Headhunter

'Good. Cause tomorrow night I'd like to take you to Europe. To London, Paris, Rome. I'd like to buy you fine clothes. I'd like to give you all the cocaine you want. I'd like to spend just hours and hours playing with your pussy, getting you so hot you think you're going to melt. Sound like fun?'

The girl swallowed.

'Here,' Suzannah said. 'Let's run away for good.' She pulled open a flat drawer in the washstand and removed a stack of $100 bills which she tossed to the girl. Crystal's mouth dropped. The bills slipped through her fingers and tumbled to the floor.

'Go on. Pick them up. They're yours,' the woman said. 'That's $10,000 lying at your feet. And that's just spending money.'

'Where did you get that?' the girl exclaimed, her voice breaking in a croak.

'Why, from the man before the guest who comes tonight. The one this evening will bring another twenty grand with him. And once he's finished, well then we're off and free. I'll have made $100,000 off Mardi Gras this year. Not bad for two weeks' work, eh?'

The girl said nothing. She stared at the stack of money with a dumbfounded look on her face.

'Crystal,' Suzannah said softly, 'it's time to answer that question. Do you want to stay with me — or shall we call it a night and you can return to your job at the laundry? The decision is yours.'

In a flash, the girl was across the space between them and cradled in the woman's arms. Warm tears touched Suzannah's shoulder where the glove joined her corset. As the woman whispered, 'That's my girl,' over and over again, she caught a glimpse of the two of them in the washstand mirror. This one was easy,she thought with a smile. Once you know the market of life — and what people need to buy.

For a moment longer she held the girl, then gently pulled away. 'No turning back, dear, is that agreed?'

'Yes,' Crystal said.

'Good. Let's have some more cocaine.'

Back in the room with the masks, Suzannah drifted over to the middle door in the wall on the left and pulled it open. Beyond the jamb a spiral staircase disappeared below. 'Come on,' Suzannah said, 'there's something weird to see.' Her words held out adventure like honey to a cub.

Together they descended, twisting around and around on the iron steps, past the main floor and on down to the basement. Suzannah opened a hidden trap door and a gust of stale damp air swept up and out of the black pit that yawned beneath it.

Ever so faintly from below came the murmur of running water. Then as Crystal's heart pounded against her rib cage, Suzannah picked up a torch, climbed into the hole and disappeared down a rusted iron ladder.

Crystal followed.

As she descended the girl could feel the walls sweating and dripping with the ooze of centuries. When the ladder ended the two of them continued on down a narrow flight of stone steps. Crystal had counted twenty-six before a wail of anguish

from off to the right brought her to a halt. Her muscles locked tight and for a second she froze.

The noise was a low-keyed godless gibber that seemed to burst forth from no discernible point. It appeared to issue from several sources off to the right side.

Crystal turned to run — when Suzannah grabbed her by the arm. 'Look,' the woman said.

Continuing her grip on the girl, Suzannah swept the torch in an arc that sliced through the darkness around them. Crystal could see that they had reached a vaulted corridor. The floor was of chipped flagstone, the arched walls and roof of dressed masonry. The corridor stretched away before them into indefinite blackness. To the left there was a closed wooden door. To the right were five black open archways through which came the wail.

'What you hear,' Suzannah said, her words sucked away almost the second they were uttered, 'is wind off the Mississippi River. What you see is an old smuggler's vault dating from the seventeen hundreds.'

As she spoke the woman stabbed the flashlight toward one of the open archways on the right. At the outer reaches of its beam Crystal could just make out the stone-banked channel of a stream.

'You see that underground river? It connects with the Mississippi. It was once used by French pirates, back in the early days. Now its mouth on the river is sealed by a mesh of iron bars.'

'Is this what you wanted to show me?' Crystal asked, now embarrassed by her attempt at flight.

'No,' Suzannah said, 'I want you to see this.' She walked over to the wooden door and ushered Crystal in.

'What's in here?' the girl asked, standing in the pitch dark as the woman reached up to light a torch set into the wall beyond the doorway and off to their left.

Crystal choked in fright. Her neck hairs stood on end. Never before had her eyes seen — or even imagined — the instruments that cluttered this hellish room.

'This is a torture chamber!' Crystal shrieked with a spine-jarring shiver.

'Correct,' Suzannah said. Then she laughed out loud, her voice hard and brittle.

This vault was a stone crypt, twenty feet by thirty. The chimney of a fireplace ran up one wall like a great gray sucking vein, cobwebs hanging like veils from several of its bricks. Beside this hearth stood a brazier with seven branding irons dangling from its rim. Along the opposite wall there was a medieval rack, its wheels and clamps cast in mimicked shadow by the torch, dark stains discoloring the upper surface and spreading down the sides in thin drip-lines. An Iron Maiden crouched waiting in the far comer with its door gaping open on several hundred spiked teeth. Turning in panic, Crystal saw a gibbet iron hanging from the ceiling — that one wall was covered with whips and manacles and cat o' nine tails — that a skull rack containing seven leering ivory grins hung on the stone surface behind the door — that knives and needles and surgical instruments were laid out in tidy precision on a flat surface to her left — and, worst of all, that Suzannah stood guarding the doorway with her arms folded across her breasts. Reflected torch-light glinted off the metal rings in her crotch.

As the vault began to echo with the dull hideous whine that Suzannah had said came from the wind off the river, Crystal's mind screamed at her, A knife! Grab a knife!

The girl ran to the dusty surface spread with polished, gleaming blades. Then with a butcher knife in one hand and a skinning knife in the other, she turned to face the door.

Suzannah grinned. 'Crystal, you are precious!What a scene,' she said.

'I want out of here,' the girl hissed through tightly clenched teeth.

'Good. Then it works,' the woman replied, never moving an inch. 'For that is precisely the thought, my dear, that this theater is designed to induce.'

'Yeah! What's this place for? You just tell me that!'

'Crystal, Crystal, Crystal,' Suzannah said, shaking her head. 'This is where I work.'

'Work!'

'Yes,work,silly. What do you think it's for?'

'What sort of work would ever need a place like this?'

'The sort of work, sweetheart, that pays a hundred grand in two weeks. The work of relieving guilt.'

'Go to hell!' Crystal screamed. 'Let me outa here!'

'So what's stopping you? You're the one with the knives.'

The girl blinked. For a split second she glanced down at her own hands and the two razor sharp instruments that they held. Then, fearing a trick, she flicked her eyes back to the door. Suzannah had not moved.

'What you see around you, dear — what you seem to be so afraid of — is really nothing more than a million-dollar fantasy — the essence of masochism. These are just a few of the props.'

Crystal shook her drugged head. 'But why would anyone want this?' She gestured at the walls.

'Ah, now that's the question… and it shows you don't know men.'

'Tell me,' Crystal said. And she put down the knives.

The Graveyard

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982