The Hostage

"Hope is not a feeling. It is a thing you do in the dark, with your hands, until your hands give out."

Monday, 4:20 PM.

Chloe knew it was Monday because he had told her.

He told her every morning now, when he came down with the thermos. It's Thursday. It's Saturday. It's the fourth of November. He said it in the flat clear tone of someone reading a train timetable, as though the day itself were a kind of gift and he were the only person in the world allowed to give it. She had stopped answering. She had stopped asking him to stop. The date was a thread, and she took it from his hand each day and wound it, carefully, round a finger.

Monday. The twelfth.

Forty-five days.

She had counted them twice. She had counted the drips, forty thousand cycles at ninety seconds each, until the arithmetic became a kind of prayer. And she had counted something else, in the second week, when the first fear had worn off and left room for the worse thing behind it. She had counted the number of times he had touched her.

Seven. Each time to untie the knot. Each time she had flinched, and each time he had stopped, and waited, and begun again.

Seven times in forty-five days.

She did not know what to make of that. She turned it over every night in the dark, as a child turns a stone, looking for the side that would show her what it was.

Above her, the whole world was roaring.

It had begun after lunch. She had heard it first as a faint shudder in the beams overhead, then as a sound, a long hollow booming like a drum being struck very slowly, and finally as a voice. The wind had a voice up there. It pushed against the walls of the old building and moaned in the rafters and hissed across the roof, and under it, every few seconds, a loose sheet of tin banged against its fastening like a fist on a door.

She lay on the mattress with her knees to her chest, and listened.

She had grown very thin. She knew it from the way her sweater hung. The cream wool, once soft, had gone gray and stiff at the cuffs, and under it her ribs had come up like the bars of a cage. Her hair, which her mother used to call spun honey, hung in dull ropes against her neck. On the left side, behind her ear, a patch had been cut very close to the scalp, in the first week, and had not yet grown back.

She touched the place with her bound hands.

Lock of hair, she thought. For a box. For a card. She had understood, then, what he was doing. She had understood it slowly, as one understands a language one has not learned. And she had lain in the dark afterwards with her heart thudding, and thought of her mother opening the box.

Mom.

She breathed.

She had not said the word aloud in a very long time. She had been saving it.

The door at the far end of the cellar opened.

It was not the usual hour. He came at seven in the morning and seven at night, by her count, a man of habit. This was only the afternoon, and the sound of the bolt was wrong, quick and light, and the beam of the flashlight swept the room as if in a hurry.

She curled up tighter.

"Chloe."

His voice was very quiet.

"I'm going to take the gag off," Julian said. "I'd like you to hear this without it."

He knelt in front of her. He smelled of rain and cold iron, and under it of cedar and lemon, a clean smell, a smell like laundry on a line. In the flashlight's backwash she saw his face for a moment, and it startled her.

He looked tired.

Not afraid. She had been watching him for a month and a half, and she knew exactly what afraid looked like on a human being. This was something else. It was the slackness around the mouth of someone who has run a long way and is almost at the end of the road. His hair was damp. A thin red line crossed his left cheekbone, as though a branch had caught him.

His fingers found the knot behind her ears, and she held still.

The cloth fell away.

She worked her jaw. It clicked.

"There's a storm," he said.

"I heard."

"It's a very bad one." He sat back on his heels. "I wanted you to know, so you wouldn't be frightened of the noise. It's only the wind. The building is old, but it's sound. The beams in this cellar are white oak. They'll hold."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because in a few minutes someone is going to come down those stairs."

Her whole body went cold.

"I'd like you to stay exactly where you are," Julian said. "I'd like you not to run, and not to scream, and not to try to reach the door. There is a key. It's on a nail beside the stairs. I've left it there. She will find it." He paused. "You will be safe in about ten minutes. I want you to be very calm for ten minutes."

"Who?" Her voice broke. "Who's coming?"

