Shackles

The First Day

The Second Day

It wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to grasp the full enormity of what lay ahead for me, what I would have to face over the days, weeks, maybe months of this kind of imprisonment and isolation.

I woke up with the knowledge, lay in the icy dawn with it swelling inside my head like a malignant tumor. Last night, in those first hours of aloneness, I had managed to block out most of it behind a barrier of hate and frantic activity. I had paced back and forth, back and forth, indulging in a monologue of curses. I had prowled through the provisions, looking for something, anything that I could use as a possible tool for escape. I had done the same with my pockets-wallet, keys, change, handkerchief, nothing, nothing. I had tried yanking again and again on the chain, tried picking the padlock with each one of my keys, opened a can of something and tried to use the lid to dig into the wall around the ringbolt. All senseless, wasted effort that got me nothing but scraped palms and a cut finger, and left me mentally as well as physically exhausted. Sometime long past nightfall I had stretched out on the cot and wrapped myself in the blankets and fallen into a fitful sleep. Woke up once, while it was still dark, with hunger gnawing at me, but I hadn’t eaten because my mind wasn’t working right and somehow it translated eating into a weakness, a giving in. So I had gotten up, used the toilet, drunk some cold water from the sink tap and splashed a handful over my face, and then gone back to the cot and again swaddled myself in blankets and uneasy sleep.

Now my mind was clear, and the truth was unavoidable: I was a condemned man, just as the whisperer had said, with three or at the most four months to live and very little chance of reprieve or escape. I was in an isolation cell fifteen feet square, with nothing more to occupy my time than old books and magazines, pencils and pens and blank paper, and a radio that probably wouldn’t bring in much except static because this was mountain country and winter besides. And I not only had my imminent death to cope with, I had the problem of keeping my sanity throughout the ordeal. Death itself no longer terrified me the way it had at one time, though this kind of death would not be easy to reconcile. But insanity… that was something else again. That was a hideous looming specter, a screaming darkness, that filled me with the most primitive loathing and revulsion.

The fear began to seep in again as I lay there. And then to seep out through my pores in a prickly sweat. I kept my eyes shut and lay still while I repaired the internal leaks and restored a dry calm.

This was what I had to guard against, this slow erosion of the dikes my mind had already thrown up against the roiling waters of unreason. Plug each little hole before it grew larger, threatened the entire protective structure. Keep the dark tide from flooding in, from dragging me down into its depths.

No matter how bad it gets, I thought, I can’t let that happen. That’s my number one priority. And the way to keep it from happening is to live minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. Don’t look ahead; don’t think about this afternoon, much less tonight, and never about tomorrow. Don’t think about death, or any more about madness. Believe that I will survive this somehow, never stop believing it for a second.

I will survive.

I will.

Get up then, get moving. It’s what you do every morning, isn’t it? This is no different, you can’t allow it to be any different. Lying here passive like this invites brooding, invites self-pity-invites cracks in the dike.

I sat up, disentangled myself from the blankets, swung my legs off the cot. There was a furrow of pain along the back of my left calf where the leg iron had somehow bitten into the flesh. I leaned down to rub at the spot, and to see if I could loosen the thing a little. It was tight around the calf but not so tight that I was unable to work it downward half an inch or so. That was far enough. I didn’t want it all the way down to my ankle, where the lower edge would ride against my heel and maybe open a sore that would make walking painful.

It was cold in the room-still snowing outside-but not so cold here in my corner, because I had left the space heater on all night. The coils glowed, radiated warmth, made faint ticking sounds. Better use it sparingly. It’s old and the coils might burn out on you. Well, he was right, goddamn him. If they did burn out, and the temperature dropped far enough below zero, the blankets and my clothing wouldn’t be enough to prevent me from freezing to death.

I reached over, switched the thing off. From now on I’d keep it off during the daylight hours. Use it only at night, and not all night unless the weather conditions were bad enough to warrant it. Bundle up in the blankets, drink plenty of hot tea and coffee and soup-keep warm that way.

Up on my feet. A few stretches, a few squats, a few toe touches: the kind of light calisthenics I sometimes indulged in to loosen stiff muscles, get the circulation flowing on cold mornings. Yes, and what if I adopted a regular exercise program, did a series of calisthenics every day? It would be another way of keeping warm, another way of passing time. And by preventing my body from atrophying in these confines, I would be helping to prevent my mind from doing the same.

The exercise put a sharp, spasmodic clenching under my breastbone. How long since I’d eaten anything? Almost thirty-six hours. Almost a day and a half since the dinner at the Rusty Scupper with Kerry and Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean-

Kerry, I thought.

No, I thought, no, not yet.

I put on my sport jacket and overcoat-I had taken them off last night because it had been warm enough to sleep without them-and then went around the card table, dragging my chain like a fat ghost, and plugged in the two-burner hot plate. Took the coffee pot into the bathroom and filled it with water and brought it back out and put it on the stove. Hunted through the canned goods, settled on beef stew. Opened the can, dumped the stew into the saucepan, put the saucepan on the other burner. Spooned a little coffee into the enameled mug, then added a little more because this was my first morning, I didn’t need to worry about conserving it just yet. Set out the one bowl and a plastic fork and spoon, opened a package of saltines, opened another package of paper napkins. Did all of that slowly, carefully, establishing a routine.

While I waited for the water to boil and the stew to heat, I picked up the radio and checked to see if he’d put in batteries. He had; the packet in the cardboard carton was a spare set. I flipped the On switch and listened to a steady spewing of static. It was the same from one end of the dial to the other-heavy static, with here and there a murmur of voices or music that I couldn’t distinguish. I carried the radio to the window, held it up to the glass, and fiddled with the dial again. Same thing. But the wind was up, whipping and bending the nearby trees, and it was snowing pretty heavily. Maybe I could tune in a station once the storm eased, or when the weather improved.

And maybe I couldn’t. It might be impossible to pick up anything from here with an ordinary radio. It might be that this portable was just another little torture device in his war of nerves…

The smell of the stew cooking made my stomach clench again, my mouth water. But it wasn’t appetite; it was the need to fill a cavity. I emptied the stew into the bowl, added a handful of crushed crackers, made the coffee, took cup and bowl around to the cot and ate sitting down. The stew was tasteless but I managed to get all of it down. The coffee was a handle on normalcy, part of the same morning habit pattern that had ruled most of my adult life-something that stirred me into facing up to a day’s offerings, even the burnt ones.

So I let myself think of Kerry then-not for the first time since I’d been here, but for the first time with any concentration. Was she all right? Yes. He wouldn’t bother her; he hadn’t lied to me about that. Believe it. His hatred was for me, his punishment for whatever it was he thought I’d done to him strictly personal and private. Just him and me. If he’d wanted to include Kerry he could have picked up both of us Friday night when we’d returned to her place. There hadn’t been many people on the street at that hour, either; he could have pulled off a double snatch without much trouble. But instead he’d waited for me to come out alone.

Just him and me.

But she would know by now that something had happened to me. She would have at least suspected it sometime yesterday, when I didn’t call as I’d promised, or even earlier if she’d noticed that my car was still parked near her building. She’d have gone to my flat, and when she’d found no sign of me there she would have gotten in touch with Eberhardt. By now they had probably contacted one of Eberhardt’s cop friends at the Hall of Justice. But in California you have to be unaccounted for for seventy-two hours before a missing persons report can be filed; it would be Tuesday before there was an official investigation.

Kerry would be frantic by then. Eberhardt, too, though he wouldn’t let anybody know it. It would only get worse for them as the days passed, as the investigative wheels spun and spun and churned up nothing at all. And those wheels would churn up nothing… unless someone had seen me abducted, written down the license number of the whisperer’s car, and the police were able to track him down and force him to reveal what he’d done with me. Not much chance of that, was there? No. So slim a chance it wasn’t even worth considering.

I could feel Kerry’s pain, Eberhardt’s pain, because it was the same kind that was inside me. And the longer I was chained up here, the more that pain would increase. And what if I died here in three or four months, according to plan? I have a burial spot all picked out for you. And you mustn’t worry-I’ll dig your grave deep so the animals won’t disturb you. My remains would never be found, nor any trace of what had happened to me. Vanished into thin air, vanished as completely and mysteriously as Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa. Poof! Gone. Missing and presumed dead-that would be the official nonverdict. But Kerry and Eberhardt would never know for sure. And they would wonder and they would hurt, at least a little, for the rest of their lives…

No. Dangerous territory. Off limits, back off. Minute to minute, remember? Hour to hour, day to day, don’t look ahead, don’t speculate, don’t let your imagination run away with you. Kerry’s a big girl; she’ll be fine. And you think Eberhardt hasn’t handled worse than this? They’ll come out of it all right. Just make sure you do too.

I got on my feet, went into the bathroom and washed out the soup bowl and then brought it back out and set it on top of the bookshelf. Made another cup of coffee, much weaker this time-more for warmth than anything else. Without the heater on, it was chilly in here; I could almost feel the bite of the wind that kept snapping and howling at the cabin walls outside. I moved around to the cot, picked up one of the blankets and folded it around my body.

