“Please.”
As if responding to the man’s supplications, the spider spun out its thread, descending.
The killer stopped reaching, turned his hand palm-up. “Little one,” he breathed.
Fat and black, the obedient spider reeled itself down into the big open palm.
The killer brought his hand to his mouth and tipped his head back slightly. He either crushed the spider and ate it—or ate it alive.
He stood motionless, savoring.
Finally, without looking back, he went to the head of the stairs on the right, at the midpoint of the hallway, and descended spider-quick and almost spider-silent to the first floor.
Chyna shuddered, stunned to be alive.
2
The house held a drowning depth of stillness as a dam held water, with tremendous pent-up power and pressure on the breast.
When Chyna found the courage to move, she cautiously approached the head of the stairs. She feared that the visitor had not fully descended to the first floor, that he was toying with her, standing just out of sight, waiting, smiling. He would reach for her, palms up, and say, Come to me.
She held her breath, risked exposure, and looked down. The stairs curved through gradients of gloom to the foyer below. She could see just well enough to be sure that he wasn’t there.
As far as Chyna could discern, no lamps were on downstairs. She wondered what he was doing in that darkness, guided only by the pale moon glow at the windows. Perhaps he was in a corner, crouched like a spider, sensitive to the faintest changes in the patterns of the air, dreaming of silent stalkings and the frenzied rending of prey.
She went quickly past the head of the stairs, into the last length of hallway, to the next open door and the second source of amber light, dreading what she might find. But she could cope with both the dread and the finding. It was always not knowing, turning away from truth, that caused night sweats and bad dreams.
This room was smaller than the master suite, with no sitting area. A corner desk. A double bed. One nightstand with a brass lamp, a dresser, a vanity with a padded bench.
On the wall above the bed was a poster-size portrait of Freud. Chyna loathed Freud. But Laura, dear of heart and idealistic, clung to a belief in many aspects of Freudian theory; she embraced the dream of a guiltless world, with everyone a victim of his troubled past and yearning for rehabilitation.
Laura was lying facedown on the bed, atop the sheets and the blankets. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her. A second pair of handcuffs secured her ankles. Linking both of those shiny steel restraints was a shackling chain.
She had been violated. The pants of her baggy blue pajamas had been cut off with a neatness worthy of a conscientious tailor; the blue panels of cloth had been smoothed across the blankets to both sides of her. The pajama shirt had been shoved up her back; now it was gathered in rumpled folds across her shoulders and the nape of her neck.
Chyna moved deeper into the room, her fear equaled now by a swelling sorrow that seemed to enlarge her heart yet leave it cold and empty. When she caught a faint odor of spilled semen, her fear and sorrow were matched by anger. As she stooped beside the bed, her hands curled into such hard fists that her fingernails pressed painfully into her palms.
Sweat-damp blond hair was pasted to the side of Laura’s face. Her delicate features were salt-pale and clenched in anxiety, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.
She was not dead. Not dead. It seemed impossible.
The girl—terror had reduced her to the condition of a girl—was murmuring so softly that the words couldn’t be heard even from a distance of inches, yet so urgently that the meaning was harrowingly clear. It was a prayer, one that Chyna had recited on numerous nights long ago, in far places: a prayer for mercy, a plea to be delivered from this horror untouched and alive, dear God, please, untouched and alive.
On those other nights, Chyna had been spared both violation and death. Already, half of Laura’s petition had gone unanswered.