Shackles Read online

  The wildness went out of me all at once, leaving me limp and shaken. Neither panic nor rash action was going to get me out of this. It would have to be guile, cunning, my wits against his. Now, trapped here in transit, there was nothing to do but wait it out until we got to wherever we were going. And not let my imagination create any more horror-film scenarios. Reality was never quite as hideous as anything you could dredge up from the depths of your subconscious.

  He seemed disinclined to talk anymore for the time being, and that was to my benefit. The less I heard of that calm, whispery, goading voice, the better off I would be. I lay still, emptying my mind, concentrating on what I could see of the night outside.

  Clouds obscured some of the stars now, fast-moving and thick. Rain clouds? Thunderheads? I couldn’t tell. Couldn’t tell anything about our surroundings, either, except that the lower part of the sky and the underbellies of the clouds were stained with a faint shimmery glow. City lights created a sky glow like that. But so did densely populated smaller towns and suburbs.

  Time passed in silence broken only by the sporadic swish of passing cars. Hardly any traffic at all now; must be very late, after three at least. Almost one when he abducted me … that would put us two to three hours away from San Francisco. But there was nothing much in that. Several highways led out of the city, to all sorts of connecting roads. We could be just about anywhere.

  The silence began to get to me after a while. I did not want to start him talking again, but I wished he would turn on the radio. No chance. More miles, more silence. And then a rhythmic snicking sound filled the car: He’d flipped on one of the directional signals. We slowed, swung off to the right. Secondary road this time, one that ran straight for several miles. There was virtually no traffic here. The darkness outside was clotted, with more of the gathering clouds cutting off the starshine altogether.

  We came into some kind of town, lights at intervals on the outskirts, a chain of lights as we got into the center of it, then flashing signal lights where we made a left turn onto still another road. This one was a little bumpy, not quite as straight; the jouncing motion began to affect my stomach, start it churning again. I shut my eyes, rolled onto my side. It was an effort of will to keep from throwing up.

  A long time later lights came into the car, and when I glanced up I saw that we were passing through some kind of village: streetlamps, the silhouetted tops of old-fashioned buildings pressing in close on both sides. Then we were out of it, into darkness again. And more miles of silence, and tortuous curves, and the constant struggle to keep from emptying what was left in my stomach.

  He slowed again, without putting on the directional signal this time, then pulled off onto the side of the road and stopped. He put on the emergency brake but did not shut off the engine or the lights. Outside, there was nothing to see except dark and a spot of reflected light somewhere in the distance. I thought: End of the line?

  But it wasn’t. He said, “Have you figured out yet who I am?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then roll onto your belly and turn your head toward the seatback. Don’t look around. I’m going to get out and make sure you’re covered with the blanket.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a service station up ahead and we need gas. When we drive in there I want you to lie perfectly still and make no sound. If you do anything to alert the attendant I’ll shoot both of you. Is that clear?”

  “Clear enough.”

  “On your belly, then. Face toward the seatback.”

  I did as I was told. He must have leaned up to watch me because he didn’t get out until I had finished moving. The rear door opened, letting in a gust of icy air scented with pine and fir and tinged with snow. Mountain country, I thought. Somewhere to the northeast, east, or south of San Francisco: You weren’t likely to find mountainous pine and fir forests and the threat of snow in any other direction.

  He leaned in, arranged the blanket over me, leaned back out. Pretty soon we were under way again, but only for about a minute. Then we turned off the road, came to a stop: the service station. He got out, shut the door, but I could hear him unscrewing the gas cap, getting the hose off the pump, inserting it into the tank opening. A voice came from somewhere, asking a question I couldn’t make out. He said from close by the rear window, in that same disguised voice, “Cash. I’ll bring it over when I’m done.” I could feel him looking in at me as he filled the tank. I lay motionless, sweating a little, waiting.