As I stood sipping my coffee, my gaze came to rest on the calendar that lay open on the card table. Open to this week, the first week in December. With my free hand I flipped through some of the pages. One of those two-year calendar/daybook things, for this year and next. Today was… what? Sunday? Sunday, December 6. The calendar was there because he wanted me to know what day it was, to count how many had gone by and how many lay ahead. But I could turn that knowledge into an advantage by using it to maintain my orientation, my sense of order and normalcy. One thing that would surely weaken your grip on sanity would be losing track of days of the week, dates, time itself. That would put you in a shadow world, a kind of deadly limbo, and it was a short fall from there into madness.

Using one of the pencils I drew an X through the box for Saturday, the fifth, my first day here, and another X through the box for today. This would become another part of my morning routine.

I started to put the pencil down. Didn’t do it because I found myself looking at the pads of yellow ruled paper-and remembering what he’d said yesterday, in his sly way, about my writing my memoirs. Well, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. But not in the way he’d meant it. Suppose I made a record of what had happened to me since Friday night, every detail I could remember, every impression? It might help me figure out who he was, what his motive was.

It would keep me busy too, keep my mind occupied for long periods of time. And once it was done I could go on to something else-a sort of journal, a damning chronicle of my ordeal. Put down whatever came into my head. Make writing a daily activity, to go along with an exercise program and the routine I established. I had done enough client reports in my time; I had a pretty fair grasp of English. It wouldn’t be difficult work, and it was the kind I could lose myself in once I got started.

The idea energized me a little, enough so that I caught up one of the pads and sat down with it in my lap. And before long I began to write.

The Third Day

It’s all down on paper, everything that happened during the twenty-four hours between Friday night and Saturday night. Twenty-nine pages using both sides of a sheet to conserve paper. I spent most of yesterday working on it and half of today. My fingers are stiff-writer’s cramp. But the important thing is that I’ve included all the details, even the smallest one. You can’t forget something that might be vital when you’ve got it down in black and white. Or black and yellow.

I wonder if anyone else will ever read it.

It won’t be him. I’ll make sure of that.

I still don’t have an inkling of who he is. Men like me, men who have been in law enforcement work for better than three decades, touch thousands of lives directly and indirectly. We have a profound effect on some of those lives; we inflict pain on some, in most cases because they deserve it but, in a few unavoidable instances, even when they don’t. You can’t help that, no matter how hard you try, how many precautions you take. So he has to be someone I hurt once, intentionally or by accident, deservedly or otherwise… but that narrows it down not at all. He could be any one of a hundred or two hundred people out of my past.

What do I know about him? So damned little. He’s intelligent, well-spoken-white collar rather than blue. Average height, slim build. Caucasian. Age? Hard to tell from either his mannerisms or the disguised voice; say somewhere between thirty and forty-five. Drives an American-made car, make and model undetermined. Carries a snub-nosed revolver. Dresses unobtrusively. Owns or has rented or at least has access to a deserted mountain cabin, location undetermined, that he expects to remain unvisited for a minimum of four months. What else?

Nothing else.

He could be almost anybody.

The snowfall has finally quit. Not much wind now-it’s late afternoon-and the overcast doesn’t hang quite as low.

I tried the radio again a while ago. Mostly static, but I did find one station that comes through for ten or fifteen seconds at a time before it fades out again. That’s encouraging, even though it took me five minutes to bring it in the first time, almost twice as long to bring it back the second time. Country and western station, the honky-tonk variety. But even honky-tonk stations do news broadcasts now and then, don’t they?

Reception should be better when the clouds lift and the wind dies down. Tonight, maybe. Or tomorrow morning. I’ll keep fiddling with the dial until I can hold the signal for longer periods.

Soup for dinner. Split pea. And half a can of fruit cocktail.

While I was heating the soup, it occurred to me that I might be able to use the hot plate for another purpose. I could take some of the napkins and paper towels, roll them into a tight cylinder, and then set the cylinder on fire with the hot plate-make a kind of torch. Then I could try to’ burn or char the wall around the ringbolt. With enough burning or charring of the wood, maybe I could work the bolt loose.

But I didn’t consider the idea for more than a few seconds. It’s no good. In the first place, the wall is made of thick, smooth-sanded pine logs; there’s almost no chance that I could do much damage to a log like that even with repeated attempts. And in the second place, there’s the danger of accidentally starting a fire I couldn’t control. It could happen, no matter how careful I was. And what chance would I have of putting out a fire, chained up like this, the bathroom at a distance and nothing larger to carry water in than a saucepan? No. The possibility of being burned alive is even more frightening than the prospect of death by starvation.

There has to be another way.

Men have escaped from prisons for as long as there have been prisons. Escaped from fortresses, from isolation cells smaller and more barren than this one-from every kind of lockup there is or ever was. Whatever one man can think up, another man can find a way to circumvent. That’s the nature of the beasts we are.

I’m as bright, as clever, as resourceful as he is, damn him. There has to be a way out, something he overlooked, some little crack in this escape-proof prison that I can squeeze through. And I’m going to find it.

Sooner or later I am going to find it.

The Fourth Day

Why thirteen weeks?

Why not twelve-three full months, a more conventional number? Why thirteen?

The possible importance of this didn’t occur to me until this morning, while I was exercising. I checked the written record I made and I’d put down more or less verbatim what the whisperer said on Saturday night: There is enough food on those shelves to last thirteen weeks.

There must be some significance in the number, some reason for him to pick it as the optimum number of weeks for my survival. Is he someone I helped send to prison who served a total of thirteen years? This little corner resembles nothing so much as a jail cell; everything in it has a prisonlike function. He could be trying to replicate for me, in a thirteen-week microcosm, what he was forced to endure for thirteen years-with death being my release. But I can think of only one man who went to prison on my testimony and served exactly thirteen years; he was in his mid-fifties when he got out of San Quentin and he died three years later of natural causes.

Something that happened thirteen years ago, then? I’ve tried to think back, remember what I did, the cases I had, thirteen years ago, but it isn’t easy. Time distorts memory, and memory distorts time. There are a few things I’m sure took place just that many years back; others might have been thirteen or twelve or fourteen or fifteen. And of the ones I’m sure of, I can’t pick out any one person that he might be, any motive strong enough for this kind of revenge.

What else could thirteen represent, if not years? An occurrence on the thirteenth of the month-the thirteenth of December, maybe? If he’d snatched me on the thirteenth of this month, then yes, that might be it. But he hadn’t. He’d made his grab on December 4-Friday, December 4. Some sort of correlation between four and thirteen? No, that’s reaching too far.

Look at it another way: Why did he pick December 4? Why not December 3, or December 5 or any other damn day? Could have been nothing more than random selection-the day he was ready, when all his preparations were made. But it could also be that there’s an underlying meaning to the date too. Something that happened on December 4 thirteen years ago? Possible. But if I can’t be sure entire cases took place in a given year, how the hell can I remember something that might have happened on a specific date that long ago?

Thirteen. Thirteen. A superstitious symbol, an unlucky number for some and lucky one for others. Suppose it’s a lucky one for him? The thirteen weeks might not have any meaning beyond that. I might be trying to make too much out of it, stumbling around in a blind alley…

Let it go for now. The thirteen weeks means something or it doesn’t, and if it does I’ll figure it out eventually. That’s the way my mind has always worked. Let it alone, let it simmer on a back burner and one day it all comes boiling up to the surface.

Gnawing in my belly-it’s time to eat. Spam. I used to hate Spam when I was a kid; I haven’t eaten it in twenty years or more. But I looked at a can while I was making coffee this morning, and it started my mouth watering. Funny.

The Fifth Day

Good weather this morning. Blue sky, sunlight slanting in through the window at an oblique angle. I stood at the window for a long time, watching the sun sparkle on the snowdrifts and the snow-heavy tree branches and the icicles hanging from the near eaves of the shed roof. Snow looks so clean and fresh with the sun on it; everything looks clean and fresh, untouched, unsullied, and it gives you hope. Not that I’m losing hope. No. But with the day bright like this, so clean-looking, the loneliness is a little easier to handle and I don’t have to work so hard to keep my spirits up, to keep on believing.

I fiddled with the radio again while I was at the window and had better luck. The honky-tonk station came in for a visit and hasn’t left yet, at least not for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s staticky and it keeps fluctuating, but it’s audible enough.

Station KHOT, out of Stockton. That gives me some idea of where I am. A Stockton country station doesn’t figure to have all that much range, so that puts this cabin somewhere in the Sierras to the east of Stockton. Yosemite’s to the southeast; so are clusters of little Mother Lode towns and ski resorts. Doesn’t figure he’d have taken me down that far. More likely, this place is in Amador or Calaveras or Alpine county; lots of wilderness in that section of the Sierra foothills, not too many towns, and a sparse population in winter. And the traveling time would be just about right, if my memory hasn’t distorted those long, painful hours on the road.

All right: the Sierra foothills east or northeast of Stockton. That isn’t much, but it’s something. Not having any idea of where you are is like existing in limbo, as if you were already dead.

So I’ve been listening to KHOT and its honky-tonk music. One of the songs they played was “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille,” and for some reason it brought a sudden, vivid image of Kerry. The hurt got so bad so quickly I had to move the dial to get away from it. I found another station, somebody talking, but it was so static-riddled that I could only make out random words and sentence fragments-not enough to understand much of what was being said. When I switched back to KHOT I caught most of a news broadcast. All sorts of things happening on the international and national and local scenes, but no mention of me. That’s not surprising, though. I’m yesterday’s news by now.

