Bill Pronzini: Shackles

I did some goose-stepping in place, to loosen the muscles in my legs. Then I squatted to examine the ringbolt set into the wall beneath the window. It was in there solidly-driven in with a sledge, maybe, or wedged through a tight-bored hole to the outside and then locked into place with a bolt plate. I took up a handful of the chain, stood again, backed off a few paces, and yanked backward with all the strength I could muster. Nothing happened except that I scraped some skin off one palm; there was no give at all from either the chain or the ringbolt. Wasted effort, as I’d known it would be. But you have to try.

I let go of the chain, rubbed sweat off my face with the sleeve of my coat. I was still wobbly but I didn’t want to sit down again, not yet. Walk, I thought. And I walked, taking short shuffling steps until I was sure of my balance. Behind me the chain made a slithering rattle on the rough-hewn floor. I went toward the front wall first, but the chain stopped me well before I reached it. I couldn’t have touched that wall, let alone the front door, if I’d gotten down on my belly and stretched out full length. I came back toward the rear at the chain’s full extension. It let me get almost to the center of the room, then within a few feet of the fireplace. But there was no way I could reach the fireplace, either-no way to find out if any of its mortared stones were as loose as some of them looked. As for the other two closed doors, they might as well have been in another county.

The bathroom cubicle was accessible, though, when I lifted the chain over the cot and over the card table. I could use both the toilet and the sink. He had also supplied three bars of soap, a frayed hand towel, a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, and a mirror with a jagged crack in one corner that hung from a nail above the sink. A window no larger than a porthole, with a pebbled glass pane, was cut into the outer wall. But it wouldn’t budge when I tried the sash. Nailed shut, probably. I tried the one sink tap to see if there was running water. There was-ice-cold and clear.

Out of there, over to the packed bookshelf. Cans of soup, beef stew, Spam, tuna fish, sardines, spaghetti and ravioli, macaroni and cheese, chili, vegetables, a variety of fruits. Packages of crackers, cookies, tea bags. Two sixteen-ounce jars of instant coffee. A smaller jar of nondairy creamer. Sugar. Salt. Pepper. The more I looked at all of this, the more my stomach clenched and knotted-and not with hunger.

I bent for a closer look at the cartons on the floor. In the one of kitchen miscellany there was a dented saucepan, an enameled coffee pot and matching cup, another stack of plastic glasses, a packet of batteries that would likely fit the portable radio. The magazines in the second carton were rumpled back issues of several different titles; the paperback books were a similarly mismatched secondhand assortment. It seemed these things, too, had been carelessly swept off thrift-shop shelves.

That’s what he did, I thought. Went into a thrift shop somewhere, bought all this crap at once, transported it up here with the provisions. Just for me. Built this little corner, this little cell, just for me.

Why?

You may want to commit suicide after a while…

I shook my head, shook the words out of my mind. Pawed through the stuff on the card table without finding anything I hadn’t noticed earlier. The light in there was starting to fade, and when I glanced over at the window I saw that the snowfall had thickened, was blowing now in swirls and gusts out of a sky that seemed to hang blackly above the trees. I leaned over to flip the switch on the floor lamp. It worked all right; light from a twenty-five-watt bulb chased away some of the shadows. Was the cabin hooked into a main power supply? Or did the electricity come from some kind of portable generator? It made a difference in how high up in the mountains, how isolated, this place was.

I left the lamp on-small comfort-and paced for a time, with the idea of strengthening the muscles in my legs. Ten paces toward the front, turn, ten paces toward the rear. But it wasn’t long before the weight of the dragging chain began to do more harm than good to my leg muscles. I stopped moving finally, lowered myself onto the cot.

At first I just sat there, mind blank, listening to the wind work itself up into a frenzy and hurl snow against the window glass. Then the cold began to seep through my clothing, to bump and ripple the flesh along my back. I got up again, shook out one of the folded blankets, wrapped it around me like a sarong. I switched on the space heater, too, and moved it so that when it warmed up it would throw its heat against my legs.

I sat huddled inside the blanket, and pretty soon I thought again: Why ? The question filled my mind. No shying away from it now. Time to deal with it, and with all its implications.

He was somebody with a killing grudge against me, that was certain. So much of a grudge that instead of murdering me outright, he wanted me alive and suffering a good long time-weeks, even months. That was what this little cell was all about. There couldn’t be any other explanation for the foodstuffs, the magazines and books, the access to toilet facilities. And yet, why give me a selection of food, things to read, a radio, blankets, the heater, the bathroom? Why not a real poverty cell, a makeshift Inquisitor’s dungeon where I would be forced to survive in squalor rather than in relative comfort?

If I knew who he was, what his grievance against me was… but I didn’t know, I didn’t have a glimmer of an idea. All I knew was that I must have had direct contact with him at some point. Otherwise he wouldn’t be so coy about letting me see his face, wouldn’t have kept asking me if I remembered him.

Playing head games with me. Psychological torture. This place, these shackles-they were part of it, too. He had to be unbalanced, no matter how rational he seemed on the surface, but this wasn’t a random persecution any more than I was a random victim. He had a reason, a purpose for all of this. Revenge was at the bottom of it, but there was more to it than that-nuances of motive and intent that I couldn’t even begin to guess at now.

Jesus, I thought, he must really hate me. And that made what he was doing all the more terrifying: someone hating you with enough virulence to plot a thing like this, someone whose life had touched yours in a way that was so meaningless to you , you might even have forgotten he existed. It was the stuff of nightmares, of gibbering paranoia. If you had ever made an enemy in your life-and what person hasn’t-could you ever feel completely safe?

Where was he now? Still around here somewhere; I felt sure of that. Sleeping in one of the other rooms, maybe-he’d admitted to being tired when we got here, before he administered that last dose of chloroform. I felt sure of something else, too: He wasn’t going anywhere without talking to me again. That was also part of the psychological torture. Now that he had me here, chained up in his little cell, he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to watch me squirm.

Wait him out, then. And no more speculating, because that was what he wanted me to do-that was playing right into his hands. Sooner or later he would show himself. And when he did, I would find out at least some of the answers.

I sat swaddled in the blanket, bent forward at the waist so that some of the warmth from the space heater reached my upper body. And I waited, mind empty-a big white vegetable, because vegetables have no emotion, vegetables are not afraid.

It was almost three when he finally came.

I was lying on the cot, still wrapped cocoonlike in the blanket, eyes closed, not sleeping but not quite awake either. Drifting inside myself. When I heard the door open and then close, it seemed an unreal perception, part of a vaguely formed dream. But then I heard his steps, one, two, three, and in the next second I was sitting bolt up-right, blinking to get my eyes clear.