The Four Stages Of Cruelty Part 27

Something in her changed, a collapse in the sternness of her face, and she was crying as she started across the floor on her hands and knees toward Josh. Lewis thrust her forward with his shoe on her rear, forcing her to crawl faster.

No one spoke. They all watched silently, fearful of their own lives and sick with the shame. But there was nothing they could do in the face of that insanity.

She reached Josh where he lay, frozen and confused, and Lewis said, "Three," and she moved again, just her hands this time, trembling as she unb.u.t.toned his pants and pulled them down over his hips.

"You see?" Lewis said, a smile come over him. "Now you know he's only twenty. Look at the f.u.c.king b.o.n.e.r rising up. Good to go even when shot. Do it! Two, one."

Josh couldn't help the erection. He wanted to tell her that. It was not in his power to stop it. And suddenly he was thinking of Stephanie, and his drawings of her, and the night when he'd arrived at her house with his father's gun and demanded that she be with him again, that she kiss him, make love to him. It was his punishment to relive that awful moment, to have his erection surge upward in spite of all the shame he felt and even the injury to his leg, with the others watching, with Brother Mike watching, a gun at her head, and her trembling hands touching him as she wept.

And then the fumbling stopped and her hands fell away.

"I can't," she said.

He shut his eyes. He did not want to see her life end in a spray of blood and brains.

"What in the h.e.l.l are you doing?"

Roy stood at the top of the stairs, very still, watching Lewis.

No one had the courage to speak up.

"You sick skinner b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Roy said. "Did someone f.u.c.k your mommy and make you watch when you were a snot-nosed kid?"

Lewis's gun lifted to Roy. "She's going to make it up to him. She's going to suck him off. Or she's going to suck on this gun."

"Oh, she is, huh?" And he waited, as if daring Cooper Lewis to act.

"Did you find it, Roy?" Jacko said. "Can we get the f.u.c.k out of here now?"

Josh wanted to hear yes, but Roy shook his head instead, eyes still on Lewis. "It says dig all right. But I guess we need to dig deeper. I never seen Fenton so mad."

Josh knew what he had to do. He struggled to pull his pants back up, embarra.s.sed and angry, and he called out for their attention.

"I know where he is, Roy," Josh said. "You get Lewis away from us. You tell Fenton to let her go, and I'll tell you where Hammond is."

He wondered if they understood what he was offering them. Roy only stared.

"What do you mean where Hammond is?" Roy asked. There was no mockery in his tone, no dismissal.

"He's here," Josh said. "In Ditmarsh. I figured out what Crowley was telling us. You'll never find him unless I tell you."

"He's here?" Roy asked again.

"I'll tell you where when you let her go."

Roy tipped his head back and laughed. "In Ditmarsh all along." He bellowed down the stairs into the darkness for Fenton to come up.

"They'll kill him," Brother Mike said. "He's helpless."

"What do you want from me?" Josh asked.

Brother Mike didn't answer.

48.

Fenton looked as though he'd been digging for coal, his hands and face black, his eyes buggy. Josh wouldn't tell them what they wanted to know until I was free of them, and Fenton said I'd be free enough, locked in down there. Josh agreed and let them toss me down into the darkness.

It hurt bad. I lay at the bottom of the dark stair, and I couldn't see a thing, not even a crack of light where the door must have been. It was so black I wondered if I were unconscious or floating through s.p.a.ce. I winced when I pushed myself up. Pain is weakness leaving the body, the recruitment poster said, but I knew that pain was gravity attaching you to the here and now. I crawled into the first narrow cell, out of the hallway, out of the line of sight, and sat up against the wall.

A minute later, maybe ten minutes, I heard the door open. I wondered if it was my rescue or my end. The light did not fill the dark pa.s.sage outside but splashed through like a pa.s.sing current. I heard a heavy thud, a groan, and a cry. I knew it had to be another body tumbling down.

"Brother Mike?" I called. I listened but heard nothing. Then the sc.r.a.ping sound of someone crawling. I should have gone out and found him, but I waited instead, still paralyzed with my own fear and the failure that smothered any desire to help.

