Mind Prey

was: nobody, nothing could get at her in the cylinder.
     
    A FTER A VERY long time of wandering in and out of consciousness, she closed in on herself. Found a ray of rationality, followed it to a kind of spark, and sat up. Grace was sitting on the concrete floor, facing the computer monitor. The screen was blank.
    “Grace, are you all right?”
    Andi was whispering. Grace reflexively looked up at the ceiling, as though the whisper might have come from the outside, from God. Then she looked over her shoulder at Andi: “Mom?”
    “Yes.” Andi rolled up to a sitting position.
    “Mom, are you…”
    “I’m getting better,” Andi said, shaking.
    Grace crawled toward her. Her slender daughter looked even thinner, like a winter-hungry fox: “Jeez, Mom, you were arguing with Daddy for a while…”
    “John Mail beat me up; he raped me,” Andi said. She simply let the word out. Grace had to know what was happening, had to help.
    “I know.” Grace looked away, tears trickling down her cheek. “But you’re better?”
    “I think so.” Andi pushed herself up to her knees, then stepped off the mattress, shakily, one hand on the wall. Her legs felt like cheese, thick, soft, unreliable, until the blood began to flow again. She pulled her skirt up, pulled her blouse together. He’d taken her bra: she remembered that. The assault was coming back.
    She turned her back to her daughter, pulled up her skirt, pulled down her underpants, looked inside: just a spot of blood. She wasn’t badly torn.
    “Are you okay?” Grace whispered.
    “I think so.”
    “What are we going to do?” Grace asked. “What about Genevieve?”
    “Genevieve?” My God. Genevieve. “We’ve got to think,” Andi said, turning around to look at her daughter again. She knelt on the mattress, pulled Grace’s head close to her lips and whispered, “The first thing we’ve got to do is find out if he’s listening to us, or if we can talk. We have to keep talking, but I want you to get on my shoulders, and I’m going to try to stand up. Then I want you to look at the ceiling, see if there is anything that might be, you know, a microphone. It probably won’t be very sophisticated—he’d just stick a tape recorder microphone in one of the airholes, or something.”
    Grace nodded, and Andi said, out loud, “I don’t think I’m too hurt, but I need some sleep.”
    “So just lie down for a while,” Grace said. Andi squatted, and Grace stepped over her shoulders. She probably weighed eighty pounds, Andi thought. She had to push herself up with help from the wall, but she got straight, and they walked back and forth through the room, Grace’s head almost at the ceiling, the girl dragging her fingers across the dark wooden boards, probing into corners, poking her fingers into the airholes in the concrete walls. Finally she whispered, “Okay,” and Andi squatted again and Grace got off, shook her head. She’d found nothing.
    Andi put her lips close to Grace’s ear again. “I’m going to say some things about John Mail. We want to see if he refers to what I say, when he comes down next time. Ask me a question about him. Ask me why he’s doing this.”
    Grace nodded. “Mom, why is Mr. Mail doing this? Why is he hurting you?” The question sounded phony, artificial, but maybe on a crude tape it’d be okay.
    Andi counted out a long, thoughtful pause. “I believe he’s compensating for sexual problems he had when he was a child. His parents made it worse—he had a stepfather who’d beat him with a club…”
    “You mean, he’s a sex pervert.”
    Andi shook her in a warning: don’t push it too far …
    “There’s always the possibility that he has a straightforward medical problem, a hormone imbalance that we simply don’t understand. We did tests, and he seemed normal enough, but we didn’t have the tools back then that we do now.”
    Grace nodded and said, “I hope he doesn’t hurt us anymore.”
    Andi said, “So do I. Now try to sleep.”
     
    T HEY FELT HIM coming, a sense of impact, a heavy body moving around. Then they heard him on the cellar steps, the footfalls muffled and far away. Grace huddled into her, and Andi felt her mind beginning to slip. No. She had to hold on.
    Then the door opened: the scraping of the slide lock, the screak of the hinge. Grace said, “Don’t let him take me alone, like Genevieve.”
    Mail’s eye appeared at the crack of the door, took them in. Then he closed the door again, and she