The Cellar

by Peter Fugazzotto

"He killed her," I said. "He killed Amanda."

  "She dragged us into this," said Jay.

  "Wasn't her fault. She thought it was her only way out."

  "No moral compass." Even in the dim light, I could see him turning away. I wondered if he had finally realized that I had witnessed what he had done to Amanda.

  "It was bad, Jay. No one deserved what happened to her."

  "Real bad?" asked Tug.

  I could only nod. I could not describe to him what I had seen. "She tore the key from his neck. She has it in her hand. I don't think he noticed."

  "And where is she now?" asked Jay.

  "In the room. Still in the room. Where she was killed."

  "And how are we going to get the key?"

  I shook my head. Silence descended over us. I saw that Lipsky cowered in the corner, eyes and lips still sewn shut. I needed to get us out of here. Somehow.

  I started with the sutures above my right chest. The thread was tightly sewn through my skin. Beneath it, the stone bulged. I plucked at the thread with my thumb and finger, seeing if I could scrape the knot loose with my nail but it had been pulled tight. The knot was not coming undone.

  I really had little choice in the matter. I firmly grabbed the knotted end of the sutures in my hand.

  "You're not going to do that, are you?" asked Jay. He was already turning his gaze away.

  "What's a little more pain? At least, I'll know that I'm still alive." With that, I tore my hand back, opening the sutures on my chest like pulling a zipper. I almost puked. Blood poured out again and the stone popped out, thudding on the ground, glistening as if it were an actual organ that was meant to be in me.

  I gasped for air. My chest burned. I pressed my hand over the wound to stem the bleeding. Warm blood filled my palm. I was going to bleed to death, kill myself, getting all these objects out of my body. Was this what the Sandman wanted? For us, to be so ready, that we would be willing to kill ourselves? Did he want us to realize that we were nothing anymore?

  Tug tossed me a grimy piece of cloth. "Use this."

  I chortled. "Here I was thinking I needed to remove all these things to prevent an infection and now I'm stopping the bleeding with a dirty, shit-soaked rag."

  "Better than bleeding to death. Hold it against there. Steady pressure. It'll stop soon. Then when you are ready the next sutures."

  I stared down my body. The bulges in flesh. My forearm, my stomach, my balls, my thigh. I was not sure how I would be able to do this without passing out. Maybe it would be better to leave them inside me. Maybe it was better to risk infection. I didn't even know what the Sandman had sewn inside me. I had passed out. I had wavered between blacking out and screaming in pain.

  The worse thing was I had no idea what he had put inside of me. I needed to get it out.

  I worked my way through the remaining stitches pulling out a shoelace, coins, a baby bird skull, until the only sutures left were those on the inside of my thigh. I had lost so much blood. I felt weak. I was exhausted and all the willpower had drained out of me.

  What difference did any of this make? Death would come soon enough. The Sandman would return and drag me out of my chains and pull me apart. My days, my hours, my minutes were numbered. It was only a matter of time, and whether I had whatever it was in my thigh made no difference to the dark abyss I faced.

  I scraped the knot with my thumb. It loosened easily. Even as I began unweaving the black thread, I recalled the fading image of the Sandman bent over me, his free hand gently touching my thighs, as sliced my skin open. I wanted to scream.

  Blood bubbled out of my leg. I dug my fingers inside the wound feeling around for what he had left inside of me. It was cold and hard, slippery with my blood. I gasped. So hard to breathe. So hard to stay awake. I found the sharp edges and pried the object from my thigh and let it clatter to the ground next to me as I quickly covered my wound with another dirty rag.

  Maybe I would be luckier if I bled to death. I would lose blood pressure. I would get light-headed, the room disintegrating in static, my limbs needling, and then I would pass out and it would be over.

  "Skip, what is that?" Tug had pulled his chain taut and stretched his arm out along the ground.

  I stared at the metal object I had pulled from my leg. It was a saw blade.

  "We could cut the chains," said Jay. "We could get out of here."