"It's me," the voice said, and the creature slithered in to join me.

Josh, my rescuer, leaned up against the other wall. I heard him pant and groan.

"They're gone now," he said. "There's no reason for them to come back."

I nodded and closed my eyes.

Hours went by, I presume, or only seconds. I woke up in the same absolute darkness and wondered if he was still present or if the arrival had been a dream. I nudged his foot with my own and heard him cry out and start to cough. I wanted to know he was still with me.

A little strength had come over me. I felt a touch of the old me creeping back in. Resilience is the last thing to go. It keeps surging back like a forgotten tide, even when you think it has been banished for good. It was followed by anger. Disdain. Maybe loneliness, the great force beneath everything that keeps mas.h.i.+ng us together.

"You told them that Hammond is here?" I asked him. "Why did they believe you?"

"Because it's true," he said. "He's been here all along. Crowley knew. That's what he was telling us."

My brain moved slowly, m.u.f.fled by the darkness, the gears in it cranked and turned.

"Is Hammond Roy?" I asked. All along.

He coughed. The sound didn't go anywhere, just flapped from his chest and stopped in the air.

"No," he said. "It was dig."

I waited.

"The G was a six. Ditmarsh infirmary six," Josh said. "I was in Ditmarsh infirmary three. Crowley was in DI-two. Hammond in DI-six. I figured it out."

I tried to think it through and understand. DI-6? I counted down the cells in my mind and came to the one where the man with no fingers or toes, no face, sat on the edge of his cot and waited for the world outside to go by.

"That's Hammond?"

There were prisons within prisons, Ruddik had said. I was stunned by the thought that Hammond had been returned to Ditmarsh. Maybe Hammond shot himself. Maybe someone shot him. And when he was helpless and harmless and they had no other place to put him, they brought him back and abandoned him to a mute and solitary existence, his ident.i.ty obliterated.

"I didn't know it was Hammond. I had no idea until now. But Crowley spent a lot of time with him," Josh said. "I didn't like to go near. Roy knew I was right. As soon as I told them."

The darkness around us. We were two voices and no physical bodies. We might have been talking on the telephone.

"What about Brother Mike?" I asked. "What did they do with him?"

I heard Josh s.h.i.+ft, and then his voice came from lower than before, closer to the ground.

"They took him," he said, almost a whisper. "I asked them not to. I should have made a better deal."

"Why did they put you down here?"

He didn't answer, and I got used to the silence again.

"I'm cold," he complained, and the voice came from far away.

I'd like to say that my response was immediate, that I slid over to my rescuer with the little strength I could still summon and lay down beside him, that I put my arms around him and shared my warmth. I'd like to say that the impulse was natural and human and immediate, but it wasn't. I let him lay there alone for a long, long time.

His breathing became my stumbling metronome. When the metronome faltered, I waited for it to begin again, and I started to cry. I willed myself away from the wall and over to him. I found his form on the ground, lying on his back, and I stretched out beside him on the hard, damp stone. At first I put my hand on his chest; then I touched his forehead and his face, and rested my hand on his forearm, my mouth next to his ear. When he twitched, I slid my hand down further and grasped his hand in mine and imagined a little clench.

"I feel very close to him now," he said.

The words startled me. Did he mean Crowley, or did he mean his father? Someone on the other side. I had the feeling that there were explanations lingering inside him. You could call them confessions, or you could call them ghosts. Thoughts, hopes, regrets, things he wanted to release by telling me but couldn't any longer because he had slipped off. So instead of listening to those things, I told him it was going to be okay.

What was it like to die? Were you alone with your infinite thoughts and memories, a sense of greater existence, or did you feel the presence of others close to you? Was it enough to feel that presence, or did the overwhelming desire to reach someone cause you pain? Was that what eternal peace meant-an untethering, a drifting away from the pain of love, an understanding of its boundless power?

I heard the footsteps and the voice calling out, and I wondered, with a terrified tensing up of my stiff body, who it could be.

"Kali?" the voice called. "Kali, are you in here?"

