His heart beat so quickly he couldn’t reply. His grandfather looked at the bike as if it were the devil’s instrument, tempting him away from the religious meditation. He loved his bike; he could never think of it as anything evil.
His only excuse welled up inside, then deflated to a limp rag; he had been tired of sitting in the house. After all, holy day or not, it was a beautiful day, a great day to ride a bike. He never fought back.
His parents weren’t as severe, but his grandfather left him feeling God would punish him for what he had done. Of course, in time he forgot about it. They all did, even his grandfather. Now, during the greatest strain and effort of his life, he bordered on hallucination and madness. He almost expected to hear his grandfather say, “See, what did I tell you about riding your bike on Yom Kippur?”
The absurdity of such an idea made him smile.
No, he thought, God would be on their side and not on the side of these crazy people. The madman wouldn’t be there. There would be no excruciating, heart-stopping torture. He’d lift himself out of the well without any confrontation. He had faith.
Without any further hesitation, he reached upward and grasped the ledge, but when he started to pull himself higher, one of the flat rocks that fit into the ledge gave way. It scraped against the surrounding stones as it shifted, sending waves of panic through him. Quickly his left hand flailed and found a rock as the ledge rock came crumbling in toward him. It avalanched by him and descended into the darkness. He heard a dull thud on the bottom, and he thought about that skeleton reaching up from under the damp wet dirt.
In his mind’s eye, he saw it crawling out even farther. It was waiting for him down there, waiting to welcome him to the land of the dead.
The rock he gripped was tearing into his palm. He tried to get a good grip with his left foot, but he couldn’t find a wide enough protrusion. He knew he had only a few moments left before he would slip and fall like the ledge rock. There was nothing to do but chance another grip on the ledge. He thought he would have only one more opportunity.
He swung his body as best he could and reached upward, driving his hand as far over the ledge as possible before taking hold. The ledge shifted, but unlike the first flat stone, this one held. He didn’t wait to be sure. He pulled himself up as fast as he could until his torso was over the ledge.
Then he literally fell over it, falling to the hard earth with jarring impact but grateful for its firmness. For a few moments he lay there in the darkness, catching his breath as the reality of what he had accomplished sank into him. He turned onto his back and listened.
He heard some strange noise, strange because it was familiar and yet it sounded so odd. What was it?
It was coming from him.
He was crying.
He had made it; he had come up out of the darkness. He had refused to be defeated and he had battled back against seemingly insurmountable odds.
But his tears of happiness and relief were short-lived as he turned toward the house, which was now almost completely locked in darkness, and realized the worst was yet to come.
Gerald did not want to fall asleep, but it seized him. One moment he was thinking about the woman and the next moment he was reeling back through time, falling down the tunnel of his imagination. His memories merged with his dreams and the hybrid boiled beneath the skin of his consciousness waiting for an opportunity to emerge. That opportunity came only after sleep took hold. It was one of the reasons he was reluctant to give in to his fatigue.
He was walking down the hallway to his father’s room, but when he turned into the doorway, his father’s bed was gone and in its place was his Bad Box. He was lying in it, his eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, the large right hand resting on the left. His knuckles looked black, and his fingernails, always a little too long, were yellow.
His father was dressed in his orange and black flannel shirt and a pair of coveralls. On his feet were the hard black work shoes that Gerald feared because he had been kicked in the behind with them many times. They were ominous-looking, even when his father had them off and they rested near his chair in the living room.
His thin gray hair was plastered down against his temples and over his skull. It was possible to see the blotchy red skin through the strands. His untrimmed eyebrows looked like two gray caterpillars resting at the base of his forehead. There was still a great deal of color in his face, but there was always color in his face, no matter what time of year or how gray the days had been. His blood beat too closely to the surface of his skin.
His lips were dry and pale and turned out just enough to reveal the two remaining bottom teeth. He looked as though he were struggling to make a sound. There was even tension in his cheeks; the wrinkles in his forehead deepened. Gerald moved in closer.
He looked back to be sure the door hadn’t closed. The hallway seemed to withdraw, the walls shrinking. He began to struggle to retreat. He didn’t want to go in any farther, but he was being pulled, drawn to the Bad Box. He turned and twisted. The air behind him became as solid as a wall. It practically lifted him toward his father. He could do little to prevent his forward motion. Even screaming was out of the question—no sound would come from his mouth.
He was at the side of the Bad Box. His hands were drawn to the edges. They were practically glued to it. Pull as hard as he could, he could do nothing to free himself.
Suddenly his father’s eyes opened. He sat up quickly and seized Gerald’s right wrist. Gerald freed his left hand from the box and tried to back away, but his father’s grip was tight, his strength surprisingly enormous. He was trying to pull him into the Bad Box with him.
“No!” He mouthed the word, but still no sound emerged. His father was digging those hard yellow fingernails into his skin. Gerald was losing the battle. He was moving over the Bad Box. His father’s effort forced him to lie back in the box and tug. Now he had both hands around Gerald’s wrist.
