“Knew what?”
Brian continues confessing. One gets the feeling he has never said the following out loud: he was twelve, for the first one. He woke up on the floor, his body cold and hot at the same time. He must not have made a noise, because Tessa was still snoring, there, in his bed. Mitch, of course, stayed asleep. Brian got clean underwear and pajama pants and changed in the bathroom, not knowing what to do. Very confused. Very, very upset. Lots of head scratching. Luckily, Troy was home that weekend, and on Sunday, when Mitch left the shed to get sodas, Brian asked Troy whether he should be worried that his peener was spitting stuff all over his jockey shorts at night.
Tessa laughs, sedately, full of endorphins and petting him. “Troy was cool about it, wasn’t he?”
Brian affirms that Troy put down the five--eighths (they were rebuilding a Harley engine from scratch) and explained to Brian that no, he should not be worried. He should know, in fact, that it was a hundred percent normal. Was it a girl from his class? Yes, Brian said adamantly, yes, it was a girl from his class. Brian tells Tessa, no, it was not a girl from his class. It was Tessa. It has almost exclusively been Tessa all his life, which is weird and he knows it. He’s been with other women, a pretty solid number of them, especially after Mitch died, but he has, only on maybe a half--dozen occasions, dreamed of other women, and he has very rarely masturbated to other women, and Tessa is now laughing and hugging Brian, and I want to vomit. “Troy said to use tissues, hide the magazines, sponge the sheets if it happened at night. They didn’t know you slept with us. I never did it with you next to me. Not once. That would’ve been—no.”
Tessa’s pensive. She feathers his hair between her fingers. Her teeth worry her lower lip, until Brian puts his thumb where her teeth are biting. She licks it. Not mischievous. Docile, like a cat.
“Tell me,” says Brian.
“What?”
“What you’re thinking.”
She runs a finger over his eyebrow, which rises at this pause, this reluctance.
“Please?” he says.
“I stopped sleeping with him a week ago,” Tessa says, and swallows. “I shouldn’t have told you about him, at least that he worked here. It was only ever physical, but—”
The Killer is reentering the nondeluxe penthouse, but wild dogs couldn’t pry my attention from Tessa saying,
“I tried to keep it strictly physical.”
Brian looks at the bracelet on Tessa’s wrist. He undoes the clasp and sets it on the bedside table; then he puts her fingertips to his mouth and kisses them. To show he is quiet. To show she should go on.
Go on, go on.
Tessa says, “He loves me way more than I deserve.”
“Impossible,” Brian says, and I hate him for saying it, and I hate him for getting to say it.
Tessa huffs, turns over, away from him—and Jules begins an impressive, lengthy keening scream at the sight of the Killer climbing the last few stairs; he stops at the top step, to enjoy the sound—but Brian makes a frustrated face for all of a second before he’s furled around Tessa from behind. “Tell me,” he says again. “Because I need to know. This could be a problem. I’m a thousand percent sure I love you more than he does. So if you’ve got issues with that—”
“Have you ever felt like—like, going through what we went through, it’s too much to ever explain to somebody? And the idea of even trying—you’re tired before you start.” She’s crying again. She wipes her tears on the sheet. “What it takes to survive that when you’re so small. How it never goes away, not all the way away, not ever.” She shakes on a sob. Brian turns her, very carefully, so she’s cradled to him. Tessa fights for a full breath and says, “If I could’ve told him, if I thought in a million years I could have made him understand how hard it is, even now, especially now, to feel . . .”
Alone.
I wonder if the anger is visible in my eyes. It wouldn’t matter. The Thinker is composing a text message, which the Killer—listening to Jules’s continuing screams like a man taking in the symphony—reads, replies to, and grudgingly obeys by walking toward her.
Whereas I, behind my death mask, roil in Tessa’s self--assured, self--centered, self--fulfilling prophesy that I couldn’t possibly understand her loneliness. While Brian pats and pets and shushes and squeezes, I ask Tessa, Would I be permitted to understand now? Now that I sit alone among the dead, death behind me, death beneath me, watching it watch you and stalk you and I’m powerless to stop it?
Just as quickly, anger is punctured by Tessa’s voice in my head, asking, Are you sure I was going to say “alone”?
Brian nudges his lips to Tessa’s and says, so she’ll feel the shapes the words make on her own mouth, “You don’t have to tell me. Or make me understand. I already know.” His tongue darts out to lick a teardrop. “Don’t I.”
“Yes,” Tessa says. “Yes.”
