Empties (11 page)

And when he was alone, his imagination tormented him with what she could do to him, if not with the power she claimed to have demonstrated then with an axe, a saw, an ice cream scoop. Everything that he was sat in his skull, and would be ripped out, all the blood vessels torn, and his personality would die in his eyes. Nothing of him would remain to look out or inward again, all past gone, all present empty and unable to father a future...
 

How had he come to this, how could he have done so unless it was a delusion?
 

He pulled at his handcuffs and insisted that he was asleep at home, and was startled by the involuntary quivering sounds of dismay struggling in his throat.
 

“Wake up!” he shouted to his sleeping body, imagining that he had suffered a stroke and was dying in this strange dream-coma, with no one to save him.
 

“Carla!” he shouted to his neighbor.
 

They would break down his door and find him dead, but he would still be here in this basement room.
 

She turned on all the lights in her living room, feeling feverish and full of hope as she reclined on her sofa. There was a lot she could do with her power, she told herself. Even a limited chess piece has a moment when the entire game hangs in the balance. She could threaten powerful people into doing what she wanted. True, that would take time and planning, careful intimidation and disciplined demonstration. She would build a cell structure, first one, then another, of people who would do her bidding. She would accumulate money by simple extortion until it became as powerful as her ability. No one would be able to resist her. She would raise a daughter, maybe two, and they would rule the world...
 

But her wild hopes faltered as she tried to imagine the exact steps it would take to do what she wanted with her power. Her fatigue seemed to stay longer with her...
 

She closed her eyes and drifted into the gallery of the Senate. Below, the blowhards were making speeches. One by one she emptied several figures seated at their desks, bloodying the surfaces, until the President pro-tem stood up and cries of panic filled the chamber. She felt no fatigue as her mind twitched and took aim again, still without tiring, and his world was torn from his head...
 

She came awake with a start and knew that the man Gibney had to die as soon as possible, and Benek too, as soon as she was pregnant. Revealing herself to him with the rat had been an accident; but his knowing would be a threat for as long as she held him alive, even if he doubted. Suddenly she knew that no one who might have the slightest suspicion that she existed could be left alive.
 

10

“Dierdre!” he shouted in the darkness, then listened for sounds up in the hall, even though he knew it was unlikely that she or anyone else could hear him from this dungeon. She had made sure of that. She was probably sleeping, or had gone out to get Gibney, and that possibility filled him with anguish, then with resolve.
 

He tensed as the heater clicked on, then began to struggle against his manacles in the dim, orange light; this might be his only chance to escape and save Gibney’s life.
 

He pulled the right manacle tight against the vertical brass header bar to which it was attached, and strained. The cuff would not spring. He pulled harder, until his wrist hurt, then stopped, realizing that if he could loosen the brass bar from its horizontal seat he would be able to slip the manacle free.
 

He grabbed the bar with his right hand and wrenched. The hollow shaft moved—and he began to hope. He jerked it three times; it moved again. There was some dried blood on it, where the rat’s brain had hit.
 

He paused, held his breath, and listened. There were no sounds from upstairs. He took a deep breath and worked the bar back and forth, managing to move it a quarter of an inch each way. The hollow brass was soft, promising to bend and possibly to slip out of its mooring in the larger horizontal bar. Dierdre had not foreseen that he might not have to open or break the manacles, but only to free them from the bed, although the manacles seemed to be of good quality—not police issue, but stainless steel with good locksets, probably bought in an expensive novelty sex shop.
 

He worked the bar back and forth, bending it at the middle.
 

Suddenly it came loose from its lower mooring, and he slipped the handcuff from the bar. With his right hand free, he reached over to the left bar and began to rock it loose.
 

It was slow going; this one seemed stronger. He took a deep breath and jerked at the center. The bar bent and came out from its upper mooring. He slipped the cuff over and sat up, telling himself that he could not let Frank Gibney die.
 

He stared at his ankles and caught his breath as the heater went off, but the sudden blackness stopped him for only a moment. He did not need to see that even with his legs spread only halfway, he could not bend his knees easily. Slowly, he bent forward at the waist and probed for the bar beyond his right ankle. If he could free his right ankle, reaching the left bar would be much easier.
 

Bending nearly double at the waist, he found and grasped the bar and held on tightly, breathing heavily. He would not be able to hold this position for very long.
 

It was hard to get a rocking motion started in this position, so he began to pull from the center, hoping to bend the bar with one continuous effort. After all, this kind of bed was not made to be a prison, but only to be decorative. It was sturdy in the spring and mattress supports, but the rest had not been made to resist sustained violence.
 

Slowly, the bar began to bend, then snapped free of both moorings. He fell on his back. As he relaxed and regained his breath, he told himself to hurry, that there was only one bar left, that all his effort would be for nothing if Dierdre came back suddenly, or if she reached Gibney before he could warn him.
 

He sat up and inched forward, bending his left knee, and grasped the left bar with both hands. He began to pull, but the bar resisted until it seemed that he would pull out his wrists and shoulders. He paused and breathed deeply, then tried again, giving it everything. It began to bend at the middle as he strained, then popped out of its moorings. He threw the bar away and got out of bed.
 

