by Stella Noir
It was another bathroom that was somewhat similar to the one in my room, only not quite as elaborately decorated. It had the same sparkly marble floor and counter, with more subdued lighting, but was twice the size of my bathroom and, from what I could tell, it looked like it belonged to a couple. There were two of everything spread throughout the room: two enormous sunken bathtubs, two toilets, and two dressing lounge chairs. There were also two sinks set into the long, gold-flecked counter that ran across one entire wall. Next to each sink sat an array of teeny bottles and jars that appeared to double when reflected in another enormous mirror that, I hoped, had no one watching me behind it. As I walked past, I glanced at the counter and picked up a fancy little jar that I had seen in a magazine somewhere for over two thousand dollars. I laughed at the thought of Jake’s brother spending so much on skin care, especially when he was holed up here out in the middle of nowhere.
I walked through another door that led to yet another bedroom. This bedroom had a dim light in the corner but the main light in the room came from a series of monitors set up in the center of the opposite wall.
I moved closer to the stack of monitors and realized that I was looking at the bedroom I had just been held in, as well as a few other rooms in the hospital section of the house where I had woken up when I first found myself here.
I knew he’d been watching me, I thought as I looked to see where each monitor was set up and fumed when I saw one in the ornate bathroom I had been using this last week. On one of the monitors, I saw Jeffrey laying on the ground near the door of the room, but he wasn’t moving and Jake wasn’t in there with him. I didn’t know if Jake had killed his brother or not, but I was glad to see that Jeffrey was the one that was unconscious.
I didn’t know what I was feeling for Jake. I wanted to believe that he was good at heart, and still deserved the benefit of the doubt, but I was so overwhelmed with everything that had just happened that I could barely think straight. Old memories were blending in with everything that had gone on over the last couple of weeks and I just needed to get out of there so I could think clearly.
I walked back through the double bathroom and back into the other bedroom and found Jake standing in the middle of the room. He didn’t move or speak, he just looked at me for a moment with incredibly sad eyes, then quickly looked away. I didn’t know what to do or say. I wanted to run up to him and throw my arms around him, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about everything his brother had said, and done. And Jake had let him. Jake had watched.
He had clearly been crying and his shoulders were hunched over like he didn’t have a shred of energy or dignity left in his whole body.
11
JAKE
I knew Abby had left the room even before I set out to kill my brother. No matter what was going on around me or how far I had let things get out of control I still thought about her every second of the day and could feel her presence leave the room soon after I started to throttle Jeffrey. He had done me a huge favor by laughing in my face while I had my hands around his neck and as I increased my grip on him I felt his body go limp. I hated him with every fiber of my being, and watching that smile fade from his face into a far away look of terror gave me more pleasure than I could imagine, until the moment when I realized who it was that I really hated, and I let him go. I had been the one that had let all this insanity go on for so long. I was the one that had always been to afraid to stop him. But I could never really figure out what it was exactly that I was afraid of. I knew he was capable of killing, but that wasn’t it. I would have welcomed death over having him tell Abby how pathetic I was.
It was almost like I was trapped in my own fear. I didn’t know how to change myself, how to fix my problems, and he was always right there to offer up a solution. But I didn’t want any part of it after I met Abby. Twice. Twice I let him take over for me when I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted, but after that, I told him I wouldn’t do it again. I didn’t want to do that to her. But then once I came back to this house it felt like everything spiraled out of control. I felt paralyzed and terrified like I had when I was a kid. But it wasn’t Jeffrey that I hated. It was me, for letting everything go way too far.
When I let go of his body, Jeffrey’s head fell to the side, but I could still see his chest moving up and down. I was more concerned with finding Abby and making sure that she was ok, so I left him there. I knew I could never gain her trust back after everything I had let happen, but I had to help her get out of this goddamned house.
I looked out into the hall and didn’t see any sign of her, so I turned to the right and went to the elevator at the end of the hall. I checked to see what floor it was stopped at and realized that she had to be in one of the rooms on this floor since the arrow was still pointing at four. I made my way back towards the room where I had left Jeffrey and figured he must still be lying on the floor since I hadn’t seen him come down the hall. I quietly opened doors and whispered Abby’s name, but I wasn’t sure she would even want to see me. When I opened the door to my old bedroom I noticed a light streaming in from the adjoining bathroom. I wasn’t sure she was in there but I as I stood quietly and waited I heard a jar being gently set down on the counter and I knew it had to be her. No one else was in the house.
There was a part of me that hoped Abby would just go out Jeffrey’s bedroom door into the hallway so I wouldn’t have to face her but also didn’t want her to run into him when she was alone. I had been a coward for far too long and I knew I had to face the one thing I was most afraid of right now, the look of hatred I knew would be in her eyes. As I started to walk across the room that I spent so much time in as a child, everything that happened to my brother and me flashed back before my eyes. The beatings and the torture and the loneliness. I wished I had never come back, that he hadn’t forced me to come back by bringing Abby here. I had told Jeffrey over and over that I was done with everything, that I just wanted to be free of him and this house and everything that it reminded me of. Everything in this room brought back memories of the pain and humiliation our father imposed on us for years, and as I looked around the room it all came flooding back.
