Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

Inside, the usual rubble lot, decorated with broken plumbing fixtures, rotting furniture, rusting appliances, and scorched rubble. She saw a flash of red ahead that quickly disappeared into an irregularly shaped blackness, the entrance to the former basement. She stumbled forward through the junk. The rain was coming down harder than before, the breeze had turned into an actual wind, lightning flashed and thunder echoed like cannonades through the Manhattan canyonlands. She laughed to herself and thought, Yes, the pathetic fallacy, the image of my life, chasing a lunatic through a hurricane into a ruin.

She stood for a moment blinking in the dark. Hey Hey was nowhere in sight. She shouted, but nothing came back but dull echoes and the sound of innumerable freshets burbling through the roofless building. When her eyes adjusted she found she was on a brick ledge a few feet above a rubbled slope that led, she guessed, down to the original basement floor. Then there was a sound, a groan, and a sharp, high shout. She scrambled down the rubble and onto concrete.

The air was damp and the damp brought out the smells- burnt things, mold, broken sewage pipes, rats both live and dead. From her bag she took the little Maglite she kept on her keychain. Its narrow beam shone on standing water; the basement was flooded and she had to walk carefully, feeling beneath the black water with her sneakered foot. Another cry just ahead, and there was a glow. Lucy thought it must be another sick one sheltering in the ruins, like the one Hey Hey had led her to before. She reached into her bag to make sure she had her cell phone.

Candlelight was shining from what must have once been the building's boiler room. The boilers were gone, carted off for scrap, but the walls still held twisted stumps of pipes and the floor was a tangle of rusty plumbing. She saw the candle, stuck in a beer bottle, and saw its light reflecting from Hey Hey's red coat. She moved toward him, saying, "Oh, there you are. Why didn't you wait up, man?" She saw him hang his hat on a pipe. That was wrong. Hey Hey never took off his hat. The man turned. Lucy said, "Oh, shit!" and spun and leaped for the door, but she stumbled on a pipe and he had her. He was incredibly strong. His forearm around her neck felt like a tree limb. It only took a few seconds for Felix to choke her into unconsciousness.

Felix Tighe looked on his work and found it good. The bitch was naked and spread-eagled on a frame of one-inch piping, her legs stretched as far as they would stretch, her arms in a crucifixion position. The wacko had been carrying half a dozen rolls of tape in his belongings, which had come in handy; a good omen, Felix thought. He had neglected to buy tape, and he thought it amusing that the victim had supplied tape not only sufficient to immobilize himself but enough to take care of Lucy Karp, as well. The guy's clothes stank, however, and Felix was anxious to get this over with and get back into his own clean ones. Not so anxious that he would leave anything interesting out of his forthcoming session with the cunt.

A clank and a scraping sound told him she had revived. He had three candles arranged to cast light on her face and body and he watched avidly. He loved to see them when they woke up and realized where they were and started to understand what was going to happen to them. The best part of the present setup was that he didn't need a gag. With the thunderstorm and the isolated venue, no one was going to hear her yell. Another really terrific omen.

But the expression on her face was not what he was expecting. She wasn't looking at him in horror at all, but staring at something in the corner of the room, behind him. He snapped a look around; nothing. Then she began to speak, as if to someone standing right there, pausing as if to listen to a reply, and then speaking again. She was speaking in Spanish, not the jailhouse Caribbean Spanish he was familiar with, but a pure, lisping Castilian.

Lucy awoke to pain and a dark, nauseous headache. Hard things were pressing into her back and her thighs ached. She knew exactly where she was and what had happened to her, but no terror stabbed her belly or made her tremble. Instead, all her attention was focused on a dim figure standing in the corner of the room, a middle-aged somewhat plump woman dressed in the black-and-white habit of the Carmelites. The woman had three small moles on her face, which was otherwise distinguished by a long nose, huge round eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a perfect rosebud mouth.

"Is this one of His jokes?" Lucy asked the figure in her native tongue. "I went through agonies to preserve my precious virginity and now I'm going to be raped and murdered in a cellar?"

"It is somewhat amusing, I suppose," said Saint Teresa. "No more amusing, perhaps, than that a woman such as I, who lived only for delight, and fine clothes, and witty companions should have founded a strict order of cloistered contemplative nuns. You can have no idea of the dullness of the conversation of young, ignorant Castilian girls. If it happens as you imagine, I hope you commend your soul to Him and give thanks that you have had the great good fortune to be tortured to death as He was. What an honor! I knew many who would envy you your situation."

"That's a point of view, Reverend Mother," said Lucy, at which the apparition gave her the kind of God-haunted grin one only ever sees on the faces of people far advanced in holiness, and Lucy burst out laughing.

"Who the fuck… what the fuck are you laughing about!" Felix screamed. "You think this is funny? How about this, you think this is funny?"

With which he began to torture Lucy with his knife, and was happy to see that she howled appropriately.

"You're not laughing now, are you, bitch?" he said. It was not as good as he thought it would be, and he was starting to get pissed. He asked her where the Vietnamese was, and she told him he was in Paris, but she didn't know any more. Felix didn't think that was worth too much, but maybe something. Maybe she knew more and wasn't telling yet. But she would.

The problem was that he was causing her pain, but not fear, and so it was about as much fun as torturing an animal: okay, but nothing special, not like doing Mary and the brat or the others, before prison. She was not begging for mercy. On the contrary, she seemed to be praying for Felix's soul and forgiving him for what he was doing to her. She also wanted to know about the goddamn looney he got the clothes off of, and he took pleasure in telling her that her looney was resting quietly and would be released unharmed in time to put on his bloody clothes and take the rap for what Felix was going to do to Lucy. To which she had replied only, "Thank God he's all right."

The worst of it was that he needed the fear to get sexy and so far his attempts at raping her had been unavailing. He used the handle of the knife instead, but it wasn't the same. No, he was going to actually have to cut parts off her to get her off this God shit and make her understand that he was what she needed to worship, the center of everything, the only thing worthy of any attention at all. The problem with that, unfortunately, is that once you started to cut pieces off they went into shock real fast and checked out, and then it was just meat, and not as much fun, although fooling with the body and thinking about the people who would find it gave him a giggle or two. But he was still a little annoyed that she had turned out to be some no-fun religious maniac. He voiced this thought to his victim as he idly twirled the point of his knife under her small breast.

"I'm not a maniac," she said and cried out as he increased the pressure. She felt no need at all to be stoic.

"I bet you think I'm a maniac, though, don't you?" This was a fun game. You asked them a question and however they answered, you zapped them and when they finally agreed with you, you zapped them to say the opposite.