Hell and Gone

up to the front door. Still night, but there was enough illumination to read the house number painted onto the black metal mailbox. It was the number that jarred Hardie’s memory.

This was Kendra’s house.

Specifically, the split-level he’d helped to purchase but had only seen once. The secret house, buried out there in an anonymous suburb of Philadelphia, where Kendra and Charlie, Jr., lived under her maiden name, on the off chance that the Albanian mob wouldn’t be satisfied with the innocent blood already on their hands and would come looking to punish Hardie’s family. The Albanians were the least of his worries now, because his new enemies—the Accident People, the Industry, a freakin’ cabal, whatever—they were saying to Hardie:

Yeah, we know where they are. Look, we’re standing on their front lawn in the middle of the night.

When did they take this? Was this live? Was this Mann taking these photos?

The image disappeared silently…

…and was replaced by an image from inside the house. The dim vestibule. Six stairs leading up to the living room, more stairs leading down to the den. God, please. Get them out of the house. Don’t do this…

Next image:

A living room Hardie had never seen, but familiar furniture, familiar clutter. His family’s possessions.

Next image, the images loading faster now…

A dark hallway, lined with framed photos. Hardie tried to see if Kendra had hung any of their old photos on the wall, but before he could make anything out—

The next image:

Farther down the hallway, headed toward the bedrooms…

Next image:

A gloved hand opening a door. Hardie burned the image of that hand into his brain. Because someday, when he found the owner of that hand, he was going to rip the appendage off the end of his arm and make him eat it…

And then:

Kendra, in bed, one bare leg draped over the covers, pillows in disarray, hair fanned out.

“NO!” Hardie shouted, but the sound was trapped inside the mask—it was like yelling inside a bank vault.

As awful as it was to watch those images—it was even more torturous when they stopped.

Because then Hardie’s brain went off and running, and he continued the slide show from hell on his own, wondering if it was Mann inside the house or one of her creepy-crawling henchmen…or somebody else, someone even more fearsome, and the only reason they didn’t load a new photo is because this was unfolding in real time, and now the gloved hand was pressed down over Kendra’s sleeping mouth, a needle sliding into her arm…

“STOP THIS, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! GODDAMN IT, LISTEN TO ME, LEAVE THEM ALONE! THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!”

Hardie braced himself for the next image, trying to prepare himself for the worst yet hating himself for the images his own mind was inventing. He’d had plenty of experience seeing the things people did to each other. There was plenty of material to draw from.

But no other images appeared. Instead, a voice inside the mask, preceded by an audio crackle.

“You’re going to be a good prisoner, aren’t you, Five?”

The Prisonmaster.

“Oh, I have feeling you’re going to be an excellent prisoner. This is your destiny. All your life you were preparing yourself to be here, with us.”

Hardie swallowed the nuclear explosion of a scream that was forming in his throat, choking it back down into his chest, burying it.

In prison, the only place you can run is inside your own head. Eve Bell, for example, found her secret philosopher’s garden and had become very skilled at whisking herself away for short periods of time. If you could escape, truly escape, into your own mental landscape, you could almost deal with the screaming sirens and horrible food and coffinlike mask.

Hardie, however, didn’t like his own head.

His head was condemned space.

Unfit for human habitation.

Now and again, Charlie Hardie pictured his life as a hotel. He had spent most of his time there closing off the floors below him as he ascended higher and higher, never looking down, never wondering when he was finally going to run out of floors.

The lobby and the lower floors were his childhood—the foundation. The carpeting was shabby and almost no one was ever at the front desk, but it was a decent enough place to stay. The management did the best they could considering the neighborhood. There was a bed, four walls, food to eat. A few diversions, a few fellow travelers.

Then came the fractured, damaged floors of his adolescence, back when the idea that you could check out of the hotel held great appeal to him.

These were followed by the ten stories of his twenties, the military years, which he tried hard not to think about, ever, and by the time he’d reached the thirtieth floor the hotel was beginning to show its age, its limitations.

But that was okay, because that’s when Hardie met Kendra.

He’d been back in Philadelphia and she’d sent him a stupid birthday card with some cartoon joke on it—a Far Side gag depicting suffering souls in hell, and a horned devil telling them, “It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity.” They’d barely known each other back during his adolescence; she was a friend of a friend of his best friend, Nate Parish, and Hardie was stunned she still remembered his name, let alone cared enough to send a card.

These were the hopeful years, the time he thought he might be able to turn his hotel into something worthwhile again. At the time, he thought it would be simple: close off the bottom floors and concentrate on the floors you currently occupy. Kendra helped him with that. Her own hotel had a strange and tragic history. So they decorated the floors they were on and ignored the floors beneath them and had a boy and named him Charlie, Jr., much against Hardie’s wishes. Kendra insisted. She believed boys should go on to honor their fathers, even if those fathers were working too much, and seemed to disengage a little more with every passing day…

And then one day Hardie looked inside a room he wasn’t supposed to.

 * * *

The last place Hardie wanted to be was inside his own head space.

He turned off the lights and continued his ascent.

This time, though, he’d run out of floors.

There was no penthouse.

There was no roof.

There was nothing up there but a cold hard empty.

And a traffic ticket, on the dining-room table.

Usually Kendra scooped up the bills, took care of them. Hardie worked with Nate day and night some weeks. He gave Kendra the checks. Kendra deposited the checks and paid for everything. So he never saw bills. Never bothered. Only reason he looked was because of the return address, Pennsylvania State Police, and he thought it was for him, some lingering piece of business. He opened it. Speeding ticket, the kind you pay by mail. He hadn’t been speeding, nor had he been pulled over, nor had he traveled the turnpike anytime in the past month. Then he saw the name: Kendra Hardie. She’d been speeding on such and such a date, such and such a time, headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and Hardie couldn’t figure out for the life of him what his wife was doing on the turnpike.

As much as he mocked himself for his utter lack of detective skills, Hardie had to admit that he put everything together fairly quickly. Checked their E-ZPass account, recorded the number of times Kendra had headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (a lot, as it turned out, all when Charlie, Jr., was in school). Then he checked their cell phone bill for texts and calls—the standard jealous husband bullshit, stuff cops and detectives did all the time. Her text message account had gone over, way over, for three months now. About 90 percent of the texts going to the