The radio is still on, still playing country music. “Silver Threads and Golden Needles.” Very spritely, even though the lyrics themselves aren’t too cheerful. It’s good to hear the sound of another human voice, even a singer’s over a staticky radio. The silence was beginning to get to me a little. Much more of it and I might have started talking to myself just to relieve it.

Music, and the sun shining off clean snow outside. This day won’t be too difficult to get through. Not too difficult.

There are forty-three books in the carton of paperbacks-forty-two different titles. Eleven mysteries, four by Agatha Christie, including two dog-eared copies of Sleeping Murder. Two spy novels. Five adult Westerns and four traditional Westerns and one pioneer-family saga. Two science fiction novels. Six historical romances. Three Harlequin romances. Two sex-in-the-big-city novels. Two show-business biographies. One book on organic gardening. One fad diet book. One history of jazz. And one book on how to avoid stress.

In the carton of old magazines there are a total of thirty-seven issues and seven different titles. Five issues of Vogue, all from the late seventies. Six issues of Sports Illustrated from 1985 and 1986. Twelve issues of Time, random over a five-year period beginning in 1976. Two issues of The Yachtsman, dated June and July of 1981. Eight issues of Arizona Highways, six from the late seventies and two from 1980. Three issues of Redbook, dated March, May, and August of 1986. And one issue of Better Homes and Gardens, dated January 1985.

I’ve put all of the them, books and magazines, into little separate piles along the wall next to the cot. No reason for that-I can’t reach most of them easily without sitting or lying on the cot-or for cataloguing them as I have, other than to pass the time. The first couple of days, I didn’t read anything. I tried once, the second day, but I couldn’t concentrate, could not sit still. Monday morning I forced myself to page slowly through an issue of Sports Illustrated. And Monday evening I looked at a couple of issues of Arizona Highways, until the photographs of wide-open spaces caused the loneliness and the trapped feeling to well up and I had to stop.

On Tuesday I picked out a traditional Western novel called Gunsmoke Galoot. Silly title, but it was originally published in 1940 and that was the sort of title they put on Westerns back then. I managed to get through one chapter in the morning, another in the afternoon, and still another before I went to sleep. Yesterday I was able to sit still long enough to read two chapters at a time until I finished it. I remember very little about the plot or characters-just that the writing had a nice pulpy flavor that was comforting, almost soothing.

I’ve never read Westerns much, books or pulps, though I don’t have the attitude of some people that they’re childish and inferior to most other kinds of fiction. Of the more than six thousand pulp magazines I’ve collected over the years-

My pulps. What will happen to them if I don’t get out of here? What will Kerry do with them? Sell them off? Put them in storage? And the rest of the things in my flat… books, clothing, furniture, the accumulated detritus of a man’s life? And the flat itself, what about that? The rent is paid until the first of the year; my landlord is a generous sort, he won’t start pressing for back rent until February, but what then, when he does start pressing? Will Kerry pay the rent, on the slim hope that I’ll be found alive or return on my own? or will she-

No, dammit, it’s not going to work out that way. Stop trying to look ahead! Today is what matters. The here and now.

Of the 6,000 pulps in my collection, only about 50 or so are Westerns. Dime Western, Star Western,.44 Western, Western Story. All are issues from the thirties and forties, most with stories by writers who also wrote detective stories: Frederick Brown, Norbert Davis, William R. Cox. A few have stories by Jim Bohannon, a writer who used to contribute Western detective stories to Adventure. I met him at a pulp convention in San Francisco a few years ago-the same convention at which I met Kerry and her parents, Cybil and Ivan, both former pulp writers themselves. Cybil wrote hard-boiled private-eye stories under the male pseudonym Samuel Leatherman; Ivan wrote horror stories-still writes them at novel length. It’s an appropriate field for him because he’s something of a horror himself. He hates me because he thinks I’m not good enough for Kerry, and too old for her besides; I hate him because he’s a grade-A asshole and how did I get off on Ivan Wade? The subject here is Westerns, for Christ’s sake.

I used to like Western films and serials when I was a kid. Every Saturday my ma would give me a quarter and send me off to the neighborhood movie theater, alone or with friends. That way, I wouldn’t be home when my old man… the hell with my old man, I’m not going to write about him. I liked the crime films best, the serials about detectives like Dick Tracy, superheroes like the Spider and Captain Marvel, but I would sit just as engrossed through a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or Three Mesquiteers film, or chapters of Western serials. I remember one serial, I think it was called Adventures of Red Ryder. It had an Indian boy in it-Little Beaver. I envied that kid as much as I envied the pulp private eyes when I got older. I wanted to be Little Beaver, run around having exciting adventures, wear a headband with a feather in it, Jesus that film made an impression on me. I must have been eight at the time, maybe nine. Little Beaver…

Now I seem to have drifted into childhood reminiscences. What the hell is the point in that? Or in wasting any more paper on the subject of Westerns? It may pass the time but it doesn’t seem to be doing me much good otherwise. Besides, my fingers are starting to cramp up.

Station KHOT has faded out again and I should try to tune it back in. Then something to eat, and a chapter or two of another paperback, and then maybe I’ll wash out my shirt and underwear. They’re starting to smell, and with the sun out it’s not as cold in here as it has been; I can wrap myself in one of the blankets while the clothing dries in front of the heater.

I wish I could shave, too. My beard is growing out and it itches. But there’s nothing I can use for a razor, except maybe a can lid and that would cut hell out of my skin. I’ll just have to endure the discomfort until my facial hair gets long enough and the itching stops.

Tuna, crackers, and some Oreo cookies for lunch-a regular feast. But I’ve been on short rations from the first, and I’ve got to stay on them just in case. I’ve even taken to reusing one tea bag three and four times, and making coffee with just half a teaspoonful of instant.

Clouds in the sky now. The sun is hidden and it won’t be long before it sets. There are long shadows, night shadows, on the drifted snow outside. I can see other shadows in the trees-crouching in the trees like animals, predators hiding there waiting for nightfall.

Cold in here again. And wouldn’t you know it, my shirt and underwear still aren’t dry.

The Sixth Day

No more sun. Heavy clouds instead, gunmetal gray and veined with a kind of gangrenous black. Ugly clouds. Fat, bloated clouds full of rain. Break open pretty soon, dump rain like gray piss on the rest of the day.

I can’t keep still. Cold in here, the air smells of rain even in here, I need to move around. I’m not going to write any more, pointless to keep writing crap like this.

Gray piss all over the rest of the day.

The Seventh Day

Yesterday was bad, the worst since I’ve been here, and today doesn’t look much better. More dark clouds, more rain-it hasn’t stopped raining since yesterday noon.

I’m still edgy, depressed. It’s getting to me, all of it, the weather, the chain and the leg iron, the short rations, the staticky radio, all of it, and I can’t seem to break the mood. Dangerous frame of mind, I know it is, I know I’ve got to snap out of it, but how? How? I did an hour’s worth of nonstop exercises this morning, then paced and paced and paced until I was fatigued, but the workout didn’t seem to have any effect on me mentally. I don’t even want to eat. My belly is screaming for food but the thought of food makes my throat close up. I’ve got to eat, though. Got to keep my strength up.

Frigging weather. Why doesn’t it stop raining?

I keep wondering if he’ll be back.

Nearly a week now since he left. And he said he wouldn’t come again until he was sure I was dead. But will he be able to stay away that long? The whole purpose of this prison is to make me suffer, right? A man who hates that deeply, who craves revenge that much-wouldn’t he want to keep tabs on his victim, get a firsthand look at some of the suffering? Seems likely he would. He’d have to have tremendous will power not to. And wouldn’t he want to make sure I hadn’t found some way to get free, no matter how escape-proof he thinks this place is? If I were him I wouldn’t be able to sleep night after night for as long as four months if there was even the remotest chance of my prisoner getting loose, coming after me.

But I could never be a man like him, so how can I know what goes on in a mind like his? Maybe he’s completely satisfied that there’s no way for me to escape. And maybe just the thought of my suffering is enough for him.

Still. Still, there’s a chance he’ll come back. I want him to, because then I might be able to gull him into believing I’m sick, catch him off guard that way. He wasn’t careless before, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be maneuvered into making a mistake. Oh yes, I want him to come back, I want him to make a mistake, I want to get my hands on him.

I want to kill him.

Only one other person I’ve felt that way about. Man named Emerson who hired a gunman to take out Eberhardt a few years ago. I happened to be with Eb at his house when the gunman showed up and both of us got shot, Eberhardt so seriously that he almost died. I tracked Emerson down with every intention of canceling his ticket-only he was dead when I caught up with him, dead of a freak accident, and it came as a relief because I didn’t have to put myself to the test after all, find out if I really was capable of cold-blooded murder when the moment of truth arrived. Now, looking back on that time, I know I would not have been able to kill Emerson. All my life I’ve lived and worked within the law. And I’ve seen too much torn and bleeding flesh, too much death and dying, to want to inflict that kind of indecency on another human being.

But this is different. What the whisperer has done to me isn’t human; he isn’t human. He’s a dangerous animal, a mad dog. And I can kill a mad dog-I know that just as surely as I know I wouldn’t have been able to destroy Emerson.

Every man has his price in murder, just as he has his price in wealth or power or love. When the mad dog locked me in these chains we both found mine.

The Tenth Day

My daily routine is well established now, some of it by choice and some of it dictated by the contents and confines of my cell.

