The girl had been immobilized, her arms and legs duct-taped securely to a solid, blocky wooden chair. Several strips of the silver duct tape circled her head and covered her mouth, preventing her from crying out, although it was not for lack of trying.
The girl was being tortured. The man had been fantasizing about using his pliers in the previous Flicker, and now he was doing it. And he was using other implements of torture, too. The scene was horrifying. The girl was naked and covered in blood; it flowed from wounds in at least a dozen different places.
Her captor studied her appraisingly, looking exactly like an artist examining his canvas. He tilted his head sideways. Took a step back. Then he advanced, plunging the pliers into his victim, wielding them like some demented sex toy, ripping and tearing the soft flesh of her inner thighs as she bucked and thrashed. Fresh blood flew, splattering the man’s hands and wrists, dripping down the insides of her legs in thick trails.
Cait wanted to avert her eyes, she tried to avert her eyes, tried to close her eyes to the horror, but she couldn’t, because her eyes didn’t matter. She was seeing the ghastly sight with her mind, and there was no shutting down her mind, no closing her mind to a Flicker. She had no choice but to experience it until it ran its course.
She tried to scream, to cry out for help, but she could not. She wondered if she was going mad, sinking into her own personal hell, where she would live out her days doomed to watching this depraved horror show inside her head.
In the Flicker the man continued his torture. He was relentless, stabbing and slicing. The suffering girl’s head whipped back and forth, her face puffy from crying and blotchy from fear and pain. On the floor her clothes had been scattered like wrapping paper around a toddler’s gifts on Christmas morning. Wounds covered her, large and small, all of them red and raw and angry and weeping blood. There was barely a spot on the girl’s entire body that had not been attacked with the awful pliers or with razor-sharp knives.
Finally the suffering victim’s eyes opened widely in an obscene parody of disbelief, as though it had only now occurred to her that something awful was happening to her. She blinked several times, rapidly, as spasms wracked her body. Her muscles contracted and released and contracted and released again, and then her head lolled to the side and back, eyes closed, mouth agape.
And then she was gone.
And so was the Flicker.
And Cait was back. She opened her eyes and saw Kevin, sweet, considerate Kevin, his worried face staring down at her. She was stretched out on the hotel room floor, next to the bed where she had fallen when the Flicker started, lying flat on her back, legs splayed. Kevin crouched next to her, cradling her head in his arms.
She shuddered. Opened her mouth. Tried to speak. All that came out was a terrified husky squeak. She shook her head and realized she was panting, hyperventilating, and tried to slow her breathing but could not. She burst into tears and Kevin lifted her easily in his arms. He kicked the open suitcases to the floor, one after the other. Clothes burst out of them and formed small fluffy hills around the luggage. Then he set her down on the bed and held her as she cried.
After a while—Cait couldn’t say how long; maybe five minutes, maybe thirty—the terror began to abate, and the vision of what she had seen dimmed enough to allow her to concentrate on the here and now. Kevin stroked her hair rhythmically, caressing it, saying nothing, waiting for her, endlessly patient. “Oh, God,” she whispered. She sobbed deeply and she thought she might scream but didn’t.
“Where were you?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know. It looked like it might at one time have been an apartment. It was messy and dirty and in the middle of the room was a chair with a naked girl strapped to it. It was the girl from last night and she was being tortured horribly. I…I think I watched her die…” Cait squeezed her eyes closed as if to ward off the vision, just as she had done during the Flicker, but she was no more successful now than she had been then.
“Oh God,” she said again.
CHAPTER 27
The streets were relatively traffic-free—at least as traffic-free as they ever got in this metropolitan jungle—as Milo cruised toward Everett. Following his play time with the now-deceased Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker, he had wiped the bloodstains off his hands and arms as best he could using a series of dirty towels, then slept fitfully for a short while.
Following the invigorating nap, he clambered up off his air mattress and changed his clothes. Then he walked to the YMCA a few blocks away and showered with the hottest water he could stand, scrubbing the filthy stench of dead prostitute off his body.
Normally Milo could sleep like a baby for twelve to fourteen hours after one of his play sessions, but today was different. Today was special. Rae Ann had become nothing more than the first act, the warm-up band for the rock concert of torture that would soon follow. Milo was determined to introduce himself to the arrogant little bitch who had so recently begun haunting his visions.
His routine—and, in fact, his entire life—had been completely disrupted thanks to the mysterious young woman, and that made Milo nervous. Uncomfortable.
Usually, when entertaining one of his special guests, he was able to make the fun last much longer than it had with Rae Ann, although never as long as he wanted. He inevitably began a session with the best of intentions: to keep the girl alive for as long as possible. Not because he gave a damn about the girl, but rather because his surgical procedures only served to stimulate him while the victim was alive and conscious and thus able to appreciate what was happening to her. Once she was dead or even just passed out, the entire affair was instantly rendered pointless.
So his goal was always to do enough to provide for his own stimulation while not going so far that his guest slipped into unconsciousness, either from pain or blood loss. Eventually, of course, it would always happen. It was inevitable. And often when it did occur, the girl wasn’t just unconscious but dead. Unfortunately, and despite Milo’s best efforts at controlling his urges, he had a habit of becoming so engrossed in his work he was unable to hold back. He would pass the point of no return and lose his victim to eternal darkness.
Today that moment arrived even faster than usual, for the very reason that today Milo did not want to make the fun last. Today he had other business to attend to. He was only playing with Rae Ann because…well…because she was there, and it would be unacceptable to leave home without getting at least a small taste of such a succulent morsel.
So he had hurried things along. The session had still been immensely enjoyable, but varying his routine had taken him outside his comfort zone and had made him feel anxious and upset, like he was trying to keep a secret and was afraid someone else might have learned it.
And he had varied his routine in other ways, too, ways that represented infinitely more risk to Milo than simply making him feel anxious. Typically, when finished with a girl, he would dispose of the body immediately, even before allowing himself to slip into the comforting cocoon of a good night’s sleep. Normally he played his games in the middle of the night, in part because it added a certain delicious ambiance to the proceedings, but also for the practical reason that it made corpse disposal much easier. He would simply hack off his victim’s arms and legs and stuff everything into garbage bags. Then he would take a midnight stroll, toting the bags to various restaurant Dumpsters around the city.
The only inherent risk was of being stopped by a patrolman while making his “deliveries,” but Milo had long ago discovered that law-enforcement presence in the neighborhoods he haunted was minimal in the middle of the night. Even the cops who did patrol were not inclined to step outside the comfort and safety of their cruisers for anything short of a murder in progress. Milo had more than once been given the stink-eye by a passing cop, but he had never yet come close to being questioned while in possession of body parts.