The Cellar

by Peter Fugazzotto

  But it was me that changed.

  I was the steady trickle eating away at our marriage.

  50

  "He got Lipsky," Amanda said. The blood had begun seeping again from the cut over her eyes and I wanted to reach out and comfort her. I wanted to pull her close into my arms and feel the warmth of her body against mine, as if that would give me some kind of solace against the fear that was burrowing in my limbs.

  "What do you mean he's got him?" asked Jay

  "The Sandman, him, his dogs. They cornered him. He's got him now."

  "And you just watched?"

  She curled her fists. "What was I supposed to do? We need to hide. I escaped him before. I know where he won't look."

  She led us back through the kitchen. I took a moment to glance out of the dirt-smudged windows and into the yard. Heavy rain had returned, and the distances to the barn were blurred, but even so I could see him coming, a huge man, dragging something long and metal at his side, like a jagged blade, and at his heels, his dogs, two of them, bouncing and yipping, leaping in the air. One of them had something in his mouth and the other snapped at it, trying to tear it free. Suddenly, the dogs were a fury of barking and biting, rolling on the ground, shackles raised. A sharp word from the Sandman sent them scurrying, tails between their legs.

  Amanda pulled me from the window before I could see what it was that the dogs were fighting over.

  "He can't find us," she pleaded in a whisper.

  She pointed to the heavy kitchen table. "We have to move this."

  I grabbed beneath one side of the table and Jay the other and we lifted the table and moved it aside a few feet. Amanda pulled back a rug to reveal a trapdoor set in the floor.

  "In here?" asked Jay keeping his voice low.

  I knelt down, grabbed the inset metal handle, and pulled the trapdoor open.

  I had expected the door to lead down to the cellar or a crawlspace beneath the house. Instead, it was a small hole dug into the earth, damp, edged with old bricks.

  "You've gotta be kidding me, right?" I hissed. "You can't hide in there."

  The space was maybe three feet by three feet and a foot and a half deep. It was more like a small grave than a hiding place.

  "I survived," she said in a low tone.

  "No way," said Jay. "No way in hell. I'm not going in there."

  "He's going to kill you. He's going to torture you and kill you. Do you want to die?"

  Visions of Tug, broken and bloody, chained in that cellar, filled my head and with it came a sudden tightening in my groin, a constricted breath. How had we gotten into this nightmare?

  "Get in there," she said. "I won't slide the table back over it. Please."

  Suddenly the sound of the dogs rending and snarling erupted so close that I jumped. They had to be there. At the front door. The Sandman was coming.

  I laid the axe on the floor, stepped into the hole, lowered myself to my hands and knees, and looked up pleadingly at Amanda. "I'm not going to fit."

  "Curl up. On your side. That's how I was."

  I did what she said. I lay down on my left side in a fetal position. The cold wet earth sent shivers up my spine.

  "It won't be long," she promised.

  Then before I could protest, before I could change my mind, she closed the trapdoor and I was plunged into darkness.

  Immediately I wanted out. I pushed the door back open.

  "You'll die," she said. "Don't come out. No matter what."

  The screen door squeaked and slammed shut.

  I ducked back down, pulling the trapdoor over me.

  Abysmal darkness. The ground was cold and wet against my face like the flesh of some swamp reptile. Roots tickled my skin and I shivered thinking for a moment that it was bugs, and maybe it was.

  I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists.

  In here for a few seconds and already I was not sure that I would be able to last for more than a few minutes.

  Jay and Amanda's feet shook the floorboards as they raced out of the kitchen. I was alone now. I tested the trapdoor with shoulder. It moved slightly. I would be able to pop it open and burst out into freedom again if I needed to. I had that.

  My breath echoed. I tried to quiet it. The last thing I needed was for the Sandman to hear me under foot and blast a hole in the floorboards.

  One breath, two breaths, three breaths.

  I could barely move. Hardly adjust. This was my worst nightmare, buried in a hole, not able to move. It was almost worse than facing a killer. I would not be able to last long. Already I felt a deep itch worming its way up my spine.

  Sudden panic washed over me. The dogs. They would scent me out. They were hounds. They would smell me beneath the floors and begin howling and yapping, black nails scrabbling at the wood, trying to dig out their prey.

  The walls of the hole pressed against me and I had the insane notion that the earth was closing up around me. I bit down hard on my lip, so hard that I could taste coppery blood filling my mouth. This was not going to happen.

  The front door slammed hard. Footsteps scraped the planks above me making me shiver uncontrollably. I held my breath and tried to look through the floorboards but they were too closely put together and not a single fragment of light found its way through.

  The Sandman breathed heavily and raggedly as if he had been running until his legs had given out on him. Even though I could see nothing, the sound of his footsteps painted a picture of where he was in the room. I tracked him from the entrance, the pound-pound-pounding of his feet to the sink. God, was he drinking something out of there? Then the trembling footsteps until he had to be standing above me. He grunted. Did he notice that the kitchen table had been moved? Did he know that I was just below him?

  The dogs yipped and yowled from outside and he shouted some unintelligible curse at them and they were reduced to a quiet whimpering. Not much different than myself and it was all I could do to repress a sudden maniacal laugh from bursting out of my lips.

