THIRTY-SEVEN
Zee felt dazed and out of sorts. Her stomach rumbled and growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten in days. Her face and part of her neck was swollen from spider bites. It had taken hours to rid herself of them all. She’d begun to sweat and vomit. When it became hard to breathe, she’d thought she was dying. But Natalie had talked to her in a calming voice. The more upset Zee got, the calmer Natalie became.
Zee felt pain in her joints when she stood for too long. Worse than that was the hunger. She’d chewed on the dirty straw littering the ground, but it wasn’t helping. “Are we dying?” she asked Natalie.
Natalie was in her usual spot, facing Zee, her back against the cement wall. “I don’t know.”
“What if he starves us to death?”
“We’ll be okay. I read once that dying of starvation is a peaceful way to go.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Do you really want to know what happens?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Simply put,” Natalie told her, “once the organs fail to work, the body will slip into a coma and pass away quietly.”
“But I’m thirsty, and my stomach is cramping.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“What? Cramping?”
“No. That you’re still thirsty. If you were starving, you’d be too weak to sense thirst.”
She’s lying again. She’s a big liar.
“The voices in my head think you’re a liar.”
Natalie shrugged. “Tell them all to fuck off.”
That was one of the funniest things Zee had ever heard. “Do you hear that?” she said out loud. “Natalie says fuck off!” She laughed so hard she had to hold her sides.
Natalie laughed, too.
“What’s it like to be normal?” Zee asked.
“I don’t know if I believe there is a ‘normal.’ We’re all different. I have voices inside my head, too,” Natalie told her. “But I’ve never given them names. I always figured the voices had something to do with instincts and conscience and perhaps lessons I was taught at a young age.”
“What do you mean?”
“For instance, if I feel like having an extra piece of cake, I always hear my mother’s voice reminding me that the extra weight will go straight to my hips.”
Zee chuckled at that. “Every one of my voices would tell me to eat the whole damn thing.”
Natalie smiled.
“Are you hungry?” Zee asked.
“If you gave me a hot dog, I wouldn’t turn it down. And that’s saying a lot, since I don’t eat meat.”
“Do you think he killed your husband?”
“No,” Natalie said.
As soon as the question had come out of her mouth, Zee scolded herself for being so blunt. One more bad habit she couldn’t seem to stop. If she had a question, she asked it. Didn’t matter what it was about. Her father told her not to worry about things like that. He told her to be herself. And to always love herself. She missed him. More than she’d ever missed him before.
“My mom died when I was very young,” Zee confessed. “She had cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I blame my dad.”
“Your dad? Why?”
Zee shrugged. “I’ve been blaming him for so long I don’t really remember why.”
“People often place blame on the ones they love most.”
“Why?”
“I’m not really sure, but most people are more likely to act aggressively against a friend or partner rather than a stranger. If you’re blaming your father for your mother’s death, then you should probably talk to him about it.”
“I guess my questions would be, did Mom know she was dying? And then I would want to know if she had talked about having more kids. I want to know if she knew I was crazy and if that’s what really killed her. I was only six months old when she died. Do you think she knew I was a crazy baby?”
“You’re not crazy now, so my guess is that you weren’t crazy then, either.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You’re not on medication, and you’ve been lovely to talk to. In just these past few days, I’d say without hesitation that I consider you to be my friend.”
“Are you always this stupid nice?”
Natalie laughed. “No. Just ask my husband. Like your father, I would say he usually gets the brunt of any anger or annoyance I might be feeling at any given moment.”
“I bet you’ve helped a lot of people feel better about themselves.”
“Well, that’s stupid nice of you to say.”
Zee’s laughter was stopped short when she heard the now-familiar sound of the door above the stairs creaking open. She looked at Natalie with wide eyes. “I don’t want to die.”
“Stay strong. You’re going to be fine.”
“I don’t want you to die, either.”
“Is that laughter I heard?” He lit the lantern and then headed their way. “It looks to me as if you two are becoming fast friends.”
Zee didn’t bother standing up to see why he’d come. Beneath his bloodied shirt she saw gauze bandages. “What happened to you this time, Bozo? Every time I see you, you’ve either been crying like a little baby or you have a new injury.”