  It seemed to take a long time before he finished. I heard the hose nozzle rattle as he extracted it, heard the gas cap rattle as he replaced that. He went away, came back, got into the car. Then we were moving again, out of the light into heavy darkness.

  “Very good.” he said. “You didn’t even twitch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can come out from under the blanket now. But don’t try to sit up. I wouldn’t like that.”

  I squirmed around on the seat, pulled the blanket down, got my body turned so that I could look out through the window. We passed occasional lighted buildings, and in the glow from them I could see the tops of evergreens. And a thin sifting of snow, slanting down from the direction in which we were heading.

  I said, “How much farther?”

  “Oh, not far now. Another forty-five minutes or so. Unless I have to stop and put on chains, but I don’t think that will be necessary. There hasn’t been much snow here lately.”

  “We’re up in the mountains.”

  “Yes, we are. You’re such a good detective.”

  “Which mountains?”

  “Not relevant,” he said.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Be quiet now. You’ll know all you need to soon enough.”

  We made a right turn, drove on an even surface for ten minutes, made a couple more turns. Then we were on a road with a rougher surface, and climbing before long through a series of endless turns that grew sharper, now and then became hairpins and switchbacks. Sickness simmered up into the back of my throat; I closed my eyes again, swiveled my head downward toward the floorboards. Gagged once but didn’t let anything come up.

  On and on, on and on. Turn, turn back, turn, turn back. The road surface got bumpier, seemed to be studded here and there with potholes; the jarring vibration as we bounced through the holes set up a fresh pounding in my head. Wind whistled outside, tugging at the car. He put the windshield wipers on: I could hear their steady clack-clacking. Must be snowing harder now, limiting visibility. He had also slackened speed, so that we were moving at less than twenty-five.

  We had been climbing steadily, and the higher up we got, the worse the road surface became. For a time we seemed to be following an up-and-down roller coaster course; then the terrain flattened out and we were into more twists and turns. I opened my eyes, looked out through the window. Nothing to see but dark restless clouds emptying snow in thin, wind-swirled flurries; the upper branches of trees silhouetted against the clouds, most of them wearing thin jackets of snow. There was a layer of frozen powder on the ground here, too: the rear tires spun in it from time to time, briefly losing traction before he maneuvered free of the deeper patches. We were down to a crawl in low gear.

  God, I thought, how much longer?

  Ten minutes. Or maybe fifteen; my mind was fuzzy and I no longer had a clear conception of time.

  The car cut away to the left, tires crunching on thinly packed snow; went up and over some kind of hill, down through a dip and up a long gradual slope on the other side, and finally came to a halt. “Here we are,” he said.

  The words brought a small measure of relief: I could not have stood much more of that jarring and jouncing. But I didn’t say anything, didn’t move. Just waited.

  Pretty soon he said, “All right. On your belly again, face to the seatback.”

  “Does it really matter if I see you?”

  “Do what you’re told.”

  “What happens now?”

  “You go
to sleep again for a little while.”

  “More chloroform? Listen, there’s no need—”

  “There’s a need.”

  “It makes me sick to my stomach.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said with mock sympathy. “No more talking, now. I’m tired and I want to get this done with. On your belly.”

  Pain flared in my back and arms as I rolled over. My left arm was so badly cramped the tips of the fingers on that hand were numb. When I was in position I heard him get out, open the trunk, shut it and then open the rear door and lean in. Smelled the snow and the evergreens, then the sharp odor of the chloroform.

  I didn’t struggle this time when he clamped the damp cloth over my mouth and nose. No point in it. Let it happen, let the chloroform do its job, wake up and find out where we were and what he had in store for me, wake up and find a way out of this….

  MORNING

  This time, when I came out of it, there was disorientation and an even more savage headache, but no nausea. I lay still for a cluster of seconds, until the mind-swirls settled and I could think clearly again. My first perception was that I was on my back, lying on a surface thinner and more resilient than a car seat. Then I realized that my hands and arms were no longer shackled behind me; they were resting at my sides, palms up, and there was a tingly weakness from fingers to armpits. I tried to raise my right arm but it wouldn’t work right, wouldn’t come up more than a few inches.