Wake up around seven, get up immediately. To the window first, for a look at the new day. Passable weather this morning: high, broken overcast, streaks and wedges of blue here and there. The sun hasn’t appeared yet; I keep hoping it will before the day ends. But at least there haven’t been any more rainstorms. The one over the weekend lasted two full days, broke at last on Sunday afternoon-and the worst of my depression broke with it. Odd how the weather can affect your mood so profoundly. I can tolerate overcast and snow flurries, I’ve discovered, but I dread long periods of rain. And I yearn for the sun. In a way I’ve become a sun-worshiper: I need it to help me survive.

Back near the cot for my morning exercises. Sit-ups first; I can do a set of fifty now, where I could do only twenty-five when I started. Then leg pulls and stretches, easy enough with my right leg, damned difficult with my left because of the leg iron and the chain. Then push-ups, twenty or so, then on my feet for knee bends, toe touches, several other twists and stretches and jerks that I can’t name because I’ve more or less made them up myself. I can do an hour’s worth of exercises now without fatigue. Tomorrow I’ll increase the time by fifteen minutes. And keep increasing it in fifteen-minute increments whenever I feel I’m ready. Eventually, I should be able to use up most of the morning in exercising, and that will be good because your mind shuts down when you’re making physical demands on your body. Sweat and strain equal a period of relative peace.

Drag the chain into the bathroom, use the toilet, then strip to the waist, brush my teeth and wash my face, and take a quick sponge bath with the dampened cloth. Avoid looking into the cracked mirror over the sink; I’ve only glanced at my reflection once, two days ago, and that was plenty. The face itself is unpleasant enough, with its coating of straggly gray whiskers and its haggard aspect. But the eyes… I’m afraid to look into my own eyes, for fear of what I might see reflected there.

Put on shirt and coats, go get the coffeepot and fill it with water and then take it back out and put it on the hot plate. Plug in the hot plate. Spoon coffee into the mug (coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, tea at night). Draw an X through the day’s date on the calendar. Switch on the heater, just for a few minutes, to take some of the chill out of the room: I’ll be feeling cold again because my body has cooled after the morning workout. Find something on the shelves to eat for breakfast; open the can and set it aside. By this time the water should be boiling. Make the coffee, take the cup to the cot and sit down with it. Turn on the radio, try to bring in KHOT-the only station I seem to get on the radio. The last few days it hasn’t come in for more than thirty seconds at a time, but this morning I got one twenty-minute stretch of golden oldies like “Orange Blossom Special” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” songs I’m beginning to like in spite of myself, and several other stretches of five to ten minutes each. Plus part of a news broadcast that told me a bunch of things, none of which I particularly wanted to hear (and nothing about me, of course). I’ve always been an ostrich when it comes to the daily news. For too long my life has been overrun with pain and suffering and ugliness; I don’t need any more of it in black and white, or in bright colors with some newscaster speaking solemnly in a voice-over-the same newscaster who will be joking it up with a weatherman or a sportscaster two minutes later. So I didn’t listen to much of the radio newscast, paid the most attention to a sports update that told me the Forty-niners won last Sunday. Let’s hear it for the Forty-niners.

When I’ve finished the coffee, return to the hot plate and make another half cup. Then pour my breakfast into the saucepan and heat that. Eat breakfast on the cot, washed down with my second cup of coffee. Wash out the saucepan and the plate afterward, put them back on the top shelf next to the hotplate.

Pace for a while, twenty minutes to half an hour, as long as I can stand it.

Sit or lie on the cot and read a chapter or two or three of one of the paperbacks. I’m partway through an unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra now, as a change of pace from the fiction. Lurid stuff, plenty of sex, lots of glitter and glamour and big money, all sorts of innuendo on a variety of fronts. All I knew about Sinatra before I started this book was that he was a crooner and a decent actor and a paisan who may or may not have a few underworld connections. Now I know enough to make me care even less about him than I did before.

Write a little, as I’m doing now. If I happen to feel like writing, that is. I haven’t the past two days, so I didn’t bother; there was just nothing I cared to set down on paper. Today I felt like picking up a pen again and I seem to be going on at some length. Not for any therapeutic reason… or maybe it is therapy, in a way, the kind that helps you keep things in perspective by confronting your thoughts, writing them out. But I don’t want to force it. Does it matter if I keep a record of every single day I’m here? I don’t see how it can.

Work on the wall for a while. I started doing that four days ago, during the rainstorm-bent and flattened one of the soup cans at the top and in the middle to fit my hand, so that it resembles a kind of scraping tool, and then gouged and rubbed and scraped at the wood around the ringbolt. I’ve been doing that every day since, for an hour or so at a time, even though it hasn’t done much damage to the log and I really don’t expect to get out of here that way. This is a kind of therapy, too, a way of reinforcing my resolve not to give up.

Pace some more, back and forth, forth and back, dragging that goddamn chain (I don’t listen any more to the slithering, clanking sound it makes-I’ve found I can shut my ears to it if I try hard enough). Do that until I feel tired enough to sleep for an hour or two. Afternoon naps are good for you, particularly when you get up around my age. Ask any doctor, ask Dear Abby, that’s what they all say.

After the nap, read another chapter or two in the current paperback. I might also read a chapter or two before I fall asleep, if that’s what it takes to clear my mind and make me drowsy.

Get up, put fresh water on the hot plate, make a cup of tea. No afternoon meal; just two meals a day, morning and evening, to conserve provisions.

Drink the tea while thumbing through one of the magazines, spot-reading when something catches my eye-the ads, mostly. Modern magazine advertisements can be interesting sometimes, though not as interesting as the ones in the pulps. You can find ads for the damnedest things in thirties and forties issues of Popular Detective, Flynn’s, Complete Detective, Strange Detective Mysteries, a host of others. Ads for trusses, false teeth, lonely hearts clubs, sex manuals, anatomical charts, nose adjusters to alter the shape of your schnozz, home study courses in taxidermy and how to be a detective or a secret service operative. Cures for tobacco addiction, alcohol addiction, epilepsy, rheumatism, piles, pimples, warts, stomach gas, and kidney problems. Booklets on how to patent your invention, how to stop stammering, how to analyze handwriting, how to make love potions, how to “become dangerous” and lick bullies twice your size, how to raise giant frogs for fun and profit. Hundreds more just as improbable. Somebody ought to do a book of pulp-magazine ads, reproduce the screwiest ones in their entirety. For my generation it would be more than a collection of high-camp hucksterism; it would provide instant nostalgia with each and every page.

Wash out the tea cup, put it back on the shelf. Maybe try to bring KHOT in again, maybe pace a while longer or do a few more exercises, maybe look out the window if the weather is decent, maybe work a little more on these misery pages, these burnt offerings, this indictment. Improv time. Don’t want to establish too rigid a routine here. Got to leave a little room for spontaneity, right?

By this time it should be late afternoon, getting on toward dusk. Switch on the lamp, if it isn’t on already. Switch on the heater, if it isn’t on already, because once darkness settles, no matter what the weather is like, it gets chilly in here.

Almost time for supper. Make preparations-and take time doing it, there’s no hurry, let the belly do a little begging for its evening meal. What’ll it be tonight? Corned beef hash? Very good choice, sir, very nourishing. Corned beef hash, crackers, tea, and-let’s see-how about some nice Fig Newtons for dessert? I haven’t had Fig Newtons since I was a kid, and when I was a kid I hated them. If I told my ma once I told her fifty times how much I hated Fig Newtons, and still she bought them, still she put them in my school lunch pail or on my dessert plate at home. I gave up eventually and ate them, every last one, instead of ignoring them or throwing them away. Mothers are good at making you give up, making you eat or do things they think are good for you. It’s a subtle form of mind control that, if practiced properly-and my ma was an expert at it-retains its hold on you no matter how long you live. I still hate Fig Newtons, so tonight I’m going to eat Fig Newtons, and not just because I can’t afford to waste food. If I were confronted with a package of Fig Newtons somewhere else, at any time, I would probably eat the damned things then too. The only reason I haven’t eaten them in thirty-five years is that I’ve somehow managed to avoid being confronted with them.

Eat supper while paging through another magazine. Wash the plate and cup and saucepan, put them away on the top shelf.

Read another chapter or two, sitting or lying on the cot.

Do another twenty minutes or so of exercises.

Wash my hands and face in the bathroom sink. Strip down to my underwear (if it’s not too cold to sleep in just underwear). Turn off the heater and the lamp. Wrap myself in the two blankets and lie down and will myself to sleep immediately so that I won’t lie there in the dark and think and maybe brood. I remember seeing a movie once, one of those old Topper comedies with Roland Young, and one of the players asked Eddie “Rochester” Anderson if he was afraid of the dark. He said no, he wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of what was in the dark. I laughed at the time; I’m not laughing now. I’m afraid of what’s in the dark, too-the dark recesses of my mind.

And that’s my day. This day, and with minor variations, all my yesterdays and all my tomorrows until I find a way out of here. On the one hand, the regular routine creates the sense of normalcy I need and acts as a kind of mind-numbing drug for most of my waking hours. On the other hand, the monotony and the crushing loneliness can’t help but have negative long-range effects.

Now I know exactly how hard-core convicts feel, men in solitary confinement, prisoners on death row. And yet most of them can look forward to their release; even the ones on death row have a mathematically better chance of survival than I do-lawyers working for new trials, commutations, stays. And those prisoners aren’t forced to wear leg irons and chains, not anymore. And they have other prisoners to talk to, friends and relatives who come to visit them. I have no one. No friend or loved one who has any idea of where I am, no way anyone can work effectively for my release. There is only me. My world has shrunk to this corner, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and I am its only inhabitant. For all I know, what I hear on the radio may be nothing more than a tape playing in an empty studio, and the entire human race has been eradicated and I am the last man in the world, trapped here in my little world.

