The Poison Artist Read online

  “Hello, Caleb.”

  The whisper across his ear was as light and dusky as a moth’s wing.

  And he was frozen, pinned in place by the needle in her hand. She gently caressed him, her fingers tracing the tendons in his wrist, back and forth in shortening strokes until she found a point of balance midway along his forearm. It was a tender and familiar caress. A lover’s touch.

  She was right behind him.

  He could feel her chest pressing against his back, feel the brush of her hair on his neck. He couldn’t move, and it was more than just the needle or the drugs flowing from it. It was the way she touched him, the way her perfume wrapped him like spider silk enveloping paralyzed prey. The way her heart beat against his back, a calm and steady throb.

  Her breath tickled across his ear again.

  “You asked when you’d see me again,” she said. “And I told you: Sooner than you think. Did I keep my promise?”

  The needle lost its sting. In fact, everything faded to a low murmur. There was just the cold pressure of the syringe’s metal hub against his skin. The rush of fluid running into him. But there wasn’t any pain. She held him up with one arm around his waist and took the bottle of absinthe before it fell from his slack hand.

  “I had such a good time on our last date,” she whispered. “I wanted to see you again, right away.”

  She withdrew the needle.

  He watched as she reached around him, one arm still encircling his waist. She set the syringe on the table in front of him. While still holding him from behind, she leaned up and kissed the puncture hole in the side of his neck. The spot was already going numb, but he felt her lips there. Felt the gentle, cold bite of her teeth.

  When she let go of him, he went face first into the table’s edge, then rolled off that, knocking over two chairs before he hit the floor.

  It was all completely painless, but he could feel a sticky trickle of blood above his left eyebrow.

  Emmeline knelt next to him, her face floating above his. She hooked a lock of her hair behind her ear so that it wasn’t hanging in his eyes. Then she put two of her gloved fingers on his lips, and traced them down his chin to his neck. She held them over his jugular, her eyes closed and her lips moving silently as she counted. He could feel his pulse hammering against her fingertips. She was wearing the same dress she’d worn the first time he’d seen her. The silent-film-star dress, the one with no back to it at all. Her hair was dark and shining, like freshly broken obsidian.

  “Caleb?” Bridget called.

  Emmeline turned and looked over her shoulder, then looked back at Caleb. He had seen her face in the grip of true pleasure, had seen her trembling at the edge of ecstasy. This wasn’t it. She wasn’t enjoying this at all.

  “I’m sorry,” Emmeline whispered. “I’m sorry for this.”

  She stood, and Caleb watched as her shadow crossed toward the living room. He couldn’t turn his head to follow her, couldn’t see her. There was only her shadow, stretching long across the floor. Then that disappeared and there was silence for a moment, until Bridget cried out again.

  “Caleb!”

  The air vibrated with an electric-violet flash, followed an instant later by the crack of a high-voltage discharge.

  Bridget’s scream floated out of the living room, high and sharp.

  He tried to move, but couldn’t. He could only stare at the underside of the table, at the up-ended legs of the chairs.

  And still, there was no pain.

  Twenty-Two

  FIRST, THE SOUNDS came back. Much later, there was light as well.

  The sounds were sharp and close, but the light was diffuse. Diluted by shadows and vague crosshatches, blurred by a prism of fog.

  Directly to his right, he heard the ripping clicks of a heavy zipper. Then small objects tapped one at a time onto a wooden surface. Glass vials, metal instruments. He heard a pair of heels clicking across a hardwood floor, the whisper of silk on smooth skin.

  There were smells, too: a match’s lingering, sulfurous smoke; the probing, cold fingers of rubbing alcohol and liquid iodine. Emmeline’s perfume, as subtle as a hypnotic suggestion.

  The light was just a flicker of low candle flames. He tried to blink, tried to rectify the wet glow clouding his vision. But his eyes would neither blink nor focus.

