Dean Koontz - Intensity

But she is tough, this girl, with surprising inner resources. Good. The challenge thrills him.

“And from the motor home we’ll go out to the meadow with the dogs, Ariel, and you can watch while I bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe the sky will clear by that time, and maybe there’ll be stars or even moonlight.”

Ariel huddles on the chair with her book, eyes distant, lips slightly parted, a deeply still girl.

“Hey, you know, I bought another doll for you. An interesting little shop in Napa, California, a place that sells the work of local craftsmen. It’s a clever rag doll. You’ll like it. I’ll give it to you later.”

Mr. Vess gets up from the footstool and takes a casual inventory of the contents of the refrigerator and the cabinet that serves as the girl’s pantry. She has enough supplies to carry her three more days, and he will restock her shelves tomorrow.

“You’re not eating quite as much as you should,” he admonishes. “That’s ungrateful of you. I’ve given you a refrigerator, a microwave, hot and cold running water. You’ve got everything you need to take care of yourself. You should eat.”

The dolls are no less responsive than the girl.

“You’ve lost two or three pounds. It hasn’t affected your looks yet, but you can’t lose any more.”

She gazes into thin air, as if waiting for her voice-box string to be pulled before she recites recorded messages.

“Don’t think you can starve yourself until you’re haggard and unattractive. You can’t escape me that way, Ariel. I’ll strap you down and force-feed you if I have to. I’ll make you swallow a rubber tube and pump baby food into your stomach. In fact, I’d enjoy it. Do you like pureed peas? Carrots? Applesauce? I guess it doesn’t matter, since you won’t taste them — unless you regurgitate.”

He gazes at her silken hair, which is red blond in the filtered light. This sight translates through all five of Vess’s extraordinary senses, and he is bathed in the sensory splendor of her hair, in all the sounds and smells and textures that the look of it conveys to him. One stimulus has so many associations for him that he could lose himself for hours in the contemplation of a single hair or one drop of rain, if he chose, because that item would become an entire world of sensation to him.

He moves to the armchair and stands over the girl.

She doesn’t acknowledge him, and although he has entered her line of sight, her gaze has somehow shifted above and to one side of him without his being aware of the moment when it happened.

She is magically evasive.

“Maybe I could get a word or two out of you if I set you on fire. What do you think? Hmmm? A little lighter fluid on that golden hair — and whoosh! ”

She does not blink.

“Or I’ll give you to the dogs, see if that unties your tongue.”

No flinch, no tic, no shudder. What a girl.

Mr. Vess stoops, lowering his face toward Ariel’s, until they are nose-to-nose.

Her eyes are now directly aligned with his — yet she is still not looking at him. She seems to peer through him, as if he is not a man of flesh and blood but a haunting spirit that she can’t quite detect. This isn’t merely the old trick of letting her eyes swim out of focus; it’s a ruse infinitely more clever than that, which he can’t understand at all.

Nose-to-nose with her, Vess whispers, “We’ll go to the meadow after midnight. I’ll bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe I’ll put you into the ground with them and cover you up, three in one grave. Them dead and you alive. Would you speak then, Ariel? Would you say please? ”

No answer.

He waits.

Her breathing is low and even. He is so close to her that her exhalations are warm and steady against his lips, like promises of kisses to come.

She must feel his breath too.

She may be frightened of him and even repulsed by him, but she also finds him alluring. He has no doubt about this. Everyone is fascinated by bad boys.

He says, “Maybe there’ll be stars.”

Such a blueness in her eyes, such sparkling depths.

“Or even moonlight,” he whispers.

The steel cuffs on Chyna’s ankles were linked by a sturdy chain. A second and far longer chain, connected by a carabiner to the first, wound around the thick legs of the chair and around the stretcher bars between the legs, returned between her feet, encircled the big barrel that supported the round table, and connected again to the carabiner. The chains didn’t contain enough play to allow her to stand. Even if she’d been able to stand, she would have had to carry the chair on her back, and the restricting shape and the weight of it would have forced her to bend forward like a hunchbacked troll. And once standing, she could not have moved from the table to which she was tethered.

Her hands were cuffed in front of her. A chain was hooked into the shackle that encircled her right wrist. From there it led around her, wound between the back rails of the chair behind the tie-on pad, then to the shackle on her left wrist. This chain contained enough slack to allow her to rest her arms on the table if she wished.

She sat with her hands folded, leaning forward, staring at the red and swollen index finger on her right hand, waiting.

Her finger throbbed, and she had a headache, but her neck pain had subsided. She knew that it would return worse than ever in another twenty-four hours, like the delayed agony of severe whiplash.

Of course, if she was still alive in another twenty-four hours, neck pain would be the least of her worries.

The Doberman was no longer at the window. She had seen two at once on the lawn, padding back and forth, sniffing the grass and the air, pausing occasionally to prick their ears and listen intently, then padding away again, obviously on guard duty.

During the previous night, Chyna had used rage to overcome her terror before it had incapacitated her, but now she discovered that humiliation was even more effective at quelling fear. Having been unable to protect herself, having wound up in bondage — that was not the source of her humiliation; what mortified worse was her failure to fulfill her promise to the girl in the cellar.

I am your guardian. I’ll keep you safe.

She kept returning, in memory, to the upholstered vestibule and the view port on the inner door. The girl among the dolls had given no indication that she had heard the promise. But Chyna was sick with the certainty that she had raised false hopes, that the girl would feel betrayed and more abandoned than ever, and that she would withdraw even further into her private Elsewhere.

I am your guardian.

In retrospect, Chyna found her arrogance not merely astonishing but perverse, delusional. In twenty-six years of living, she’d never saved anyone, in any sense whatsoever. She was no heroine, no mystery-novel-series character with just a colorful dash of angst and a soupçon of endearing character flaws and, otherwise, the competence of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond combined. Keeping herself alive, mentally stable, and emotionally intact had been enough of a struggle for her. She was still a lost girl herself, fumbling blindly through the years for some insight or resolution that probably wasn’t even out there to be found, yet she’d stood at that view port and promised deliverance.

I am your guardian.

She opened her folded hands. She flattened her hands on the table and slid them across the wood as if smoothing away wrinkles in a tablecloth, and as she moved, her chains rattled.

She wasn’t a fighter, after all, no one’s paladin; she worked as a waitress. She was good at it, piling up tips, because sixteen years in her mother’s bent world had taught her that one way to ensure survival was to be ingratiating. With her customers, she was indefatigably charming, relentlessly agreeable, and always eager to please. The relationship between a diner and a waitress was, to her way of thinking, the ideal relationship, because it was brief, formal, generally conducted with a high degree of politeness, and required no baring of the heart.