Mind Prey

road, and a two-horse stable out back. When his children had grown, he’d moved to Florida. The next owner converted the stable to a garage, got lonely in the country winter, and moved back to the city. The next owner was Mail.
    By the time Mail took the place, the old house was a ruin, a shack. A caved-in chicken coop squatted behind the shack, with the remains of what might have been a machine shed, now reduced to a pile of rotting boards. A still-recognizable two-seater outhouse was out to one side, nearly buried in the corn. Farther to the back was the foundation of a barn.
    If the farmhouse was a ruin, the basement and root cellar were solid. Mail had run a new electrical cable out to the place from his own house, a job that had taken him two hours.
    He had worried, for a while, about keeping the women in the house. A trespassing antique hunter might accidentally stumble over them. Antique hunters were everywhere, stripping old farmhouses of their antique brass doorknobs and doorstops and forced-air register fittings, old pickle crocks—those were getting hard to find—and even nails, if they were hand-forged and in good shape.
    But antique scavengers were a nervous lot. Judges treated them like burglars, which is what they were, so Mail had put in two Radio Shack battery-operated motion alarms and felt fairly safe. Any antique hunter tripping an alarm would be out of the house in an instant; and if it was anybody else, the cops, for instance, the jig would be up anyway.
    The only other danger was Hecht, the neighboring farmer. Hecht was a phlegmatic German, a member of some weird religious sect. He had no television, there was no newspaper box on his mailbox post. He had never shown much interest in anything beyond his tractor and his land. Mail had never seen him near the old house, except at planting and harvest time, when he was working in the adjacent fields. By then, the women would be long gone.
    Mail walked in the thin oval of illumination from the flashlight, smelling the corn and the dust; and when he crossed the crest of the hill and turned the light toward it, the old farmhouse came up like a witch-house in a Gothic novel, glowing with a faint, ghostly luminescence often found in old clapboard houses that had once been painted white.
    As Mail passed the porch, on the way around back, a nervous chill trickled down his spine: a finger of graveyard fear as he passed the cistern. Scratching sounds? No.
    He clumped inside.
     
    G RACE HEARD HIM coming and pushed herself against the wall. She wasn’t sure that her mother had heard: Andi had been lying on the mattress for hours, one arm crooked over her eyes, not asleep, but not conscious. She had drifted away again, after the last attack. Grace had tried to rouse her, but Andi wouldn’t respond.
    Grace had decided to go after Mail.
    Mail had attacked her mother four times now, battering her each time, raping her after the beating. She could hear the crack of his hand through the steel door, and thinner, weaker sounds that must have been her mother’s voice, pleading. He slapped, Andi had told her. Hit her with an open hand, but it was like being hit with a board. This last time, something had broken, and Andi was out of it, Grace thought.
    She’d have to go after Mail, even if she had nothing but her fingernails. He was killing her mother, and when he’d done it, she’d go too.
    “No.” Andi pushed herself up. Blood ringed her nostrils, a dark reddish-black crust. Her eyes were like holes, her lips swollen. But she’d heard the footsteps, and roused herself, half-turning to croak the single warning word.
    “I have to do something,” Grace whispered. He was coming.
    “No.” Andi shook her head. “I don’t think…I don’t think he’ll do anything when I’m like this.”
    “He’s killing you. I thought you were dying already,” Grace whispered. She was crouched on the back corner of the mattress, like a cowering dog at the pound, Andi thought. The girl’s eyes were too bright, her lips pale, her skin stretched thin like tracing paper.
    “He might be, but we can’t fight him yet. He’s too big. We need…something.” She pushed herself up, feeling the impact of Mail’s footsteps on the stairs. “We need something we can kill him with.”
    “What?” Grace looked wildly around the cell. There was nothing.
    “We have to think…but I can’t think. I can’t think.” Andi put her hands to her head, at the temples, as though