain on her knees and thighs, wheezing, shuddering with the effort, but she persevered because each precious inch that she was able to gain improved her leverage; she was using her entire body to lift, lift, lift.

The sandwich plate and the bag of potato chips slid off the table. China cracked and chips scattered across the floor with a sound unnervingly like scurrying rodents.

The pain in her neck was excruciating, and someone seemed to be twisting a corkscrew into her right clavicle. But pain couldn’t stop her. It
motivated.
The greater her pain, the more she identified with Laura and the whole Templeton family, with the young man hanging in the motor-home closet, with the service-station clerks, and with all the people who might be buried down in the meadow; and the more she identified with them, the more she wanted Edgler Vess to suffer a world of hurt. She was in an Old Testament mood, unwilling to turn the other cheek just now. She wanted Vess screaming on a rack, stretched until his joints popped apart and his tendons tore. She didn’t want to see him confined to a state hospital for the criminally insane, there to be analyzed and counseled and instructed as to how best to increase his self-esteem, treated with a panoply of antipsychotic drugs, given a private room and television, booked in card tournaments with his fellow patients, and treated to a turkey dinner on Christmas. Instead of having him consigned to the mercies of psychiatrists and social workers, Chyna wanted to condemn him to the skilled hands of an imaginative torturer, and then
see
how long the sonofabitch bastard freak remained faithful to his philosophy about all experiences being value neutral, all sensations equally worthwhile. This ardent desire, refined from her pain, was not noble in the least, but it was pure, a high-octane fuel that burned with an intense light, and it kept her motor running.