  There was pressure on the side of his head, then on his forehead. Pushing and tugging. A pair of scissors made a series of snipping clicks over his eyebrow. Then he saw hands lifting a strip of wet gauze from his eyes, and he was looking at the redwood beams crossing his bedroom ceiling. The hands came back into view and lifted his head, placing a rolled towel underneath him. He felt nothing but the pressure of the hands moving his head.

  His neck was a limp stalk.

  But now, with the towel under him, he could see down the length of his body.

  He was lying on his bed, naked. The hand came back, settled on his left cheek, and gently tilted his face to the right. His head swiveled over, like a vase toppling. Something inside his neck made a popping sound, but he didn’t feel it. It was like hearing a twig snap on the other side of a forest clearing.

  Emmeline was sitting on a wooden chair between the bed and the wall. She took her hand from his cheek. There was a black leather satchel on his bedside table, surrounded by votive candles. The bag was open, but he couldn’t see what she’d taken from it.

  “Hello, Caleb,” she said. “Don’t try to move, all right?”

  He tried to work his mouth, but nothing was connected. He couldn’t answer her. He wondered if he’d been paralyzed, if the painless snap in his neck had clipped through all the nerves at the base of his skull. Just severed them, making an island of his brain.

  He could hear his heart running away, could barely get enough air with each breath. She’d given him something more than just vecuronium. He felt the sandy prickle of morphine. What else, he couldn’t even guess.

  “You can’t talk,” she said. “But you don’t need to. I know what you need. And I’m taking care of you. Because I’m your friend, remember?”

  She reached to him, her hand disappearing above his eyes.

  He felt light pressure on his forehead, felt it as she pushed his head into the rolled towel. But he couldn’t tell what she was doing. Maybe she was only petting his hair away from his forehead. Stroking him, comforting him. There was no way for him to be sure.

  “I didn’t mean for you to hit the table that way,” she said. “I should have let you down more gently. But I fixed it. Look.”

  She reached into the leather bag and came out with the mother-of-pearl powdering compact he’d seen in her bathroom. She flipped it open and looked at herself for a moment in the small mirror, using her little finger to dab at the lipstick on the corner of her mouth. Then she turned the mirror to him.

  At first she held it too close, tilted the wrong way.

  He just saw his mouth, slack and open. A trickle of drool ran from the left side of his mouth toward his ear. Emmeline brought the mirror back a few inches and angled it upward, and then he saw his forehead.

  The edge of the table had put an inch-long gash above his eyebrow. She’d sutured the wound with black thread, six stitches. The surgical knots were perfectly spaced along the top edge of the laceration channel. His forehead was swollen and pink, glistening with whatever ointment she’d spread on it. But it wasn’t bleeding.

  She’d fixed it.

  Emmeline snapped the compact mirror closed and put it on the bedside table. She stood and walked to the dresser at the other end of the bedroom, her hips swaying coolly with her footsteps. He could follow her with his eyes, though he couldn’t move his head at all. The bottle of absinthe was on the dresser, along with a glass and pitcher of ice water. She made a drink, taking her time to drip the water over the sugar cube.

  She must have brought her own glasses, her own spoons. She had the correct absinthiana laid out on the dresser—the heavy crystal reservoir glasses and the slotte
d silver spoons. Two of each, but she only made one drink.

  Then she came back and sat next to him, crossed her legs, and perched the drink on her knee. She closed her eyes when she sipped the absinthe. Afterward, when she breathed out, he could smell the wormwood, the sweet anise.

  “When we went to Spondulix, I sang a love song,” she said. “Do you remember? Did you understand that’s what it was—a love song? For you?”

  She looked at him, searching his face for an answer. She took another small sip. Granules of sugar swirled at the bottom of the glass as she tilted it.

  “I needed three drinks to do that,” she said. “It was hard, singing for you. Getting the courage to do it.”

  She put the drink down and looked at her fingernails, then met his eyes again.

  “This is going to be hard too.”

  Caleb watched her lean toward him, watched as she took ahold of his chin with her thumb and forefinger. She tilted his head back to the center, so that he was staring at the ceiling again. Then she kept turning him until he was facing the bedroom’s other wall.

