Shackles Read Online Free PDF Page B

thrift shop. Against the outer wall stood a white-painted bookshelf, also of thrift-shop origin, that was jammed with canned and packaged foodstuffs. An ancient two-burner hot plate rested on top of the shelf. And in the corner where the side wall—the one with the uncovered window in it—and the room’s back wall joined were three cardboard cartons: rolls of toilet paper and paper towels in one, magazines and paperback books in the second, a miscellany of kitchen items in the third.
    That was all. The rest of the room—the main room of somebody’s mountain cabin—was barren. No furniture, no carpeting, no adornments on any of the walls, no cordwood or kindling for the fireplace. Nothing except what was in this cluttered corner where I had been chained.
    Four doors gave access to the room. Three were shut; the fourth, in the near back wall some ten feet from the cot, stood open. Through it I could see a cubicle that contained a toilet and sink. The door in the front wall opposite seemed to be the cabin’s main entrance; it was flanked by windows, both of them shuttered. The remaining two doors must have led to other rooms—bedrooms, kitchen. There were just the three windows, and all of the light in the room came through the unshuttered one near the cot.
    I dragged my arm up to look at my watch. After nine now: I had been unconscious this time for three or four hours. The whisperer—where was he? If he was in one of the other rooms, he was being damned quiet about whatever he was doing. There was no sound in the cabin, nothing but the plaint of the wind outside.
    I eased my chained leg off the cot, managed with some effort to stand up and stay up. But the left leg buckled on my second wobbly step, as I started around the lower end of the cot, so that I had to lunge ahead into the wall and clutch at the windowsill to keep from falling. I leaned there, breathing hard, looking out through the rime-edged glass.
    A cleared area maybe fifty feet wide stretched the width of the cabin, patched here and there with snow. More snow drifted up against a shed of some kind toward the rear. Otherwise trees were all that I could see—white-garbed spruce and fir, densely grown, climbing beyond the shed into a misty obscurity. Cold, silent world out there, ruled by the elements. High-mountain country—but where? I pressed my cheek against the glass, squinting toward the front. White and gray and dull green, nothing else. If the whisperer’s car was still here, it was parked somewhere around front or on the far side.
    I did some goose-stepping in place, to loosen the muscles in my legs. Then I squatted to examine the ringbolt set into the wall beneath the window. It was in there solidly—driven in with a sledge, maybe, or wedged through a tight-bored hole to the outside and then locked into place with a bolt plate. I took up a handful of the chain, stood again, backed off a few paces, and yanked backward with all the strength I could muster. Nothing happened except that I scraped some skin off one palm; there was no give at all from either the chain or the ringbolt. Wasted effort, as I’d known it would be. But you have to try.
    I let go of the chain, rubbed sweat off my face with the sleeve of my coat. I was still wobbly but I didn’t want to sit down again, not yet. Walk, I thought. And I walked, taking short shuffling steps until I was sure of my balance. Behind me the chain made a slithering rattle on the rough-hewn floor. I went toward the front wall first, but the chain stopped me well before I reached it. I couldn’t have touched that wall, let alone the front door, if I’d gotten down on my belly and stretched out full length. I came back toward the rear at the chain’s full extension. It let me get almost to the center of the room, then within a few feet of the fireplace. But there was no way I could reach the fireplace, either—no way to find out if any of its mortared stones were as loose as some of them looked. As