Mind Prey

looked at her and scratched his head.
    “Can I see them? I mean, you know, put a stocking over my head or something? I assume they haven’t seen your face or anything.”
    “Gloria, this isn’t about money,” Mail said. “This is about what she did to me in the old days.”
    That stopped her. She said, “Oh.” Then: “What’re you doing to her?”
    Mail thought about it for ten seconds, then said, “Whatever I want.”
    “God,” Gloria said. “That’s so”—she wiggled in the chair—“neat.”
    Mail smiled now and said, “C’mon. I’ll show you.”
     
    O N THE WAY out the back, Gloria said, “You told me you’d stopped thinking about her.”
    “I started again,” Mail said.
    “How come?”
    Mail thought about not answering, but Gloria had been inside with him. As dreary and unlikable as she was, she was one of the few people who really might know how his mind worked, how he felt.
    “A woman started calling me,” he said. “Somebody who doesn’t like Andi Manette. I don’t know who—just that it’s a woman. She said Manette still talks about me, about what I was like. She said Manette said I was interested in her sexually, and that she could feel the sex coming out of me. She must have called fifteen times.”
    “God, that’s a little weird,” Gloria said.
    “Yeah.” Mail scratched his chin, thinking about it. “The really strange thing is, she called me here. She knows who I am, but she won’t tell me who she is. I can’t figure that out. But she doesn’t like Andi, that’s for sure. She kept pushing, and I kept thinking, and pretty soon…you know how it gets. It’s like you can’t get a song out of your head.”
    “Yeah. Like when I was counting to a thousand.” Gloria had once spent a year counting to one thousand, over and over. Then, one day, the counting stopped. She didn’t feel like she’d had much to do with it, either starting or stopping it, but she was grateful for the silence in her brain.
    Mail grinned: “Drives you nuts…”
    On the way down the stairs, into the musty basement, Gloria realized who the woman was—who was calling John Mail. She opened her mouth to tell him, but then decided, Later. That would be something to tease him with, not something simply to blurt out. John had to be controlled, to some extent; you had to fight to maintain your equality.
    “I built a room,” Mail said, gesturing at a steel door in the basement wall. “Used to be a root cellar. Damn near killed me, working in that hole. I’d have to stop every ten minutes and run outside.”
    Gloria nodded: she knew about his claustrophobia. “Open it,” she said.
     
    A NDI AND G RACE had used the snap tab from Grace’s bra to work on the nail in the overhead joist but could work only a half-hour or so before the skin on their fingers grew too painful to continue. They were making progress—a half-inch of the nail was in the clear—but Andi thought it might take another week to extract it.
    She didn’t think they had a week: Mail was becoming more animated, and darker, at the same time. She could feel the devils driving him, she could see them in his eyes. He was losing control.
    “Never get it out,” Grace said. She was standing on the Porta-Potti. “Mom, we’re never gonna get it.” She dropped the snap tab and sat down on the Potti cover and put her face in her hands. She didn’t cry: both of them had gone dry-eyed, as though they’d run out of tears.
    Andi squatted next to her, took her daughter’s hand, and rolled it: the skin where she’d been holding the too-small tab was pinched and scarlet, overlying a deeper, dark-blue bruise. “You’ll have to stop. Don’t do any more until the red goes away.” She looked up at the joist, rubbing her thumb against the shredded skin of her own forefinger. “I’ll try to do a little more.”
    “No good anyway,” Grace said. “He’s too big for us. He’s a monster.”
    “We’ve got to try,” Andi said. “If we can only get a weapon, we can…”
    They heard the thumps of feet overhead. “He’s coming,” Grace said. She shrank back to the mattress, to the corner.
    Andi closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, said, “Remember: no eye contact.”
    She spit into her hand, dabbed a finger into a dusty corner, reached up and rubbed the combination of dirt and saliva on the raw wood where Grace had been digging around the nail. The moisture darkened the wood and made the rawness less noticeable. When she