Bill Pronzini: Shackles

“More chloroform? Listen, there’s no need-”

“There’s a need.”

“It makes me sick to my stomach.”

“That’s too bad,” he said with mock sympathy. “No more talking, now. I’m tired and I want to get this done with. On your belly.”

Pain flared in my back and arms as I rolled over. My left arm was so badly cramped the tips of the fingers on that hand were numb. When I was in position I heard him get out, open the trunk, shut it and then open the rear door and lean in. Smelled the snow and the evergreens, then the sharp odor of the chloroform.

I didn’t struggle this time when he clamped the damp cloth over my mouth and nose. No point in it. Let it happen, let the chloroform do its job, wake up and find out where we were and what he had in store for me, wake up and find a way out of this…

This time, when I came out of it, there was disorientation and an even more savage headache, but no nausea. I lay still for a cluster of seconds, until the mind-swirls settled and I could think clearly again. My first perception was that I was on my back, lying on a surface thinner and more resilient than a car seat. Then I realized that my hands and arms were no longer shackled behind me; they were resting at my sides, palms up, and there was a tingly weakness from fingers to armpits. I tried to raise my right arm but it wouldn’t work right, wouldn’t come up more than a few inches.

I got my eyes open, blinked them into focus. Ceiling. The rustic variety-knotty pine crisscrossed by beams of some darker wood. I turned my head to the left. Wall, the same knotty pine as the ceiling, with an uncovered window down past my feet. To the right, then, and I was looking at part of a room, shadowed, empty of both people and furnishings of any kind. A fireplace bulked at the edge of my vision: native stone hearth, no logs and no fire.

Cold in here . The awareness of that made me shiver. I looked back to the left again, up at the window. From this vantage point I could see a wedge of sky, smoky gray veined with black, and little dusty flutters of snow.

My mouth and throat were dry, raw. I worked up a thin wad of saliva, moved it around from cheek to cheek, managed to swallow it. The tingly sensation was stronger in my arms and hands: improving circulation. I thought about trying to sit up, to get a better look at where I was. Moved my arms a little, experimentally, and then my legs-

There was something tight around the calf of my left leg, something that made a metal-on-metal scraping noise.

I tried to lift my head enough to see what it was, but the pain from neck and shoulder cramps was too intense. I tried again and again, jaws locked against the pain. On the fourth try I managed to raise up enough to see down the length of my body-and what I saw made the hair pull all along the back of my scalp.

The thing around my calf was a band of iron five or six inches wide. Attached to it through a welded metal loop was a length of thick-linked chain, the other end of which was fastened to a ringbolt set into the wall below the window.

A swell of nausea pushed me down flat again. I lay motionless until it subsided, until the ache in my head dulled again into a tolerable throbbing. Then I flexed and rubbed my hands and arms, worked them through the pins-and-needles stage to where I could use them to push up slowly into a sitting position. It took three tries to get all the way up, to get my right foot off and onto the floor as a brace.

What I was lying on was a folding canvas cot, the kind campers use. I noted that with a portion of my mind; it was the leg iron and the chain that held my attention. There was a lot of chain, much more than I’d first thought. Most of it lay in a loose coil between the cot and the wall-at least a dozen feet of it. Why ? But my mind was not ready to deal with that yet; it shied away from the question, threw up a barrier against it.

I leaned forward for a closer look at the leg iron. It was a pair of hinged jaws that interconnected one over the other for an adjustable fit and had then been padlocked in place. The padlock was one of those industrial types with a staple a quarter of an inch thick. The chain loop was on the opposite surface and one end of the chain had been welded through it; the other end was fastened to the ringbolt in a similar fashion. The bolt itself appeared to be as thick as a spike. You would need a heavy-duty hacksaw to cut through link, loop, staple or bolt, and at that it would probably take hours to accomplish the task.

I quit looking at this new set of shackles and eased my body around on the cot so that I could see the rest of my surroundings. At first they made no more sense than the chain and leg iron. Or maybe it was that my mind refused to let them make sense just yet.

At the head of the cot was a square folding card table, the top of which was littered with an odd assortment: portable radio, several pads of ruled yellow paper, pens and pencils, a large desk calendar open to this week, a stack of paper plates and another of plastic glasses, a tray of plastic knives, forks and spoons, one of those little hand can openers. Next to the table on one side were a pair of heavy wool blankets; on the other side were a long squat space heater and an old brass floor lamp with an unshaded bulb, both of which looked as though they had come out of a Goodwill thrift shop. Against the outer wall stood a white-painted bookshelf, also of thrift-shop origin, that was jammed with canned and packaged foodstuffs. An ancient two-burner hot plate rested on top of the shelf. And in the corner where the side wall-the one with the uncovered window in it-and the room’s back wall joined were three cardboard cartons: rolls of toilet paper and paper towels in one, magazines and paperback books in the second, a miscellany of kitchen items in the third.

That was all. The rest of the room-the main room of somebody’s mountain cabin-was barren. No furniture, no carpeting, no adornments on any of the walls, no cordwood or kindling for the fireplace. Nothing except what was in this cluttered corner where I had been chained.

Four doors gave access to the room. Three were shut; the fourth, in the near back wall some ten feet from the cot, stood open. Through it I could see a cubicle that contained a toilet and sink. The door in the front wall opposite seemed to be the cabin’s main entrance; it was flanked by windows, both of them shuttered. The remaining two doors must have led to other rooms-bedrooms, kitchen. There were just the three windows, and all of the light in the room came through the unshuttered one near the cot.

I dragged my arm up to look at my watch. After nine now: I had been unconscious this time for three or four hours. The whisperer-where was he? If he was in one of the other rooms, he was being damned quiet about whatever he was doing. There was no sound in the cabin, nothing but the plaint of the wind outside.

I eased my chained leg off the cot, managed with some effort to stand up and stay up. But the left leg buckled on my second wobbly step, as I started around the lower end of the cot, so that I had to lunge ahead into the wall and clutch at the windowsill to keep from falling. I leaned there, breathing hard, looking out through the rime-edged glass.

A cleared area maybe fifty feet wide stretched the width of the cabin, patched here and there with snow. More snow drifted up against a shed of some kind toward the rear. Otherwise trees were all that I could see-white-garbed spruce and fir, densely grown, climbing beyond the shed into a misty obscurity. Cold, silent world out there, ruled by the elements. High-mountain country-but where? I pressed my cheek against the glass, squinting toward the front. White and gray and dull green, nothing else. If the whisperer’s car was still here, it was parked somewhere around front or on the far side.