He hit her again, a hard chop to the side of the neck this time.
Then Chyna lay in darkness, listening worriedly to her mother's distant gay laughter and strange men's voices. Shattering glass. Cursing. Thunder and wind. Palm trees thrashing in the night over Key West. The quality of the laughter changed. Mocking now. Crashes that weren't thunder. And the skittery palmetto beetle over her bare legs and across her back. Other times. Other places. In the vapory realm of dreams, the iron fist of memory.
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
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
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
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.