Instead of responding, he pulled a brown paper bag from his canvas bag, held it up, and jiggled it. “I’ve got something for you.”
She could tell the way he struggled that he was hurting. “Fool me once, shame on you,” Zee said. “Fool me twice, shame on me. Or something like that.” She shrugged. “In other words, I’m not falling for it.”
His good arm dropped to his side, the bag along with it. He pulled a face. “You’ve lost all humor. How sad.”
He walked up close to Natalie’s cell, wrapped his fingers around the bars, and shook them hard, making the cage rattle. He then pressed his face close to the bars so that his nose stuck through one of the gaps. “Wake up. I have a surprise for both of you.” He slid the brown bag, followed by two water bottles and a small black box, into Natalie’s cell.
Natalie eyed him warily.
He walked a few feet away, unfolded a rickety old chair that had been leaning against the wall, and left it in the middle of the room. Then he walked over to the enclosed cell, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside. Zee had never seen him go inside before.
Natalie was on her hands and knees. She was weak, but she crawled across her cell, grabbed the goodies, and headed back to her corner.
Zee thought she looked like a skinny little rat that had been living in a dark cave for too long. Her thin hair hung in limp strings from her head. Her eyes looked bigger than usual, marbles in hollow sockets. In a few short days she seemed to have morphed into an alien creature.
Or maybe, Zee thought, she was hallucinating. She hoped not, because when she hallucinated, things got really weird, and she’d forget what was real.
Zee looked down at her own arms, glad to see she was wearing her coat. Her father had given it to her years ago after they’d watched The Matrix together, and she’d begged him to buy her a coat like that. She knew she’d lost some weight, which made her glad she couldn’t see her arms, afraid she might look like Natalie, a skinny, pale rat. And then she waited for the voices to chime in, call her a loser or a chickenshit, but they remained quiet.
A tap, tap, tap on the bars made her look to her left. It was Natalie. She’d gone through the paper bag and was trying to tell her something. Her voice was so low and raspy it was hard to hear what she was saying.
“Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Her long, bony arm slid easily between the bars, and she set a sandwich on the floor inside Zee’s cell. The black box the killer had put in her cell was now wrapped around her upper arm.
“Do you have your medicine?” Zee asked, intrigued.
Natalie nodded. “Come and eat. I’ve tasted it, and it’s good. No tricks this time.”
“What if it’s been poisoned?”
Natalie was chewing. “If I drop dead, you’ll know for sure.”
Zee wondered if Natalie might be kidding as she crawled that way. She picked up the sandwich and pulled it apart, still not convinced spiders weren’t going to pop out. But it looked fine, and it smelled okay, so she took a bite. Natalie was right. It wasn’t bad. She ate it quickly, then grabbed the water bottle Natalie had left for her and drank it down in two long gulps.
When she finished, she noticed that Natalie was back in her corner, still eating her sandwich, nibbling on the crust like a mouse.
The rattling of chains echoed off the walls.
She looked up and saw Forrest backing slowly out of the cell, pulling someone along with him. It was a man, but he was hunchbacked, and his arms and legs were misshapen, giving him an awkward gait, one arm hung longer than the other. Like Natalie, he’d been stripped of clothing. His skin appeared nearly translucent. Clumps of white hair covered a spotted, mostly balding head. Drool fell from one side of his mouth as he was yanked to the center of the room and forced to sit in the folding chair, which squeaked under the slight weight of him.
Forrest attached the chain hanging from the man’s left arm to a metal hook on the left side of the room and then did the same for the other side. He worked fairly quickly for an injured guy, but if he was the Heartless Killer, then that would mean he probably did this on a regular basis.
When he was done, Forrest straightened and looked at Natalie. “You’ve eaten and you have your medicine,” he said. “So now you owe me. I want you to question Dog and find out why he tortured and beat his only son.”
Zee’s full attention was on Natalie, who simply nibbled at the edges of her bread, ignoring Forrest completely. That worried her. And rightly so, because when she looked back at the killer, she saw his face redden before he pivoted on his feet and disappeared behind the stairwell. That worried her even more, because the last time he disappeared under there, he’d pulled out a hose. The water had made a mess of things. Nearly drowned Natalie, and the straw still stank.
