by Gary Beck
"We’ve got to do something."
"I know. Let’s lock the door and barricade it with the bed and anything else we can find." They dragged the bed to the door and Beth carefully turned the dead bolt.
They stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do next, with a growing feeling of desperation.
"Do you have any matches?" Kiesha asked. "We could start a fire."
"No. Even if we could, we’d probably burn ourselves to death."
"Missy. I hope you don’t want to be Miss Pussy America."
Beth didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She rushed to the bathroom but couldn’t see any way out, then tried the closet, without any luck. She wracked her brain trying to think of something. The best idea she could come up with was to throw things out the window to try and get the attention of someone on the street. It didn’t seem very promising. She saw a small panel on the wall near the door and took a closer look. The catch was coated with old paint and it took a minute to pry it open. Beth stuck her head into a pitch-black shaft with ropes going up and down. She couldn’t see more than a few feet either way.
Kiesha tugged at her shoulder. "What is it? Where does it go?"
"I don’t know what it is. It’s too dark to see. There are some ropes but I can’t tell how far they go."
"Maybe we can get to the next floor. Should we try it?"
"Can you think of anything else?"
"No."
"Neither can I. Let’s do it. Do you want to go first?"
"No. You go. I’ve never been much of a climber."
"Me neither, but I’ve seen them do it in the movies. You wrap your legs around the rope and go down one hand at a time." Beth leaned into the gaping pit, grabbed a rope, gave it an experimental tug and slowly pulled herself into deep space. She turned back to Kiesha, "Once you’re in, pull the door closed. Maybe they won’t figure out where we’ve gone."
"I’ll try. Good luck, missy."
"You too. I’ll try to find another door. If not, I’ll see you at the bottom somewhere." Beth worked her way down the rope with infinite caution. She fought off the panic that was assailing her from the black abyss. She stopped every few feet, secured herself and stretched out a hand and touched the walls, hoping to find a door, without success.
Kiesha climbed into the shaft, cutting off the faint light above Beth that gave her a fragile illusion of safety. The rope swayed dangerously with Kiesha’s weight but held. Beth moved even more carefully now that both of them were on the rope and offered a silent prayer that it wouldn’t break. Kiesha closed the door behind her and the tiny gleam of light was gone. Beth worked her way down, slowly and carefully, pausing regularly to feel for footholds and an exit. She couldn’t really see anything, but her eyes were adjusting to the pitch-black shaft and her fear was subsiding.
She felt a small ledge with her foot and softly called to Kiesha, "There’s a ledge just below you. When you get to it stop and rest for a minute."
"I’ll stop at the next one and we can talk. How are you doing?"
"What did the virgin say? So far, so good."
"You can’t be too bad if you can still joke."
"Missy, I’ve never been more scared in my life."
Beth went down a little further and felt a ledge. She turned around so both feet were solidly on it and braced herself on the rope. "Kiesha."
"I’m still here."
"I’m on a ledge. Did you find yours?"
"I just got to it. There. I’m resting. My arms hurt. Do you know how far we have to go?"
"No. I don’t even know how far we’ve come. Maybe two or three floors."
"That’s all? It’s a long way down, unless we find a door."
"Every time I stop, I feel around for a door, but nothing so far. We’ll have to keep going until we reach bottom."
"Then what?"
"Hopefully there’ll be a way out and we’ll get out of this nightmare."
"Now I know how coal miners must feel. It’s a good thing I’m studying computers."
"Save some of that energy for the climb. I’m starting now and I’ll find another resting place and call you. Be careful."
"You too, missy. I’ll see you at the bottom."
Beth resumed her descent. Her hands were burning, her shoulder muscles were aching, and she felt twinges of pain run down her back. She ignored her discomfort and concentrated on going down carefully, hand over hand. She was completely calm. The only thing that mattered to her was to get to the bottom safely and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her. After she had climbed down for a while she found another ledge and told Kiesha to feel for it. She went a little further and found a ledge for herself. When she was securely placed, she let out a sigh of relief. She figured they were more than halfway down and despite the growing soreness in her upper body, she knew she could make it the rest of the way.
