Twenty
Henry Rouvroy picked up shotgun-shattered fragments of his face from the bathroom floor and dropped the pieces of broken mirror into a heavy-duty plastic trash bag.
He paused repeatedly to study reflections of his stare in the silvery shards before throwing them away. He saw nothing in his eyes, certainly nothing like guilt. No such thing as guilt existed, except in the weak minds of those who believed in the false gods of various authorities. He saw the same nothing he had seen in the eyes of Nora Carlyle’s corpse, the universal nothing of the human gaze.
The eyes were not the windows of the soul, and what could be seen beyond them was only a thousand hungers, needs, desires, and one thing more—fear. Henry knew his hungers and did not need to discover them in his eyes. His needs and desires were insatiable, and he would feed them, feed them as no glutton ever born had ever fed. The first woman in the potato cellar would not be the last, and if he lived long enough, the fields of his brother’s farm would be a six-acre cemetery without headstones.
Henry challenged himself to acknowledge the fear in his eyes, and he saw it clearly. He was not afraid of any variety of authority. He feared only others like himself, monsters in the making or already made. He knew that legions of them stalked the world. He knew of what they were capable, because he knew of what he was capable: anything.
He saw nothing exalted about the human animal, nothing elevated or dignified, or exceptional. Only two roles existed for any human being: prey or predator. Rule or be ruled. Act or be acted upon.
Somewhere nearby, a predator intended to prevent Henry from establishing a survivalist retreat on this property. The unknown adversary could have but one motivation: to seize the property for himself and live there to ride out the coming storm.
If that was the case—and it had to be the case—then he must be someone who knew the storm was coming, someone who traveled the same Washington circles in which Henry had once moved. He must have discovered that Henry had stolen a fortune from the operation, and he must have put Henry under observation to discover what further intentions he might have.
Those circles were infested with people who possessed limitless resources for investigating and tracking a subject of interest. Henry had taken great care to conceal his theft and to cover his trail when he came west, but evidently he had not been careful enough.
He didn’t for a moment believe that his brother, Jim, might be stalking him. Jim was dead. Shot three times. The third time in the face. Even if Jim survived—which he had not—he would be blind and brain-damaged.
After picking up the last of the broken mirror, Henry carried the bag to the kitchen and put it in the trash can. He took the shotgun with him.
At the cellar door, the chair remained wedged securely under the knob.
Putting one ear to the space between door and jamb, he held his breath and listened. No sound rose from below.
Perhaps some people would have been superstitious enough to wonder if Jim might have returned from the dead for revenge. Henry didn’t believe in life after death of either the spiritual or the zombie-movie kind.
The missing bodies, the bloody handprint, and the smear on the bedspread were just theater. Somebody out there had an adolescent sense of humor. He wanted to torment Henry.
Whoever the sonofabitch might be, he was evidently a sadist. No surprise. Most people in Henry’s Washington circles were sadists. In a certain kind of personality, sadism and a craving for power were entwined character traits.
Henry put the shotgun on the dinette table. Still standing, he poured another glass of the wine that he had tolerated with dinner.
A year previously, Henry had become aware of a sadistic streak in himself. He first recognized it when, while watching a woman chef on the Food Network for half an hour, he imagined sixteen violent and grotesque things he wanted to do to her. At the end of the show, he had no memory of a single dish that she had prepared.
He then switched to Home and Garden Television, where he found a program hosted by a cute interior designer. By the end of the show, in Henry’s vivid imagination, the woman sagged naked and broken against a limestone column to which she had been lashed with lengths of barbed wire.
For the past year, no woman on television was safe when Henry picked up the remote control. Certain celebrities inspired in him such extravagantly savage fantasies that he bought the largest flat-screen TV on the market.
Jim and Nora didn’t have a TV. No cable service existed in these boondocks, and they refused to spring for satellite service.
If Henry Rouvroy’s plans were fulfilled, he would have no time for television, anyway. He doubted very much that he would be able to find celebrity chefs to imprison in the potato cellar, but even rural Colorado had plenty of tender flesh to suit his purposes.
Because he considered himself an intellectual, Henry had spent considerable time thinking about his sadistic impulses. He understood that they were not triggered by the cooking show. Extreme sadism always had been a fundamental quality of his nature. For most of his life, he repressed it in order to avoid imprisonment. He channeled that energy into his career, powered his ambition with it.
A year earlier, however, because of his insider knowledge, he recognized that a time was coming when societal upheaval and chaos would result in widespread failures of local authority, creating circumstances in which a sadist could surrender to his compulsions with little fear of punishment. The nation would soon be a thrill park for men like him.
To be ready for that time of infinite delights, he had much to do. Stock the place with years’ worth of consumables. Seed the first hundred yards or so of the dirt lane, this side of the highway, so that weeds and grass would make it vanish. Create a natural-looking deadfall of trees that further blocked entrance, but only after charting a driveable path through the forest, to get an SUV around the deadfall.
He must sell the horses and chickens, too, or otherwise dispose of them. His assumption of his brother’s identity had not been for the purpose of becoming a farmer.
The thought of feeding chickens and collecting their eggs made Henry shudder. And he would not slaughter and pluck them, either. A man of his education, sophistication, and accomplishments should not be reduced to killing the food he ate.
Before he killed the women he intended to keep in the potato cellar, he would most likely bite them, as part of his play, but he had no intention of eating them. That was so twentieth-century Hollywood, and Henry had as much contempt for clichés as he had for people who ate fast food, people who wore off-the-rack suits, people who believed in things, and people in general.
For a while, waiting for his enemy’s next move, Henry didn’t think about anything. Sometimes it was a relief not to think. He could at will become the blank, the vacant flesh, the nothing that was the truth of every human being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary genius, a hero of Henry’s, believed that each of us must be a circle, inventing his own truth moment by moment, consuming his truth as a snake consumes its tail, always rolling forward, living for this moment and the next, only this moment and the next, always seeking the new, becoming the new, metamorphosing, ever changing with our ever-changing truths. In transition, in progression toward the ever-new self, said Emerson, “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.”
Now imperfect Henry was a perfect circle. Nothing inside the circle. Nothing outside. Just a thin line curving to meet itself.
This was a kind of meditation, meditation without even the awareness of meditating, meditation without purpose.
When he stopped being nothing, he sat at the kitchen table, sipping the mediocre wine. He waited for a development that would break the current impasse between him and his unknown enemy.
The moment arrived when he heard footsteps ascending the wooden staircase in the cellar.
He got to his feet and picked up the shotgun. He went to the chair-braced door.
The footsteps were plodding, as if the intruder carried a heavy burden or was weary. Finally he reached the top step.
Henry waited in silence. So did the man on the cellar stairs.
After a while, the doorknob turned back and forth, squeaking against the headrail of the tipped chair. Then it stopped moving.