  "Give it to me," said Tug.

  After half a minute of steady sawing against the links of the iron chain, he pinched his face in a curse. "It's too soft. It can't cut through the chain."

  "What else could go wrong? What else?" said Jay. He rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. "Next time he comes down, I'll attack him so he kills me. End all this. Nightmare."

  "I'm ready for it to end," I said. I felt no shame in adding my voice. I was more than ready for death. How could anyone be expected to survive this? And even if one did survive, what would remain? Would I even be human after all this? How could I ever return to my old life? Who would be the man that would return? Certainly not the heartless lawyer who had driven up the mountain road.

  "It's not over until I say it is," muttered Tug.

  "I think it's pretty close to over," said Jay. "Give me the saw. I'm going to end it. Right now."

  "Fuck that," said Tug. He wrapped one of the rags around his ankle above the shackle, pulling it tight, twisting it, and knotting it.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "Cutting off the blood. A tourniquet."

  I stared slack-jawed at him as he began sawing into his own foot below the iron shackle.

  "You can't be serious."

  "Is there any other way?"

  I turned from the dark blood that sheeted over his foot.

  62

  When it was done, I could barely look at Tug. The tourniquet and rags wrapped around the stump failed to stop the bleeding. The air of our prison had filled with the coppery tang of blood, a sea of blood, his, mine, all of ours, and all I wanted to do was to throw up, empty my stomach.

  So much blood lost. The cuts, the blows. How were we even still alive?

  I stared around the gloom. We had become shadows hunched against walls. Despite the eroding walls, the chains that shackled us remained solidly bolted, resistant to any pulling or wiggling on our part. The floor was damp, cold, what I imagined a grave would be like. In some ways I was surprised that I had not seen worms turning through the earth, hungry for us, ready to consume us and return us to the dark.

  "In her hand? The key?" Tug's voice cracked. His lips fumbled through a face contorted in pain. His expression had changed so much that I could hardly recognize him. The pain draped over his face like a mask. If I would have seen him walking past me on the street, I would not have recognized him. He had changed that much. I wondered if I was the same. Had I gone through the same transformation? I ran my fingers across my swollen lips and cheeks. I was some exaggerated version of myself. Beneath the swelling, bone and cartilage was broken. It would not heal the same. Even when all the swelling went down and the cuts healed, I imagined when I would stare in a mirror, I would be taking in the image of another man, a stranger with a dark history.

  I glanced at Jay, half hidden in the darkness. None of us were the same. What we had gone through. What we had become. His changes were more than skin deep. I would need to talk to him about what he had done to Amanda.

  I turned back to Tug. "Last time I saw her she was lying on the ground next to the chair. He just left her there. The key's in her hand. Or at least I hope it still is."

  Tug could not stand, not with his foot amputated, so he was crawling on all fours, trailing a dark swath of blood. He wasted no time. He quickly vanished from our sight and towards the room with the chair.

  "I hope he's not there," said Jay. "We need some kind of lucky break. We need something."

  I reached out towards Lipksy. "Hey buddy, I know you probably don't want to hear this but we're going to need to get those sutures out of
your eyes. Tug's going to bring back a scalpel." I fought back a chill remembering the scalpel that sat on the metal tray. I didn't think that I would be able to cut those sutures, much less hold the knife steady in my hands. All I could think of was the Sandman scraping that blade against my skin, the pain, and the odd displacement as he inserted all those objects under my skin. I wanted to climb out of my own skin. "You're going to need to be able to see to walk."

  Lipsky shivered against the wall giving no indication that he had heard me.

  "You think he's all right?" I asked.

  "Are you an idiot?" asked Jay. "All right? None of us are all right. My god, look at your face, man. And none of us will ever be all right after this. They're going to ship us off to the mental ward after this. Lock us into little padded rooms. Chain us to walls. Conduct experiments on us." He broke down into laughter. "It'll be like a homecoming. Right back where we started from. Maybe we should just not leave. From one prison to the next. What's the difference? Our lives are over."

