Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

And for once the old asshole got stoned himself and talked too much. One time when I wasn’t there to look out for him. How many other people were there, besides you four that I’ve got?”

      Judy paused. Thought, hoped, prayed. “No one.”

      “You know what I think? I think you’re lying to me again.”

      “No. No I’m not. No.”

      Gliddon sighed faintly. Basically he believed Judy. Hurting girls was something that he enjoyed very much, but right now he had one more person to talk to. First, though, he meant to take a short break and grab something to eat.

* * *

      For Pat, being left alone with his imagination under present circumstances was almost as bad as being worked over. Almost. He had been worked over seriously a time or two in his life, and he understood how lucky he had been to survive those occasions without permanent damage. He feared that this time he was not going to survive at all. When the man called Ike had taken him out of his cell, Pat had feared that he was going to be killed at once. Then when that hadn’t happened, he considered trying to seduce Ike. But in Pat’s experience in rough situations such efforts only tended to make things worse.

      Back in his cell, crouched shivering again in his adobe corner, he could imagine the worst of everything that was going to happen to him. He almost welcomed the shivering that shook him and made his teeth chatter. Maybe if he was lucky he would freeze to death before Gliddon got around to him again.

      To Pat it seemed now that he had always known that he was going to end something like this. There had never been any use in hoping for some other outcome. Life as he had known it had been basically like this all along. A few bright intervals here and there. But he seemed to have spent an awfully high percentage of his lifetime alone in the dark.

      But this time he wasn’t left alone in the dark for long.

      After the glare of first Gliddon’s lantern and then Ike’s, it was hard to see anything in the dim cell. But as soon as Pat’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom again he could see, or thought he could see, someone standing just inside his door.

      He could have sworn the door hadn’t been opened again, but … and then he saw that it was Helen. Her hands were free, and she was looking at Pat gleefully, like some small girl triumphant in a game of hide and seek. Pat knew a relief so great that it made him feel for a moment as if he were going to faint.

      Helen put a finger to her lips—as if Pat might need any warning to keep silent. Then with an impish smile she stepped close to him and squatted down. “I fooled them,” she whispered. “They thought I was sad because I was crying.”

      Pat wanted her to get to work at once on his bound hands. But she just squatted there. She added: “They’re going to be mad—I already set Bill loose.” She continued to look at Pat fondly, as Annie had used to do sometimes. But Helen was doing nothing helpful.

      “Helen,” Pat pleaded at last, in quiet desperation. “Help me get loose.”

      “In a little while. I want to kiss you, first.”

      “Not now, not—”

      She was leaning toward him, and now her lips stopped his. Her lips—Helen’s lips?—felt cool. In another moment Pat had recognized their touch, even before they left his mouth and moved down toward his throat.

      “Annie.” His own whisper was still very soft. But it carried the astonishment of a shout.

      “Hush, lover, hush,” the girl murmured against Pat’s neck. Her brown hair brushed his face. Only Annie had ever really bitten him in making love. And now he felt her teeth again.

      It wasn’t pain. But as he had known it with Annie a dozen times before, it had the intensity of great pain. Never, with anyone else, anything like this … it went beyond, unimaginably beyond, anything that he had known of sex.

      Pat moaned. He couldn’t help it if the sound was loud. He forgot his bound hands and even the threat of death. He couldn’t tell how long it went on. He never could. He knew only that at last it ended, and that the moment Annie took her mouth from his throat and let him go the shivering came back, even stronger than before. Pat felt he wasn’t going to be able to go on living in this condition. Something was going to have to happen soon to end it, one way or another. He felt so weak now that he wondered if he was dying. But the idea conveyed no fear.

      He was miserable, colder than ever, very weak, but no longer afraid as he slumped back again in the angle of the wall. The adobe behind his back felt soft and crumbly. “Annie, don’t leave me.” As long as she stayed with him, he wasn’t even going to worry about how she had managed for a time to look so much like Helen.

      “You can call me Annie,” her soft voice answered. “For you to is all right.” She was standing up straight again, in the middle of the little cell, and despite the darkness Pat could see her a little better than before. “Poor Pat. You don’t look good. But it’s going to be all right, Annie knows what to do for you.”

      “Annie.”

      “Or you could call me Helen. I was Helen once before … a long time ago.”

      With crossed arms she grasped her loose pullover shirt at the waist. In a quick motion she slid it up and off over her head. Her upper body, completely uncovered, was slender and pale in the darkness.

      “Annie … help me … get me out of here.”

      “Don’t faint now, Pat. Don’t, my lover. Here.” And what the pale girl in the darkness was doing now seemed very strange; even Annie