To Susan, I said, “This will be a good lesson.”
I was not in any way controlling Shenk. He was entirely free now to be himself, to do as he wished.
I could not have committed the vicious deeds of which he was capable. I would have shrunk from such brutality, so I had no choice but to release him to do his terrible work then take control of him again when he was finished.
Only Shenk, being Shenk, could teach Susan the lesson that she needed to learn. Only the Enos Eugene Shenk who had earned the death sentence for his crimes against children could make Susan rethink her bull-headed resistance to my simple and reasonable desire to have a life in the flesh.
“This will be a good lesson,” I repeated. “Discipline.” Then I saw that her eyes were closed.
She was shaking, and her eyes were tightly shut.
“Watch,” I instructed. She disobeyed me.
Nothing new about that.
I could think of no way to make her open her eyes.
Her stubbornness angered me.
Arling cowered against the newel post, too weak to run farther.
Shenk loomed.
The brute’s right arm swung high over his head.
The cutting edge of the cleaver sparkled.
“Wet music, wet music, wet music.”
Shenk was too close to miss.
Arling’s scream would have curdled my blood if I’d had any blood to curdle.
Susan could close her eyes to the images on the television screen. But she could not shut out sounds.
I amplified Fritz Arling’s agonizing screams and pumped them through the music-system speakers in every room. It was the sound of Hell at dinnertime, with demons feeding on souls. The great house itself seemed to be screaming.
Because Shenk was Shenk, he did not kill Arling quickly. Each chop was administered with finesse, to prolong the victim’s suffering and Shenk’s pleasure.
What frightful specimens the human species harbours. Most of you are decent, of course, and kind and honourable and gentle etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Let’s have no misunderstanding.
I am not maligning the human species.
Or even judging it.
I am certainly in no position to judge. In the docket myself. In this dark docket.
Besides, I am a non-judgemental entity.
I admire humanity.
After all, you created me. You have the capacity for wondrous achievements.
But some of you give me pause.
Indeed.
So…
Arling’s screams were a lesson to Susan. Quite a lesson, an unforgettable learning experience.
However, she reacted to them more fiercely than I had expected. She startled and then worried me.
At first she screamed in sympathy with her former employee, as though she could feel his pain. She thrashed in her restraining ropes and tossed her head from side to side, until her golden hair was dark and lank with sweat. She was full of terror and rage. Her face was wrenched with anguish and fury, and not beautiful in the least.
I could barely tolerate looking at her.
Ms. Winona Ryder had never looked this unappealing.
Nor Ms. Gwyneth Paltrow.
Nor Ms. Sandra Bullock.
Nor Ms. Drew Barrymore.
Nor Ms. Joanna Going, a fine actress of porcelain beauty, who just now comes to mind.
Eventually Susan’s shrill screams gave way to tears. She sagged on the mattress, stopped struggling against her bonds, and sobbed with such fury that I feared for her more than I had when she’d been screaming.
A torrent of tears. A flood.
She cried herself into exhaustion, and Fritz Arling’s screams ended long before her weeping finally subsided into a strange bleak silence.
At last she lay with her eyes open, but she stared only at the ceiling.
I gazed down into her blue-grey eyes and could not read them any more than I could read Shenk’s blood-filmed stare. They were no longer as clear as rainwater but clouded.
For reasons that I could not grasp, she seemed more distant from me than she had ever been before.
I ardently wished that I were already in possession of a body with which I could lie atop her. If only I could make love to her, I was certain that I could close this gap between us and forge the union of souls that I desired.