One Door From Heaven

immovable and tape open her eyes.
        Preston could risk a few minutes, only a very few, to torment the girl. Then he would leave her bound and would set fire to the maze as he backed out of the hub where she would be left to die with the TV off. No episode of Touched by an Angel to buck her up in her last minutes.
        As he left, he would tell her how her brother suffered. He'd ask her where her loving God was now when she needed Him, ask her whether God was maybe off playing golf with angels or taking a
        snooze. Leave her to the smoke and the flames. Leave her screaming with no one to hear but cigar-store Indians.
        Over the years, assisting unto death many who were suicidal and some who were not, he had discovered first that a brute in him took pleasure in extreme violence, and second that killing the young was more thrilling than dispatching the old. Nursing homes were drab playgrounds compared to nurseries. He didn't know why this should be so; he only knew that it was true. True for him, and thus as true as anything could be. Objective truths don't exist, after all, only personal ones. As most ethicists agree, no philosophy is superior to that of any other. Morality is not simply relative. Morality doesn't exist. Experience is relative, and you cannot judge the choice of experiences that others undertake if you have chosen a different path through life. You approve my pleasure in killing the young, and I'll politely grant you the validity of your peculiar passion for bowling.
        He would not have the private hours with the Hand that he had so long anticipated, which was a grievous disappointment, although a disappointment that he could bear in light of the Hole's pregnancy and considering the likelihood that she was carrying two, three, or even additional brats more twisted than the Hand and the Gimp, all needing more from the world than they could ever hope to give back. For the coming year, his work had been secured, his entertainment brilliantly arranged; and bliss would be his.
        The Hand blinked blearily, regaining consciousness. While the girl remained groggy and disoriented, Preston steeled himself for the unpleasant task of carrying her to the hub of the living-room maze. He touched the runt, shuddered, plucked her off the floor, and bore her into the labyrinth, through the lobes and the binding corpus callosum of the Teelroy family's group brain as modeled here in trash and mold and mouse droppings.
        Where the TV stood and the armchair waited, the floor appeared to have been the site of a voodoo ceremony: bird bones scattered in what might have been a meaningful pattern before it had been kicked apart; distributions of human hair; fingernail and toenail clippings cast like bridal rice over all else.
        The Slut Queen was gone.
        Tied securely, left unconscious, alone for only the twenty minutes-twenty minutes-that Preston required to drive into Nun’s Lake and return with the Hand, this vodka-sucking wad of human debris had nevertheless managed to screw things up. But then screwing things up was the only talent her useless kind possessed.
        She couldn't have gone far. Her car still stood in the driveway, and the keys jingled softly in Preston's pocket. She probably lay nearby in the maze, still bound and unable to move fast.
        He deposited the Hand in the armchair. Cringing with disgust, he uncoupled her brace and stripped it off her leg. If she regained her wits before he returned, she wouldn't be able to move any faster than the Slut Queen.
        Preston took the brace away with him. It made a good club.
        AN INDIAN in a red-and-white headdress, standing proud between towering stacks of The Saturday Evening Post, offered no cigars, but brandished a tomahawk.
        Clutching at the Indian, Micky pulled herself to her feet. Her ankles were so tightly bound, with less than two inches of play in the cord between them, that she could shuffle each foot no more than a fraction of an inch at a time. But she didn't have far to go.
        Directly across the passageway from the chief, a bay in the maze wall featured a two-foot-diameter round table on which stood a lamp with a bell-shaped yellow glass shade. An ornate bronze finial in the form of a smiling cherub's head fixed the shade to the lamp rod. Being not merely shackled and fettered, but also hogtied, Micky initially intended to set the lamp carefully on the floor,