M Sellars - The Law Of Three

“Go screw yourself, Porter,” I fired back.

Silence interrupted the flow of the short exchange as he fell mute. I listened carefully, searching for any ambient sound I could identify-any indication that Millicent Sullivan was still alive.

“I see you’re back to your old self,” Porter finally spoke, his voice suddenly far calmer than it had been ten minutes ago. Apparently, my idea was correct.

“So glad that you’re pleased,” I chided. “So you must not have killed her.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Simple, Eldon,” I explained. “You wouldn’t have called back if you had. If you kill her, you no longer have a hold on me.”

“So you have decided to admit that you need her soul?”

My fear ebbed, but the dip was shallow. I harbored no illusion that he hadn’t at least done something to her that was too horrid to consider.

My tone remained sharp. “Yeah, sure, whatever, Eldon. Now, let me talk to her.”

“I’d love to put her on, Gant, but she seems to have passed out.”

“What did you do to her, you sick fuck?”

“And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

The quote from Deuteronomy was a verbal harbinger of things unimaginable. Unfortunately, I knew how literally Porter interpreted the Bible. I shuddered with the fear that he had in fact made one of the aforementioned choices and that it was more than just a recitation of chapter and verse.

My mouth began to water as my stomach convulsed, working into a knot, and then slowly unraveling. The acrid bitterness of bile singed the back of my tongue, and I swallowed hard to force it back down. The breadth of his cruelty should have been no surprise to me by now, but this was getting to be more than I could take.

When I finally responded to his pointed selection, my voice was cold and hard. “Skip the verse, Eldon. Just tell me what you did to her.”

As he had done earlier in the day, he seemed to be taking morbid pleasure in the horrors he was committing. His personality had made another one-hundred-eighty-degree shift, and even though he was trapped with no means of escape, here he was gloating. Flaunting what he perceived as his newly found control over me.

“You wouldn’t happen to know whether or not she is right-handed or left-handed, would you?” he asked.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” I muttered. “If you cut her hand off, she’s going to bleed to death.”

“Son of God, Gant.”

“Not of any God I know,” I spat. “How badly is she bleeding?!”

“Oh, calm down,” he chided. “She’s fine. She even still has both of her hands.” He paused for a beat then added a sinister, “For now.”

“Then what did you do to her?” I repeated the question with added hardness.

“Nothing yet.”

I knew he had to have done something, or she wouldn’t be unconscious. I wanted to press him for an answer but wasn’t sure if that would just set him off again. I decided my best bet would be to take a different approach. “So why did you bother calling me then?”

“To find out if she is left-handed or right-handed.”

“I really don’t know, Eldon. Why?”

“Oh well, it doesn’t matter all that much, I suppose,” he spat. “When the time comes, I’ll take her left, just like you did to me.”

I closed my eyes, and the memories flooded in. Things I thought I had finally come to terms with bored into my skull and re-awakened my own viscid fear.

I could almost feel the cold and even the dampness of the fog. The forlorn sound of violins filtered into my ears from somewhere above me, straining out a lament as only they could. I stood there motionless as I felt my own arm going numb.

Mentally, I was once again dangling in the chilled air with a thin, nylon rope twined tightly about my forearm, suspended precariously over the side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. A raving madman, bent on ending my life had his bony hand wrapped around my throat and was squeezing. My consciousness was fleeing in panic, and I was all but prepared to join it.

It didn’t matter that this was only in my head because it had once been all too real, and right now, the high definition memory was making my heart race all over again.

I pushed my still shaking hand back up to my side then thrust my thumb beneath the nylon strap and pushed outward. With a dull pop, it released, and I immediately wrapped my hand around the grip of the pistol.

The miniscule piece of breath I’d been able to grasp was failing quickly, and my vision was darkening as my eyes started rolling back in my head. The abbreviated lesson in the use of the pistol flashed through my mind as just so much jumbled nonsense. I could find no way to apply the instructions to my present situation.

Being unable to aim, I centered on what was left of my strength and pressed the gun upward at an angle across my chest until it met resistance.

The panicked voices of various stringed instruments blended to a thick, disharmonious crescendo in my ears…

For a brief instant I considered the fact that my left arm was now completely numb, and I silently begged for the resistance I found to be his arm and not my own. Then, tensing my body, I pulled the trigger.

The muzzle flashed.

The explosion reported deafeningly in my ear.

The spent shell ejected directly toward me and transferred its searing heat to my cheek.

Thick blood spattered like heavy rain across the side of my face.

The cold fingers snapped open.

Something thudded heavily against me and fell away.

A tortured scream faded into the distance below.

A single violin cried into the night, fading with sorrowful purpose toward silence…

Everything went completely black.

I was on the verge of hyperventilating when I opened my eyes. The torturous snippet of my life was well over one year old, but it had impressed itself upon me with the clarity of here and now. Each detail was as crisp and terrifying as it had been then.

As it continued to replay in my head, I fought to focus on the situation at the other end of the line.

“So I took your hand?” I retorted, finding a morbid solace in having caused him harm. “I guess that’s one for me, then.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Gant,” he snarled.

“You were trying to strangle me, Eldon,” I said. “Just exactly what did you expect me to do?”

“Accept your sentence,” he returned.

“I don’t accept the judgment of a lunatic.”

“Whether you accept it or not, Gant, you can’t deny your guilt. You have admitted it freely.”

“So why take her hand,” I asked, trying to push past this point of contention. “Isn’t it mine that you want?”

“Oh, Gant,” he replied. “You know what I want from you.”

“So, why her then. Do you intend to torture me by proxy?”

“Like I said, your sentence has been pronounced,” he replied. “Don’t you remember?”

He was intent on reiterating my sentence, most likely for those I am sure he knew were listening. It didn’t matter what I said to him, he was going to bring it all back around to this.

“I wasn’t paying that much attention to you, Eldon,” I said with a note of impatience. “But I get the feeling you want to remind me.”

His speech became measured and almost theatrical. “By this our definitive sentence we drive you from the ecclesiastical court, and abandon you to the power of the secular court, that having you in its power now moderates its sentence of death against you.”

“Yeah, sounds vaguely familiar,” I retorted. “But let’s get back to reality here. What makes you think you’ll be able to execute that sentence?”