In the Dark

"There are two kinds of silence. One is empty. The other is full of someone listening."

Friday, 11:50 PM.

The television in the corner was the only thing in the room that gave off light.

It was a small one, black and white, with a bent rabbit-ear antenna taped to a window frame that had been boarded over years ago. The picture rolled and settled. A newsreader with a sprayed helmet of hair was explaining, with the grave delight of someone who has been handed a gift, that police had named the suspect in the White Mountain and Green Mountain killings.

Julian Frost sat on an upturned crate with his hands on his knees and watched himself become a legend.

"—dubbed the Mountain Chainsaw Killer by online commentators—"

He considered the phrase.

It was crude. It was inaccurate, in several respects, and he found that he minded the inaccuracy more than the accusation. He had used a chainsaw twice. A bone saw, a hacksaw, and a pair of heavy tin snips had done most of the work. But a nickname was not a deposition. It was a handle, a way for a frightened public to pick up a hot thing without burning its fingers.

He reached out and turned the volume down to nothing.

The room was long and low, with a floor of old poured concrete stained in dark continents. Overhead ran a lattice of beams, black with age, from which hung a few forgotten chains and hooks. At the far end, behind a stack of rotted pallets, a flight of stone steps went up into darkness. The air smelled of cold cement and resin and, faintly, of machine oil. Of sawdust, still, after thirty years. It gets into the walls, he had read. It becomes part of the structure.

He liked the smell. It had a patience in it.

On the workbench beside him lay the notebook, the black one, spine cracked, bound in a rubber band. A fountain pen lay across it. Not a good pen. He had found it in a drawer in Marcus's apartment, in a dusty box of his father's things, and he had kept it because it held ink well and wrote in a steady line.

He opened the notebook to the page marked with a ribbon.

The entries ran down the left margin in a column of dates, each in blue, each in his own hand. Beside them, in a second column, the places. A third, the compounds. At the bottom of the page the last line was still wet-black.

Revise. The mother is awake.

Below it, in a smaller script, he had added a week ago:

Captain Lauren Vance.

He read the name, and it gave him a feeling he had not expected, a small clean pleasure, like the click of a lock turning exactly as designed.

Fifteen years in homicide. Seventeen commendations. A daughter at Boston University. He had read all of it, the night Snyder's voicemail gave him her name. He had thought: a cop. He had thought: a mother. He had thought, she will never stop.

It was the most beautiful thing he had read in his life.

On the television, a face appeared. A girl with honey hair, laughing, turned halfway toward the camera. A caption slid across her, in white block capitals. Alleged victim.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he pulled the old tape recorder across the workbench, a heavy gray Panasonic with a dented lid and a single red button, and set it down in front of him. He tapped the microphone twice with his fingernail. A hollow tock tock from the speaker.

He pressed record.

The reels turned, slowly. A faint hiss rose from the machine, the sound of nothing, taken seriously.

He leaned toward the grille. He said, in a very low, very even voice, "For the one who finds this."

He waited.

The reels turned. The hiss ran on. Somewhere deep in the walls a pipe ticked.

He found that he had nothing else to say. Not yet. It was not time. He pressed stop and lifted the tape out of the machine, and set it carefully into a cardboard sleeve, and wrote on the sleeve with the fountain pen, in his clean slanted hand: 1.

Then he put it in the drawer under the workbench, on top of the others.

He stood and straightened his cuffs. He did this every time, without thinking: the left, the right, button, button. His mother had taught him that when he was small. Boys who care how they look are boys who care how they act. She had said it every morning at the door, with her hand on his shoulder, in a house he no longer allowed himself to picture.

He took a thermos from the shelf and a loaf wrapped in a paper bag.

Then he went to the end of the room, behind the pallets, and began to climb down, one hand on the cold rail, into the part of the building that was truly dark.

Saturday, 12:20 AM.

She could not tell any longer which direction was up.

That was the first thing the dark had taught her. Not that it was black, though it was. Black she had expected. What she hadn't known was that without light, a person lost the idea of a body. Her hands floated. Her feet floated. The floor, which she knew was concrete because it was cold and gritty under her cheek, seemed to tilt and rock like the deck of a ship.

She lay on her left side with her knees drawn up.

The gag was a strip of cloth, soft cotton, folded and tied at the back of her head. He had been careful about the knot. It did not pinch. It did not cut. It simply held her jaw slightly open, so that her tongue lay dry and swollen against the back of her teeth.

Her wrists were bound in front of her with plastic cable, loose enough not to leave marks. Her ankles were free but for the chain, a long one, looped through a ring bolted to the wall. He had measured it. He had told her so, politely, the first night: It's fifteen feet. That will reach the bucket and the mattress. It won't reach the stairs.

He had said it as a host might say, The bathroom is on your left.

Chloe pressed her face into the crook of her arm and breathed.

Count, she told herself. You have to count something.

She counted the drips. There was a leak somewhere in the dark, a slow irregular tick against stone, and she had learned its rhythm. One, two, three, four, five, six. A pause. Then three fast ones. Then silence for as long as it took to count to eleven. If she kept count properly, a full cycle was about ninety seconds.

She counted cycles. Forty made an hour, nearly. She had done that for what felt like years, and she thought, but could not be sure, that it had been about two weeks.

Two weeks.

Her mother would be frantic. She would have called everyone. She would have the whole department turning over rocks. And she, Chloe, would be lying in a hole in the earth with her mouth tied shut, being rescued.

The thought almost made her laugh. It came up through her chest like a hiccup and died in the cotton.

Because the truth was that she had walked here herself. Nobody had pushed her. She had worn her best sweater and packed a bag and told her mother, with a face as steady as a coin, that she was going to Maya's. She had even rehearsed it in the mirror. Staying at Maya's till Sunday. The kind of lie that nobody questions because everyone wants to believe it.

