I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Okay, I’ll decide. You’re low, and yer buddy here is high. Place your bets.”
He bent down and tossed the dice on the ground and I suddenly knew where this was going. He was betting on our fates. Any combination of two through six would represent me—low—and combinations of seven through twelve would represent Tooth—high. The dice came up a five and a three. High.
“That’s too bad,” he said looking at Tooth, whose dazed head was already hanging to the side from the punch. He undid the gag and forced open Tooth’s mouth. I started screaming but my gag was so tight I barely made a noise. He shoved the fiery embers into Tooth’s mouth.
Tooth went crazy, flailing his head, spitting out the embers as well as fresh blood. Skinny Man punched him again and I nearly vomited when I heard the crack of bone. More blood shot from Tooth’s nose and sprayed on Skinny Man’s face like a Pollock painting. The man went back to the stove and collected more of the hot orange gems, came back and punched Tooth in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He thrust the embers in Tooth’s mouth and then, using both hands, he forced Tooth’s mouth to stay shut and tied the gag up again.
I looked away. I kept looking away, listening to Tooth’ groans of pain, hearing them from someplace else. A place from our past, from our future. Block it out, I thought, just block it out, go somewhere else. You’re not here, you’re wherever you want to be but you’re not here. And before long, there was Tooth and me stealing lawn ornaments, there was California with the waves crashing on the beach, there was us driving on Route 66 on our way out West, the purple sunset blanketing the dusty buttes. At some point, through my closed lids, I saw the light turn off. I heard the door open and the man go back upstairs, his cackling dying away into the night.
I kept my eyes closed and listened to Tooth cry for a long time, not knowing what to do, just feeling like a kid again, yearning for my parents’ bed. And always asking, like a skipping CD in Tooth’s Camaro, the same stupid question that wouldn’t go away: Why was this happening? Why wouldn’t I wake up?
Stress and fatigue finally took over, shut me down into a semiconscious state. It wasn’t exactly sleep, because I could still hear the choking sobs of my friend, but it removed me from the larger picture. I didn’t know it then, but those moments before the ember attack would be the last time Tooth would look like the friend I had grown up with.
CHAPTER 14
Morning, or at least I thought it was because I could swear I heard birds chirping somewhere. I was leaning against the wall, the gag still tight in my mouth. My whole body ached like it had been steam rolled. On top of that, the bite on my leg was beginning to itch, a possible sign of infection. The room was pitch black, which meant the embers in the stove had burned out. Tooth was snoring. The rain had stopped.
I said a little prayer to God, feeling like a fair-weather fan, slinking back for acceptance from an establishment I’d eschewed. But still, it’s funny how you find God in such moments, almost instinctively, like a caterpillar on a strand of silk stretching for the first branch it sees, even if the tree is dead. Yeah, it may seem pointless, but at least it’s something. I even swore that if I survived I would go to church.
Church. Would I really? All those nights listening to Tooth’s dad preach about God and faith and Heaven. I thought he was just a sad old drunk, but the truth was that he was home tossing back a cold one and we were chained in some psycho’s basement. He was watching television; we were watching human dismemberment. Perhaps he wasn’t so crazy.
I wondered if he’d be smart enough to come look for us. In all the years I’d known Tooth his father had never seemed too concerned about his whereabouts. He’d let Tooth spend that weekend in jail, and Tooth’s mom rarely visited or called. She had a new life in New Jersey, or so Tooth said.
I remembered being at Tooth’s one night when his mother had come back for a brief stint, back when we were in junior high. We all had dinner in the living room while we watched sitcoms. Tooth’s dad had ordered a pizza. A commercial came on urging parents to get to know their kids better, you know, talk to your kids about drugs and sex and shit. Tooth’s parents kind of looked at us like they knew we’d started experimenting with drugs, but they didn’t say anything.
Tooth got this funny look on his face and he asked, “Hey, do you remember our password?”
