Winter at Death's Hotel (46 page)

Her fingertips went in.

A section of wood as big as a matchbox swung up. She looked in.

And saw a pair of human eyes looking out.

She screamed, and then she was twisting and falling, and the weight came on her bad ankle and it collapsed and she was falling backward, feeling her right thigh strike the chair, and then her head hit the floor and she felt the blow as a flash of light and a stopping of everything.

***

Sergeant Cassidy came toward Dunne's desk at Mulberry Street and waved a yellow envelope. “You got a telegram.”

“Oh, Jeez, what now.” Dunne, his eyes baggy with fatigue, took it and rather expertly ripped off the end and extracted the message. He read it, grunted, looked up at Cassidy.

“The Doyle woman was right—it's the hotel.” He waved the telegram. “From Pittsburgh. The old man—four complaints, one arrest. He's a Peeping Tom.” He got up and reached for his coat, then bent to take a revolver from a drawer. “Let's go.”

“You want I should call a carriage?”

“I wanna get there today. We'll take the El.”

***

Louisa rolled on her back. She wanted somebody to help her up. Everything had been knocked out of her—her breath, her heartbeat, her vision. She had lost contact with the world. Where was she? And why—?

She looked up. Somebody was bending over her. He was whispering to her.

“You stupid cunt!”

It was Galt.

She felt pressure on her left wrist and realized too late that he had closed a manacle on it. Seconds later, he closed another on her right wrist, then grabbed the chain that joined them and pulled her up. She shrieked.

“You make noise like that, I'll cut you!” She heard a click; a shiny blade appeared in front of her eyes. She tried to focus on it, recognized the engraved bolster: it was Newcome's Italian flick-knife. “You give me trouble, I'll cut you right here. I'll put this knife up your hole and cut in circles, around and around.” He jerked her toward him with the chain. “Say something.”

She tried, but no sound came out.

“Cat got your tongue? Not frightened of me, are you? Well, you should be, you sick bitch, you whore. I've seen you playing with yourself, sucking their cocks…” He jerked the chain again. “Get in there!” He pulled her around so that she could see the opening behind him—next to the fireplace, as she had guessed, a whole section of the wall. Inside were wood and darkness. He gave her a push in the back. “Get in there.”

She tried to struggle. He swung her around again, holding her at arm's length now by the chain, and hit her twice the way a man hits another man, low in the abdomen with a man's strength. All the air seemed to go out of her lungs. She vomited.

“I should make you lick that up, you stuck-up Brit cunt. Down on your knees, you'd like that, wouldn't you.” He pulled her close. She was weeping; she could hardly see. He said, his lips so close to hers she felt him form the words, “Get inside when I tell you, or I'll cut you in the tit.”

He pulled on the chain to start her. She fell against the unfinished timber of the door frame, then fell forward, tripping over a sill at her ankle's height; she went down on her knees, her head crashing into a deal wall. He pulled her up by the back of her dress, pushed her to her right. “Climb.”

She was at the bottom of a wooden shaft. A ladder of rough wood went up into darkness. She felt him close behind her in the confined space as he closed the door and the light faded and then disappeared. “
Climb!
”

She put her manacled hands on a rung at the level of her nose and raised her bad foot and put it on the lowest rung and went up. It didn't matter that the ankle screamed; it didn't matter that her abdomen had pains as if he'd broken something inside her. It didn't matter that she couldn't remember falling, that all she could remember was that she had recognized him and thought for a fraction of a second that he was going to help her. What mattered was that it was Galt.

What mattered was that she was there and he was there, and he said he was going to kill her. Didn't that mean he was the Butcher?

The
gun. I should use the gun
. But the gun seemed abstract; the real was here in the dark, climbing this ladder that smelled of old wood.

He said, “Put your hands out in front of you. You're at the top. Climb out and stand there. Or try to run away, if you want.” He tittered. “Try it.”

She felt her hands on a flat surface that must be a floor; she could feel the roughness of the boards and the cracks between them, and she thought,
The
crushed
stone
is
under
these
boards
. Her feet had climbed only one rung of the ladder; the floor of the tunnel was no more than her head height above the floor of Marie's room. She climbed, her hands flat on the floor, then reaching out to her right as her feet came up, finding a wall and using it to stand. She took a step forward into the darkness, bumped her head, then stood there bent over as he came up. She tried to reach around with her manacled hands to find the pocket in her dress. The fingers of her right hand could touch the edge of the pocket, actually go in to almost the knuckles, but she couldn't reach the gun. She tried to twist herself and bend to the side.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Could he see in the dark? Or had he heard her, the whisper of her dress? He had a handful of her skirt in his hand; he was close to the pocket and the gun. “What're you up to?”