Gerald, using his left hand, tried to pry his father’s hands off, but the old man’s grip was as tight as a bear trap. Gerald continued going over and in. It seemed impossible for him to prevent it.
Then he reached over the Bad Box with his left hand and took hold of the lid. Disregarding the possibility he might catch his own arm in the Bad Box, he pulled the lid downward. His father saw what was happening and released his grip on Gerald so as to prevent the lid from coming down over him.
But it was too late. Gerald slammed the lid shut and then latched it quickly. As soon as he was finished, he backed away from the Bad Box. He heard his father’s cries. He heard him pound on the lid. For a moment he was unable to move in any direction. Then he turned and ran out of the room.
Irene was standing in the hallway. She had a dish towel in her hands and she was twisting and twisting it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Pa’s dead,” he said. “Go on downstairs.”
“But I hear him.”
“Go on!” he commanded, this time physically turning her toward the stairs.
He looked back at his father’s doorway as she descended.
He’s dead, he thought. He’s dead; he’s dead.
The pounding didn’t stop. It grew louder and louder and louder until…
He awoke in a sweat and realized he was in his bed. Irene moaned, but she didn’t awaken, nor did she turn toward him. He listened for a moment, satisfied that what he had heard was both in his memory and his imagination.
“He was dead,” he muttered. “He was dead.”
To whom was he defending himself? Would he defend himself forever?
He closed his eyes again, but the moment he did so he heard the pounding. It would never stop. Someday, when the lid was closed over him, he would awaken and pound against it himself, he thought. And what would drive him to do it harder and more frantically was not his need to survive so much as the sound of his father’s vengeful laughter.
He opened his eyes and forced himself to think only of the woman.
11
Moving so slowly that she barely progressed more than two or three inches at a time, Stacey carefully and quietly as possible reeled in the chain to minimize the amount of noise it would make when she actually started out of the room and down the stairs. She couldn’t pry the loop off her foot, so there was no other choice.
She remained on the floor until she had the chain neatly coiled against her body. Because of the tension and the excitement moving through her in a continuous, electric flow, she was able to ignore the pain in her hands and in her back.
Before she started to stand, she listened hard for any sounds suggesting that either Irene or Gerald roamed about. Satisfied that they were still asleep, she pulled herself up cautiously. Even the smallest tinkle of the chain made her hesitate and wait to see if either of them had heard.
It never occurred to her as she headed for the doorway in her bare feet that she was wearing only the flimsy nightgown. All she thought about was getting out of the house. Once that was accomplished without her being seen or discovered, she would run for miles if she had to, and not stop until she had found someone or someone had found her. She decided she would head back the way she had come. Maybe she would reach that garage; it would still be open, being an all-night business.
Just the thought of finding another normal human being flooded her with relief. As she walked softly to the doorway, she kept crooning to herself that soon, soon this would end; soon she and Tami would be fine.
She paused before entering the hallway and peered out toward what she knew was Irene and Gerald’s bedroom. The door was open, but there were no signs of any movement and she could hear no voices. She saw two other bedrooms with closed doors and imagined that in one of them Tami slept.
If only she could go to her and wake her quietly and then corral her out of the house quickly; but she knew the attempt would be too risky. Even if neither Gerald nor Irene heard them, Shirley would, and by now Stacey had come to fear her almost as much as she did the two mad adults.
She closed her eyes as though to block out the pain of leaving Tami behind, even for what might prove only a short while, and stepped into the hallway. It was only then she realized she had seen and taken note of very little in and about this house. She had come up those stairs blindly, in a rage to find Tami. She understood that it hadn’t been quite two days, but she felt she had been trapped for months.
She was weak from the struggle and from so little nourishment and from whatever Gerald had put in her food to suck energy from her. The tension and the torment had damaged her sense of perspective. She lost her ability to gauge distance and couldn’t determine how far she was from the front door. She couldn’t remember if the road bordered the house or stretched away from it. Nevertheless, she stepped forward, determined and strong as never before. Her husband might not have recognized her.
There was no carpeting on the hardwood hall floor. The boards creaked under her feet. The sounds were tiny, but in her heightened awareness, they broke like little explosions. She paused, holding her breath. She wanted to look back every once in a while to see if she had been discovered, but she couldn’t. Her mind was set totally on reaching that stairway. She even thought it might be bad luck to look back.
She prowled close to the wall on her right, noticing the streaks along the bottom half. The faded green paint was marred by what looked to be handprints and miscellaneous smudges. She imagined the random markings were the product of Shirley, the graffiti of madness, turning the place into the hallway of some kind of asylum for lunatics and the demented.
The small hallway light above her cast an exaggerated shadow of herself over the floor and walls. She felt as if she had been turned into a cold-blooded monstrous creature simply by being in this house. Hopefully, once she broke out of it, she would return to her normal form. Of course, there was always the possibility that she wouldn’t, that she would remain maddened and deformed. She would spend the rest of her life in some hysterical state of mind; maybe she would end up institutionalized.