“You wanted to love him,” Brian says, “but you couldn’t. You couldn’t do that to him.” He nips her lower lip between his teeth.
“I’m sorry,” says Tessa, to Brian, to me.
They’re getting turned on again. It’s in their voices, but so is fatigue.
There is terrible fatigue in Jules’s voice, too, as the Killer comes toward her in the bedroom of Room 1801. She moans like a toddler in a nightmare. She’s wearing a brief silk nightie; it was white, and now it’s red. Jules didn’t help Justin fight; she sat in her corner, like this, and she moaned, like this, and when Justin could no longer fight, Jules still didn’t fight, as the Killer came for her and did all this damage. There’s a butter knife sticking out of Jules’s right ankle. The Killer did that to hobble her. He needn’t have. Terror has hobbled her.
So why does she fight now, as he reaches for her?
It’s three o’clock in the morning.
It’s instinct. This time it isn’t more torture, more bleeding. This time it’s the end. An animal knows. Jules bats at his hand with pointless, open palms. The Killer twists a fistful of her hair and pulls. Jules is dragged backward, through the bedroom. She is dragged past her dead husband, for whom she reaches, crying. It’s pathetic but understandable, her display. She has regressed to a state of primal reaction. The Killer pulls her to the bedroom’s stairs. Then thuds can be heard, and shrieks in time, and then they appear in the regular penthouse’s entryway, and then in the eighteenth floor’s hall. Blood leaves a path behind them. Jules is reaching for her ankles. Both of her ankles have butter knives through them. The Killer drops Jules against the door to Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse. He goes to the door to the stairway, opens it, and doesn’t quite close it.
Brian and Tessa snuggle, speaking so low it’s hard to make out under Jules’s despondence, and Jules’s despondence is made that much more distracting by her attempt to collect herself. She’s trying to get it together. She’s looking around the hallway; she’s looking at the door to Room 1801 and crying anew, mumbling, “Justin, sweetie, sweetie.” She is red; all of her is red. Jules licks each of her palms and tries to scrub the blood off her face. Partly she succeeds; partly she blends it. She tucks back her hair and straightens her nightgown.
“I’m not knocking on their door,” Jules says. Her chin is high and proud. One might say “snobby,” if one weren’t, at this moment, madly in love with her. “You’ll have to knock, asshole.”
Jules’s bravery does crumble a little when the Killer swings the stairway door wide and stands forebodingly there.
But she speaks through the crumbling. It is lovely and dreadful. “Did your mother make you those coveralls? They’re nice. Very Sears.”
The Killer is slow in walking to her. He is patient, standing over her.
Jules spits at him. It only hits his shin—the wounded left—but it gets the point across.
The Killer raises his right hand, which holds his blood--lathered knife. He raps his knuckles on the door, four times.
Jules screams so loudly, the Thinker, on the twentieth floor, drops a king of hearts to cover his ears. “Tessa! Don’t open th—”
Even soundproof rooms have doors through which knocks must echo.
And if knocks must echo, the barest hint of a scream might do the same, no matter how efficiently the Killer was able to hack through Jules’s voice box and abort the rest of the message. He avoids the arteries again. He retreats to the door to the stairs and leaves it slightly open. Jules’s throat crackles like radio static.
“What’s—” Tessa is bolt upright in the bed.
So is Brian. “That sounded like your friend.”
Tessa’s shuffling clothes, putting them on while walking. She takes Brian’s undershirt by mistake. It’s white, what is colloquially called a “wife--beater.” Her nipples are pointed shadows underneath it.
Brian’s leaping into his pants. “Wait. Wait, Tess!”
CAMERA 62, 56, 19–13, 4, 13–14, 42, X
Tessa’s running down the spiral staircase while zipping up her skirt. She has no shoes. Brian’s buckling his belt at the top of the stairs—having shoved into his boots and pulled on his shirt—when Tessa reaches the deluxe penthouse’s door and wrenches it open.
It’s so bright in the hall, compared to the penthouse. Jules’s body tumbles backward, over the threshold, her crackling throat a slow flow of black blood, the hall light triggering a switch in the deluxe penthouse’s camera feed so that it’s no longer night vision, no longer green, black, and white. So that the Killer’s knife, when he emerges from the stairway’s door, gleams like an oblong ruby. And Tessa is bent over Jules, and Jules is whistling from the throat, and Jules’s mouth mouths the word “Run” over and over again, and Brian is almost down the stairs, but the Killer moves quickly, very quickly, knife high.
It is evidently not part of the plan to leave any survivors in the hotel.
