The Inquisitor

The Kidnapping of Edward

ONE

Edward was a sturdy looking twelve-year-old, he played a lot of sports, especially basketball and soccer, his favorites. Brown-haired with hazel eyes that seemed to flash when he spoke to someone, especially a girl in his class, he was very attractive to girls and boys alike. Although an only child of wealthy parents, he had a lot of friends, especially in sixth grade. The night he was kidnapped was a sultry evening as he dozed off in his bedroom, and it had been raining in tropical downpours earlier. Now the rain was over, and so were the thunderstorms, which had terrified him with their cloud-to-ground lightning. He felt safe. Only he wasn't.

The scraping sound astride his window went unnoticed by the nearly asleep sixth grader. So did the slight squeaking and grinding sound of his window being raised, as softly as possible by the determined intruder. The man, actually about to become Edward's kidnapper and only companion during the ensuing six weeks, was slight of frame and sturdy himself, an adult, and far stronger than the ninety-pound [40 kg] boy, as he stealthily eased into the moonlit shadows of Edward's cherished room. His footsteps made no sound except for a hint of sound, a barely perceptible creaking on the floorboards near Edward's cozy bed where he lay swaddled in covers and practically asleep. The man could hear the boy softly breathing. He smiled a smile that no one saw. His plan to capture this lad was going well.

TWO

Edward felt a jab in his forearm, just below his left elbow, as he stirred in his sleep. It was a needle prick, and contained a powerful sedative that would make the 12-year-old less resistant to what was about to happen.

When the intruder removed the boy's blanket and sheets, a familiar blue blanket with orange basketballs adorning the bed and tucked in nicely by his Mom just a few hours earlier, he gazed at the sleeper in his plain brown pajamas, barefoot but otherwise still clothed. A moment later, he picked Edward up and cradled him in his powerful arms, before escaping into the cool night.

The car was waiting; a silver Hyundai. The man placed Edward, still fast asleep, sitting him upright in front on the passenger's side. The boy slumped in his seat, breathing softly, as Horatio, the kidnapper, turned the key in the ignition. It's almost as quiet as a hybrid, he mused. The Hyundai Intrepid sped off to its destination, an hour's drive away. Horatio had visions of what he would do with the boy, and about the ransom he would ask for. "His parents are loaded," he said aloud, as the words slipped out. Horatio had suffered due to his station in life, an existence based in grinding poverty. This boy has it better than I ever had, Horatio thought. At a stoplight several miles away from the boy's home as he prepared to get on the Interstate, he glanced at the boy's fragile form, so vulnerable. Would he punish the boy in some of the ways he had been punished? On the Interstate, the car sped onwards, ever onwards, as Edward slept soundly.

THREE

Horatio was speeding to his destination in the dense woods. For a Hyundai, this crate can handle, Horatio mused while making a sharp turn onto a gravel road. Edward moaned in his restless sleep. The boy was dreaming that he'd been kidnapped! Scenes of torture and carnage with himself as the victim played through the lad's unconscious like the scariest movie ever! Horatio glanced over as the boy moved his limbs almost as if fending off an imaginary attacker, in a telltale movement reminiscent of flailing, and he had to smile. Boys often react this way, he said almost aloud, but under his breath. But why does it always end the same? Horatio asked himself. Why? Why? Why? Why?

The gravel settled back into a monotonous clatter resounding off the Hyundai's undercarriage. The boy settled back into REM, a shallower sleep filled with his dreams. Like an Intrepid traveling, as it was, such a bad pun, why are cars given such names? Horatio asked the dark night, the car cornered at too fast a speed around a bend nearly hurtling onto its side and just missing a Ponderosa pine. But it righted itself, as Horatio used to race cars, and he knew how to take a car – or a boy – to the edge. Soon the familiar red cabin came into view in the Hyundai's headlights. Inside a clearing, the cabin was miles from nowhere, not anywhere. Horatio braked and the Intrepid stopped a bit more abruptly than he would have liked. "We're home!" Horatio exclaimed. But Edward was still trying to sleep in his drugged state, and when the man got out, he was obliged to carry the twelve-year-old bodily like a bride, eventually past the threshold into what promised for Edward to be an alien world, a world of pure terror – or so Horatio assumed.

FOUR

Horatio carried his young hostage through the trap door in the cabin's hardwood floor by activating the electronic sensor on the wall with direct eye contact, an unusual innovation that he still considered amazing, a bit of technology that was transporting the art of kidnapping to nouveau heights. Without this peculiar activation, a witness such as a would-be rescuer in the cabin's parlor-sized room would have assumed the trap door to be non-existent. Yes, the cabin's floor seemed seamless, excuse the alliteration, as Edward's twelve-year-old tender skin. But as Horatio descended the set of ten steps into the soundproofed subterranean chamber where Edward would be bound and gagged in just a few moments, tied to the wooden pillar for support, he felt confident that all was proceeding according to plan. First he stripped off the boy's pajamas, his loose-fitting shirt and similar cotton pants, leaving Edward in just his briefs, not for any prurient reason but out of necessity – he had to fit the ropes tightly against the boy's bare skin. The ropes were thin and pliant, plastic ropes; they'd be tight enough to keep Edward well-secured, but not tight enough to cause him undue pain or discomfort. Horatio was an expert with ropes, a one-time Eagle Scout. The boy would have had to be Houdini's long-lost great-grandnephew to escape his bonds. Around his ankles first, and then his knees, cutcheon knots mostly, the kind of bonds that were traditionally Hungarian, not American or Belgian. Then his waist, keeping Edward's arms snug along his ribs and side, the last knot near the sixth-grader's bared chest, and finally the handkerchief gag, a cloth nearly as thin as gauze, so the pubescent would not strain to breathe. He was still decent in the pale light from a single fluorescent bulb, wearing his Hanes single garment; as nudity was unnecessary and Horatio was not a pervert. This is pure business, the kidnapper mused, I'm doing it for the money. But while sex might not have been his interest in the boy as with some notorious cases, Horatio did have his own issues. He kidnapped boys partially because of those issues whether he cared to admit it to himself or not. Edward wasn't the first; he was the third such victim. This time, however, things would work out much differently than with Charlie or Luke. Edward was a special case – a very special case, mainly because he was a very special boy.

