CHAPTER TWO
797 Words
CHAPTER TWO
The man was pleased to hear the woman’s soft moan. He knew she must be regaining consciousness. Yes, he could see that her eyes had opened a little.
She was lying on her side on a rough-hewn wooden table in the small room that had a dirt floor, cinderblock walls, and low timbered ceiling. She was bound up tightly in a curled up position, taped fast with duct tape. Her legs were sharply bent and tightly bound to her chest, and her hands were wrapped around her shins. Her head lay sideways on top of her knees.
She reminded him of pictures he’d seen of human fetuses—and also of embryos he sometimes found when he cracked a fresh egg from one of the chickens he kept. She looked so mild and innocent, it was somehow a rather touching sight.
Mostly, of course, she reminded him of the other woman—Alice had been her name, he believed. He’d once thought that Alice would be the only one he’d treat this way, but then he’d enjoyed it … and there were so few pleasures in his life … how could he stop?
“It hurts,” the woman murmured, as if out of a dream. “Why does it hurt?”
He knew that it was because she lay in a thick tangled bed of barbed wire. Blood was already trickling onto the table top, and it was going add to the stains in the unfinished wood. Not that it mattered. The table was older than he was, and he was the only person who ever saw it anyway.
He was hurting and bleeding some as well. He’d cut himself while getting her into the truck with the barbed wire. It was harder to do than he’d expected because she’d fought back more forcefully than the other one.
She had writhed and twisted while the homemade chloroform was starting to kick in. But her struggles had weakened and he’d finally subdued her completely.
Even so, he wasn’t much bothered to be hurt by the sharp barbs. He knew from hard experience that such cuts healed up pretty quickly, even if they did leave ghastly scars.
He stooped down and looked closely into her face.
Her eyes were opened almost impossibly wide now. Her irises twitched around as she looked back at him.
Still trying to avoid looking at me, he realized.
Everybody acted that way toward him, wherever he went. He didn’t blame people for trying to pretend he was invisible, or that he didn’t exist at all. Sometimes he’d look in the mirror and pretend that he could make himself disappear.
Then the woman murmured again …
“It hurts.”
In addition to the cuts, he was sure that her head ached badly from the heavy dose of homemade chloroform. When he’d first mixed up the stuff right here, he’d almost passed out himself, and he’d suffered from a splitting headache for days afterward. But the preparation worked very well, so he would continue using it.
Now he was well prepared for what he was about to do next. He was wearing thick work gloves now and a thickly padded jacket. He wasn’t going to hurt himself any more while getting the thing done.
He went to work on the mass of barbed wire with a pair of wire cutters. Then he pulled a length of it tightly around the woman’s body and twisted the ends into makeshift knots to hold the wire in place.
The woman let out a sharp whimper and tried to twist loose from the duct tape as the barbs tore through her skin and clothing.
As he kept working, he said …
“You don’t have to be quiet. You can scream if you want—if it helps.”
He certainly wasn’t worried about anybody hearing her.
She whimpered louder, and she seemed to try to scream, but her voice was weak.
He chuckled quietly. He knew that she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs to properly scream—not with her legs bound up against her chest like that.
He pulled another length of barbed wire around her and stretched it tight, watching as blood dripped from where each barb pierced her flesh beneath her clothes, soaking through the fabric, spreading and making spots much wider than the wound itself.
He kept right on pulling strand after strand around her until she was all bound up like some kind of enormous wire cocoon, not looking human at all. The bundle was making all kinds strange low sounds—sighs, gasps, whimpers, and groans. Blood trickled here and spurted a little there until the whole tabletop was bathed in red.
Then he stepped back and admired his handiwork.
He turned off the overhead light and walked out into the night, closing the heavy wooden door behind him.
The sky was clear and starry, and he couldn’t hear anything now except the dense rumble of crickets.
He took a long, slow breath of the clean, fresh air.
The night seemed especially sweet just now.
- Writer
