Page 7 of Possession

“What! No, I’d never—”

“My man Briggs told me all about it, and of course you were seen entering the locker room. You see, I’d kill you for it, slow and painful, creatively, but then I’d never see a penny of your debt. So it’ll be one finger tonight—”

“No! Mr. Crowley,please—”

The boss, Crowley, grabs Frank’s hand and yanks it forward. “Be a man about it, Mr. Prescott, or I’ll take your cock instead.”

“Oh my god!” Frank shouts as Crowley pulls a pair of bolt cutters from beside his chair. None of the men around him react, but Frank wets himself, staining the front of his trousers dark. Crowley only shakes his head.

“I’ll be taking the lad as well, Mr. Prescott, but not for his pretty face. Pretty or no, he’s too old, nowhere close to seventeen. But his hands can serve me. He’ll still have ten fingers, see, and he’d better use those to keep my Beast alive. Because if the Beast dies, the boy dies. And I can see you don’t care much about his life, but you might care about his murder—when I frame you for it.”

Frank is blubbering now, beyond words, maybe beyond understanding what Crowley is telling him. I’m not sure I understand either. On a certain level, I do. But on another, I simply can’t see this as real.

It’s a dream. A nightmare.

I’m so numbed by that I barely even wince when Crowley uses the bolt cutters to lop off one of Frank’s fingers. Frank screams. Crowley sets the bolt cutters on an end table and tosses a handkerchief at Frank as the guard lets go of him. Frank collapses, still wailing.

Crowley says to one of the guards, “When the doc is finished with Beast, have him cauterize Mr. Prescott’s finger. Consider it a courtesy, Mr. Prescott. It’ll save you a trip to the ER, along with all the uncomfortable questions.”

Crowley looks at me. “As for you, lad, you’ve got some work to do.”

I seem to have frozen in the guard’s hold. I’m watching but not seeing. This isn’t real. It can’t be.

The hold releases me. My knees wobble as I’m forcibly turned. The gun nudges me in the back. I stumble forward. Somehow I find my balance. Somehow I start walking.

I only sort of register that I’m heading toward a closed steel door. I only sort of hear Frank crying behind me and the more distant thump of the techno beat. I’m half outside myself, numb. Disbelieving.

I stop at the closed door. The gun nudges me again. “Open it.”

I obey woodenly, then my heart jumps. A concrete stairwell, brutally lit with bare bulbs, yawns before me.

I don’t want to go down there.

“Move,” the guard orders. “There’s no point in fighting.”

I know that.

It doesn’t matter that this has nothing to do with me. I don’t even bother saying it. I have no protection from this. No one will shield me.

No one ever has.

So when the muzzle of the gun prods me forward, I go stumbling down the stairs. I go down and down into the dimmer space of a basement.

A long row of steel bars divides the room in half.

On one side, the guard from the locker room—Briggs, Crowley called him—stands watch. His open half of the room ends in a cinderblock wall with another door. Between that closed-off room and the stairwell, a long corridor runs away into the darkness.

But I’m not heading toward that room or that dark corridor, so none of that really matters. What matters is what lies on the other side of those bars.

A cell.

Within, the fighter is lying unconscious and nude on a mattress. Another man, a doctor I guess, is kneeling beside him stitching a wound.

The cell is large and rectangular, like half the room was sectioned off to form it. The fighter and doctor are at the far end along the narrow wall.

Bloody gauze litters the ground around the doctor. A medical kit lies open at his side. At the head of the mattress stands an IV pole hung with a bag, and a line runs down to the still figure.

The doctor doesn’t look up from his work, but the waiting guard, Briggs, speaks to the guard who brought me.

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