FIVE

Edward was beginning to stir in the cabin's basement, although he was still in a dream-like fugue, sleeping. It was mid-morning of the next day when he opened his eyes, although there was no clock to tell the time. As the boy's eyes slowly opened, he noticed the predicament he was in, and guessed immediately what had occurred. "I've been kidnapped," Edward said aloud, and sensors that Horatio had installed captured the words clearly. The twelve-year-old was also under videotaped surveillance from a digital camcording device. In fact, Horatio had begun his day hours before. He was watching his assumed prey with a hawk-like interest.

Somehow, Edward knew this. "I know you're watching me. You might as well come down here and keep me company, whoever you are."

"I know you can hear me too."

This was eerie, a little more than unsettling, to Edward's captor. How could the kid know not only that he'd been kidnapped, but that his every movement and utterance were being recorded? There was much that Horatio didn't know about Edward, and there was much that he was about to find out. He wasn't much like those other boys. In fact, he was quite unlike them.

Horatio had already learned the phone number of Edward's parents. He'd patiently dialed it many times that morning. The phone usually rang and rang, a high-pitched electronic trill that had annoyed the kidnapper to no end. Once he'd heard the answering device click on, and nervous, he'd tried to leave a message. "I've got your –-" but the stupid machine had cut off, leaving his tongue to go through its useless machinations in the void of nothingness. Where were these people? Weren't they concerned that someone had stolen their only son from his bedroom while he slept? Finally, he let it go. The boy had still been asleep, probably from the effects of the drug he'd administered via injection. But now Edward was awake. Most assuredly awake the splendid-looking nearly nude 6th grader was, tied and bound nicely to the post in Horatio's subterranean chamber. He wasn't struggling though. He seemed strangely calm. No little boy tears, just a hard-to-read expression that seemed to imply something, but what, he didn't know. He watched Edward through the video monitor, his Hanes sole garment seeming somehow incongruous against the backdrop of the boy's sturdy but still developing body, its smooth boyish muscles not straining to loosen its bonds or struggling in any way. If this boy was terrified, his terror was invisible. In fact, perhaps Edward wasn't terrified. Was there instead a certain thrill or smugness hiding in his ambiguous facial features? He was a very handsome boy, almost hypnotic in the way his "tweener" body met along his pale yet defined chest and thighs, his slightly bulging calves, his athletic feet. To Horatio, this silent spectacle was maddening.

SIX

Edward was daydreaming about what his kidnapper might do to him, or what he was like, so he could size him up. Although his pajamas had been removed, Edward wasn't particularly concerned. The still air in the subterranean chamber beneath the cabin's floor was warm enough, and comfortable, not overly humid or dry. The cement under his soles felt hard, but he could also feel a carpet, and sure enough, when Edward looked down, there it was. The small carpet, a throw-rug, had been placed there, obviously for the sixth grader's comfort. This act of kindness, was instead viewed as something else, an act of weakness, by the perceptive boy. "I'm really going to have fun with this idiot," he said under his breath so that it was not distinguishable on Horatio's audio monitors. But a smile suddenly flashed across Edward's face, and his captor saw that, just as he was meant to. 'I have him now,' Edward muttered again just below Horatio's threshold of hearing. 'I've lured him down here.' Somehow instinctively the twelve-year-old had also surmised that his captor was male, like himself, not a woman.

Horatio had seen the boy's lips move, twice in the last several seconds, but it was more maddening, if that was even possible. Now the boy was smiling a smile that implied he was in heaven instead of hell. What the f__k is going on?" Horatio exclaimed to himself by his monitor in the cabin's main living room. Suddenly, Horatio stood up, bolting out of his chair and pressed the remote control using his eye contact so that the trap door opened. He came bounding down the ten wooden steps so that he and the boy were soon eye to eye, each in plain sight of the other.

"What took you so long?" Edward said.

For a long and pregnant moment, Horatio said nothing.

SEVEN

Edward stood there scantily dressed and bound. Somehow, his gauze gag had been removed, which was odd, Horatio thought.

Edward regarded his kidnapper for the first time while awake, sizing him up with his keen and perceptive eyes. The boy saw a man in his late twenties with a scruffy beard and blonde; Horatio also possessed facial hair, the beginnings of a blonde goatee. He looked to be of average height and weight, in good shape except for a slight paunch, which implied "fun" for the boy. He won't be able to catch me in a footrace, Edward mused. When the long, pregnant silence, like a staring contest ended, it was Horatio who spoke first, hoping to intimidate his victim as he had the others. He still had no real inkling of the danger he was in.

"What happened to your gag?" he said.

"Maybe you didn't tie it well enough," Edward countered, sowing the first seeds of doubt in his confident captor. Edward kept staring at Horatio, his gaze rather peculiar, fierce in its way and penetrating, intense; incongruous for a typical 12-year-old boy, especially one who was supposed to be at Horatio's mercy. Horatio noticed that the boy had weird front teeth; it appeared that two of his most visible incisors had been sharpened to conical points, in the fashion of a vampire. But this has to be my imagination, Horatio considered. Still, it was unsettling.

Horatio attempted to regain the upper hand. "I could torture you," he asserted.

"You could," replied Edward.

But the twelve-year-old appeared unfazed. Most boys feared pain and would be terrified in this situation, Horatio thought. What's up with this kid?

"Aren't you afraid of pain?" Horatio asked sweetly.

"I like pain," Edward said, "and I also like causing pain. How do you think you would torture me?"

"I could stick needles under your toenails," Horatio offered, trying to frighten the boy as most kids dreaded needles. He'd actually used needles in this way on his two earlier victims. He was already considering using this mode of torture with Edward's tender feet.

"Kewl," Edward said, "But if you do, there might be some more surprises coming for you."

This wasn't even close to the reaction he'd expected. Horatio changed the subject abruptly. "I tried calling your parents already this morning."

"That must have been fun for you. Any luck?" The boy suddenly sounded chirpy and cheery.

Horatio tried to ignore Edward's latest affectation, possibly because he had no idea what it could mean.

"They'll pay a good ransom for you, their only child," he told the boy.

This logic swiftly provoked Edward's laugh, a laugh that reminded Horatio of a demon in one of those devil movies, or maybe a hyena. Horatio emitted an involuntary shudder.

Horatio finally got up the nerve to ask the twelve-year-old why this was so funny. "I don't see how you find this so f__cking hilarious," the boy's crazed captor screamed.

