Intensity

'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.