The Face

because he knew what was coming.
        Corky pulled the sheet and blanket to the bottom of the bed and liberally sprayed his skeletal captive from head to foot. This was a quick and effective method of reducing the malodor to an acceptable level for the duration of their nightly chat.
        Beside the bed stood a bar stool with a comfortably padded seat and back. Corky settled upon this perch.
        A tall plant stand, crafted from oak and serving as a table, stood beside the stool. After taking a sip of his martini, Corky put it down on the plant stand.
        He studied Stinky for a while, saying nothing.
        Of course, Stinky didn’t speak because he had learned the hard way that it was not his place to initiate conversations.
        Furthermore, his once robust voice had deteriorated until it was weaker than that of any terminal tuberculosis patient, marked by an eerie rasp and rattle: a voice like wind-driven sand scouring across ancient stone, like the brittle whispery click of scuttling scarabs. The sound of his voice scared Stinky these days, and speaking had become painful; evening by evening he said less.
        In the early days, to prevent him from crying out loud enough to make the neighbors curious, his mouth had been taped shut. Tape was no longer necessary, for he could not project a worrisome volume of sound.
        Initially, although maintained in a state of semiparalysis with drugs, Stinky had been chained to the bed. With the severe withering of his body, with the total collapse of his physical strength, the chains had become superfluous.
        In Corky’s absence, the captive’s glucose drip always included drugs to keep him docile, as insurance against an unlikely escape.
        [297] Evenings, he was allowed a clear mind. For their sessions.
        Now his fright-stricken eyes alternately avoided Corky and were drawn to him by magnetic dread. He lay in terror of what was to come.
        Corky had never struck this man, had never employed physical torture. He never would.
        With words and words alone he had broken his captive’s heart, had shattered his hope, had crushed his sense of self-worth. With words he would break his mind, as well, if in fact Stinky was not already insane.
        Stinky’s real name was Maxwell Dalton. He had been a professor of English at the same university where Corky still enjoyed tenure.
        Corky taught literature from a deconstructionist perspective, instilling in students the belief that language can never describe reality because words only refer to other words, not to anything real. He taught them that whether a piece of writing is a novel or a law, each person is the sole arbiter of what that writing says and what it means, that all truth is relative, that all moral principles are fraudulent interpretations of religious and philosophical texts that actually have no meaning other than what each person wants them to mean. These were deliciously destructive ideas, and Corky took great pride in his work as a teacher.
        Professor Maxwell Dalton was a traditionalist. He believed in language, meaning, purpose, and principle.
        For decades, Corky’s like-minded colleagues had controlled the English Department. In the past few years, Dalton had attempted to mount a revolt against meaninglessness.
        He was a nuisance, a pest, a threat to the triumph of chaos. He admired the work of Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot and Mark Twain. He was an unspeakably vile man.
        Thanks to Rolf Reynerd, Dalton had been imprisoned in this bedroom for more than twelve weeks.
        When Corky and Reynerd had sworn that together they would [298] make a statement to the world by making a well-planned assault on Charming Manheim’s tightly guarded estate, they had also agreed that to prove the seriousness of their pledge, each would first commit a capital crime on behalf of the other. Corky would murder Reynerd’s mother; in return, the actor would kidnap Dalton and deliver him to Corky.
        Keeping in mind how his intention to smother his own mother with a minimum of mess had so easily degenerated into a frenzied clubbing with a fireplace poker, Corky had obtained an untraceable handgun with which to despatch Mina Reynerd quickly, professionally, with a shot through the heart to ensure that there would be little blood.
        Unfortunately, at that time, he’d not been expert in the use of firearms. His first