The Big Dark Sky (22)
14
He had taken away Ophelia Poole’s wristwatch because he said time had already run out for her, and therefore a watch was of no use.
Perhaps an hour before sunset, Optime returned for her. Asher Optime. He’d shown her his driver’s license, so that she would know the name he’d given her was in fact his and would conclude that he wouldn’t have revealed it if he wasn’t certain she had no chance of escape.
This self-emasculated crackpot scared her, but he didn’t terrify her into helplessness. He didn’t understand why she didn’t quail before him, but he had no way of knowing that she had been expecting him for years and living for the day when he would appear.
Leaving his chair on the veranda, eating one of the cookies that earlier he’d retrieved from his larder when weed-induced craving overcame him, he said, “Pissed your pants yet?”
“Not me,” she said. “What about you?”
Looming over Ophelia, screwing his pale face into as portentous an expression as he was able to manage while wacked-out on pot, he said, “I’m escorting you to the necropolis. ‘No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than there.’”
“What an ass you are,” she taunted him. “Who talks that way?”
“Samuel Johnson. Though his subject was libraries rather than graveyards. I think it was Johnson, not Shakespeare. Anyway, it was someone whose IQ was three times yours.” He sucked at his teeth to extract a lingering morsel of cookie. “Let’s see how long you can hold on to hope when you’re locked in there with the rotting dead.”
“If you’ll let me take a piss, I’ll have no trouble holding on to hope until I kill you.”
Ophelia dared to speak to him like this because she had three advantages over the sociopathic creep. First, she had read what existed of his ridiculous manifesto and understood the swollen ego and the delusions that motivated him. Second, she was a lot more intelligent than he thought she was, with common sense and street smarts that were unknown to his kind. And finally, he was ludicrous, a fool who lacked the capacity for clear-eyed self-examination that might have saved him from his foolishness. She only had to play with him psychologically and keep herself alive until he made the stupid move that would be the death of him.
Or so she told herself repeatedly, insistently. In spite of the extraordinary intensity of Optime’s madness and his barely repressed ferocity, Ophelia refused to entertain even a shadow of a shadow of a doubt.
“What about you?” she asked. “Do you still piss like a man, or did you cut off your willie, too?”
His throttled rage was apparent in tics and other stresses in his face. His eyes were incandescent wicks swollen with gaslight. The hissing of the lantern seemed to come from him, as if he were the great snake that resided at the bottom of the pit of the world “until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.” She considered reciting those lines to him, but she doubted that he would know the source, T. S. Eliot, and she was sure that he would not grasp the meaning.
When he took the switchblade from a pocket of his jacket, she thought she might have pressed him too hard. However, he only used the knife to cut the zip tie that bound her wrists.
He put the blade on the table where she could reach it, though he drew the pistol from the holster on his hip and gave her a look into the muzzle. “Free your ankles, but don’t do anything stupid.”
After she cut the zip ties that fettered her, she returned the knife to the table, and Optime took possession of it again.
He keyed open the padlock that fixed the chain around her neck, and she was free of that, too.
In respect of the pistol, she didn’t get up from the chair until he ordered her to her feet.
He followed her across the barroom, through the back door, to the outhouse that had two holes in its smooth board seat. He had restored the small structure from a state of near collapse. In another century, this privy served the patrons of the saloon, but it now accommodated Optime and his prisoners.
Previously, when he accompanied Ophelia to the outhouse, he permitted her to close the door. This time, the sharp edge of his repressed rage became apparent when he denied her privacy.
In the summer heat, the place stank. Beetles crawled the pit below, and fat spiders sat patiently in their elaborate tapestries of sticky silk everywhere that the walls met the ceiling.
The shadowy interior would have allowed a degree of modesty, except that Optime stood to one side of the open door to watch her, allowing a shaft of sunshine to spill inside and reveal her in the act.
She refused to be embarrassed. Instead, she made him the object of ridicule. “Now that you have the sex drive of a dead worm, is this how you get your jollies—watching ladies pee?”
Backlit, his face in shadow and his eyes as black as the empty sockets of the Grim Reaper, he didn’t respond. His silence was ominous, and Ophelia decided that she should say no more.
When she was finished, he walked her out to the street and followed her, pistol in hand, toward the small stone church at the end of the abandoned town.
Slowly sinking toward the great mountains in the west, the sun had for several minutes bathed the ghost town in a honeyed splendor that made some of the weathered buildings appear gilded. Now, the late afternoon grew moody with a blood-orange radiance as eerie as witch fires. The few windows that remained intact took color from the sun and peered at the street like jack-o’-lantern eyes.