“No,” I whispered.
“Good. Then I’ll see you later, my dear Sara.” He bent down and kissed my forehead—and God, my body thrummed another ache as his lips touched my skin—and left the room. I lay on the couch, unable to move, unable to do anything but think about the monster who had captured me and how awfully, terribly much I wanted to feel his touch again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rien
What a wonderful plaything. It was like learning a new instrument when I touched her.
I hummed as I passed through the secret bookcase door, the wall sliding back into place behind me. On the operating room table, Mr. Steadhill was still breathing heavily. I turned on the music, a light classical quartet piece by someone I didn’t know. Baroque, maybe. The strings trilled their melodies in the air.
I snapped on my gloves. Pleasure first, then pain. I enjoyed inflicting pleasure on the girl, but pain was my first love. Now, I picked up an eyedropper of silver nitrate and pulled up a stool next to the operating room table. Mr. Steadhill was asleep, but he would not be asleep for long. Raising the silver nitrate above the bare half of his face, I let the liquid drop onto his exposed tissue.
He woke with a jerk, his body twisting on the table. The screams from behind his gag did not go well with the music, and I frowned, reminding myself to go back to the linen-knotted gag instead of cotton. Drip, drip, drip went the eyedropper.
I remembered when my parents had forced me to learn the cello. All of their friends had children who could play the piano or the violin. My mother didn’t love cello music, but she loved the idea of cello music. And she loved the idea of having a son who could play such an instrument. What a thing to brag about!
At first I’d hated it, but then I started to practice alone in my room. When I took up the cello and set it in front of me, cradled between my knees, I realized that I liked it. I liked the way my fingers curled around the neck. I liked the way I could scrape the bow across the strings. The low notes would vibrate the wood so that my whole body trembled along with it. The notes would run through me like waves of water.
Once my mother realized I loved the cello, she sold it and bought a grand piano instead. I never played another note.
Drip, drip, drip. The silver nitrate would cauterize the facial wounds that were already becoming infected. Although my operating room was sterile, the air was not. I thought back to my medical school lessons. One of the first scientific experiments to prove that infections could move through air was by deliberately infecting patients. It was something that my professors had called inhumane. Back then, doctors would put an infected patient next to an uninfected one. The only thing between them was a gauze membrane. They did not touch, but the infection would spread from one patient to another. Then they knew that the disease passed through air as easily as through bodily contact.
Was that inhumane? The knowledge of these diseases must have saved thousands of lives afterwards. I couldn’t judge these early doctors for their actions. They thought that what they were doing was for the best.
“What I am doing is for the best,” I said, dripping the silver nitrate onto Mr. Steadhill’s face. He screamed and screamed and did not understand. His muscles twitched under the drips of the concentrated liquid. His eye was glazed over, reddened. I would have sprayed it with saline, but he really didn’t need his sight in both eyes. Instead, I dripped silver nitrate onto the eye.
Oh, how he howled! It was a glorious sound, even muffled.
“Now you’ll live for longer,” I said, patting Mr. Steadhill on the shoulder. “I know that might not be what you want, but it’s for the best.”
The music played on and I cleaned up, putting back the silver nitrate and storing the extra operating table off to the side. I did not think Sara would need to come back into this room. I would keep her in the library.
Yes, that would work. I whistled as I washed my hands in the sink, happy to have part of the plan figured out. Mr. Steadhill would die soon; I would keep him around for another couple of days. I had an idea of how to use him, but the idea wasn’t completely clear in my mind. Still, I was happy to have him around to play with, especially since I didn’t have any other clients this week. Perhaps he would offer to pay me for his release.
And Sara. Sara. She was a new instrument to learn. I understood only a tiny sliver of her so far, but I was certain I would know more. I would get better. She was unfamiliar to me now, but I would uncover the desires that ran through her, all of the nuances of what she wanted from my fingers and lips. She was new, and innocent, and although I did not know if she would stay, for now I would keep her and discover more about her. Soon, I would tease out all of her secrets.