  Bridget was tied to a chair on the left side of the bed.

  Her face was beaten and bruised, her mouth stuffed with a washcloth. Their eyes met. She tried to speak behind her gag, and what came out sounded like his name. Like she was pleading his name. There was pressure on his chin again, and his field of view swiveled up to the ceiling, then down the right-hand wall to Emmeline. She withdrew her hand from his face and picked up the drink.

  “We made promises,” Emmeline whispered. “Promises that meant something. You said you’d never hurt me. But you did.”

  She took a sip.

  “Don’t you think it hurt, what you did tonight? What I saw tonight?”

  She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. In one ear, Caleb could hear Bridget choking out his name, over and over, behind the gag.

  “Don’t you know how alone I was?” Emmeline asked. “How good it felt, to give myself to you? But, Caleb—I’m going to give you another chance. And I’m not going to break my promises. I’m not going to hurt you. I just had to think awhile, had to decide what to do. I had to figure out how to make sure you’d remember. That you can never see her again. Never talk to her again.”

  Emmeline picked up his hand from the mattress and held it in hers. It might as well have been a mannequin’s hand. He felt a tickle of pressure in his elbow, and that was all.

  “And I figured it out.”

  He watched as she kissed each of his fingers and then laid his hand on the mattress alongside his hip. She reached into the bag and brought out a clean white hand towel, which she spread on his chest. Then, from the bedside table, she took a pair of tweezers and a stainless-steel needle driver and laid those on the towel. She reached into the satchel and brought out a small foil-wrapped package, tore it open, and took out a curved needle attached to twelve inches of black suturing thread. Finally, she took a syringe from the table and held it between two fingers, her thumb inside the stainless-steel ring of its plunger.

  “Like I said, this is going to be hard,” she said. “But I promise you, it won’t hurt at all.”

  She took hold of his lower lip with her thumb and forefinger, pulled it out, and slid the hypodermic needle in. She gave the plunger a small push, then withdrew the needle and reinserted it into his upper lip. When she was done, she put the syringe on the towel. She finished her drink and walked slowly back to the dresser to make another one.

  She was killing time, waiting for whatever she’d injected to take effect.

  From the left corner of the room, Caleb could hear Bridget. She wasn’t trying to say his name anymore. She was just crying. Emmeline stood with her back to both of them, dripping the water over the sugar cube. Because her dress had no back, her pale skin was visible from her neck to the smooth, inward curve of her lumbar vertebrae. There were scratch marks underneath both her shoulder blades. He must have done that himself, without meaning to. Must have been clinging to her the second time they made love. Pulling himself up to kiss her breasts and her neck.

  Emmeline spoke to Caleb without turning.

  “She’ll be all right. When I’m finished with you, I’m going to take care of her, too.”

  Bridget went on crying.

  When she sat down again, she had the drink in one hand and a washcloth in the other. She dabbed the side of his mouth with the cloth, then folded it under his chin. She took a sip of the absinthe but didn’t swallow it. Instead, she slid off the edge of the chair and knelt on the floor next to him. She leaned over him and kissed him, letting the cold absinthe move from her mouth into his. She had her hand on his cheek and she kept her lips over his until the absinthe went down his throat.

  She pulled away until her nose was an inch from his.

  “You were looking at my back,” she said. “You gave me those scratches. But I didn’t mind. That didn’t hurt me. You can do it again sometime, if you want. Whenever you want.”

  She leaned in and kissed him again.

  Then she got back into the chair and used her fingertips to straighten her dress over her knees. She took the needle driver from the towel on his chest, and used its plierlike grips to clamp onto the middle of the curved suturing needle. She picked up the tweezers in her other hand, gave him half a smile, and then used the tweezers to pull out his upper lip.

  “So you remember,” she said.

  With a slow twist of her wrist, she brought the suturing needle through the middle of his lip.

  “Never talk to her again.”

