At first they had emulated the photos that inspired the macabre photo shoot, but soon enough they took things to another level. Calvin had been scared at first. He couldn’t remember killing Celia, so when he cut the man’s head off it felt like the first time committing such an act. The man was already dead, but nothing about dismemberment was normal. It was a grisly task that made him feel cold inside while he performed it. They didn’t have something like an axe or even a saw, so Calvin had to cut through the flesh and muscle with the kitchen knife Hazel had concealed in her purse. The spine was an unruly bastard and all the blood made everything so slick that Calvin’s hands kept slipping, which made Hazel laugh. Soon Calvin was laughing and joking and that cold feeling inside was replaced with a deep warmth he could only remember feeling in the best days of his relationship with Ronnie, but she was out of his life and he wasn’t going to think about her now.
Hazel produced some towels she found in the ticket booth area and he tried to clean up a bit before completing the severing of Danny’s head. After that they decided to let the body cool off a bit, figuring a little rigor mortis would make chopping it up a bit easier. In the meantime they had propped the head up on the guy’s stomach as if he was watching them, and they fucked right there on the cold floor. All the coldness that Calvin had felt while cutting the guy’s head off was replaced with the heat of passion. Sometimes he stole a glance at the severed head and it made him feel waves of pleasure that rippled through his body equal to those he felt from Hazel’s touch.
They ended by taking pictures posing through the process of dismembering the man they referred to as Dead Danny. At one point Calvin had severed a hand, breaking the bones over his knee rather than trying to cut through them. He said, “Can I give you a hand,” and stuck the cold hand out to Hazel. She laughed and grabbed Dead Danny’s head. “Got a head above the rest,” she said.
By the time they were finished they had run the gamut of stupid puns and senseless jokes.
“One foot in the grave.”
“That one was a knee slapper!”
“This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed home…”
“Oh, of corpse!”
“I’m all ears.”
“Farewell to arms.”
Calvin’s favorite was when he extracted Dead Danny’s eyes and placed them on Hazel’s stomach while she was lying on her back. “I’ve got my eyes on you.”
Now Calvin lay upon the bed, staring at the pictures, remembering each and every one of them like it was yesterday. The body parts were tossed into the closet. That was another reason he had for showing Hazel what he thought was going to be the Wall of Suicide. They put the body in there and used towels to wipe up the blood. A sizable stain was left on the floor, but after it dried the coppery odor became stale and they were used to it. Even the body, which must have been decomposing, didn’t bother them. They couldn’t even smell it.
At the time, killing Danny was surreal. Though at first Calvin had been terrified, once he and Hazel had come together and shared the warmth of their live bodies, he dove into the acts of mutilation like maneuvering his way through a pleasantly sickening dream. Even now, eyes darting from photo to photo, he had a feeling similar to that he felt when he woke up to find Celia dead in his living room. The feeling wasn’t as strong, but the more time that passed, the more it seemed like the pictures were stills from a movie.
“Are you ready for the test?” said Hazel.
Calvin wasn’t aware that she had been standing there behind him. Just knowing she was there made him feel good. He wondered what they were to endure and if they would be allowed to take the test together.
“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. How ’bout you?”
“Oh yeah. I’ve been ready for some time. I have no idea what the test is gonna be, but I’m ready for anything.”
Calvin didn’t doubt that. Hazel’s full throttle, no bars held, full speed ahead attitude was inspiring, and even a bit intimidating at times. But he liked that about her. He didn’t look at it as a reversed roles sort of thing, though that had certainly crossed his mind. It was just that there was something comforting about her look on life and the fact that all of this didn’t get under her skin.
Calvin, he sat there looking at the pictures because when he didn’t, when he tried to do anything else, he began to doubt. The pictures had power. Hazel didn’t need that power (she had somehow harnessed it herself and even seemed to know how to use it), but Calvin couldn’t function without her or the pictures.
“I wonder if we can take the test together,” he said.
Hazel let out a burst of a chuckle that could easily have been taken in offense. “Don’t think so. Until this week we’ve been going through this alone. I have a feeling that’s how we’re going to be tested, that way we can’t… play off of each other. You know what I’m saying?”
Calvin smirked. “I guess. It’s just…”
He didn’t want to say what he was thinking. Didn’t want to come off like some kind of pansy-ass, but when he was alone, when he wasn’t with hazel or the photos of Dead Danny, he was scared.
Chapter Thirty-One
In addition to Ronnie, Lance was keeping someone else hostage in the strange barn-like structure. A man.
After a week strapped in the chair with nothing to look at but portraits of herself and that strange coat of arms emblem with the stylized GH on it, Ronnie had a hard time pinning down a routine. Lance was spending equal amounts of time in a room on the other side of the partition, though there was no rhyme or reason to his separation of time between Ronnie and the man she couldn’t see, but knew was there. The unpredictable manner in which Lance led his life was unsettling. The situation was beyond unsettling. There was something about the randomness of Lance and his time divided between the two that made it even worse. How do you expect the unexpected?
The first time Ronnie was aware of the man on the other side was after Lance’s stunt with the razor blade and his lips. Once his maniacal laughs and her shrill screams died down, Lance seemed pleased with his scare tactics and left to get some food. As soon as he was gone, the man on the other side of the partition said something.
“Are you alright?” he said. His voice was muffled due to the drywall between them. It carried above and it was clear that he was trying to speak up so that she could hear him.
At first Ronnie was terrified. She had been so relieved, if only for a small period of time, that Lance had left. It felt like she had a chance to think for the first time since he’d abducted her. She was hesitant to respond, assuming it was Lance messing with her mind, but then the voice called out again.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
Ronnie had been so shaken from what she had seen Lance do to himself that she trembled and sobbed. Her face was saturated with tears and snot ran down her lips and chin and there was nothing she could do about it. Couldn’t even wipe her face, which was downright maddening.
She still didn’t respond.
He raised his voice. “My name is Vince. I’m strapped to a chair that’s bolted to the ground.”
Another pause. What the man was saying had been registering with Ronnie, but she was too shattered to say anything. Perhaps he recognized this, because that was the last thing she heard him say that day.
Lance was feeding them regularly and he never took a hand to her. If she protested he would cut himself and then he would laugh about it. Must have been some kind of messed up reverse psychology, and it worked. She didn’t like watching him abuse himself anymore than she wanted him to lay a hand on her. His wide array of clay detailing tools had a way of shutting her up if she started talking too much.