Intensity

Chyna. Remember our bargain? You can either answer it-or I'll slice off a piece of your face. Would you like to hear what I intend to do with Ariel?"
        "I'm sure I know."
        "Yes, some of it. Sex, that's obvious. She's a luscious piece. I haven't touched her yet, but I will. And I believe she's a virgin. At least, in the days when she still talked, she said she was, and she didn't seem like the kind of girl who would lie."
        Or there was the Wild Wood beyond the River, Ratty and Mole and Mr. Badger, green boughs hanging full in the summer sun and Pan piping in the cool shadows under the trees.
        "And I want to hear her crying, lost and crying. I want to smell the purity of her tears. I want to feel the exquisite texture of her screams, know the clean smell of them, and the taste of her terror. There's always that. Always that."
        Neither the languid river nor the Wild Wood materialized, though Chyna strained to see them. Ratty, Mole, Mr. Badger, and Mr. Toad were gone forever into the hateful death that claims all things. And the sadness of this, in its way, was as great as the sadness of what had happened to Laura and what would soon happen to Chyna herself.
        Vess said, "Once in a while, I bring one of them back to the room in the cellar-and always for the same purpose."
        She didn't want to hear this. The handcuffs made it difficult to cover her ears. And if she had tried, he would have shackled her wrists to her ankles. He would insist that she listen.
        "The most intense experiences of my life have all taken place in that room, Chyna. Not the sex. Not the beating or the cutting. That all comes later, and it's a lagniappe. First, I break them down, and that is when it gets intense."
        Her chest was tight. She could breathe only shallowly.
        He said, "The first day or two, they all think they'll go out of their minds with fear, but they're wrong. It takes longer than a day or two to drive someone insane, truly and irrevocably insane. Ariel is my seventh captive, and the others all held on to their sanity for weeks. One of them cracked on the eighteenth day, but three of them lasted a full two months."
        Chyna gave up on the elusive Wild Wood and met his gaze across the table.
        "Psychological torture is so much more interesting and difficult to undertake than the physical variety, although the latter can be undeniably thrilling," Vess said. "The mind is so much tougher than the body, a greater challenge by far. And when the mind goes, I swear that I can hear the crack , a harder sound than bone splitting-and oh, how it reverberates."
        She tried to see the animal consciousness in his eyes, which she had glimpsed unexpectedly before. She needed to see it.
        "When they crack, some of them writhe on the floor, thrash, rend their clothes. They tear at their hair, Chyna, and claw their faces, and some of them bite themselves hard enough to draw blood. They maim themselves in so many inventive ways. They sob and sob, can't stop for hours, sometimes for days, sobbing in their sleep. They bark like dogs, Chyna, and screech and flail their arms as if they're convinced that they can fly. They hallucinate and see things more frightening than I am to them. Some speak in tongues. It's called glossolalia . Do you know the condition? Quite fascinating. Convincingly like a language yet meaningless, a ranting or pleading babble. Some lose control of their bodily functions and wallow in their filth. Messy but riveting to watch-the true base condition of humanity, to which most people can only admit in madness."
        As hard as she tried, Chyna could see no beast in his eyes, only a placid blueness and the watchful darkness of the pupil, and she was no longer sure that she had ever seen it. He wasn't half man and half wolf, not a creature that fell to all fours in the light of the full moon. Worse, he was nothing but a man-living at one extreme end of the spectrum of human cruelty, but nonetheless only a man.
        "Some take refuge in catatonic silences," Vess continued, "as Ariel has done. But I always break them out of that. Ariel is by far the most stubborn, but that only makes her interesting. I'll break her too, and when her crack comes, Chyna, it'll be like no other. Glorious. Intense."
        "The most intense experience of all is showing mercy," Chyna said, and had no idea whatsoever where she had found those words.