The Binding (8 page)

Prescott reached up and turned a key, then snapped a sliding lock across with a sound that exploded like a rifle shot in the passageway. Then another.

“Mr. Prescott, you can’t lock your daughter up.”

“Nobody is locked in here.”

“Then . . .”

“These are to keep things
out
. Protection from outside is what
is needed here. Becca is free to go wherever and whenever she wants. She only has to knock.”

Prescott now seemed to have come fully awake. Genuine emotion worked in the old man’s face. Nat remembered that he was here to treat his daughter for a nasty little mental quirk and decided to cut the guy a break.

“Okay, then. But I have to ask her about all this.”

Prescott stood back.

“You do remember coming by last night, don’t you? I wasn’t dreaming?”

Prescott laughed thinly, but his eyes were uncertain. “What are you talking about?”

Nat stared at him. “When you came to the door, you didn’t seem to recognize me.”

Prescott’s eyes went dead. “Of course I did,” he said. “
My
mental faculties aren’t in question here.”

Nat studied him, then said: “I’ll talk to you after I’ve had a chance to meet Becca. You’ll be here, right?”

Prescott stared, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “Where else would I go, Doctor? Where else would I go?”

Prescott suddenly walked away and was swallowed up by the gloom, with only the sound of his shuffling feet coming back to Nat as he traversed the hallway.

Nat reached for the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open and entered Becca’s room.

CHAPTER NINE

N
at found himself in the typical room of a certain kind of teenage girl. More precisely, the kind who loves books. Rows of them were lined up in a white five-shelf bookcase to Nat’s right, and more were packed onto shelving that lined walls covered in light green wallpaper. There were no posters of movies or bands or anything like that, but there on the pale cream-colored wall opposite him was a painting that might have done by a nineteen-year-old girl: a landscape with dark jagged mountain ranges and what appeared to be a man walking along a fringe of forest and entering the tree line at the bottom of the hills. There were two sconces on the wall, throwing light out into the small room, and two amber-colored candles on the windowsill, unlit. There was an old quilt on the wrought-iron bed and many pillows. Two stuffed animals—a zebra and a bear—looked down at the pillows from the window shelf. If Becca opened the window regularly, the bear and the zebra would have been moved somewhere else. So, like the curtains, the window remained closed.

The room smelled sweet, as though she’d sprayed rose water into the air sometime before he’d opened the door.

Becca was sitting at a small antique desk, the right side of her face in half profile. She didn’t move, only stared ahead at the book she was reading.

“Becca?” Nat said.

She turned slightly in the chair to look at him. Her eyes were widely spaced, brown, and fixed on Nat with a kind of repressed
urgency. Her nose was slightly flat and dented in the middle—like a young Ellen Barkin, Nat thought—her skin pale and her face oval-shaped. Becca was attractive, even if she was almost severe-looking, especially with her brown hair pulled back. She was wearing a white turtleneck and a pearl gray skirt that reached to the knees. She appeared . . . oddly composed, Nat thought. Not what he’d expected.

“Yes?” she said.

Nat breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t display the usual psychotic or schizophrenic affect, or appear to be entranced or possessed or zombified either. She was a nineteen-year-old girl whose brothers had committed suicide and whose father had lost himself in grief.

Nat Thayer’s insta-diagnosis? A girl raised under sad circumstances.

“I’m Dr. Thayer. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Her eyes seemed to blaze up for a few seconds, then calmly searched his face. She got up and moved to the bed, leaving the desk chair for Nat.

“Thank you,” he said, sitting down. “I’m not sure if your father—”

She shook her head.

“He didn’t mention I was coming?”

“No,” Becca said. “I mean, he’s not my father.”

She said this with an unforced conviction, as if she were stating something so obvious that it almost didn’t warrant mentioning.

“Okay, we can talk about that later,” said Nat. “I came by to see how you were doing. I talk with a lot of people, and I’m able to help some of them.”

She didn’t ask,
Help with what?
—she just watched him. Her hands were pressed together and placed on her lap.

“So,” Nat said, smiling. “How
are
things with you?”

Her gaze was steady and deep. “What do you mean?”

