Soon.
Soon, my flesh.
TWENTY
“Susan?” I dared to say into her daunting silence.
She stared toward the ceiling and did not respond.
“Susan?”
I don’t think she was looking at the ceiling, actually, but at something beyond. As if she could see the summer sky.
Or the night still to come.
Because I did not fully understand her reaction to my attempt at discipline, I decided not to press conversation upon her but wait until she initiated it.
I am a patient entity.
While I waited, I reacquired control of Shenk.
In his killing frenzy, swept away by the “wet music” that only he could hear, he had not realized that he was operating entirely of his own free will.
As he stood over Arling’s mutilated corpse and felt me re-enter his brain, Shenk wailed briefly in regret at the surrender of his independence. But he did not resist as before.
I sensed that he was willing to give up the struggle if there was a chance of being rewarded, from time to time, with such as Fritz Arling. Not with a quick kill, like those he had committed in his escape from Colorado or in the theft of the medical equipment that I required, but a slow and leisurely job of the kind he found most deeply satisfying. He had enjoyed himself.
The brute repulsed me.
As if I would grant killing privileges as a regular reward to a thing like him.
As if I would countenance the termination of a human being in any but the most extraordinary emergencies.
The stupid beast did not understand me at all. If this misapprehension of my nature and motives made him more pliable, however, he was free to put faith in it. I had been using such unrelenting force to maintain control of him that I was afraid he would not last as long as I would need him another month or more. If he was now prepared to offer considerably less resistance, he might avoid a brain meltdown and be a useful pair of hands until I no longer required his services.
At my direction, he went outside to determine if the Honda was still operable.
The engine started. There had been a loss of most of the coolant, but Shenk was able to back the car away from the palm tree, return it to the driveway, and park under the portico before it overheated.
The right front fender was crumpled. The wadded sheet metal abraded the tire; it would quickly shave away the rubber. Shenk would not be driving the car so far, however, that a flat fire would be a risk.
In the house again, in the foyer, he carefully wrapped Arling’s blood-soaked body in a painter’s tarp that he had fetched from the garage. He carried the dead man out to the Honda and placed him in the trunk.
He did not dump the body rudely into the car but handled it with surprising gentleness.
As though he were fond of Arling.
As though he were putting a treasured lover to bed after she had fallen asleep in another room.
Though his swollen eyes were hard to read, there seemed to be a wistfulness in them.
I did not display any of this housekeeping on the television in Susan’s bedroom. Given her current state of mind, that seemed unwise.
In fact, I switched off the television and closed the armoire in which it was housed.
She did not react to the click and hum and rattle of the pair of motorized cabinet doors.
She lay unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the ceiling. Occasionally she blinked.
Those amazing grey-blue eyes, like the sky reflected in winter ice melt. Still lovely. But strange now.
She blinked.
I waited.
Another blink.
Nothing more.
Shenk was able to drive the battered Honda into the garage before the engine froze up. He closed the door and left the car there.
In a few days, Fritz Arling’s decomposing body could begin to stink. Before I was finished with my project a month hence, the stench would be terrible.
For more than one reason, I was not concerned about this. First, no domestic staff or gardeners would be coming to work; there was no one to get a whiff of Arling and become suspicious. Second, the stink would be limited to the garage, and here in the house, Susan would never become aware of it.