Off Season - Jack Ketchum [71]
That time when she vomited, there was still something left inside her.
She heard a loud hissing sound and an awful stench filled the room. Trembling, she turned back to look at him again and saw that he had seared her wound with the torch to close it up. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, drinking her blood from a bowl. Steam rose from the blood-slick floor and from the black, gleaming wound. She may have vomited then too, but now she could not remember. Laura’s eyes were open, flickering, watching him through some horrible last effort of will. Perhaps she feels nothing by now, thought Marjie, knows nothing—perhaps she’s in shock. Then the man threw down the empty bowl and extended her remaining arm along the floor, and Laura’s eyes went bright with knowledge and terror, and Marjie knew that shock had not spared her.
She had to look away as the hatchet fell. She moved back into the cage nearer the boy and put her hands to her ears against the sounds he made—and against the splashing sounds, the hiss of fire and blood with its attendant reek of burning flesh, the low moans, the terrible thump of metal against bone, the sounds of breakage, and the liquid sounds which perhaps were worst of all.
He was keeping her alive as long as he could, and she participated in her torture by her body’s blind attempt to survive it. Didn’t she know that it was better to be dead now? What awful fraud animated her? Her will to live was as cruel as he was. Marjie could only pray that when her own time came she would . . . what?
She dismissed the thought. It was evil, stupid. Laura had no choice, she understood that. When her own time came, neither would she. If it came, she added. And there was the proof of it, she thought. She did not believe that they could kill her. Reduced to cinders, she still would want to live. She thought of her sister.
It seemed to go on forever. Then at last there was a silence and she turned back to them because she knew that she owed it to herself and even to Laura somehow to see what he had done, to witness his crime. Yet it took all her courage to do so. When it was accomplished, when she opened her eyes again, it seemed she had used up the last of her courage, that there was a gaping hole where her defiance had been.
An uncontrollable shudder possessed her now. She did not know when it had begun. It seemed to drain her like a tap on a dying battery. She opened her eyes and saw that both Laura’s arms were gone at the elbow, and both legs at the knee. He had piled them beside her like firewood. And still Laura lived, her glazed eyes still blinked and stared, her chest rose and fell in an irregular broken tremor.
Her mouth was open wide. He had impaled her tongue—the offending member with which she had cried out to him before—on a fish hook. And now he was pulling on it, slowly, grinning with an imbecile’s ripe pleasure as blood trickled down her chin and dripped across her breasts.
He reached into his pocket and she saw the knife again. He moved the blade into place and pulled the tongue out further. He sliced the tongue carefully along its base and pulled it free. He held it a moment dangling from the hook as though admiring it, opened his mouth and pulled it away with his teeth. He knelt down in front of Laura so he was certain she could see and with both hands fed the tongue into his mouth and began to chew.
It was then that she vowed to kill him if she could.
A few moments later, she heard his key at the lock.
There was no room for anger. Her terror admitted nothing else; it was deep and rapacious. She found herself clinging to the boy’s arm so ferociously that she made him cry out.
He tried to pull away. “No,” she said, “you have to stay, you have to help me!” She knew that somewhere