The baby isn't born yet. It doesn't know anything.
Do you want to die a murderer?
I'm already a murderer.
You didn't pull the trigger. You could never have known Travis would do that. It's not your fault.
What about Sophie? If she's dead, it's because of me.
You didn't kill her either. You didn't kill any of them. Travis and Master did. You wanted to survive. They are the evil ones here. You aren't a murderer...but you will become one if you do this.
I don't want to live!
The baby doesn't want to die. Feel him thrashing. He protests. Don't do this.
I began to pass out and my numb fingers released the chain. I slumped against the cot, gasping. I couldn't cry anymore. I couldn't even scream. I held onto the edge of the cot, just breathing.
Breathe in.
Exhale.
In.
Out.
As long as there is breath, there is still hope.
Chapter 15: The Endless Dark
There was a clink, and I looked up. I had thought I was beyond fear, but I was wrong. My heart thudded wildly in my chest as the bearded visage of Master appeared through the barred window in my door. He was unlocking my door.
I pushed myself to my feet. Master entered. He closed the door behind him. I tried to look defiant, but I imagined I was failing miserably. I crossed my arms as well as I could with the heavy chain on my arm.
Master crossed the room until he stood just a few feet in front of me. He too crossed his arms. And there he just stood, staring silently.
“What do you want?” I hissed at him.
After a moment, Master did something I could never have expected.
He threw back his head and laughed. He roared with laughter, his huge frame shaking with mirth.
Before I could even register the change, he stopped laughing and lunged at me. He grabbed me by the hair at the back of my head and he yanked me down onto the bed, straddling me.
“You thought you could escape me?” He growled into my ear, his hand tightening painfully in my hair. His free hand came up to my neck, the massive fingers nearly able to encircle my throat completely.
I cried out as he leaned into me, his weight making it hard to breathe.
“Well? Do you?” He shouted, shaking me by the hair.
“I'm sorry!” I cried, aware of the knee pressing into my belly. Suddenly I no longer wanted to die, now that death seemed like such an immediate possibility. I desperately wanted to live. “I'm sorry! I won't do it again!”
“No. You won't.”
He let go of my hair and throat and stood. I nearly cried in relief, thinking he was about to leave.
That was when he began to unbuckle his belt.
“No!” I cried, holding out a hand. “I'm pregnant! You don't rape the pregnant girls! You'll kill the baby!”
He sneered at me. “Well, you've gotten rid of my only other option in your little escape attempt. So I guess I'm breaking the rule. Baby dies, it's your fault.”
As he came toward me again and I shut my eyes to block out the sight, one thought roiling in my mind.
His only other option. He means Sophie. Sophie really is dead.
***
I had forgotten how much it hurt. I was on fire inside, and there was no Jenny to bring me the medicine. There was no one to help. No one to talk to. I was alone at the mercy of a madman. A madman and a murderer.
Apparently I no longer deserved any measure of kindness. My food was toast and bologna, my drink water. Travis spoke to me coldly if he spoke at all. There was nothing to break the monotony, not even my journal. No Bible, no little TV in the corner, nothing.
After a day I longed for a bath. I longed for my socks. My sweater. A hairbrush. I had been given toothpaste and a toothbrush, but that was it. Not even any toilet paper.
It had never occurred to me that my life could be worse than it was when I was first captured, but these next days proved how wrong I had been. The one blanket did little to assuage the chill. Only cold water flowed from the sink. There was no warmth to be found anywhere, no beauty, no happiness. There was no relief from the darkness and the silence.
After three days, my skin and hair began to itch. My hair was so nasty that I couldn't stand for it to touch me, and my skin crawled. I stank. I lay on my bed and stared at the wall, daydreaming of the things I'd had before my botched escape. I dreamed of hot food, of hot baths, of soap. I dreamed of the sight of that thin beam of sunlight that had pierced my window in the early morning. I dreamed of having someone to talk to. I even dreamed of another girl being raped and beaten, so that I would be let out of my cell to tend to her wounds.
After four days, I started to lose count. I spent all of my energy shivering. I couldn't sleep in the cold. Eventually I began to hallucinate from sleep deprivation. I jumped out of my skin at every noise, my heart pounding.
I imagined my parents were in the cell with me. They stood in the middle of the room, looking sadly down at me. They reached ghostly hands out to me, tears on their faces and wails coming from their mouths. They never said anything. They only cried.
When I did sleep, I dreamed of the men Travis had shot. In my dreams they chased me, hands outstretched, their eyes cold and lifeless, blood staining their clothes. They whispered of hell. They whispered of what they would do to me. Anytime I stopped running they would soon find me, shuffling on silent feet, laying their cold hands on my shoulders.
Once I woke in a cold sweat, bolting upright in bed. The light in the hallway was on, and someone was opening the door to the basement. Someone was screaming, and for once it wasn't me.
