John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

Lindsay’s eyes fixed on the bowl, and her exhausted mind groped to understand what he might be doing.

But it didn’t matter: if he drugged her, she would at least fall into the bliss of unconsciousness.

If he killed her, she would be forever released from his prison and her own terror.

She opened her mouth and let him feed her.

Oatmeal! Oatmeal, sweetened with brown sugar and cinnamon.

And milk!

She swallowed and opened her mouth for more.

Part of her was revolted that she was letting him touch her just so she could have water and food, but the food itself ignited a hunger she hadn’t realized was there.

She swallowed every morsel he offered, and sucked down as much water as she could manage when he held the bottle to her lips again.

She felt her body begin to tingle as its numbness gave way to the infusion of energy the food and water provided.

“Please,” she whispered quietly to him. “Please let us go.”

“You never let me go,” he said, but a moment later she could feel him ripping the tape away from her ankles.

She could barely move her knees, and couldn’t feel her feet at all, nor move her ankles.

Then he tore the tape from her wrists, and her arms dropped from the hard wood into her lap. She moved her fingers and tried to get one hand over to the other to massage her throbbing wrist, but it was too much.

Her joints screamed with pain and her muscles refused to obey the commands of her mind.

The man untied the object that had pressed against her throat, and she finally saw what it was — a metal bit, the kind she’d seen on horses. Tentatively, fearfully, she rotated her head on her neck. But it was all right; nothing pressed against her throat, nothing strangled her breath.

He peeled the blanket away from her, then grabbed her by the arms and pulled her to her feet. Her legs still numb, Lindsay stumbled and fell against him, and as her body came in contact with his, her nostrils filled with the musky odor she’d first smelled in her bedroom on Wednesday afternoon.

Could it have been that recently? The time when every muscle in her body hadn’t ached and her soul hadn’t been filled with terror was a memory so dim it seemed years ago.

Could it only have been a few days?

She tried to resist her captor, tried to pull away, but she couldn’t even straighten her back, let alone find the strength to twist herself out of his grip. He half carried her away from the chair to a mattress on the floor, where he shoved her down, hurling her body with enough force that she could feel the hard concrete even through the thick padding.

A low wall separated her mattress from the one a few feet away, on which Shannon cowered. But the wall was just high enough so she could no longer see the other girl.

The man closed hard, cold, metal handcuffs around Lindsay’s wrists, then chained the cuffs to the wall behind her.

From the pocket of the raincoat, he produced a packet that looked vaguely familiar, but Lindsay didn’t quite recognize it until he tore it open and pulled the contents loose from the foil.

Baby wipes.

The kind she had seen mothers use on their infant children in the restrooms at the mall.

She cringed, and had to force herself not to give him the satisfaction of uttering even a single sound as he pulled her panties away and began cleaning her.

“How do you like it?” he asked as he worked. “Do you like it as much as I did?” Tossing the wipe aside, he put what looked like a dish towel between her legs, pinned it like a diaper, and covered her with a ragged blanket.

He vanished behind the low wall, and a few seconds later Lindsay heard Shannon’s chains rattling. “No,” she croaked. “Please… no… please…”

Then Lindsay saw him again, straightening up, pulling Shannon to her feet and half leading, half dragging her across the chamber floor. Naked, Shannon was so thin Lindsay could see the knobs of her spine and hollows between her ribs.

“Please… no… please…” Shannon whispered again, the words coming like a mantra. “… No… please… no…”

Every muscle in Lindsay’s body tensed, and she wanted to hurl herself on the man and tear Shannon from his grip. But her wrists were cuffed and chained to the wall, and she knew her body was too weak anyway.

She watched helplessly as he opened a door on the far side of the long room, half carried Shannon through it, and closed it behind them, abruptly cutting off Shannon’s whispered pleas as a terrible, hollow silence fell over the dungeon.

Lindsay was alone.

She felt like crying, but refused to give in to the urge, knowing even through her terror that it would do no good.

She closed her eyes against the threat of tears and stretched her legs out to their full length.

As the oatmeal and water fed the tiniest bit of strength back into her body, and the numbness and tingling in her legs and arms finally began to ease, she tried not to think about what was happening to Shannon, and what might soon be happening to her, too.

And there was no way out.

No way out at all.

The sound of the door echoed oddly as Steve Marshall closed it behind Sergeant Grant.

Sergeant Andrew Grant, he thought as he sank back onto the sofa next to his wife. How had it happened that until tonight he’d never even thought of the cop in terms of having a first name, let alone wondered what it was?

Not that it mattered, for knowing Grant’s first name hadn’t changed a thing. Not one single thing. His beautiful, wonderful, perfect wife still looked every bit as hollowed out and ashen as she had before the policeman arrived to fill them in on his progress.

And Lindsay was still gone.

And no one — not her friends or the police or Kara, or he himself — had any better idea of what happened to her than they had on the day she vanished.

The only thing new was that he now knew Sergeant Grant’s first name.

And he and Kara were once again sitting side by side, not talking, feeling the emptiness of their home. As the silence threatened to overwhelm them both, faint echoes of Sergeant Grant’s visit seemed to whisper from the walls of their home, and Steve reached out to take Kara’s small, pale hand in his own.

“She’s not a runaway,” Kara said, as if responding to the same echo Steve had heard.

He hesitated, wishing he could offer her some scrap of evidence — anything — to share with her the same faint hope he was still clinging to that Sergeant Grant was right and at any moment the phone could ring, or the door could open, and their daughter would be with them once more. But he couldn’t. All he could do was hold her hand.

“What did he mean, there was no evidence of foul play?” Kara asked, her voice as hollow as the house had been since Lindsay vanished.

“He meant that teenage girls do things when they’re upset,” Steve said, choosing his words carefully. “You know that. Remember when you were seventeen? Remember what the girls in your class were thinking about? How many of them were constantly angry at their parents and threatening to run away? You know what he was talking about, Kara.”

It was as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “He said there was no evidence,” she whispered, almost to herself. “But she’s gone. Her blanket is gone. What kind of evidence does he want?”

“Kara—”

Finally, she looked at him. “Where would she go? With who? Oh, God, we’ve been over this a thousand times, Steve. You know as well as I do that Lindsay’s no runaway!”

“Honey, maybe he’s right,” Steve began. For the last hour, as Andrew Grant had gone over every tiny scrap of information he’d garnered about Lindsay’s disappearance — which was essentially nothing — Steve had allowed himself to hope that maybe the sergeant was right — that Lindsay had just taken off in a fit of anger, wanting to punish them the same way teenagers everywhere wanted to punish their parents. And if he could hang onto that, he could hang onto hope that when she cooled off, she would, indeed, come home.