Relentless

the writer?”
    “Thomas Landulf.”
    “Vaguely familiar. But I’ve never read him.”
    “He published his first novel just fourteen months ago.
The Falconer and the Monk
.” She consulted a notepad. “Waxx called it ‘a triumphant example of idiot logic, an incandescent work of puerile nonsense that will be a shining beacon to perpetual juveniles and the terminally sentimental for generations to come.’”
    “Better syntax than usual,” I said, “but ouch.”
    “I wondered if Landulf wrote anything since, so I googled him.”
    Penny turned, glanced toward Milo at the family-room windows, then rose from her chair and came close to me.
    Lowering her voice, she continued: “Eleven months ago, three months after the publication of his book, Tom Landulf tortured and killed his wife, tortured and killed his three-year-old daughter, and committed suicide.”
    Her piercing blue gaze had never been more compelling, and I was constrained to meet her eyes as long as she required.
    “That’s why the name rang a bell,” I said. “Must have been a two-day sensation on the news, so I heard a little about it.”
    Because I am squeamish, my custom is to avoid watching or reading news about mass murders. More than a custom, it is a rule.
    Penny said, “His wife, Jeanette, loved to play the piano. He cut off her ears. Then her fingers, one at a time.”
    The history of literature is replete with colorful monsters that come from netherworlds and other worlds and laboratories.
    Penny said, “Photos he took while he dismembered her prove she was alive and conscious when he began. When eventually she passed out, it was from blood loss.”
    Vampires, werewolves, zombies, ravenous extraterrestrials, murderous poltergeists, abominations of nature, hideous creatures born of experiments gone wrong: None are real, all are projections, metaphors, an externalization of what lies within us.
    “What he did to Melanie, the three-year-old, was unspeakable. I will never talk to you about it. Never. You’ll have to read it yourself if you want to know. She was alive, too, through most of it.”
    The only monsters in this world are those who pass for human, who cast shadows and are reflected in mirrors, who smile and speak of compassion and shed convincing tears.
    “When the wife and daughter were dead,” Penny continued, “he drenched himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.”
    Eye to eye with her, I could not hear either of us breathing or a single motor in any of the three refrigerators, or a whisper of wind at any window, as if we were not as real as we supposed we were, but existed only on a plasma screen, characters in a film, watched by someone who, on a remote control, pressed the MUTE button.
    Finally, Penny said, “The official conclusion of the police—two homicides and a suicide. What do you think?”
    Because of the extreme sadistic nature of those crimes, I wanted to believe that the authorities had reached the correct conclusion, that Thomas Landulf had killed his wife and child, that the monster who could do such things no longer walked the world.
    Penny’s stare allowed no retreat from the truth.
    “Most likely … not a suicide,” I said. “And not two murders, but three.”
    “Most likely,” she agreed. “And you know what I think? I think before the murders happened, Waxx must have been tormenting Landulf, like he’s done with us.”
    “It’s a good bet.”
    “So when he and his family are killed, why wouldn’t the cops have wondered about Waxx?”
    I reminded her, “Clitherow said funny things happen when you go to the cops about Waxx.”
    “When I first turned up Landulf, I thought
this
is what we go to the cops with. But then I realized …”
    I nodded. “Yeah.”
    “… we really are alone. Who is he that he can’t be touched?”
    “Something as sadistic as the Landulfs … I have to wonder
what
is he?”
    The slaughter of the Landulf family required reconsideration of Waxx and of the threat that he posed to us. By the hour, he appeared less professorial and more predatory, his refinement only a cloak to conceal deformities, his civilized demeanor a mask.

   Lacking an appetite, I nevertheless ate lunch. With the story of the Landulf murders so fresh in my mind, I should have found the food to be without taste, but it was delicious.
    Perhaps even in Hell, the damned experience moments of grace, if only as a reminder that Hell is not the be-all.
    After lunch, pleading