Hellbound Hearts (38 page)

Alone, you walk down the hill, automatically calculating the
number of graves in each of the family plots you pass. You are good with numbers. You always have been. Counting rescued you as a child, and became your vocation as an adult. Numbers provide order to chaos. Comfort. And you have calculated correctly—you will be the last one standing. But that is as it should be. You are responsible for all of this, for everything that has happened and will happen. It is you who guided Jeremy's hands twenty years ago. And now you are the only one left who knows how to open the stone puzzle.

You will suffer day and night until you are old and feeble, then this suffering will end. And true agony will begin. You have no doubt that your counting skills will be sorely tested.

Gary A. Braunbeck and Lucy A. Snyder

“The great epochs of our lives come when we gain
the courage to rebaptize our evil as our best.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “Fourth Article,”

Beyond Good and Evil

Of the three it was Penny who was finally able to get free from the manacles. So emaciated had her limbs become that she easily slipped her left hand through, but her right was still swollen at the base of the index finger and thumb where the bones were broken. She didn't make a sound, even though it was obvious to Lewis that she was in terrible pain. Pausing only long enough to pull in a deep breath, the frail nineteen-year-old gripped her right wrist and bore down with what little strength remained in her body. Her face turned red from both the agony and the effort, but still she did not cry out.

“I'm fuckin'
stuck
,” she finally whispered through gritted teeth.

“Hold on,” said Carl. “I got an idea. But . . .”

From his corner, Lewis said, “But
what
?”

“It's pretty gross,” the cadaverous twenty-year-old replied.

“I don't care!” said Penny. “We gotta get some food or we're gonna die down here.”

“Do it,” said Lewis.

Carl blanched. “But—”

“Just do it, already!” Penny snapped.

Lewis watched Carl rise to his blistered feet and limp toward Penny, his chains slithering rusty trails across the concrete floor. She held out her broken, manacled hand. Carl unzipped the front of his pants and pissed over the bloodstained metal cuff. Aided now by the lubricant of Carl's urine, Penny's broken hand squeaked through the corroded manacle and she fell back against the wall, swearing under her breath as she cradled her torn, swollen, bleeding appendage. She looked ready to start crying. Carl was already tearing away part of his shirt to make a bandage, so Lewis pulled out the lace of his left tennis shoe.

Working quickly, they dried Penny's hand, wrapped it, and used the shoelace to tie the bandage in place so that the pressure was more or less even. All of this they did in less than one minute; they'd had plenty of practice. Lewis had learned first aid in a summer internship at Grand Teton National Park and taught everything he knew to the others; college and his family seemed so long ago, so far away he sometimes wondered if his old life had just been a pleasant dream. His hands knew how to tie a bandage or make a sling, but if he tried to remember the first time he'd done these things, sometimes he was sitting under an oak tree with the park ranger, but sometimes he was sitting here in the basement. The hope that he could get that dream back was all that kept him sane some days. He'd told the others time and again that when this day came, they would have to move fast, no matter how sick, broken, or weak all of them felt because the Cold Ones had taken to starving them for days at a time.

The Cold Ones. Carl had started calling them that because the guy was always telling the woman he was going out for “a couple of cold ones.” Lewis thought the name fit. What the couple's actual names were—Smith, Jones, Cleaver, Partridge—none of them knew, and the longer they were kept down here, the longer they were used as toys, as furniture, as ashtrays, as toilets, as objects to be abused in ways none of them had ever imagined and now would never forget, and the longer this went on . . . the more power the
Cold Ones gathered to them. Lewis could feel it. The ice behind their gazes, the frost in their fingertips, the chilly echoes of their voices coming from some dark pit buried deep in the wintry chamber where a human heart should have resided, all of these things and more turned them, with every passing minute, into things beyond pain, beyond damage, beyond any Earthbound sensation that might, for a moment, stop them in their tracks.

Penny took a deep, shuddering breath and climbed to her feet. “Okay, guys. It's showtime. Wish me luck.”

Lewis looked up at her. “If they come back—”

“—I drop everything and just get the box. I know.” She gave the boys a quick smile, then limped toward the staircase that led up to the kitchen. She disappeared around the corner and soon Lewis heard the old wooden stairs faintly creaking under her bare feet.

Carl whispered, “What if the door's locked?”

Lewis shook his head. “He didn't lock it this morning. I listened; the door only clicked once.”

They fell silent as Penny pushed open the door. Both boys stared up as her footsteps moved across the ceiling; she was in the hall heading toward the kitchen.

Lewis's stomach growled. All of them knew where the refrigerator was; they got dragged past the kitchen whenever they were taken to the upstairs living room or bedrooms. Its low hum taunted him on those nights, transforming his stomach into an angry demon. Penny was supposed to get just a few pieces of whatever was there: a couple of slices of American cheese from the fat, greasy block in the refrigerator, a couple of pieces of bread if the loaf was already started, a little bologna, a few grapes, maybe an apple if the Cold Ones had a whole bag. They'd agreed she wouldn't touch their fancy gourmet food, that she mustn't take anything obvious, nothing that would be missed. And whatever she did, she couldn't spill anything, or leave any smudges behind to let their captors know she'd escaped from the basement.

“Dude, what if they come back?” Carl was knocking his knees together like he had to pee again.

“They won't,” Lewis said, making himself sound more confident than he actually felt. “It's already been more than fifteen minutes.” He'd counted it down in his head:
one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .

“But they
never
leave together, what if—”

“Carl,
chill
. They used to go out together all the time. But that was before they brought you and Penny down here. If they were gone for more than fifteen minutes, they'd be gone for
hours
. They're going to a swinger's club or something.”