She heard Kiesha call from far away, "I stopped. Are you all right?" She was a little spacy and had trouble answering right away. "Did you hear me, missy? You all right?"
It seemed like a great effort to talk, but she finally managed, "Just catching my breath. I’ll go on in a minute."
Beth cautiously flexed her arms and back, gripped the rope tightly and continued down into the swallowing darkness. She had no sense of time and didn’t know how long they had been suspended in inky space. All she could focus on was moving one hand after the other, hoping to touch bottom.
The rope suddenly shook and she heard Kiesha yelp. "Kiesha. Are you all right?"
"Yeah. I slipped and scraped my hand, but I’m okay. Let’s keep going."
Beth kept working her way down and when she felt a ledge under her foot, paused and called, "Do you want to stop and rest?"
"No. Keep going." A strange feeling of disorientation seized Beth and she couldn’t imagine ever getting off the rope and reaching the end of the bottomless hole. When her feet finally landed on something solid, she kept moving, even through she couldn’t go further.
Then realization dawned. "Kiesha. I’m on the bottom." She reached up and helped Kiesha the rest of the way down.
They sat on a shelf in the narrow space, breathing hard, too exhausted to do anything else. A dim light shone way up the shaft and they heard nasal voice, "I don’t think them bitches went down here."
Stern voice ordered, "Light a match and take a look."
"I got a lighter." The tiny flicker didn’t penetrate very far. "You bitches down there…? I can’t see nothing, boss."
"Neither can I. One of you get a flashlight."
Beth nudged Kiesha and whispered, "Let’s get out of here before they figure out where we are."
They groped for an exit and Kiesha said softly, "I found a door."
Before they could find a handle, they heard Kiesha’s abuser yell, "I’m gonna piss on them bitches if they be down there." A few moments later a smelly liquid sprinkle splattered them. Beth reached frantically until she felt a knob and turned it. The door opened into a darkened room, but it was a way out of the shaft.
"Let’s get out of here before they throw something down that could hurt us."
A thin beam of light pointed down and they scurried out of the shaft before they were seen. The light apparently wasn’t bright enough, because they heard stern voice, sounding eerily as if he was right on top of them, "I can’t see nothing. How could them bitches climb all the way down there? Can you do that?"
"Not me, boss," nasal voice said fervently.
"Then where did them bitches get to?"
"I don’t know, boss."
"Could they have snuck past us in the hall?"
"No way, boss. Maybe they climbed out the window. It was open."
"And then what did they do, fly away on a magic carpet?"
"I guess not."
"Well forget about them. We got business to take care of."
"Don’t you want us to look for them?" nasal voice asked.
"Where? You got any ideas?"
"N
o, boss."
Stern voice seemed to be coming from further away. "Now that we settled that beef with Lobo, I’m wonderin’ if we want them spics up there. We take over their business, we make a lot more bread."
"We do that, we have to waste em," third voice said.
"Yeah. Well there’s only six or seven of them. Nobody gonna miss them." The rest of stern voice’s murder plan faded away and the little beam of light disappeared.
Beth and Kiesha tried to see around the dark room, without success. They slowly stood up, bodies aching, and carefully started to explore.
Kiesha bumped into something. "Ow."
"What is it?"
Kiesha felt around her. "It’s a pile of chairs."
Beth’s hand brushed something, and she investigated. "It feels like a stack of tables."
She kept groping blindly until she found an open space. The room was full of dust and their movements stirred it into the air, and it seeped into their eyes, noses and mouths. Beth kept slowly stumbling forward until she felt a door, then she found the knob. She turned it, eager to escape the smothering darkness, but the door didn’t open. She turned it harder, but it still wouldn’t open. She yanked and yanked, cursing in frustration, without result. The dust was thick in the air and it was hard to breathe. She pounded on the door, but it didn’t give and its thickness muffled the sound. She felt around the frame and couldn’t find another way to open the door, but her hand touched a light switch and she turned it on.
