After picking up the last of the broken mirror, Henry carried the bag to the kitchen and put it in the trash can. He took the shotgun with him.

At the cellar door, the chair remained wedged securely under the knob.

Putting one ear to the space between door and jamb, he held his breath and listened. No sound rose from below.

Perhaps some people would have been superstitious enough to wonder if Jim might have returned from the dead for revenge. Henry didn’t believe in life after death of either the spiritual or the zombie-movie kind.

The missing bodies, the bloody handprint, and the smear on the bedspread were just theater. Somebody out there had an adolescent sense of humor. He wanted to torment Henry.

Whoever the sonofabitch might be, he was evidently a sadist. No surprise. Most people in Henry’s Washington circles were sadists. In a certain kind of personality, sadism and a craving for power were entwined character traits.

Henry put the shotgun on the dinette table. Still standing, he poured another glass of the wine that he had tolerated with dinner.

A year previously, Henry had become aware of a sadistic streak in himself. He first recognized it when, while watching a woman chef on the Food Network for half an hour, he imagined sixteen violent and grotesque things he wanted to do to her. At the end of the show, he had no memory of a single dish that she had prepared.

He then switched to Home and Garden Television, where he found a program hosted by a cute interior designer. By the end of the show, in Henry’s vivid imagination, the woman sagged naked and broken against a limestone column to which she had been lashed with lengths of barbed wire.

For the past year, no woman on television was safe when Henry picked up the remote control. Certain celebrities inspired in him such extravagantly savage fantasies that he bought the largest flat-screen TV on the market.

Jim and Nora didn’t have a TV. No cable service existed in these boondocks, and they refused to spring for satellite service.

If Henry Rouvroy’s plans were fulfilled, he would have no time for television, anyway. He doubted very much that he would be able to find celebrity chefs to imprison in the potato cellar, but even rural Colorado had plenty of tender flesh to suit his purposes.

Because he considered himself an intellectual, Henry had spent considerable time thinking about his sadistic impulses. He understood that they were not triggered by the cooking show. Extreme sadism always had been a fundamental quality of his nature. For most of his life, he repressed it in order to avoid imprisonment. He channeled that energy into his career, powered his ambition with it.

A year earlier, however, because of his insider knowledge, he recognized that a time was coming when societal upheaval and chaos would result in widespread failures of local authority, creating circumstances in which a sadist could surrender to his compulsions with little fear of punishment. The nation would soon be a thrill park for men like him.

To be ready for that time of infinite delights, he had much to do. Stock the place with years’ worth of consumables. Seed the first hundred yards or so of the dirt lane, this side of the highway, so that weeds and grass would make it vanish. Create a natural-looking deadfall of trees that further blocked entrance, but only after charting a driveable path through the forest, to get an SUV around the deadfall.

He must sell the horses and chickens, too, or otherwise dispose of them. His assumption of his brother’s identity had not been for the purpose of becoming a farmer.

The thought of feeding chickens and collecting their eggs made Henry shudder. And he would not slaughter and pluck them, either. A man of his education, sophistication, and accomplishments should not be reduced to killing the food he ate.

Before he killed the women he intended to keep in the potato cellar, he would most likely bite them, as part of his play, but he had no intention of eating them. That was so twentieth-century Hollywood, and Henry had as much contempt for clichés as he had for people who ate fast food, people who wore off-the-rack suits, people who believed in things, and people in general.

For a while, waiting for his enemy’s next move, Henry didn’t think about anything. Sometimes it was a relief not to think. He could at will become the blank, the vacant flesh, the nothing that was the truth of every human being.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary genius, a hero of Henry’s, believed that each of us must be a circle, inventing his own truth moment by moment, consuming his truth as a snake consumes its tail, always rolling forward, living for this moment and the next, only this moment and the next, always seeking the new, becoming the new, metamorphosing, ever changing with our ever-changing truths. In transition, in progression toward the ever-new self, said Emerson, “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.”

Now imperfect Henry was a perfect circle. Nothing inside the circle. Nothing outside. Just a thin line curving to meet itself.

This was a kind of meditation, meditation without even the awareness of meditating, meditation without purpose.

When he stopped being nothing, he sat at the kitchen table, sipping the mediocre wine. He waited for a development that would break the current impasse between him and his unknown enemy.

The moment arrived when he heard footsteps ascending the wooden staircase in the cellar.

He got to his feet and picked up the shotgun. He went to the chair-braced door.

The footsteps were plodding, as if the intruder carried a heavy burden or was weary. Finally he reached the top step.

Henry waited in silence. So did the man on the cellar stairs.

After a while, the doorknob turned back and forth, squeaking against the headrail of the tipped chair. Then it stopped moving.

Twenty-one

After dinner, Lamar Woolsey returned to his Las Vegas hotel room and switched on his laptop. He had six e-mails.

He answered five quickly but took time to consider his response to the sixth, which was from Simon Northcott. Simon was already in Denver, where the conference would begin the following afternoon.

Scheduled to give a speech on Tuesday, he proposed instead that he and Lamar dedicate the time to debate. Simon listed three related propositions, which were all ground they had covered before.

Debating Simon would be as pointless as debating an issue of constitutional law with a Broadway tenor who cared only about winning over the audience by belting out show tunes. If the audience cared about law, the singer didn’t stand a chance of winning the debate; but because everyone appreciates a rousing rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” there would be enough applause to convince him that he had indeed won.

Having once been a man of reason, Simon had become more of an evangelist than a scientist. His new version of reason did not allow him to abandon or even to revise a cherished theory as a consequence of new information. Instead, Simon required that new information be interpreted in such a way as to support a theory to which he and so many others had devoted their careers.

At last Lamar Woolsey answered the invitation to debate.

Dear Northcott: For centuries, from the beginnings of science until the year I was born, the universe was believed to have existed forever in the same condition we observed it. Then came the big bang theory and decades of accumulating proof that the universe had a cataclysmic beginning and has been expanding ever since. If I live long enough, another revolution in science may make it unnecessary for us to debate your favorite issue. Then I will simply need to say I told you so. I look forward to hearing your speech.

After changing into pajamas and brushing his teeth, Lamar sat on the edge of the bed and keyed in his home number in Chicago. He listened to the voice-mail message: “You have reached the Woolsey residence. No one is available to take your call right now, but please leave a message, and we will get back to you.”

He could access existing messages, but he was too weary to deal with them now. He would call for that purpose in the morning.

He didn’t leave a message. There was no one to receive it.

He called only to hear his wife, Estelle, who recorded the greeting. She’d been gone almost three years, taken suddenly by an aortal aneurysm, but Lamar had not changed the recording.

When he switched off the bedside lamp, her voice remained clear in his memory. Closing his eyes, he could see her. Lying on the edge of sleep, he hoped to dream of her.

He wasn’t concerned about having a nightmare about Estelle. Her presence guaranteed a dream of great comfort and gladness.

Twenty-two

Entering the dark kitchen, Grady whispered reassurances to the agitated wolfhound.

At the French door, peering out, Merlin stopped barking but began whining as though other dogs were at play in the yard and he was eager to romp with them.

Grady leaned over the table, squinting through the window at which he had earlier sat sentinel. His eyes were by now so dark-adapted that he saw the two creatures at once.

One of them sat as a dog might sit in the chair that Grady had occupied in the late afternoon, when Merlin had chased coveys of scents around the yard. The other sat on the marble-topped table on which Grady had earlier stacked three reference books about the fauna of the mountains.

Because the two had their backs to the house, Grady couldn’t see their eyes. Their impossible, inexplicable eyes.