In respect of the pistol, she didn’t get up from the chair until he ordered her to her feet.
He followed her across the barroom, through the back door, to the outhouse that had two holes in its smooth board seat. He had restored the small structure from a state of near collapse. In another century, this privy served the patrons of the saloon, but it now accommodated Optime and his prisoners.
Previously, when he accompanied Ophelia to the outhouse, he permitted her to close the door. This time, the sharp edge of his repressed rage became apparent when he denied her privacy.
In the summer heat, the place stank. Beetles crawled the pit below, and fat spiders sat patiently in their elaborate tapestries of sticky silk everywhere that the walls met the ceiling.
The shadowy interior would have allowed a degree of modesty, except that Optime stood to one side of the open door to watch her, allowing a shaft of sunshine to spill inside and reveal her in the act.
She refused to be embarrassed. Instead, she made him the object of ridicule. “Now that you have the sex drive of a dead worm, is this how you get your jollies—watching ladies pee?”
Backlit, his face in shadow and his eyes as black as the empty sockets of the Grim Reaper, he didn’t respond. His silence was ominous, and Ophelia decided that she should say no more.
When she was finished, he walked her out to the street and followed her, pistol in hand, toward the small stone church at the end of the abandoned town.
Slowly sinking toward the great mountains in the west, the sun had for several minutes bathed the ghost town in a honeyed splendor that made some of the weathered buildings appear gilded. Now, the late afternoon grew moody with a blood-orange radiance as eerie as witch fires. The few windows that remained intact took color from the sun and peered at the street like jack-o’-lantern eyes.
At the church, three stone steps led up to a wide stoop, where Optime instructed Ophelia to kneel. She obeyed.
Holding the gun in his right hand, with the cold muzzle jammed against the back of her head, he used his left hand to insert a key in the lock that he had installed. He opened the door.
“Crawl inside on your hands and knees.”
She knew that he wouldn’t kill her here, not yet, not until he broke her and could write in his manifesto that she had acknowledged the false promise of hope. He first required the death of the spirit and only then the death of the body. His evil creed was a construct of madness; however, it included principles by which he justified his actions. Ophelia believed he would reliably conduct himself according to those principles.
She had to hope that he embraced his insane vision with the faith of a true believer. She had no other choice.
She crawled out of the orange light and into the church, which was as dark as a coffin with its lid closed.
Optime picked up something from the floor, just inside the door. It was a Tac Light, and Ophelia turned her head away from the blinding beam when he directed it at her.
“Get to your feet.”
She rose and looked around at what was less a church than it was a crude chapel. Five pews to the left and five to the right of the central—and only—aisle. The roof was supported by three tie beams, king posts, and rafters.
“Sit.” With the light, he indicated the first pew on the left.
The four windows were neither tall nor wide. They had been bricked in from the inside. This recent masonry was the work of Optime, which he’d described in his manifesto. The bricks were practical, making both a mausoleum and prison of the building; but they also had a symbolic purpose, being a barrier against hope ever entering this abandoned church.
Ophelia didn’t need to be told the source of the faint foul odor, but Optime said, “I’ll finish my manifesto and offer it to the world when there are seventy-seven dead in the basement, seven of them children, each seven years old or younger.”
He had not yet explained in his writings why he’d settled on that number of victims or why seven must be children. Perhaps he didn’t know. And even if he could explain his morbid mathematics, the explanation wasn’t likely to make sense.
“If you want to know your destiny beyond all doubt,” he said, “open the door to the basement and inhale deeply, get the odor of your future in full strength.”
She said nothing.
“I’ll lock you in here without food or water. But when you’re desperate enough, there’s sustenance below. Rainwater leaks in and pools down there, and the stew awaiting you is richer than what the Donner party had to eat when they were trapped in deep snow in the Sierra, two hundred years ago, with nothing but the stringy meat of their dead companions.”