“I…please…”

“I'll give you ‘please.'”

She heard a scrape, then the scratch of a match. The light seemed brilliant in the darkness; she thought of the flash of the gunshot in the tunnel under Madison Square Garden. There were more sounds, metallic, small, and the light grew and she realized that he had lit a lantern.

“All right. You're going to walk straight ahead until you come to the end. Then you'll turn left. If you don't, I'll cut you.”

She could feel the sting of the manacles on her wrists. His pulling must have broken the skin. Again, the pain was abstract. It was like a failure of belief: this was happening, but it couldn't be happening. It had happened to other women, but it couldn't happen to her. Surely?

She was shuffling, limping forward. She tried again to reach around to the pocket but couldn't do it. He would see. He had the lamp. She went on, following her own long shadow down the path of rough boards. Small as she was, she had to bend her head because of the low ceiling. On each side, bare vertical timbers ran up, and bare brick made diminishing lines like railroad tracks toward the end of the tunnel.

She reached another wall. Where was she now? She had been in Marie's room on the third floor. She must still be on the third floor. She looked left: blackness. Another tunnel. So had she come to the body of the centipede from one of its legs?

“I said go left, cunt.”

She turned and started into the dark. He turned into it behind her and his lantern again threw her shadow ahead. It was the same as before, verticals and horizontals and darkness, claustrophobic and terrifying. She thought of old Carver in these tunnels, bent because of his height, opening the peepholes to look at women. And there was a smell…

“You'll come to another ladder. Climb.”

That would be at an interior corner of the building, the corner of the centipede's body; on her right would be one of the air shafts, beyond it more walls of brick and stone.

Was she too terrified to be frightened? Like a small animal when it hears the owl's cry as the bird descends, when it is too late and shock strikes like early death to save the pathetic thing from pain?

I
am
not
helpless. I am not an animal. This can't be happening.

She bumped into a ladder. Behind her, he laughed. “You stupid twat. Walked right into it!” He spun her around and pinned her against the ladder; a rung pushed back at her shoulders, another at the top of her buttocks. She could feel the length of him from his chest down to his knees, pressing against her, forcing her into the ladder. His face was close. “You're stupid, you know that? Your brains are down between your legs. So high and mighty, not letting me touch you, laughing at me behind my back, and you thought I didn't know!”

She felt a fleck of spittle strike her face. He grabbed the chain of the manacles and bent to put the lantern on the floor, then put his hand under her skirts and stood, raising the front of her skirt and petticoat. She writhed, cried out.

“Go ahead and scream, bitch! Nobody can hear you here. The other one tried that. She screamed her head off, and I hadn't even cut her yet. Go ahead. You're afraid of me, aren't you. You're pissing yourself, aren't you. You're shitting yourself…” His hand was between her legs, feeling her through her drawers, then the fingers scrabbling at the fabric as he pulled the drawers down. She was moaning, “No, don't, don't!” and trying to push his hand down, but he caught the manacles and raised them so that the chain was pressing into her mouth, and her words seemed to spur him on. She felt his hand go between her legs so that it could feel her buttocks, her anus, then it came forward again and fingers crawled into her vagina.

This
can't be happening!

He put his thumb on her clitoris and began to press with his thumbnail. “You like that, don't you. That's what you like, I know it is.” The pain was intense. His fingers were inside her. “I'll show you some real stuff. I'll drive you crazy. You'll beg for it. You love it.” He began to whisper, the sound insistent, sometimes slurred, the words incoherent. His whole hand, his fist, was inside her. She screamed, not words but animal sounds: the owl was descending and all she felt was pain.

Then his hand came out and he was doing something between them. She wanted to faint, tried to faint, but she was awake, alive for the first time since she'd fallen. She knew suddenly that it was really happening to her; he had done these things and he was going to do worse. She screamed.

He was doing something between them. She could feel his hand moving, then a rhythmic beating against the tops of her legs.

