Shackles by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

but the words got caught in the dryness in my throat and I had to cough and swallow and start over. “Just this. If I survive, if I get out of here alive, I’ll track you down no matter where you are and I’ll kill you.”
    “Yes,” he said, “I don’t doubt that. But it’s a moot point. Because you won’t survive.”
    He put his back to me again, went through the door and shut it behind him.
    I sat there, not moving, not thinking, listening. Faint sounds in the room behind the closed door. Silence for a time, then the slamming of a door somewhere outside—car door. Engine cranking up, revving, revving—him doing that on purpose so I’d be sure to hear—and then diminishing, becoming lost in the snow-laden wind that skirled against the walls and windows of my prison.
    He was gone.
    And I was alone.

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The Second Day
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    It wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to grasp the full enormity of what lay ahead for me, what I would have to face over the days, weeks, maybe months of this kind of imprisonment and isolation.
    I woke up with the knowledge, lay in the icy dawn with it swelling inside my head like a malignant tumor. Last night, in those first hours of aloneness, I had managed to block out most of it behind a barrier of hate and frantic activity. I had paced back and forth, back and forth, indulging in a monologue of curses. I had prowled through the provisions, looking for something, anything that I could use as a possible tool for escape. I had done the same with my pockets—wallet, keys, change, handkerchief, nothing, nothing. I had tried yanking again and again on the chain, tried picking the padlock with each one of my keys, opened a can of something and tried to use the lid to dig into the wall around the ringbolt. All senseless, wasted effort that got me nothing but scraped palms and a cut finger, and left me mentally as well as physically exhausted. Sometime long past nightfall I had stretched out on the cot and wrapped myself in the blankets and fallen into a fitful sleep. Woke up once, while it was still dark, with hunger gnawing at me, but I hadn’t eaten because my mind wasn’t working right and somehow it translated eating into a weakness, a giving in. So I had gotten up, used the toilet, drunk some cold water from the sink tap and splashed a handful over my face, and then gone back to the cot and again swaddled myself in blankets and uneasy sleep.
    Now my mind was clear, and the truth was unavoidable: I was a condemned man, just as the whisperer had said, with three or at the most four months to live and very little chance of reprieve or escape. I was in an isolation cell fifteen feet square, with nothing more to occupy my time than old books and magazines, pencils and pens and blank paper, and a radio that probably wouldn’t bring in much except static because this was mountain country and winter besides. And I not only had my imminent death to cope with, I had the problem of keeping my sanity throughout the ordeal. Death itself no longer terrified me the way it had at one time, though this kind of death would not be easy to reconcile. But insanity … that was something else again. That was a hideous looming specter, a screaming darkness, that filled me with the most primitive loathing and revulsion.
    The fear began to seep in again as I lay there. And then to seep out through my pores in a prickly sweat. I kept my eyes shut and lay still while I repaired the internal leaks and restored a dry calm.
    This was what I had to guard against, this slow erosion of the dikes my mind had already thrown up against the roiling waters of unreason. Plug each little hole before it grew larger, threatened the entire protective structure. Keep the dark tide from flooding in, from dragging me down into its depths.
    No matter how bad it gets, I thought, I can’t let that happen. That’s my number one priority. And the way to keep it from happening is to live minute to minute, hour to hour,