"Yeah."
"That was sweet," she said. "I'd like to help you collect on Manette… if you'll let me."
"Jesus." He looked at her and scratched his head.
"Can I see them? I mean, you know, put a stocking over my head or something? I assume they haven't seen your face or anything."
"Gloria, this isn't about money," Mail said. "This is about what she did to me in the old days."
That stopped her. She said, "Oh." Then: "What're you doing to her?"
Mail thought about it for ten seconds, then said, "Whatever I want."
"God," Gloria said. "That's so"-she wiggled in the chair-"neat."
Mail smiled now and said, "C'mon. I'll show you."
On the way out the back, Gloria said, "You told me you'd stopped thinking about her."
"I started again," Mail said.
"How come?"
Mail thought about not answering, but Gloria had been inside with him. As dreary and unlikable as she was, she was one of the few people who really might know how his mind worked, how he felt.
"A woman started calling me," he said. "Somebody who doesn't like Andi Manette. I don't know who-just that it's a woman. She said Manette still talks about me, about what I was like. She said Manette said I was interested in her sexually, and that she could feel the sex coming out of me. She must have called fifteen times."
"God, that's a little weird," Gloria said.
"Yeah." Mail scratched his chin, thinking about it. "The really strange thing is, she called me here. She knows who I am, but she won't tell me who she is. I can't figure that out. But she doesn't like Andi, that's for sure. She kept pushing, and I kept thinking, and pretty soon… you know how it gets. It's like you can't get a song out of your head."
"Yeah. Like when I was counting to a thousand." Gloria had once spent a year counting to one thousand, over and over. Then, one day, the counting stopped. She didn't feel like she'd had much to do with it, either starting or stopping it, but she was grateful for the silence in her brain.
Mail grinned: "Drives you nuts…"
On the way down the stairs, into the musty basement, Gloria realized who the woman was-who was calling John Mail. She opened her mouth to tell him, but then decided, Later. That would be something to tease him with, not something simply to blurt out. John had to be controlled, to some extent; you had to fight to maintain your equality.
"I built a room," Mail said, gesturing at a steel door in the basement wall. "Used to be a root cellar. Damn near killed me, working in that hole. I'd have to stop every ten minutes and run outside."
Gloria nodded: she knew about his claustrophobia. "Open it," she said.
Andi and Grace had used the snap tab from Grace's bra to work on the nail in the overhead joist but could work only a half-hour or so before the skin on their fingers grew too painful to continue. They were making progress-a half-inch of the nail was in the clear-but Andi thought it might take another week to extract it.
She didn't think they had a week: Mail was becoming more animated, and darker, at the same time. She could feel the devils driving him, she could see them in his eyes. He was losing control.
"Never get it out," Grace said. She was standing on the Porta-Potti. "Mom, we're never gonna get it." She dropped the snap tab and sat down on the Potti cover and put her face in her hands. She didn't cry: both of them had gone dry-eyed, as though they'd run out of tears.
Andi squatted next to her, took her daughter's hand, and rolled it: the skin where she'd been holding the too-small tab was pinched and scarlet, overlying a deeper, dark-blue bruise. "You'll have to stop. Don't do any more until the red goes away." She looked up at the joist, rubbing; her thumb against the shredded skin of her own forefinger. "I'll try to do a little more."
"No good anyway," Grace said. "He's too big for us. He's a monster."
"We've got to try," Andi said. "If we can only get a weapon, we can…"
They heard the thumps of feet overhead. "He's coming," Grace said. She shrank back to the mattress, to the corner.
Andi closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, said, "Remember: no eye contact."
She spit into her hand, dabbed a finger into a dusty corner, reached up and rubbed the combination of dirt and saliva on the raw wood where Grace had been digging around the nail. The moisture darkened the wood and made the rawness less noticeable. When she was satisfied-when the footsteps were on the stairs, and she could wait no longer-she stepped down, pushed the Porta-Potti against a wall, and sat on it.
"Don't talk unless he talks to you, and keep your head down. I'll start talking as soon as he comes in. Okay? Grace, okay?"
"Okay." Grace rolled onto the mattress, facing the wall, pulled her tattered dress around her legs.
Mail was at the door.
"John," Andi said, her voice dull, her face slack. She was desperately trying to project an image of weariness, of lifelessness. She wanted to do nothing that would provoke him.
"Come on, up, we've got a visitor." Andi's head snapped up despite herself, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Grace roll over. Mail stepped down into the cell, and as Andi got to her feet, he took her arm, and she shuffled to the door.
"Can I come?" Grace squeaked. Andi's heart sank.
"No," Mail said. He never looked at the girl, and Andi said, quickly, so he wouldn't have a chance to think of her, "Who is it, John?"
"An old nuthouse friend of mine," Mail said. He thrust her through the door, stepped out behind her, and closed the door and bolted it. A woman, all dressed in black, was standing at the bottom of the dusty basement stairs. She had a long, thin stick in her hand; a tree branch. In her other hand, she held a bottle of beer by the neck.
Witch, Andi thought. And then, Executioner.
"God, John," the woman breathed. She came closer and walked around Andi, looking her up and down, as though she were a mannequin. "Do you hit her a lot?"
"Not a lot; I mostly fuck her."
"Does she let you, or do you make her?" The woman was only inches away, and Andi could smell her breath, the sourness of the beer.
"Mostly, I just go ahead and do it," Mail said. "When she gives me any trouble, I pound her a little." Andi stood dumbly, not knowing what to do. And Mail said, "I try not to break anything. Mostly I just use my open hand. Like this."
He swatted Andi's face, hard, and she went down, but her head was clear. Mail hit her almost every time he took her out of the room, and she had learned to anticipate the motion. By moving with it, just a bit, the blow was softened. By falling, she assuaged whatever it was that made him hit her.
Sometimes he helped her pick herself up. Not this time. This time he stood over her, with the woman in black.
"Brought some rope," he said to Andi. He showed her several four-foot lengths of yellow plastic water-ski rope. "Put your hands up-no, don't stand up. Just put your hands up."
Andi did what he told her, and he tied her hands at the wrist. The rope was stiff and cut into her skin.
"John, don't hurt me," she said as calmly as she could.
"I'm not going to," Mail said.
He tied a second length of the rope to the bindings at her wrist, led it over a joist-mounted rack in the ceiling, and pulled on the end until Andi's hands and arms were above her head, then tied it off.
"There you go," Mail said to Gloria. "Just the way you wanted her."
"God," Gloria said. She walked around Andi, and Andi turned with her, watching. "Don't turn, or you'll really get it," Gloria snapped.
Andi stopped, closed her eyes. A second later, she heard a thin, quick whistle and then the tree branch hit her in the back. Most of the impact was soaked up by her dress, but it hurt, and she screeched, "Ahhhh," and arced away from the other woman.
Gloria's voice was hot, excited. "God. Can we get her dress off? I want to hit her on the tits."
"Go ahead," Mail said. "She can't do anything to you."
Gloria walked straight up to Andi, and, as she reached for her blouse, said, "You should have taken her clothes away from her, anyway. We oughta cut them off with a knife. Same with the kid, we oughta…"