At first I thought he was talking to me, but I didn’t know what password he meant. We had so many passwords for so many things they were hard to remember. Like, we had a fort in the woods behind his house and the password was pussylicker. (As with most kids, curse words were taboo to us and therefore used ad naseam in the absence of adults.) I thought maybe he was trying to get me to swear in front of his parents, who probably wouldn’t have minded, but I wasn’t going to test it.
His father answered, “Wasn’t it macaroni and cheese?”
“That’s it,” his mother said.
I thought, what the hell are they talking about? Macaroni and cheese? What fort did that get you into?
Tooth said, “Yeah, that’s a stupid password.”
After that, we all went back to watching sitcoms. I found out later what the password meant. It was in case anyone had tried to kidnap Tooth. If anyone had approached him when he was younger, he would have asked for the password that only his parents knew, and if the person didn’t know it, he’d have run away. It dawned on me that despite the dysfunction that overshadowed their family the majority of the time, there was still a modicum of love under it all.
My family never had a password.
I was thinking about this when the basement door opened and Skinny Man came in carrying something large in his arms. The sunlight from upstairs drifted down and backlit his frame. He was dressed in jeans and a button down and was wearing a baseball cap that said MACK TRUCKS on it. Butch was at his heels, running in circles as if he was about to get a juicy steak.
“Morning,” he said. “Roger, I want you to know you have a lovely house.”
My heart stopped and I couldn’t even swallow much less gasp.
He’d been to my house.
That’s when I realized the thing in his arms was a body. When he reached up and turned the bulb on I nearly fainted, because in his arms, slumped over like she was dead, was my sister Jamie.
Oh my God. There are no words. Breathing, focus, rational thought: they all locked.
What welled up inside me came from a deep place in my heart, a place so sacred I didn’t know it existed until that moment.
I wailed. I pleaded. I begged. Though none of it made much sense through the gag. He just laughed like the Joker and carried her to the door beside Tooth. He took out some keys and, still holding her, undid the lock and disappeared inside.
My desperate cries woke Tooth, who looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was. His entire mouth and cheeks were blistered red and black. The rag in his mouth was caked in crimson goo and pus. When he saw me, he remembered where he was and swiveled his head looking for our attacker. I motioned with my head toward the door on his other side and he looked over, but when he looked back at me he just shook his head. I think he was trying to tell me he couldn’t see anything.
It wasn’t long before Skinny Man came out and shut the door. In his hand he fooled with the dice he’d taken from me. “She’s nice,” he said, “just ripe enough for me. We’ll have to play with her a little later.” He gave Tooth a stinging smack in the mouth, pulled his hand away and wiped off the fresh blood. “Guess you won’t be talking for a bit, my friend.”
Butch was sniffing the wound on my leg, whimpering like he was waiting for an okay to take a bite. I hated that dog. I wanted to kill it just as slowly as I wanted to kill Skinny Man.
“I searched your car and found this,” he said to Tooth. He held up a pay stub. “Mervyn. What the fuck kind of name is that?” He balled it up and tossed it on the floor. Butch ran to it and sniffed it but sensing it wasn’t
a fresh kill went and sat by his bowls.
It hit me that he must have moved the car. No park ranger would come looking for us now.
From the room behind us came a plea for help. Jamie was awake. Tooth recognized her voice and looked at me with bulging eyes. I wanted to call to her, to tell her to be quiet, but the gag filled my mouth and I didn’t want to piss off Skinny Man. Now more than ever I needed to get out of here before anything happened to Jamie.
He went up the stairs and returned with an armload of wood which he lit up in the stove. Like a Pavlovian dog, I started sweating, because the last time he did that he tried to cook the mystery woman, and now he had Jamie, and would he cook her right in front of me? After the logs were cracking and popping with flames, he took the shovel off the tool table and placed it back in the fire.