The door to the basement opened and Master and Travis came through. I only caught a glimpse of them as they moved past my door. They were carrying something between them, something that was fighting.
Another girl. My heart clenched in my chest. I had caught a glimpse of her hair, golden as straw. She screamed and fought. They opened a cell and shoved her in. The lock clinked. She threw herself against the door, crying. She rattled the bars in the window, yelling for help. She sobbed, a sharp, raw sound that echoed in my chest.
I walked to the end of my chain and knelt with my arm stretched behind me, my other hand reaching toward the door. I wanted to talk, to reassure the girl, but she wouldn't hear me. My heart ached to help her. To let her know that she wasn't going to die, at least not today.
But how do you reassure someone who has been so violently ripped from their life? How do you convince someone they will be okay, when they've just lost everything they loved?
When had I turned into this spectre of the darkness that thought this imprisonment was to possibly be preferred to any other outcome? When had I become so resigned to my fate that I could try to tell someone that it would be okay, you're only a sex slave, a baby machine, a punching bag?
When had the darkness in front of my eyes penetrated into my soul?
***
Her name was Tanya, and she wasn't even from America. She barely spoke English. Her speech was obscured by a heavy accent. She was younger than me. Oh, she sounded so young. She talked about her parents missing her, about the school missing her. She screamed about going home.
Apparently her parents were rich. I heard her begging for mercy, telling Master that her parents would pay for her return. She promised amounts of money I could only ever dream of seeing.
When Master ignored her pleas and had his way with her anyway, I was glad when she didn't fight. Sophie was tough. She could take the abuse. From what I had seen of Tanya, she was much smaller. Petite. She would not survive as much. At night I knelt by my cot and prayed that God would make her be still and not resist, so that she would be okay.
And I hated myself for the fact that I was glad. I rejoiced in the fact that this meant Master would not visit me, and despised myself for it. I prayed for forgiveness even as I thanked God that I was being left alone.
Tanya didn't scream for long. Afte
r a week or two, she became quiet. The silence was deafening again. I had never even talked to her. I was too tired. What was the point? She was weak, and she was young. I couldn't become attached, only to lose another friend. No, it was best to refrain from speaking. So I held my tongue even when I ached for conversation, lying on my cot curled under my blanket and staring at the wall. I stared until my eyes burned and the cinder-block lines swam in front of my eyes. I stared until I had memorized the number of blocks on each wall. Then I turned over, and stared at the other wall. I prayed silently, often wordlessly. I prayed for someone to find us. I prayed for an end of the darkness, even as my sanity faded into the void.
I started looking forward to when Travis would come. He still wouldn't speak to me. I desperately longed for the times when the door would open and I would see his face. I laid quietly on my cot as he brought the trays and removed the last one, while I stared hungrily at the handsome lines of his face. It scared me how much I longed for a conversation, for the touch of another human being, so much so that I wanted to talk to the man that had murdered two others right before my eyes.
I even anticipated Master's visits. Tanya didn't scream, she just cried quietly afterward. I noticed that it made Master grumpy. He seemed to like it when the girls screamed.
They brought Tanya the little old TV, and I strained my ears until they ached, listening to the movies as they played. The notes of old Disney songs, so quiet I could barely hear, drifted to my ears. It was like water for a dying man. I cried every time Tanya turned the TV off. I prayed for the time when she would turn it on again.
Rational, sane thought ceased to matter. I no longer cared if I was crazy. Crazy was easier than sanity. The lies were better than the truth. The truth hurt too much to imagine. I looked at Travis and I imagined him as the man who had written me poetry. I imagined him at the man that had sat across from me in that Chinese restaurant and told me about how he saved babies. I imagined Master as the weird uncle that skulked around the house, the one who always says slightly inappropriate things but everybody loves.
Yes, I think after a while I began to love my captors. Is love the right word? What do you call it when your heart flutters and your heart patters in your chest at the sight of someone? When you long for their presence anytime they are gone? When you can't wait until you see them again? Isn't that what we call love?
Yes, I truly had gone mad. I was falling in love with my captors, and I didn't even have the energy to care. They were my only salvation from the darkness and emptiness that threatened to swallow me whole. They were the only relief from the cold and the dark that I could never be free of. I was convinced that even if I ever got free, that the cold was a permanent part of me now. I couldn't even remember what it felt like to be warm.
My uterus was past my belly button now. My stomach and my chest did not reflect the gauntness of the rest of me. My wrist was so thin that I could almost slip my hand through the band. I'm sure if I had really tried, I could have. But it didn't matter. I would only get punished, and it wasn't like I was going to escape again. There was no window, no keys. Unless I was going to dig my way out through the concrete wall with my fingernails, I was never getting out.
