Chapter 13

You return to the photograph of the woman in the white sundress. Her dark curls are tangled in Max's enormous fist, and her expression is difficult to interpret beneath the harsh red lighting. You have studied the image so often that you know every visible detail, from the exposed brick behind the spectators to the dark truncheon hanging at his side.

Yet you find yourself examining it with a new and increasingly desperate purpose. You search the faces of the spectators, looking for a husband. You wonder whether the woman was brought there by someone who loved her, someone who stood among those casual onlookers and watched with the same terrible anticipation you have begun to recognize in yourself.

You imagine him smiling when Max first approached, perhaps even encouraging his wife to cooperate, believing that he was about to witness something thrilling. You wonder when that smile disappeared. More disturbingly, you wonder what happened afterward, beyond the narrow boundaries of the photograph, when the camera was lowered and the spectators stopped pretending that everything was safe.

The possibility that the husband himself might have taken the photograph sends an unpleasant thrill through you. You imagine standing behind the camera, watching your own wife kneel beneath those lights while the enormous figure towers over her. You imagine the sound of Max's breathing, the oppressive heat of the room, and the terrible moment when she looks toward you for help.

The scene fills you with guilt because you cannot deny that some part of you wants to witness it. You tell yourself that you would intervene if she were genuinely frightened, but the confession of the remorseful husband has made that promise feel increasingly hollow. He believed the same thing. He thought he could stop the performance whenever he pleased, and by the time he understood his mistake, the decision was no longer his to make.

Your imagination begins to venture beyond the photographs, into those terrible moments the husbands refuse to describe. You imagine deserted corridors, locked rooms, and the enormous silhouette of Mangler Max filling a doorway while a frightened wife searches desperately for some means of escape.

You wonder whether the women are eventually returned to their husbands, trembling and changed by whatever they have endured, or whether some disappear into the darkness foreverer. The absence of answers allows your imagination to supply possibilities more dreadful than anything the photographs reveal.

You begin to wonder whether Max's cruelty is calculated to leave wounds that cannot be seen. Perhaps he forces the wives to confront the terrible knowledge that their husbands brought them willingly into his presence, that the men they trusted were initially delighted by the spectacle of their helplessness.

Perhaps he makes them listen as those same husbands plead for mercy, their earlier excitement transformed into desperate bargaining. You imagine a wife discovering that her husband's promises of protection were meaningless, that the man who knew her most intimately had placed her within reach of a monster simply to satisfy a forbidden curiosity.

Perhaps the real devastation comes afterward, when she returns home and finds that the familiar comforts of marriage have become reminders of his betrayal. You wonder whether Max deliberately engineers this destruction, taking satisfaction in knowing that he has poisoned something beautiful without needing to remain in either of their lives.