  A crazy thought intruded my head. I almost wanted him to find me. I wanted him to pull the trapdoor open, shout an 'aha', and then shoot me in the head. As horrible as that was, at least all this would be over. I wouldn't have to suffer this madness.

  His feet scraped across the wood. One step, two steps, three. And with each step he moved further away from where I hid and closer to the hall. Once he was in the clear, once I could no longer hear his footsteps, then I would escape my prison. I would leap up, grab the axe, and fly as fast as I could out the front door, swinging at the dogs, and charging for the forest. I would be gone. I would not look over my shoulder even if gunshots filled the air and bullets whistled by my ears. I would run and never look back.

  The footsteps returned and stopped. I squeezed my eyes shut. The planks of the trapdoor creaked. He stood right above me. Then I heard the sound of water trickling, smacking and splattering, and my nostrils filled with the sharp stench of urine and small drops trickled through the boards, across my face, my lips, and I swatted at my mouth with my fingers.

  My guts balled. He knew I was in here. God, why had I agreed to this madness? His feet shuffled and then the floorboards let out a huge screech as the table was dragged across them, dragged to a stop right over me.

  "I wake to sleep," he whispered. "And take my waking slow. I am the Sandman."

  His footsteps faded as he moved down the hall.

  I waited with trembling breath until I could not hear him anymore, and then I pressed against the trapdoor, pressed with all my might, and it did not even move an inch. I was trapped. I was in hell.

  51

  Since my time in hell with the Sandman, I've come to reflect on my existence and how I've chosen to live my life, and one thing I have realized is how much I was a prisoner.

  I'm not sure if we are not all born prisoners, caged in by economic status, social norms, and our family environment. We have singular moments of freedom and true choice but most of our lives are conspiring to sh
ackle us, to put us in little boxes, and make sure that we march in lock step down a well-trod path.

  The problem is that we often mistake certain forks in the road for freedom. We think because the path leads us away from the lives of our parents or the social class we are born into that we are venturing towards freedom. But it is just another prison. True freedom, I have finally come to understand, means that when you see a fork in the road, the true choice for freedom is to get off the road, head into the deepest brush, stumble towards the distant river, wander towards a place of inevitable and fast-flowing death.

  Even though I've realized this I am still a coward. I see the forks in the road. I see the wilderness. But I stay frozen on the path, choosing neither fork, staring at the wilderness, the weight of my journey swelling behind me, urging me to do something but I do nothing, afraid to make a choice, blind to the fact that death will come at me just as quickly with my feet planted.

  Maybe it's just that I don't care anymore since I should be dead. I might have even died for all I know, and all this is a nightmare of a life lived in that final breath.

  Maybe I died trapped beneath the Sandman's kitchen floor, or in his cellar, or in the forest around his house.

  But I know that is not true. I know that I survived. I'm just a coward, unable to make the decision I know that I should make, fearful to step off the path and into the wilderness, afraid to make the choice to live my final days in freedom.

  This is no song of a hero.

  52

  I scraped my fingers raw trying to claw my way out of the prison beneath the Sandman's kitchen floor. After he disappeared down the hall, I pressed my shoulder and knee into the trapdoor, straining so hard that my flesh burned. But I had no strength. I was trapped in a sideways fetal position and could not lever my limbs to a position of power. The angles were odd and uncomfortable.

  I tried to drive my elbow upwards with successive blows, but each strike only brought greater pain and the swelling of bruises.

  I could not breath in that prison. At one point I hyperventilated so hard that I actually passed out only to wake up in darkness.

  How do I describe the absolute terror of waking up to blackness and being physically trapped? I don't think I had anything other than a mild, normal claustrophobia before this. But that all changed in the pit.

  I woke to blackness and my own breath, roaring, bouncing back into my face off the planks, hot air stuffing itself down my own throat.

  I drove my legs into the mud and brick, desperate to straighten them, to create enough space to quell the curling itch that ran through my spine and limbs. I pressed so hard in that bent position that my legs cramped, and with the only relief being to lengthen them and relax, I cramped even further, sharp unbearable pain seizing the backs of my legs, freezing them into the position.

  I smashed my elbow again into the wood but it did not move. No shred of light broke through. No fresh air seeped in.

  I clawed and smashed and kicked until I was nothing more than a ball of pain and fury but then that passed and there was nothing left. There was only the darkness and my own thundering breath.

  I focused on my breath. I let it run its course from ragged and heavy to mild panting to long, deep exhalations, and as my breath slowed, my mind quieted. I closed my eyes and pretended that the darkness in which I was entombed was a thing of my own choice, something that I could control.

  I mentally worked my way through my muscles tensing and then relaxing them, starting with my feet, moving up through my cramping legs, to my back and chest, arms, neck, and face, even all the way to the top of my head. When I did this once, I did it again until I felt that my muscles were under my control again, no longer under the grip of the fear that has seized me when I had first realized that the Sandman had trapped me beneath his kitchen floor.

  I was quiet and relaxed, and knew that I had nothing to do, nothing at all, but to wait. Eventually the trapdoor would open. Then fear would drive me to freedom. Or death.