But that makes no difference in how I get through my days. I haven’t lost my will to survive, nor will I lose it, and so I go on. Minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. Living on three things other than the meager rations of food.

Hope.

And my love for Kerry.

And my hatred of the mad dog who put me here.

The Twelfth Day

Christmas songs on the radio. The one playing right now is an oldie called “Silver Bells.”

Soon it will be Christmas Day…

Hazy sky and pale sunlight this morning, as though the sun were shining through milk, and KHOT’s signal is stronger than it has been on any day since my imprisonment. The song that was playing when I first switched on was “Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer.” There have been half a dozen others since: carols and old favorites by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette, novelty items like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

This isn’t the first day the station has put on Christmas songs, but it’s the first day I’ve paid any real heed to them. First day I’ve let myself think about Christmas, how close it is. And now that the thought is in my head, I can’t seem to get it out again.

Today is December 16-Wednesday, December 16.

Friday of next week is Christmas.

Only nine more shopping days left.

Usually I put Christmas shopping off to the last minute, but this year I vowed to buy my presents at least one week and preferably two weeks early. I hate crowds. And no matter where you go in the Bay Area one or two days before Christmas, the crowds are unbelievable-holiday commercialism at its most demented. So I wasn’t going to put myself through any more of that last-minute lunacy, not this year. I even had what I was going to buy people pretty much worked out. That way I wouldn’t have to wander around looking for something suitable. I could just walk into this or that store and buy the gift and walk right out again.

For Kerry I was going to get a videotape of Gone With the Wind, one of her favorite old movies. And a pair of white jade earrings she’d admired in a jewelry store window last month. And a Norwegian ski sweater, blue and white with a reindeer design, that I saw in a Saks ad and figured would look good on her. The only things I hadn’t chosen yet were her joke gift and her card. We’ve exchanged joke gifts at Christmas every year we’ve been together. Once she gave me a huge plastic jar full of popcorn; last year I gave her a gorilla mask, because she’d once confessed to a secret desire to own a gorilla suit so she could scare hell out of people who came knocking at her door. That kind of nonsense thing. As for her card, I have to be careful in what I select because she doesn’t care for the fancy or traditional or sentimental variety. She prefers something simple, or better yet, something humorous.

For Eberhardt, the only other person I regularly buy presents for, I had a new briar pipe and some decent tobacco in mind. His old pipes stink and so does the tobacco he uses, a foul black mixture he gets somewhere that looks and smells like burning horseshit.

This week Kerry and I would have gone to one of the neighborhood lots and picked out a tree. We’ve done that the last couple of years and it’s always been a special occasion. Then we’d take it back to her apartment and trim it and sit around afterward watching the tree lights and feeling Christmassy. Last year we got to feeling more than that and ended up making love on the carpet, so exuberantly that one or both of us knocked off a couple of ornaments and broke one. First time I’ve ever had that under my tree, she said.

Next week there’s her office party. I don’t like parties much but she insisted that I go last year, so I gave in reluctantly and went expecting to have a lousy time-and had as good a time as anybody else who was reasonably sober and didn’t try to grope one of the agency secretaries behind the water cooler.

And a couple of days before Christmas, we’d drive around the city and look at the decorations people put up-the flocked and tinseled trees, the manger scenes and cardboard sleighs and Santas and strings of colored lights around windows and doors and in shrubs. You can still see that kind of traditional Christmas spirit in San Francisco’s neighborhoods. It always puts the spirit in me, too, makes me think of when I was a kid and Christmas had a special aura and a special meaning… one that goes away when you grow up and that you can never recapture. Innocence is part of it; so is wonder. As an adult you can remember what it was like, you can feel nostalgia for it, but you can’t really feel it anymore. It’s like trying to touch a ghost: all vague outline and no substance.

And on Christmas Eve Kerry would cook a special dinner-she’s a very good chef-and then we’d open some of our presents. Not all of them, we always save a couple for Christmas morning. And then we’d go to bed and make love, we always make love on Christmas Eve, and when we woke up it would be Christmas and we’d open the other presents and then have breakfast and later on we’d go over to Eberhardt’s and share a holiday drink with him, exchange presents, and then we then we I don’t want to go on with this it isn’t doing me any good I can’t go on with this.

It hurts to remember, it hurts to think about Christmas and Kerry and the way things used to be and won’t be this year. No more of it. No more Christmas music, either, shut the radio off and keep it off.

It hurts too much.

The Sixteenth Day

I’m losing weight.

I came in here at about 245, belt stretched all the way out to the last hole, gut starting to bulge over all around. A couple of years ago I dropped 25 pounds eating salads and eggs and yogurt, healthy stuff like that. Got down to about 215, felt good, looked pretty good, managed to keep the weight off for almost a year. But I like beer-correction, I used to like beer-and I used to like to eat and I’ve always had sloppy habits, my food intake being no exception. So I put the 25 pounds back on over the past year, plus another 5 for bad measure. Porky Pig, that was me when I got taken out of the real world and transplanted into this one.

Now, though, the weight is coming off again. My pants are loose at the waist and I’ve taken the belt in one notch already, with another not far off. Short rations, the enforced two-meager-meals-a-day diet-that’s one reason. Exercise is another. I work out an hour and a half each morning now, another half hour each evening. If I keep up that kind of escalating program, I’ll be in tip-top shape at the end of three months. Down to about 210, muscles where all the flab used to be… maybe I’ll be strong enough to rip that goddamn ringbolt right out of the wall.

Sure. And maybe I can also huff and puff and blow the wall down.

Yessir, tip-top shape at the end of three months. Best I’ve looked in more than thirty years, since my tour in the military. Of course, I won’t look so good once the food starts running out. It won’t be muscles bulging then; it’ll be ribs and bones. And the gut won’t be flat, it’ll be concave. By the time I die of starvation, I might even be all the way down to 195 or so… first time in my adult life I’ve weighed less than 200 pounds.

The whisperer won’t even know me when he comes to bury my corpse.

The Seventeenth Day

What was it he said that last afternoon, after he made his grisly little joke about cutting off my leg with one of the can lids? Something about it being the equivalent of an animal chewing off a limb caught in a trap?

Well, here’s an interesting little problem in self-analysis: Suppose I had an axe or a hatchet. And suppose there isn’t any other way out of this prison. Would I be able to chop off my own leg in order to escape?

Never mind the fact that this cabin is isolated-more than a mile from its nearest neighbor, he said-and that I don’t know anything about tying off severed arteries. Never mind that I would surely bleed to death before I could crawl more than a couple of hundred yards. Let’s say help is close by. Let’s say that if I were able to chop my leg off, it would guarantee my survival. Would I be able to do it then? Would I have the guts and will of a fox or a wolf in the same situation?

I wonder.

I wonder just how many people would have an animal’s courage if they were confronted with that decision.

The Twentieth Day

’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the cabin, not a creature was stirring except the poor miserable bastard trapped here in chains.

The Twenty-First Day

Christmas Day.

And it’s snowing outside, it has been snowing most of the night. What we have here is a white Christmas. Outside the window it’s all picture-postcard stuff, snow falling, snow mantling the trees, the overcast high so that you can see everything in sharp relief. Any minute now, Bing Crosby will come strolling out of the woods singing “White Christmas.” Or he would if he wasn’t dead.

Now, now, let’s be cheerful here. It’s Christmas Day, it’s a white Christmas, let’s have a little good cheer.

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, la la la la. ’Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la.

All right, that’s enough for now. A man can only take so much good cheer at one time. Too big a jolt and I might OD. Spread it out, make it last, there’s a long long day of celebration ahead.

Long day ahead for Kerry, too. How will she spend it? Sitting home alone, wondering, remembering how it was with us on Christmases past? Over at Eberhardt’s-he’d have invited her, the circumstances being what they are-or with one of her lady friends?

With Jim Carpenter?

Good-looking guy, Carpenter, suave, sophisticated, very successful in the ad business, eight or nine years closer to her age than I am, wears $800 suits and still has the trim body of an athlete. Besides which, he’s one of her bosses-Bates and Carpenter, San Francisco’s fastest rising ad agency. Maybe he’s been consoling her during the past three weeks, out of the office as well as in. Providing the strong male shoulder, the reassuring words in her time of need. How soon before she goes to bed with him, if she hasn’t already? Tonight, tomorrow night, some night next week-

Hey, hey, hold it right there.

Suppose she does go to bed with Jim Carpenter? So what? You stupid jealous schmuck, why shouldn’t she crawl into the sack with him or anybody else if she needs it badly enough? You expect her to keep the home fires burning forever, on blind faith? Stay celibate until she’s a crone? For all she knows you’re dead, pal, dead and buried somewhere-she doesn’t know anything about what happened to you, for Christ’s sake. She’s hurting too, you think you’re the only one? Don’t start condemning her, blaming her for anything.

Don’t doubt her, not even for one second.

Don’t stop loving her.

Heigh-ho, better lighten the mood again. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride a one-horse open sleigh. There, that’s better. That’s the old spirit.