He returned quickly, this time holding a long leather whip.
Zee kept her eyes on him.
He lifted the whip in the air, and with a flick of his wrist, he made the leather crackle and snap.
The man in the chair flinched, but he had yet to howl, which made her think that maybe there was a wild animal still hidden within the cell.
Natalie kept on eating. Nibble, nibble, nibble, her eyes darting around as if she was afraid someone might take her food.
Zee kept blinking—once, twice, three times—hoping it would all go away. Maybe this had all been a long, drawn-out nightmare, and any second now she’d be back in her room shuffling her tarot cards or reading today’s horoscope. But a few blinks later, she was still there. And so was the man. And Forrest, and Natalie, her new best friend.
Forrest ducked beneath the chain to get to Natalie’s cell. Once again he stood close to the bars. “You’re a psychotherapist, and this is your patient,” Forrest told her. “Dog wants to know why he tortured his only son. Was he born sick? Or was it something else? My mother told me long ago that he was once a good man. I want to know if that’s true. If you don’t get him to talk, I will have to punish him, and then you, too. I will beat the very last breath from the old man if that’s what it takes. Do you understand?”
Natalie didn’t move.
“I know you do,” he said before he returned to his place behind the decrepit man.
Zee watched all three people, her gaze darting from Natalie, to the old man, and finally back to Forrest. Waiting. Watching. The clowns had known all along where Forrest lived. They had danced and pointed, telling her which way to go when she was lost. It all made sense now. This was a circus, all right. And she was the only spectator.
“Ask him!” Forrest shouted, making Zee jump.
Nobody else moved.
The tip of the leather whip hit the old man’s shoulder, splitting him open. His cry of pain came out, sounding like the screams of a dozen people.
Natalie frowned.
Finally. Something.
The snap of the whip had worked this time. Natalie buried the rest of her food beneath a pile of straw and then crawled to the door of her cell, where she could get a better look at what was going on. “Stop it,” she said in a tiny voice.
Zee wasn’t sure if she was telling the old man to stop screaming or telling Forrest to stop hurting him.
“Leave him alone,” Natalie said, looking at Forrest now.
Forrest’s eyes narrowed. “Ask him the question.”
“Old man,” she began.
“His name is Dog.”
“Dog,” she said, “why did you beat and torture your only son?”
Dog grumbled and mumbled. Zee could tell that he was really trying to answer the question, which surprised her.
The whip snapped again, slitting open Dog’s other shoulder.
This time he howled.
It was the same piercing cry Zee had heard many times before. There was no other animal inside his cell. Dog was one and the same.
The expression on Natalie’s thin face was a mixture of horror and rage as she cried, “Dog! Look at me!”
The silence was deafening.
And once again Forrest raised his arm, ready to strike again.
Unable to take any more, it seemed, Natalie began to shake the bars as she shouted, “What did you do to your son?”
She shook the metal bars so hard, Zee thought she might break right through.
“He took her from me,” Dog said at last, his voice hoarse. The clarity of his words surprised everyone, including Forrest.
“Who did he take from you?” Natalie commanded.
“My wife.”
“You were jealous of your own son?”
Forrest looked tense.
Dog began to cry, his eyes like leaky faucets, his entire body trembling.
“You didn’t like the attention your wife gave your son,” Natalie said, “so you tortured him?”
Dog growled. Gone was the sadness. His eyes widened, and his nostrils flared. “She only loved him! Everything she did was for him! I hated him. I wished he was never born. But when I harmed her little boy, her prized possession, she grew angry. And that anger was directed at me . . . only me.”
Forrest looked at Natalie in confusion.
“He preferred your mother’s anger and hatred over nothing at all,” Natalie told him.
“Is that true?” he asked Dog.
Dog’s head bobbed.
Forrest’s expression changed suddenly, and Zee wasn’t sure what he was thinking as he furiously worked to unchain Dog. Once that was done, he shoved him back into his cell, shut the door with a clang, and secured it tightly.
“He could have had both,” Natalie said as Forrest blew out the lantern and walked away.
Forrest got as far as the steps before he turned and said, “What did you say?”
“Babies need a lot of care,” Natalie told him. “If your father had been patient, he could have had both your mother’s love and his son’s love.”