Intensity

straggly from the rain. Very attractive, I think. A real charmer under that grime. Maybe later I'll bathe you.'

Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.

Uncannily, after a further silence, Edgler Vess said, 'Untouched and alive.'

She knew that she had not spoken the prayer aloud.

'Untouched and alive,' he repeated. 'Is that what you said? on the stairs earlier, on your way down to Ariel?'

She stared at him, speechless.

'Is it?'

Finally: 'Yes.'

'I've been wondering about it. You said your name and then those three words, though none of it made sense when I didn't know that Chyna Shepherd was your name.'

She looked away from him, at the window. A Doberman roamed the backyard.

'Was it a prayer?' he asked.

In her desolation, Chyna hadn't thought that he could scare her any more, but she had been wrong. His intuitiveness was frightening-and not entirely for reasons that she could understand.

She looked away from the Doberman and met Vess's eyes. For one brief moment, she saw the dog within, a dark and merciless aspect.

'Was it a prayer?' he asked again.

'Yes.'

'In your heart, Chyna, deep in your heart, do you truly believe that God really exists? Be truthful now, not just with me but with yourself.'

At one time-not long ago-she had been just barely sure enough of what she believed to answer Yes. Now she was silent.

'Even if God exists,' Vess said, 'does he know that you do?'

She took another bite of the omelet. It seemed greasier than before. The eggs and butter and cheese, too rich, cloyed in her mouth, and she could hardly swallow.

She put down her fork. She was finished. She'd eaten no more than a third of her meal.

Vess finished the food on his plate, washing it down with coffee that he didn't offer her-no doubt because he thought that she would try to throw the hot brew in his eyes.

'You look so glum,' Vess said.

She didn't reply.

'You're feeling like such a failure, aren't you? You've failed poor Ariel, yourself, and God too, if He exists.'

'What do you want with me?' she asked. She meant, Why put me through this, why not kill me and get it over with?

'I haven't figured that out yet,' Vess said. 'Whatever I do with you, it's got to be special. I feel you're special, whether you think you are or not, and whatever we do together should be? intense.'

She closed her eyes and wondered if she could find Narnia again after all these years.

He said, 'I can't answer your question as to what I want with you but I have no doubts about what I want with Ariel. Would you like to hear what I intend to do with her?'

Most likely, she was too old to believe in anything, even just a magic wardrobe.

Vess's voice came out of her internal grayness, as if he lived there as well as in the real world: 'I asked you a question, Chyna. Remember our bargain? You can either answer it-or I'll slice off a piece of your face. Would you like to hear what I intend to do with Ariel?'

'I'm sure I know.'

'Yes, some of it. Sex, that's obvious. She's a luscious piece. I haven't touched her yet, but I will. And I believe she's a virgin. At least, in the days when she still talked, she said she was, and she didn't seem like the kind of girl who would lie.'

Or there was the Wild Wood beyond the River, Ratty and Mole and Mr. Badger, green boughs hanging full in the summer sun and Pan piping in the cool shadows under the trees.

'And I want to hear her crying, lost and crying. I want to smell the purity of her tears. I want to feel the exquisite texture of her screams, know the clean smell of them, and the taste of her terror. There's always that. Always that.'

Neither the languid river nor the Wild Wood materialized, though Chyna strained to see them. Ratty, Mole, Mr. Badger, and Mr. Toad were gone forever into the hateful death that claims all things. And the sadness of this, in its way, was as great as the sadness of what had happened to Laura and what would soon happen to Chyna herself.

Vess said, 'Once in a while, I bring one of them back to the room in the cellar-and always for the same purpose.'

She didn't want to hear this. The handcuffs made it difficult to cover her ears. And if she had tried, he would have shackled her wrists to her ankles. He would insist that she listen.

'The most intense experiences of my life have all taken place in that room, Chyna. Not the sex. Not the beating or the cutting. That all comes later, and it's a lagniappe. First, I break them down, and that is when it gets intense.'

Her chest was tight. She could breathe only shallowly.

He said, 'The first day or two, they all think they'll go out of their minds with fear, but they're wrong. It takes longer than a day or two to drive someone insane, truly and irrevocably insane. Ariel is my seventh captive, and the others all held on to their sanity for weeks. One of them cracked on the eighteenth day, but three of them lasted a full two months.'

Chyna gave up on the elusive Wild Wood and met his gaze across the table.

'Psychological torture is so much more interesting and difficult to undertake than the physical variety, although the latter can be undeniably thrilling,' Vess said. 'The mind is so much tougher than the body, a greater challenge by far. And when the mind goes, I swear that I can hear the crack, a harder sound than bone splitting-and oh, how it reverberates.'

She tried to see the animal consciousness in his eyes, which she had glimpsed unexpectedly before. She needed to see it.

'When they crack, some of them writhe on the floor, thrash, rend their clothes. They tear at their hair, Chyna, and claw their faces, and some of them bite themselves hard enough to draw blood. They maim themselves in so many inventive ways. They sob and sob, can't stop for hours, sometimes for days, sobbing in their sleep. They bark like dogs, Chyna, and screech and flail their arms as if they're convinced that they can fly. They hallucinate and see things more frightening than I am to them. Some speak in tongues. It's called glossolalia. Do you know the condition? Quite fascinating. Convincingly like a language yet meaningless, a ranting or pleading babble. Some lose control of their bodily functions and wallow in their filth. Messy but riveting to watch-the true base condition of humanity, to which most people can only admit in madness.'

As hard as she tried, Chyna could see no beast in his eyes, only a placid blueness and the watchful darkness of the pupil, and she was no longer sure that she had ever seen it. He wasn't half man and half wolf, not a creature that fell to all fours in the light of the full moon. Worse, he was nothing but a man-living at one extreme end of the spectrum of human cruelty, but nonetheless only a man.

'Some take refuge in catatonic silences,' Vess continued, 'as Ariel has done. But I always break them out of that. Ariel is by far the most stubborn, but that only makes her interesting. I'll break her too, and when her crack comes, Chyna, it'll be like no other. Glorious. Intense.'

'The most intense experience of all is showing mercy,' Chyna said, and had no idea whatsoever where she had found those words. They sounded like a plea, and she didn't want him to think that she was begging for her life. Even in her despair, she would not be reduced to groveling.

A sudden smile made Vess look almost like a boy, one given to puns and pranks, collector of baseball cards, rider of bikes, builder of model airplanes, and altar boy on Sundays. She thought that he was smiling at what she'd said, amused by her naivete, but this was not the case, as he made clear with his next words.

'Maybe? what I want from you,' Vess said, 'is to be with me when I finally make Ariel snap. Instead of killing you in front of her to drive her over the edge, I'll drive her some other way. And you can watch.'