She smiles. “Yes.”
She empties the pills from bottles on a counter against the wall and returns with the water. She feeds them to him, and lets him drink. She doesn’t check to see if he’s swallowed them, because she doesn’t need to.
It will be fifteen minutes before he feels the medicine, so he tries to divorce himself from the slow death of his body. She sits in a chair beside his bed, hands neatly on her lap, staring.
“Why did you decide to become a psychiatrist?” he asks her after a long silence.
“I’m not,” she says. “I just read some books.”
“But you’ve got medical training.”
“I worked as an ER nurse. I went to medical school, but I dropped out.” She smiles. “I would have been a great doctor, though, don’t you think?”
“I’m maybe the wrong person to ask.”
They sit quietly again, but she is fidgety.
“Do you want to know all about my shitty childhood?” she asks. “The incest? The beatings?”
He shakes his head. “No,” he says thickly. “Maybe later.”
He feels the first tingle bloom in the center of his face and begin its tidal surge across his body. Just stay there in the room, he tells himself. Don’t think about Debbie. Don’t think about the kids. Don’t think. Just be in the room.
Gretchen is looking at him appreciatively. She reaches out and touches his face. It’s an affectionate gesture he has learned often indicates that she is about to do something terrible.
“I want to kill you, Archie,” she says, her voice soft and sweet and untroubled. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve fantasized about it for years.”
She runs her fingertips over the edge of his earlobe. It feels good. His breathing eases as the codeine softens the pain of his broken bones, his split flesh. “So do it.”
“I want to use drain cleaner,” she tells him, as if discussing a wine they might serve at a dinner party. “I’ve always done it quickly. Made them drink a lot of it at the end. Death comes very suddenly.” Her face is animated. “But with you, I want to do it slowly. I want to watch you experience death. I want you to drink the drain cleaner slowly. A tablespoon a day. I want to see how long it takes. What it does to you. I want to take my time.”
He meets her stare. Amazing, he thinks, what psychopathic horror lives in that pretty, demure body.
“Are you waiting for my blessing?” he asks.
“You said you’d be good. I sent the package to Henry. Like you asked.”
“So that’s part of the fantasy? I have to take the poison willingly?”
She nods, biting her lip. “I’m going to kill you, Archie,” she says with absolute assurance. “I can carve you up and send you piece by piece to your children. Or we can do it my way.”
He considers his options. He knows that she presents him with impossible choices, fully realizing that he can choose only one outcome. She wants total power over him. His only weapon is to retain some illusion of power himself. “Okay,” he agrees. “On one condition.”
“What?”
“Four more days. That’s all I can do. If I’m not dead from it in four days, you find some other way to kill me.”
“Four days,” she concurs, her blue eyes bright with pleasure. “Can we start now?”
He watches her body language change; her excitement palpable. He nods his surrender and she immediately jumps up and goes to the counter against the wall. She pours a glass of water, retrieves a beaker of clear golden fluid, and returns to him. “It will burn,” she instructs him. “You’ll have to resist a gag reflex. I’ll plug your nose for you and follow the drain cleaner with water to wash it down.” She pours a teaspoon of fluid from the beaker and holds it at his chin. The familiar smell sickens him. “Are you ready?” she asks.
He has no sense of consequence. It is not him who is there in the basement with Gretchen Lowell. It is someone else. He opens his mouth and she plugs his nose and thrusts the spoon far back into his throat and empties the poison. He swallows. She holds the glass of water to his lips and he gulps as much of it as he can. The burning is overwhelming. He feels it scald his throat and then flame into his gullet, and for a second he is back in his physical self, his nervous system in full panic. He screws up every muscle in his face and bites down on his tongue to keep from vomiting. Then, after a while, it passes and he lies panting on the bed, Gretchen holding his head in her hands.
“Shh,” she says, soothing him. “You did well.” She smoothes his hair and kisses his forehead several times. Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out six large white oval pills. “More codeine,” she explains. “You can have as much as you want. From now on.”
CHAPTER
28