“I suspect someone had a catch go bad in the summer warmth. This is a mostly unvisited anchorage. The Kokkola harbormaster would go mad if you dumped your load of rotting fish to bob around in his harbor.”
They skirted the depressingly abandoned buildings and made for the lighthouse. Von Krebs said there were animals living in the abandoned buildings and he feared rabies and hantavirus. So they took a more picturesque path through the trees, climbing the lighthouse hill.
Other than a little more wind than she liked, it was a perfect day, with not a cloud in the sky.
They found a few tables and benches of a design common the world over beneath the striped lighthouse. It had a marvelous view of the bay.
“Here’s a nice spot for our picnic.”
“You’re unhappy here. Homesick?” Von Krebs asked.
“I’d like to head home, to tell the truth. There’s nothing for me to do here, at least nothing more important than what I could be doing back home.”
He looked up, nodded.
Nets, heavy and wet, fell all across her. She struggled, and the more she fought, the heavier and more entangled she became.
They rolled her up in the nets like a rug, with a few kicks for good measure, and she felt herself being hoisted across two men’s shoulders.
Three strong men helped secure her. They had that same horribly fishy smell she’d noticed earlier. They put her in handcuffs before unwrapping her from the nets. She was put into a cheap tube-steel chair, with her arms around one of the metal supports for the wooden back brace.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked.
They were inside the lighthouse
, at the bottom. The stairs up reminded her a little of a nautilus with its natural ascending spiral. It reeked of decay, overlain by a fresher, fishier smell, as though someone had just shoveled the day’s catch out the door.
Von Krebs stood as though posing for a photograph with one leg up on a sea chest, leaning forward across his thigh with arms casually crossed at the wrists.
“Are you just an ordinary bastard, or the traitorous kind?” she asked.
He smiled, and the room got a little colder. “You know, I have a great interest in pain. Just how much pain an individual can take before they vomit, void their bladder and bowels, pass out, even die. Yes, you can die from pain, even though the injuries providing the source for the pain are themselves nonlethal. Let me tell you another way I am beyond the sadists of old. I can savor it in ways they could not imagine. I will feed off your aura as it slowly, agonizingly, leaves your body.”
“I gave myself up for dead years ago. I feel like I’ve lost this aura your kind finds so precious. I’ll probably disappoint you.”
He opened the chest, unrolled a small chamois sheet, and began to extract what looked like medical instruments, laying them on the chamois. There were scalpels, probes, clamps, scissors. The stainless steel took on an unnatural shine in the darkness.
He also had rope and surgical tubing. Perhaps he was a vivisectionist.
She noticed her sword-stick was in the corner. No one had investigated it closely, so they hadn’t found the switch that unlocked grip from sheath.
“You three, out. Wait outside the door. You may hear her screaming.”
The fishy-smelling men retreated.
“Meet Chien,” Von Krebs said.
The small nude Asian woman, who had what looked like a barbed octopus with long folds of skin between its limbs riding across her back, descended the stairs from the shadow above. Its limbs engulfed her neck, breasts, and waist, offering a sort of obscene modesty.
One dreadful tentacle reached out and tapped Duvalier, once, twice, three times.
Chien shimmered for a moment, then Duvalier found herself looking into an exact duplicate of herself, down to the smallest freckle and chipped tooth.
“Chien speaks good Midwestern English. Her Spanish is also excellent, but I do not believe she will need that. It’s one of the reasons we selected her when we found out you were coming.”
“When did you learn that?”
“Ah, I never reveal sources. Even to those with but five minutes left to live. Chien, how do you do?”