A Time of Torment Read Free

her knees or her feet. Objectively, he had to admire her spirit, but he couldn’t risk incurring a broken nose, or even a bruise to his face. Any injury might be enough to raise suspicions, even in the case of harmless Roger Ormsby.
    He stepped back.
    ‘I warned you,’ he said. ‘Now you’re going to make me do something that I didn’t want to do.’
    The girl began wailing and writhing. Ormsby was just drawing back his hand to give her a sharp slap on the head when the doorbell rang.
    Ormsby listened. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He could try to ignore the bell, and hope that whoever it was went away. On the other hand, if one of his neighbors had seen him pull into the garage they’d know he was home, and if he didn’t answer they might begin to worry. The last thing he needed was for the police to be called.
    And what if it was the police? Suppose he had been seen? The street had appeared to be empty and unwatched, but one could never be sure …
    The bell rang a second time. Ormsby struck the girl once to subdue her before he closed the trunk again. He moved through the house, turning on a lamp as he entered the hallway. He saw a shape through the glass fan of the door: a tall figure.
    Ormsby paused when he was still five feet away.
    ‘Who is it?’ he called, but received no reply.
    Ormsby shuffled his feet and tried again.
    ‘Who’s there? What do you want?’
    Finally, the voice spoke. It sounded to Ormsby like that of a black man.
    ‘Delivery for Mr Cole.’
    Ormsby relaxed.
    ‘You have the wrong house,’ he said. ‘Cole lives in fourteen thirty-seven, across the street. This is fourteen thirty-six.’
    ‘You sure? Says fourteen thirty-six on the slip.’
    ‘Well, your slip’s wrong.’
    ‘Shit,’ said the man, and Ormsby saw his shape ripple as he took in the street. ‘Don’t look like anybody’s home over there. Maybe you could sign for it, save me a wasted trip.’
    Ormsby experienced a creeping sense of unease.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t open my door to strangers after dark.’
    ‘It’s not dark yet.’
    ‘Even so.’
    ‘Shit,’ said the man, again. ‘Okay, you have a good evening.’
    He went away. Only when Ormsby heard his footsteps moving down the path did he slip into the living room and ensure that he had departed. The caller was wearing a jacket, and didn’t look like any delivery man Ormsby had ever seen, but as he paused at the sidewalk, Ormsby saw that he was holding a box. The man hung a right, and was lost behind the tall hedge that marked the perimeter of Ormsby’s property. Ormsby waited, but he did not reappear.
    Ormsby returned to the garage and opened the trunk of his car.
    The sack lay limp and flat on the rubber matting.
    The girl was gone.

3
    L et us leave Roger Ormsby for now, staring into the empty trunk of his clean, well-maintained car, in his big, anonymous house with its many unused rooms, the whole surrounded by a pretty garden with beds that flower throughout the year, for Ormsby prided himself on his plants, and they flourished thanks to his care and attention, the addition of copious amounts of old coffee grounds …
    And human ash.
    It was one month earlier, and the town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, had witnessed the final exodus of its summer tourists. The boardwalk concessions had closed, along with those bars, restaurants, and stores that relied exclusively on the season for their income. Here and there rainbow flags still flew, for Rehoboth was as gay-friendly as such towns came, and anyway, the pink dollar was only pink in a certain light. Once it arrived at the bank, it was as green as any other.
    In the bathroom of a house at the edge of the town limits, the lawyer Eldritch was shaving, working at his sparse whiskers with an old straight razor. His was the only room with a mirror, and even then it was barely large enough to enable him to see his own face. Beyond the bathroom was his bedroom, and downstairs was his home