  The driver’s locking mechanism made a sharp click when she released the needle, then clicked again when she grabbed its tip from the inside of his upper lip. There was no pain, but he felt a tug as she pulled the needle through. Bridget was so silent that he could hear the whisper of the thread as Emmeline drew it through him. She held his bottom lip with the tweezers, twisted her wrist again, and then he was watching as she pulled the needle out and brought the thread up. She let the needle dangle as she threw two loops of thread around the driver. Then she used its plier jaws to grasp the thread’s free end, which she pulled through the loops, tugging until the first half of the knot was tight. She threw another loop to complete the knot, cinched it, and used a small set of scissors to cut the thread.

  She sat back.

  “That’s the first one,” she said. “Eight to go. And then we’ll talk about your eyes. So you remember never to look at her again.”

  When she was done with his mouth, she picked up the powdering compact, flipped its mirror open, and held it for him. His mouth was outlined with blood. Already, his lips were swelling and puckering around the needle holes. Emmeline snapped the mirror shut, tossed it into her leather satchel. She sipped her drink, then picked up the syringe.

  “We won’t need the mirror again. Because you won’t be able to see. But I swear, Caleb,” she whispered. “This won’t hurt.”

  She started with his left eye.

  And she was right: a few minutes later, when she pulled out his upper eyelid with the tweezers, twisted the suturing needle through it, and sewed his eye shut, it didn’t hurt at all.

  He was in the dark now, but Emmeline was still with him. Just holding his hand. He couldn’t feel her fingers laced with his, couldn’t tell whether her hand was cold or warm, but he could feel the pressure as she massaged his palm.

  Then she was whispering to him, her breath in his right ear.

  “I’ll take care of Bridget. But first you get to have this . . .”

  There was pressure on his neck, something expanding underneath his skin.

  “It’ll take about a minute. You’ll sleep. And that way, you won’t have to hear. I don’t want you to know. It’ll be better if you don’t.”

  He finally tore through.

  The bed was gone. The floor under it had just been an illusion, fooling him all these years with feigned solidity. He’d slipped right through it, had found the void he’d always feared. The
true foundation of his house was just a vacuum.

  Twenty-Three

  CALEB WAS RUNNING.

  Tripping over the curb and falling to the wet pavement, getting to his feet and stumbling on. He hit the retaining wall on the opposite side of the street, scraped along it, skinning his shoulder, opening new cuts on his palms. The scream trapped behind his lips was a wet, gurgling hum. He kept running. His shins slammed into the bumper of a parked car and he went sprawling across its hood, knocking his head on the windshield.

  The car’s alarm went off.

  He slid off the hood and fell into a fetal ball on the asphalt. The alarm went through its full cycle, so deafening that it covered the pain, overwhelmed it. He lay on the ground and screamed.

  Then, with two final beeps, the alarm shut off. There were footsteps, someone running on cement in hard-soled shoes. He curled himself tighter, his hands around his shins. Another group of people came at a run from a different direction.

  There was a moment’s silence, broken finally by a woman’s high, wavering scream.

  “It’s Caleb Maddox, I think, he’s—”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “—call them yet? Did somebody call—”

  “—his eyes, oh shit, Terry, look at his eyes—”

  “Don’t touch him. Stay back from him. They’re coming.”

  They cut the stitches from his lips in the back of the ambulance, and someone turned his head to the side and let him vomit out the blood and bile he’d swallowed. He felt the thick gouts of it coming out, felt the cold metal bowl pressed against his cheek. They held him down and let him scream, held him tight to the padded stretcher and listened to the incoherent torrent spilling from him.

  “Emmeline—it was Emmeline. And she’s got Bridget. You have to look for her. The police—Kennon. I couldn’t find her—tried—but I can’t see.”

  “Sir—”

  “I can’t see!”

  And then he was just screaming again, and the paramedics were wrestling his arm down, strapping him in place, jabbing him with something. He screamed all the way down the hill, and was thrashing against the restraints when the ambulance pulled to a stop outside the emergency room. He was bucking and writhing while they wheeled him inside. Yelling for Bridget, for Kennon.