“Don’t know where you live yet,” he said, waltzing back over to Tooth, “but I’ve got other ways of amusing myself.” He pulled the gun out from the back of his waistband, cocked it, and put it to Tooth’s head. I cringed, expecting my friend’s brains to explode onto the side of my face, but the bastard didn’t pull the trigger. He was just trying to drive us crazy. Instead, he put it in his pocket and held up the dice.
Tooth was breathing hard, his charred lips singed and gooey like marshmallows that had fallen in a campfire.
“Oh boy, what to do, what to do. This is always the hard part, deciding where to begin. Never had three fresh ones at the same time before. I kind of feel like a kid in a candy shop. I don’t want to go too fast, though, an opportunity like this should be savored. Had me two before. Had me one and half, too. Fuck, I had me halves scattered all about like the earth was bearing babies. Babies, oh yeah, had me one of them once, too. Pretty little girl with bright blue eyes. So trusting when they’re young, will follow you anywhere you call ’em sweetie and precious. Yeah, that one, I hung her face on my wall to remind me of how precious our time together was. And now I got me three. What to do, what to do. Best to let fate decide for me. You’re one through four,” he said pointing at me. “You’re five through eight,” he said to Tooth, “and the bitch in the back is the rest.” Butch barked a couple times to which Skinny Man replied, “I’ll handle it my way! You stay outta this!”
He tossed the dice on the ground and they came up a three and a six. Who was nine again? Then my stomach bubbled, my head swam. What was he going to do to Jamie? He was going to rape her, I just knew it. He was going to rape her and beat her and cook her alive. Tooth was thinking the same thing, I could tell. He was yanking his chains away from the wall to no avail.
Butch barked. Skinny Man screamed, “Just hold on! I only got two hands!”
My God, he was insane. He was the devil, arguing with his hellhound.
A shoe flew at my head and missed by an inch. The crazy fuck was getting undressed in front of us. I shook my head, bit the rag to try and rip it in half. The dog kept barking while the maniac tore his pants off. Faster and faster he ripped his wardrobe off and then flung it about the room. Once he was fully naked he squeezed himself and lurched about as if he had no control over his body, as if he was Satan’s marionette.
As he moved, his tattoos undulated like underwater scenes of hell. I could see them clear as day now: dogs raping women, wolves eating babies. The muscles in his arms and back tightened and flexed, and even though he was skinny, he had a tautness to him. One look and you knew he could lash out at you with rattlesnake reflexes. He took up moaning as he danced, like an engine revving up for take off. When his dancing reached its frenetic peak, his arms and legs snapping this way and that, his moaning a full-on siren, he took a pair of hedge-cutting shears off the table, spun around wildly, ran into the room with Jamie and slammed the door.
Then for a few moments everything went silent. Tooth and I stopped fighting the chains, just listened. The raspy wheezing of Butch’s breath was all we heard, a scratchy sound like someone raking leaves.
Then faintly, Jamie spoke. “Please don’t. Oh God, please don’t.” I could hear her hyperventilating. “No. No, please!”
Then she screamed.
I went wild. Tooth struggled with all his might but the chains held. Over the dog’s breathing, and our frantic attempt to free ourselves, Jamie’s high-pitched wail cut into my heart, stopped my breath like someone was stamping on my chest.
She just kept screaming and screaming. Butch was up and pawing at the door, licking his chops. I fought so hard my wrists began to bleed. Maybe thirty seconds went by before the door opened again and Skinny Man came out carrying the hedge-cutting shears and a mound of gore. I felt faint. I had no idea what part of my sister the bloody flesh belonged to, but I knew it was part of her. Tooth was trying to scream around the gag but he wasn’t making any sense. The sores around his mouth split, dribbling more snot-colored pus down the corners of his lips.
Skinny Man dropped the goop in the dog dish and removed the shovel from the stove. I felt like I was watching it all through the large end of binoculars. It seemed so far away. The glowing shovel, bright red from the fire, left an afterimage in my retina when he went back in the other room.
