by David Wood
He opened his eyes. “Come in,” he said, irritated.
The rapping paused then started again. This time it was more of a knock.
“Come in!” he said again.
The knocking stopped but she didn’t enter. She was probably sulking on the other side of the door because he had raised his voice. She was so damn sensitive. It had gotten so that he couldn’t even joke around with her anymore. Couldn’t tease her or poke fun, couldn’t come up behind her and unhook her bra or pinch her ass or even say something risqué.
The knocking started up again. This time he held his tongue.
If she wanted to act like a child then Craig would treat her like one. He would ignore her. Let her knock on the goddamn door until her knuckles turned black and blue.
The knocking continued.
She wants you to get angry, he thought. Wants you to lose your temper, to yell and scream and rush at her, so she could go crying to her mother. That’s been her plan all along. To break up and then blame you. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. He put on his best smile and said sweetly, “Come in, baby. The door’s unlocked.”
The knocking stopped for a moment then the rapping started again.
This time just three light taps.
And that was all it took. Craig lost control of himself, felt the words rise in his throat like a dry heave. He screamed, “Come the fuck in, you dumb bitch!”
The door opened and Amy appeared, wearing a bewildered expression. “What is wrong with you?”
He propped himself up on his elbow, tried to slow down his breathing. “I was...” Confused. But he simply waved the sentence off and lay back down. “Nothing,” he said. Then, “What is it, Amy? What can I do for you?”
She moved toward the bed and sat down beside him, lay her slender hand on his chest and started massaging him through his white cotton tee shirt. “I just wanted to talk.”
He sighed, some of the heavy pressure blowing out of him. True, he was quick to anger, but unlike Amy, he was also quick to calm. Quick to forgive and forget, to move on. Except maybe when it came to her damn mother. “We can talk,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“About us. About our situation.”
“About being stuck in here?”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. Raising his shirt and rubbing his stomach. Her cool hand felt good against his warm flesh. “Not about that. About what happens when we leave. When we get out of this flat.” He covered his eyes with his arm, drew a long breath and said,
“Well, that’s up to you.”
She pulled his arm away from his face. “Look at me,” she said. “I love you.” Her eyes were welling up again. “I’m not going to leave you. Not when we get out of here, not ever. I promise. I swear on my mother.”
His chest rose. “Then you’re willing to stay here in Portugal with me?” he said. “Really?”
She nodded her head. “I’ll stay wherever you stay. I’ll go wherever you want to go. I’ll always be by your side, Craig, I promise.”
He sat up on the bed and hugged her, his sick nauseous stomach swelling with delight. She smelled a bit like sweat from not having showered but he didn’t care. He clutched her to him and wouldn’t let go. He flooded himself with her scent.
Tears spilled down his own cheeks now. “I love you, too. You don’t know how badly I needed to hear that.”
Her chin moved up and down against his shoulder. She shook in his arms, her tears seeping through his shirt. “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”
For a moment everything drifted away. The hunger, the thirst, the exhaustion and restlessness, the stench of vomit escaping under the bathroom door. Even the pulse. He felt perfect, as perfect as he had felt when they first landed in Honolulu two years ago.
Softly she said, “Let’s go now, Craig. Let’s get out of here.”
It took him a few seconds to comprehend. “Out of the bedroom?”
She sobbed, shook her head against his chest. “I mean, out of this flat, Craig.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and held her away. He looked in her reddening face, in her sopping wet eyes. “What?”
“Let’s leave here,” she said, gently touching his face. “We can go out and find another apartment here in Lisbon, if you want. Or we can go to France or Spain, wherever you decide. Let’s just get the hell out of this flat. Please.”
He turned his head to one side. “I don’t understand, Amy. What are you saying? That you still think I’m the one keeping us locked up in this place?”
“Craig, please.”
He tightened his grip on her shoulders and shook her, shook her hard. “Is that what you’re saying, Amy? Is that what you think?”
She was bawling now. Trembling on her own again.
He felt his fingers closing, pressing into her skin. He felt the bone, the cartilage. “Is that why you told me all this? That you love me and want to stay with me?” He felt the color rising in him, felt his own skin growing red. “Is that why you came in here and started touching me?”
She whimpered, “You’re hurting me.”
He let go of her and jumped off the bed. “How dare you,” he said with indignation. “I didn’t do this. I’m not the one keeping us here.”
He gave her one last look then stormed toward the door.
“Craig!” she bellowed.
He turned and glared at her as she slunk off the bed and onto the floor.
“I found your credit cards.”
He parted his lips to say something but didn’t. Instead he spun around and walked out the door. Then he slammed it behind him.
Chapter 18
In the early afternoon, when Amy finally summoned the courage to exit the bedroom, she found Craig seated at the table in front of his laptop. He was actually working through this. Writing his goddamn novel. He didn’t say anything to her as she crossed the room, didn’t so much as look up. He just kept typing.
Amy moved to the couch. It had to be Craig. He had to be the one to have done this. She wondered briefly if he had been planning it all along. He’d had to. He had everything covered. The door was sealed, the window shut tight and unbreakable. He had sabotaged the phone and Internet service. Threw away the few scraps of food the last tenant had left behind. But what was his end game? Was this his new way of attempting suicide?