“How are things going? Do you feel happy with . . .” Nat spread his hands and looked around. “Your situation.”

“How can I be happy?”

Nat frowned. “Well, we’re happy when we feel that we’re enjoying life, I guess.”

“But that’s just it,” she said, and her pained smile said,
You’ve blundered right into it.

“Just what?”

“That’s the problem.”

“Let’s talk about that.”

Her eyebrows arched, as if she was going to mention something a bit sad, though she didn’t mean for it to be that way.

“I can’t enjoy life,” she said quietly, “because I’m dead. I died three weeks ago.”

Nat felt a chill go through him at the matter-of-factness in her voice. Behind it, he heard the hum in his ears, the echoing low buzz of dark electricity in the house. But what frightened him was the look in Becca’s eyes. A look of serenity.

“Why do you say that?”

“That I died?”

“Ye-es.”

She brought her right hand up and smothered a laugh. Nat saw that the nails were bitten to the quick, and the pinkie finger was painted with a black cross.

Why are you horrified by this?
her expression seemed to say.

Nat had come expecting a clinically depressed teenager. But there was something about Becca’s confidence that unnerved him more than he could describe. For a second he believed her, and felt a little lunatic laugh run up his own throat.
She thinks she’s met death and it’s nothing to be afraid of
, he thought, before getting control of himself.

“That’s a very serious thing, Becca. Death. Not something people usually find amusing.”

“
Isn’t
it, Dr. Thayer?”

Nat frowned and looked away. “I suppose it can be. I suppose it’s even good to laugh at death. But in this—”

“Ah!” Becca said. “I see. Because my brothers died, I should be more respectful when talking about it.”

“I’m not telling you how to feel, Becca.”

Her eyes were mischievous. “Thank you, Doctor. But, you know, they weren’t my brothers.”

Now her eyes grew serious.

“If only they
were
my brothers. I would’ve loved them. I’ve dreamt about having brothers, to throw me in piles of leaves out on the lawn”—she pointed at the closed curtains—“and to go Christmas caroling with. To defend me.”

There were tears in her eyes now, and her voice had a slight warble of hysteria in it. Nat watched her, unable to get a word out.

“But I never had one.”

Something about Becca’s maturity made Nat trust he didn’t have to play games with her. And the fact that he was seeing her furtively—outside of his office, after the doom-laden visit from her father—tempted him to be unorthodox. It had always been a weakness of his.
I’m not saying you’re not concerned about the patients
, his mentor, Dr. Francesci, at BU had once told him.
It’s just that you like to make it interesting.

All true. So let’s make it interesting, then
, he thought.

“So tell me, when did you die?” Nat said.

Becca seemed delighted by this. Her eyes were liquid in the gloom, and her head tilted slightly to the right, as if she was trying to recall, and then stopped. “December twenty-first, 2011.”

“And what did you die
of
?”

Her eyes searched his face. She leaned toward him. “I was murdered,” she whispered.

Nat felt the chill again. How had he come to be having this conversation with a nineteen-year-old girl? The still depths of her voice, the calmness of those eyes. It was eerie.

“By whom?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps you can be my detective and find out.”

“Perhaps I can. What happened on December twenty-first?”

For the first time, she hesitated. Her lips formed into an unhappy shape, and tears rimmed her eyelids. “I was in my bed. I dreamt I was choking, and when I woke up a man had his hands around my throat. So I believe it would be called manual strangulation.”

Nat glanced at the turtleneck, and suddenly a memory came floating back to him from his childhood. When he was a young boy, six or seven, his father used to play a record for him, an old 78 in a cream-colored paper sleeve from a children’s collection called
Scary Tales for Littl’uns
. It had been handed down from his grandfather, along with the upright record player with the musty webbed speakers that pulled out from the feet of the contraption on thin brown wires. Nat would sit in their basement, his ear close to the dusty speakers, and listen.