A dim light illuminated what was a dust-filled storage room. Kiesha was standing in a narrow aisle next to a floor-to-ceiling mound of plush cushioned dining chairs that had seen better days. They had probably once been antique white, but the finish had faded. The light green and ivory fabric was torn and stained. It seemed awfully wasteful to Beth, but she couldn’t tell if the chairs were worth salvaging. Dark wooden tables were piled high on the other side of the aisle. Stacks of wooden crates lined the wall, without labels or markings to reveal their contents. Beth tried the knob again, but the door wouldn’t open.
"Let me try," Kiesha said, and struggled with it for a minute, then gave up. "It won’t budge."
"I know. It’s either locked from the outside or jammed tight."
"What are we going to do?" Kiesha asked.
"I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait until someone finds us."
"How long do you think we’ll be here?"
"I don’t know."
"I don’t like it here."
"We can always climb back up for the contest."
Kiesha laughed, "I’ll wait, now that we’re safe."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The two women briefly considered taking turns pounding on the door in the hope that someone would hear them. Since they didn’t know if the noise might alert their abductors, they decided to wait and give their loved ones a chance to find them. They couldn’t take out chairs to sit on, or the pile might come tumbling down on them, so they sat on the floor. By this time, they were filthy, achy, scared and burning with a mixture of rage and humiliation. They leaned against each other, drawing comfort from nearness.
Kiesha said in a hoarse voice, raspy from the dust they breathed in, "We should make them animals pay for what they did to us."
"We’ve got to get out of here first."
"I know. But if I don’t think about getting them, I won’t feel clean again."
"They didn’t rape us and they didn’t really hurt us, so I guess we got off lucky. Maybe we’re better off just calling the police."
"They won’t do squat," Kiesha said bitterly.
The battered women talked about what just happened with the strange feeling of detachment that sometimes follows a disaster. Although they were all right for the moment, they weren’t sure where they were, or how they would get out of there. They speculated how long it would take for them to be missed, then searched for. The conversation trailed off when they realized they had no idea when someone would find them.
They brooded silently for a while, then Kiesha started to ramble, "When they grabbed us, everything happened so fast that it took me a while to figure out what was going on. I was so scared that I couldn’t think straight. Then I got angry. I thought they were going to rape us and kill us and I’d never see my babies again. I was helpless, but I wanted to hurt them somehow before I died."
Beth wasn’t surprised at how similar their feelings were. "I felt exactly the same way. At first, I thought they were just trying to scare us. Then I heard what they were saying and I realized we were in serious trouble. When they started talking about that obscene pussy contest, I knew they were disgusting animals and it wouldn’t do any good to talk to them or plead. The only idea I could come up with was to promise them wild sex if they’d let us go, but I didn’t think that would make a difference to them."
"I thought of that too, but I was afraid that they could force us to do anything."
"Yeah. I would have done anything to see my children again, but I think they made it clear that they weren’t going to let us go. I swore that if one of them put his filthy cock in my mouth, I’d bite it off."
Kiesha giggled, "Good for you, missy. At least he would never have forgotten you."
A feeling of relief slowly crept over them, followed by a wave of exhaustion. They either dozed off or spaced out. Sometime later Beth snapped awake and looked at her watch. She had been out for over an hour. Kiesha was sleeping, snoring wheezily and she let her rest. Beth thought wistfully of the cell phone in her purse. She couldn’t remember if she dropped it in the elevator, or if she still had it when they were dragged into the room upstairs. She yanked herself out of the fantasy of just dialing Peter, who would then come and rescue them. She did decide that from now on she would wear her phone on her belt. She idly looked through her pockets hoping to find something useful, but only came up with a dime. She studied the hinges on the door and wondered if they could be unscrewed with the dime. She made a note to try it when Kiesha woke up, but just then she twitched in her sleep. Beth slipped an arm around her shoulders comfortingly and fell asleep.
