by Cole Baxter
I remember crouching down beside a corner as I heard his footsteps approaching me. I wondered if it would be a good day or a bad day. On the good days, Jacob was calm and gentle and would feed me warm soup and bread. On the bad days, he was unspeakably nasty, torturing me both physically and mentally.
Of course, these moods could switch in a second. One day, he was delivering me a bowl of hot chicken broth and I’d tried to take the bowl from his hands without asking nicely. I was starving because I hadn’t been fed in over a day and was on the verge of fainting. He wrenched the hot bowl from my hands and dumped the scalding liquid onto my body. From then on, I groveled at his feet whenever he was feeling benevolent.
When I reached a point in the wall that had several hooks reflecting soft light, I nearly fell to my knees. I had completely forgotten about them until then. Because I was so uncooperative whenever he was trying to sexually assault me, Jacob decided it was a good idea to string me up and tie me to the wall so it was harder to fight. He only did that once, as my ear-shattering screams were too distracting, even for him.
My hands dropped to my knees and I forced air into my lungs so I could keep going. My head was spinning so badly that I thought I was going to pass out.
“Gregory!” I whimpered. I shouted my son’s name a few more times. Finally, I heard a soft voice within the maze.
“Mom?”
Tears flooded my eyes. My baby was with me and he was alive. Suddenly, a tiny morsel of strength entered my body, just enough to keep moving. I continued through the maze, expertly navigating each turn. I was surprised that I knew where I was going. My feet guided me around the walls, completely independent of my brain.
“Mom, is that you?” a sleepy voice asked, somewhere within reach. It was the sweetest sound I had ever heard. My heart hadn’t felt such joy from a sound since the day I’d heard his first cry. Though I didn’t have a clue what I was doing the second he came into this world, I was overjoyed to have him. I vowed to love and protect him no matter what.
“It’s me,” I cried. “I’m coming for you. Keep talking, Gregory. I’m on my way.”
“I’m scared,” he said.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, though I didn’t necessarily believe it to be true. I wanted to tell him that I was scared too, but I needed him to keep calm. I had dealt with enough meltdowns in his life, and this was the last place one needed to happen.
I turned around the next corner and nearly screamed when my foot came into contact with something. I fell to my knees and wrapped my arms around my young son.
“I’m here,” I repeated into his ear. “We’re going to be okay.”
I examined Gregory the best I could in the low light. He wasn’t his usual lively self, not by any means. He was curled up in a ball on the ground, his back nestled into a corner. It was painfully familiar. He had learned how to keep himself from being startled when Jacob came through. It made my heart hurt.
He looked just like he did in the picture, but perhaps a bit thinner. His eyes were sunken and had purple circles surrounding them. I noticed that his bottom lip was split and there was some dried blood under one nostril. I wondered if Jacob deliberately took the pictures before beating him. Either way, I went into momma bear mode and was ready to rip that freak into shreds if he tried to lay a hand on my son again.
I picked him up and pulled him close to me. His skin felt so cold against mine. I rubbed his freezing arms, trying to warm him up. He flinched when I touched him.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he responded, his affect flat and emotionless.
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know,” he responded, his tone the same.
I sighed. I didn’t know how to get a response out of this kid. He had been mistreated for almost a week now. Even an hour in the maze would be enough to completely shut him down. Gregory was so emotionally sensitive and hard to talk to at times. For all I knew, he had broken bones that he wasn’t telling me about.
“Look,” I said, feeling desperate, “I’m going to get us out of here. I need you to listen to me and do whatever I say, okay? Do you know how we used to play Simon Says when you were little? Well, I’m Simon and you’re going to follow my lead, okay? It’ll be like a game of hide and seek.”
“We can’t move,” he said. “If I move, he will hurt me. If I say things that he doesn’t like, he will hurt me.”
“What kinds of things?” I asked, a knot in my stomach.
He shrugged. “Lots of stuff. Like, I can’t ask to go to the bathroom anymore. I can’t ask for food. I can’t ask for my mom.”
I held my son a little tighter. I could feel his slender body shivering against mine.
“Do you know how to get around the maze?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, perking up a little. “It is a very complex system, but I figured it out on the first day.”
“The first day?” I asked, a small smile forming on my lips. I was so proud of my little genius. I had spent a lot of time in the maze and I didn’t even know the full layout.
“I can see it in my head. We are in the top-left quadrant. The door is in the bottom-left quadrant, but it is always locked.”
“Not anymore,” I whispered. “The man is hurt right now. Soon, he will be too tired to even move. We are going to hide from him until he is too tired to hurt us. Then, the good guys will come and take us home. I need you to hold my hand and hide with me until that happens. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” he said.
I held his hand and gave it a little squeeze. There were times when I thought I would never see him again. The police say that the first twenty-four hours are the most important when it comes to finding a missing person. Their chances of survival diminish rapidly after that first day. Even though everyone around me said that we’d find them, that statistic crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
And even though I was going to fight like hell to get out, for a brief moment, I was just glad to be reunited with my son. There were times, especially in the early years, where I felt like I couldn’t be a parent, but now I realized how primal it felt to have my child in my arms. I was meant to have him, no matter how tragic the circumstances were.
