Alex abruptly stops. As he reaches the divot of my breastbone, he secures the top button of the shirt. He fastens it, then works his way down gradually to close the shirt.
He clasps my face between both hands, those blue eyes intense. “A subject has never made me feel so weak.”
“That’s because I’m not a subject. I’m a woman.”
He releases me with a forced breath. “You’re a parasite.”
I lift my chin, defiant. “And yet that doesn’t change how badly you want me.” I lick my lips to wet them. “You’re the one with the illness, Alex. Why don’t you just give in? Accept that you can’t cure me, that there’s nothing to cure.”
He steps backward, moving down the stairs. His face is level with mine. “It damn near breaks me…I’ve never wanted a woman more.” He takes another step down. “But not like this. Not without you able to reciprocate what I feel. It can’t happen any other way—that would make me more vile than the fiend who put my sister in the ground.”
He starts down the stairs, letting his words hang in the dark between us. Before he’s gone, I make sure he hears me. “If you actually succeed…the feelings I’ll have for you won’t be what you want, Alex.”
“I’m willing to risk that,” he says.
A chill touches my skin and I cross my arms. I look at the cabin door. If there’s any chance of escape, it’s not through here. No, hiding that door, keeping me in the basement, isn’t a means of security. That cabin belongs to him.
His own personal ninth circle of hell.
When I enter the basement, Alex is waiting for me with the leather cuffs in his hands. For now, I accept my temporary fate. I won’t find a way out of here by physically overpowering him, or seducing him.
Alex plays on a psychological playing field, and I need access to that chamber locked away in his mind, the one with all the ticking clocks.
That’s my way out.
I hold out my wrists to him, and he locks a cuff into place. He won’t meet my eyes, his gaze distant and evasive. I’ve pushed him too far tonight, but not far enough to snap.
He leaves the room, and I sit on the cot and pull my knees to my chest. He returns with the jogging pants I left in the shower room.
“I would appreciate it if you stayed clothed,” he says.
I huff a soundless laugh. “Sure. Anything for my captor’s comfort.”
Alex appears to temper a retort, and instead leaves the room again. He’s not gone long when he returns with a hammer and nail. I watch curiously as he drives the nail into the wall opposite me.
He removes the keyring from his pocket and hooks it on the nail. So I can stare at it. Knowing it’s just out of reach. A cruel taunt.
“It’s late…or early,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “We’ll begin in a few hours. Get some sleep.”
The lights dim as he leaves the room, shutting the curtain behind him. I hear a door close. The one I always hear, that leads to his lab. He doesn’t go to his dark room of clocks.
I sit in silence for a long time just staring at the keys on the wall.
Maybe I failed, or maybe I stirred something in Alex that will prove useful. I’m not sure what damage I may or may not have caused—but I am sure of one thing.
I read Toyota on one of the silver keys while I was trying to unlock the door. Which means there’s a vehicle somewhere close.
18
Monster
Alex
Since our inception, humans have been consumed with the concept of time. The ancient Maya believed it was their sacred onus to keep time on its course, using mathematics and astronomy to develop a calendar that is as near accurate to the one we now use.
The ancient Egyptians revered their sun god, placing obelisks at the mouth of tombs to capture the rays of the sun and revive the dead. Those sun monuments served as a way to tell the time of day, a derivative of the sundial. They valued time even in death, mummifying those they honored to withstand the test of time.
From the Sumerian sexagesimal system, the water clocks of the Zhou dynasty, Egyptian shadow clocks, to the Frankish hourglass, every civilization has made a sacred practice of recording the passage of time.
My personal favorite is the pendulum clock. First to analyze the pendulum’s properties, Galileo discovered isochronism, simply meaning the pendulum maintains a constant period despite variations. Which he realized was exceedingly useful in timekeeping.
This method of keeping time was the most accurate up until the mid-twentieth century, when physicists proved atoms were the ultimate timekeepers. Introduction of the atomic clock changed the length of the second as we knew it, and opened a doorway into the future where the writings of H. G. Wells may become fact rather than fiction.
According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, a clock at rest appears to slow when compared to a clock traveling at a fast rate, thus giving credence to theories of time travel. I’ve dabbled in my own temporal theories, the results proving that particles traveling at virtually the speed of light decay slower than those at a latent state.
The history of time, a witticism in its own right. The desire to crack the space-time continuum is as deeply rooted in personal desire as it is in need of a scientific breakthrough.
However, there is only one truth every scientist can agree upon as cited by Einstein himself: there is no “master clock” for the universe. Time is relative to the observer.
As I am Blakely’s observer, I pay special attention to how I see her, which is no longer through the lens of a microscope. A dangerous shift in perspective.
An image of her standing before me, shirt draped open, her beautiful breasts on display, covers my vision and suddenly even the air is tactile. I can feel the weight of her on top of me. Feel her soft skin as I graze my knuckles down her belly.
I drag my hands over my face, as if I can wipe her from my thoughts. She’s an infection invading my system. That’s why I’ve barricaded myself in the dark room, letting the maddening tick of the clocks drive her out.
I stare at the one pendant of light in the room, the bare bulb strung in the middle. I have no use for the glaring clarity of daylight today. My chair is positioned right in front of the newest clock. It’s a basic, round wall clock. Black and white. A pendulum protrudes from the bottom, oscillating back and forth, ticking the seconds away.
It’s beautiful in its simplicity. That’s why I chose it. Classic, sleek, modern. Hard. It suits her perfectly.
Cold sweat beads along my brow as I extend my hand toward the swinging pendulum. Light reflects off the steel every time it ticks a full second, sending a fracted shard of light onto my palm.
As I watch, absorbed in the comforting rhythm, I speculate if electroshock could work as a time machine and send Blakely’s mind back to a moment before she entered this room.
The way she looked at me—the judgment in her cool eyes—as she stood amid the clocks…
I close my eyes and curse. The errant thought creeps into my mind, questioning if I chose Blakely for the project or my own selfish needs.
I stand and knock the chair backward. The jarring scrape of the legs against the wood floor is barely heard over the relentless ticking, but it’s enough to interrupt my spiral.