Intensity, Page 20

  should manage to sprint through the attacking dogs and get into the house alive, he will not be able to call for help.

  The danger of cellular phones has been on Mr. Vess’s mind in recent days. It’s difficult to imagine a would-be burglar carrying a portable phone or using it to call the police for help from a house in which he’s become trapped by guard dogs, but stranger things have happened. If Chyna Shepherd had found a cellular phone in the clerk’s Honda the previous night, she would not be the one now languishing in shackles.

  The technological revolution here at the end of the millennium offers numerous conveniences and great opportunities, but it also has dangerous aspects. Thanks to his expertise with computers, he has cleverly altered his fingerprint files with various agencies and can go without gloves at places like the Templeton house, enjoying the full sensuality of the experience without fear. But one cellular phone in the wrong hands at the wrong time could lead suddenly to the most intense experience of his life—and the final one. He sometimes longs for the simpler age of Jack the Ripper, or the splendid Ed Gein, who inspired Psycho, or Richard Speck; he dreams wistfully of the less complicated world of earlier decades and of killing fields that were less trampled, then, by such as he.

  By feverishly pursuing high ratings, by hyping every story steeped in blood, by making celebrities out of killers, and by fawning over celebrity killers, the electronic news media happily may have inspired more of his clear-thinking kind. But they have also alarmed the sheep too much. Too many in the herd are walleyed with alertness and quick to run at the first perception of danger.

  Still, he manages to have his fun.

  After making his calls, Mr. Vess goes out to the motor home. The license plates, the blunt-end screws and the nuts to attach them to the vehicle, and a screwdriver are in a drawer in the kitchenette.

  By various means, usually two or three weeks prior to one of his expeditions, Mr. Vess carefully selects his primary targets, like the Templeton family. And though he sometimes brings back a living prize for the cellar room, he nearly always travels well beyond the borders of Oregon to minimize the chances that his two lives—good citizen and homicidal adventurer—will cross at the most inconvenient moment. (Though he didn’t employ this method to get Laura Templeton, he has found that clandestine browsing, via computer, through the huge Department of Motor Vehicles’ records in neighboring California is an excellent method of locating attractive women. Their driver’s license photographs—head shots only—are now on file with the DMV. Provided with each picture are the woman’s age, height, and weight—statistics that assist Vess in identifying unacceptable candidates, so he can avoid grandmothers who photograph well and plump women with thin faces. And though some people list post office boxes only, most use their street addresses; thereafter, Mr. Vess needs only a series of good maps.) Upon nearing the end of his drive, when he gets within fifty miles of the target residence, he removes the license plates from the motor home. Later, because he makes a point of being far away from the scene of his games by the time anyone finds the aftermath, he could be tracked down only if someone in the victim’s neighborhood happened to see the motor home and, though it looked perfectly innocent, happened to glance at the plates and—that damn blown tire again—happened to have a photographic memory. Therefore, he leaves the tags off his vehicle until he is safely back in Oregon.

  If he were stopped by a police officer for speeding or for some other traffic violation, he would express surprise when asked about his missing license plates and would say that, for God knows what reason, they must have been stolen. He is a good actor; he could sell his bafflement. If the chance arose to do so without putting himself in serious jeopardy, he would kill the cop. And if no such opportunity presented itself, he would most likely be able to count on a swift resolution of the problem by calling upon professional courtesy.

  Now he squats on his haunches and attaches one of the tags to the frame in the front license-plate niche.

  One by one the dogs come to him, sniffing at his hands and his clothes, perhaps disappointed to find only the scents of aftershave and dishwashing soap. They are starved for attention, but they are on duty. None of them lingers long, each returning to its patrol after one pat on the head, a scratch behind the ears, and a word of affection.

  “Good dog,” Mr. Vess says to each. “Good dog.”

  When he finishes with the front plate, he stands, stretches, and yawns while surveying his domain.

  At ground level, anyway, the wind has died. The air is still and moist. It smells of wet grass, earth, moldering dead leaves, and pine forests.

