‘I DON’T FUCKING KNOOOOOOOOOWWW!’
Damn! What if he doesn’t?
Well, Kelly thought, it doesn’t hurt to be sure. He brought him up just a little, just to eighty-five feet, enough to renew old pains without spreading the effects any further. Fear of pain was now as bad as the real thing, Kelly thought, and if he went too far, pain could become its own narcotic. No, this man was a coward who had often enjoyed inflicting pain and tenor on others, and if he discovered that pain, however dreadful, could be survived, then he might actually find courage in himself. That was a risk Kelly was unwilling to run, however remote it might be. He closed the release valve again and brought the pressure back up, this time to one hundred ten feet, the better to attenuate the pain and increase the narcosis.
‘My God,’ Sarah breathed. She hadn’t seen the postmortem photos of Pam, and her only question on the matter had been discouraged by her husband, a warning which she’d heeded.
Doris was nude, and disturbingly passive. The best thing that could be said for her was that Sandy had helped her bathe. Sam had his bag open, passing over his stethoscope. Her heart rate was over ninety, strong enough but too rapid for a girl her age. Blood pressure was also elevated. Temperature was normal. Sandy moved in, drawing four 5-cc test tubes of blood which would be analyzed at the hospital lab.
‘Who does this sort of thing?’ Sarah whispered to herself. There were numerous marks on her breasts, a fading bruise to her right cheek, and other, more recent edemas on her abdomen and legs. Sam checked her eyes for pupillary response, which was positive – except for the total absence of reaction.
‘The same people who killed Pam,’ the surgeon replied quietly.
‘Pam?’ Doris asked. ‘You knew her? How?’
‘The man who brought you here,’ Sandy said. ‘He’s the one -‘
‘The one Billy killed?’
‘Yes,’ Sam answered, then realized how foolish it might sound to an outside listener.
‘I just know the phone number,’ Billy said, drunkenly now from the high partial-pressure of nitrogen gas, and his release from pain was helping him to be much more compliant.
‘Give it to me,’ Kelly ordered. Billy did as he was told and Kelly wrote it down. He had two full pages of penciled notes now. Names, addresses, a few phone numbers. Seemingly very little, but far more than he’d had only twenty-four hours before.
‘How do the drugs come in?’
Billy’s head turned away from the window. ‘Don’t know…’
‘We have to do better than that.’ Hissssssssssssss …
Again Billy screamed, and this time Kelly let it happen, watching the depth-gauge needle rotate to seventy-five feet. Billy started gagging. His lung function was impaired now, and the choking coughs merely amplified the pain that now filled every cubic inch of his racked body. His whole body felt like a balloon, or more properly a collection of them, large and small, all trying to explode, all pressing on others, and he could feel that some were stronger and some weaker than others, and the weaker ones were those at the most important places inside him. His eyes were hurting now, seeming to expand beyond their sockets, and the way in which his paranasal sinuses were also expanding only made it worse, as though his face would detach from the rest of his skull; his hands flew there, desperately trying to hold it in place. The pain was beyond anything he had ever felt and beyond anything he had ever inflicted. His legs were bent as much as the steel cylinder allowed, and his kneecaps seemed to dig grooves into the steel, so hard they pressed against it. He was able to move his arms, and those twisted and turned about his chest, seeking relief, but only generating more pain as he struggled to hold his eyes in the sockets. He was unable even to scream now. Time stopped for Billy and became eternity. There was no light, no darkness, no sound or silence. All of reality was pain.
‘… please … please …’ the whisper carried over the speaker next to Kelly. He brought the pressure back up slowly, stopping this time at one hundred ten feet.
Billy’s face was mottled now, like the rash from some horrible allergy. Some blood vessels had let go just below the surface of the skin, and a big one had ruptured on the surface of the left eye. Soon half of the ‘white’ was red, closer to purple, really, making him look even more like the frightened, vicious animal he was.
‘The last question was about how the drugs come in.’
‘I don’t know,’ he whined.
Kelly spoke quietly into the microphone. ‘Billy, there’s something you have to understand. Up until now what’s happened to you, well, it hurts pretty bad, but I haven’t really hurt you yet. I mean, not really hurt you.’
Billy’s eyes went wide. Had he been able to consider things in a dispassionate way, he would have remarked to himself that surely horror must stop somewhere, an observation that would have been both right and wrong.
‘Everything that’s happened so far, it’s all things that doctors can fix, okay?’ If wasn’t much of a lie on Kelly’s part, and what followed was no lie at all. ‘The next time we let the air out, Billy, then things will happen that nobody can fix. Blood vessels inside your eyeballs will break open, and you’ll be blind. Other vessels inside your brain will let go, okay? They can’t fix either one. You’ll be blind and you’ll be crazy. But the pain will never go away. The rest of your life, Billy, blind, crazy, and hurt. You’re what? Twenty-five? You have lots more time to live. Forty years, maybe, blind, crazy, crippled. So it’s a good idea not to lie to me, okay?
‘Now – how do the drugs come in?’
No pity, Kelly told himself. He would have killed a dog or a cat or a deer in the condition he’d inflicted on this … object. But Billy wasn’t a dog or a cat or a deer. He was a human being, after a fashion. Worse than the pimp, worse than the pushers. Had the situation been reversed, Billy would not have felt what he was feeling. He was a person whose universe was very small indeed. It held only one person, himself, surrounded by things whose sole function was to be manipulated for his amusement or profit. Billy was one who enjoyed the infliction of pain, who enjoyed establishing dominance over things whose feelings were nothing of importance, even if they truly existed at all. Somehow he’d never learned that there were other human beings in his universe, people whose right to life and happiness was equal to his own; because of that he had run the unrecognized risk of offending another person whose very existence he had never really acknowledged. He was learning different now, perhaps, though it was a little late. Now he was learning that his future was indeed a lonely universe which he would share not with people, but with pain. Smart enough to see that future, Billy broke. It was obvious on his face. He started talking in a choked and uneven voice, but one which, finally, was completely truthful. It was only about ten years too late, Kelly estimated, looking up from his notes at the relief valve. That ought to have been a pity, and truly it was for many of those who had shared Billy’s rather eccentric universe. Perhaps he’d just never figured it out, Kelly thought, that someone else might treat him the same way in which he treated so many others, smaller and weaker than himself. But that also was too late in coming. Too late for Billy, too late for Pam, and, in a way, too late for Kelly. The world was full of inequities and not replete with justice. It was that simple, wasn’t it? Billy didn’t know that justice might be out there waiting, and there simply hadn’t been enough of it to warn him. And so he had gambled. And so he had lost. And so Kelly would save his pity for others.
‘I don’t know … I don’t -‘
‘I warned you, didn’t I?’ Kelly opened the valve, bringing him all the way to fifty feet. The retinal blood vessels must have ruptured early. Kelly thought he saw a little red in the pupils, wide as their owner screamed even after his lungs were devoid of air. Knees and feet and elbows drummed against the steel. Kelly let it happen, waiting before he reapplied the air pressure.
‘Tell me what you know, Billy, or it just gets worse. Talk fast.’
His voice was that of confession now. The information was somewhat remarkable, but it had to be true. No person like this had the imagination to make it up. The final part of the interrogation lasted for three hours, only once letting the valve hiss, and then only for a second or two. Kelly left and revisited questions to see if the answers changed, but they didn’t. In fact, the renewed question developed yet more information that connected some bits of data to others, formulating an overall picture that became clearer still, and by midnight he was sure that he’d emptied Billy’s mind of all the useful data that it contained.