And she had gotten into the car.

Take a step forward. Don't regret the things you weren't brave enough to do.

She squeezed her eyes shut, though there was no difference.

Mom had said that. Her mother, who never said anything lightly, with her chin in her hand over a bowl of soup. She had said it without knowing. And Chloe had taken it, the way you take a gift, and carried it out of the house and across the whole width of the city to a man who was, even then, waiting for her at the end of the platform in a gray coat with his hands folded in front of him.

She did not hate her mother for it.

She knew, with a clarity she had not wanted, that it was the opposite. That she would give anything, everything, her sweater, her sketchbooks, the next sixty years of her life, to be standing in that kitchen again hearing the same wrong, loving advice.

Above her, very faintly, a sound.

She went still.

It came from a long way up: a scrape, then footsteps. Slow ones. A pause, as of a hand testing a rail. Then the groan of a door, and another, and the deliberate descent, one stair at a time, of someone who was in no hurry at all.

Chloe's pulse beat in her ears.

A line of light appeared under the door at the far end of the room. Thin, yellow, wavering. It laid itself across the floor like a thread.

She had learned that he came at the same time. Twice a day, once in the dark morning and once in the dark night. He brought water and food. He took the bucket and brought it back clean. He did not speak unless she did. He never touched her, except to untie the gag, and then only for as long as it took to drink, and he always, always looked away while she did.

I won't hurt you, he had said, on the second day. I'd like you to believe that. I don't expect you to. I would just like it to be said.

The bolt scraped. The door swung inward.

A flashlight, held low. Its beam fell on the wall, on the floor, on the pale line of the chain. Then it rose, gently, to her face, and stopped a foot short of her eyes, so that she wasn't blinded.

"You're awake," said Julian Frost.

She said nothing. She could not.

He crouched beside her. In the spill of the light she could see his hands, clean, long-fingered, the nails cut square, the cuffs buttoned at the wrist. He set the thermos down on the concrete. He did not look at her face. He looked at the ring in the wall, at the cable, at the knot behind her ears.

"I'm going to take this off," he said. "You can shout if you like. No one will hear it. But I'd rather you didn't. It's easier on your throat, and it wastes the time."

His fingers found the knot. She flinched, and he stopped, and then waited until her shoulders came down.

The cloth came away.

She dragged air into her lungs in a long cracked gasp. Her tongue tasted of dust and lint. When he held the thermos to her lips she drank, and it was warm water with a little honey in it, and she thought, with a hysteria she barely held down, He put honey in it. He put honey in it because I said once that I didn't like plain water.

"Why," she said. Her voice was a scrape. "Why are you doing this?"

He took back the thermos and screwed on the cap.

"There's a person I've been waiting a long time to speak to," he said. "I couldn't ask her directly. She wouldn't have come."

"Who?"

He didn't answer. He broke the loaf in half and handed her one piece, and she took it in both bound hands and could not eat it.

"You're going to ask if it's my mother," Chloe whispered. "It's my mother, isn't it? You wanted her. That's why you came to the house. That's why you were so... so kind to me."

"You were kind to me," said Julian. He seemed, for a moment, almost puzzled. "No one had asked me to breakfast in a long time."

"Don't."

"You made me laugh."

"Don't you dare." The tears came, without warning, hot and furious, running sideways into the corners of her mouth. "Don't you dare say that. You're going to kill me. You're going to do to me what you did to those, to those people on the news, and you're going to talk about breakfast."

He was quiet.

When she dared look, he was gazing at the floor between his shoes, with the beam of the flashlight resting on his knee. The yellow light made his profile look carved. She saw, with the strange double vision of the very frightened, that he was shaking. Very slightly. A fine fast tremor in the hand that held the light.

Not fear. Something else. Something that had been a long time under pressure, and had learned to look like calm.

"I don't plan to kill you, Chloe," he said.

"You said that to them, too."

"I never met them." He said it so softly she almost missed it. "I never met any of them."

He stood. The beam swung away from her, over the wall, over the ring and the chain. For one second she saw the whole room, the low arch of the ceiling, the stained stone, the rough shelf with a row of glass jars. And at the very back, almost out of the cone of light, a narrow slit of window, bricked shut long ago.

Then it was dark again, and he was a shape against the yellow line.

"Eat the bread," he said. "You'll want your strength."

"For what?"

He stopped in the doorway.

"Your mother found Marcus," said Julian Frost, in a voice she would remember for the rest of her life, though she would not understand it for weeks. "I told you she was good."

The door closed. The bolt shot home.

And in the dark, with the bread still crushed in her hands and the cold of the concrete creeping up through her ribs, Chloe Vance began to count again.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

The drip fell, and the silence closed over it, and from somewhere very high above her came the faint, patient, unhurried sound of a man climbing a stair.

Julian reached the top of the stairs and closed the door behind him, and leaned his back against it.

He stood there a long time, in the thick dark, with his eyes shut.

His hands would not stop. He pressed them flat against the cold wood, palms down, and the tremor went on running through them like current through a wire. He counted his breaths, the way he had learned to do in a different dark, in a different basement, with a different man's voice in his ears. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

Don't you dare. The girl's voice, raw and furious. It had gone through him like a nail.

For a moment he saw her at the breakfast table with a spoon in her hand and her mother's frown, arguing with him about whether soup counted as a food group. He saw it so clearly that he could smell the coffee.

He opened his eyes.

"Almost," he said to the dark.

It was only a word. It sounded very small. He said it again to be sure, and then he straightened his cuffs, left and right, button and button, and went up into the night to wait for Friday.