This particular record featured a story told by a male narrator in a rich baritone, about a beautiful woman who wore a black velvet band around her throat. The woman never took the band off, not even when she bathed or slept. She grew up with it around her neck, had her portrait painted with it on—the family had money. When she turned eighteen, she met a man who became her lover, and at first he was intrigued by the velvet necklace, but eventually he grew annoyed by it and asked her to take the band off once so he could see the lovely lines of her ivory throat. She said no. This made the lover angry. As time went on, he became consumed with fury, more and more obsessed by the velvet band.
He
demanded
she remove it.
No
, the woman told him lovingly.
If you love me, ask me anything except this one thing.
He insisted; she begged him to forget the velvet band. Finally, driven to a kind of madness, he screamed at her to take it off or he would do it himself. She said something debonair and eerie, something like
Very well, my love
, and with a smile, she reached up to her neck and pulled the band away.

And . . . off . . . came . . . her . . . head!
shouted the narrator through the hisses and skips of the record needle.

Nat seemed to hear a faraway echo of the narrator’s voice now, distinctly, in his head.

He shifted in the chair.

“But,” he said, composing himself and raising an eyebrow at her, “I can see that you’re breathing. If I feel your pulse, I bet I’ll feel your heart beating.”

The enigmatic smile again. “Yes. I’m aware that I
appear
to be living, but I’m telling you that it’s an illusion. I can’t explain how I’m still here when I should be in my grave.”

I should ask her what was happening in her life before the “murder” occurred
, Nat absently thought. About the relationship with her father. Did she feel isolated, perhaps, removed from life? But there was a shining intelligence in her eyes.
Let’s play the game her way for a moment.

“Who was the man who killed you?”

She looked at her hands. “I’d never seen him before.”

“Describe him to me.” Nat suddenly felt the urge to rough her up a bit verbally with a full-blown interrogation. She’d unnerved him—this whole house had unnerved him—and he wanted to get control of the situation.

“Dark hair, long hair, mustache. Sunburnt. And his eyes were . . .” It all came out in a rush, as if she’d memorized it.

“Were what?”

“All black.”

“Interesting.”

She shook her head jerkily and took a sharp inward breath, as if she’d just seen the man standing behind Nat.

“Becca . . .” he said quietly.

“Yes?”

“Is there anyone else living in this house besides you and your father?”

Her eyes went cold. “I told you—”

“He’s not your father. Yes, I remember. Anyone else besides the old man, then?”

“I don’t thi-iink so.”

“Then why do you double-lock the door?”

“Because the black-eyed man came once, so he might—”

“But I thought you’re already dead.”
Checkmate, little girl.
Nat smirked to himself.

Her forehead was cut with two worry wrinkles. “But I feel things, Dr. Thayer. The sensation of his grip . . .”

Her right hand detached itself from the left and began to reach slowly upward. Nat watched it, an ivory, blue-veined hand with a bracelet of green stone falling down the arm as it rose. The hand came up, the fingers slightly bent. Her hair slid soundlessly off her shoulder until it fell in a glossy bunch and hung straight down.

Nat watched the hand rise as if it were floating of its own will. It finally touched the hollow where the neck met the breastbone, touched lightly the cords of Becca’s throat that stood out through the fabric of the turtleneck, and then began to close on the neck itself. Becca’s eyes rolled back in her head as her eyelids started to close. As Nat watched, her chin rose and she gave a little choking sound.

“Okay, I think I get it,” Nat said. So she was a dramatic girl. She wanted to win their little game.

Nat could see the right finger press into the pale line of the carotid artery and the thumb press on the windpipe. He had
never seen a patient reenact her own choking before and found himself paralyzed with fascination. He went to speak but no words came and he felt suddenly weak. The flesh of her thumb went white as she pressed down on the windpipe, and he heard her breath drawn inward in a gasp.

“Okay, Becca, you made your point.”

As if through a fog, Nat reached out for her arm. He half stood and took a step toward the bed. His fingers closed on her thin arm, and he found the muscles were tensed, remarkably strong. He tried to pull them down from his crouched position but was startled to find that the arm stayed locked where it was, the hand pressing her neck harder and harder. Nat caught his breath and reached his fingers around for a better grip, the tips digging against the soft wool of her turtleneck and pushing into her right breast. Her whole body seemed to be filled with tremendous excitement.