The footsteps came closer. Keeper Wallace was calling my name. My eyes had become used to the darkness. When the door moved, I saw him standing there, filling its opening. He had a rifle in his hands and he was alone. The rifle clattered to the stones. He bent, his arms came under my back, and I felt myself rising up.

"Put your arms around my neck."

I hung my arms around his neck.

We climbed the stairs, my body rising up into the blinding light.

"Josh," I said. "We need to bring Josh."

"It's okay," Wallace said. "We'll get him later."

It took me seconds to blink my vision back. I saw Stone lying on the floor, a tangle of pink laundry on his chest. I saw Cutler sitting against the wall. The brightness of morning outside, but more dazzling than that. Flooded by fire hoses, Ditmarsh had become a castle made of ice. The floor of the hub covered in a translucent lava. Some of the beams and bars and railings dripping with the same opaque, stiffened candle wax, and all of it glittered in the first sunlight. I'd never seen it so brilliant.

I saw soldiers moving toward us slowly, spread out in formation, rifles in that familiar angled point, carefully walking the ice.

49.

The same country road, the same rutted turnoff into the woods. Though most of the snow was gone, the trees and bushes were still skeletal. I tried to imagine a verdant burst of spring, the tangle of green choking the path, hiding the way. I wanted to see Brother Mike's house in the woods turn into something from a fairy tale, a place to dwell forever.

There was nothing but stillness when I pulled into the yard. I got out of the Land Rover and climbed the steps of the porch. I did not like the quiet, and I felt anxious rapping on the door. There was no answer. I turned the k.n.o.b and pushed. The door stuck on the floor and then pried free. I called out and heard his voice answer weakly from within.

I had hoped for tea, even for one of those cookies, but he was in no condition for hosting. He'd described it on the phone as his "bad state" when I'd called to check on him. I saw the evidence now. The air in the room was slightly sour. He looked sallow, unhealthy. I guessed that he'd eaten very little. I said h.e.l.lo and sat down across from him.

"How are you?" he finally asked.

"Better," I said. And though it was a lie, I knew by now that the lie was going to become true. Eventually I would be better, maybe even whole. I still felt shame and grief and anger and fear, but the emotions were no longer as corrosive. I did not wake up every night and stare at the ceiling with my heart thudding in my chest. It stopped happening when I realized that Josh was with me. I felt very close to him now that he was dead. That still bothered me. It wasn't an easy or a comforting thought, to know I was linked to him forever, but it had become my reality.

"I'm very glad," he said, and added, "I'm still struggling."

There were many questions I wanted to ask him, but I did not know how to begin. Would the answers cause him more pain? I knew that whatever was eroding him had something to do with his basic beliefs. My own beliefs were flimsy and flexible. They could be reshaped. I was already molding them to make sense of things I would never have believed months before. But the impact on him was heavier than that, more structural. Some fundamental aspect of his universe had collapsed, and life in the aftermath was a difficult adjustment.

"I have a task," he said, "that I've been putting off for some time. I'm wondering, since you're here, if you would help me take care of it?"

The way he said it, it could have been a drain that needed snaking or a will that needed a witness's signature.

"Of course," I said.

That seemed to liven him slightly. He stood up stiffly, as though bothered by chronic pain, and walked into the kitchen. I followed. At the back porch, he found a large hammer and asked me to carry it.

We put on boots and crossed the backyard to the kiln.

"I'm having some difficulty bending over," he said. "So I was wondering if you would crawl in there for me and retrieve the pieces of pottery that are inside. It will be dirty work, I'm afraid."

"Sure," I said.

I lifted the tarp that covered the entrance. Still dark in there, but no longer as warm.

"Do you have a flashlight back at the house?" I asked. "I might trip and break something."

"Don't worry about it," he answered.

There was no arguing. I hunched over and made my way inside.

My eyesight adjusted to the darkness. I did not realize until I was standing inside that a closed dark s.p.a.ce would bring back the anxieties. I felt a little bite of fear on the back of my neck, and my heart rate became more rapid. But that was then, and this was different. I saw the bowls and vases and cups along the shelves. They were cold to the touch. I took a vase in each hand and headed back down the tunnel. At this rate it would take me a very long time indeed to retrieve each precious item.