Intensity

how he couldn't wait for the end of the month, because Laura was coming home for a three-day weekend. He didn't mention she was bringing along a friend."
        An accident. Photos dropped. A casual exchange, mere idle conversation.
        The arbitrariness of it was breathtaking and almost more than Chyna could bear.
        Then, as she watched Vess thoroughly wiping off the counters and rinsing the dishpan and scrubbing the sink, Chyna began to feel that what had happened to the Templeton family was worse than merely arbitrary. All this violent death began to seem fated, an inexorable spiral into lasting darkness, as if they had been born and had lived only for Edgler Vess.
        It was as if she too had been born and had struggled this far only for the purpose of bringing one moment of sick satisfaction to this soulless predator.
        The worst horror of his rampages was not the pain and fear that he inflicted, not the blood, not the mutilated cadavers. The pain and the fear were comparatively brief, considering all the routine pain and anxiety of life. The blood and bodies were merely aftermath. The worst horror was that he stole meaning from the unfinished lives of those people he killed, made himself the primary purpose of their existence, robbed them not of time but of fulfillment.
        His base sins were envy-of beauty, of happiness-and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.
        Hand-drying the plates, pans, and flatware in the drainage rack, returning each piece to the proper shelf or drawer, Edgler Vess looked as pink-clean as a freshly bathed baby and as innocent as the stillborn. He smelled of soap, a good bracing aftershave, and lemon-scented dishwashing liquid. But in spite of all this, Chyna found herself superstitiously expecting to detect a whiff of brimstone.
        Every life led to a series of quiet epiphanies-or at least to opportunities for epiphanies-and Chyna was washed by a poignant new grief when she thought about this grim aspect of the Templeton family's interrupted journeys. The kindnesses they might have done for others. The love they might have given. The things they might have come to understand in their hearts.
        Vess finished the breakfast clean-up and returned to the table. "I have a few things to do upstairs, outside-and then I'll have to sleep four or five hours if I can. I've got to go to work this evening. I need my rest."
        She wondered what work he did, but she didn't ask. He might be talking about a job-or about his dogged assault on Ariel's sanity. If the latter, Chyna didn't want to know what was coming.
        "When you shift around in the chair, do it easy. Those chains will scrape the wood if you're not careful."
        "I'd hate to mar the furniture," she said.
        He stared at her for perhaps half a minute and then said, "If you're stupid enough to think you can get free, I'll hear the chains rattling, and I'll have to come back in here to quiet you. If that's necessary, you won't like what I'll do."
        She said nothing. She was hopelessly hobbled and chained down. She couldn't possibly escape.
        "Even if you somehow get free of the table and chairs, you can't move fast. And attack dogs patrol the grounds."
        "I've seen them," she assured him.
        "If you weren't chained, they'd still drag you down and kill you before you'd gone ten steps from the door."
        She believed him-but she didn't understand why he felt the need to press the point so hard.
        "I once turned a young man loose in the yard," Vess said. "He raced straight to the nearest tree and got up and out of harm's way with only one bad bite in his right calf and a nip on the left ankle. He braced himself in the branches and thought he would be safe for a little while, with the dogs circling below and watching him, but I got a twenty-two rifle and went out on the back porch and shot him in the leg from there. He fell out of the tree, and then it was all over in maybe a minute."
        Chyna said nothing. There were moments when communicating with this hateful thing seemed no more possible than discussing the merits of Mozart with a shark. This was one of those moments.
        "You were invisible to me last night," he said.
        She