The Unquiet

When he was steps from his house he paused. He knelt and ran his fingers across the gravel, tracing some half-seen indentation, then rose and followed the wall of the house to the garden at the rear, the fingers of his left hand gently brushing the woodwork, the cigarette now discarded among the weeds. He reached the back door and examined the lock, then took a set of keys from his pocket and used one of them to open it.

He moved through the house, his fingers always searching, touching, exploring, his head slightly raised as he sniffed the air. He opened the empty refrigerator, fa

One of them had waited there. One waited, while two descended.

But one of those who had descended…

At last, he moved toward the great closet in the corner. He turned the key in the lock and opened the doors. His eyes took in his collection, ensuring that nothing was missing, that no item had been displaced. The collection was safe. He would have to move it now, of course, but it would not be the first time that part of his trove had been uncovered in such a way. It was a minor inconvenience and nothing more.

The face of the ruined mirror found him, and he stared at his partial reflection for a moment, only his hair and the edges of his temples visible in what remained of the glass, his own features replaced by bare wood and fused glass. His fingers lingered on the key, caressing it, feeling the vibrations that coursed through it from deep, deep below. He drew in a final breath, as at last he recognized the third scent.

And the Collector smiled.

Chapter XXII

I awoke. It was dark and the house was silent, but it was not an empty darkness, and it was not an easy silence. Something had touched my right hand. I tried to move it, but my wrist shifted only an inch or two before it was brought up short.

I opened my eyes. My right hand was cuffed to the frame of the bed. Frank Merrick was sitting on a straight-backed chair that he had placed by my bedside, his body leaning slightly forward, his gloved hands between his knees. He was wearing a blue polyester shirt that was too tight for him, causing the buttons to strain like the fastenings on an overstuffed couch. A small leather satchel lay between his feet, its straps untied. I had left my drapes open, and the descending moonlight shone upon his eyes, turning them to mirrors in the gloom. Immediately I looked for the gun on my nightstand, but it was gone.

“I got your piece,” he said. He reached behind his back and removed the Smith 10 from his belt, weighing it in his hand as he watched me. “It’s quite a piece of weaponry. A man’s got to be serious about killing to carry a gun like this. This ain’t no lady’s gun, uh-uh.”

He shifted it in his hand, folding his fingers around the grip and raising it so that the muzzle was pointing straight at me.

“Are you a killer, is that what you are? Because if you think so, then I got bad news for you. Your killing days are almost done.”

He stood quickly and pressed the muzzle hard against my forehead. His finger lightly tapped the trigger. Instinctively, I closed my eyes.

“Don’t do this,” I said. I tried to keep my voice calm. I did not want to sound as if I was pleading for my life. There were men in Merrick ’s line of work who lived for that moment: the catch in their victim’s voice, the acknowledgment that dying was no longer an abstract future concept, that mortality had been given form and purpose. In that instant, the pressure of the finger on the trigger would increase and the hammer would fall, the blade would begin its linear work, the rope would tighten around the neck, and all things would cease to be. So I tried to keep the fear at bay, even as the words scraped like sandpaper in my throat, and my tongue caught against my teeth, one part of me trying desperately to find a way out of a situation that was now far beyond its control while another focused only on the pressure against my forehead, knowing that it presaged a greater pressure to come as the bullet tore through skin and bone and gray matter, and then all pain would be gone in the blink of an eye, and I would be transformed.

The pressure against my forehead eased as Merrick removed the muzzle from my skin. When I opened my eyes again, sweat dripped into them. Somehow, I found enough moisture in my mouth to enable me to speak once more.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

“Through the front door, same as any normal person.”

“The house is alarmed.”

“Is it?” He sounded surprised. “Guess you might need to get that looked at.”

His left hand reached into the bag by his feet. He took out another set of cuffs and threw them at me. They landed on my chest.

“Slip one of them bracelets around your left wrist, then raise your left hand against the far bedpost. Do it slowly, now. I didn’t have time to test the pull on this beauty, not with you waking up so suddenly and all, and I don’t rightly know how much of a tap it might take to set her off. Bullet from a gun like this would make a real mess, even if I aimed it right and it killed you straight off. But if you was to panic me, well, there’s no telling where it might end up. I knew a man once who got caught by a slug from a.22 in the brainpan, right here.” He tapped the frontal lobe above his right eye. “I got to admit, I don’t know what it did in there. I figure it must have rattled around some. Them little sons-of-bitches will do that. Didn’t kill him though. Left him speechless, paralyzed. Hell, he couldn’t even blink. They had to pay someone to put drops in his eyes so they wouldn’t dry up.”

He stared at me for a moment or two, as though I had already become such a man.

“Eventually,” he continued, “I went back, and I finished the job. I took pity on him, because it wasn’t right to leave him that way. I looked into them unblinking eyes, and I swear that something of what he was had stayed alive in there. It was trapped by what I’d made him, but I released it. I set it free. I guess that would count as a mercy, right? I can’t promise that I’d do the same for you, so you be real careful putting them cuffs on.”

I did as he had told me, leaning awkwardly across the bed so that my trapped right hand could close the cuff around my left wrist. Then I placed my left hand against the far bedpost. Merrick walked around the bed, the gun never wavering from me, his finger poised over the trigger. The sheet beneath my back was now drenched with perspiration. Carefully, using only his left hand, he secured the cuff, leaving me lying in a cruciform position. He moved in closer.

“You look scared, mister,” he whispered into my ear. His left hand brushed the hair from my brow. “You’re sweating like meat on a grill.”

I jerked my head away. Gun or no gun, I didn’t want him touching me like that. He gri

“You can breathe easy for now. You answer me right, and you may live to see another sunrise. I don’t hurt anything, man or beast, that I don’t have to hurt.”

“I don’t believe that.”

His body tensed, as though, somewhere, an unseen puppeteer had suddenly given his strings a gentle tweak. Then he pulled the sheets away from my body, leaving me naked before him.