Edward suddenly regarded his captor with a kind of pity. "They'll talk to you eventually," the boy cooed, reassuringly, "But what if they don't want me back?"

In the subterranean chamber's stillness, the boy's words resounded like a thunderclap in Horatio's mind, even if Edward had spoken them in a barely audible whisper.

EIGHT

Edward's parents had wondered what had happened to Edward. The mystery was provoking quite a lively discussion in what had been the sanctuary of their home – at least lively by their standards.

"I don't know," muttered Caroline, Edward's mom, to Richard, her husband and the boy's biological father, "I think he might have been kidnapped the other night."

"Maybe so," Richard said, "maybe so." Richard was a handsome hulk of a man, a promise already of what physical appearance young Edward would turn out to have. His stare was penetrating like his son's, but Caroline didn't mind. She was used to both her men, and their every nuance.

"Shouldn't we call the police?"

"What could they do about it? Besides, it would ruin Edward's fun. He's been fantasizing about something like this happening for more than a year now. Kidnapping Edward serves whoever might have taken him right. Soon enough he'll figure out that Edward is like a kid from Hell."

"I guess you're right, dear. I wouldn't want to be that poor man."

"Yes, from that garbled message on our machine, if he's the one that took our boy, he is a man. He's going to realize soon enough that Edward is quite extraordinary."

"Maybe we should answer the phone the next time it rings though."

"I guess. But then the kidnapper will put Edward on the phone. If he talks to us it might ruin the boy's fantasy. It could make him angry. We don't want to get him angry."

"I suppose not, still, we should see what the kidnapper wants, assuming he is a kidnapper."

There was a pregnant pause. Caroline spoke to break the sudden stillness. "It is kind of peaceful around here without Edward being home."

"Yes, it sure is. I kind of like it. It's a little like a vacation."

"More than a little, I'd say," echoed Edward's mother. She was knitting at that moment, a craft she felt nervous about doing when her unpredictable twelve-year-old was about. She was knitting a winter cap for Edward, in his favorite color, dark-red, the color of blood nearly dried. "He sure is a Hellion," Caroline said, this time more of a comment to no one in particular.

NINE

Horatio thought he'd found a way to torment the twelve-year-old and regain the upper hand. With Edward helpless and bound, although no longer gagged, and nude except for his still relatively clean pair of Hanes, the strong captor began tickling the boy, in an attempt to find vulnerable places on his body. He used his fingers applying different types of pressure to different areas exposed to his touch. He began with the boy's underarms and along his ribs, as Edward squirmed and struggled at first while bound fast in the expertly tied cutcheon knots. This exercise was promising Horatio thought, as the squeals of laughter sounded deliciously desperate and more normal, and as the squeals proceeded to transform themselves into gasps for air in-between each boyish scream, for a few moments Horatio grew more contented, sligntly more authoritarian with each passing moment. But those gasps from the boy never quite translated close enough into genuine fear for Horatio's liking.

In fact, the kid's smile became mingled with longer and longer periods of eye contact, as Edward grew more engaged and inured to the unpleasant sensation of being tickled, became too accustomed to this invasive type of unpreventable touch, an intrusion that can lead to torture and even murder from the digital pressures of a skilled tickler, like the Moravian brothers of legend who used to kill their captured victims. Edward after a while, by the time the touch had begun to focus on Edward's bare belly and chest, his meaty thighs, he is a sturdy boy for this age, Horatio mused, so sturdy and mentally strong, difficult to break, by the time Horatio found himself focusing on Edward's belly and chest and tender nipples and pectoral tissue near the boy's nipples, and as the captor's hands began tickling, ever tickling, and roaming lower on the twelve-year-old's body, down to his calves, and finally to the boy's feet, and at last Edward's bare soles began suffering the captor's tickling, relentless tickling, of the sinister type once-practiced by the Moravian brothers of lore until the boy's laughs began sounding like disconcerting cackles, and then like sharp intakes of breath resembling the hissing of a copperhead, they sounded to Horatio as if he were tickling a venomous snake, instead of a boy, all of a sudden – not the quality of the boy's beautiful near-pubertal skin, but the sound, the sound, the hissing, the hissing, it was unnerving, damn, this kid is different, so different, so disturbing, so that Horatio while down near the floor of the subterranean chamber couldn't stand it any longer, and abruptly .... stopped.

Edward stopped laughing and halted simultaneously the hideous hissing sound that he had been making.

"Why the f___ck did you just stop, you bastard?" He was staring at Horatio with a kind of anger. He had LIKED the incessant tickling. He'd enjoyed the excitement of having to struggle for each breath as he'd gasped for air. The hissing to Edward was a proclamation of the joy he felt at being brought close to the edge. It was a thrill for him. Horatio suddenly realized all this and ran upstairs, up the ten steps back into the cabin's living space, leaving the boy bound and tied, the hideous, hideous, boy! This was not at all the way it was supposed to be.

Upstairs, Horatio went to his own bed and dropped off into a deep sleep. Back downstairs in the chamber Edward simply took stock of the situation and immediately began planning his next move.

TEN

Edward was considering what had happened between him and his captor, playing over and over in his mind the favorite fantasy of being tortured and helpless. He'd enjoyed being tickled so mercilessly, but why had the stupid man stopped? The boy's resentment was building, mingled with an incipient anger. It's time to start playing THE GAME Edward mused. The game was nasty, although the details of it were less fresh in the twelve-year-old's memory. He thought of Charles, his reluctant best friend and age-mate, and what had transpired just nine months before. Now the memories were flooding back, searing, painful wounds to the boy, old scabs of emotions resurfacing almost with a mind of their own. His parents had attempted to console him, but Edward's torment, a self-flagellating torment that seemed perpetual, had never completely gone away. The next phase of Edward's kidnapping began commencing. He knew Horatio was upstairs above this subterranean chamber somewhere. The boy sensed that his captor had been repulsed by him and was not watching at that moment. What was the man doing? Edward wasn't entirely sure but hoped that Horatio was sleeping or resting, and not vigilant, so that he might more easily pounce and execute the plan that was already forming. Except for his parents, most adults could be easily manipulated he'd discovered.

Like a snake shedding its skin, Edward began the tensing and relaxing ritual that he knew would free his hands. Once his hands were freed of the odd futile knots that his captor had so painstakingly tied, he could be entirely free. THE GAME was going to be very amusing with this man as his reluctant vassel. It would begin in just a few moments, Edward thought, as the boy's heart began racing with a kind of terrible joy and excitement.