Lewis didn't actually know where the couple went, and told himself he didn't
want
to know, although his imagination got the better of him sometimes. Sometimes the Cold Ones videotaped what they did to him and Carl and Penny; he figured they probably sold the tapes to like-minded perverts. Or maybe
they
were the ones with the money, and today they were touring another basement in another isolated house. Lewis hoped they were selling the tapes they made, because then maybe the FBI or the sheriff would find one and figure out where they were.

However, if there weren't any tapes for the good guys to find, maybe Penny would find the black box. There wasn't any easy way for her to get help on her own—the Cold Ones had no landline phones in the house, they
never
left their cell phones behind, and the house was too damned far out in the country for Penny to try to walk to safety in her condition.

He hoped she found the box. There'd been many nights when he'd overheard the couple, mostly the man, talking about it, their voices filtering hollowly through the floorboards into the basement. From what Lewis had been able to make out, the box had some tremendous power to grant wishes. Maybe it was sort of like Aladdin's lamp with a genie inside, except it was a puzzle you had to solve instead of just rubbing on it. He'd glimpsed the box himself a couple of times, and Lewis could
feel
the power in it. Usually the Cold Ones kept it locked up in a fancy glass cabinet in the living room, but sometimes,
sometimes
, the guy forgot and left it out on the coffee table after he'd been up all night trying to figure out how it worked.

Lewis had never believed in fairies and magic and crap like that, but listening to the guy's voice . . . clearly
he
believed in the power in the box. And here, trapped in this stinking dungeon with nothing else to hope for, all his prayers to God met with utter silence, Lewis had found himself believing, too, grasping at this one thin thread of improbable hope in the face of unthinkable horror.

He had never made the best grades in school, had never been the smartest kid in any of his classes, but he knew he was damn good at solving puzzles. His uncle had given him an old Rubik's Cube one summer, and he'd been able to solve it way before any of the other kids in the neighborhood. By the end of the week, he could solve the thing within two minutes, no matter how messed up it was. In his freshman dorm, he'd gotten through the new
Resident Evil
before any of the other guys, and the week before he was kidnapped, he'd won a Sudoku contest sponsored by the math department. He was dead sure he could do better than their captors.

Penny's footsteps were moving across the ceiling again, and soon he heard the basement door open.

“I got it all, guys.” Penny padded down the creaky stairs, carrying a big white picnic plate piled with odds and ends from the refrigerator and pantry. She had a big, lidded Styrofoam cup tucked in the crook of one skeletal, cigarette-burned arm, and—Lewis's heart skipped a beat—in the other was the black lacquered puzzle box.

Penny carefully set the plate of food down on the concrete floor between the young men, then the cup, and then handed the box to Lewis, her expression doubtful. “It was right there on the coffee table, just like you said it would be.”

“Outstanding!” Lewis ran his fingers over the surface of the box, mesmerized, his hunger forgotten. This was the first time he'd been close enough to see that each side of the box was shaped like a face of some sort, but not a human face . . . or maybe they were faces of things that had once been human but weren't anymore. Oh, whoever had made this was some kind of genius. Lewis envied anyone who was that smart, that clever. Just looking at it—even looking at
it up close—he couldn't find one seam, one indentation, one pressure point that even
hinted
at how you went about opening it.

The horrible pressure of the situation suddenly made his hands shake and his heart pound. If he couldn't open it, or if he did open it and nothing happened, oh, God . . .

Pretend it's that stupid Rubik's Cube
, he told himself, trying to calm himself down.
Pretend that you're doing this on a dare. Pretend that it's something fun.
This was the best way to go, to think of it as a fun game . . . because, holding it in his hands now, feeling as if the six faces were laughing at him, Lewis realized that there was no going back. He
had
to solve it, to open it before the Cold Ones came back. If he didn't, if he was still messing with it when the couple got home, they would probably gut him like a fish—or gut Penny or Carl. And make him watch.

Fun
, he reminded himself.
Think of this as a game, nothing more
.

And there it was—the seam. He probed its edges, its surface, the contours of the face in which it was hidden; clockwise, counterclockwise, side to side, up and down, and then—

—
click!

The sound was so quiet, so soft, so subtle, that none of them should have been able to hear it, but hear it they did, and for a moment all stared in wonder as a section of the box slid out, revealing an interior that was so shiny Lewis could actually see part of his face reflected.

“Is that some kind of a music box?” asked Penny.

It took a moment, but then Lewis heard it, as well; a soft, tinkling melody like a bird's song at morning.

Lewis lost all track of time after that; for him, the world was the box, its faces, his eight fingers and two thumbs, and the fervent hope that he was still the best puzzle-solver anybody had ever seen.

His fingers danced over the surface of the box, finding more seams that opened to reveal hidden indentations that in turn offered up more clicks. Lewis hunched over the box, possessed by it, enamored of it, his concentration total, his control the strongest it had
ever been when confronted with a riddle, brainteaser, or puzzle. As with the toy cube in a life that seemed so long ago and no longer part of him, he eventually fell into a rhythm, found his heart beating in time with his breathing while his fingers pressed down in countertime, on the upbeat. He didn't know how or why but his whole body—his entire
being
, within and without—seemed now to be part of an orchestra, every digit a note, every movement a new instrument joining in the music, every breath a change of key, every
click!
the sound of the conductor's baton tapping against the podium as the next section of the symphony began. Part of him knew the music was coming from the ever-opening box, but he would not allow himself to think about that because to do so would invite wonder, and wonder would invite hesitation, and under no circumstances could he hesitate now. The box was offering its secrets up to him, almost as if it were telling him where next to press, to tap, to push, caress, and pull.

It's
letting
me open it
, he thought to himself.
It wants me to succeed.

His fingers danced a glissando over the six sides once more, and when the final clicks revealed the mirrorlike interior of the last six sections, the box came alive in his hands, rose from his palms as if it were a bubble, a leaf in the wind.