My breath caught in my throat when I saw a shadow moving through the bathroom doorway and towards me. I glanced up at her for just a second but couldn’t bear to keep looking into her beautiful eyes, I was just too ashamed.
“Jake?” she asked as she walked towards me in the dark. “Are you ok?”
My eyes filled with tears as I felt her moving closer to me. I couldn’t believe she was asking me how I was, after everything she’d been through.
12
ABBY
I reached up and wiped away a tear that had fallen down Jake’s cheek. I didn’t know what to say or do, but I just couldn’t be angry with him.
“Is Jeffrey dead?” I asked.
“No. I went a little crazy on him for a minute, but there’s no way I could kill him. He’s my brother, and even though he’s done some terrible things…what he’s been through is even worse, Abby. You have no idea. I’m not trying to erase the horrible things he’s done to you. But I can’t justify hurting him any more than he already has been,” he said as his voice cracked. I could tell that this was hard for him and I wanted to know more, to understand what was going on between them, but I knew that would have to wait.
“What is this place, Jake? Where are we?”
“It’s the house I grew up in.”
“House? It seems more like a mansion to me. And the place I was in earlier, the old hospital, is that in this house too?” I asked as I moved closer to him, trying to understand the expression on his face. He was still keeping his gaze on the floor but some of the pain and sadness that had darkened his face since the night I left seemed to have lifted a bit, at least temporarily.
“Yes, it’s in the basement. My father was a doctor and he had his own clinic built down there before my brother and I were born. The main floor of this house, the one above the hospital, he
ld his offices and the nurses and servants quarters, and the third and fourth floors are where my family lived. My brother and I shared this floor mostly. This was my bedroom from when I was born until I left to go to college, and I still used it when I came home for vacations, but once I was out on my own I never came back here…until now. My brother and I shared the bathroom between these two rooms and the room with the monitors on the other side is his. I guess he still uses that room as his bedroom.”
“Is this where you’ve been sleeping since I’ve been here? Have you been staying at this house with him?”
He was quiet for a moment and kept his eyes lowered to the floor.
“I…I’ve been sleeping in that room behind the mirror. I just wanted to be near you Abby, and to see you when the light came in through the window in the morning. I wanted so badly to believe that I could stand up to him and get you out of here. Each day when I saw you laying in bed so peacefully I swore it would be the last day he would get his filthy hands on you. I fought with him every day to get him to see how what he was doing was wrong. So incredibly barbaric and sadistic, and so much like our father. But I just didn’t try hard enough to stop him. I’ve been almost paralyzed by my fear of him for a long time and I don’t completely understand why. I know what I did is unforgivable and that I’m a coward. I hate myself for the way I let him treat you. I’ll never be able to forgive myself…and I know you can’t forgive me. I don’t expect you to…but I just didn’t…I couldn’t…”
Jake stopped short and looked up at me in alarm when he heard Jeffrey’s bedroom door open. He grabbed my hand and quietly opened the door that led out into the hallway, then pulled me out with him and to the right. We slipped into another room across the hall that looked like an office of some sort. It was lined in bookcases and had a large desk in the middle of the room. There were two chairs in front of the desk and a couch with a coffee table that was covered in magazines off to the side. I glanced down at them and the dates on the magazines were all over ten years old.
“I think I know what rooms he has monitored and I should be able to get around all of the cameras. The only thing we might have a problem with is the elevator. I know that he has a camera in there.”
“Is there any other way down?” I asked, holding Jake’s hand and, for some reason, feeling safe for the first time since I’d gotten to that horrible place.
“Yes, there’s a back staircase that goes all the way down to the basement on the other end of the hallway, but I’m pretty sure he’s got cameras on that too. There is a third way down, but it might be a little riskier. Each one of these rooms on this side of the fourth floor is adjoined by a door. They’re a series of libraries my father had created for us because he expected both of us to follow in his footstept and become doctors, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with him or his work.”
“But Jeffrey did? What kind of doctor is he, Jake?”
“He’s not a doctor. He never went to medical school. There was an…accident when we were twelve and our father died. After that, Jeffrey spent all his time reading every one of our father’s books and journals. He went through all of the notes our father had taken for different laboratory experiments he had executed in the basement and developed some of his own experiments based on them. After our mother died from liver and kidney failure when we were twenty-one, Jeffrey started up the medical practice again. I don’t know how or where his staff or patients came from, and I never questioned him. I’ve just always turned a blind eye to Jeffrey’s behavior because of everything he’s been through.” Jake stopped as a visible look of pain spread across his face, then took a deep breath and squeezed my hand.
“What we need to do right now is get you out of here. Beyond this door is a string of libraries. There’s a room in the very center that’s made up of a four-foot landing that wraps around the perimeter of the room and a stairway that goes from it to the third floor. I’m not positive, but I don’t think there are any surveillance cameras in that room, or in any of the libraries. They’re his domain and he usually doesn’t let anyone else in them. We should be able to sneak through and make it to those stairs without him seeing us. Then we just have to get down one more flight and out of the front door.”