  With the rain finished, the mist is lifting off the foothills and off the lower flanks of the mountains behind the house. He can’t see the peaks of the western range yet or even the blanket of snow lingering on the higher slopes. But directly overhead and to the east, where the mist doesn’t intervene, the clouds are more gray than thunderhead black, a soft moleskin gray, and they are moving rapidly southeast in front of a high-altitude wind. By midnight, as he promised Ariel, there might be stars and even a moon to light the tall grass in the meadow and to shine in the milky eyes of the dead Laura.

  Mr. Vess goes to the back of the motor home to attach the second license plate—and discovers odd tracks on the driveway. As he stands staring at them, a frown pools and deepens on his face.

  The driveway is shale, but during a heavy rain, mud washes out from the surrounding yard. Here and there it forms a thin skin atop the stone, not soupy but dark and dense.

  In this skin of mud are hoof impressions, perhaps those of a deer. A sizable deer. It has crossed the driveway more than once.

  He sees a place where it stood for a while, pawing the ground.

  No tire tracks mar the mud, because they were erased by the rain that had been falling when he’d come home. Evidently the deer spoor date from after the storm.

  He crouches beside the tracks and puts his fingers to the cold mud. He can feel the hardness and smoothness of the hooves that stamped the marks.

  A variety of deer thrive in the nearby foothills and mountains. They rarely venture onto Mr. Vess’s property, however, because they are frightened of the Dobermans.

  This is the most peculiar thing about the deer tracks: that among them are no paw prints from the dogs.

  The Dobermans have been trained to focus on human intruders and, as much as possible, to ignore wildlife. Otherwise, they might be distracted at a moment crucial to their master’s safety. They will never attack rabbits or squirrels or possums—or deer—unless severe hunger eventually drives them to it. They won’t even give playful chase.

  Nevertheless, the dogs will take notice of other animals that cross their path. They indulge their curiosity within the limits of their training.

  They would have approached this deer and circled ever closer as it stood here, either paralyzing it with fright or spooking it off. And after it had gone, they would have padded back and forth across the driveway, sniffing its spoor.

  But not one paw print is visible among the hoof impressions.

  Rubbing his muddy fingertips together, Mr. Vess rises to his full height and slowly turns in a circle, studying the surrounding land. The meadows to the north and the distant piney woods beyond. The driveway leading east to the bald knoll. The yard to the south, more meadows beyond, and woods again. Finally the backyard, past the barn, to the foothills. The deer—if it was a deer—is gone.

  Edgler Vess stands motionless. Listening. Watchful. Breathing deeply, seeking scents. Then for a while he inhales through his open mouth, catching what he can upon his tongue. He feels the moist air like the clammy skin of a cadaver against his face. All his senses are open wide, irised to the max, and the freshly washed world drains into them.

  Finally he can detect no harm in the morning.

  As Vess is putting the license plate on the back of the motor home, Tilsiter pads to him. The dog nuzzles his master’s neck.

  Vess encourages
the Doberman to stay. When he is finished with the plate, he points Tilsiter to the nearby deer spoor.

  The dog seems not to see the tracks. Or, seeing them, he does not have any interest.

  Vess leads him to the spoor, right in among the prints. Once more he points to them.

  Because Tilsiter appears to be confused, Vess places his hand on the back of the dog’s head and presses his muzzle into one of the tracks.

  The Doberman catches a scent at last, sniffs eagerly, whimpers with excitement—then decides that he doesn’t like what he smells. He squirms out from under his master’s hand and backs off, looking sheepish.

  “What?” says Vess.

  The dog licks his chops. He looks away from Vess, surveys the meadows, the lane, the yard. He glances at Vess again, but then he trots off to the south, returning to patrol.

  The trees still dripping. The mists rising. The spent clouds scudding fast toward the southeast.

  Mr. Vess decides to kill Chyna Shepherd immediately.

  He will haul her into the yard, make her lie facedown on the grass, and put a couple of bullets in the back of her skull. He has to go to work this evening, and before that he has to get some sleep, so he won’t have time to enjoy a slow kill.

  Later, when he gets home, he can bury her in the meadow with the four dogs watching, insects singing and feeding on one another in the tall grass, and Ariel forced to kiss each of the corpses before it goes forever into the ground—all this in moonlight if there is any.

  Quickly now, finish her and sleep.

  As he hurries toward the house, he realizes that the screwdriver is still in his hand, which might be more interesting than using the pistol, yet just as quick.

