Rosary girls

54

The night behind the duct tape was a Dali landscape, black velvet dunes rolling toward a far horizon. Occasionally, fingers of light crept through the bottom part of his visual plane, teasing him with the notion of safety.

His head ached. His limbs felt dead and useless. But that wasn't the worst of it. If the tape over his eyes was irritating, the tape over his mouth was maddening beyond discourse. For someone like Simon Close, the humiliation of being tied to a chair, bound with duct tape, and gagged with something that felt and tasted like an ancient tack rag finished a distant second to the frustration of not being able to talk. If he lost his words, he lost the battle. It had always been thus. As a small boy, in the Catholic home in Berwick, he had managed to talk his way out of nearly every scrape, every frightful jam.

Not this one.

He could barely make a sound.

The tape was wrapped tightly around his head, just above his ears, so he was able to hear.

How do I get out of this? Deep breath, Simon. Deep.

Crazily, he thought about the books and CDs he had acquired over the years, the ones dealing with meditation and yoga and the concepts of diaphragmatic breathing, the yogic techniques for fighting stress and anxiety. He had never read a single one, nor listened to more than a few minutes of the CDs. He had wanted a quick fix for his occasional panic attacks-the Xanax made him far too sluggish to think straight-but there was no quick fix to be found in yoga.

Now he wished he had stuck with it.

Save me, Deepak Chopra, he thought.

Help me, Dr. Weil.

Then he heard the door to his flat open behind him. He was back. The sound filled him with a sickening brew of hope and fear. He heard the footsteps approach from behind, felt the weight on the floorboards. He smelled something sweet, floral. Faint, but present. A young girl's perfume.

Suddenly, the tape was ripped from his eyes. The grease-fire pain made it feel as if his eyelids came off with it.

When his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw, on the coffee table in front of him, his Apple PowerBook, opened and displaying a graphic of The Report's current web page.

MONSTER STALKS PHILLY GIRLS!

Sentences and phrases were highlighted in red.

… depraved psychopath…

… deviant butcher of innocence…

Behind the laptop, on a tripod, sat Simon's digital camera. The camera was on and pointed right at him.

Simon then heard a click behind him. His tormentor had the Apple mouse in his hand and was clicking through the documents. Soon, another article appeared. The article was from three years earlier, a piece he had written about blood being splashed on the door of a church in the Northeast. Another phrase was highlighted:

… hark the herald assholes fling…

Behind him, Simon heard a satchel being unzipped. Moments later, he felt the slight pinch at the right side of his neck. A needle. Simon struggled mightily against his bindings, but it was useless. Even if he could get loose, whatever was in the needle took almost immediate effect. Warmth spread through his muscles, a pleasurable weakness that, were he not in this situation, he might have enjoyed.

His mind began to fragment, soar. He closed his eyes. His thoughts took flight over the last decade or so of his life. Time leapt, fluttered, settled.

When he opened his eyes, the cruel buffet displayed on the coffee table in front of him arrested the breath in his chest. For a moment, he tried to conjure some sort of benevolent scenario for them. There was none.

Then, as his bowels released, he recorded the final visual entry in his reporter's mind-a cordless drill, a large needle, threaded with a thick black thread.

And he knew.

Another injection took him to the edge of the abyss. This time, he willingly went along with it.

A few minutes later, when he heard the sound of the drill, Simon Close screamed, but the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, a disembodied wail that echoed off the damp stone walls of a Catholic home in the time-swept north of England, a plaintive sigh over the ancient face of the moors.