ELEVEN

Horatio was sleeping off his frustration in the bedroom above the subterranean chamber. He was sleeping soundly but he was not a snorer. He was also not alone in the little room.

Edward watched his about-to-be victim like the boy predator he'd become. He'd watched a pleasant cartoon once in which a wolfine beast was licking its chops. He tried licking his own chops but he wasn't sure what part of the human anatomy that his chops were. The twelve-year-old had put back on his pajamas and some boy's size workboots that he'd found while quietly ransacking the cabin. How convenient! He'd exclaimed soundlessly. He'd also discovered some of Horatio's "toys" – like some plastic twine and a pair of handcuffs and a small whip. It's time to play the GAME Edward mused. It's time to play the GAME he mused again. The monstrous sixth-grader was angry, thinking really vicious thoughts. He would let his bad boy imagination run wild. He would be a really bad boy today. It's TIME to play the GAME Edward mused again, this time still silently only more loudly inside his head. In a split instant, Edward pounced!

TWELVE

Edward was very quick and agile, and soon had Horatio, the man who had been his captor, trussed with his arms behind his back and his hands well-cuffed. "You little bastard, what the Hell are you doing!" Horatio screamed. Horatio was next blindfolded as Edward had also discovered a plaid bandana that he tied securely around the hapless kidnapper's head so that he could no longer see.

"C'mon, let's go!" Edward hissed, as menacingly as a twelve-year-old boy can sound when he hisses.

He also used the little whip he now wielded, and slashed Horatio with surprising force, its leather plaits striking the unprotected skin and causing tender pink welts all over the grown man's back. "Owwwh!" Horatio protested, but then felt the nasty whip strike the backs of his thighs and calves and a multitude of new welts being born.

"C'mon, we're going to play the game!" Edward yelled. He was driving the poor man who'd been his captor through the main living room of the isolated cabin. Horatio stubbed his toes on several impediments that the monstrous boy deliberately led him over. Edward opened the door. They were suddenly outside in the sunshine. It was slightly past midday and sunny enough to cause Edward to adjust his eyes in the bright glare. Having a blindfold and a pair of white briefs as scant coverings for his nakedness were perhaps Horatio's only solace.

The boy slashed the man with the whip again and again, driving him onwards into the unknown, a terrifying unknown for Horatio. What had been familiar terrain became a total mystery to his senses because he was now wearing a blindfold.

"Please don't do this!" Horatio begged pitifully, as his bare grown-up soles began encountering the sharp stones of a gravel path.

"Keep moving you idiot!" The sadistic child now screamed, slashing with the awful whip again and again. Edward was really getting into THE GAME. This was perhaps his favorite thing to do, more fun than being tortured and vulnerable, although he liked that too. If Horatio had only known, he'd never have taken this boy. How could he have known that the child, a mere angelic visage of tender years, was really this evil?

THIRTEEN

Wearing his pajamas and the boy-sized workboots he'd found in the cabin, Edward was really quite comfortable himself, and dressed perfectly for the pleasant weather. The air temperatures were in the mid-70s Fahrenheit [25°C], and there was a slight breeze blowing. The boy was smiling, as his parents put it, he was "in his glory," and having real fun in the midst of THE GAME. He drove his adult human prey onwards along the sharp stones of the gravel path and then off into a thicket of brush and brambles. "Keep moving!" the boy hissed again, and used the nasty little whip for emphasis, its plaits searching for raw and tender areas of Horatio's vulnerable body to attack. "Owwh!" Horatio whined,as the whip found its mark on the backs of the man's bare legs, stinging and welting with each motion of the sadistic boy's wielding arm.

But the thicket proved a new horror to the nearly naked adult being mercilessly driven forward, ever forward. Besides the scratches from the thorny branches Horatio's body encountered, there were thorns and sharp projections on the ground, torturing the man's naked soles. "Please!" Horatio screamed piteously, hoping for some mercy in the boy's heart. But mercy was the last element he'd be likely to find in that dark, angry place.

All over his body and especially on the soles of his feet, a hundred tiny cuts and bruises were forming. Horatio wailed in pain. But still the bad boy pushed him onwards, ever onwards.

Soon Edward's eyes lit up as he spotted a new potential torture for the man who'd become his victim.

"Oh, I can see a little treat for you!" Edward exclaimed.

Horatio could only imagine what that treat might be.

FOURTEEN

Edward's eyes lit up as he guided the barefoot and nearly naked Horatio toward the 'treat' he saw, a very active hornet's nest situated near the end of a small bush branch only a few inches above the thorn-streaked ground. He kept flashing the nasty little whip, urging his blindfolded former captor onward, until Horatio's bare foot was poised just above the fairly large insect colony. The man's sole seemed to hesitate in mid-air for a couple of long agonizing seconds, almost as if the man's foot was in some way prescient of what it was about to disturb. The blonde and handsome Edward smiled an angelic boy's smile that seemed enigmatic except in this peculiar context. At this moment, the sixth grader was pure evil.

What Edward saw was a mud daubed paper wasp creation, a miracle of nature that revealed several large yellowjackets in their telltale yellow and black coloration entering and exiting the nest, actually a moderate-sized hive, by an entrance that was just above the thorn and bramble-strewn ground. Horatio had stopped because it was painful to continue walking. He couldn't know that it was about to get exceedingly more painful in just a few seconds.

Edward was impatient. His horrid little whip flashed again to keep his own prey moving, striking Horatio in the small of his back and on his vulnerable and tenderized thighs. "Get going you –" the boy hissed again, insistent with this power he possessed, a viciousness emerging that a day or two earlier, Horatio would never have suspected.

Suddenly, Horatio's foot moved forward the crucial few inches, and there was an ominous crunch. It sounded different than a twig or branch cracking, Horatio remembered thinking much later.

It took maybe five seconds for dozens of angry yellowjackets to fly straight at the giant intruder, silently as is their way. Edward knew that most of them would ignore his own pajama-covered flesh, although a few did try to "light" on the boy, who casually brushed them off.