  I got my eyes open, blinked them into focus. Ceiling. The rustic variety—knotty pine crisscrossed by beams of some darker wood. I turned my head to the left. Wall, the same knotty pine as the ceiling, with an uncovered window down past my feet. To the right, then, and I was looking at part of a room, shadowed, empty of both people and furnishings of any kind. A fireplace bulked at the edge of my vision: native stone hearth, no logs and no fire.

  Cold in here. The awareness of that made me shiver. I looked back to the left again, up at the window. From this vantage point I could see a wedge of sky, smoky gray veined with black, and little dusty flutters of snow.

  My mouth and throat were dry, raw. I worked up a thin wad of saliva, moved it around from cheek to cheek, managed to swallow it. The tingly sensation was stronger in my arms and hands: improving circulation. I thought about trying to sit up, to get a better look at where I was. Moved my arms a little, experimentally, and then my legs—

  There was something tight around the calf of my left leg, something that made a metal-on-metal scraping noise.

  I tried to lift my head enough to see what it was, but the pain from neck and shoulder cramps was too intense. I tried again and again, jaws locked against the pain. On the fourth try I managed to raise up enough to see down the length of my body—and what I saw made the hair pull all along the back of my scalp.

  The thing around my calf was a band of iron five or six inches wide. Attached to it through a welded metal loop was a length of thick-linked chain, the other end of which was fastened to a ringbolt set into the wall below the window.

  A swell of nausea pushed me down flat again. I lay motionless until it subsided, until the ache in my head dulled again into a tolerable throbbing. Then I flexed and rubbed my hands and arms, worked them through the pins-and-needles stage to where I could use them to push up slowly into a sitting position. It took three tries to get all the way up, to get my right foot off and onto the floor as a brace.

  What I was lying on was a folding canvas cot, the kind campers use. I noted that with a portion of my mind; it was the leg iron and the chain that held my attention. There was a lot of chain, much more than I’d first thought. Most of it lay in a loose coil between the cot and the wall—at least a dozen feet of it. Why? But my mind was not ready to deal with that yet; it shied away from the question, threw up a barrier against it.

  I leaned forward for a closer look at the leg iron. It was a pair of hinged jaws that interconnected one over the other for an adjustable fit and had then been padlocked in place. The padlock was one of those industrial types with a staple a quarter of an inch thick. The chain loop was on the opposite surface and one end of the chain had been welded through it; the other end was fastened to the ringbolt in a similar fashion. The bolt itself appeared to be as thick as a spike. You would need a heavy-duty hacksaw to cut through link, loop, staple or bolt, and at that it would probably take hours to accomplish the task.

  I quit looking at this new set of shackles and eased my body around on the cot so that I could see the rest of my surroundings. At first they made no more sense than the chain and leg iron. Or maybe it was that my mind refused to let them make sense just yet.

  At the head of the cot was a square folding card table, the top of which was littered with an odd assortment: portable radio, several pads of ruled yellow paper, pens and pencils, a large desk calendar open to this week, a stack of paper plates and another of plastic glasses, a tray of plastic knives, forks and spoons, one of those little hand can openers. Next to the table on one side were a pair of heavy wool blankets; on the other side were a long squat space heater and an old brass floor lamp with an unshaded bulb, both of which looked as though they had come out of a Goodwill thrift shop. Against the outer wall stood a white-painted bookshelf, also of thrift-shop origin, that was jammed with canned and packaged foodstuffs. An ancient two-burner hot plate rested on top of the shelf. And in the corner where the side wall—the one with the uncovered window in it—and the room’s back wall joined were three cardboard cartons: rolls of toilet paper and paper towels in one, magazines and paperback books in the second, a miscellany of kitchen items in the third.

