The Midnight Dancers: A Fairy Tale Retold (35 page)

“You’re not doing it right,” Craig complained, lurching to his feet. “He’s not squealing. Come on, break his collarbone! He won’t need it!”

Paul disregarded the words and held on. 

“He’s just being obstinate,” Michael said. He held the bone ten seconds longer, and then released it.

“You’re losing your touch,” Craig warned.

Masking his relief, Paul tried not to let himself relax entirely. He wasn’t trained enough to stop from completely feeling the pain, but he had managed to stop himself from responding erratically. Once again, he sent up a grateful request for further endurance.  It was not going to get any easier.

Resolved or not, Rachel floundered about in the woods, trying to find her way up towards the house. The black skirt of her dress caught on the branches, and she wrapped it around her legs, trying to move quickly as well as quietly. But her outfit was scarcely conducive to stalking. 
At least it’s black
, she thought to herself grimly. 

At last, almost miraculously, she stumbled across a path—plank steps leading from the dock to the side of the house.  Her heels made clocking noises on the stone, and they were impractical. She tore them off. In her stocking feet, she crept up to the house, trying to ignore her anxiety. She wasn’t sure what she would find, or exactly what she would do when she found it.

The lights were still on, but the house was silent.

She approached cautiously, tiptoed up to the veranda and stood behind a pillar, looking in the window. There was no sound from inside, and no more music. The smoking ruins of the birthday feast were still on the table, sprayed with extinguishing foam, water dripping from the tablecloth to the carpet. 

After a moment, she stepped inside the house. She opened the door to the basement and listened. There were no sounds but the hum of some appliances. After a moment, she stole downstairs. There was the abandoned pool game, with cues and balls all askew, party napkins and drinks littered around the empty room.

She searched the entire basement, then returned upstairs, opened the door to the kitchen, and tiptoed inside. There were the remains of Prisca’s omelet preparations and a can of beer on the counter, but nothing else. 

Finding a hallway and a staircase, she stole from room to room, opening doors onto empty rooms with increasing bewilderment. There was no sign of life. It was eerie.

It was as though Michael and his cohorts had never existed. As if, with a flick of a magic staff, they had vanished with their captive into the ground, never to be seen again.

Starting to become unnerved, she opened a bedroom sliding door and hurried out onto the small balcony. The breeze whipped her hair as she looked down at the portico where they usually danced. It was deserted. Only the branches of the willow trees swayed over the silent stones. She could see the helicopter gleaming on the heliport. Had they taken him away in a boat? She looked down at the dock, but couldn’t tell if any boats were missing.

She stood on the balcony, searching over the wooded island, thinking. Her gut instinct told her that Michael was still here, though unseen. Perhaps he was watching her from some hidden corner, waiting merely for her to give up before springing his trap. She looked over her shoulder despite herself, and then steeled herself to be rational. Yes, somehow, she knew he was here, but not seeing him made her enemy seem increasingly omnipotent.

Pain and humiliation. Those were their weapons. Weapons to both punish him and shut him up. Weapons to break him, and make him ashamed to go to the police, or to tell anyone about his ordeal.

His obstacle was his helplessness. Tied down and barely able to move, he was relatively unable to resist. But within those boundaries, he had to fight his enemies, with as much persistence as if he were unfettered and armed.

So far, he had managed to remain silent as he sweated and endured, even though he couldn’t keep his expression fixed. Although his concentration was sustained, he was finding it hard to stay still and upright, to keep pressure off his upper body, whose muscles would otherwise start cramping from the extra-tight ropes.

His seven captors were taking turns, trying experiments and debating about what they could do next to break him.  Since pain expands rapidly to fill its temporal space, Paul wasn’t sure after a while if he had been tied there for minutes, an hour, or several hours. 

He had to let that sense of time go, he told himself, licking his dry lips between moments. To hope for a definite ending would only make him desperate.  And desperation was his biggest enemy now. 
Trust. Trust
, he told himself. 
From moment to moment. That’s all I need.

“I almost think he’s enjoying this,” Michael said, casting a sidelong glance at his prisoner.

They had tossed beer bottles at him to see him duck, and doused him with the leftovers of their drinks.  His shoulders were sprinkled with broken glass where one had smashed over his head.  Paul attempted to distract himself by taking an inventory of his wounds. He was bruised, he could tell, but not seriously cut. The beer still dripping down his neck continued to irritate his skin wherever it ran, and the smell mixed with his own sweat was unpleasant.

