Page 47

How many times I’ve toyed with that button, determined to know why it never lit up like the others. Where it took the elevator. Why I never saw anyone else attempt to access it.

Thoughts click into place, as I recall the one time I saw a group of men in black suits, business partners of my father’s, enter the elevator. My mother had summoned me to her sitting room, and I waited for the men to clear the elevator first. By accident, I pressed the button to my father’s office, which put me in a panic, but when the car arrived, and the doors opened, his office was empty. As if I’d imagined all those men in suits, like a sketchy dream.

My father twists around, facing the back wall. It raises the hairs on my skin, like any moment, he’ll turn around and stab me in the back with one of those knives.

The elevator comes to a stop, and a slight tremble snakes over my bones, while I wait for the doors to open. The sound of grinding metal from behind stirs my curiosity, and I turn around to find the back wall has opened on a cavernous room lit by sconces.

The catacombs, I bet, though I haven’t been down here to know for certain.

A thin gauze of cold air clings to my skin, when he leads me down hallways that seem to be made of stone. The clang of the metal knives is the only sound between us, over the steady thud of footsteps and the rush of blood pulsing in my ears.

We pass entrances that seem to lead to other tunnels, like a maze of them one could easily get lost in. My father comes to a stop in front of a wooden door brandished with brass moldings, like something out of the medieval era, but recently updated. Once again, he presses his ring to a panel on the door, and it opens to a small, dark room.

“What is this place?” I finally ask.

“Generations ago, your great-great-grandfather had this castle built on an Indian burial ground the locals wanted to bulldoze. He was granted permission to keep it and bury his own relatives here. It’s where we keep the bones of our ancestors.”

A light flips on, illuminating the room, in which a number of tools hang from the wall. Knives. Whips. Chains. Some I’ve never seen in my life. An old chair that reminds me of something from a dentist’s office sits smack in the middle, only this one comes equipped with straps, and some kind of contraption around the headrest that looks like the dental gear I wore when I was thirteen.

More clanging fills the room as he drops the knives onto a counter opposite the chair.

“They say it starts with animals, but that’s not always true. My obsession began with bones.” A piece of what looks to be the bottom jaw of something sits out on the counter beneath a cupboard that holds various jars, some filled with solutions and whatever soaks inside of them. “My father brought me here, and I was overwhelmed with the comfort I felt in this place.”

“What starts with animals?”

Setting the bone back down, he twists just enough that I see a hint of a smile play on his lips. So odd and rare, I almost wonder if I’m mistaken. “Sadism.”

Sadism? Christ, he thinks I’m out cutting up bunnies in the yard with those knives?

“This isn’t what it loo--”

“For years, I thought your mother had gotten her claws into you and turned you into some pansy pianist. I thought maybe you’d blow my theories out of the water. Turns out, you have the gene, after all.”

“Gene?” I thought sadism was learned.

After casually crossing the room, he comes to a stop in front of the wall of weapons and runs his fingers through the braided cords of a whip there. “I’m guessing your fancy education never taught you much about behavior epigenetics. It was something I became fascinated with at an early age. How the trauma that my grandfather suffered could be passed down generations, altering the genes of his offspring. That is the purpose of our group. Evolutionary biology.”

“I’m not following.”

“I’m talking about your predisposition for inflicting pain on others. It has become part of your genetic makeup.”

Brows lowering with a frown, I don’t bother to say aloud that I’m still lost in his explanation, because I know my father to be a man of little patience. One who’d belittle me as simple and slow.

“Our group seeks to explain--”

“Group? What group?”

“We call ourselves Schadenfreude. We are a collective. Generations of those dedicated to studying the epigenetics of sadism. The evolution of dominance and survival.” From his pocket, he tugs out a cigar and lights the end of it, while my mind reels in a poor attempt to keep up. “It began with your Great-Grandfather Dane. There was a time, before all of this.” He gestures to our surroundings. “After the Great Depression. When he was so poor, he couldn’t afford to feed himself, or his family. At the time, he was working for the New England Fishing Company in Gloucester. Profitability was low, and fleets were reduced during the war, to be used as naval trawlers for mine sweeps. Men were out of work.” In the pause that follows, he puffs on his cigar, staring back at me. “Starvation makes a man do desperate things. Irrational things. There were whispers through the neighborhood of two Germans. At the time, they claimed to have worked in a factory during the war. It would later be determined that these men were actually Nazi physicians, war criminals who fled Germany to avoid persecution. But I digress. Their study was the effects of sadism on future generations. The concept of DNA had recently been discovered and eugenics was huge. Heredity was fascinating to the Nazis, in particular.”

I slide my gaze toward the dentist chair, my chest cold with the thoughts of what he intends to do. If the point of this story is to prepare me for tortures that he intends to carry out on me.

“These men offered a large sum of money to essentially torture your great-grandfather for a period of time. Their theory was that the trauma suffered would alter his behaviors and produce future offspring with sadistic tendencies.”

“How? If he was the one who was tortured?”

“That’s the nature of Schadenfreude. Part of his torture was witnessing the torture of others. In time, his empathy began to shift. Of course, the Germans rewarded this behavior. It’s not to say their experiments weren’t founded in some personal motivations, you know. And at the end of it, he had enough money to purchase his own fishing boat, start his own company. Build the foundations of what we are today. But the psychological effects of what he suffered never left him, and so he maintained a sort of friendship with the Germans. And it wasn’t long before he began to partake in the study himself.”

“He tortured innocent people?”