  Either was preferable.

  I waited a long time. Every so often the fear rose in me, the fear that he would never open the trapdoor, the fear that the muddy walls were closing around me, and in those moments of fear I would have to fight my breath and my body, wrestle them back under control.

  This happened several times. But each time I won. Each time I brought myself back under control more quickly.

  I thought for a while that I would be able to so this, that I would be able to fight my way out of this.

  Then I heard the scream. Jay's voice. Only it wasn't. It was as if someone had copied his voice onto a record and was playing it back, sped up, while scratching the record at the same time.

  He sounded more like an animal than a human.

  The hairs on my arms and neck rose and my body spasmed. I screamed back at him with the silent howl of my breath, wanting to show him that I stood with him, but afraid that if I vocalized my yell that the Sandman would come back for me and do whatever he did to elicit that feral cry.

  The screams lasted half a minute maybe. They were capped by a slam that shuddered through the entire house. Then silence. No pleading. No crying. No whimpering. A giant period at the end of a sentence. A long pause.

  I disappeared into darkness and breath. Eventually soft, scraping footsteps lulled me out.

  I held my breath.

  "Skip? Are you still in there?"

  It was Amanda.

  "Move the table. Help me get out of here before he comes back."

  "He's done things. To your friends. Horrible things." Her voice broke into a sob.

  "The table. We can escape."

  "I never really escaped him. No, I didn't." She laughed sudden and sharp.

  I felt as if I had swallowed a stone. "Don't tell me this," I said. "We. Can. Escape." I pushed on the floorboards. "Help me here."

  "Why did he pick me?"

  "Amanda, move the table. Now."

  "He was watching when I came to your house. He was there in the darkness and the rain. He wanted you. Promised me that Bethany and Gigi wouldn't suffer any more. No promises for me. He watches me. He's always there. Wherever I go, he is my shadow." She lowered her voice to a whisper, a thread of breath. "I had no choice."

  My heart punched at my chest as if trying to tear its way out. We had been set up. I should have seen it. Lipsky was right. He had suspected something was wrong when Amanda had come to our house. In hindsight, he was right. Things did not add up. But hindsight meant nothing. Not while I was trapped beneath the kitchen floor, not while my friends had been locked away in a cellar, not while the Sandman wandered around above me.

  "We can make this right," I said.

  "I am," she said. "I am making this right."

  "Good, then move the table. Help me out of here."

  She shuffled across the floor, her feet whispering along the planks. But instead of getting closer, she moved further away.

  "Amanda..."

  Her voice drifted. "I am making this right."

  I returned to darkness and despair.

  53

  Somehow, impossibly I must have fallen asleep. I don't remember it. Trapped in darkness, unable to move, my breath curtailed as if a palm pressed over my mouth, I imagine that the line between waking and sleeping was slim.

  I thought about what the Sandman said to me. It was familiar. A poem from some man long dead. I didn't remember who wrote those words or what they meant. While I lay in my grave, I remembered thinking about those words, but then after that, I did not remember much. Some time around then I crossed that border between sleep and waking.

  It was a sudden scraping that woke me. I was curled in that hole, my muscles cramped and frozen in that position, in a world of unending blackness, where time did not even seem to exist. The scraping woke me. It vibrated through the boards, the shudder of wood on wood.

  I knew exactly what it was. Someone had moved the kitchen table.

  Either Amanda or the Sandm
an.

  Maybe it could have been Tug or Lipsky but they did not know where I was. Not Jay. He would not have come for me if he had escaped.

  So it had to be one of the other two. One to help me. One to kill me.

  I waited, trying to quiet my breath, but it seemed so loud, echoing off the mud and brick of my prison, as loud as if an airplane roared overhead.

  I listened for some further sound to give me an indication of who it was out there. A heavy footstep. The scraping of metal. A whimpering sob.

  But I heard nothing else after that scraping.

  Not even quiet footsteps creeping away.

  I thought about calling out to see who it was, but what good would that do?

  In a worst case scenario, my voice would alert the Sandman to the movement of the table, and any chance of escaping would trickle away from me.

  It must have been Amanda. She must have come back for me. The Sandman would not just move the table and wait there. He would rip open the trap door and ...

  What would he do to me? What had he done to the others? My throat thickened with the memory of what he had done to Tug, bloodied, maimed, and then I recalled the feral cry of Jay. What had the Sandman done to Jay to make him scream like that? Worse than all that was the silence. Why hadn't I heard anything while I was trapped beneath the kitchen floor?

  "Amanda?" The rain had returned, hissing off the sodden roof. It would be good to be in the rain again. To be cleansed.

  I pressed against the trapdoor with the palm of my hand. It moved. Light angled through the crack. Impossible light. I held the door open a crack sucking in fresh air, though of course it still stunk like the death-strewn kitchen. I squinted letting my eyes adjust to the light, and for the needle-like pain in the back of my eye sockets to finally subside.

  But it was not just about adjustments. I also waited to gather courage. There were horrors outside that I would have to face. The Sandman. The dogs. Amanda who could betray me again.