Edward watched as the hornets started to sting the man, and then he laughed, obviously enjoying the show. The yellowjackets were stinging Horatio on every bit of exposed flesh that they could find, and meeting no resistance except the man's screams of pain, which hardly altered their predetermined flight paths, especially once they'd landed on bare human skin. Welts and swelling appeared like raised darker pink dots, all over Horatio's powerful frame, and without any extra prodding from the boy's whip, the man burst into flight, and started running as he screamed and wailed piteously. The yellowjackets for their part, still clung to the tortured adult, sometimes even after stinging. Only when the man, now free of the terrible boy, at least for a moment, discovered the cold relief of a trickling stream a few inches deep and lay full length face down in it to escape the stinging creatures and their wrath, justified from their own insectine perspective no doubt as he had unwittingly destroyed their nest, only then, did the hornets cease their warfare against the Shiva who had ruined their world.

The water in the stream was about four inches [10 cm] deep. When Horatio plunged into it, he also gashed his forehead on a sharp rock.

Edward raced to catch up and found the entire scene playing out before him to be uproarously funny, in fact hilarious. But at that moment, Edward had to use the bathroom in the cabin and so needed to get back. "Okay," the cruel boy said, "Get up."

Horatio was sobbing, a blubbering mess.

"C'mon," Edward said, feeling the urge to expel feces, "and stop your stupid blubbering."

FIFTEEN

Edward was soon back in the subterranean chamber after taking care of his bodily function, still dressed in his pajamas but now barefoot again as he didn't need the workboots. He had Horatio resecured to the post where he'd been himself tied and tickled, and was now tending to his former captor's stings, welts, and abrasions, numerous in number. Witchhazel stings when applied, but it's also a disinfectant and perhaps the 12-year-old's intentions were good.

"Yeoww!" yelled Horatio. He was also squirming which Edward was attempting to discourage.

"Will you hold still?" The boy said while applying the liquid to the man's bare skin on his chest and belly. He was also using a pair of tweezers to remove stingers when and where he could find them. It was tedious and Edward was meeting with considerable resistance. But Edward was taking his responsibility as a boy-nurse seriously.

"I have to do it, silly. Do you want to get a humungous infection?"

"I feel like I'm going to die," Horatio moaned.

"You're not," said Edward emphatically. "You just have a lot of stings."

"I feel awful," Horatio moaned.

"I can believe it," Edward agreed. "But you didn't do half-bad for your first time playing THE GAME with me."

The point wasn't missed on the now hapless Horatio. "First time?" he said. "I don't ever want to do that again!" Suddenly Horatio broke down and started sobbing.

"Stop it," ordered Edward, "Right this instant." He paused, "Anyway, I hate to see a grown man cry."

"I should have never kidnapped YOU!" Horatio said.

"I don't know. I'm kind of glad you did. Guess what we're going to do next now that it's dark out again?"

"No! No!" screamed poor Horatio as the cruel boy smiled pacifically. Horatio feared the worst. Maybe a nocturnal rerun of the dreaded GAME as a way to amuse young Edward.

"No, not the GAME. Not tonight anyway. I was going to let you call my parents when I know they'll be home. Maybe you can ask for a ransom or something. Who knows?"

Was Edward merely teasing, raising Horatio's hopes only to dash them? The 6th-grader grinned enigmatically.

SIXTEEN

It was now early evening of the day after Edward had forced Horatio to play the dreaded GAME. Horatio was being allowed to rest in his bed under the covers, but not to sleep. Horatio, wired with a certain anticipation, wasn't in the mood to sleep as Edward had called home and reached his parents. The boy was having a conversation and Horatio was listening in on the cabin's extension phone.

"Yes, his name is Horatio. He's my kidnapper!" Edward sounded so chipper and enthusiastic.

"That's our boy," Edward's dad remarked, "Having a good time?"

"Excellent," their 12-year-old blurted out, "He's everything I could have imagined."

"We're hoping that you get THE GAME out of your system for awhile," Edward's mom chimed in. "Does he want to speak with us?"

"I think so," Edward replied while looking over at his erstwhile captor. There was just a smidgen of disdain in the boy's eye contact. Horatio was still hoping to salvage a ransom out of this mess. "Do you want to speak with my parents now?" Edward was so confident in dealing with the man who'd once been a stranger. Too damned confident.

Horatio tried to interpret the boy's gesture in a more positive light, leaping at the chance, almost literally. He began speaking into the phone. "I have your precious son. I'm demanding a ransom for you to get him back. I'll need $50,000."

Listening in silence for what seemed an eternity but was instead several long agonizing seconds, the man felt himself cringing. What happened next was unnerving to Horatio, and would have been disheartening to any respectable abductor. After the pause, there were only peals of laughter; a kind of jolly hilarity bordering on mirth. Both parents were laughing so hard they were speechless. Finally, Edward's Dad managed to get out a few words. "Are you serious man? Are you sure it isn't the other way around? Who's got who out in that lonely cabin?"

Horatio tried to bluff, remaining calm, and serious. "I could torture him."

More laughter ensued. Finally Edward's mom spoke. "If you do, you'd better be damned good at it. I'm sure you've discovered by now what can happen if our Edward get's angry."

"He actually likes pain." Edward's dad chimed in. "And is pretty capable of inflicting pain, as well as very creative and resourceful when it comes to going about it. My advice to you: For your own sake, don't rile him!"

"Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll give him back for a measly $10,000. I don't know why I'm doing this. It must be bargain day in the 12-year-old boy store. I'll bring him back tomorrow if you pay me and don't bring any cops."

There was another polite pause, and then more laughter from both parents simultaneously, as if Horatio had pressed some kind of invisible button. Edward too began giggling uncontrollably and emitting a strange chortle. Horatio found himself recoiling from the boy, for perhaps the ength time since he'd kidnapped him. That chortle was an absolutely inhuman sound and made Horatio's neck hairs stand on end and move about as if they were dancing. He was feeling very frustrated.

Again, Edward's Dad broke the laughing jag. "Okay, we'll make you a counter offer. If you can bring us $300.00, or the equivalent in items of value, and get him back to us in a week, we'll take him off your hands. Take it or leave it."

Horatio was flabbergasted. "Are you asking that I pay YOU to give him back? Are you crazy?"

Edward's parents were indeed serious. Serious indeed. Edward started chortling again as he looked at Horatio and finished saying his goodbyes to his parents. "Don't hurt that poor man too badly, Edward," his mom implored. "We don't want another incident. Will you try to behave, at least to some extent?"

