He opened his eyes and, as he tried to focus, groaned in agony. At the same time, a feeling of relief exploded inside him.
I’m alive. I’m alive, I’m ...
The sensation of joy drained away, however, as he realized that above him was not the cloudy sky of Ons but a damp and irregular stone ceiling, its far corners lost in darkness.
Where the fuck am I?
He carefully turned his head and realized that he couldn’t move a single muscle from his neck down. He was struck by the terrifying possibility that he had been paralyzed, but the shooting pain in his knee brought him back to reality.
As he succeeded in wiggling his toes inside his sodden boots, never had he felt so happy at something so trivial. He then tried to do the same with his fingers but, hard as he tried, found he couldn’t move them at all. That was when he realized he had been tied up.
He was lying on an old wooden table, which swayed a little when he moved. His hands had zip ties around them, and a thick rope had been lashed around his chest, securing him to the table.
He tried to process it all. His last memory, before suddenly waking up in a cave, trussed up like a turkey, was of being thrown against the rocky shore. That was enough to disorient the most levelheaded person.
He breathed deeply and instantly regretted it as he felt a sharp pain in his side. He must have a couple of broken ribs at the very least. The shock kept the pain at bay for the moment, but it was just a question of time before he truly began to suffer.
He closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten as he tried to calm the crazed beating of his heart. Then he opened his eyes again and looked around, a little calmer now.
He was inside a long, high cave, the stone floor covered with dry sand and the pulverized remains of seashells. In the openings in the walls, here and there, somebody had placed small kerosene lamps, which hissed softly as they bathed everything in their yellowish glow, although most of the light came from an old beacon connected to a gasoline drum by an antiquated rubber pump that looked at least a hundred years old.
Music played through a loudspeaker. The powerful voice of Rocío Jurado sang passionately of how she had found love, against a background of clicks and crackles as an old audiotape wound around the bobbins. That incongruous detail, more than anything else, made his hair stand on end.
He gradually took in more details, or at least as many as he could observe from the position in which he found himself. There were a few old pieces of furniture, including a bed that consisted of an old strawmattress on some fishing crates. Fixed to the walls were hooks from which hung oilskins, nets, and various implements.
Just then, Roberto sensed the presence of two faces in the shadows. He painfully turned his head to try to find out who those two people were, observing him, motionless, silent, and unblinking.
Almost immediately, he wished he hadn’t.
The two people neither moved nor spoke because they were dead.
From a shelf, in two enormous glass jars full of alcohol, the head of Elvira Couto and a man who he assumed was Ricardo Docampo observed him through lifeless eyes. An inarticulate cry of terror caught in his throat.
“Help!” he finally managed to scream with all the power in his lungs. “Help! Is there anybody there? Help!”
He shouted himself hoarse, but nobody appeared. He struggled against the zip ties and the rope, but these only dug into his flesh, biting deeper the more he moved. His hands tingled, and he was soaked with sweat.
Just when he was beginning to think he would be trapped there forever, he heard footsteps approaching from the far end of the cave.
“Hello! Who’s there?” he shouted. “Help me! Please!”
The steps came to a halt a few feet away, but try as he might to turn his head, he couldn’t see his visitor. Then he heard the sound of a chair scraping as it was dragged across the floor, and a shadow came between him and the light.
Roberto focused his gaze, struggling to identify the person, and when he did so, he gasped.
In front of him, with a satisfied air, was Varatorta, who observed him with a friendly smile.
“Hello, Roberto,” he said in a smooth, polite voice, as if they had just bumped into each other while strolling through the park. “Welcome to my secret lair. You have no idea how much I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.”
34
There Is a Monster Among Us
Roberto remained silent, too confused to say anything. His mind, already befuddled by the fall into the sea, refused to process the mass of information that was now assaulting his brain.
“It’s you,” he finally managed to say. “You’re theTangaraño. You’re the murderer.”
“Come now,” Varatorta said with a smile. “‘Murderer’ is a very ugly word. I think of myself as an artist. Or someone who investigates human nature, if you prefer.”