I waited with baited breath and it wasn’t long before we heard the faint singe of skin followed by Jamie’s horrific cry. Then he returned, with that sedated look people get after eating a big meal, and put the shovel back in the stove. He scooped up his clothes and went up the stairs. Before he did though, he set the clippers against the wall near the door, as if to remind us of our nightmare.
Despite the gag, I screamed for Jamie, annunciating as best I could. “Jamie? Jamie, please, talk to me, say something.” I sounded like a drunk with a swollen tongue.
We waited and listened. There was no response. Was she dead? Did that psycho just kill her? The moment was too much to bear and I threw up. The puke shot around the gag and ran down my shirt. I hadn’t eaten anything in a long time, so most of what came up was bile. The combination of piss and blood and puke collecting on the floor was so foul I figured the stench of the house alone might bring the police.
The boiler rumbled, the fire crackled, Tooth panted. I stared at the dry puddle of skin that had melted off Mystery Woman and tried not to think of anything.
I could tell you that time passed, but it didn’t so much pass as jump ahead to another point, everything in between just a black spot in my memory.
Until, finally, she spoke.
“Mom,” she said. He words were strained. “Mom. Dad. Please, somebody help me. Oh God, it hurts. It hurts.”
“Jamie.” Whispering her name in the dark . . . I’d never whispered like that before. You know, that kind of whisper where the words become an emotion. The kind of whisper that wakes something inside of you.
I threw my head back and let my body shake; I don’t know why. I was just so happy she was alive it was more than I could bear.
Tooth and I exchanged determined looks and I knew what he was thinking, same as he knew what I was thinking. We had always shared the same brain more or less. We were thinking, there’s always a way out, you just have to find it. Neither Batman nor the Silver Surfer were going to save us. This was real life, and if we wanted out we had to do it ourselves. At that point, with myself covered in regurgitated food, and Tooth swollen and burnt, a silent vow passed between us. No more waiting to die. We were going to escape. And if we died trying, then so be it.
As I leaned back listening to my sister cry, I realized for the first time how much she meant to me. All our fighting and name-calling meant nothing anymore. She was my sister, and I loved her, and if I had to die to save her I was prepared.
Near the stove, Butch chomped up the last of her flesh and licked his lips. He pawed the door open, slipped through, and with a grunt he went upstairs.
I turned back to Tooth and nodded a few times to let him know I was ready and able. I imagined myself with him, in California on the beach, watching the waves roll in. It was serene, and suddenly I felt okay about dying—not the pain part, just the pa
rt about not existing. Probably we would never see California, or the outside of this cellar ever again, but I felt okay.
I caught Tooth’s eyes and followed the motion of his nodding head. It was his way of telling me we had to talk so I started working at the gag. Barbed wire or no, we had to formulate a plan.
CHAPTER 15
We worked tirelessly to get the gags out of our mouths, until our jaws were damn near swollen. It was worse for Tooth, because every time he moved his jaw his burnt lips split and bled like squashed cockroaches. And the gags were tight; Skinny Man hadn’t been playing when he tied them. It took about a half hour of mandible work before we loosened them enough to converse coherently. We left them wrapped around our bottom lips so we could put them back in our mouths if we sensed trouble.
First thing I did was call out to Jamie, to see if she was okay. Her faint response was disheartening. She couldn’t tell it was me; I guess she thought I was Skinny Man because she kept begging me to let her go, saying she wouldn’t tell anyone. It was a familiar plea, and I realized how crazy it sounded when I put myself in our maniac’s shoes.
I shouted, “Jamie, it’s me, Roger. I’m in the next room. Can you move?”
She just babbled and cried and told God she hurt. She was alive, but no help to us. I could only imagine what had been done to her. Every time I blinked I saw Butch licking his lips—it made me ill.
The Summer I Died: A Thriller Page 10