Life Expectancy

"No gun. Just a pointy metal nail file."
        "You were going to-what?-stab me in the carotid artery?"
        "Only if I couldn't get one of your eyes," she said.
        He raised his pistol, and though he pointed it at her, I figured that once he started blasting away, he'd drill me, too. I'd seen what he'd done to the newspaper.
        "I should kill you dead right here," he said, although without any animosity in his voice.
        "You should," she agreed. "I would if I were you."
        He grinned and shook his head. "What a piece of work."
        "Right back at ya," she said, and matched his grin.
        My teeth were revealed molar to molar, as well, though my grin was so tight with anxiety that it hurt my face.
        "All these years, planning for this day," the maniac said, "I expected it to be gratifying in a savage sort of way, even thrilling, but I never thought it would be as much fun as this."
        Lorrie said, "A party can never be better than the guests you invite."
        The lunatic killer considered this as if Lorrie had quoted one of the most complex philosophical propositions of Schopenhauer. He nodded solemnly, rolled his tongue over his teeth, uppers and lowers, as though he could taste the brilliance of those words, and finally he said, "How true. How very true."
        I realized that I wasn't holding up my end of the conversation. I didn't want him to get the idea that a party of two might be more fun than three.
        When I opened my mouth-no doubt to say something even more inappropriate than my stupid coathangers line, something that would bring me closer to a bullet in the groin-a great hollow peal tolled through the vaulted subcellar. King Kong pounded his mighty fists one, two, three times against the giant door in the massive wall that separated his half of the island from the half where the nervous natives lived.
        The maniac brightened at the sound. "That'll be Honker and Crinkles.
        You'll like them. They have the explosives."
        As it turned out, Cornelius Randolph Snow not only had a keen appreciation for fine Victorian architecture but also for Victorian hugger-mugger of the kind that flourished in melodramas of the period and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used with singular effect in his immortal Sherlock Holmes yarns: concealed doors, hidden rooms, blind staircases, secret passageways.
        Hand in hand but only because of the steel cuffs, quickly but only because of the gun prodding us in the back, Lorrie and I went to the end of the room where the maniac had brutally shot the old newspaper.
        Shelves spanned the width of that wall, rose from floor to ceiling.
        Stored thereon were periodicals in labeled slipcases.
        The maniac studied several shelves, up and down, back and forth, maybe looking for the 1952 run of Life magazine, maybe hoping to spot a juicier spider.
        Nope, neither. He was searching for a hidden switch. He found it, and a section of bookshelves pivoted open, revealing an alcove behind them.
        At the back of the alcove, a stone wall embraced an iron-banded oak door. In an age that demanded harsher punishment for patrons with overdue books, they might have kept a tardy Jane Austen reader here until solitary confinement and a short ration of gruel brought the miscreant to remorse and contrition.
        The maniac pounded one fist three times on the door-obviously an answering signal.
        From the farther side came two knocks, hollow and loud.
        After the maniac responded with two, a single knock came from the space beyond. He answered with one thump.
        This seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated pass code but the maniac was delighted by the ritual. He beamed happily at us.
        His toothy smile no longer had quite the endearing quality that had marked it previously. He was an adorable-looking fellow, and against your better judgment, you still wanted to be charmed by him, but you kept scanning for dark hairy bits of spider on his lips and tongue.
        A moment after the last knock, the buzz of a small' high-speed motor arose from the farther side of the door. Then metal shrieked on metal.
        A diamond-point steel drill bit thrust through the keyhole. The spinning shaft chewed up the lock mechanism and spat metal shavings on the floor.
        Our host raised his voice and reported with boyish enthusiasm: "We tortured a member of