Chapter 9

It was morning now, and Mark stood outside his cabin breathing the sweet, clean air. That at least was one wholesome component of the cesspool into which he had fallen.

Around him, the Peace Haven girls, under the eyes of the bearded acolytes, were going about their duties. Perhaps they had been instructed on the subject because now they paid him no attention. In fact they seemed to make every effort to avoid him.

Maybe the word had gone out as to what had happened to Linda Barnes-how perilous it was to have contact with the new man.

Mark had found Linda the previous night.. She wasn't alone. The two girls in attendance in her cabin were honestly concerned with her condition. Also, they both were quite eager to have him leave. They didn't actually put it into words that they were afraid of Mark, but they obviously felt that if Carol Rice found him there it would go even harder with Linda.

So he'd left and gone back to his cabin. He'd slept but not too well and new he was tired, jumpy, and nervous. The puzzle of Dr. Sanders' whereabouts was still not solved. If Sanders had been taken and was being held prisoner, Mark's chances of finding him were rather slim. He was sure Peace Haven had facilities for hiding people.

Perhaps even dead people....

An hour later he drove into the village. He pulled up in front of the general store and looked around for Able Tate. The sheriff was nowhere in sight. Then Tate emerged from Sis Bennett's establishment picking his teeth. He approached Mark and the latter became instantly aware of a change in the sheriff.

Tate's manner was sullen and hangdog as he asked, "What do you want?"

"I'm looking for Dr. Sanders."

"I haven't seen him."

A change-yes, but exactly what kind? There was no belligerence whatever. Tate's hostility, the command of his presence as an officer of the law, had vanished. But something else had taken its place. A look of contempt and loathing glowed in his eyes, even though he seemed to be trying to hide it. It was as if he were looking inside Mark and finding filth. The same filth Mark himself found in Carol?

At that moment, Fred Kelp, the thin, sharp-tongued native Mark had met on first arrival, came out of the general store and saw Mark. Clear, undisguised hatred was reflected in his face.

Beyond doubt they had both heard the news-that Mark was now a part of Peace Haven.

"Have you any idea where Dr. Sanders is?"

"I've got no idea," Tate said sullenly.

Then, quickly, a change came over him. Everything in his face and manner indicated appeal. He raised a hand in a begging gesture. "Look, maybe you and I can make a deal."

"What kind of a deal."

"When you came here, you were against that outfit. You wanted something done about them."

"That's right-but you didn't."

"I did. That's honest! I did want to do something. But hell, you know why I couldn't."

So Tate was under the blackmail club too. Mark had known this of course, but this was absolute proof. Mark wanted to reach out, take the proffered hand, speak sincerely and honestly.

Instead he frowned and said, "I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. If you have something to say, say it plainly and quit beating around the bush."

Even as Tate reverted to his former attitude, Mark struggled with the fear that Tate could be a trap, a test the satanically clever Carol Rice had set up to find out if Mark measured up in the realm of loyalty.

Perhaps this was not true, but Mark couldn't risk it. The stakes were too high.

"I'll look for Dr. Sanders elsewhere," he said, and began backing the car away.

As he pulled out of town, he could feel Tate's contemptuous eyes burning into his back and his flesh crawled in shame in reaction to that contempt.

If Mark had any reservations in his mind that he was actually dealing with a sexually degenerated madwoman, the illusion was dispelled an hour later. It came about some four miles out of the village. As he left the settlement, clouds that had been fluffy white earlier were darkening in the western sky. Thunder rolled far off, signaling a summer storm.

He had no idea what rain did to the dirt roads, and hoped to get back to Peace Haven before the rain came. But he did not succeed. Just as the first drops hit the windshield of the car a figure appeared in the middle of the road to block his way. He braked the car sharply, flashed the lights on in the lowering gloom and saw Carol Rice.

She stood erect, holding up a commanding hand. The yellow glow revealed the face of one in the preliminary stage of some evil ecstasy. She wore a dress that came slightly below her knees. The rain sluiced down and the thin dress was dashed, soaking, against her body, revealing that she was entirely naked beneath the garment.

She came around to the side of the car, opened the door and took Mark by the arm. He got out. Going from the shelter of the convertible top out into the rain was like stepping under a waterfall. The rain was roaring against the trees now, Carol had to put her lips close to Mark's ear as she said, "I saw the storm coming and so I went to meet you."

He did not see the connection, although he knew that what stared out at him from Carol's face was indicative. Her eyes glowed with a bright, hot madness, her lips were parted and seemed unnaturally red in the gloom, her body quivered. She put her hands on his body-brazenly, obscenely, unashamed.

"All right," Mark shouted. "You found me. Let's get in out of the rain."