  "Get a hold of yourself. Don't be crazy."

  He rattled his chain. "Not much choice in the matter at this point."

  "We'll get out of here. We'll get back home."

  "To what? Our lives are fucked up anyway. They're going to end up throwing me in jail. Charge me as a sex offender. Back in a prison again. Live with what we did." He silently screamed.

  "We need to survive. We need to get out of here. Get help."

  "Maybe I'm done. Maybe I'm ready to die. What's the point?"

  "I'll help you. We'll get through your problems. I'm good at what I do."

  "What's taking him so long?"

  I quieted my breath and listened. I no longer heard the scraping of Tug's hands and knees across the floor. "Tug?" I hissed. Above us, the wood creaked as if the house were settling. I strained to hear. In the distance, as if miles away, I heard the hum of the wind and maybe, though I could have been imagining it, the sound of faint birdsong.

  And I imagined the lake and the woods as they should have been. A shimmering glass-like surface. Dragonflies, fat and red, darting over the water, almost bumping into their own reflections. The sharp smell of pine needles carpeting the ground. The steady grind of unseen insects inhabiting the forest. And that bird song, distant, bubbling. And I saw birds lift from the shadows of the bushes, through the wide space between the pines, up, up, up into the blue sky, flying away, black specks against the bright sun.

  And I imagined us returning to the forest, crossing that river, and descending the winding mountain road towards our homes, our families, our lives. All of that was possible. We could once again travel with the warmth and certainty of the sun against our skin.

  But first Tug needed to come back, and it was taking him too long. I stared at the saw blade he left behind, coated in congealed blood, and wondered when I would have to make that decision, wondered if I would only be freeing myself to crawl to my own death.

  63

  I jabbed the tip of the saw blade into the concrete wall where the chain had been anchored. Even though I had wrapped the back end of the saw in moldy cloth, the metal bit through, cutting into my hand. I ignored the thick trail of blood that ran from my palm down my elbow.

  The concrete fell away, not in chunks, just in tiny bits, like snowflakes. I had already been at it for five minutes or so and had only hollowed a section half the size of an egg. I was making progress but it would take hours to work my way around the seating of the chain and to go deep enough that I could pull the chain free.

  I doubted that we had hours but I needed to do something. I didn't think Tug was coming back. We had not heard any noise from him in a while. I could not imagine what happened to him.

  So I tore at the wall with the small piece of metal, knowing the task was futile, but desperate to be doing something.

  "Give me that," said Jay reaching for the saw.

  "I'm making progress."

  "For yourself. How much time do you think that we'll have?"

  "If I can get free, I can find the key. Free you."

  "Isn't that what Tug's supposed to be doing? How hard is it to find the fucking key? It's the next room over. He's been gone for ten minutes. You think he got lost, you idiot?"

  "You think you can tear away the wall faster than I can?" I asked.

  Jay sneered, his lips twitching, unable to hold that expression before his face collapsed. "Not what I want it for."

  I pointed the saw blade at the iron shackle around his neck. "It won't cut through that. Tug already tried."

  "That's not what I want to cut." He drew his finger slowly across his neck.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I want to get out of here on my own terms. While we still have time." He looked hard at the doorway and then wiped at tears with the back of his wrists. "Let's be honest. We're not getting out of here alive. You know that as well as I do. And that fiend, he's going to take his time with us. He's going to torture us more. We are going to suffer. I want to end this. On my terms. Give me the saw."

  I pulled the saw close to my chest, as if I could hide it from his sight and with that erase the thoughts that filled his head and traveled to mine. "No. Tug's still out there. We're still alive. As long as we have that, we have a chance."

  "It's not your choice to make, Skip. It's mine. I'll be quick and then you can take the saw back and chip away at the chain. We're wasting more time talking than anything else."

  "I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to lose you."

