Life Expectancy

Shelves spanned the width of that wall, rose from floor to ceiling. Stored thereon were periodicals in labeled slipcases.

The maniac studied several shelves, up and down, back and forth, maybe looking for the 1952 run of Life magazine, maybe hoping to spot a juicier spider.

Nope, neither. He was searching for a hidden switch. He found it, and a section of bookshelves pivoted open, revealing an alcove behind them.

At the back of the alcove, a stone wall embraced an iron-banded oak door. In an age that demanded harsher punishment for patrons with overdue books, they might have kept a tardy Jane Austen reader here until solitary confinement and a short ration of gruel brought the miscreant to remorse and contrition.

The maniac pounded one fist three times on the door—obviously an answering signal.

From the farther side came two knocks, hollow and loud.

After the maniac responded with two, a single knock came from the space beyond. He answered with one thump.

This seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated passcode, but the maniac was delighted by the ritual. He beamed happily at us.

His toothy smile no longer had quite the endearing quality that had marked it previously. He was an adorable-looking fellow, and against your better judgment, you still wanted to be charmed by him, but you kept scanning for dark hairy bits of spider on his lips and tongue.

A moment after the last knock, the buzz of a small high-speed motor arose from the farther side of the door. Then metal shrieked on metal.

A diamond-point steel drill bit thrust through the keyhole. The spinning shaft chewed up the lock mechanism and spat metal shavings on the floor.

Our host raised his voice and reported with boyish enthusiasm: “We tortured a member of the Snow Village Historical Preservation Society, but we couldn’t get keys out of him. I’m sure he’d have given them to us if he’d known where to get them, but it was our bad luck—and his—that we chose the wrong person to torture. So we’ve had to resort to this.”

Lorrie’s cuffed hand sought my cuffed hand and held it tight.

I wished that we had met under different circumstances. Like at a town picnic or even at a tea dance.

The drill withdrew from the lock plate, fell silent. The broken lock assembly rattled, clinked, twanged, and gave way as the door opened into the alcove.

I had a glimpse of what appeared to be an eerily lit tunnel beyond the door.

A dour man came through, out of the alcove, past the pivoted section of bookcase, into the library’s subcellar. A similar specimen followed him, pulling a handcart.

The first newcomer was about fifty, totally bald, with black eyebrows so shaggy that you could have knitted a child’s sweater from them. He wore khakis, a green Ban Lon shirt, and a shoulder holster with gun.

“Excellent, excellent. You’re right on time, Honker,” said the maniac.

I had no way of knowing whether the new guy’s name was, say, Bob Honker, or whether this was a nickname inspired by the size of his nose. He had an enormous nose. Once it must have been straight and proud, but time had rendered it a spongy lump, ruddy with a fine webbing of burst capillaries—the nose of a serious drinker.

Honker appeared to be sober now, but brooding and suspicious.

He scowled at me, at Lorrie, and said gruffly, “Who’re the bitch and Bigfoot?”

“Hostages,” the maniac explained.

“What the hell we need hostages for?”

“If something goes wrong.”

“You think something’ll go wrong?”

“No,” the maniac said, “but they entertain me.”

The second newcomer stepped away from the handcart to join the discussion. He resembled Art Garfunkel, the singer: a decadent choirboy’s face, electroshocked hair.

He wore a zippered nylon windbreaker over a T-shirt, but I could see the bulk of a holster and weapon beneath it.

“Whether something goes wrong or not,” he said, “we’ll have to waste them.”

“Of course,” the maniac said.

“It’d be a shame to off the bitch without using it,” said the choirboy.

More than their casual talk of murdering us, this reference to Lorrie as “it” chilled me.

Her hand gripped mine so tightly that my knuckles ached.

The maniac said, “Put her out of your mind, Crinkles. That isn’t going to happen.”

Whether this was the guy’s legal name or nickname, you might expect someone called Crinkles either to have a well-creased face or to be wonderfully amusing. His face looked as smooth as a hard-boiled egg, and he was about as amusing as an antibiotic-resistant streptococcus infection.

To the maniac, Crinkles said, “Why’s she off limits? She belong to you?”

“She belongs to nobody,” our host replied with some annoyance. “We didn’t come all this way just to score some quiff. If we don’t stay focused on the main objective, the whole operation will fall apart.”

I felt that I ought to say something to the effect that if they wanted to get at Lorrie, they would have to come through me. But the truth was, armed and crazy, they could come through me as easily as the blades of a kitchen mixer churning through cake batter.

The prospect of dying didn’t distress me nearly as much as the realization that I was helpless to defend her.

I hadn’t made pastry chef yet, but in my mind I had always been a hero—or could be in a crisis. As a kid, I often fantasized about whipping up soufflés au chocolat fit for kings while at the same time battling the evil minions of Darth Vader.

Now reality set in. These violent lunatics would eat Darth Vader in a pita pocket and pick their teeth with his light saber.

“Whether something goes wrong or not,” Crinkles repeated, “we’ll have to burn them.”

“We’ve already gone over this,” the maniac said impatiently.

“Because they’ve seen our faces,” Crinkles persisted, “we’ll have to whack them both.”

“I understand,” the maniac assured him.

Crinkles had eyes the color of brandy. They grew pale when he said, “The time comes, I want to be the one gets to ice the bitch.”

Waste, off, burn, whack, ice. This guy was a walking thesaurus when it came to synonyms for kill.

Maybe this meant he had croaked so many people that he found discussion of murder boring and therefore needed richer language to maintain his interest. Or, conversely, he might be a hit-man wannabe, all boast and jargon, with no guts when it came to doing the dirty deed.

Considering that Crinkles hung out with a madman who shot librarians for no reason and who saw no difference between spiders and bonbons, I decided that the wisest course was not to doubt his sincerity.