I once instructed Tessa, while she and I were boxing, “If a man attacks you and he’s an amateur, yes, certainly, use a knee to the groin. But professional assault personnel wear a cup. If a man attacks you and he looks professional, then, Tessa, put everything you’ve got into a shin kick.”
Maybe this advice plays in her head.
Maybe not.
Maybe it penetrated deep enough into her mind, when she heard it, that it became a part of her, something she’ll carry as long as she lives, however long that will be.
It will be at least another few seconds, because as the Killer comes for Tessa, as Brian runs across the penthouse to save her, as Jules gurgles, Tessa crouches and curls her left leg tight to the hip, releases it with an outward snap that is like a bear trap tripped, and the arch of her foot—the powerful part—connects solidly with the Killer’s wounded left shin. There is a dull thunk, not a crunch but good anyway, and the Killer makes a kind of desperate yapping noise as the pain of ripped--open cuts impedes his coordination and he windmills over the women. If the Killer were allowed to fall forward, he might impale himself on his own damn knife, but no, Brian catches him around the belly and hurls him into the kitchen. Tessa’s pulling Jules up to sit against the door frame, seeing the blood, babbling, “It’s okay, babe. It’s okay. Don’t worry,” and like comments that are patently untrue. The Killer has recovered his wits, head--butts Brian, and Brian falls. The Killer raises the knife high up in both hands.
Tessa screams so loudly, the Thinker returns to the security counter. The Thinker is searching for the audio feed volume. The audio feed volume is digital. It requires a code. The Thinker presses random buttons. The foyer’s chandelier goes dark, and the fountain in the maze’s center lights up and jets water at the night sky. The Thinker flaps an impatient wave at the controls and goes back to his cards.
Brian rolls out of the path of the knife. The Killer uses so much force that he stabs through the carpet and into the flooring. He’s trying to pull the knife free when Tessa kicks him in the face. This time, there is a crunch. There is also wonderful, awful banshee screeching that any sane person would run away from, coming from Tessa’s mouth. The Killer cannot run. He tries to catch Tessa’s feet as they pummel him. Blood leaks out of his mask. He catches her foot, turns it, and she falls to the floor with a thud. She hits her head, but the carpet is stupidly thick. The Killer is wrapping his hands around Tessa’s throat when Brian leaps on his back. The Killer stands, reverses into the kitchen and into the refrigerator. Brian bounces off. Brian ducks a punch that dents the refrigerator, runs around the Killer and helps Tessa stand. “Stairs! Stairs!” Brian shouts as the Killer selects the biggest knife from the knife block. He pulls out a spare and rears back to throw it at Brian, but Tessa stumbles, so Brian falters, so the knife flips past where Brian’s head was a half second ago and embeds into the door frame with a thwummm. Tessa grabs for Jules, but Jules is dead. Brian propels Tessa and himself through the door to the stairwell.
“Hurry!” Brian says. “Hurry! Hurry! Go!”
“Is he behind us?”
“No! He must be taking the elevator! Hurry, Tess! We can beat him—go, go!”
The Killer’s shoulders quiver with rage. He steps over Jules. He hustles across the hall, into the regular penthouse, across the living room, into the secret elevator. He hits the “Lobby” button and turns around.
Jules, not dead, smiles at him and raises a stiff middle finger right as the secret elevator’s seam sews shut. She laughs. It’s a gurgling sound. She wiggles so she can fall back to the floor. She flops around as her own blood drowns her.
“Go! C’mon, Tess, hurry!”
Brian and Tessa are running past the eleventh floor.
The Killer, in the secret elevator, passes the ninth floor.
There are no lights on in the foyer. It is dark as a grave. Until headlights bathe it bright. There’s a Lamborghini tracing the horseshoe of the parking lot. It’s Charles Destin’s Lamborghini.
“Who is he?” Tessa says, running. They are passing the eighth floor. “Who’d want to do this?”
The Killer is passing the second floor.
The Thinker is watching Charles Destin pull on Manderley’s front doors. Destin curses at finding them locked. He has a woman with him. She’s wearing a short, thin gold dress and big hoop earrings. Destin says something to her about “a scenario” and rolls his eyes. He takes her hand and leads her around the outer perimeter of the hotel.
The Killer is in Franklin’s office. He limps past the desk and filing cabinets, out, past the check--in counter and the information desk. He goes to the stairway door and stands to the side of it, knife in both hands again, high above his head.
“Go!” Brian says. “Go, go, go!”
He and Tessa are running past the fourth floor.
The Killer is waiting.