  "Lose me. Who the hell are you? We don't even know each other anymore. We're completely different people. Any connection is from a long lost past colored by nostalgia. We don't owe each other anything anymore. We're not really friends. We once were. We shared something. But it's all gone. Every last bit of it, and it's too late to bring any of that back, just like it's too late to bring Dave back. We never should have come here. It was a bad idea. A stupid idea. Stupid Tug. We should have just let the past be buried. And now this, now this hell. We're all going to die." He slammed his fists on the ground. "So give me the goddamned saw! Let me cut my own throat. Better at my own hand!"

  "No."

  "No? You son of a bitch! I'm going to kill you!"

  "Just like you did to Amanda?"

  His lips quivered as he tried to find words. "You saw...?"

  "Everything. You fucked up. What you did..."

  "You don't understand. I had no choice."

  "I do understand. He gave me the same choice."

  A shuddering sigh broke from his chest. "Give me the saw. Let me end this. Let me kill myself."

  I exploded in laughter, a deep belly laughter, the kind of laughter where you couldn't breathe and your stomach cramps and when you think it is all over, it floods your whole body again.

  Finally I could breathe. "No, you're not going to kill yourself. He is. The Sandman is. Unless we can get out of here."

  With that I turned back to the wall, the scraping, the flakes of concrete showering onto my bloody arms, the reassuring bite of the metal into the palm of my hand.

  64

  Jay was right. Scraping away at the wall was hopeless. Flakes of concrete cascaded over my bloody arms but I made hardly any progress. Another five minutes of work and I realized that it would take me days of non-stop digging to get the chain free, and by then the Sandman was sure to have returned to drag one of us back into hell.

  But I was not ready to give up. I did not want to die here. I needed to find a way out.

  My hands were a mess, covered in my own blood, torn open by the sharp edge of the saw. I took a break to blow on my palms and dab the deeper wounds with the rag.

  Jay skulked against the wall, casting me dirty glances. Lipsky trembled as if fighting back tears.

  I crawled towards him until I reached the end of my chain. "Lipsky, come here. Crawl towards me. Yeah, that's right, towards the sound of my voice."

  I could barely look at him with his eyes and mouth stitched s
hut. It was grotesque. I reached out a hand and touched his shoulder when he was close enough.

  "I'm gonna take those stitches out, buddy."

  He mumbled something behind his closed lips and wildly shook his head.

  "You'll just have to deal with the pain. It'll be over soon enough."

  He tried to back away but I seized his arm and held on tight.

  Again, the garbled sound that I could not make out.

  "He says, 'He'll kill me,'" said Jay.

  Lipsky nodded.

  "You think he was going to save you?" I asked. "How long do you think you could live with your mouth sewn shut?"

  He stopped pulling away from me.

  "This is going to hurt, but it'll be over before you know it. Okay?"

  He nodded.

  I touched his chin and turned his mouth towards me. Black thread wove in and out of his lips, pulled so tight that the flesh bulged and bled, and seeped clear fluid. I choked back bile. I scraped at the thread with a fingernail. The Sandman had pulled it incredibly tight.

  "Lipsky, these stitches, they're really tight. I'm going to need to cut your lip a little to get under the thread. Okay? I'm sorry. There's no other way."

  He did not move.

  I pressed the saw teeth against his skin, cutting beneath his lip. Blood formed into a dark red drop. With my fingers, I held his lip in place. Then with a shaking hand, I pulled back quick and hard and the blade cut through the thick black thread.

  The blood made the tips of my fingers thick but slowly I was able to weave the thread back out of his lips and then his mouth was open, peppered with holes, bleeding.

  He gasped hard. "Thanks, Skip." He drew in several deep breaths. "So good to breathe again."

  When I freed his eyes, his courage melted away and he screamed and whimpered but within a few minutes, I had given him back his sight.

  "I never thought I'd see again."

  Jay sat against the wall fingers trying to create space between the shackle and his neck. "Odds are the next thing you're going to see is the Sandman, anyway, so I'm not sure if old Skip here has done you any favors."