After another lengthy pause, Edward agreed to rein in his 'very worst impulses'. But he was a bit too reluctant about it, it seemed to Horatio. Edward was creeping out the grown man who'd once been a total stranger and less than a week previously had not had the misfortune of knowing this particular kid. Horatio shuddered involuntarily when he noticed the look the malevolent twelve-year-old shot him at that moment, a deadly glance penetrating the one-time child abductor's perceived comfort level like a freaking laser. The kid was pure evil. When the conversation ended and the dialtone unpleasantly resumed, Horatio began having second thoughts about accepting the parental counter-offer. Those second thoughts would haunt the kidnapper again and again in the coming weeks, like acid being poured from a morning sky.

SEVENTEEN

The next five weeks of that summer flew by for Edward, but for his one-time kidnapper it must have seemed like an eternity. At any hour of the day or night, when Edward felt the impulse to terrorize Horatio, he would commence an impromptu session of the dreadful GAME. Sometimes he would blindfold his adult, and now completely unwilling victim, and force him to walk or run over hazardous terrain of ground-covering shrubs and prickly undergrowth, usually barefoot.

Sometimes there were new horrors, made worse because they were unpredictable.

Horatio's flickering hopes to maintain his sanity began to increasingly focus on the counter offer posed by Edward's parents during the disasterous phone conversation, the one during which a demand for the boy's ransom had morphed into a payment of $300.00 made to the parents only so that they would TAKE THEIR little monster back! On an afternoon when he told Edward that he'd accepted the offer and would drive him safely back to his parents 3;

Horatio was dressed and ready. Edward's parents were expecting their son at two of the clock that afternoon. It was already 12:45 p.m. and it was a forty-five minute drive to Edward's home if traffic wasn't heavy. The boy had been resting on Horatio's bed, sleeping peacefully and contentedly until late in the morning. Now, he was elsewhere.

"Edward? Where are you kid? Where did you go? We have to get you back home by two o'clock."

Horatio knew that the twelve-year-old had to be around the cabin somewhere. He did the eye contact remote trick and opened the trap door to see if the kid was in his favorite place, the subterranean chamber. Horatio, now healed for the time being from some of the ordeals he'd been put through, easily negotiated the ten steps down into the chamber. That's when he heard the trap door slam.

He frantically shot up the stairs back up towards the cabin, but the trap door suddenly wouldn't budge. A second later Horatio knew why.

"Heeiiiiiiiiiii" Heeiiiiiiiii" It was that hideous laughing sound the boy made. The former captor was trapped down in the chamber for about nine hours before Edward relented to the man's cries and tears and let him back up.

"I didn't want to go back today," the twelve-year-old simply said.

EIGHTEEN

Horatio was devastated when he failed to bring the boy back that first time, but didn't have much time or opportunity to brood about his situation. Edward had plans for his unwilling playmate. Every day these plans involved a brand of sadism that frightened Horatio to his very core. Although he never again brought Horatio near the hornet's nest, he'd threaten him with it.

On one long night's journey the odd couple traversed a circuitous route around the remote cabin and into a nearby country village. The pair came upon a sheriff who watched amused as Edward led Horatio brazenly past him, with his hands cuffed in front of him and with the man barefoot and wearing a blindfold.

Horatio hadn't realized that anyone was near them, especially not a sheriff, but he was aware of lights flickering through his blindfold from nearby streetlamps, and felt the stones of the village Main Street digging into the soles of his now extremely tender feet.

The sheriff's deep voice startled the shit out of him.

NINETEEN

Edward eyed the sheriff's deputy with more than a cursory interest. He was a towering man with bulging muscles, maybe six foot four [1.93 m] with well-coiffed hair and a moustache. Edward estimated the deputy to be in his mid-to-late 30s, around his Dad's age of 37. Under different circumstances, the perceptive 12-year-old reckoned, this sheriff would have been an excellent 'unwilling playmate' candidate. Edward thrived on domination fantasies like this one: Being able to completely terrorize someone who happened to be much bigger, stronger, and older. Yet the boy was a realist. He recognized the impossibility of that fantasy being acted upon any time soon.

The deputy, a veteran law enforcement officer of twelve years, dressed in a gray policeman's uniform, imagined something entirely else when he spotted the man and boy on his village's Main Street at that odd hour. Probably a father and son out on a camping trip, was his own first impression. The boy didn't seem in any danger whatsoever. The kid wasn't nervous, or anxious, in the slightest. He seemed quite comfortable with the man. Still, this encounter was a trifle odd and worth initiating conversation.

"Nice night," the deputy began, "I'm Deputy Sam McGill. You guys okay?"

Horatio was anything but okay. He was once again at the mercy of this kid from Hell. He wanted it to end. Immediately. Horatio's head turned in the direction of the stranger's voice. He wanted so badly to say, "Help! You have to get me away from this vicious child, this sixth-grade sadist! He's going to end up hurting me real bad or maybe even killing me!" Tears of impotent rage pooled in his eyelids. But instead he said nothing, knowing he'd kidnapped the boy and would be headed for prison if he did even the tiniest amount of explaining. Instead, Edward seized upon the opening to frame the situation.

"We're just having some fun tonight," Edward said, "My Dad and me like to do outdoor things at night instead of watching TV or something lame like that."

"That's real nice. I wish more fathers would spend quality time with their kids."

I'm not his God-danged father! Horatio mused furiously. But dared not speak his thoughts as at that precise instant he felt the boy's gentle touch, which might as well have been a cattle prod.

"It's good exercise too!" Edward opined with apparent extra glee. And then the boy added, "Dad doesn't get out to the gym enough in summer because of his job, and he so looks forward to our little camping trips. I love my Dad." Edward squeezed Horatio's neck causing him to cringe with a kind of revulsion, a gesture that the boy unfortunately noticed.

Deputy Sheriff McGill was touched by the handsone boy's obvious devotion. He choked up a little as he said,"Well, I didn't mean to interrupt you guys. Carry on!"

Horatio felt a sickening wave of panic when the deputy sauntered away in the opposite direction down the village street.

"C'mon, we're going back into the woods now, you stupid dickhead!" Edward hissed.

TWENTY

"We're going to be doing something really special now that you've earned it," Edward hissed, while dragging the terrified Horatio away from the lights in the village and back toward a patch of dense undergrowth and thick forest.

"I'm being punished again?" whined the man who now could barely remember that he'd been the one who'd kidnapped this kid.

