David stepped onto the landing and flipped the wall switch. Light bloomed on the stairs and below. Ronny Jessup had installed tinted bulbs from which issued a rose-colored glow.

For minutes David stood at the top of the stairs, considering the place below as not a hard passage of his life to be endured, but as a scene in a novel. Writing fiction, he maintained control, had the final decision on what events would occur and what their meaning would be, as in life he nearly never did.

When he felt a calm at the center of his mind, when the silence of the house became a deeper silence, he went down the stairs.

| 17 |

At the foot of the stairs was a steel-bar gate, at the moment standing open. Beyond the gate lay what Ronny Lee Jessup called the “receiving room.” He had finished the block walls with plasterboard painted a glossy waterproof white and had applied multiple coats of sealant to the concrete floor to make it easier to clean when one of his games got messy.

He had relied on his physical advantage, his size and great strength, to subdue a woman initially, but then used chloroform to keep her quiescent during transport. He bought acetone from an art supply store, bleaching powder from a janitorial supply, and brewed the chloroform himself from acetone by the reaction of chloride of lime. While maintaining his captive in sedation, Jessup carried her through the house, down the stairs, into the receiving room, where he placed her in a lounge chair.

He had then secured the gate to the stairs with a combination lock to which only he knew the five-digit release code.

If he’d needed to bind the captive’s hands and feet, then as she lay in the lounge chair, he cut those bonds. He applied no more chloroform. He removed her jacket or coat if she wore one, took off her shoes to deny her the chance of delivering an effective crotch kick, and waited for her to awaken.

When she was fully conscious, he explained that her life would now last only as long as she pleased him and was of use to him—unless she was smart enough, in the next fifteen minutes, to find her way out of the cellar maze by the secret exit.

Jessup had told David that, when giving what he called this “orientation speech,” he had often wept with the terrified captive, and sometimes wept even when she didn’t. It was such a terribly sad moment, Mr. Thorne, very damn sad and exciting all at once. This was no doubt true, for he was a homicidal psychopathic sentimentalist with an intense and disorganized emotional life.

It was not true, however, that the captive might find a secret exit. There was no secret exit from that prison, only the stairs beyond the gate.

You’d be surprised, Mr. Thorne, how nearly all them believed it, poor things. How much they wanted hope when they should have known there weren’t none. Broke my heart every time, it really did.