Wonder how Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean are getting along? Has he slept with her yet? Popped the marriage question yet? No, it’s too early for him to be thinking seriously about tying the knot, too soon after the Mysterious Disappearance of His Partner. Got to observe a decent interval of mourning, after all. But it’d be nice if they do get together eventually. She’d be good for him; Kerry was right about that. He needs a woman with both feet on the ground and something in her mind besides sex and a collection of cobwebs and dust bunnies.

Snowing harder now. Where’s old Bing? Or don’t they dream of white Christmases where he is now?

Frosty, the snowman, was a hap-hap-happy soul, dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee dee dee.

Well, what have we here? Can it be a parade of all my Christmases past, like ghosts lining up for review? Yes, indeed. Let’s see, these were joyous, and these were not so joyous, and this little group over here sucked out loud. None even close to this one, though. No presents on this Christmas; no fancy dinner, no wassail, no lovemaking, no caroling, no candlelight services at Mission Dolores to celebrate the birth of the Saviour. Instead we have tea and canned beef stew and canned spinach and Triscuits, we have snow and a Christmas-card view through a rimed window (who needs cards when you’ve got the real thing), we have unrelieved static in place of traditional music, and we have chains in lieu of colored lights and tinsel. But hey, it’s still Christmas, right? Sure it is. It’s still the greatest holiday of them all.

Merry Christmas, Kerry.

Merry Christmas, Eb.

Merry Christmas, Bobbie Jean.

Merry Christmas, you whispering mad dog son of a bitch.

Peace on earth, good will to men.

The Twenty-Fifth Day

I’ve been sick the past three days. Bad cold or flu, maybe even a touch of pneumonia. Fever, chills, aching in all my joints, weakness, nausea. I couldn’t do much of anything except lie on the cot, swaddled in my overcoat and both blankets, the heater turned all the way up, and drift in and out of sleep and a kind of delirium. Made myself get up once the first day to use the bathroom, fell down on the way back and couldn’t stand up, could not stand up, and had to crawl the rest of the way to the cot. Vomited on the floor later on because I was too weak even to try for the bathroom. Didn’t eat anything the first day, took a little soup and some tea the second morning that I threw back up, took more soup and tea the second night that stayed down. Yesterday I managed to hold solid food in my stomach again-about half a can of macaroni and cheese.

Once, during the worst of it, I dreamed that I was outside the cabin, running through the snowdrifts, laughing, free, and woke up feeling so shattered to find myself still shackled that I had to fight to keep from breaking down. Dreamed another time that Kerry and I were in bed, her bed, lying with our arms around each other after making love, and then she got up and went away and didn’t come back, didn’t come back, didn’t come back, and I searched everywhere for her but she was gone and I knew I would never see her again. That dream nearly unmanned me too.

Bad, very bad, those three days. The worst so far.

But whatever virus had hold of me, it seems to have weakened and let go. I woke up drenched in sweat and feeling that heavy, different kind of body ache that tells you a fever has finally broken and your body is rebuilding its defenses. Woke up feeling hungry, too, always a good sign. I was able to get up and move around, go through most of my morning routine-everything but the exercises-without too much difficulty. I ate a whole can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, a whole can of corn, a whole can of peaches in heavy, syrup. No sense in conserving rations today or tomorrow. I’ve got to regain my strength, guard against a relapse. Another viral bout like this one, at my age and with poor nourishment and no medication of any kind, and I might not survive it.

I’ve got to make a decision about the heater. Keep it on most of today, and run the risk of those old coils burning out from overuse? Or shut it off and keep it off until after dark, when the cold gets even worse, and run the risk of more sickness? It’ll be bitter cold in here without it; snowing again today, and the temperature must be well below freezing outside. But those coils have begun to ping loudly every now and then, as if in protest, and I’m afraid they won’t last with continuous use. Twice yesterday I shut the thing off for ten to fifteen minutes when the pinging got loud, and the coils seemed all right again when I switched it back on. The periods between the loud pings are decreasing, though… starting to do it again right now. It could give out any time.

All right, then, I have to shut it down for at least part of today. The risk of pneumonia isn’t as great as the risk of freezing to death, which could happen to me if the heater quits working. The coats and blankets, the hot coffee and tea just aren’t enough protection.

This afternoon I read over the pages I wrote on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And they made me uneasy, they scared me more than a little.

Rambling stuff, only half coherent, like the scribblings of a borderline lunatic. I’ve been trying to tell myself it was the virus already at work inside me, creating a sort of waking delirium, but that won’t wash. The truth is, I was a little crazy those two days. No longer in complete control.

There’s an explanation for it. The loneliness, the pain, missing Kerry, missing normalcy, a buildup of self-pity-all of that magnified by the holidays. That’s why, statistically, there are more suicides during the Christmas season than at any other time of the year. Still, I can’t use that as an excuse. I am not a statistic, I am not just anyone-I’m me. If I give in to the pressure I’ll lose control again, and if that happens I might not be able to regain it. And then I wouldn’t be me any longer, would I?

The Twenty-Ninth Day

I saw a deer this morning while I was standing at the window looking at the new day-the first living thing I’ve seen in four weeks.

It came down out of the trees higher up-just movement at first, flashes of dark brown and white until it reached level ground. Then, slowly, it ventured out into the open, and I saw that it was a big, white-tailed, six-point buck. His eye had picked out a patch of grass near the shed, where the thin snowpack has melted away. The weather has been sunny the past two days, and warm enough to turn the snow slushy, to reveal patches of earth in places where there is no shade.

I watched the buck nibble at the grass. Every now and then he would raise his head, keen the air, as if aware that he was being watched. Once he seemed to look straight at me and I stood very still, even though I was pretty sure he couldn’t see me behind the window glass. He couldn’t smell me, in any case, so he wasn’t afraid. He stayed there feeding for fifteen minutes or so, and I stood motionless all that time, watching him.

God, he was a beautiful animal. How can anyone kill an animal like that, shoot it down for sport? I don’t care what arguments hunters use, it isn’t right to take an innocent life like that, any innocent life, unless there is no other choice-and then it should be done with the most profound regret. Life, most life, is too precious. That deer’s was so precious to me this morning that I felt an aching sense of loss when he finally finished feeding, turned, bounded away into the trees, and was gone from my life, probably forever.

But he left me with something, too: fresh hope. For one thing, he is a symbol of freedom. For another thing, he came on the second day of the new year, and what is a new year but a new beginning?

An omen, then. A symbol and an omen.

I am going to survive this winter just as that deer will survive it. I know that now. I have no doubt of it.

The Thirty-First Day

The radio has quit working. No sound, not even a hum, when I switched it on this morning. I thought it was the batteries at first and put in the replacement set, but it still doesn’t work. Must be a blown transistor or tube or something.

It’s not as much of a loss as it might have been two or three weeks ago. I can get by without it now. If I need conversation or music in here, I’ll create it myself.

After all, don’t psychologists say that talking to yourself is one way of validating your own existence, reassuring yourself that you’re still alive and kicking?

The Thirty-Fourth Day

Thought for the day:

For weeks before all of this happened, ever since that ugly case involving the Purcell family, I contemplated retirement. Talked it over with Kerry, and she was all for it-provided, she said, I was sure I wouldn’t grow bored and discontented. Not me, I said. Detective work is no longer the be-all and end-all of my life, I said. I can find plenty of things to do, I said, plenty of ways to occupy my time. Bored? Discontented? No way.

Well, bullshit.

What is this if not a kind of forced retirement? This filling up of my days with endless routine, marking time until the Grim Reaper shows up? No purpose in my existence here other than survival; no purpose in retirement, either, other than survival of a somewhat less painful variety. I’m miserable now, confined to this room by chains I can see, feel, hear slithering along the floor whenever I move. If I were home, retired, rattling around my empty flat all day, wouldn’t I be just as miserable in the long run? And just as chained? Invisible chains, sure, much longer than this one and allowing me much more freedom of movement, but still confining in their own way?

I’m a detective, dammit. That is not only what I am, it’s who I am. I hate the business, I hate the things I see, the people I have to deal with, the actions I’m sometimes forced to take. But hey, who says you have to love your job to be good at it, to take satisfaction from it, to need it to give meaning and fulfillment to your life? I’d wither up and die in the chains of retirement, just as I’ll wither up and die if I don’t escape from these chains. I know that now. I should have known it all along.

When I get out of here, I am not going to retire. I am going straight back into harness. Find the mad dog first, and then resume my duties at the agency and keep right on working until, God willing, I die in bed at the age of ninety after successfully completing one last case.

Retirement is hell, so to hell with retirement.

The Thirty-Sixth Day

The stench in here is bad and getting worse by the day. Garbage is part of it, but the worst part of it is me.

I’ve filled up two of the cardboard cartons with empty cans and cookie and cracker wrappers. At first I didn’t bother to rinse out the cans before I dumped them into the cartons; but then the food remnants began to rot and smell, and I had to spend part of a day cleaning them out with soapy water. Now I rinse each can thoroughly as I use it. Still, the accumulation of them and of the microscopic food particles that I wasn’t able to wash away have gradually built up a sour odor. The odor in one of the cartons got so bad that I pushed it out into the middle of the room, to the full extension of the chain, and then skidded it over to the far side of the room. If this were spring or summer, I would have ants and maybe mice and rats to deal with on top of everything else.

