It seemed logical to return to the grove, where they’d last seen the women. But details bothered her. Why had Jervis told Wade he’d made his phone call from the shop?
Lydia drove to the shop.
“Damn it all!” she yelled. Her passkey didn’t fit the padlock on the garage. Someone had put a different lock on. No choice, she reckoned. She aimed her Colt Trooper and looked away. One round blew the lock off its hasp.
Inside, she turned on her SL and looked around. The little used shop existed only for the handful of students who liked to tune up their Jaguars themselves. No one was here now, but in the back she noticed three cars covered by tarps.
She was not surprised when she hauled the first tarp off. A red 300ZX, Penelope’s car. “And would this be Sladder’s security car?” she wondered aloud, hauling off the second tarp. A white Escort, campus security seals on the doors. And the third tarp slid away to reveal a spray painted black ‘68 Camaro with a bashed in grille.
She checked the trunks, knowing they would contain no bodies. The ZX and Camaro were clean. It was the trunk of the security car, however, that released death’s meaty stench into her face. Her stomach lurched. She held her breath, roving the flashlight through the trunk space. Christ! Maggot fat and lying in a puddle of coagulated blood was a severed human arm, chopped just above the elbow.
One pulse short of vomiting, Lydia slammed the trunk shut. Behind her stood a row of jugs, like those big metal milk cans with wide mouths and large handles. But these felt like plastic and scarcely had any weight at all. She shined the SL in one. A layer of some off whitish slime covered the bottom, and she remembered the gunk they’d seen in the sump hole at the gravesite. Like lard, she thought. Or wet plaster.
A sudden humming sounded in her ears. She felt it more than heard it, a vibrato in her head. Then the lights snapped on.
She jerked, turned.
Jervis stood before her, a lit Carlton in his mouth. He was grinning. “Welcome to my parlor,” he quipped.
Lydia drew her Trooper, aimed, and—
Jervis slapped it out of her hand.
She kicked him in the balls, cracked the SL over his head. Jervis laughed. Then the merry chase began.
She ran madly through the shop. Jervis madly followed. Lydia grabbed the largest, heaviest things she could lay hands on: piston rods, brake drums, torque converters. They all either bounced off her attacker’s head or were swatted away like gnats. Last, she heaved an intake manifold, which must’ve weighed fifty pounds, directly at Jervis’ face. He caught it one handed and tossed it aside as though it were Styrofoam.
“Let me save you some time,” he suggested, “and show you who you’re fucking with.” He picked up an entire dismounted engine, which weighed four or five hundred pounds. He held it under one palm, like a shot putter. “Understand now?” he asked. “You know many guys who can lift a Chevy 427 with one hand?”
“Can’t think of any right now,” Lydia droned.
He shot putted the engine across the shop. It bounced loudly, pounding cracks in the cement floor.
Jervis smiled, toking his Carlton. “Where’s Wade?”
“I don’t know,” Lydia said.
A flinching sadness touched his face. He spoke very quietly. “I made a promise to myself today. You know what I mean? Have you ever made a promise to yourself?”
“Yes, Jervis. Lots of times.”
Jervis made a thoughtful nod. “Well, I promised that I would never let a girl lie to me again. I was in love once, with a girl named Sarah. I let her lie to me because I was too afraid to confront the truth. Without truth, there’s nothing, right? When we let people lie to us, we become cowards at our essence. Her lies…hurt me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jervis.”
“I’m not a coward anymore. No woman will ever lie to me again.” He looked at her, his eyes flat yet full of…hope? “You mustn’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying, Jervis,” she lied. “I don’t know where—”
“No, no, no!” he roared louder than any voice she’d ever heard. The words were cannon shots which shook the brick joists of the shop. “Lying mocks me! It takes me back to what I was!”
Lydia wished for a convenient corner to crawl into. She shivered before him—the impassioned maniac. She knew she was dead, so what good would lies do?
Jervis quieted, grimaced as if to push something back. “It’s a complicated thing,” he whispered, “the rebirth of my Existenz. Sartre said one must recognize existence before essence, and I have. To become the center of my universe, I must accede to my object of self. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“I gave Sarah all my love, and she gave me lies. Truth is relative, but so is falsehood. It’s transpositional. If you lie to me, you become Sarah, and if you become Sarah, you attack my spirit. I’d be forced to do something really awful to you. Something…hideous.”
The only thing worse than a homicidal psychotic was a philosophical homicidal psychotic. Lydia’s eyes remained riveted to him.
“I could take you apart like a doll, your arms, your legs, your head,” he cheerily informed her. He seemed to stand in an aura of darkness. “I could pull your insides out like yarn. So…I’ll ask you again. Where’s Wade?”
Truth? she thought. I must accede. Even if she told where Wade was, Jervis would kill her anyway. So what could she say?
“Blow yourself,” she said.
Her feet were off the floor in an instant. Jervis had her throat in his right hand and something else in his left. Gagging, her gaze flicked down to see what it was.
What he held was a Craftsman auto body sander. You used them to sand down putty on fenders, though Lydia seriously suspected that Jervis planned a slight variation of this utility. The disc was loaded with fifteen grit synthetic sandpaper.
An inch from her nose, he turned it on. Its motor shrieked. The grinding disc spun before her eyes at 4,000 rpm’s.
“Tell me where Wade is,” Jervis said, “or I’ll sand your face off.”
In the chokehold, Lydia barely managed to gasp, “Eat my poop.”
“So much for Mr. Nice Guy.” He would do her real slow, would stretch her death out like pizza cheese. The motor’s screams played foreshadow to her own. Just as the grinding disc would strike pay dirt—her face—the motor died.
“Jervis, Jervis,” Professor Besser’s voice came from behind. He’d pulled the sander’s cord out. “If you kill her, we may never find Wade.”
“She lied to me!” Jervis spat. “She affronted my Existenz!”
“Forgive her, my boy. Didn’t Sartre also say that one must forgive his universal counterparts for the sake of the ultimate existential ideal?”
Jervis’ flat eyes thinned in rumination. “No!” he shouted. “Sartre never said anything even close to that!”
“Bring her to the labyrinth,” Besser commanded. “We’ll put her in one of the holds.”
Seething, Jervis let her down and gave her a smack on the back of the head. The blow laid her out—she nearly lost consciousness. “You’re fucked, bitch,” Jervis promised her in a fierce whisper. “I’m gonna do a job on you that would make Charles Manson puke. Just you wait.”
He began dragging her along by the collar, but not toward the shop door, she dizzily realized.
He was dragging her toward the wall—
—then into the wall—
—then through it.