She fought these thoughts back like someone trapped underwater groping for oxygen. Such thoughts could defeat her by leaving her immobile, shaking and stuttering on the stairway.
She reached the top of the stairway before the chain slipped in her sweaty palm. It wasn’t really much of a rattle, but enough to reach their bedroom. She closed her eyes and debated whether or not she should just rush down the stairs now.
But what if the sound hadn’t awakened them? Surely her rushing down the stairs would, and what if that front door was locked? She couldn’t get it opened and get out before Gerald reached her. She waited for what seemed to be minutes, but which were in reality only seconds. Encouraged by her success up to this point, she began to descend the stairs.
Here the house betrayed her even more. The steps sounded as though they might give way at any moment. A wild idea flashed through her mind. This house was supernatural; it was a part of who and what they were. At any moment it would shake and rattle its windows to alarm Irene and Gerald. Then, even if she did reach the front door, it wouldn’t open, nor would the windows or the back door. The house would keep her trapped.
She shook the nightmare from her mind and slipped down the stairs, coiling the chain tightly to her body and holding on to the banister with her other hand. Aside from the small light in the hallway above her, there was no illumination in the house. No moonlight shone through the windows.
She searched her mind for any scrap of memory that would suggest the layout of the house at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t want to bump into anything and cause further noise, but she could recall nothing. Normally her night vision would have been adequate, but her anxious mind continued to play tricks on her. Objects looked like people. In fact, she thought she saw something move.
Three-quarters of the way down the stairs, she paused and studied something near the front doorway.
Was that a man standing with his back to the wall? What if Gerald had been down here all the time, waiting for her, playing with her? In his sadistic way, he would permit her to think she was escaping and then at the last minute…She brought her free hand to her heart and closed her eyes. Maybe he would kill her now.
The vision flashed through her mind. He would kill her and bury her body somewhere out there in the wilderness where no one would ever think to look for her. Like he did to Marlene. And to Donna…and who knows who else? If he killed her, they would tell Tami she had left her to live with them. If Tami cried about it, they would punish her until she stopped crying by putting her in that thing they called the Bad Box. David would never find her; Tami would grow up in this mad world, if she was left to grow up at all.
Such a story line nearly froze her where she was. Should she return to the room? she wondered. In a strangely ironic way, it seemed like a safe haven at this moment. She wondered if she was going mad. Perhaps she already had lost her wits. Everything she had done and everything she was doing was jumbled and confused. She was making mistakes, and they might prove fatal.
She flit open her eyes again and concentrated on the shape against the wall by the door. Slowly it focused into meaning, and she realized it was a grandfather clock. Relieved, she completed her descent of the stairs. Still, she did not look behind her. She felt like someone high up on the ledge of a skyscraper. As long as she didn’t look down, she would be able to get to safety.
She moved to the front door and turned the knob. Just as she had feared, the door was locked. She searched for a way to release it, but to her chagrin, this door had an old-fashioned skeleton keyhole. She would have to have the key to unlock it, even from the inside.
Refusing to permit panic to set in, she concentrated on the alternatives. She could go out a window or she could try the back door. Chances were the back door was locked as well, she mused. She would go to a front window and see if she could open it without making much noise.
She turned to do so and moved directly into the arms of
the awaiting, naked Gerald Thompson. He embraced her so quickly and so smoothly, she barely had time to utter a cry, but when he pressed her up against his nude body, she brought her head back and screamed with all her might. Her panic turned into an hysterical shriek unlike any human sound she had ever made or had ever heard. Her own voice tore through her body, reverberating down her spine, shattering any sense of composure she had been able to sustain. The shrill yell would echo in her memory forever.
Yet she did not faint; desperately, she held on to consciousness, struggling to find the power of resistance that lay dormant in her most primitive part. Like some trapped forest animal, she reached out to claw him. The chain clattered to the floor and he lifted her over his head. She clenched her hands into little fists and pummeled the top of his head. He dropped her over his shoulder like a sack of so much feed and blood flooded into her face. She felt as though her skull was about to explode.
He grasped her by her calves and started back up the stairs. She stopped pounding him and tried to dig her nails into his skin. He roared with anger and pulled down so hard she thought he would snap her legs like sticks. The pain forced her to retreat and her screams turned to sobs as he continued to make his way up the stairs, the chain dragging over the steps behind them.
She opened her eyes only when Irene spoke from the hallway.
“What happened?” she asked. “You woke the children.”
“She tried to run away,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Go back to bed.”
“The children are crying.”
“So go to them,” he said.
“No,” Stacey cried. She reached out to Irene, hoping to appeal to her common femininity, but Irene glared at her angrily.
“Gerald should put you in the Bad Box,” she said. “You’re ungrateful,” she added as she turned to go into the children’s bedroom. Stacey closed her eyes. Gerald carried her back into her bedroom. He threw her down on the bed and before she could sit up or offer any more resistance, he caught her face between the large, muscular fingers of his right hand and squeezed her cheekbones, pressing down on her at the same time. The pain was excruciating; she thought her face would crumple up like a paper bag.
The Maddening Page 18