But the real problem is my body odor and my clothing and the two blankets. Washing out my shirt and underwear and socks once a week, using nothing but a bar of hand soap, doesn’t do much to get rid of the soaked-in sweat smell. Sponge baths don’t do much to cleanse my body, either. I’m afraid to wash my hair, matted and greasy as it is, because of the threat of another bad cold, of pneumonia. And there’s nothing I can do about the blankets or the cot or my coats or my trousers.

All of this is as much an indignity as the rest of it. I’ve been turned into a filthy, rank-smelling bum-I have been made unclean.

I hate him for that, too. As if I needed any more fuel to keep the hate burning high and hot, like a fire on the edge of my soul.

The Thirty-Ninth Day

I’ve given up scraping at the wall around the ringbolt with flattened cans and the edges of can lids. It’s wasted effort, pointless and frustrating and psychologically debilitating. I am not going to escape that way. In all this time I’ve managed to scrape a circular furrow around the bolt no more than an eighth of an inch deep. At this rate it would take me a year, maybe two, to work through the log to the outside. And I’m more convinced than ever that I would need to work all the way through in order to free the bolt. He didn’t just imbed it in the log; no, he drilled a hole straight through to the outside, fitted the bolt into the hole, and then fastened it in place with a locking plate of some kind. I’ve never doubted his intelligence, his cunning, his thoroughness. It would be a mistake to doubt them now.

What I can and still do doubt is his ability to foresee and effectively block every conceivable method of escape. There is something he overlooked, something I’m overlooking. There has to be. I’ve believed that all along and I’ll keep believing it until I find the weak link in the chain… metaphorically if not literally.

The Forty-Third Day

Funny, but old memories seem to come bobbing up to the surface lately. Things I haven’t thought about in years, that were lodged and forgotten in the depths of my mind, most of them from my youth-and I don’t understand why, here and now, after all the days in this place.

The house where I grew up, for instance. It was in the Outer Mission, in a little Italian working-class enclave near the Daly City line. Big rambling thing, built in the twenties, part wood frame and part stucco, with a fenced-in rear yard that had a walnut tree in its exact center. I used to climb the tree when I was a kid, sometimes to pick walnuts when they were in season, sometimes just to sit and think or read. Drove my ma crazy until she decided I was old enough not to break a leg climbing in or out; then she quit yelling at me to put my feet on the ground and keep them there.

That memory of my ma, and others too. She was a big, sweet-faced woman, hiding a load of pain and sadness under a jovial exterior. My old man was one reason for the pain and sadness. My sister Nina was another: Nina died of rheumatic fever at the age of five. I don’t remember much about her, except that she had black hair and black eyes and she was very thin; I was only eight when she died. Ma couldn’t have any other children and so she lavished all her maternal love on me. I was lucky in that respect. If she’d been anything like my old man, the whole shape of my life might have been different.

She loved to cook, as did most Italian women of her generation. She would spend hours in the kitchen, making Ligurian dishes from her native Genoa. Focaccia alla salvia, torta pasqualina, trenette col pesto, trippa con il sugo di tocco, burrida, tomaxelle, cima alla Genovese, dozens more. Lord, the aromas that would fill the house from her kitchen! Garlic, spices, simmering sauces, frying meats, baking breads and cakes and gnocchi e canditti. I can close my eyes now, even here in this place, and it’s as if I’m back in that big house surrounded by all those succulent smells.

There was one Sunday when I was twelve or thirteen-a feast to celebrate the wedding of one of my cousins. It was a warm day and we ate in the backyard, on tables covered with white linen cloths, and there was accordion music-Ma’s brother was a professional accordion player-and dancing, and homemade dago red and grappa from another brother’s ranch in Novato. It was a special occasion so I was allowed to drink a glass of strong red wine with the meal, and combined with the sun’s heat it made me woozy. Some of the guests and relatives laughed, my old man loudest of all, but Ma wasn’t one of them. She never laughed at me. She never laughed at anyone.

She never laughed much at all.

Big woman from Genoa. Big sad loving woman who traded the old world for a new one, and made the best of a life she didn’t deserve. She was exactly as I remember her-not a saint, no, but good. Down deep where it counts, as good as anyone God ever made.

The Forty-Fifth Day

He was here last night!

He came back, he was here, he was right here in this room watching me while I slept!

When I woke up and saw one of the doors across the room standing partway open, saw in front of it the straight-backed chair he’d sat in that first night, I thought I was hallucinating. I came up off the cot with chills racking me, scrubbing at my eyes, staring. But the chair stayed where it was, the door stayed open, the son of a bitch was here.

Rage boiled up, a black savage rage, and I lost control for a time… I don’t know how long. I shouted curses, I ripped at the chain until my hands started to bleed. I hurled empty cans from the garbage carton at the chair and the open door. Then, all at once, the wildness was gone and I was down on all fours, spent, my breath rasping out in little puffs of vapor like smoke from the fire inside.

When I could stand again I went to the window, looked out. But it was an act of reflex: I knew there would be nothing to see, nothing to alter the same old view. And there wasn’t: He was long gone.

He must have come in the small hours, when he could be reasonably sure that I would be asleep. Left his car some distance down the road so the sound of the engine wouldn’t carry and wake me up. Picked last night because the weather was clear and there was a full moon, bright and silvery-it was the last thing I saw through the window before I slept. Made his way around on the other side of the cabin, all stealth and cunning, and let himself in through a window or another outside door. Eased that inner door open, eased the chair through, stood or sat there watching me sleep, the moonlight spilling in and making every detail clear to him. Enjoying what he saw… oh, he enjoyed every fucking minute of it, you can bet on that.

I knew he couldn’t stay away. Knew he’d come back at least once to check up on his handiwork. And I should have known it would be this way, skulking around in the night, watching me in the night and then making sure I’d realize it when I woke up and he was already gone. Far more satisfaction for him that way than facing me, talking to me, giving me even a few minutes of human contact. And far more torment for me.

How long was he here? Five minutes, ten, twenty, thirty? Over there in the dark, watching, something evil in the dark watching and smiling and feeding on what he saw like some kind of vampire… Jesus, every time I think of it it makes my skin crawl, it adds fresh fuel to my hatred and my longing to destroy him. I’ve never felt this kind of bloodlust before, nothing even remotely like it. It’s an ugly and frightening thing, like an alien substance alive and growing in my body. And yet it’s also sustaining somehow-a force I can use to help shore up my faith and my resolve.

Setting all this down on paper has calmed me, put me back in control. But I don’t think I can write much longer. The palm of my right hand is cut and abraded from the chain, and holding the pen, pressing down with the point, is painful. There’s pain in my left heel, too, where the goddamn leg iron slipped down during my frenzy and dug into the flesh.

Enough for now. I better wash out all the cuts as a precaution against infection.

The leg iron.

The leg iron!

The Forty-Sixth Day

I’ve found the flaw in his plan, the weak spot in his “escapeproof” prison. There’s a way out of here, just as I believed all along-and all along it has been right here in front of me, I have been staring at it day after day, I have been carrying it with me every time I move.

The leg iron.

It was when I went into the bathroom yesterday to wash out the cuts that the realization came to me. I was sitting on the floor, working on the gouge in my heel with the wet washcloth, pushing the leg iron up out of the way with my left hand… and then I saw, really saw, what I was doing.

The leg iron had slipped down off my calf. In the beginning it had been tight around the calf, then a little less tight, and a little less tight, and yesterday, for the first time, it had slipped all the way down. I must have lost at least 20 pounds in the past six weeks, maybe as much as 25. And I’d been heavy when he brought me here, 245 or better-Kerry had been after me to start dieting again. I must be down around 220 now. My pants are baggy, my shirt hangs on me like a scarecrow’s: flattening gut, tightening thighs, thinning calves. I always did have big legs, and when I put on weight the fat tends to deposit there as well as around my middle. Go on a lengthy diet and one of the first places the weight loss is visible is in my legs.

Sitting there on the floor I straightened out my left leg and foot so that the heel pulled back in against the ankle; then I worked the iron down as far as it would go. Got the lower edge over the gouge in my heel, over the heel itself by a fraction of an inch until the upper edge of the iron bit hard into the flesh of my instep. A little of the wildness came back into me then, and I had to fight myself to keep from trying to force the iron any farther. The worse thing I can do right now is to cut up my foot; cuts might get infected, the foot might swell.

I thought then of slicking it with soap, to make the metal slide more easily over the flesh. But it didn’t help, not yet anyway: I still couldn’t get the iron down any farther on my instep.

I’ve got to be patient. I can afford to be patient now that I’ve found the means of escape. I’ll lose more weight; with the amount of food I’m eating and the daily exercise program, I can’t help but lose more weight. All I need is another fraction of an inch off my foot. People don’t think of losing weight off their feet but it happens. Shed enough poundage, you’ll see the difference on just about every part of your body, feet included. I know, I’ve been there-fat and not fat, fat and not fat, a vicious cycle all my adult life.

Another month to six weeks should do it. Six weeks maximum. The remaining provisions will hold out that long, I’ll see to that. And I’ll hold out too if I’m careful, don’t overdo anything, don’t cut up my foot, don’t catch pneumonia. Patient and careful. The day will come. That’s the only way to look at it.

The day will come when I’ll be free again.