"Sort of," Edward hissed again, "We're going to do a Meld."

"A what?" Horatio whispered, having no idea what the boy was talking about, but knowing it couldn't be much fun, except perhaps for Edward.

"A Meld," Edward repeated, as if he were explaining something to an infant, instead of to a grown man.

The boy was leading Horatio over harsh terrain, with lots of pine cones and small rocks underfoot, and through a few thorn-strewn patches that made the unshod one-time kidnapper wince. Soon the man-boy pair came to a quiet grove in the darkness, visible to the naked eye only as indistinct shadows on a night when the moonlight was at one-quarter phase, barely adequate for night vision. Edward suddenly stopped quick in his leather hiking boots, an article of apparel that Horatio envied.

"I like to do Melds," the 12-year-old commented, still without defining what a Meld was or in any way lessening the adult's rising fear. Edward, by contrast, knew exactly what a Meld entailed.

Edward approached his human prey, or so it seemed to Horatio. "Face me," he ordered. The sturdy boy then placed his index and middle fingers of each hand and pressed their tips against his companion's temples, firmly but not painfully. He then came very close to Horatio, close enough so that he could smell the boy's sweet breath.

"Are you going to kiss me?" Horatio asked rather plaintively.

"Not hardly. We're going to Meld."

For a second or two, nothing happened. Then, with the clarity of an electric shock, it began.

TWENTY ONE

When it began, Horatio found it terrifying. Because he was a flawed person not naturally given to empathy or compassion, the MELD with this particular boy remained terrifying. The lightning of neuronal impulses that trafficked between their brains would have been illuminating and perhaps even wondrous to a human being who was kind and accepting of other human beings, no matter how different. It was simply Jungian, a merging of minds, one mature but damaged by childhood events and traumas never resolved, the other mind immature but perfect in its way, a beautiful mind as handsome as the boy's body, yet wired differently than are those of most humans. Edward's mind, while predatory and perhaps evil in its way, was also deliciously idiosyncratic. To his former kidnapper, this intimate knowledge being willingly if invasively shared was anything but welcome. Inside Horatio's head straight from the inner spaces of Edward's being came flooding a billion poisonous thoughts, realities, impulses, and imaginings. Like most human children, this special twelve-year-old possessed a light and a dark side of infinite complexity. IT merged with Horatio's own thoughts, except the resultant blend was like oil and water, like sandpaper and flesh pressed together, like a billion bleeding wounds formed in an instant.

His classmates at school knew Edward's diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome and took it for granted. They generally avoided him because he was strange, but a reluctant toleration of the boy's eccentricities existed too. None of them, not his teachers or even his parents realized much about the condition other than recognizing the boy as slightly peculiar. Edward, however, was aware of much more, especially of the power that the condition gave him over people who didn't have it, especially neurotypicals who were vicious or lacking empathy. Edward imagined himself to be like those he felt a kinship to in history. The Egyptians had been like Edward, four thousand years before. They'd been identical in fact, with similar mental processing, with a peculiar affinity for picture symbols instead of letters.

The MELD continued to create agony for Horatio. He began screaming, shrieking in a kind of excruciating pain. "Stop it! Make it stop!" Tears were cascading down the man's cheeks in what appeared to be a copious flow, and as they did, the tears and the ducts releasing them seemed to be burning as if a caustic irritant were being poured on his tender skin. "It feels like acid," the man screamed, pleading with Edward now, "Make it stop." A few seconds later, it mercifully ended, as Edward's communal ritual was finally spent. "That was a good one," Edward simply said, "Thanks."

TWENTY TWO

During his time being kidnapped, Edward subjected Horatio to five more MELDS, each more excruciating than the last. But he liked to vary the methods of torture used to torment this abductor who'd become his prey.

One day he chased a shrieking Horatio around the remote cabin in a circumnavigation that came to resemble a perpetual motion machine, around and around. Edward chased his hapless victim while brandishing a razor-sharp steel Bowie knife that was nine inches [23 cm] long with serrated edges. "I'm going to cut you when I catch you!" the boy kept yelling like an enthusiastic banshee. Edward didn't run at full speed because catching the man was the last thing he wanted. The fun was in the chasing.

Another time Horatio was led blindfolded through the woods and told by his sadistic 12-year-old 'kidnappee' that "We're going to have some real fun now. I know where there's a copperhead snake. I'm going to make you kiss it." Edward was lying, but Horatio unfortunately believed the boy after what had happened with the yellowjackets.

Another psychological twist he subjected Horatio to involved something he'd been deathly afraid of as a boy Edward's age – earthworms. Horatio was tied and speadeagled on the forest floor. During a MELD, Edward discovered how cold & gooey worms made to crawl over the naked skin of his chest and stomach was more than unpleasant to his former captor; and that some bullies had so abused him.

Horatio's shrieks of pure fright resounded through the forest until the man became hoarse.

Once, and only once, while they were relaxing and lying clothed on the bed in the cabin, Edward tried confiding in his unwilling playmate, and flashed just a hint of the vulnerability that the boy himself felt constantly, every minute of every day. By then, he'd begun calling his one-time kidnapper by his given name. "Horatio, Horatio, where art thou Horatio?"

"I'm right here kid," the man answered, "but then you already know that." He sounded tired, emotionally exhausted, but not angry.

"Horatio, I'll tell you something. Even when I'm with people, I may as well be somewhere else." While pondering his perpetual loneliness, and his separateness from most people, Edward was on the verge of tears. He thought that he was risking something, revealing a truth, reaching out, with this person who'd cared enough to kidnap him. Or had he? Lacking any empathy whatsoever, perhaps bearing simultitude to many kidnappers of young boys, Horatio simply didn't get it.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

Edward just got angry again. "C'mon, we're going down into the chamber, you and me."

A few minutes later, Horatio was in the subterranean chamber beneath the cabin, tied, and bound, UPSIDE DOWN, his head nearest the floor.

"What? What did I do?" Horatio yelled.

Edward just looked at him with contempt. "I'm going back up into the cabin."

"You're not just going to up and leave me hanging like this?"

"Yup, 'fraid so."

A few seconds later, the familiar trap door slammed shut.