“You little bitch!” I heard Jacob scream from the door. “I’m going to kill you!”
I heard the blade of his knife scrape against the wall. The idiot had pulled it out himself. Part of me was thankful that he had—it would only make him lose blood faster. The other part was horrified that the knife would find my son or me before he took his last breath. And there was the real possibility that I had missed all vital blood vessels and had hit nothing but fat and muscle.
“You can’t run from me,” Jacob roared. “You’re going to stay here forever, so you’d better get used to it. Don’t make this harder on me. It’s only going to make things harder on you and your boy—our boy.”
I clenched my teeth. Of course he would try to tell me that my son was his progeny. Gregory was my husband’s boy through and through.
I heard Jacob’s pounding footsteps echoing in the maze. He was coming our way.
“Let’s go,” I whispered into my son’s ear. “It’s time to play hide and seek.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jacob limped toward us with much more speed than I could have expected from him with an injured leg. I held my breath and looked around. He knew the maze much better than I did. Judging by the delight on his face when I showed him the pictures, he revered this place as a sanctuary. It was his greatest creation and he knew it well.
I figured there was a pretty good chance we could outrun him, but Gregory was in a weakened state. I tried to lift him up, but he was too heavy for me to carry and move quickly throughout the maze. My greatest fear was that Jacob would catch onto our movements and be able to cut us off. I would need my son’s help.
“Do you hear where he is?” I whispered into Gregory’s ear.
/> “Yes,” he whispered back.
“Do you know the most logical place to go to be as far away from him as possible? Can you see our locations in your head?”
“I think so.”
“Lead the way.”
I know it must have seemed like poor judgment at the time, having my nine-year-old son take control of the situation. After all, I was the one who was supposed to take care of him and make sure he got out of the maze alive. Yet, I was giving him free rein to take us wherever he thought was best. Perhaps it would have been a crazy move if I had an average child with me, but Gregory was special.
At the age of three, he came home from preschool with coloring worksheets clutched in his hand. I always stuck them on the refrigerator, even though he had no interest in coloring and tended to scribble on top of the picture, just to fulfill basic requirements while still technically following directions. But on the back of this particular worksheet, Gregory had drawn an intricate maze—well, intricate for a three-year-old.
At first, the familiar nausea came forward at the sight of a maze. I wondered if he had experienced what I had endured in utero, like his brain had taken in information through mine. I knew that it was a strange thought to have, but what little kid knows how to draw a maze without being taught?
The teacher must have thought I was insane when I brought the worksheet back the next day. She had greater concerns when it came to my son, like his poor verbal skills or his ability to share with others. I could tell that she was exhausted and thought that an hour of coloring would buy her some peace and quiet, not complaints from a mom.
After some discussion, we figured out that there was a wooden maze game in the preschool. It was one of those small boards that had a wooden peg inserted along a groove, allowing a child to slide it around. It was fairly basic, something the average kid could figure out in a few minutes. The teacher said she saw Gregory using it during play time a few days prior. She concluded that he must have learned about mazes then and decided to draw one of his own. She was impressed that he had shown any creativity but was less amused by his product. To her, it looked like scribbles on a page, a creative rendering of a physical toy in the room.
But I knew that it was much more sophisticated than that. I sat down at the kitchen table with the maze and worked through it. I was a young adult, and I managed to get caught up in a few dead ends along the way. It was one of the first moments in my child’s life that I knew that his gifts could get him far in life.
And at the same time, I worried that his abnormalities would work against him. Late at night, I wondered if my son was not my Greg’s, but someone else’s. I feared that his interest in the complicated and struggles with anything social would cause him to turn out as anything other than the polite man I was trying to raise. When we had talked about a future family, Greg really wanted a son to play sports with and to one day enlist in the military if he so desired. I just wanted a happy child.
With my hand inside Gregory’s small hand, I followed him through the maze, walking as quietly as possible. Jacob was thundering behind us, screaming all sorts of profanities.
“You bitch!” Jacob roared again. “How could you do this to me? I’ve always been so good to you. You’re nothing but a little whore. You only care about yourself.”
I gritted my teeth and kept walking. I hoped my son was tuning out all the shouting. As far as I knew, he had never heard language like that before in his life.
Suddenly, Gregory changed direction, pulling me toward the left. Until that point, we had been moving in a clockwise direction. Now, we were going through a portion that I didn’t remember. When I was trapped in the maze, I tried to stick to paths I knew. For a moment, I thought about taking control and returning to the path, but I had to trust my son. He was far more intuitive with these things than I was. And I had my fear tainting my decisions. He understood the social implications far less than I did. In his mind, he was working on a puzzle. Nothing else really mattered. He knew there was some danger involved, but he had no idea how bad it could be.
Jacob was near, but his footsteps slowed as he searched his creation for us.