Sometimes I lay on my back and watched as my belly would pop and move with the baby's kicks. I laid my hand on top, hating the layer of skin and muscle that kept me from touching the baby directly. I refused to think about the day this baby would be born—the first and last day I would ever see or hold my child.
One day the men brought in a third girl. I didn't even bother to worry about her. I lay on my bed with my blanket stuffed in my ears until she stopped screaming. I hadn't even seen them bring her in. I refused to ask her name. There was no point. We were all just bodies, with no past and no future, living in the darkness until we died. No one would find us. No one was coming. Our parents had given us up for dead. The world had moved on, while we rotted in this dungeon.
My skin was so pale that I could see my veins. I no longer had the energy to do anything but sleep. I could barely force myself to eat. I had no will to live, and no energy to die. I just lay on my cot, shivering in the cold, watching my belly swell. I imagined it would consume me until there was nothing left but a huge ball of stretched skin, like a human egg. This baby would drain me dry until there was nothing left. Then they would take it and give it away. And another girl would take my place, and another, until the end of time.
The thought occurred to me that maybe I had died and this was hell. I had died without God, and this was my punishment. I had lost my chance for salvation and I was condemned to eternal pain.
Yes, that had to be it. Jenny must have had it right when I first got here. Like she'd said...
Welcome to hell.
Chapter 16: Only the Living Feel Pain
I don't remember much of the months that followed. My belly grew and my heart shrank. I rarely left my bed. I no longer bothered to cry. I no longer bothered to talk. I couldn't bring myself to care. I only ate because Travis said if I didn't, he would force it down my throat. The cries and screams of the other girls became the background music to my fading life.
Then one day I bolted up in my bed, gasping at the pain that had lanced through my belly. I sat there, shaking a little from the effort of sitting up, rubbing the tight skin. The baby pushed back at my hand. Thinking it must have just been a stomach spasm, I laid back down and let my eyes drift closed.
The pain came again, and I clutched my belly. The muscles tightened underneath my hands. I'd had enough contractions to recognize this as one. But this was different. They had never hurt before, just tightened my belly for a few seconds and then were gone.
Was it time? I had no idea how many months I had been pregnant. It might be early, or it might be late. The pain rippled across my skin again and I groaned. My lower back ached fiercely.
That was how Travis found me when he brought my breakfast, kneeling against the side of my cot and trying to breathe through the pain.
He set my tray on the floor and sat next to me on the cot. “What is it?'
“The baby,” I muttered through clenched teeth.
“It can't be. You're not due for five weeks.”
The contraction eased and I took a moment to catch my breath. “I don't think the baby cares.”
Abruptly Travis stood and walked out of the cell. I turned my attention inward, pressing my forehead into the cot frame as the next pain swept through my body.
My voice was rough from lack of use, but it felt good to groan through the contractions. I had a momentary feeling of panic as I realized that I was going to have to do all of this without pain medication. Then the next contraction came, and I was too busy focusing on breathing through the wave of pain to think about anything else.
It wasn't long before my atrophied muscles began to shake and I climbed up to lie on the cot, curling around my belly and grasping my knees with my hands. For once I was warm. I kicked the blanket off and pushed my damp hair from my forehead.
God, protect me. Protect the baby.
This was really happening. I was about to see my baby.
And then I would lose them. My heart quailed at the thought. Maybe I didn't really have to have the baby now. I wasn't due for a few more weeks. If I could just keep the baby in, they wouldn't take my little one away. Maybe I never had to give birth. I could just grow the baby inside me until he or she was big enough to defend themself
Even in my haze of pain, I knew I was thinking crazy thoughts. Obviously the baby was coming now, and I had no choice in the matter. Tears streamed from my eyes and into my matted hair.
I felt a pop, and wetness flooded out between my legs. I looked down in astonishment. I had forgotten about this...the part in movies where a woman goes into labor after her water breaks. Well, apparently this wasn't like the movies. And it was far more uncomfortable and messy than the movies showed. Fluid gushed from me with each contraction. The white of my gown was faintly tinged with pink
where the amniotic fluid had soaked it. Was that a bad thing? I had no idea. I'd never seen a birth in real life except for Jenny's. I had no idea what I was doing or what was supposed to happen. Here, there was no attentive doctor, no group of nurses chanting at me to push. There was no husband to hold my hand.
A while later, Travis returned, and there was a girl with him. She was tall, almost as tall as he was. She had short hair that had probably once been a pixie, but was now a ragged sort of bob.
As soon as she was in the cell, Travis stepped out and locked the door behind him.
The latest contraction passed. “What's your name?” I croaked, my voice hoarse from groaning.
The girl looked nervous. She had a ragged scar along her left cheekbone and a strange, ethereal beauty. Her eyes were the deepest blue I had ever seen. She looked like she belonged on a runway, not in a basement. Even the pale nightgown could not destroy the impression of an angel standing amidst the filth.
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