TWENTY THREE

The rain fell relentlessly onto the remote cabin's corrugated tin roof, pinging and pinging. It was monotonous but interesting to listen to from Edward's perspective. He had been hearing Horatio's muffled shouts, the man begging the boy to untie him and remove him from the subterranean chamber. Horatio was hanging upside down afterall, but in the last few moments the man's desperate pleas had ceased, and he was now quiet. Probably all his blood has rushed to his head and he's fainted like Charles did that time, Edward mused, a little worried. I better go and check on him. Edward teared up, starting to cry when he remembered his friend, his best friend actually, the only real friend he'd ever had. It had been an accident, the authorities had said, and also his parents and Charles's parents. All the adults had been sympathetic, amazingly so. Eleven years old, Charles had suffered a seizure while tied and bound upside down. ''No one could have predicted such an event," the attending physician had remarked,"the boys were just playing a bondage game."

Edward lay on his back on the bed, gradually growing sleepier. He began dozing off. About an hour later, he approached his conscious state again. When he suddenly thought of Horatio, Edward felt a wave of dread, a genuine sense of suffocating panic. It was eerily quiet, like a silent tomb in the remote cabin. "Horatio!" Edward screamed, leaping off the bed. "I'm coming." In his panic, the boy forgot how the trap door opened, and just stared at the place in the floor where it was. The twelve-year-old became really frightened. He was almost ready to call his parents when he remembered again how the door opened. Eye contact. Edward forced himself to relax. He connected with his eyes. On the fourth attempt , the trap door finally opened, and Edward bolted down the ten wooden steps.

Horatio was motionless. Is he dead too just like Charles? Edward untied the man who fell like a rag doll onto the concrete floor. This strange man who had kidnapped him and given him so much pleasure now given way to absolute fear. "I have to give you CPR," Edward said. He put his mouth to the man's lips just as Horatio suddenly burst back from unconsciousness.

"No! No!" Horatio screamed, "Please kid, not another MELD! I can't take it! Please! Give me a break! I can't stand it!"

Edward felt a mixture of emotions at that instant simply overwhelming him. He began cackling incongruously, that hideous laugh invariably repulsing Horatio more than anything else the boy did.

"I hate that laugh of yours," Horatio said.

"I know," Edward replied, "but I'm so glad you're alive!"

Geez! What a weird kid. Horatio thought. What a freaking weird kid!

TWENTY FOUR

It was a cobalt blue sky. Edward was looking up at it outside the cabin that had been his home for a big chunk of the summer. He pondered, and pondered. Horatio was tied and bound and gagged down in the subterranean chamber, albeit right-side up this time. Edward had been scraping off little bits of his former captor's skin with some sandpaper he'd discovered, probably the kidnapper's prized toy left over from one of Horatio's earlier boy-nappings. But the twelve-year-old had grown bored. He'd gone up into the cabin and then outdoors for a little break. He missed his parents. He missed his computer and even his familiar posters in his bedroom. He missed his dog, even though he didn't have one. If I did, this place wouldn't be a good place to fantasize about having a dog, Edward mused in his bittersweet peculiar way. "If I had a dog, I'd call it Sparky," the boy said aloud so that the surrounding forest might listen.

Calmly walking back into the cabin that had come to be so familiar, Edward picked up the phone on this Saturday. It rang with the fiber optic clarity and electronic trill that every American telephone had come to mimic, with ringing bell sounds a bygone memory. Someone picked up on the other end. "Mom? Is that you?" A few moments later, the arrangements had all been made, except for the payment expected from Horatio if he was to be allowed to give Edward back.

When the conversation was over, his Dad had joined in too, Edward knew what he had to do. He knew exactly what he had to do.

TWENTY FIVE: CONCLUSION

Edward opened the trap door with his concerted eye contact, a laserbeam of attention, and bounded down the ten wooden steps with a bounce. Immediately he began untying Horatio who began sliding down the pole as he was gradually untrussed, and finally ungagged. The man, now emotionally and physically spent beyond belief, gazed at the boy he'd once kidnapped with the saddest eyes that Edward had ever seen. He dared to speak. "Are we going to have to play the GAME again?" Horatio asked plaintively, his voice practically a whimper.

"No," Edward replied, his own voice a little sad too, "Not today."

"That's good," said the much-abused man, "Thank you." There were tears of relief in his eyes.

Edward led his former captor upstairs into the cabin and then sprang the surprise. "Get your keys!" The boy was smiling, not laughing.

"You mean it?" Horatio was not getting his hopes up too much considering the history of his ordeal, of what had originally supposed to have been Edward's ordeal.

"Yes, we're going back to see my parents. Maybe you'll be able to strike some kind of deal with them so that they'll take me back."

Horatio grabbed his car keys and locked the cabin after he and Edward had gone out into the sunny day, the day so sunny, Horatio was now thinking, that it was beyond meteorological and on the brink of the miraculous. Soon the two were driving in the Hyundai; the man dressed and presentable; the boy barefoot and in his pajamas, precisely the attire he'd worn on that long ago night when he'd been kidnapped.

The two spoke nary a word during the entire 37-minute ride.

Horatio pulled up in the Hyundai half-expecting an avalanche of police and law enforcement vehicles with all that implied, but there was just the parent's single automobile, a Subaru, next to them in the driveway.

"Mom! Dad! We're home!" Edward shrieked happily, just like the every-boy he wasn't. He padded barefoot into the house and was immediately hugged.

"Have HIM come in!" said Edward's Dad.

After some pleasantries were exchanged, Edward's Dad came right to the point. "Do you have the money we've agreed upon?"

"Otherwise you'll have to keep him," insisted Edward's Mom, more taciturn than she usually was.

Edward didn't seem to care either way.

Horatio gazed forlornly, as might a bereft pet, first at Edward's Mom and Dad and finally at Edward. "No!" the poor man cried, bursting into a gusher of sobs. "Please don't make me take him back!"

A few moments later, a solution was reached, although some might consider it a bit drastic. Drying his tears, Horatio handed the keys of the Hyundai over to Edward's father, and signed the "Quit Claim Deed" to the car that the paternal figure had held in his hand, with a ballpoint pen in his other hand, the sinister left.

Horatio was ordered to wave goodbye to the boy who he'd once kidnapped in the dashed hopes of collecting a ransom.

Edward smiled a crooked-toothed grin and began that awful laugh.

A moment later, Horatio began walking down the quiet residential street, headed for somewhere else, wherever Edward wasn't, never once looking back.

The End