  Up the flagstone steps, onto the front porch, where the finger of the Seattle attorney hangs silent among the seashells in the cool windless air.

  He doesn’t bother to wipe his feet, a rare breach of compulsive procedure.

  The ratcheting hinge is matched by the sound of his own ragged breathing as he opens the door and steps into the house. When he closes the door, he is startled to hear his thudding heartbeats chasing one another.

  He is never afraid, never. With this woman, however, he has been unsettled more than once.

  A few steps into the room, he halts, getting a grip on himself. Now that he is inside again, he doesn’t understand why killing her seemed to be such an urgent priority.

  Intuition.

  But never has his intuition delivered such a clamorous message that has left him this conflicted. The woman is special, and he so badly wants to use her in special ways. Merely pumping two shots into the back of her head or sticking the screwdriver into her a few times would be such a waste of her potential.

  He is never afraid. Never.

  Even being unsettled like this is a challenge to his dearest image of himself. The poet Sylvia Plath, whose work leaves Mr. Vess uncharacteristically ambivalent, once said that the world was ruled by panic, “panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.” But Johnny Panic does not rule Edgler Vess and never will, because Mr. Vess has no illusions about the nature of existence, no doubts about his purpose, and no moments of his life that ever require reinterpretation when he has the time for quiet reflection.

  Sensation.

  Intensity.

  He cannot live with intensity if he is afraid, because Johnny Panic inhibits spontaneity and experimentation. Therefore, he will not allow this woman of mysteries to spook him.

  As both his breathing and his heartbeat subside to normal rates, he turns the rubberized handle of the screwdriver around and around in his hand, staring at the short blunt blade at the end of the long steel shank.

  The moment Vess entered the kitchen, before he spoke, Chyna sensed he had changed from the man that she had known thus far. He was in a different mood from any that had previously possessed him, although the precise difference was so subtle that she was not able to define it.

  He approached the table as if to sit down, then stopped short of his chair. Frowning and silent, he stared at her.

  In his right hand was a screwdriver. Ceaselessly he rolled the handle through his fingers, as if tightening an imaginary screw.

  On the floor behind him were crumbling chunks of mud. He had come inside with dirty shoes.

  She knew that she must not speak first. They were at a strange juncture where words might not mean what they had meant before, where the most innocent statement might be an incitement to violence.

  A short while ago, she had half preferred to be killed quickly, and she had tried to trigger one of his homicidal impulses. She had also considered ways that, although shackled, she might be able to commit suicide. Now she held her tongue to avoid inadvertently enraging him.

  Evidently, even in her desolation, she continued to harbor a small but stubborn hope that was camouflaged in the grayness where she could not see it. A stupid denial. A pathetic longing for one more chance. Hope, which had always seemed ennobling to her, now seemed as dehumanizing as feverish greed, as squalid as lust, just an animal hunger for more life at any cost.

  She was in a deep, bleak place.

  Finally Vess said, “Last night.”

  She waited.

  “In the redwoods.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you see anything?” he asked.

  “See what?”

  “Anything odd?”

  “No.”

  “You must have.”

  She shook her head.

  “The elk,” he said.

  “Oh. Yes, the elk.”

  “A herd of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t think they were peculiar?”

  “Coastal elk. They thrive in that area.”

  “These seemed almost tame.”

  “Maybe because tourists drive through there all the time.”

  Slowly turning and turning the screwdriver, he considered her explanation. “Maybe.”

  Chyna saw that the fingers of his right hand were covered with a film of dry mud.

  He said, “I can smell the musk of them now, the texture of their eyes, hear the greenness of the ferns swaying around them, and it’s a cold dark oil in my blood.”

  No reply was possible, and she didn’t try to make one.

  Vess lowered his gaze from Chyna’s eyes to the turning point of the screwdriver—and then to his shoes. He looked over his shoulder and saw the mud on the floor.

  “This won’t do,” he said.

  He put the screwdriver on a nearby counter.

  He took off his shoes and carried them into the laundry room, where he left them to be cleaned later.

  He returned in his bare feet and, using paper towels and a bottle of Windex, cleaned every crumb of mud from the tiles. In the living room, he used a vacuum cleaner to sweep the mud out of the carpet.