“I’m sorry, Annabeth,” he said, his voice suddenly calm and gentle. “I don’t mean to frighten you. You just get me so worked up sometimes. It’s only because I love you and I want us to be a happy family again. The three of us haven’t been together since you were last with me. I want to prove to you that I can be a good husband and father. You mean the world to me and I’m going to make it up to you. Come out, and I’ll treat you like a queen. Please, Annabeth, I mean it.”
I shook my head at Gregory, trying to silently indicate that Jacob was not telling the truth. My son didn’t always understand things like lies and sarcasm. He took a lot of language at face value. It made it harder for him to understand Jacob because he couldn’t look at his face and see the rage.
“Don’t listen to what he says,” I breathed into his ear. “He is saying bad things. You just do your maze, okay?”
He nodded and continued on through the passage, carefully stepping over bumps in the floor. He really had a good understanding of where everything was.
I tried to make some sense of how long we had been in the maze. I had hoped that Jacob would have bled out by now, but he still seemed strong enough to put up a good fight. I also knew that there was a good chance Jacob had prepared for us to fight back and knew how to trap us.
I heard what sounded like the slam of a door and nearly jumped out of my skin. Gregory didn’t seem to be too perturbed and kept walking with absolute concentration. I tried to control my fast breathing and shaking limbs so I wouldn’t freak him out.
“Annabeth?” I heard Jacob say, his voice so much closer than it had been before. He was gaining on us. We walked a little faster until we hit a wall.
“This wasn’t here before,” Gregory said frantically. I couldn’t tell if he was more upset by the fact that Jacob was gaining on us or because he made a mistake. “I know this wasn’t here before.”
I felt the wall in front of us. It was made of wood, not stone. Jacob must have added doors to throw us off and make us easier to catch.
“Keep going,” I urged my son, bile rising into my throat. We were running out of time. I didn’t know how many walls Jacob had built, but it concerned me that my son might not be able to outsmart him. He had gone from having no power over me to nothing but power over me, and it was making him crazy.
I heard another loud noise, like pounding on wood, and it made my heart leap out of my chest. It had to be another door. I just couldn’t tell where it was located. It sounded like it was close to where we started, but I was becoming so turned around in the maze that I really wasn’t sure which way was up.
“What the—” Jacob shouted, his voice trailing off. I paused for a moment, listening intently. Jacob sounded agitated and confused. Something wasn’t going right for him. He must have made a mistake somewhere along the path. We needed to take advantage of it. But I didn’t know how to explain something so intricate to my son, who continued to pull me through the maze.
“Mom, what are you doing?” he asked as I looked around. I heard the pounding sound again, followed by Jacob’s voice. He sounded scared, but I had no idea what he was afraid of. I had a thought, but I couldn’t pinpoint whether it was instinct or just wishful thinking.
“Can you take us back to the beginning without running into Jacob?” I asked. “We need to get to the door, but he can’t get us first.”
Without another word, we began walking at a brisk pace toward the start of the maze. The pounding grew louder. My stomach churned until Jacob said something that confirmed my suspicion.
“Who did you call?” Jacob whined. “Did you call the cops on me? How are we supposed to live a peaceful life if you’re trying to get me in trouble?”
I gave my son’s hand a squeeze. Someone was here with us. We just needed to get to the door before Jacob did. The pounding on the locked door grew
louder and louder. We were going to be okay.
“Go away,” Jacob roared. “If you come through that door, I will kill them both. I have a gun and I’m not afraid to fire. If I can’t have them, then nobody can. We’ll be together in death if that’s what it takes.”
I gasped. I feared that this would be a possibility, but I never thought that Jacob would be capable of killing me. I truly believed that if he looked at my face and I begged hard enough, he wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger. However, I also didn’t think he was capable of killing my husband, raping me, and abducting my son. There was no telling what he could do if pushed far enough.
“You don’t want to do this,” Gabriel’s voice boomed through the wall. A small squeal came from my throat. He was here to save us. It wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
“You don’t know what I want,” Jacob snarled, not loud enough for Gabriel to hear. He was close, clearly understanding that we were trying to get to Gabriel first.
“How close are we to the door?” I asked softly.
“Almost there,” Gregory replied.
Suddenly, I felt a hand grasp my hair, tugging me so hard that my neck bent backward. I screamed as loud as I could, but a second hand hit me hard against the face. I fell to the ground with a horrible pain in my cheek. My hand went to my face and I instantly felt blood drip onto my palm.
“Shut up if you want to live,” Jacob growled. The lights flashed on, and suddenly, I could see Jacob’s sweaty face hovering above mine. He gnashed his teeth as he stared down at me. His entire pant leg was dark red with a rag tied tightly around the spot where I’d stabbed him. A black handgun was clenched tightly in his hand, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.
“Please don’t hurt us,” I whimpered, thinking of my son who was standing by my side. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think that’s enough,” Jacob said sternly. “You deliberately disobeyed me. Now, that police officer is here and he’s going to separate us. I can’t have that. You know I can’t have that.”