"No! No! Don't you see? It's the rain that makes it." He didn't, but he was to get the idea soon. Carol took his hand, pulled him toward the forest wall, through it and between the trees. They came to an open place that looked like a pond.

When Carol pulled him into it he realized the whole area was a mud flat with the thinnest surface of water over it. In a frenzy she stripped off the dress she was wearing and stood naked in the driving rain, clawing at his clothing. His trousers fell down to his ankles, he went down on his back. Carol pulled the trousers off and threw them after her dress. As he struggled on the ground, she pulled off his shorts; tore the shirt off his back.

Now he too was naked and she looked down at him in completely uninhibited obscene freedom. She laughed, went to her knees, scooped up a handful of mud and began plastering it over his chest.

"Carol-for God's sake-"

Her voice was a snarl. "Shut up! Shut up, goddam you!" She threw herself into his arms, pulled him over on top of her. He rolled away in an effort to free himself. Then he understood this was what she wanted, to roll with him in abandon.

Then the battle-it could hardly have been called less-took on fantastic aspects: a man and a woman fighting desperately in the mud until they were covered from head to foot and no longer resembled human beings. In the struggle he felt her mouth and teeth and hands on the most intimate parts of his body. But mainly he could feel the animal lust rising higher and higher in the madwoman's body.

Spitting mud from her mouth, she began hurling words and phrases-filth beyond description, filth that made the mud seem clean-into his ears. Her verbal suggestions and demands made him want to vomit. Suddenly he found himself expertly locked in a position in which his leverage was gone. In horror he realized what she planned to do. He struggled. "No! No! For God's sake-No!"

"Yes! Yes!" Her scream was that of a lust-maddened harpie as she desecrated the beauty of her body by the filthy demand she made upon his. Expertly, using her fingers in an indescribably demented manner, she forced him, by pure physical reaction to comply to her degenerate need.

He clawed at the ground while his body functioned automatically. Tears of anger and helplessness came to his eyes. Then her face was over his and she screamed. "Take me, goddam you! Take me, you crawling animal SOB!"

And in a reactionary rage he took her, they were like two huge fish hooked together, splashing and flopping helplessly in the mud....

It was over. She lay motionless for a long time, as though he had killed her. Then she stirred. The driving rain had washed the mud off her upturned face, when she opened her eyes it was as though she'd just awakened and was wondering where she was.

"Are you all right?" Mark asked.

Her mind cleared and she laughed. "All right? I never felt better in my life."

"This is-" He was going to say crazy, but again he caught himself in time. He forced a grin. "This is the damndest kind of lovemaking I ever bumped into."

She rubbed her breasts again his chest. "But it was fun, wasn't it?"

He hoped his grin wasn't weakening-turning in any way sickly or uncertain. He tried to speak gaily. "You know me. Game for anything new. Did you ever make love in the middle of a river?"

"There's no mud there. This is better," she said matter-of-factly. Then, as the fever abated, she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "I'm cold."

"I'm not exactly hot, myself."

"There's a place back in the trees that's dry. We can build a fire."

As they slogged ankle deep out of the swamp, Mark thought she was not quite as gay and light as she appeared. The storm clouds had thinned, although it was still raining, and he could see a kind of dazed, set look on her face. The reaction from high emotional violence, he thought.

They came to a small log cabin set in a higher clearing. Mark pushed the door open. It was warm and dry inside. "This is a hiker's cabin," she said. "People can stay here but they're supposed to leave it as they found it."

"Somebody did," Mark asserted as he lit the lamp. The floor had been swept, the table cleared, there was a pile of logs beside the fireplace. "Shall I build a fire?"

"I think we need one."

They were naked, their clothes still back in the swamp. Mark pulled a blanket off one of the two bunks and handed it to Carol. "Dry yourself on this and wrap it around you. I'll have a fire going in a few minutes."

He stacked the kindling and the logs, looked for the matches. As he did so he glanced at Carol and was struck by the change in her appearance. Now she was like a tired, wistful child. All the arrogance, the cruelty, even the madness seemed gone.

And Mark found himself in the realm of unreality again. Was it possible that this cold, wet, shivering girl single-handedly had built a fantastic place like Peace Haven? Was it possible that she held the highest officials in the state completely helpless through blackmail?

It didn't seem possible. As he touched flame to the shavings in the fireplace, Mark had a feeling of utter futility. He was dealing with something he did not understand; he was wading into waters too deep and murky to be safe-waters fraught with peril, and he saw only chaos and disaster as the end.

But he shook these feelings off as he rubbed his hands briskly together over the flame.

"Come close and get the benefit of the heat."