  These domestic chores occupied him for almost fifteen minutes, and by the time he finished, he was no longer in the mood that had possessed him when he’d entered the kitchen. Housework seemed to scrub away his blues.

  “I’m going to go upstairs and sleep now,” he said. “You’ll be quiet and not rattle your chains much.”

  She said nothing.

  “You’ll be quiet, or I’ll come down and shove five feet of the chain up your ass.”

  She nodded.

  “Good girl.”

  He left the room.

  The difference between Vess’s usual demeanor and his recent mood no longer eluded Chyna. For a few minutes, he had lacked his usual self-confidence. Now he had it back.

  Mr. Vess always sleeps in the nude to facilitate his dreams.

  In slumberland, all the people whom he encounters are naked, whether they are being torn asunder beneath him in glorious wetness or are running in a pack with him through high shadowed places and down into moonlight. There is a heat in his dreams that not only makes clothes superfluous b
ut burns from him the very concept of clothes, so going naked is more natural in the dreamworld than in the real one.

  He never suffers from nightmares. This is because, in his daily life, he confronts the sources of his tensions and deals with them. He is never dragged down by guilt. He is not judgmental of others and is never affected by what they think of him. He knows that if something he wishes to do feels right, then it is right. He always looks out for number one, because to be a successful human being, he must first like himself. Consequently, he always goes to his bed with a clear mind and an untroubled heart.

  Now, within seconds of resting his head on his pillow, Mr. Vess is asleep. From time to time his legs cycle beneath the covers, as if he is chasing something.

  Once, in his sleep, he says, “Father,” almost reverentially, and the word hangs like a bubble on the air—which is odd, because when Edgler Vess was nine years old, he burned his father to death.

  Chains rattling, Chyna leaned down and picked up the spare cushion from the floor beside her chair. She put it on the table, slumped forward, and rested her head on it.

  According to the kitchen clock, it was a quarter till twelve. She had been awake well over twenty-four hours, except when she had dozed in the motor home and when she had sat here unconscious after Vess clubbed her.

  Although exhausted, and numb with despair, she did not expect to be able to sleep. But she hoped that by keeping her eyes closed and letting her thoughts drift to more pleasant times, she might be able to take her mind off her mild but gradually increasing urge to pee and off the pain in her neck and trigger finger.

  She was walking in a wind full of torn red blossoms, curiously unafraid of the darkness and of the lightning that sometimes split it, when she was awakened not by thunder but by the sound of scissors clipping through paper.

  She lifted her head from the pillow and sat up straight. The fluorescent light stung her eyes.

  Edgler Vess was standing at the sink, cutting open a large bag of potato chips.

  He said, “Ah, you’re awake, you sleepyhead.”

  Chyna looked at the clock. Twenty minutes till five.

  He said, “I thought it might take a brass band to bring you around.”

  She had been asleep almost five hours. Her eyes were grainy. Her mouth was sour. She could smell her body odor, and she felt greasy.

  She had not wet herself in her sleep, and she was briefly lifted by an absurd sense of triumph that she had not yet been reduced to that lower level of humiliation. Then she realized how pathetic she was, priding herself on her continence, and her internal grayness darkened by a degree or two.

  Vess was wearing black boots, khaki slacks, a black belt, and a white T-shirt.

  His arms were muscular, enormous. She would never be able to struggle successfully against those arms.

  He brought a plate to the table. He had made a sandwich for her. “Ham and cheese with mustard.”

  A ruffle of lettuce showed at the edges of the bread. He had placed two dill pickle spears beside the sandwich.

  As Vess put the bag of potato chips on the table, Chyna said, “I don’t want it.”

  “You have to eat,” he said.

  She looked out the window at the deep yard in late-afternoon light.

  “If you don’t eat,” he said, “I’ll eventually have to force-feed you.” He picked up the bottle of aspirin and shook it to get her attention. “Tasty?”

  “I didn’t take any,” she said.

  “Ah, then you’re learning to enjoy your pain.”

  He seemed to win either way.

  He took away the aspirin and returned with a glass of water. Smiling, he said, “You’ve got to keep those kidneys functioning or they’ll atrophy.”

  As Vess cleaned the counter where he’d made the sandwich, Chyna said, “Were you abused as a child?” and hated herself for asking the question, for still