Peter left work a little later than usual, delayed by a last-minute task and rush hour was at full peak. Urgent as he was to get to the landlord’s office and get the keys, he couldn’t go any faster than the human tide carrying him to the subway. He rode downtown, packed shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip against the beleaguered mass of humanity that toiled to and from pasture twice daily. More grotesque and unnatural than a wildebeest migration, the herd suffered depredations and assaults from foul air to foul manners. The hazards of the journey weren’t as dangerous as predatory crocodile or lion to the vulnerable herd, but it was more degrading. Rigid subway protocol demanded that you not make eye contact with your neighbors, not intrude physically more than necessary and avoid all personal expressions of disgust. You were required to suspend yourself in time and space and not disrupt the orbits of planetary bodies.
Peter was carried along with the mass charge out of the Astor Place station by the horns down yuppie east village horde, heading home for a quick change of costume before a foray to local cafés and restaurants. They coursed down St. Mark’s Place and once they crossed 2nd Avenue, their ranks thinned, and he could almost walk at a normal pace. He cut through a deserted Tompkins Square Park and kept going until he reached Avenue D. When he got to the landlord’s office the lights were out and the door was locked. He knocked loudly but didn’t get an answer. He took out his cell phone and called the landlord, but only got the answering machine. He left a message that he was outside the office and would wait there for a while. The temperature was in the mid forties, but a gusty wind sent chills through him, so he ducked into the doorway. He dialed Beth’s number and when she didn’t answer he left a message, telling her where he was.
Peter waited for about half an hour, but the landlord still didn’t appear. He phoned Beth again and when she didn’t answer he began to worry about her. He forced himself to wait patiently
and the minutes crawled by with irritating slowness. He dialed Beth again and when she still didn’t answer he really started to fret. He phoned Miss Lily, who told him that Beth and Kiesha went shopping and hadn’t come back yet. She didn’t seem particularly concerned about it, so he relaxed a bit. She mentioned that she was making dinner for the children and would have food for the adults whenever they got there. She sounded disappointed when he told her that he didn’t get the keys, and he heard her tell Hector the bad news.
She said encouragingly in her usual caring way, "Don’t worry. You’ll get the keys tomorrow," and hung up. He waited a while longer, tired, cold and hungry, really irked that the landlord wasn’t there, and growing alarmed at his wife’s absence. He left a message for the landlord asking him to call at any hour, then headed back to the hotel.
Miss Lily served dinner to the children with the help of the girls, who she praised lavishly. Hector kept getting in the way until she finally told him to wait in his room. He was worried about Kiesha and didn’t understand why Miss Lily was so calm. He phoned her and was surprised when Peter answered. He realized that he had misdialed and apologized for bothering him, then blurted out his concern. Peter told him he was just getting on the subway and would look for the women on Third Avenue before coming back to the hotel. Hector paced the confines of the tiny room, restless and impatient. Horrible images of accident or injury flashed through his mind. He pictured Kiesha lying crumpled in the street, a victim of a hit and run driver, her bright red blood coloring the dark street, as she waited for the arrival of the wailing ambulance. He shook himself out of the horrible thought and forced himself to wait patiently.
Beth awakened with a start and looked at her watch. It was almost 7:30 and she knew that Peter would be looking for her soon, if he hadn’t started already. She couldn’t think of any way out of the room and resolved to try to unscrew the hinges once Kiesha woke up. She sat there quietly and remembered the horror of being abducted, held captive, being beaten and threatened with sexual abuse. She shuddered and it disturbed Kiesha, who sat up and cried out in alarm. Beth soothed her and when she was under control told her that she intended to unscrew the door hinges. Kiesha walked to the door with her and watched intently as she worked the dime into the screw slot. The dime was much too thin to exert any leverage, and no matter how hard she tried it kept slipping. She tried different angles and tore a fingernail and gashed her thumb. A last effort, partially filling the slot with a piece of her shirt, didn’t work and she gave up the futile attempt and resigned herself to waiting.