“Ted… what?”
“ What, Ted, what?” He mimicked her in a high, squeaky voice. “What a piece of work you are.”
“What are you talking about?”
He squeezed so hard she cried out. “You like that? ’Cause you knowwhat I’m talking about. Don’t play the innocent little girl.”
She struggled, but had almost no strength left. It was like a nightmare. Maybe it wasa nightmare — maybe all of this was. “What are you saying?”
“What are you say-ing?” he mimicked.
She twisted, trying to break free, and he roughly spun her around, his face almost touching hers. The red, sweaty, misshapen, furious look that disfigured his face frightened her terribly. Both his eyes were bloodshot and leaking water. “Look at you,” he said, lowering his voice, his lips warped with anger. “Leading me on, always teasing, first promising and then saying no, making a fool of me.”
He gave her a sudden, violent squeeze with his powerful arms and she felt a rib crack under the pressure, pain lancing through her chest. She screamed, gasped, tried to speak, but he squeezed her again, forcing the air from her lungs. “The cocktease stops right here, right now.” Spittle splattered her face. His lips, covered with a white film, were now brushing hers, his strangely foul breath washing over her like fumes from a rotting carcass.
She tried to breathe but couldn’t. The combined pain of her ankle, her hand, and now her ribs was so excruciating she was unable to think straight. Fear and shock sent her heart, already racing from the pursuit through the mines, into overdrive. She had never seen a face so twisted and so terrifying. He was completely mad.
Mad. Mad…She didn’t want to think of the ramifications of that — she would not, couldnot, follow that thought to its natural conclusion.
“Please—” she managed to gasp.
“Isn’t this perfect? You just running into my arms like this. It’s karma. It saves me all the usual kinds of preparation. The universe wants to teach you a lesson, and I’ll be the teacher.”
With that he threw her to the ground. She fell sprawling, with a cry of pain. He followed up with a kick to her injured ribs. The pain was unbearable and she cried out again, gasping for air. She felt the world swirling around, a strange ethereal floating sensation, pain and fright and disbelief overpowering all rational thought. A mist passed before her eyes, and consciousness shut down.
A long, dark time seemed to pass before another searing lance of pain brought her back to herself. She was still in the dingy room. Mere moments must have ticked by. Ted stood over her, his face still grotesquely distorted, eyes watering, lips covered with a sticky bloom of white. He reached down, seized her leg, spun her around, and began dragging her over the rough floorboards. She tried to scream but couldn’t. Her head banged roughly against the floor and once again she felt herself on the verge of passing out.
He dragged her from the back room into the main section of the structure. The vast pump rose above her, a monstrous juggernaut of giant pipes and cylinders. The tall building creaked in the wind. He pulled her alongside a horizontal pipe, yanked off her gloves, took notice of her damaged hand — lips curling into a malevolent smile at the sight — then lifted the other arm and roughly cuffed her wrist to the pipe.
She lay there, gasping, swimming in and out of consciousness.
“Look at you now,” he said, and spat on her.
As she struggled weakly to sit up, gasping in pain, part of her mind seemed to sense that this was happening, not to her, but to somebody else, and that she was watching from someplace far, far away. But there was another part of her mind — cold and relentless — that kept telling her exactly the opposite. This was real. Not only that — Ted was going to kill her.
Having shackled her to the pipe, Ted stepped back, crossed his arms, and surveyed his handiwork. The dark mist that hovered around her seemed to clear slightly, and she grew more aware of her surroundings. Old pieces of lumber littered the floor. A couple of kerosene lanterns were hung nearby, casting a feeble yellow light. In one corner was a cot with a sleeping bag on it, a box of handcuffs, a couple of balaclavas, and several large cans of kerosene. A table held several hunting knives, coils of rope, duct tape, a glass-stoppered vial with some clear liquid within, wadded piles of wool socks and heavy sweaters, all black. There was a gun, too, that looked to Corrie like a 9mm Beretta. Why would Ted have a handgun? Pegs on the walls held a dark leather coat and — perversely — assorted clown masks.
This seemed to be a hideout of some sort. A lair— Ted’slair. But why should he need one? And what were all these things for?
An old woodstove was burning to one side, the light shining between the cracks in the cast iron, throwing out heat. And now she noticed an odor in the air — a vile odor.
Ted pulled up a chair, turned it around, and straddled it, balancing his arms on the chair back. “So here we are,” he said.
Something was terribly wrong with him. And yet the furious, violent, half-demented Ted of the last few minutes had changed. Now he was calm, mocking. Corrie swallowed, unable to take all this in. Maybe if she talked to him, she could learn what was troubling him, bring him back from whatever dark place he was in. But when she tried, all that came out was a pathetic garble of sound.
“When you first arrived in town, I thought maybe you were different from the others around here,” he said. His voice had changed again, as if his rage had buried itself deep in ice. It was remote, cold, detached, like someone speaking to himself — or, perhaps, to a corpse. “Roaring Fork. Back when I was young, it used to be a real town. Now the ultra-high-net-worth bastards have taken over, the assholes with their social-climbing bimbos, the movie stars and CEOs and Masters of the Universe. Raping the mountains, clear-cutting the forests. Oh, they talk a good line about the environment! About going organic, about reducing their carbon footprints by buying offsets for their Gulfstream jets, about how ‘green’ their ten-thousand-square-foot mansions are. Mother fuckers. That’s just sick. They’re parasites on our society. Roaring Fork is where they all gather, flattering each other, grooming each other of their lice like fucking chimpanzees. And they treat the rest of us — the real folk, the native-born residents — as scum fit only to sweep their palaces and stroke their egos. There’s only one cure for all that: fire. This place should burn. It needsto burn. And it isburning.” He grinned, another fleshy, demonic distortion, frighteningly close to the face he’d shown her before.
Kerosene. Handcuffs. Rope. It needs to burn. Now, through the fog in her head, Corrie understood: Ted was the arsonist. A huge shudder of fear coursed through her, and she struggled against the cuffs despite the pain that racked her body.
But then, as soon as she started to struggle, she stopped again. He cared for her — she knew he did. Somehow, she had to reach him.
“Ted,” she croaked, managing to speak. “Ted. You know I’m not one of them.”
“ Oh, yes you are!” he screamed, leaning toward her, the white scum flying off his lips in droplets. As quickly as it had come, the icy, methodical veneer fell away, replaced by a mad, bestial rage. “You faked it for a while, but no — you’re just like them! You’re here for the same reasons they are: money.”
His eyes were so bloodshot, they were almost red. His hands were trembling with rage. His whole body was trembling. And his voice was so strange, so different. Looking at him was like looking into the maw of hell. It was so awful, so inhuman an expression, Corrie had to avert her eyes.
“But I don’t have any money,” she said.
“Exactly! Why are you here? To find some rich asshole. Iwasn’t rich enough for you! That’s why you playedwith me. Leading me on the way you did.”