Ashley Bell: A Novel (40 page)

“Did what?”

“The voodoo Gypsy memory trick.”

“Yes, we did. How do you feel?”

“I’m okay. I feel good. Wow, that was cool, huh?”

“Do you have any idea what memories you burned?”

She tries to think, but then she shakes her head. “Nothing. I guess I didn’t need them. What did I forget?”

At the refrigerator, he opens the freezer compartment. “Are you ready for that Eskimo Pie?”

The memory is so vivid that when it wanes and leaves Bibi once more in a house prepared for demolition, she can for a moment smell the lingering scent of the burned index card.

For sixteen years, she had neither recalled the incident in her bedroom nor dreamed of it, until the previous night, when she’d fallen asleep in the armchair in her father’s office, above Pet the Cat. The architecture of forgetfulness was at last collapsing, but not quickly enough. She still could not recall the nature of the thing that had stalked her in this room, neither the how nor the why of it, only that the incident had occurred.

Although of low wattage, the glow from Mickey Mouse had been more diffuse than the brighter but narrow beam of the flashlight, which revealed less of the room than had the cartoon guardian. As Bibi probed here and there, she realized that she had gotten all she could—and less than she hoped—from this trespass.

She thought of something she had learned about the captain during a conversation with her mother, a month after his death.
Psychological warfare, interrogation-resistance techniques…

Nancy had been estranged from her father for both justifiable and petty reasons. During his four-plus years in the apartment above the garage, the valley between them had been bridged; Nancy’s real father-inflicted wounds had healed, and she had come to recognize those that were imaginary. After his death, she had been struck hard by grief, and over the weeks following his burial, she had talked about him at greater length and in more depth than ever before.

He had remained a combat soldier and officer far past the age when other men needed to switch to desk work. A stint as a trainer of recruits did not give him satisfaction. For the last decade of his career, he’d become an intelligence officer, in part supervising the gathering and analysis of information about the nation’s enemies, but primarily committed to development of defenses against psychological warfare and to formulating interrogation-resistance techniques that soldiers, when captured and held as prisoners of war, could employ to deny crucial information to the enemy.

That detail hadn’t seemed relevant when Bibi was ten and first heard it from her mother. Of the thousands of things, both important and trivial, Nancy told her about her grandfather, that was one of the least interesting. But now she realized that one way to resist interrogation would be to have a memory trick, a way of forgetting those facts the enemy might most need to know.

Surely the other presence in the vacant bungalow must have made small noises as he worked his way toward her. She must have been too lost in memories to separate the telltale sounds of a stalker from the ticks and creaks of an old house easing toward the ruin that was wanted of it.

Her flashlight was a beacon that made of her an easy target, and it revealed her attacker only in the penultimate moment, when abruptly he abandoned stealth and rushed her from the doorway.

In the instant before impact, the ice-white flashlight beam stuttered across his looming face. Broad and blunt, cleft-chinned and beetle-browed, it was a countenance familiar to victims through thousands of years, seen on marauders and plunderers, on those who tortured with hot irons and exquisitely sharp skewers, on those who lynched and beheaded and those who wielded the clubs in the gulags.

He crashed into her with devastating force, he the bull and she the china shop, so that she thought something essential inside her broke on that first contact. As he collided with her, he seized her and lifted her, his momentum barely diminished, and carried her with furious intent, slamming her into a wall. Pain flashed down her spine and through her hips, around her ribs, up her spine and across her shoulders and down her arms, her breath bursting from her with such violence that with it went the ability to inhale.

The flashlight had flown from her hand and now lay in a far corner of the room, washing the juncture of two walls. The backflow of light was too dim for Bibi to make out the details of the face immediately before her, only the shape of the skull, like the head of some demented and hornless minotaur in a nightmare. That terrible moment was only prelude to worse.

As she gaped in shock and in a failed attempt to draw breath, his mouth found hers, and he thrust his tongue between her lips in a loathsome imitation of a kiss, his breath hot and spittle foaming. She wanted to bite his tongue all the way through, bite it off, but she couldn’t get her breath or work her jaws, the impact having paralyzed her. Pinned, arms useless, she wasn’t able to reach for the pistol in her shoulder rig. Pressing obscenely against her, the attacker realized that she was armed, eased up on her just enough to thrust a hand under her blazer, tore the Sig Sauer from the holster, and threw it across the room. He yanked the T-shirt out of her jeans and got his hands under it and groped her breasts, as she at last inhaled, drawing into her mouth his exhalation scented with onions and bacon grease.

With breath came muscle control, coordination, and fierce determination. She raised her right foot to plant the sole and heel flat against the crumbling plaster, tensed calf and thigh. Although jammed between wall and beast, she managed to drive her knee between his legs. The shot was not the ball-crusher she hoped, but it made him grunt and relent just enough so that she could shove him back a half step and slip past him.

He swung one hand and swatted her alongside the head. The blow rang through her skull, and though she didn’t see stars, concentric rings of darkness welled through her eyes and made a vortex of the room. She staggered, stumbled, dropped to one knee. He booted her in the backside, and she sprawled facedown, terrified but also mortified by her near helplessness when contesting with brute strength and savage purpose. He dropped to his knees and roughly rolled her onto her back, knocking aside her flailing fists to seize her by the throat and apply just enough force to make her understand that he could choke her to death one-handed if he wished.

