‘Benedict and me.’
Oberon clenched his fists. He wanted to pummel Lucius some more, and his father along with him. Instead he said, ‘When this is done, you’ll answer for Perry’s death. Until then, get to the western road, and wait for the searchers to come. Make sure nobody wanders off the path, and delay them all for as long as you can. Cassander, organize guides to join the teams at the other approaches, then take four men and monitor the area around the blockhouse. If anyone comes near, head him off. I don’t want any outsiders to get close enough even to see it, am I clear?’
‘Yes. And what about you?’
‘I’ll join Henkel once I’m done.’
‘You won’t—’
‘What?’
‘You won’t kill them?’ said Cassander.
They all knew to whom he was referring. There was no need to speak it aloud.
‘They’re worth too much to us to kill,’ said Oberon. ‘My wife will keep them quiet. But your son has just cost your family fifty percent of your share. You’d better hope those plants make it through the winter, or you’ll be begging others for food.’
Cassander didn’t try to argue. He and his son watched Oberon walk away. His time was drawing to a close, and Cassander’s was about to begin.
‘Fifty percent!’ said Lucius. ‘We can’t let him do that to us. We earned our full share. I earned it for us in Maine.’
‘I know,’ said Cassander. ‘Don’t worry. It won’t come to pass.’
‘He thinks that it was my decision alone to kill Perry.’
‘For now. You said nothing to Benedict to make him suspect otherwise?’
‘Not a word. You still believe it was the right thing to do?’
‘Yes.’
Oberon was almost at his house. His back was still impossibly broad, but he walked with a slight stoop. He was aging.
‘If you want me to do it, I’ll kill him,’ said Lucius.
Cassander gripped his son by the back of the neck.
‘We’ll see. Now get ready to meet the outsiders.’
Word was already spreading that the Cut was about to be violated, but it was made clear to all what was expected of them. Men, women, and children old enough to understand the importance of what was happening slipped into the woods to shadow the search parties as they moved deeper into the realm.
Oberon went to Sherah. He needed her for what was to come: she was a calming influence. She sent Tamara to summon Hannah, Bram’s wife, to assist her. When Hannah arrived, the two women walked quickly to the whelping shed where the bitches were kept. Sherah opened the outer door, revealing the second, inner door with its heavy window of reinforced plastic.
And from behind the window, two pregnant women stared back at her with mute hostility.
61
Paige Dunstan had been a prisoner of the Cut for three years. In that time, she had given birth to two children, both girls, by Cassander and Oberon respectively. She was now six months pregnant with a third child, this time again by Oberon. Each pregnancy was the result of rape, although after early assaults she had given up trying to fight and had learned to hold the best part of herself apart from what was occurring, so that her body and her consciousness became separate entities. It was an imperfect arrangement, but it was the best she could come up with under the circumstances.
Paige had been abducted from her home near Ashland, Oregon, by Cassander Hobb. She could remember little about it: a dark night, a van, a sudden sharp pain in the side of her neck, and when she woke she was trapped behind a false panel in the back of the vehicle. She ate there, slept there, pissed and crapped there, and was not permitted to leave the van until it reached its destination, by which point her legs were so weak and cramped that she collapsed to the ground as soon as she got outside, and had to be carried to the building that had been her prison ever since.
The prison house had armchairs; two bedrooms; a supply of books and magazines that were regularly refreshed; a laptop without Internet access, but on which DVDs could be watched; and a cupboard filled with food. It did not have a stove or a microwave, so the foodstuffs consisted of candy, cereals, fruit, potato chips, processed meats – anything that could be eaten cold or uncooked. Once a day, she was brought a hot meal. Her utensils were all plastic, and none of her food was stored in cans or metal containers that could be used as a weapon to harm herself or others. The Cut, it seemed, had learned that particular lesson at a price: after two years as a prisoner, Paige was informed by Sherah, who was marginally more forthcoming than some of the other women who tended to her, that her predecessor had slit her wrists with the lid of a baked bean can. Paige had only been told the woman’s first name: Sally. She was buried in the Cut’s cemetery, in a grave marked by another’s name.
It had been a better end than Corrie’s. Paige still thought of her. She had spent a year with Corrie, who was already pregnant when Paige arrived, and gave birth to a boy shortly after. Paige had not been able to run when Corrie tried to make her escape. By then Paige had been eight months pregnant with her first child, and couldn’t fit through the window from which Corrie had painstakingly removed the mortar, replacing it with chewing gum and wet newspaper where the loosened original material was too damaged to sit unnoticed in the frame. They’d sent the dogs after her, but one of them had nicked an artery in her neck when it brought her down, and she’d bled out among the trees. They’d buried her with Sally, and the bigger windows were subsequently bricked up to become slits.
Paige had miscarried once, and received no pre- or post-natal care beyond what was offered by the women of the Cut, but they had been giving birth in its environs for centuries and their midwifery skills, while primitive, were accomplished. The sex was entirely functional on the part of the men involved, although with some degree of care and solicitude from Cassander and Oberon. The rapes largely continued only until she became pregnant, at which point they would almost immediately cease, although some men had been permitted to use her once the pregnancy had been confirmed, just as long as they did not damage her or the fetus.