She obediently came to the fireplace and sat down cross legged in front of it. Mark sat down beside her. "Where are you from, Carol?"

She looked at him quickly. "I told you-Boston."

And one of the things that eluded him-one of the things he should have connected into the pattern, flashed clear in his mind. Dr. Sanders' words concerning John Basford:

Basford is in his middle sixties. A strange case ... He got involved in a couple of sex deviation scandals ... I personally consider him a sex maniac.

Basford was from Boston. Carol Rice was from Bostion. Carol Rice had seduced Basford, used him, ruined him.

Mark was sure of this but he still wanted some verification. How to get it was another matter, though. He pondered openings, finally said, "Don't you think I ought to know something about The Prophet?"

He tensed himself for a hostile reaction, but it did not come. Carol Rice stared into the rising fire and spoke to the flames.

"His name is John Basford. I loved him."

"Tell me about him."

"He lived in a fine house, I lived in the slums. He was a lot older than I was, but when I met him in a tavern one night, I knew, immediately that I loved him. That was how it worked with us."

"That can happen." Mark spoke gently. He wanted only to keep her in her present mood.

"We were happy for a while. He didn't want to take me home to his family and I understood. I didn't ask that, I only wanted to be with him.

"Then you certainly loved him."

"Yes-yes I loved him."

Mark detected a faintly rising note in her tone; as though hysteria, like the summer storm, was forming far away on the horizon.

"They had a ranch in Wyoming-the Basford family-and John said we could go out there for a couple of weeks and be alone."

"Was the ranch deserted?"

She turned her head and looked at him as from far away. "There were other people, but we went camping up in the mountains. We took two horses and a pack horse and went up in the hills."

"That must have been wonderful."

She gave no sign of having heard. Her body stiffened slightly within the arm he'd put around her shoulders and he sensed that the storm was coming nearer.

"There was a lot of grass up there and some men brought a lot of sheep to eat the grass-"

The picture on the cabin wall.

"There were four men with the sheep and one day they came to where we were camping. They hadn't had any women for a long time. Maybe everything would have been all right if I hadn't been taking a bath in the creek. I was naked when they came and when I saw them I was afraid and started to run. They chased me, yelling like crazy men."

She paused and Mark said, "It must have been awful."

"I guess it was and then I guess maybe it wasn't-not then."

"What do you mean?"

"They chased me and one of them caught me and dragged me back across the grass to the tent. He dragged me by one leg and the others there whooped and hollered like crazy."

"They were drunk?"

"Yes. They were drunk from whiskey and from not having had women for a long time. They dragged me back and then they took-took turns."

"Oh, my God!"

"It wasn't so bad-not then. I could rationalize it. I saw they didn't want to hurt me and I felt sorry for them. Maybe I felt sorry for them because they had me and they were raping me and I thought that way in self defense. I thought, 'I'm a woman and they want a woman and so. they're taking me. It won't kill me to be taken by four men. I won't like it, but it won't kill me.' That was what I told myself while they kept taking me one after another while the others watched."

She was stiff against his arm. The storm was closer. Mark sat silently, waiting for the first splash of emotional rain.

"Then John came back. I'd hoped he wouldn't because I was afraid they might hurt him. But he came back."

"What did he do?"

"One of the men was raping me as he came into camp and he just stood there and watched. The man stopped raping me for a minute and all four of them stared at him, waiting for him to do something. But he didn't do anything. He just stood there looking and after a while the man on top of me started raping me again. He finished and got up and John just stood there and watched while the next man took his turn."

The air in the cabin had turned electric. Carol sat stiff as a ramrod.

"And while he watched, a change came over him. He became a stranger. I could see it in his face. He didn't see me as a girl he loved anymore. He saw me as a naked female on my back with my legs open getting gang-raped, and he began to shake.

"Then, when that man finished, John took his turn, all crazy and wild. I looked up into his face as he was raping me and saw a wild animal. I started to cry and that excited him more. He got up all sweaty and panting and then-"

"Then what, Carol?"

"Then he told the men a filthy thing they ought to make me do."

Her teeth were clenched and her eyes tightly closed. Her head was thrown back as though she were in great pain.

"He told them a filthy thing and one of them made me do it. Then the other. Then John. But that wasn't the end. He knew more filthy things and told them and they made me do everything to them and it was hell-hell-hell! Something inside my mind snapped. I knew it snapped, I felt it snap, and I knew it would never go back together again."

In pure emotional rage, Mark drew her hard against his side. "Oh, Carol-you poor kid."

"I did all the filthy things and then they went away. I remember I lay there looking at John and I saw him change again. It was over and he went to pieces. He started to cry-like a baby. Then he got down on his knees and crawled over and kissed my foot. I was too tired to do anything. I just lay there and pretty soon he was kissing me and slobbering all over me.