He's masturbating. He worked himself up and he's masturbating. Oh, God, oh Heavenly father, oh, please God, don't let this happen—

“You cunt, you bitch, you whore, you cocksucker.” He was panting. “I'll give it to you. I'll have you raving. Now you'll see—you'll see…” He still had her skirts caught up between them. She felt something against her thighs, then his hand prying them apart, his knee, both knees, and something was pressing against her vagina.

“You're wet for me! You're fucking running with it…”

He was trying to put his penis into her, but it was soft. She could feel the hardness of the bones of his fingers, his knuckles, and this soft thing, this worm, this limp threat. He kept saying the same words over, cunt, bitch, whore, and she felt him harden as he tried to push it in with his fingers, and then she felt him soften and shrink again. He pulled himself away. “You stinking diseased cunt! You did it! You shit-filled cunt!” He pulled her to him with the manacles and smashed her against the ladder. He was panting, raving, beating her with his free hand. “It was your fault! You did it on purpose!” He hit her again in the abdomen. “Climb! Climb or I'll cut your shitbags out and leave you here to die!”

She was moaning, weeping. She climbed as fast as she could. The air was dizzy with her pain. She sank again into disbelief, into surrender.

Yes, yes, kill me, just give me release. Yes, descend on me, kill me.

“Keep climbing!” She had reached another floor, had stopped, already trained. Her senses were closing down; existence was becoming internal; there was no seeing, no hearing, no touching. She kept climbing, up another floor, up, up, then up another; existence was only climbing, these pieces of wood in her hands, somebody moaning, somebody weeping…

“Stop!”

He stepped around her, did something. Light. He grabbed her manacles and pulled her forward. “Stand there!”

She was in a room. It had no windows. It had a tile floor. It had two doors, both closed. In the middle, it had a double stone sink; on the sink was a wooden table. On the table, covered with a brown blanket and held down with leather straps, was Ethel.

Ethel's eyes flicked toward her. “Help me.”

That was absurd. She couldn't help herself; what was Ethel thinking of?

The tunnel was behind her. She wondered if she could hide in the tunnels, like the rabbit hiding from the owl.

He slapped her. “I said stand there!”

He had blown out his lantern. She looked at Ethel, but Ethel's eyes were closed now.

Under the sinks on which Ethel's table stood was a tube. It ran to a drain at the side of the room.

On the wall farthest from her was a shelf at head height. On it were bottles of several sizes. In the bottles was transparent fluid, and in the fluid were gray shapes like flukes or squids. In the one at the end of the row was a human face, twisted but still recognizable as a face because of the eyeholes. She thought,
Minnie
.

He stood in front of her. “Like what you see?” He held her head and twisted it so that she had to turn all the way around, a full circle. What he was showing her was that the walls were covered with photographs of women. Women undressing, women dressing, women on the toilet, women making love to men, women making love to other women—

“You like that one?” He was holding her head so that she had to look at a photograph of two women on a bed, each with her head between the other's legs.

“That's what I'm going to do with you and the very proper Miss Grimstead. I'm going to cut your tongues out last and then put you like that, and you'll bleed to death into each other's twats. And they'll find you like that. But they won't find your tongues. They'll go into my collection.” He started turning her head again. “The old man took all these pictures. Years ago. He's a sick one.”

She had been moving her feet so he wouldn't twist her head off her shoulders. When she came around to face him again, he took hold of her chain. “Shall we start? You two can watch each other. First a little of Ethel, then a little of Lady Uppity-cunt.” He pulled up on the chain. “Upsy-daisy!”

Her arms were jerked upward. He pulled her almost off her feet, tried again with both hands, but couldn't reach what he wanted, a two-inch pipe that ran the length of the wall. He cursed, let her down so that her heels touched the floor again, and reached into a pocket.

She had put herself into a place she didn't know existed, a place inside her where none of this could happen and all she had to do was wait. It was a safe place, if only she could keep the pain out of it.

He was putting a key into the right manacle. “You try anything, and I'll cut you right now. I'll cut your mouth right off; see how you like sucking all those cocks then.”

Dimly, objectively, she saw what he meant to do: raise her left arm so that he could attach the open manacle to the pipe. That seemed a good solution to his problem.

Then she allowed herself to peek out of her safe place and see that her right hand was free.