“He should enjoy his prize even more then,” Craig said, with a sneer. “A free helicopter ride to the deserted field of our choice.”

“Does he get his clothes back?” Dillon queried.

“At this point, no,” Michael said.

“He’s made you really mad, hasn’t he?” Todd said.

“He knows it,” Michael said.  His eyes were fixed on Paul’s face, but Paul was intentionally not meeting his gaze.

“Then the deserted field is going to be at least as far away as Ohio,” Mark said.

“More like Minnesota,” Michael said.

“Too much trouble,” Craig said, flinging a bottle cap. Paul ducked again and it pinged off his neck. “I say if he’s being this obstinate, let’s fly over the Atlantic and see how far he can swim.”

Paul knew they hadn’t meant most of what they said. He recognized that if he had given them what they wanted—groveling and begging for mercy—they would have let him off by now. But the foundation of aikido was treating even adversaries with dignity. He had to extend that respect to himself as well.  Besides, he was stubborn.

Breathing deeply again and making a sudden dodge against the dart of a bottle cap, he steadied himself internally.

“No clown is going to get the better of me,” Michael’s voice said softly.

Rachel retraced her steps downstairs to the ruined buffet, trying hard to think of what could have really happened, shoving aside the bloated image of evil in her mind. Unless Michael Comus were truly a demon, he and his cronies—and Paul—had to be visible and apparent somewhere on this island.

A shudder ran through her, and she suddenly remembered following Michael down that secret stair, to the little hollow with the twisted tree and the heavy sense of squalor….

The cave. Michael’s old hiding place. That’s where they must have taken Paul.

The answer was hardly reassuring. She ran to the veranda and looked out towards her home. She couldn’t see or hear anyone coming. Her sisters must have told Dad by now, but perhaps something had delayed them. There was nothing for it but to go herself.

Turning back into the woods, she raced down the narrow steps back to Alan’s boat, trying to think and plan as she plunged downwards. By the time she reached the boat’s shrouded hiding place, she had the beginnings of a strategy. Michael was not going to win if she could help it.

After devising several inventive but obscene games for their amusements with Paul’s person, Michael and his cronies appeared to give up. They all settled themselves on logs, opened new drinks, and lit up fresh joints, gazing at him with almost professional perplexity.  Paul saw Michael down two more of the pills.

Paul waited wearily, feeling the sweat and beer drip off of him. Flexing his raw wrists against their ropes, he tried to drive down the swelling in his upper arms. And his wound was starting to ache from the sheer exertion.
Center, center,
he told himself.
Still yourself. Trust.

“New game,” Michael said suddenly. “Who has a pen?”

Todd did, and handed it over. Michael twiddled with it, his eyes gleaming. He said, “Each one of us has to come up with a few appropriate words and take turns inscribing them with the pen somewhere on this clown’s skin. Then, we vote on the one we like best, and carve it into his flesh as a permanent reminder of this encounter.”

He pulled out his knife, snapped it open, and thrust its silver point into the log he was sitting on, with another smile at his victim. Paul realized a line had been crossed.

“Oh, fun!” Dillon said, stumbling to his feet. “Give me the pen. I’ve got a good one.”

Paul prepared himself, but winced as the man scrawled an obscene word across his chest with the sharp-tipped permanent-ink pen, driving the point in hard as he wrote. The result was greeted with howls of raucous laughter.

“Oh, gimme that, I’ve got one,” Mark hurried up and took the pen from Dillon.

Mark wrote his message up one of Paul’s arms and down the other one, snickering to himself the whole time. Paul turned his head aside so he wouldn’t have to smell the guy’s alcoholic breath, and attempted to let go of the pain once more. It didn’t help that Mark was standing on his foot. He caught a glimpse of what Mark had written and was repulsed.

“That’s a good one,” Todd said appreciatively.

“F—Fiddlesticks,” Craig lumbered to his feet and snatched the pen from Mark. “You’re too long-winded.”

He squeezed Paul’s cheeks, and, squinting, wrote something across Paul’s forehead, the pen slipping in the sweat.  He wiped off Paul’s forehead and outlined his letters again. It took him several attempts to write the one word. “Oooh!” the party exclaimed.

“We’re running out of room,” Brandon complained, after three other words had been written.

“We can always untie him and turn him around—there’s more room behind,” Craig said, with a snicker.

But no one else came forward. After a moment, the ringleader stood up.

“All right then,” Michael said, pulling the blade from the log and tossing it back and forth in his hands. “We vote.”