Quietly, so the woman inside cannot possibly hear the word, he says, "Seuss."
The dogs freeze, looking up at him, heads cocked.
"Seuss," he repeats.
The four Dobermans are no longer on attack status and will not automatically tear to pieces anyone who enters the property. They shake themselves, as if casting off tension, then pad around in a vaguely bewildered fashion, sniffing at the grass and at the front tires of the motor home.
They are like Mafia hit men who, following their own executions, have now regained a baffled self-awareness after being reincarnated, only to discover that they are accountants in this new life.
If any visitor were to attempt to harm their master, of course, they would leap to his defense, whether or not he had time to shout the word Nietzsche. The result wouldn't be pretty.
They are trained first to tear out the throat. Then they will bite the face to effect maximum terror and pain-go for the eyes, the nose, the lips. Then the crotch. Then the belly. They won't kill and turn at once away; they will be busy for a while with their quarry, after they have brought it down, until no doubt exists that they have done their job.
Even a man with a shotgun could not take out all of them before at least one managed to sink its teeth into his throat. Gunfire will not drive them away or even make them flinch. Nothing can frighten them. Most likely, the hypothetical man with the shotgun would be able to wipe out only two before the remaining pair overwhelmed him.
"Crib," says Mr. Vess.
This single word instructs the dogs to go to their kennel, and they take off as one, sprinting toward the barn. Still, they do not bark, for he has schooled them in silence.
Ordinarily he would allow them to stay with him and enjoy his company and spend the day in his house with him and even pile up like a black and tan quilt with him as he sleeps away the afternoon. He would cuddle them and coo to them; for they have been, after all, such good dogs. They deserve their reward.
The woman in the red sweater, however, prevents Mr. Vess from dealing with the dogs as he usually would. If they are a visible presence, they will inhibit her, and she may cower inside the motor home, afraid to exit.
The woman must be given enough freedom to act. Or at least the illusion of freedom.
He is curious to see what she will do.
She must have a purpose, some motivation for the strange things that she has done thus far. Everyone has a purpose.
Mr. Vess's purpose is to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to seek ever more outrageous experience, to immerse himself deeply in sensation.
Whatever the woman believes her purpose to be, Vess knows that in the end, her true purpose will be to serve his. She is a glorious variety of powerful and exquisite sensations in human skin, packaged solely for his enjoyment-rather like a Hershey bar in its brown and silver wrapper or a Slim Jim sausage snug in its plastic tube.
The last of the racing Dobermans vanishes behind the barn, to the kennel.
Mr. Vess walks through the soggy grass to the old log house and climbs a set of fieldstone steps to the front porch. Although he carries the pistol-grip 12-gauge Mossberg, he makes an effort to appear otherwise nonchalant, in case the woman has come forward from the bedroom at the rear of the motor home to watch him through a window.
The bentwood rocker has been stored away until spring.
Trailing silvery slime across the wet floorboards of the porch, several early-spring snails test the air with their semitransparent, gelatinous feelers, hauling their spiral shells on strange quests. Mr. Vess is careful to step around them.
A mobile hangs at one corner of the porch, from the fascia board at the edge of the shake-shingle roof. It is made of twenty-eight white seashells, all quite small, some with lovely pink interiors; most are spiral in form, and all are relatively exotic.
The mobile does not make a good wind chime, because most of the notes that it strikes are flat. It greets him with a flurry of atonal clinking, but he smiles because it has well, not sentimental but at least nostalgic value to him.
This fine piece of folk craft once belonged to a young woman who lived in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. She had been an attorney, about thirty-two, sufficiently successful to live alone in her own house in an upscale neighborhood. For a person tough enough to thrive in the combative legal profession, this woman had kept a surprisingly frilly-in fact, downright girlish-bedroom: a four-poster bed with a pink canopy trimmed with lace and fringe, rose-patterned bedspread, and starched dust ruffles; a big collection of teddy bears; paintings of English cottages hung with morning-glory vines and surrounded by lush primrose gardens; and several seashell mobiles.
He had done exciting things to her in that bedroom. Then he had taken her away in the motor home to places remote enough to allow him to perform other acts even more exciting. She had asked why? — and he had answered, Because this is what I do. That was all the truth and all the reason of him.
Mr. Vess can't recall her name, though he fondly remembers many things about her. Parts of her were as pink and smooth and lovely as the insides of some of these dangling seashells. He has an especially vivid mental image of her small hands, almost as slender and delicate as those of a child.
He had been fascinated by her hands. Enchanted. He had never sensed anyone's vulnerability so intensely as he'd sensed hers when he held her small, trembling, but strong hands in his. Oh, he had been like a swooning schoolboy with her hands.
When he had hung the mobile on the porch, as a memento of the attorney, he had added one item. It dangles, now, on a piece of green string: her slender index finger, reduced to bare bones but still undeniably elegant, the three phalanges from tip to the base knuckle, clinking against the little conch shells and miniature bivalve fans and trumpet shells and tiny spirals similar to the whorled homes of snails.
Clink-clink.
Clink-clink.
He unlocks the front door and enters the house. He closes but does not lock the door behind him, allowing the woman to have access if she chooses to take it.
Who knows what she will choose to do?
Already her behavior is as astonishing as it is mysterious. She excites him. Vess turns from the shadowy front room to the narrow enclosed stairs immediately to his left. He quickly climbs the steps two at a time, one hand on the oak banister, to the second floor. A short hallway serves two bedrooms and a bath. His room is to the left.
In his private chamber, he drops the Mossberg on the bed and crosses to the south-facing window, which is covered by a blue drape with blackout lining. He doesn't need to draw the drape aside to see the motor home on the driveway below. The two pleated panels of fabric don't quite meet, and when he puts his eye to the two-inch gap, he has a clear view of the entire vehicle.
Unless she slipped out of the motor home immediately behind him, which is highly doubtful, the woman is still inside. He can see down through the windshield at an angle into the pilot's and copilot's seats, and she has not advanced to either.
He takes the pistol from his pocket and puts it on the dresser. He shrugs out of the raincoat and tosses it atop the chenille spread on the neatly made bed.
When he checks at the window again, there is as yet no sign of the mystery woman at the motor home below.
He hurries into the hallway to the bathroom. White tile, white paint, white tub, white sink, white toilet, polished brass fixtures with white ceramic knobs. Everything gleams. Not a single smudge mars the mirror.
Mr. Vess likes a bright, clean bathroom. For a while, lifetimes ago, he lived with his grandmother in Chicago, and she was incapable of keeping a bathroom clean enough to meet his standards. Finally, exasperated beyond endurance, he had killed the old bitch. He'd been eleven when he put the knife in her.