She could see his face again, shadowed but complete enough to reveal his demonic and implacable intention, a deeply perverse desire unmistakable in his green eyes. Hulking, bull-strong, as broad-faced as a steer, he seemed at the same time reptilian, as if he gave out from every pore the poisonous smell of the venom in which his brain was steeped. Clutching her throat, his face a pale moon of madness floating above her, he said, “I can screw you and then kill you or kill you first. But if you make me kill you first and I can’t have the fun of doing you alive, then I’ll kill you so slow and nasty, you’ll think it’s taking half a lifetime.” When she gagged out a curse, he pulled back his left fist, big as a sledgehammer, aimed it at her face, and said, “You want to say that again, bitch?” One punch would shatter her nose and the orbit of one eye, and a second would split her lips, break out teeth, fracture her jaw, after which no surgeon in the world would be able to put her back the way she had been, supposing that she survived. For this monster, sex and violence were one and the same desire, and either would be as satisfying as the other. When she hesitated, he pulled the fist back farther and worked her tender throat with the steel fingers of his right hand, and he repeated his question: “You want to say that again? You want to curse me, you stupid skank?” She wheezed out, “No.” He asked if she’d take the quick kill or the slow, and she said, “Quick,” meaning that she would endure rape in return for the minimal mercy of which he might be capable. “Terezin,” he said, “put a guard on places you might go, and I lucked out. He doesn’t want you. He just wants you dead. But I get my fun first, like he’ll get his birthday fun with that little bitch.”

He let go of her throat but backhanded her across the face, a hard slap meant to confirm his dominance, to knock out of her any last trace of rebellion, to leave her stunned long enough for him to straddle her. One knee to either side of Bibi, still not having fallen upon her, he unbuckled his belt as she looked up at him with a pretense of weakness and resignation. When she crossed her arms over her breasts, he laughed at that expression of maidenly modesty, and his laugh was a low wet sound that reminded her of his tongue in her mouth, nauseating her anew. Busy with the zipper of his pants, eager to expose himself, he didn’t notice that her right hand was under her blazer, didn’t realize that she was probing an interior pocket. The handle of Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade came smooth and cool into Bibi’s hand, the nub of the release under her thumb. She drew the knife from beneath her coat, and the blade sprang out for use, seven inches long and razor-sharp and as pointed as a rapier.

As his jeans slid down his hips, his left hand pulled at his underpants, and his right was already deep inside the pouch of the garment, fondling what he sought to free. His eyes, heavy-lidded with insane desire, widened only when her hand thrust forward. He saw the wicked knife an instant before he felt it. His shirt split as if it were paper, and his flesh proved no more resistant than butter. The blade went in to the hilt. His left hand closed over hers, as if to extract the switchblade in such a way as to minimize further damage, but Bibi twisted it before yanking it out of him, cross-cutting the original wound. And thrust it again, past his grasping, ineffectual hand. And tore it free. She heaved up, rocked him. He fell not upon her, but to her right, and she scrambled away from him.

In the heat of it, under the hammer and seemingly helpless, Bibi had remained cool, had done what needed to be done, as best she could do it. But now fright rode her back and whipped her, and her spinning mind spun out at once a dozen ways that she could still end up dead here in her old bedroom.

He would have a gun. He hadn’t thought he needed it. Pride in his brute strength and the pleasure of physically overwhelming her had ironically made him vulnerable. But the gun would be under his coat—was he wearing a coat?—or in an ankle holster. And right now he was surely fumbling for it.

She recovered the flashlight, swept the floor with it, saw her pistol. It was at the farther end of the room. Near the closet door. She would have to circle the would-be rapist to get to it.

He struggled to sit up, a bear of a man, his neck so thick and corded that it would have foiled a hangman’s noose. No coat on this chilly night. Or he’d left it in another room before creeping up on her. Jeans and a bloody Hawaiian shirt. Arms sculpted by thousands of hours in a gym.

Quick but wary, hobbling, wincing with pain from the beating she had taken, Bibi circled him. She recovered the pistol, inexpressibly grateful that Pax had insisted she have it and learn to use it.

The barbarian was sitting up now, trying to reach behind himself and under his Hawaiian shirt, no doubt seeking a holstered weapon belted in the small of his back. The effort strained his damaged guts, and he strove to bite off a grudging squeal of pain each time he found that he couldn’t twist his torso even slightly to reach what he sought. His face glistened with sweat, his eyes with hate.

Bibi wanted to be gone from there, but she had to see this through to the end. She put the flashlight on the floor, aimed at the bastard, and she stood over him, just out of his reach. In spite of her two-hand grip, the pistol jumped up and down on target, as though it had a will of its own. Even in his agony, the barbarian took note of the twitching gun, and Bibi saw him take note of it. Any sign of weakness invited violence. She steadied herself. “You make a wrong move, and I’ll shoot you dead.”

He seemed to have given up the idea of reaching the gun at his back. His face cleared of hatred and rage and pain. He sat there like a giant infant, legs splayed, hands palms-up in his lap, as though bewildered that his misbehavior had resulted in these consequences.

He didn’t look at her when he spoke, and there was no strong emotion in his voice. “You’ll never get out of this alive.”

If Bibi might have answered him, the blood bubbling on his lips suggested there was no point to either argument or interrogation.

“It’s the Library of Babel,” he said, spitting blood with the strain of forming words. “An infinite number of rooms. No way out.”

He fell backward from his sitting position, and his skull rapped the floor. But he felt nothing, for he was dead, and bewilderment, too, was gone from his face, with nothing to replace it.