Page 107

After the auction in New York City, the woman drove home, thirteen hours through the night along roads that started out empty and dark, and which grew busier as the morning light came and the day crawled around to lunchtime and afternoon.

She was satisfied, a sensation she rarely felt. For a while, at least, she was satiated. She had taken another book to add to her collection, the Book of Matter. She would enjoy experimenting with it, as she had with all of her books, testing what it could do and how she could use it on other people.

She drove with relative silence in her mind, enjoying the satisfaction, replaying some of the moments from the auction. The pain and the suffering were what she enjoyed the most. She liked to see agony on the faces of other people, and she preferred it when the agony lasted, when it was more than a fleeting moment.

She had seen Drummond Fox again, and that had delighted her, but once again he had evaded her. She knew she should have been furious about that, but she was not. Instead she felt reinvigorated. She had proof, now, that the man still lived, and she had more books. And she would collect more books in the coming years. Time was running out for Drummond Fox, she knew. She was circling irrevocably closer to the Fox Library. Nothing could stop that now. If anything, she enjoyedknowing that the experience would be prolonged. She hoped that she appeared in his nightmares.

As the woman crawled along the road to her cabin she saw, to her disappointment, another vehicle parked up in the gravel drive. It was a large utility truck, parked facing the property, with two men, one of them sitting on the hood, the other standing in front of him. There was music thudding from the truck’s stereo, insistently kicking noise into the quiet woodland afternoon. They were laughing as she approached, and then they noticed the car and they interrupted their conversation to stare. Both men were holding cans of beer, and one of them, the one sitting on the hood, took a casual sip as he watched the woman come to a stop. He was tall and thin, with fair hair and wearing a Kiss T-shirt that looked to have been washed more times in its life than he had. The other man was shorter and fatter, like he ate doughnuts for breakfast, and dressed as if he had just gotten off work at a gas station or was planning to go to work later.

Both men watched as the woman climbed out. She wondered if they had come here before. She was away often. Maybe it was the place they came to drink and hang out when they were bored. She closed the car door and looked at them, feeling the cool, thick air of the afternoon, the damp of the surrounding woods. They stared back at her, both of them running their eyes up and down her body, exchanging a glance. The taller one, the blond one, had a hungry, mean sort of look. He was a type the woman had come across before. There were lots of his type in small towns across the world.

“Hello, darling,” he said.

She said nothing.

“This your place?” he asked, nodding at the house.

The woman nodded without expression.

“We ain’t doing no harm, just having a few beers,” he said. “Right, George?”

“Yup,” George agreed, nodding, but he was less sure of himself. George was just going along with his friend.

The woman held the tall one’s gaze for a moment, saying nothing.

“That’s a nice dress you got, lady,” he said.

The woman walked to the house without replying. She unlocked the front door and opened it, the hinges calling out into the day like a bird. She looked back at them over her shoulder and then left the door open as she stepped inside. It was an invitation.

They joined her soon enough, switching off the truck and hurrying into the house.

Their mistake. If they had simply left, she wouldn’t have pursued them.

She waited for them just inside the house, standing primly with her purse on her arm by the basement door. When they arrived, clattering clumsily over the threshold, expressions like dogs at feeding time, she opened the basement door and walked ahead of them down the old wooden stairs. As the two men joined her at the bottom of the stairs, they looked around cautiously. The tall man saw the mattress in the corner and nudged the other man with an elbow. They saw no danger here, only opportunity.

The woman decided that she wanted to try out the book she had taken from the Black man at the auction—the Book of Matter. She had to experiment to understand its potential. How fortuitous two men had fallen into her lap.

She gestured at the tall man to come farther into the room. And then she gestured for him to get down on the floor.

“What, here?” he asked, throwing a smile at his friend. “On the floor?”

The woman nodded, and the man happily complied, dropping to the concrete floor beneath the swinging bulb and lying on his back.

The woman looked at the other man over her shoulder and gestured him toward the mattress in the corner. He looked scared, she thought, but he nodded obediently and shuffled past her.

“I hope you are ready, miss,” the man on the floor said, leering up at her. “You ain’t never had nothing like me!”

As the woman stared down at him, the man gestured with both hands, encouraging her to join him. She squatted down, one hand on the cement floor, the other reaching into her purse to hold the Book of Matter. She directed her will toward the floor, softening it intoliquid matter beneath the man. Then she pressed on his chest with her hand. He didn’t realize at first, he was still smiling for a second or two, wondering what she was doing, glancing down at her feet as if maybe she was removing shoes. Then he noticed that he was sinking. His expression changed, incomprehension dawning, and the woman loved it.

“Hey, wait...

He flailed in the soupy concrete, but found no purchase, and his flailing only made him sink faster. And then the concrete was rising around his face, covering his legs, and he went quiet as he panicked and tried to extricate himself, fighting to survive. As she watched she saw his eyes growing wide and white as the concrete swallowed him.

And then his eyes were gone, and only his lips and nostrils and the fingers of one hand protruded, and the woman made the concrete solid again, hardening it around his skinny body with a creaking sound. She watched with interest for a few minutes as the man’s lips flapped and smacked, the light still swinging back and forth over him, shadows growing and shrinking as he struggled for air, as his lungs tried to inflate within his crushed chest. She wondered what he was thinking, suffocating in the darkness.

Then the smacking stopped, the ragged breaths running out, and the visible parts of the man’s body were still.

In the corner of the room, on the mattress, the other man was pulled into a ball and whimpering. When the woman looked at him, he went quiet. His hands were clenched in front of his mouth like he was trying to hide, his eyes wide and terrified.