Jake still had not made eye contact with me and I knew it was because he was so ashamed of everything that had happened. I still didn’t quite understand the power his brother held over him, but it was obvious that it had been hard for Jake to go against him. He had to be pushed to the brink of murder in order to break free of the hold his brother had over him. I decided I wouldn’t bring anything up though or ask him any questions until we were safely away from this place and from Jeffrey, and even then I figured it was up to Jake. He would tell me if and when he was ready.
“Ok, let’s go,” Jake whispered as he opened a door in front of us. I could tell that he was still very nervous and probably still scared of his brother, and to be honest, I was too. There was no telling what Jeffrey was capable of. We passed through the first library room and it looked much like the one we had just left, only without the huge desk. It had chairs and a couch and every wall was filled with books. The next room was the one that Jake had told me about. Instead of a room with furniture scattered around the center, it had a beautiful, hand carved railing surrounding a gaping hole that allowed the entire room below to be seen from above. We made our way to the other side of the room and just as we approached the staircase that would take us down to the third floor Jeffrey appeared through another door in front of us.
13
JAKE
I remember the first time our father beat Jeffrey. We had been asleep in Jeffrey’s bed because I was afraid to sleep by myself that night. We were only five years old. I woke up to our father yelling at Jeffrey and pulling him out of bed, and by the look on Jeffrey’s face, he had no idea why he was in trouble. My father told Jeffrey to pull his pajamas down and bend over one of the big chairs and that what he was about to do would stop his soldier from standing at attention and keep him from playing with it. I remembered that part because all I could think of was that I hadn’t seen Jeffrey bring any toys into the bed with him.
My father looked at me before he started beating Jeffrey and he told me that he wanted me to watch so that I would learn the lesson too, and that if I looked away or even blinked that I would get what Jeffrey got, only worse. He did come after me more than once throughout my childhood, but for some reason it was Jeffrey that took the majority of the abuse. I would watch in horror as my father beat Jeffrey until he was screaming, then he would walk out of the room and leave him there on the chair. After he was gone I would run up to Jeffrey and put my arms around him until we both stopped crying, then we would get back into bed and lay there, staring at the door for the rest of the night. We were both terrified that he was going to come back in and beat one of us again.
Throughout all that time, through all of the years of the beatings and the torture and the things he did to Jeffrey that I was forced to watch, the most horrifying thing of all was seeing him standing in the doorway to one of our rooms, because we never knew what was coming. But we knew it was going to be bad.
That feeling came rushing back to me when I saw Jeffrey standing in the doorway of the library that Abby and I had just snuck through. We were approaching the staircase that led to the third floor when the door in front of us flew open and there he was, smiling at us just like our father used to.
I never understood why our father smiled when he was beating and torturing Jeffrey. In the beginning, it made me think that maybe what was going on wasn’t so bad, that we deserved what we were getting, even though I knew by the way my stomach felt that it was all very, very wrong. Then, I thought for a while that maybe he was smiling because he believed what he was doing was right, but eventually, sometime around when Jeffrey and I were ten, I knew that our father was just completely insane.
That’s what I’d wondered about Jeffrey these last few weeks, and it sc
ared the hell out of me. I had that same feeling in my stomach as I had when I watched my father beat him, and it was like I was experiencing it all over again. It’s this house, and the memories and the guilt of never having done anything to stop it before. Maybe, as much as we want them to, things just don’t really ever change.
Jeffrey came towards us and I pushed Abby behind me. I would die before I let him get his hands on her again.
“Oh come on, Jacob, you’re not actually going to do something, are you? You’ve never done a goddamned courageous thing in your life, with your limp dick and your fucking tears,” Jeffrey said with a smirk.
“If I were you I’d just dive over that railing there, Abby. This hotshot isn’t going to save you. All he’s capable of doing is watching. And if you’re lucky he’ll get a hard-on after you hit the floor and break your neck.”
Then everything became a blur, with Jeffrey ranting like a lunatic and threatening both of us as we tried to reason with him. But the more I heard, the angrier I got until I just ran at Jeffrey with my hands aimed at his eyes. I wanted to claw them out and shove them down his throat so that I never had to see them or hear his voice again. For years I had to listen to him insult me and berate me and tell me that I owed him for everything he went through, all the beatings and torture he took from our father. There never seemed to be anything I could do or say, no amount of anything I could give of myself to him that would make up for what was taken away by our father.
I lunged at him, but before I got a grip Jeffrey had already moved toward me and tackled me, knocking me onto my back. Then he was on top of me, smiling that insidious, soulless smile of our father’s with his hands wrapped around my throat.
“I’m going to kill you now, Jake. You’re going to be sorry you didn’t finish what you started back there.”
“Jeffrey…please don’t do this…I love you…” I whispered, gasping for the air that wasn’t coming through my windpipe anymore.