If so, Amy realized, he planned on taking her with him.
She watched him as he typed. Had he really received an email from Amaro Dias Silva? She hadn’t seen it, he’d only read the message to her. She had watched him send an email to the landlord the previous night. But if he had gone this far in planning all this, maybe he had set up an account and emailed himself. For all she knew there was no Amaro Dias Silva. For all she knew they were squatting in this hellish place!
Amy’s last best hope was her mother. Her mother hated Craig. She feared him, feared for her only daughter. Of course she wouldn’t let not hearing from Amy slide for very long. She hated that Amy was leaving the States to begin with, deplored the fact that Amy was still with Craig at all. And now she had not heard from Amy in three full days. Surely by this time she was taking some action. Contacting the Portuguese authorities, or she might well even be on her way. Her mother had the address of this blasted building. And that would be all she would need.
He couldn’t believe how well the writing was going. The writing had not gone this well since he was scribbling in his notebook on Waikiki Beach, sipping cold Fresca and watching the women in two- piece bikinis walk by. Back then he had attributed his good fortune to the sun, to the ocean, to the mood the beauty of Hawaii had created in him. So then what was spurring him on now? Hell, it didn’t matter. He quickly checked his stats: fourteen thousand words and counting. He saved his work and almost smiled. But he stopped himself in time. He couldn’t smile right now. Amy was watching.
She stood and moved toward the boxes. Her cell phone, though undoubtedly useless here in Europe, was packed somewhe
re within. She hunched over the boxes, groaning from the pain in her lower back. Some of the boxes were marked but most of them weren’t. She had lost her enthusiasm for packing and labeling once she had realized she would be doing all of the work herself, that Craig yet again didn’t intend to help.
She knelt beside a large carton, poked her fingernails under the packing tape and peeled it off. Frrrrrrrrsssssshhhhh. She stole a glance at Craig. He had paused typing when he heard the noise and now he was watching her. She tried to pay him no mind and opened the box. Therein she found his law licenses from the State of New York and the federal courts, along with his college and law school degrees. All were expensively framed and carefully packed as though they were still more than just pieces of paper.
She stared at the framed documents and wondered briefly what life would have been like if Craig hadn’t quit the law. If they had married right away and stayed in New York.
She closed that box and moved onto the next. Books. Dozens of trade and mass market paperbacks. Yellowed and musty and dog-eared. She didn’t know why he kept them, what purpose they served. He had read them all and admitted that he would never read them again— there were too many books, he said, and life was too short. So why did he keep these around?
“What are you looking for?” he asked. She shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Anything we might be able to use, I guess.”
She pushed aside a box marked Craig’s hardcovers, the lone box he had packed, and found one of hers. She split the tape—pfffffffffftttttt— and peeked inside. Clothes, shoes, a small jewelry box, a photo album, important papers, but no phone.
The next large box contained more of his things. Manuscripts and research materials, notes and magazines, a set of binoculars and a microcassette recorder.
“Let me see that,” he said, pointing. “Hand it over.”
She pushed herself up off the floor and again she felt achy, as though she had been working out all week and her muscles were sore. She handed Craig the microcassette recorder. Then she sat back down and went to work on the next box.
Craig was playing around with the buttons, rewinding the tape. “Testing. One. Two. Three,” he said. “Testing. One. Two. Three.”
She slit the packing tape with her nail. This time she brightened. Inside this box were her diplomas, her cookbooks, her hats and scarves, and somewhere within she knew she would find her cell phone. She vividly recalled packing her cell phone with these very things.
“Testing. One. Two. Three,” echoed Craig’s voice from the recorder. “Testing. One. Two. Three.”
She fished out the accessories, books and framed photos, and set them all on the floor around her. Then she dug deeper, using her fingers to feel around. Strangely, her fingers felt arthritic. It was the very sensation her grandmother described in the years before she died—a dull, achy pain and substantial stiffness in her joints. After a few minutes of fishing, Amy finally felt the phone in her hand and gasped as she pulled it free.
The LG cell phone was broken into two pieces, the top snapped off from the bottom, hanging together now by a thin piece of film. Her small hope that the device would somehow work in Europe, work in the Alfama, work in this very flat—at least the European equivalent of 911, whatever that was—had been dashed.
She glanced over at Craig. The bastard was typing again. Had he seen it? No, she didn’t think he had seen her pull out the phone. She gave it some thought and then jumped up, ignoring the pain that shot up her legs.
“Craig!” She held up her cell, holding it together so that he couldn’t see that it was in pieces. “Great news! I got a text message from my mom last night. I’ve got no cell service now but the text says she’ll be here today, sometime this afternoon. She knows where we are.” She forced a big, bright smile. “We’re going to be all right!”
