The pressure stopped. “You broke your promise,” Winters said. Then to Susan, “He’s really quite a liar. I don’t know who he’s trying to fool with this gallantry crap. He doesn’t love you. The person he pines away for, who he dreams about every night, is his therapist. A real cute piece of meat, although a bit pale for my taste, and probably at this point a bit too stiff.”
“I’ll tell you what I do dream about,” Shannon forced through clenched teeth, “the way it felt cutting off your cousin’s head. It’s like I’m there again. Seeing him scared shitless, smelling him crap his pants. I shove the knife into his neck. And all I want is to do it again.”
“Now you know why I do what I do,” Winters said. He twisted Shannon’s injured fingers until the pain shot off like a fireball, firing deep into his brain. Then the red glare faded into blackness.
As Shannon regained consciousness, he heard Winters whispering things to him, his words slurred and nonsensical. After a while, he realized Winters wasn’t whispering but talking loud enough for Susan to hear. He was detailing what Shannon would have to do to stop the pain.
“You see,” Winters was saying, “you cut her after only ten minutes of pain. I can keep it going for hours, probably even for days. By then you’d be begging me to let you do these things to her. And in your heart you’ll want to do them. You’ll be dying to do them. So why go through all that when you know how it’s going to end up? We both know you’re nothing but a pissant weakling.”
Shannon shifted the knife so he was holding the blade and then flicked it over his shoulder. Winters dodged it and the knife clanked off the wall.
“You’re going to have to beg me to let you retrieve it,” Winters said.
The pressure was turned on. His fingers had swollen and the pain now was far worse than before. It seemed to fill him up, to push deep into his skull, hard against his eye sockets. Shannon begged to retrieve the knife. Winters ignored him. Shannon kept begging. It seemed an eternity before Winters moved him away from the table to where the knife had landed, all the while increasing the pressure. After Shannon picked it up, Winters moved him back to the table, back to Susan.
More pressure. Just as the room would start to slip sideways on him, just as his consciousness would start to fade into blackness, the pressure would be modulated down. Then it would be increased.
“If you want it stopped,” Winters said, “you’re going to have to push the knife into her throat. Not enough to kill her, or even do much damage, but enough to leave it bobbing up and down.”
Shannon looked at Susan and then at the knife’s blade. Through the pain he started laughing.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Winters whispered softly. “But it won’t do any good. If you kill yourself I’ll do horrible, horrible things to her. Far worse than what I’m asking of you.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking, shithead.”
His injured fingers were twisted violently. Consciousness flickered away for a heartbeat.
“Enlighten me,” Winters demanded.
“It was really pretty funny,” Shannon said, still laughing.
“Go on.”
“It was about, ha ha, you and your cousin.”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking how you must’ve been there while I cut his head off.”
Winters pushed his broken fingers back. Consciousness slipped away for a moment. Then Shannon started laughing again, harder than before.
“You were probably standing there watching. Ha ha, too chickenshit to do anything.”
“Your front door was being broken down. I thought the police were coming.”
“But they weren’t. It was just my neighbor. And you were too chickenshit to do anything with a thirteen-year-old boy with broken fingers and a forty-year-old tax accountant.”
“Shut up.”
Shannon’s broken fingers were jammed back. His consciousness faded for a moment. Then he was laughing again.
“What did you do, hide in the closet? Too chickenshit to move?”
“I said shut it!”
“What a fucking god. The god, ha ha, of chickenshit!”
There was a hard, violent twist. Then pain exploded through him. It seemed to blow him towards the ceiling. His body rising as if he were filled with helium. All pain was gone, all feeling was gone, any concern he had had dissipated. He looked down and saw both Winters and himself, or at least his body. It was like those other times with Herbie and his father. He had somehow detached himself from his body and was observing the events from a distance. It all seemed only vaguely interesting to him.
Charlie Winters’s face had become pinched. Thin, hostile lines pushed up from his forehead. He was straining as he used both hands to twist Shannon’s broken fingers. And Shannon’s own body just laughed harder through it all.
Then Winters stopped. He stood for a moment, confused, staring at what was in his hands, not quite comprehending that the two broken fingers had separated from Shannon’s body. Had, in fact, been ripped from the body.
It was as if Shannon were watching it all from outside of himself. Watching as his body turned and pushed the knife into Charlie Winters’s neck. Watching as the confusion drained out of Winters’s face, only to be replaced by wide-eyed disbelief and then fear.
From what seemed like through a haze, Shannon watched as Charlie Winters’s head was hacked from his body. Even as his head rolled free his lips kept moving, at least for a few seconds, screaming in panic the word “no”…
Shannon knew he was missing his two broken fingers. Even still, he could feel a throbbing ache from where they should’ve been. He stood up slowly and let go of the knife. Winters’s head had rolled a few feet from his body. Shannon tried not to look at it. He tried to stare straight ahead, trying hard not to even catch a glimpse of his mutilated hand.
He heard a muffled noise from behind. Susan’s small body was convulsing as she sobbed. Shannon stumbled over to her and removed the dish rag from her mouth.
“It’s going to be all right now,” he said, trying as hard as he ever had to smile.
“I’m so cold. Please get me something.”
“Sure. I’ll be right back.”
He made his way upstairs. A woman’s torn body lay in one of the bedrooms. He removed both the quilt and a sheet from the bed. The sheet was used to cover Winters’s head and body. He lay the quilt over Susan.
“Just another minute. I need to find something to cut these wires with.”
“Bill, you need to call an ambulance-”
“What else did he do to you?”
“Not for me, for you.”
“I’ll be okay. Just a minute…”
Shannon searched through the house until he found a wire cutter. He didn’t seem to have much strength in his left hand and it took a while to snap the wires, but eventually he had them off Susan.
“I know better than to ask if you’re okay,” he said.
Her face twisted slowly into the saddest clown smile Shannon had ever seen and then she started bawling. As she, did Shannon tried to hold her. He tried like hell not to bleed on her.
“He lied about what he told you,” she said when she could. “Your therapist, Elaine Horwitz, survived. I heard it on the news earlier today.”
And then she just sobbed harder.
Charlie Winters knew he was dead.
Instead of being drawn to a white light, he had been pulled through some sort of black void. The book he had read in prison had stated that leaving your body and dying were basically the same thing. This was different, though. He felt anchored to where he had been pulled to. Movement didn’t seem possible. And his essence, or spirit, or whatever it was that defined him, had changed shape. He had the sensation that he had become gnarled and gnome-like.