He looked at her. For a moment, a very long one, in the yellow wavering light, she thought that he was going to say something that would break her. Instead he reached out, slowly, and, with the back of one finger, so lightly that she hardly felt it, touched the place behind her ear where her hair had been cut.

"I'm sorry about that," he said.

Then he took his hand away and stood.

"Chloe." He had turned toward the stairs. "When the police ask you what I did to you, and they will ask, they'll ask a hundred times, I would like you to tell them the truth. All of it. That I fed you. That I never raised my voice. That I never touched you except to untie a knot." His shoulders moved, slightly. "I'd like you to say it. Not for me. Because it's true. And because if you say it, they will believe it. They won't believe me."

"I don't understand."

"I know," said Julian. "That's all right."

He went away up the stairs, and the bolt shot home. And in the thick, roaring darkness, Chloe lay with the cloth in her hand and her mouth open and a sob rising in her throat that she could not allow, and tried to count to ten.

She reached six.

Above her, far overhead, through the groaning of the beams and the howl of the wind, she heard something else.

Footsteps.

Not his. Heavier, hurried, uneven. A woman's boots, on old planking, coming across a wide floor, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, the way a person walks who has not slept in six weeks and is trying not to make a sound.

Chloe closed her eyes.

Mom.

Monday, 4:57 PM.

Inside, the mill was an ocean.

Lauren stood in the great doorway of the saw floor with the rain at her back, her flashlight off and her gun up, and let her eyes open to it. A cavern, three stories high, a hundred and fifty feet long. Black trusses crossed the dark overhead like the ribs of a whale. Through the broken skylights the weather poured down in silver sheets and hung in the lamp's glow, and the wind, entering at a hundred places, wandered through the space with a low, plaintive, many-voiced note, like a choir tuning.

The lamp stood on a plank platform high up in the western gable, an old kerosene lantern turned up full, and it threw its yellow glow down the whole length of the room. Under it, laid out across the floor in a bar of light as wide as a door, were the things she had seen.

The circular saw blade, four feet across. Rust-red, toothed, tilted on a trestle. Behind it, on the wall, in white paint peeling from black wood: HADLEY & SONS LUMBER CO. EST. 1921.

And in front of it, set up as carefully as a still life, a workbench.

Lauren crossed the floor.

Her boots rang on the boards, and the rain on the roof drowned the sound. She went slowly, in a half crouch, scanning the dark between the saws and the drive belts and the great black hulks of machinery that stood like sleeping animals along the walls. Nothing moved. A wet moth fluttered across the lamp.

At the bench she stopped.

It was the bench from the photograph. Plastic sheeting, clear, laid smooth. A bright steel clamp. And on the plastic, with its guide bar laid straight and its chain cleaned of everything, lay the old orange chainsaw.

It had been oiled. It shone in the lamplight like a trophy.

Behind it, on a tripod, stood a camera.

She looked at it for a long moment. The lens was turned toward the bench, toward the saw, toward the place where she was standing. A small red light burned on its side. Recording.

He's filming me, she thought.

She did not move away. She did not look into the lens. She only stood there with the gun in both hands and her heart beating in her ears, and then, very deliberately, she reached out and picked up the thing that lay in front of the saw.

An envelope. White, unsealed. Her name on it in blue ink.

Captain Vance.

She opened it with her thumb.

There was a single card, and in the tall slanting hand:

Behind the conveyor, to the left, there is a stair. The key is on the nail. I would ask you to take her first. I will wait.

She read it twice.

Then she lowered the card, and stood very still, and listened to the building breathing around her.

I will wait.

She folded the card. She put it in her pocket, beside the gull. And she turned and walked, with the gun low and her whole spine alive, along the line of the old conveyor to its end.

There was a door.

It was low and broad, made of heavy planks with a rusted iron latch, and it stood ajar. Behind it, a flight of wooden stairs went down into a darkness that smelled so strongly of pine, of old dry resin, of cedar and sawdust and cold stone, that for a moment she was seven years old and walking into her grandfather's workshop.

She switched on the flashlight.

The beam shook. She steadied it.

