Page 93 of Heartbreak Bay

But not yet. He’s completely absorbed in what’s happening on the screen ... and as I focus on it, too, I feel the same magnetic force draw me in.

Oh God, Gwen. Oh my God.

We should never have come here.

25

GWEN

There are more rooms,he said. I think about the implications of that as I walk through the processing room. There are other exits from this room, seven of them. I ignore the big doors he dragged me through before; those lead to the warehouse, to the trap where I last saw Kez.

I have blood on my hands. On my clothes. And I am not really rational.

It feels oddly fine.

“Which door?” I ask Jonathan. I know he can hear me. He’s played this game before, with many people. How many, I can’t really know.

“You choose.”

I do. I pick one at random, and I move past the silent, stinking fish conveyors. This door is smaller. It leads to a hallway running right and left. More choices. I go right. “You going to give me any clues?” I ask Jonathan. “It’s not much of a game if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You know,” he says. “You’ll know when you get there.”

I’m not surprised to find that lights are working now. He’s kept the power on, of course he has. He controls the building, probably from whatever room he’s hiding in.

We’re playing hide-and-seek.

“Would you rather be rich or poor?” he asks.

“Neither,” I tell him. “Just not afraid.”

“That’s not how it works. There are only two choices.”

“That’s why the game is wrong,” I tell him. “Because humans aren’t binary creatures. We’re confusing. We’re flawed. We’re—”

I stop talking because there are three doors in the hallway, all on my left. The doors are shut. All have glass windows, but when I stand in the middle, I realize all the blinds are closed. No way to tell what’s inside.

“Three doors,” he says. “Three choices. Two are empty.”

“What’s in the third one?”

“A tiger who hasn’t eaten for months.”

I know this one. It’s a logic puzzle.A tiger who hasn’t eaten in months is dead.It doesn’t matter which door I open.

So I do it methodically.

The first door is an office with an empty desk, two filing cabinets, and a vacant office chair. It’s eerily tidy, like it’s waiting for a new employee to arrive.

The second door is the same.

The third door holds the monster, but as he promised in the riddle, the monster isn’t a problem anymore. I stare at the old, desiccated corpse. I can’t tell race, sex, anything; it’s just old skin, hair, and the outlines of bones now. The place reeks. The carpet’s absorbed decomposition like a bloated sponge. It isn’t immediately obvious how this person died—no severing of arms and legs, like Sheryl suffered. The corpse is handcuffed to a thick U-bolt driven into the floor.

I don’t speak. I just step back and shut the door. Jonathan’s disembodied voice says, “Do you want to know?”

“Just tell me where you are. Let’s get it over with.”

“That man abducted young women, some of them barely into their teens. He raped and killed them and made harassing phone calls to their loved ones,” Jonathan says. “I gave him a choice of dying of starvation or gnawing off his hand like an animal in a trap. He chose to starve.”