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 but burns from him the very concept of clothes, so going naked is more natural in the dreamworld than in the real one.