Mind Prey

He took them out, single file, through the side door of the old farmhouse and straight into the basement. The basement smelled wet, smelled of fresh dirt and disinfectant. Mail had cleaned it not long ago, she thought. A small spark of hope: he wasn’t going to kill them. Not right away. If they had a little time, just a little time, she could work on him.
    Then he locked them away. They listened for him, fearful, expecting him back at any moment, Genevieve asking, over and over, “Mom, what’s he going to do? Mom, what’s he going to do?”
    A minute became ten minutes, and ten minutes an hour, and the girls finally slept while Andi put her back to the wall and tried to think…
     
    M AIL CAME FOR her at three in the morning, drunk, excited.
    “Get out here,” he growled at her. He had a beer can in his left hand. The girls woke at the sound of the latch, and they crawled across the mattress until they had their backs to the wall, but curled, like small animals in a den.
    “What do you want?” Andi said. She kept looking at her watch, as if this were a normal conversation and she was on her way somewhere else. But the fear made her voice tremble, as much as she tried to control it. “You can’t keep us here, John. It’s not right.”
    “Fuck that,” Mail said. “Now get out here, goddamnit.”
    He took a step toward her, his eyes dark and angry, and she could smell the beer.
    “All right. Don’t hurt us, just don’t hurt us. Come on, girls…”
    “Not them,” Mail said. “Just you.”
    “Just me?” Her stomach clutched.
    “That’s right.” He smiled at her and put his free hand on the doorsill, as though he needed help staying upright. Or maybe he was being cool. He’d teased his hair into bangs, and now she realized that in addition to the beer, she could smell aftershave or cologne.
    Andi glanced at the girls, then at Mail, and at the girls again. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “John won’t hurt me.”
    Neither of the girls said a word. Neither of them believed her.
    Andi walked around him, as far away as she could. In the outer basement, the air was cooler and fresher, but the first thing she noticed was that he’d dragged another mattress down the stairs. She stepped toward the stairs as the steel door clanged shut behind her and Mail said, “Don’t move.”
    She stopped, afraid to move, and he walked around her, until he was between her and the door. He stared at her for a moment, a little out of balance, she thought. He was seriously drunk, and his eyes looked closed in, heavy-lidded, and his lips curled in an ugly, contemptuous smile.
    “They don’t have any idea where you’re at or who took you,” he said. He nearly laughed, but somewhere, under there, he was a bit unsure of himself, she thought. “They been talking about it on the radio all night. They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”
    “John, they’ll come sooner or later,” Andi said. “Your best option, I believe…” She automatically fell into her academic voice, the slightly dry observational tone that she used when dealing with patients on a sensitive point. A tone that seemed educated and aristocratic at the same time, and often sold her viewpoint on its own.
    Not this time.
    Mail moved very quickly, shockingly quickly, like a middleweight boxer, and slapped her face hard, nearly knocking her down. An instant before, she’d been a Ph.D. applying psychology; now she was a wounded animal, trying to find its balance before it became simply meat.
    Mail stepped close to her, close enough to smell, close enough to see the texture in his jeans, and he snarled, “Don’t you ever talk that way. And they’re never gonna find us. Never in this world. Now stand up straight. Stand the fuck up.”
    She had her hand to her face, nothing coherent in her head: her thoughts were like Scrabble pieces on a dropped board. There was a crunching sound and she looked toward Mail, who was watching her, still angry. He’d crushed the beer can in his hand, and now he threw it into a corner, where it clattered off the wall and then bounced back toward them.
    “Let’s see ’em,” he said.
    “What?” She had no idea.
    “Let’s see ’em,” he said.
    “What?” Stupidly, shaking her head.
    “Your tits, let’s see your tits.”
    She tried to back away, one step, two, but there was no place to go. Behind her, an old coal-burning furnace stood like an old, close-cropped oak, the coal