  That was all. The rest of the room—the main room of somebody’s mountain cabin—was barren. No furniture, no carpeting, no adornments on any of the walls, no cordwood or kindling for the fireplace. Nothing except what was in this cluttered corner where I had been chained.

  Four doors gave access to the room. Three were shut; the fourth, in the near back wall some ten feet from the cot, stood open. Through it I could see a cubicle that contained a toilet and sink. The door in the front wall opposite seemed to be the cabin’s main entrance; it was flanked by windows, both of them shuttered. The remaining two doors must have led to other rooms—bedrooms, kitchen. There were just the three windows, and all of the light in the room came through the unshuttered one near the cot.

  I dragged my arm up to look at my watch. After nine now: I had been unconscious this time for three or four hours. The whisperer—where was he? If he was in one of the other rooms, he was being damned quiet about whatever he was doing. There was no sound in the cabin, nothing but the plaint of the wind outside.

  I eased my chained leg off the cot, managed with some effort to stand up and stay up. But the left leg buckled on my second wobbly step, as I started around the lower end of the cot, so that I had to lunge ahead into the wall and clutch at the windowsill to keep from falling. I leaned there, breathing hard, looking out through the rime-edged glass.

  A cleared area maybe fifty feet wide stretched the width of the cabin, patched here and there with snow. More snow drifted up against a shed of some kind toward the rear. Otherwise trees were all that I could see—white-garbed spruce and fir, densely grown, climbing beyond the shed into a misty obscurity. Cold, silent world out there, ruled by the elements. High-mountain country—but where? I pressed my cheek against the glass, squinting toward the front. White and gray and dull green, nothing else. If the whisperer’s car was still here, it was parked somewhere around front or on the far side.

  I did some goose-stepping in place, to loosen the muscles in my legs. Then I squatted to examine the ringbolt set into the wall beneath the window. It was in there solidly—driven in with a sledge, maybe, or wedged through a tight-bored hole to the outside and then locked into place with a bolt plate. I took up a handful of the chain, stood again, backed off a few paces, and yanked backward with all the strength I could muster. Nothing happened except that I scraped some skin off one palm; there was no give at all f
rom either the chain or the ringbolt. Wasted effort, as I’d known it would be. But you have to try.

  I let go of the chain, rubbed sweat off my face with the sleeve of my coat. I was still wobbly but I didn’t want to sit down again, not yet. Walk, I thought. And I walked, taking short shuffling steps until I was sure of my balance. Behind me the chain made a slithering rattle on the rough-hewn floor. I went toward the front wall first, but the chain stopped me well before I reached it. I couldn’t have touched that wall, let alone the front door, if I’d gotten down on my belly and stretched out full length. I came back toward the rear at the chain’s full extension. It let me get almost to the center of the room, then within a few feet of the fireplace. But there was no way I could reach the fireplace, either—no way to find out if any of its mortared stones were as loose as some of them looked. As for the other two closed doors, they might as well have been in another county.

  The bathroom cubicle was accessible, though, when I lifted the chain over the cot and over the card table. I could use both the toilet and the sink. He had also supplied three bars of soap, a frayed hand towel, a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, and a mirror with a jagged crack in one corner that hung from a nail above the sink. A window no larger than a porthole, with a pebbled glass pane, was cut into the outer wall. But it wouldn’t budge when I tried the sash. Nailed shut, probably. I tried the one sink tap to see if there was running water. There was—ice-cold and clear.

  Out of there, over to the packed bookshelf. Cans of soup, beef stew, Spam, tuna fish, sardines, spaghetti and ravioli, macaroni and cheese, chili, vegetables, a variety of fruits. Packages of crackers, cookies, tea bags. Two sixteen-ounce jars of instant coffee. A smaller jar of nondairy creamer. Sugar. Salt. Pepper. The more I looked at all of this, the more my stomach clenched and knotted—and not with hunger.