He stirred slowly. His head bobbing up and down on his chest as he fought to clear his head.
When his eyes were fully opened and focused he saw me sitting in front of him. He jumped. His eyes spread wide. I was pleased to see that he looked as scared as he was confused.
It was only then that he seemed to realize that he was bound hand and foot. His arms were tied securely to the chair, his legs to the legs. He struggled but got nowhere. He was going nowhere.
He looked around but in the dim light all he could see was me. And that suited me fine. I wanted to make myself smile at him but I couldn’t. The best I could muster was a glare. Wallace Ogilvie, his limbs bound, his mouth taped shut, his confusion total, was in front of me. He did not know who I was.
‘Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos.’
Wallace Ogilvie shrugged as best he could.
‘Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos,’ I repeated. ‘He was the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. You’ll have heard of the film.’
Wallace Ogilvie just looked at me.
‘He wrote it in 1782. You know a quote from it though. La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.’
Wallace Ogilvie continued to look.
‘No? I thought you might know a bit of French.’
Wallace Ogilvie shook his head warily.
‘Hm. How about Klingon then?’
Wallace Ogilvie’s eyebrows knitted tight in bewilderment.
‘Stupid but it’s often quoted as being a Klingon phrase. You know, from Star Trek. bortaS bIr jablu’DI’, reH QaQqu’ nay. It took me ages to learn that.’
I was trying to be glib. Trying to scare him with it. Using it to stop my anger spilling over. Control. I was the one in control.
‘No Klingon either then?’
Wallace Ogilvie shook his head. Very scared.
‘It is also said to originate in Sicilian. La vendetta e un piatto che si serve freddo. Others believe it has its roots in Chinese, Spanish or Pashtun. The Internet is great, isn’t it?’
Wallace Ogilvie was talking now behind the tape. I couldn’t make out a word. His eyes were talking too. They were telling me that I was mad and he was terrified. Perhaps. There is a fine line between the appearance of madness and insanity itself. Even I didn’t know which side of the line I stood on.
‘Got it yet?’ I asked him.
When Wallace Ogilvie shook his head again I wanted to slap him or kick him. No touching though. I had kept our contact clean until now and did not want to dirty my hands or feet on him. Control.
‘ La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.
‘ bortaS bIr jablu’DI’, reH QaQqu’ nay.
‘ La vendetta e un piatto che si serve freddo.’
I put my head very close to his. I whispered. ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’
His eyes opened wider at that. He was trying to speak again. I didn’t need to hear the words. Revenge? For what? Who are you? Where do I know you from?
Then there it was. Recognition.
Oh, he knew now all right. I nodded and managed a smile at last.
‘Yes. That’s right.’
Wallace Ogilvie shook his head furiously. His eyes were pleading, begging with me. No need to beg, I thought. And no point.
‘I’m not going to lay a finger on you,’ I told him.
I saw hope in his eyes. Faint, short-lived hope. A bit cruel maybe. The hope disappeared when I reached for the switch on the wall and flooded the room with light.
‘ La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.’
His eyes took in where he was and it filtered through to his brain.
We were in a freezer room. A huge industrial meat plant room that could house a whole herd of frozen cattle. But for now there was only me and Wallace Ogilvie. The white walls shone brightly under the fluorescent lighting, giving little indication that the meat plant had lain empty for nearly a year. The owners had taken a subsidy offer from Lithuania and upped sticks, leaving behind a workforce and a factory they couldn’t sell. Everything was in working order in case a buyer could be found but that hadn’t happened.
Security, such as it was, was easily bypassed. There was nothing to steal, nothing to use. No carcasses.
Not yet.
I think Wallace Ogilvie had worked it out by this point. That would explain why he had begun to cry. He shook and sobbed. He wailed in protest deep behind the tape.
I’d often wondered about pity. Wondered how I found it so easy not to give it room. I was supposed to feel it. I knew that. It was the natural, human response and I still clung to my humanity.
But my capacity for pity died the day she did. It disappeared along with hope, dreams and faith. I had no time and no use for pity. I compartmentalized. It’s easier than you might think.
Anyway, given that I had no pity for the others then it was never likely I’d have any for Wallace Ogilvie. I’d risen above any temptation to offer compassion to the rest so it was no effort to do the same with the man before me.
Pitiless. Merciless. Hard-hearted. I could do those. But not unfeeling. Right then, I was awash with feelings.
So was Wallace Ogilvie. He had pissed himself, a telltale pool at his feet and a dark stain at his groin. The stench was awful. Urine, fear and sweat swirling together. Disgusting but strangely pleasing in the circumstances. I was glad to know that Wallace Ogilvie was so scared he couldn’t control his bladder. That he was so pathetic.
It would have been good to think it was remorse but you don’t pish your pants out of guilt or repentance. Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. He cowered before his Lord out of dread and his Lord was me.
There was plenty I could have said to him but nothing came out. It was all there in my head but unsaid.
I looked at him. Stared at him. His head was on his chest now. It would have been so easy to hit him. Punch him, strangle him, kick him in the head, break his legs. So tempting. But I already knew what I was going to do and so it seemed did Wallace Ogilvie. Or perhaps he simply knew that he was going to die.
I stood over him, waiting until he lifted his head and looked at me with his red, pleading eyes. I nodded at him. It was now.
I turned and walked away, closing the door behind me. There was a window cut into the door so that I could see Wallace Ogilvie and he could see me. I stood for a few moments, looking at him and catching my own reflection in the glass. I looked calm apart from my eyes. They looked strained, wild.
I threw the switch. It was out of Wallace Ogilvie’s view but he would soon know that I had done it.
I stood, watched and waited. My eyes were on his, his on me. I wanted to see the reaction, the first sign of realization. I wanted to see him twitch.