She did not know what had happened to the children. Hannah and Sherah would say only that they were no longer in the Cut. Paige had given the girls names: Dorothy, after her mother, and Meredith, after her sister. Although they were the offspring of sexual assault, she continued to feel the pain of their loss. She tried to hide it from herself, but the trauma of her separation from them, even given the circumstances of their conception, was like an open wound in her flesh. Hardly a day went by that she did not weep for them.
She wondered if her mother was still alive. She wondered if her family was still searching for her, holding out hope that she might yet be returned to them, living or dead. She wondered if she ever would be, or if she, too, would eventually be laid to rest beneath a liar’s cross. She wasn’t sure that she could endure another assault, and this pregnancy was telling on her. Her body was worn out. When she looked in the plastic mirror that hung in the bathroom, she saw a woman whom she could barely recognize: older than her years, harder.
Sometimes – most of the time – Paige wanted to die, but if she died no one would ever discover what had befallen her, and this horror would go on: there would be more girls, more rapes, more pregnancies, more vanished children. So Paige endured, and waited patiently for her chance, because she knew that a chance must surely come. She refused to despair, because if she despaired she would go mad: mad, like Gayle.
Gayle had been plucked by the Cut from the streets of Washington D.C., another kid fleeing a bad home life for a chance in the big city, although what she imagined she’d find once she got there, apart from an even harder life in a bigger place, Paige wasn’t sure. Gayle had begun crying and screaming from the moment she regained consciousness. Paige had tried her best to quiet Gayle down, but it wasn’t as though she could offer her any great consolation. Paige even held back from Gayle, for a while, the length of time she herself had been kept prisoner in the hut. Eventually,
though, she couldn’t keep the truth from the girl. She told her what would happen to her, and how best to cope with it, but Gayle had broken before the first assault even began. Perhaps she’d been broken before she ever got to D.C. Paige suspected as much. She bore the mark of a girl who believed that she had already seen the worst of men, but the ones in the Cut proved her wrong.
Sometimes Paige was able to have a coherent conversation with Gayle, but those times were growing less frequent since she had conceived. Mostly Gayle just crooned to herself, although Paige didn’t think she was singing to the child. During one of their rare substantial discussions, Gayle had asked Paige how she might go about aborting the baby. Paige dissuaded her from that line of thought, mainly because she’d initially contemplated the same action herself. Two things had caused her to reconsider. The first was that, even if she found some means of inducing an abortion, she might well damage herself fatally along with the fetus. The second was something Sherah told her after she conceived for the first time.
‘If you hurt the baby,’ Sherah said, ‘they’ll kill you. They’ll bury you in the woods along with the others. But if you carry it to term, they’ll look after you, and you won’t be harmed.’
Paige had stared at Sherah in disbelief when she’d said that. She’d been abducted, imprisoned, and raped until she conceived: if that wasn’t being ‘harmed’, then Paige didn’t know what was.
Sherah guessed the direction of her thoughts.
‘You’ll go hard,’ said Sherah. ‘Don’t think it’ll just be a bullet or a blade. They’ll burn you.’
Paige thought she’d misheard.
‘Burn?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first.’
Paige struggled to find the words to express what she was feeling. Imprisonment, rape, forced childbirth, and now burning? It was like she’d tumbled back into the Middle Ages.
‘Why are you letting them do this to me?’ she’d asked.
And Sherah had shrugged.
‘I don’t want you to suffer,’ she said, ‘and I’ll do my best to keep you safe and healthy: all of the women here will. But you’re not of the Cut, and the Cut looks after its own.’
In the beginning, Paige had screamed for help, just like Gayle later did, but no one outside the Cut heard her. Hannah had arrived to warn her to be quiet, but Paige had told her to go fuck herself.
After that, Oberon came, and Paige didn’t scream anymore.
Paige had tried to escape once, shortly after the first birth, when Martha, an older woman who had since died, came to bring Paige her daily hot meal. Paige had knocked her down and started running, but they caught her within minutes. Lucius had reached her first, and he’d struck her so hard on the side of the head that she was still partially deaf in her right ear. As punishment, she was placed in the basement under the floor of the hut. She hadn’t even known that there was a basement, so well had they hidden the entrance beneath a section of board. They left her down there in the blackness for two days with just bread and water, and a bucket to use for her ablutions. That was as close to madness as she had come.
For so long she had waited for someone to arrive in the Cut, someone from outside, but nobody ever came. Still, she had not entirely lost hope, or not until she overheard Cassander talking with Hannah after her latest pregnancy was confirmed. Paige had experienced trouble conceiving again, and the earlier miscarriage had been a source of concern. If she couldn’t give birth again, then what good would she be to them? Hannah and Cassander had believed her to be sleeping, but Paige woke up to pee, and heard them speaking not far from one of the vents in the wall.
‘It’s about time,’ said Cassander. ‘I thought we’d bled her dry.’
‘Perhaps you should think about looking for another. Three births would be as many as we’ve ever had from one woman. They get damaged. It’s not the same as it is between husband and wife.’
‘I know the difference.’