He stood there, unsteady on his feet from so much bed rest, dangling the now useless cuffs as the heater came on again. He stumbled to the wall switch and turned on the bulb above the bed.
 

He would go upstairs at once, break in the door to her apartment, find his clothes and leave before she returned. No, he told himself. She was out to kill Gibney and would not be back right away, but the fear of being wrong, of confronting her without a weapon made him tense with indecision. Even a gun might be too slow, unless he came up behind her; that is, if she was able to do what she had made him see happen. Made him see. Magicians did that. But why had she gone to so much trouble? Only to frighten him?
 

He was about to go upstairs when he noticed that there was another small area in the room, just under the old stairs. He went over and saw an open cardboard box. He leaned closer and saw that his clothes and watch were inside it.
 

As he pulled the box out into the room, he glimpsed an old-fashioned work area back against the wall under the stairs. Ancient tools lay rusting on the bench, probably dating back more than a century. He went up to the bench and found a heavy hammer and a set of chisels. There were sets of hand drills, planes, jars filled with old wood screws and nails of all sizes, and an antique cast iron vise attached to the bench with massive bolts. This had been a workshop once, back in the days of gaslight, he realized when he reached up for a light and grasped an old gas jet next to the hanging bulb.
 

There was no switch that he could see, but he turned the large bulb and it went on, a glaring frostless old Edison bulb. He stopped its swing on the cord, took one of the bigger chisels, set it on the joint of the handcuff, then grasped the hammer with his right hand and struck hard. The cuff came apart and fell from his wrist. The right one was harder, because he had to strike with his left hand, but the joint separated after three blows.
 

Shivering, he went out into the room and sat down on the cold stones before the heater to work on his ankle, now able to strike with his right hand. Five blows got him free.
 

He dressed quickly, reviewing what he should do. He would not stay and confront Dierdre. He had to flee and warn Gibney.
 

But he was suddenly curious about what she had been doing in the chamber next to the dungeon. He went to the doorless entrance, looked inside, and could see nothing as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Then he looked up and saw the utility light hanging from a hook in one of the wooden cross beams.
 

He reached up and tried to turn it on, but the push switch seemed stuck. He looked around, straining to see, but there was not enough light coming through, and he was blocking much of it. He reached up to the light again, and discovered that the bulb was loose in its socket. He gave it a twist, and in the sudden electric glare from another unfrosted Edison he saw that she had been digging what had to be a grave. It was about half finished, filled with scurrying insects and smelling of seepage from the sewer. And as he realized that she had been planning to bury him here when she was finished with him, he thanked a much doubted God that the bed had not been made of sterner stuff, and that Dierdre did not know that the softer metals could be worked, bent, even broken by a human hand.
 

Looking more carefully, he saw what seemed to be stirred earth back against the far brick wall, where something might have been buried. Then at his right, he saw several bags of cement mix, and realized that she intended to pave over the floor of the alcove.
 

Trembling from the hellish sight of what would have been his last resting place, he turned away, crossed the bedroom purgatory that Dierdre had made for him, and opened the lower door to salvation. He hurried up the long wooden stairs and found the door at the top locked. The lock cylinder required a key from each side. He scrambled back downstairs, grabbed the big hammer from the floor, then sprinted back up and struck the lock angrily until it fell apart. He threw the hammer downstairs, pulled open the door, and came out in the hallway, under the stairs leading to the second floor.
 

He crept to the front door and peered out through the curtains. It was evening in the heaven of the living, nearly six by his watch. What should he do? His wrists and ankles ached, and he felt exhausted as he went out the door and hurried down the street, struggling to think.
 

Go home first, he told himself, realizing that he had no clear idea of how to stop Dierdre. Would she be able to core him if he struggled with her physically? Could he come upon her from the back and hit her over the head? Shooting her from a distance with a rifle would safely avoid her gaze. Could he afford to be skeptical about what she could and could not do?
 

What could he tell anyone? That he had met a woman who strikes men brainless, or anyone, for that matter. He couldn’t tell anyone that without being able to parade her around in chains for a demonstration—and even then they might say it was a trick.
 

Brains—why did it have to be brains? Had some human self-hatred bubbled up out of the dark to give Dierdre the ability to rip out the pride of human rationality? Worse had already happened a long time ago; the world did not need Dierdre to torment itself. Everywhere human brains were being blown out by bullets and explosives; empty-headedness ruled from cradle to grave in the service of the few.
 

The city shifted around him as he hurried home, and the only certainty he felt was that Dierdre should not have chained him to a brass bed.
 

11

She knocked on the door to Frank Gibney’s office. The wood and frosted glass door rattled gently. She waited for an answer. She looked to her right and left and listened, but the entire floor was quiet at a few minutes past noon, as she had hoped it would be; city workers took their lunchtime seriously, but the higher-ups often went out later. She heard someone cough inside the office.
 

She knocked again.
 

“Come in,” a man’s voice finally called out from within.
 

She opened the door and stepped inside. An empty steel desk stood to the right of an open door.
 

“In here,” the man called. “My assistant is out to lunch.”
 

She went into the next office and saw a heavyset, balding man eating a sandwich at a wooden desk. He stared up at her, his eyes demanding what she wanted of him, then frowned and looked puzzled by what she was carrying.