Ten minutes and nothing. Maybe the unit had lain idle too long. I began to wonder if it was working properly.
Fifteen minutes and I was sure it wasn’t operational. I began to wonder if I could fix it. I’d no idea where to start. It would be terrible. It was all going wrong.
Then he twitched. It was just a shake of a shoulder. A single shiver. It was enough.
A surge of exhilaration and anticipation ran through me. He shivered with cold and I shivered with excitement.
I spoke to the glass in front of me. I spoke to him knowing that he probably couldn’t hear.
‘The normal body temperature of an adult human is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Your core temperature is already less. But I guess you know that by now.
‘Feel that tightening across your shoulders and neck? That’s known as pre-shivering muscle tone. It means your body temperature has hit 97 degrees.’
He began to move more. His legs shook against their bindings, his shoulders trembled, hunched and flexed. He was rubbing himself against the chair, the little that the ties would allow. His feet were shaking and kicking as best they could. His head swaying side to side.
‘Colder now,’ I told him. ‘Perhaps 96 degrees. Your body is shivering so that you generate heat by increasing the chemical reactions required for muscle activity. Amazing but that can actually increase surface heat production by 500 per cent.
‘The bad news is that you can only keep that going for so long because your muscle glucose gets depleted and fatigue kicks in.’
He was shivering so much now that the chair was dancing, shuffling an inch here and there as he did anything he could to get warmer. It was hopeless though.
‘Your hands are especially cold, aren’t they? Your palms will be no more than 60 degrees. Painfully cold. That’s because your body is instinctively sending blood coursing away from your skin, deeper inside you. It is deliberately letting your hands chill to keep the vital organs warm. It won’t be enough though.’
Now he was really shaking, trembling violently. It was almost as if he was having a fit.
‘Your body temperature has dropped to 95 degrees. You have hit mild hypothermia and your body is undergoing its maximum shivering stage. It is contracting your muscles to generate more heat. Don’t worry. It won’t last long.’
I waited and watched and waited some more.
The shivering was violent and broken by pauses. Then the pauses got longer and the shivering shorter.
Before long he had stopped all attempts at movement, no real efforts to move his legs. All he did was shiver. Then eventually, as I knew it would, the shivering stopped too.
‘Oh dear. Heat is draining away fast now. Half of it is disappearing through your head alone. Your ears must be so excruciatingly cold. You are below 95 degrees now. That’s bad. Every one degree drop below 95 means that your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by five per cent. You are losing it. When your body temperature hits 93 degrees then amnesia will start to prey on you. Pity that, I don’t want you to forget anything. Not just yet.’
He just sat slumped in front of me now, occasionally raising his head to look at me with a half-hearted glare. It was the best he could manage. His skin was turning blue. His pupils were dilated.
‘You’re in profound hypothermia now. Your temperature has fallen to 88 degrees and your body can’t be bothered trying to keep itself warm any more. Your blood is thickening. Feel it? Your oxygen intake has fallen by over a quarter. Your kidneys are working overtime. If you hadn’t already pished yourself then you would probably do it anyway. Your body is giving up the ghost.
‘In case you are wondering, and you probably are, there is no specifically defined temperature at which the body perishes from extreme cold. Nazi doctors, those sick bastards that experimented with cold-water immersion baths at Dachau, calculated death at around 77 Fahrenheit. Sometimes it’s lower, sometimes higher.
‘Chilling, isn’t it?’
His chest was heaving. His breathing was severely troubled.
I watched him intently.
‘You will now be about 88 degrees and your heart is in overdrive. Chilled nerve tissues are blocking the heart’s electrical impulses. It is becoming arrhythmic, pumping less than two thirds of the normal amount of blood. There’s less oxygen, your brain is slowing. You might be suffering hallucinations.
‘It’s going to get worse. Two degrees lower and you are going to feel really weird. It’s the strange bit. You are going to feel hot. Really hot. It’s at this stage that people freezing to death feel so hot that they start ripping their clothes off. Sadly that’s not an option open to you. You will just have to suffer.
‘No one really knows why but they think it’s because constricted blood vessels suddenly open and create a sensation of extreme heat against the skin. It will feel like you are burning up.
‘Your body is shutting down. It doesn’t want to play any more. That’s happening now. You are drifting away. Gone. Bye, bye.
‘You’re not dead though. They call it a metabolic icebox. You’re not blue any more, you’ve gone grey. If I looked I might not find a pulse or detect breathing. But you’re not dead. Not yet.
‘If, like the Nazis, I let your temperature plunge further then you would have a pulmonary oedema. There would be cardiac and respiratory failure. That would be fine except that I wouldn’t know when. You would be fucking dead and I wouldn’t know when. And I want to know when. I want to know the exact point of your fucking death. I want to know to the second. You remember that cardiac arrhythmia that you are having? It is very dangerous. Any sudden shock is likely to set off ventricular fibrillation and result in certain death. You need to watch that.’
I opened the door to the freezer room and walked quietly up to Wallace Ogilvie. Oh it was cold, very cold. But I wouldn’t be long.
I stood next to him. His head slumped. His body showing no sign of life.
I leaned into him. Put my mouth close to his ear.
And I screamed. I roared. I fucking bellowed my hate into his ear. I thought my lungs might burst with the effort.
His heart jumped once. Just once and I knew it was done.
I left the room, shivering through more than cold, closing the door behind me. I pulled the switch back to off, shutting down the freezing process, and slumped with my back against the wall. I slid to the floor, crying my eyes out.
I would cry until near morning, until Wallace Ogilvie was warmed just enough that I could saw off the little finger of his right hand and take his body elsewhere. Somewhere it could be found.
‘ La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.’
I said it out loud although no one was listening.