‘Good. Sherah would be unhappy otherwise.’
Cassander had laughed, and Paige had returned to bed, storing away this little piece of information even as she feared for her own life. Sherah was Oberon’s wife. Could Cassander possibly be sleeping with her behind his back?
But she had other, more immediate concerns. After this one, they would kill her. Paige knew it. She would have to try to run again, but they let her out for only an hour a day to exercise in the fenced-in yard behind the hut, and she was always being watched. The Cut women were careful to keep their distance, and they were sometimes armed. Even when they came to check on her and Gayle, they would do so by first separating them, and at least two women would always be present. Paige would be locked in her room while Gayle was being examined, and vice versa. No matter how often she considered the problem, and from how many angles, Paige could find no way to make her escape. She would die in the Cut, and soon.
The biggest of the slit windows was no more than a foot wide and three feet long, and fitted with Plexiglas that had grown worn over the years so that it gave a misty perspective to everything. Still, Paige liked to stand on a chair and gaze out on the world beyond the walls. When she lost the will and energy even to do that, then she’d probably welcome the final visit, and the walk into the woods to the waiting grave.
Now, at the window, she saw movement: Sherah and Hannah, coming up fast. They looked worried.
‘Something’s happening,’ she said.
Gayle stopped crooning, and looked up at the older woman.
‘Maybe they’re going to let us leave,’ said Gayle. She began to giggle, then stopped.
‘I think I’m going to hurt one of them,’ she said. She spoke as though she were considering trying on a different dress: the white one, or maybe the blue, but it was a tone that Paige had never heard her use before.
‘Which one?’ asked Paige, curious about this pronouncement.
‘Hannah. No, Sherah. She pretends that she cares, but she doesn’t care. At least Hannah doesn’t try to pretend.’
‘And when will you do this?’
Gayle mused on the question.
‘Today?’
Paige heard the question in it. Maybe all is not lost for this girl, she thought.
The Cut were drawing nearer. She moved away from the window and knelt carefully before Gayle, aware of the weight of the child she was carrying. ‘I’ll help you to hurt one of them, okay, but not today. Soon, though. You’ll just have to wait for my signal. Will you do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘And then I want to hurt Cassander, and Oberon, and Marius, and Lucius …’
First things first, thought Paige.
‘Yes, we’ll find a way to hurt them too.’
62
Henkel was part of the team that moved into the Cut from the south: they were ten in total, including their Cut minders, and they spread out in a line that permitted each man or woman to see the others to the right and left. They called out Perry Lutter’s name as they went, waited for a response, then moved on. They only had enough dogs to place one with each team, but so far none of them had picked up Perry’s scent. Although Henkel would never have said as much aloud, he didn’t hold out much hope of finding Perry in the Cut. If anyone from the Cut were responsible for Perry’s disappearance – or, God forbid, his murder – then a lesson would have been learned from the discovery of Killian and Huff, and he would have been buried far from this place.
Henkel also knew that his animosity toward Oberon and his kind was prejudicing the conduct of the search. It was entirely possible that the Cut had nothing to do with whatever had befallen Perry – and, most assuredly, something had – which meant that Henkel was wasting valuable time and resources on this incursion.
But while he had no direct evidence to link Perry to the Cut, he had nearly two decades of experience in law enforcement on which to draw. The Cut’s history of violence, and the rumors of possible criminality on its part, were an open secret in Plassey County.
The only current point of contention was whether or not the Cut was winding down, and turning its back on its past in favor of a more conventional lifestyle, or as conventional as could be expected from a reclusive community that had sequestered itself away on private land and appeared never to have heard of an ordinary name like Dave or Steve. There might have been some element of truth to the belief that the Cut’s more dubious activities were in abeyance, but this did not mean they had ceased entirely. There was badness yet in the Cut.
The search was Henkel’s way of maintaining pressure on Oberon and his people. For now, with the focus of the investigation into Killian and Huff directed elsewhere, it was the best he could do. And if Perry Lutter didn’t show up soon, Henkel would be shouting his name on every TV channel and radio station that would broadcast it, and talking to every journalist who would listen, and would sow further seeds of doubt about the Cut’s nature. Pressure, pressure, pressure; soon, cracks would appear. Henkel was certain of it.
The line moved on. The dog sniffed and whined. When Henkel paused for a leak, taking some small pleasure in pissing on the Cut, he thought that he caught sight of at least two children following the searchers. A man named Bryan Kibble, who had once owned a hardware store in Turley that somehow managed to stay in business for thirty years, despite the presence of the big Sears just over the county line, waited for Henkel to rejoin the search, briefly shifting position to the right so that he and the sheriff were within earshot of each other.
‘You see them?’ said Kibble.
‘Yeah.’
‘Spooky little shits, and rough as pig iron. This whole place gives me the dismals.’
‘It’s just wood and dirt, like any other place.’
‘No it ain’t, and you know it.’
A figure moved across the back of the line, checking to see what was delaying the progress of the two men: Lucius, Cassander’s son. Henkel had noticed the bruising on his face as soon as he arrived, but it had swollen badly in the hour that had gone by since, and Lucius’s right eye was now half-closed.