She went down.

Monday, 5:04 PM.

Chloe heard the steps on the stairs, and did not breathe.

They were slow. A pause on each tread, as though the walker did not trust the wood. A creak. A scrape of leather. And then a light, a small hard circle of white, appeared at the top of the stairs and swung down the far wall, over the beams, the racks of old timber, the stained shelf of jars, and came across the floor toward her in a long searching arc.

It stopped on her face.

She could not see who held it. She could see only the beam, and behind it a shape, and above the beam, very small, a pair of eyes.

The light fell.

The shape moved.

It came across the floor in a few long strides, and then it was kneeling, and a hand was on her cheek. A rough, cold, shaking hand. A familiar one. A hand that smelled of rain and leather and, very faintly, of the cheap peppermint gum her mother chewed in the car.

"Chloe," said the voice.

It was a thread. It was a breath. It was barely sound at all.

"Chloe. Sweetheart. Look at me."

She looked.

The flashlight lay on the floor, pointing at the ceiling, throwing a pale circle on the beams. In its reflected glow she saw a face she hardly knew. Gray at the temples. Hollow at the cheeks. The eyes were ringed with violet, enormous in the thin pale skin, and the mouth was shaking.

"Mom?"

"I'm here."

"Mom, you're not real."

"I'm here, baby. I'm right here. It's me." Her mother's hands were on her face, her shoulders, her wrists, moving over her frantically, as if checking that all of her was still there. "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Chloe."

Chloe made a sound.

She had meant to say something. She had a sentence ready, one she had polished for forty-five days in the dark: I'm sorry I lied to you. But it did not come out. What came out was a thin cracked cry like a child's, and then another, and then she was sobbing, helplessly, with her whole body, her bound hands crushed against her mother's coat and her face buried in the wet wool of her collar.

Lauren held her.

She held her as she had when Chloe was a baby, one hand cupped round the back of her head, the other flat between her shoulder blades, rocking, murmuring, saying nothing, saying the same few words over and over into her hair. I've got you. I've got you. I've got you.

It lasted a long time.

When it was over, Lauren drew back, and took her face between both hands, and kissed her forehead, and her wet cheeks, and her hair. She found the place behind the ear where it had been cut. She stopped.

Her thumb rested there, very lightly.

"He took this," she said, in a voice that was not quite her own.

"It's okay. It'll grow back."

"I know it will."

"Mom." Chloe's breath was catching. "Mom, he didn't... He never. I need you to hear it. He never touched me. He fed me. He brought water. He didn't, he never..."

"I know."

"You don't know. I need you to know."

"I know," Lauren said. "Baby, I believe you."

She turned her head. In the beam of the flashlight, on a nail driven into a post beside the stairs, a small brass key hung from a loop of string.

She took it down. Her hand shook so badly that it took three tries to fit it into the lock of the cuff at Chloe's ankle. When it turned at last she heard her own breath go out in a sob. The cuff fell open. The chain slid down the girl's leg and lay on the concrete with a sound like rain.

"Can you stand?"

"I think so."

Lauren put an arm round her and lifted. Chloe's legs buckled and held. She was a feather. She was nothing. Lauren held her against her side and felt, through the wool, every rib.

"We're going to walk up those stairs," she said, "and out the door, and across the field, and into my car. And then I am going to drive you home."

"What about—"

"We're not going to think about him."

"He knew you were coming," Chloe whispered. "He told me. He said you'd come down those stairs. He said I'd be safe."

Lauren's hand tightened on her shoulder.

"He's upstairs," Chloe said. "Isn't he. He's waiting."

Above them, through two floors of ancient timber, over the howling of the storm, came a sound so loud and so abrupt that both women flinched. A single, tearing, mechanical roar. It rose, caught, steadied, and settled into a deep furious idle that shook dust from the beams.

A chainsaw, starting.

And over it, small and clear and unhurried, a boy's voice, calling down the stairs.

"Captain Vance."

It sounded almost polite.

"Whenever you're ready."