Security(49)

The Killer boards the secret elevator.

Jules and Justin are sleeping. They are still asleep when the bookshelf downstairs slides aside and the secret elevator opens into the living room of Room 1801, the regular penthouse. There are many reasons it will be distasteful to watch Jules and Justin get butchered. The main reason is there’s no chance whatsoever the two of them will live. They simply won’t. They are defenseless, sleeping, as the Killer climbs the stairs toward them, disappears from that camera, and appears on the one upstairs. They are on their designated sides of the bed—he on the left, she on the right, if one is facing the bed—and they have lived lives in which their knowledge of their own vulnerability is startlingly limited. Justin’s parents run a successful travel agency. Jules’s parents are artists—painter and photographer; they collaborate occasionally—whose livelihood does not depend on their art, but on inheritance from industrious ancestors. Jules and Justin had bad skin and broken hearts in adolescence, but then the pimples cleared and they found each other in grad school. Justin’s parents bought him a motorcycle for a high school graduation gift. They made him buy the helmet so he would feel a sense of responsibility. He rode the bike for a few months, then lost interest. Justin has long eyelashes and a touchy disposition that he thinks makes him sensitive to others’ feelings, but it does not. It makes him sensitive to his own feelings. He married Jules because she’s hot. He introduces her to people as “my hot wife, Jules.” Jules, it could be asserted, listens to Tessa’s problems with such a ready ear because Jules herself has had so few genuine problems that hearing Tessa talk is like listening to a pioneer woman tell about doing laundry with a ribbed board and a rock. Or an Amazonian hunter who eats his kill’s heart as a gesture of respect. Or an elderly couple wealthy enough to live on a cruise ship complaining that the bingo room is open only until midnight. It could be said, if one periodically entertained unkind thoughts about Jules, that Jules befriended Tessa in the first place because she found Tessa’s difficult past exotic. These unkind thoughts might be substantiated by Jules’s end--of--the--day recitations to Justin about everything Tessa told her. Everything. As Jules has begun to develop problems of her own, her recitations to Justin have begun to include problems for Tessa that actually belong to Jules: Tessa’s got a secret shoe stash that’s bankrupting her; Tessa takes her top off at the beach purely to reassure herself her tits still draw stares; Tessa’s seeing a shrink and it’s not helping at all. It comforts Jules to give Tessa her problems. Jules comforts herself by pretending Tessa wouldn’t mind: Tessa never tells Jules to keep secrets. But some things are implied. Some things are just decency. Decency is made exponentially more difficult when one has never really been tested. Jules and Justin love to tell people how Tessa delivered them from certain ruin when their catering business was failing, but Jules’s and Justin’s parents would have bailed them out one way or another. Jules’s and Justin’s parents gave Jules and Justin a house for a wedding gift. They’ve never existed without a safety net. They are nice people. It’s not that they’re not fundamentally decent people; it’s that one cannot know, because they’ve never known hardship. It is easy to be nice when being nice is easy, but niceness is the first thing to go when an unexamined life becomes even slightly difficult. People begin failing tests they never realized they’re taking. People get pills; people get mistresses. They get angry at grand injustices they created for themselves, and they created those injustices in an effort to ignore the fundamental, foundational injustice that being alive means living in the shadow of death. It strikes them—these blessed children—as horribly unfair. The Killer walks closer and closer to the bed.

Brian isn’t being as gentle now. Tessa is baiting him brutally, with a fingernail down the ridges of his back, a lick to his mouth and an evasion of hers, a laugh, as if patting a dragon’s nose. Brian stops. Suddenly. He looks at her quite seriously. He looks very young and very sad. Tessa starts to match him, younger and sadder. When they match perfectly, Brian fits them together. It’s all visible, as the covers are down. It embarrasses.

The Killer makes no sound. Justin’s eyelids snap open, seeing what his ancient, primitive instinct sensed and woke him to see. He scrambles out of the bed on his side. “What the—? Who the f*ck’re—?” He grabs a lamp by the base and tries to brandish it, but the plug holds inside the outlet and he almost falls backward. The Killer has stopped at the foot of the bed, intrigued or amused or both, as Justin bends and yanks the lamp’s cord with the noise one makes during a tough tennis serve.

The sound wakes Jules. “Whuh?” she says, falling out of bed like a klutzy sleepwalker, “Babe--uh?” She blinks at the Killer and shakes her head, chemically incapable of anxiety when it might for once be beneficial.

“Come on!” Justin shouts. “Come on, freak—let’s go!” Justin rushes forward with the lamp in both hands, feigning insanity or truly finding a temporary form of it. It might work on a burglar or a hophead.

The Killer waits. Justin swings the lamp around. The Killer catches it with one hand, waits. He waits until Justin sees the knife in his other hand. At the same time, as if on cue, the Killer nods and Justin shakes his head. The knife pistons up--in so fast, Justin seems to understand he’s been stabbed only when he hears his own offended grunt. He looks down at the handle in his heart like it’s a harmless new addition to his body—a freckle, a callus. At worst a sliver.