The Fifty-Second Day

Two hours of calisthenics in the morning, one hour in the afternoon, another hour before I go to sleep at night. If I’d tried to keep up that kind of schedule before my world shrank to this stinking prison, I would have put a killing strain on my heart. But I’ve eased into it gradually, and I pace myself through each session, and with the absence of close to thirty pounds (it must be close to thirty by now), there doesn’t seem to be much strain at all. I’m plenty tired by the time I crawl under the blankets, and I sleep quickly and deeply, but it isn’t the sleep of exhaustion.

The muscles in my arms, shoulders, and legs have become visible; my belly is almost flat. I’m turning into… what’s the expression these days? Hunk? That’s it: I’m turning into a hunk. Wait until Kerry sees me. She won’t recognize me.

I won’t recognize myself, either. Because I still haven’t looked in that cracked mirror in the bathroom. And I won’t-I will not look in a mirror again until I get out of this place. I wouldn’t know the gaunt, bearded stranger in the glass, and I don’t want to know him. He isn’t me; he’s a stand-in, a surrogate, an impostor. The real me is waiting down inside-he hasn’t gone anywhere, he’s just in a temporary state of suspended animation-and once I’m away from here he’ll come out again. And when I finally do look in a mirror I’ll see him, not the stranger with the beard and the terrible eyes.

Does that make any sense? I don’t know. I don’t care much right now.

Using soap for grease, I can work the iron the tiniest bit farther over my heel and down along my instep. And that’s all that matters.

The Fifty-Ninth Day

Another tiny bit closer to freedom. Almost half the leg iron will slip over my heel now before the lower edge binds hard into the instep.

I have to force myself to eat two full meals a day; have had to for the past week. There is a part of me, a kind of imp of the perverse that lives in all of us, that keeps insisting I eat tiny portions or nothing at all, because that way I’ll lose weight even faster. Yes, I keep telling the imp, and maybe then I’d die of malnutrition before I could get the iron all the way off. Or at least make myself too weak and sick to walk away from this cabin once I get free of the shackles. It’s still winter outside, there are still occasional snow flurries, and there is snow on the ground and it is still damned cold. I can’t travel on foot in freezing weather with only a topcoat for warmth and protection. I’d collapse before I made half a mile; I would probably die of exposure.

No, I must eat regular good-sized meals to keep my strength up. The weight is coming off slowly, naturally; there’s no sense in trying to accelerate the process. Patience. Patience and care.

What I have to concentrate on now is the future, what happens after I get out of here and out of these mountains. For the first time since he chained me here, I have to start looking ahead, start making plans.

I need to concentrate on him, too. How can I find him unless I have some clue to who he is, where he might be? And the key to that may well be the thirteen weeks’ supply of provisions.

Why thirteen? I’ve got to keep asking myself that question until I come up with the answer.

What is the significance of thirteen?

The Sixty-Fifth Day

More old memories crowding up to the surface, unbidden and this time unwanted. Unpleasant memories of my old man, of the way he lived and the way he died.

I hated him, growing up, with as much intensity as I loved my ma. And after his death I forgot him, shut him out of my mind and my life so completely that now, forty years later, I can’t dredge up even the slightest image of him. Just vague impressions-gestures, random actions, shouted words. And all of those distasteful.

I was seventeen when he died. Once he was buried I said good-bye to Ma and I joined the army and went away to fight in the South Pacific, in another of this century’s collection of wars. When I came home again, after four long hard years, no scars on my body but the first of many on my psyche, Ma and I never once talked about him, not to each other and not in each other’s hearing. Neither of us mentioned his name until the day Ma died, five years after my return. Then, on her deathbed, she said with some of her last words, “Try to forgive him,” and I said I would, for her sake, but I couldn’t. And I never have.

He was a drunk, my old man. That was his worst sin because it was the root of all his others. He was all right when he was sober: a little gruff, a little cold and distant, but you could deal with him on a more or less reasonable basis. It was a different story when he had liquor in him. He became abusive, he slapped Ma around and he slapped me around until I got old enough and big enough to put a stop to it. He gambled heavily-low-ball poker, horses, boxing matches. He lost job after job-he worked on the docks, mostly, and was in the middle of the “Bloody Thursday” clash between police and striking longshoremen in 1934-until finally no one would hire him anymore, not even relatives. He still brought home money now and then, sometimes in large amounts, but he wouldn’t say where he’d got it, and when that happened he and Ma would fight and then he would start drinking and storm out of the house and stay away for two or three days. I found out later that he was mixed up in some sort of waterfront black-market operation. But I didn’t tell anyone, least of all Ma; it would have hurt her even more, put even more lines in her round Italian face and even more pounds on her round Italian body. (He drank to excess; she ate to excess for solace and escape. When she died, prematurely, at the age of fifty-seven, she weighed 247 pounds.) I should have confronted the old man about his black-market ties, but I didn’t do that either. I wish I had. Sitting here thinking about him now, after all these years, with the bitterness undiminished by time, I wish to Christ I’d stood right in his face and told him what a son of a bitch he was.

It was the booze that killed him. He was drinking a fifth and more of whiskey a day in the last couple of years of his life, and it ate like acid through his liver and put him in the hospital and killed him within a week of his admission. I went to see him at San Francisco General just once, at Ma’s insistence. The impression I have of him then is of someone small and wasted and old, even though he was only fifty. I didn’t say anything to him-he was partially sedated at the time-and I only stayed a minute or so. Ma stayed a long time. She went every day and stayed a long time and then came home and fixed huge meals and ate most of the food herself. There wasn’t anything I could do for her. I spent most of that week, that deathwatch, in my room reading pulp magazines and army enlistment brochures and vowing to myself that I would not be like my old man, I would not, I would not drink whiskey and I would not steal and cheat and I would not hurt the people who were close to me.

I’ve lived up to those vows the best way I know how. I don’t drink whiskey, I’m reasonably honest, I don’t willingly inflict pain on those I care about or on any decent human being. Whatever else I am, whatever my shortcomings, I am not my old man’s son.

Sudden insight, one I’ve never had before: He made me the way I am today. In his own uncaring, selfish, drunken way, my old man made me exactly the kind of person I grew up to be.

The Seventy-First Day

The heater died this morning.

I turned it on to low as I always do, to let it warm up slowly, and right away it started to make a series of loud pinging and thumping noises. I watched it for a few seconds, went to shut it down again-and there was a banging, a flash with sparks in it, and the thing died. I switched it off, let it cool for an hour, and switched it back on. Nothing. Dead as hell.

And outside it’s snowing again and the temperature must be ten below zero. Exercising kept me warm for a while, but once my body cooled down I had to fold myself up in one of the blankets and drink cup after cup of hot coffee until it was time for the next set of exercises. I’ll have to keep wearing the blanket and drinking too much coffee and tea every day from now until I’m free. Eat more and exercise more, too, to maintain my body heat. The threat of pneumonia, of freezing to death, is twice as severe now, with all the life gone out of the heater and its corpse lying over there bent and broken against the fireplace, where I hurled it in a moment of rage and frustration.

But it can’t be much longer until I’m able to work that leg iron all the way over my heel and off. Another couple of weeks at the outside. I can stay healthy that long… I’ve got to stay healthy that long. I won’t let that frigging heater finish me when I’m this close to freedom.

The Seventy-Fifth Day

Five straight days of snow and chill moaning winds. Drifts piling up outside, deep enough to cover the lower third of the shed. Meat-locker cold in here-so intense three nights ago that I had to flatten out one of the cardboard cartons and wrap it around my body under my clothing. The instant coffee is almost gone, and there is only half a package of tea bags left. At least I don’t have to worry about the pipes freezing and cutting off my water supply: If that were possible it would have happened by now. Whoever plumbed this place must have used copper piping.

Sniffles in the morning, chronic runny nose, but no major symptoms of illness. So far.

I can get the leg iron, now, to within half an inch of coming off. Frustrating, that last agonizing half inch, but I just don’t dare try to force it any farther. I must have lost nearly thirty-five pounds but I still need to shed another five or so. God, how long to do that? Another ten days to two weeks at the most. I don’t think I can stand the waiting any longer than that.

The Eightieth Day

Sunshine, the first in more than two weeks. And the temperature has climbed a good fifteen degrees in the past twenty-four hours.

Thank Christ.

The Eighty-Fourth Day

Out of coffee. Out of crackers and cookies and most other things. Enough provisions left to last about three more weeks-more than the thirteen he planned.

Thirteen, thirteen. That damned number haunts me, and yet its meaning continues to elude me.

But I’ll be gone from here before the food runs out. Long before. Soon. Any day now. Every time I sit down to try removing the leg iron again, I start to sweat and tremble with anticipation. Still can’t quite do it. Almost, but not quite yet.

The Eighty-Seventh Day

So close…

The Eighty-Ninth Day

It isn’t thirteen years or thirteen weeks, it’s thirteen days. That’s the significance in the number, that has to be what this is all about. Why didn’t I realize it before this? Blocked out the details, that’s why, the same way I blocked out the image of my old man.

Thirteen days in April, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-two. Thirteen long, difficult days. But if that’s it-and it must be because I just don’t see how it can be anything else-I still don’t know who he is. Or the exact nature of his motive. Or why he would wait all this time, nearly sixteen years, to take his revenge.

He wasn’t someone directly connected with what happened back then; I’d remember him now if he was. And yet I must have met him, we must have had some kind of contact, else why the disguising of his voice, why the ski mask to keep me from seeing his face? A relative or friend of Jackie Timmons, as crazy as that possibility is?

A relative or friend of the sixteen-year-old boy I killed?

The Ninetieth Day

FREE!