"I felt sorry for him. If you'd been there-if you'd seen him-you'd have felt sorry too for this helpless animal that could do a thing like that, then had to kiss my foot and beg forgiveness instead of killing me or killing himself or running away and never coming back."

"You-forgave him?"

"No. I just lay there looking at him and not saying anything. Then we went to sleep from exhaustion-both of us. When I woke up something had happened to me. It wasn't that I hated him. He was just nothing. But something had happened inside me. In my mind. That thing that snapped would never come together again."

Suddenly, she laughed. A high, nerve grating, piercing laugh.

"Carol!"

She jerked away from him. "God damn them all!" she shrieked. Goddam all the men ever born. And all the women! Goddam the women more than the men! The women weren't there to help me! They weren't there to take it like I did-from one after another-and do all the filthy things until I vomited! So I said, by God, I'd fix them! and I did!"

The awful explanation flashed through Mark's mind. A girl gone mad from abuse and humiliation and sudden degradation; from the brutal killing of her love for a man. But she needed men. She'd proven, ever since Mark had known her, that she could not live without men. But she could not go without avenging the terrible wrong done to her, so she had turned her hatred on women on the pretext that they had escaped her fate.

A rationalization that gave her revenge and still did not close the door to the sex she needed. Mark was astounded by this revealing glimpse of the deviousness of the human mind.

Carol was pressing her face against the wall, pounding her fists against the rough logs. Then she stopped and stood rigid, motionless for a long time.

Mark wondered what he should do. Comforting her seemed a futile gesture. It would have been like comforting a potential tornado. He sat and waited.

But the tornado did not materialize. After a while, Carol turned from the wall and Mark saw instantly that she was herself again! She blinked, as though she'd gone through some sort of a hypnotic spell, and now it was over.

"Let's get out of here."

Mark suited his mood to hers. "Sure. But what will we use for clothes?"

"We'll go back to the mud flat and wash our things and wear them wet until we get home."

Home. The word shocked Mark. How could anybody call a place like Peace Haven home. "Okay. Let's get going."

He realized he'd been under some kind of a spell; he'd lost all track of time. It was now dark outside.

As he eased the car slowly down the muddy road, Mark risked another question that could have been touchy.

"I heard indirectly that Patience White was sent to the Kelps by way of an offering. The girl in exchange for leaving Peace Haven alone."

"Not exactly," Carol said. And again it was cold business. "There was a vague understanding. I talked to Fred Kelp. He was drunk at the time and said the Kelps were going to raid Peace Haven and wipe it out. I told him a girl would be where Patience was, and when. He didn't say anything but-well, that's how it happened."

Perhaps, Mark thought, he was getting callous from contact with her callousness, but the hideous implications of what Carol said didn't seem to hit him as hard as it would have previously. No, he decided, he wasn't growing callous. It was just that after a while you go shocked out. You were just as indignant but your nerves refused to respond as violently.

"Are you going to send any more girls?"

"Not until he makes some kind of an overture."

"Would you like me to talk to the Kelps?"

This seemed an anger her at first. But after thinking about it for a few moments, she said, "What would you say?"

"I don't know. I'd just play it by ear. See if I could placate them-pacify them."

She smiled at him cynically, cruelty-the old Carol as she'd been before the incident of the cabin. "Make them love us?"

"That might not be possible. But I might make them fear us."

"How?"

"When somebody pushes you around and you haven't got a weapon, what do you do?"

"Get one."

"All right, When the Kelps invade our haven-if they do-we have the right to shoot them."

Mark's sense of shock returned. Why had he said that? Why had he actually-instinctively, without thinking-suggested violence? Was Carol's cruelty and viciousness rubbing off on him? Was he becoming so subjective about this thing that he was taking the side of evil?

He thought not. He thought he was probably saying that the men who'd raped Patience White deserved to be shot. However the words were out, and it was too late to take them back.

"Of course," Carol said. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"You believe in peaceful methods. And you're right. They are the best."

"But the Kelps are cowards. Threaten to defend yourself with a gun and they'll crawl away like yellow dogs."

"All the same, let me go and talk to them and sound them out."

"All right," Carol said uncertainly. Then she spoke sharply. "But you tell me exactly what they say. I'm still running this outfit and don't you ever forget it."

"Of course. You're the boss."

They drove in silence, Mark uneasy about his own reactions. He seemed, now, to be think along the lines of preserving Peace Haven rather than destroying it. Was this true?

He fell to wondering about Sanders. Had Sanders escaped?

Actually it didn't make much difference. In a short time he himself would have access to the material that supported Peace Haven. When he got that he would act.