He stared at her, his eyes narrowed, his mouth ajar. “That’s great, Amy. I can’t believe the text went through.” He grinned back at her. “Verizon said we wouldn’t have any kind of service here. Hell, I didn’t even bring my phone.” He got up from his chair, walked to the window and pressed his head against the pane. He stood there some time then said, “First thing I’m going to do is go next door and kick our neighbor’s ass from here to Barcelona.”
She stuffed the cell back into the box and took a tentative step toward him. “You’re really convinced it’s him?”
“I’d bet my life on it.”
What if it was the neighbor? she thought. What then? Would they ever get out? Was this maniac on the other side of the wall willing to let them die? Willing to essentially murder them, to entomb them in this horrid space until they dried up? For what? For banging on the damned wall a few times?
If it was the neighbor, then there had to be others. Surely someone would hear them if they were to scream as loud as they could against the door. If they were to stand by and guard the peephole, then surely they would eventually see someone out in the hall.
Their flat was at the end of the corridor, so no one lived on the other side of the living room wall. But there was an apartment directly across from them. They could see it through the peephole. Maybe someone lived there.
She turned her head toward the bedroom to a sound and Craig did the same. It was the fado music again, battling its way through the far wall. Another sad, soulful tune accompanied by Portuguese lyrics about either love or death or longing or loss.
“You see?” Craig said. “He’s taunting us.”
It was maybe more frightening if it was the neighbor and not Craig. The enemy you know is better than the one you don’t….Craig at least she could make a plea to. Craig she could beg. Craig would at least be dying of thirst alongside her; if he were suffering badly enough he could change his mind, even decide that he wanted to live.
“That son of a bitch,” Craig said.
If indeed it wasn’t Craig then they would need some outside help. Either from Amaro or his associate, from the authorities or someone else, someone in the alley, someone in the hallway, someone that might be able to see them through their window or hear them screaming for help.
She jumped.
There was a loud knocking, a pounding sound coming now from the front door.
She looked over at Craig. He beamed at her.
“Answer it,” he said excitedly. “Your mother! That’s gotta be her.”
Chapter 19
Amy’s high-pitched scream filled the room as she frantically backed away from the door.
Craig rushed to her, took her into his arms. Felt her body shaking against his, convulsing in his grip. “What?” he shouted over her shrieking. “What is it? What did you see?”
She buried her face in his chest. When she spoke her words were muffled by his shirt. “...the peephole,” she said, her voice cracking. “I saw...I saw...” She was shaking harder now, her face burning hot against his bare arms. The fado music traveled unabated from the bedroom. The knocking had ceased. “I saw...” she said again. “It was...” Crying hysterically now. “Craig, it was...me.”
“You?” he said. “Amy, you’re...”
“No!” she screamed. “I swear. It was me. I was naked and my body was all burnt and bloody and my face was...It was melting and my head was shaking, almost spinning, back and forth so fast it made me dizzy. And then she—and then I—started climbing up the wall in the hallway like some kind of spider... Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my...”
“Calm down, calm down. He , rocked her gently, shaking now a bit himself. “Take it easy, Amy. Take it easy.” He stared over her shoulder at the door. “You haven’t eaten anything, sweetie. You haven’t eaten a goddamn thing in what, three days? You’re hungry. In fact, you’re starving, baby. And you’re under a tremendous amount of stress. You’re hallucinating. That’s all.”
“Craig, I saw myself,” she cried. “Plain as day.”
“I believe you. But that’s exactly what a hallucination is.”
He felt her shaking her head against his chest. H
e looked toward the door again. “Let me take a peek,” he said, gently peeling her off him. “I’ll see if there’s anything out there.”
Slowly he made his way toward the door. He was anxious, more anxious than he should have been considering he knew she was hallucinating, knew he would find nothing unusual on the other side of the door. Unless, of course, their neighbor was going high-tech, projecting freakish images on the far hallway wall.
But when he placed his eye against the peephole, Craig saw nothing but the grim hall.
“The hallway’s empty, sweetheart,” he called over his shoulder. “There’s nothing and no one out there.”
“Then who or what knocked?” Her voice was no calmer than before.
Craig checked the peephole again. “It had to be our friend next door. The bastard is playing games with us.”
Amy sunk to her knees before him on the floor. “I’m so scared.”
He lowered himself on his haunches and held her again. “Don’t be. This will all be over soon. Your mother will get here, she’ll get us help, she’ll get us out. Then we’ll go right to the authorities and get this guy locked up.”
“I don’t know,” she said, weeping still.
“Don’t know what, dear?”
“I don’t know if my mother is coming.”
He placed his fingers beneath her quivering chin and lifted her face up to meet his. “Of course she’s coming. She sent you a text message.”
Amy shut her eyes, shook her head. “She didn’t. I made it up.” “Made it up?”
“I thought it was you,” she cried. “I thought you were keeping me here. I thought maybe if you thought she was coming you would let me go.” She started shaking violently again.
He swallowed hard then hugged her. He started weeping himself. “How could you think it was me?” he said. “How did you think I could do that to you?”
She opened her red and moist eyes. Her nose was still swollen but not quite as much as the day before. “I don’t know. I just know you love me so much. So much. I just figured you would do anything you could to keep me here.”