by Stella Noir
“I know what you’re doing ….”
She would sneak up behind me and sing the same words every once in a while throughout the day, but in the cage in the basement her eerie high pitched voice cut through the pitch black silence like a knife; and that same voice, along with the words it would form, entered my dream every single time.
“I know what you’re doing ….”
Those horribly sung words would echo through my brain until I was convinced that my mother could actually see in the dark, could see everything that I did, and could even see my thoughts because, by then, my head was my only real hiding place. At least that was what I hoped.
In the next part of my dream I would go into the tunnels. In real life that was the one place that actually felt safe to me. When I was a kid I made a spare key for the cage padlock and I would sneak out for hours at a time. My mother found out once, and the punishment for that was worse than anything else. She never left me alone again.
In my dream the doors to the cage and the tunnel would be left wide open and for some reason that would send shivers down my spine. And even though I would be scared to go through the doors I would do it without a flashlight, and somehow I was able see just fine.
As I walked through the tunnel I would keep turning around and looking at the door behind me, hoping that the light from the basement was still visible. And with every step I took, the feeling of impending doom would get stronger and stronger until I would almost go mad with terror. It almost seemed like it was the very act of trying to escape that filled me with terror, that in trying to escape I was doing something irreparably and terribly wrong.
I didn’t want to think about the dream anymore, and I didn’t want Avery to be down in that horrible place but I had to figure out what I was going to do. Maybe I could bring her up here. Maybe she would stay up here with me.
I looked around in the rooms on the second floor, trying to see what would need to be moved and how I could keep her from trying to escape. I wanted her to stay, but how. I knew she would never want to stay, but maybe I could make it comfortable enough for her so that it wasn’t like a prison.
There were three spare rooms on this floor besides my mother’s room. Maybe I could take all of the junk out of the room at the back, the one that had it’s own bathroom, and she could stay in there. Maybe I could even make it nice for her. I wanted to make it nice for her.
I laid in bed for a while longer thinking about what it felt like to carry Avery in my arms. The way her body felt and how beautiful she looked, it was like a dream come true. It made me feel like I was her knight in shining armor, but the sad reality was that I was the bad guy in the story. I was the one that she needed to be saved from.
I got up and got dressed and went down to the basement and stood at the top of the stairs. I wanted to be with her but I didn’t want her to see me; I was so ashamed of everything that she had found out about me and I just wished I could disappear. From the stairs I could hear her crying down in that horrible cage and my heart felt like it was breaking into a million pieces. I stepped down a few stairs and I heard her gasp so I walked all the way down to the cage and unlocked the door.
“Would you like to come upstairs with me?” I said to her as I looked into her tear-filled eyes.
“Do I have a choice?” she asked, her voice shaking.
I wanted so badly for her to feel safe with me, but I just didn’t know what I could do. I had screwed up royally, but there had to be a way that she would at least come to not hate me.
“Yes, of course you have a choice. I told you I don’t want to hurt you, Avery. I won’t hurt you. And I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”
“Then why did you put me down here? Why am I here?”
“Can we go upstairs? We can talk up there a little easier.”
She looked at me for a moment then sat up on the bed.
“Are you going to let me go?” she asked as she wiped her tear-stained face with both hands, then rubbed them on her jeans.
“I’d really rather talk upstairs, if that’s ok?”
“What do you mean, if that’s ok? You act like I have something to say about all of this. Like I have some sort of choice about being here.”
“You do, in a way. If you want to stay down here, you can. But I can’t imagine why you would want to. I don’t want you to be down here.”
“What do you mean? Then why did you put me down here in the first place?”
I was barely able look her in the eye, let alone talk about why I’d done any of the things I’d done in the last twelve hours, or twelve years for that matter. I knew none of it made any sense and I knew that there was nothing I could ever say to explain any of it, so I changed the subject, hoping to at least get her out of that horrible cage and upstairs with me for a little while.
“I can make you breakfast, if you’re hungry.”
She got up off the bed and walked towards me without taking my hand, but her eyes never left mine. I watched her intently, falling into the deep blue space of her eyes as they came closer and closer to me.
How is it possible for anyone to have such incredibly beautiful eyes?
They almost didn’t seem real they were so intensely captivating; sparkling and glimmering even in this depressingly dim basement.
I turned to go through the cage door then stopped and let her walk ahead of me. When we got to the top of the stairs I started to tell her to turn to the right and go up the next flight of stairs but she knew exactly where we were going.
When we got to the kitchen I told her to sit anywhere she wanted and she took a seat at the table where she could watch what I was doing.
“What would you like? I can make you an omelette.”
“Ok,” she said as she sat quietly in the chair with her hands folded in her lap. I started the coffee and whisked up some eggs, then pulled a few more things out of the fridge and she just sat there, watching me. It made me a little uncomfortable since I didn’t like being watched at all, but I didn’t know what else I was expecting. I hadn’t planned on holding the woman of my dreams prisoner in my home or cooking breakfast for her while she sat in my kitchen against her will, but it was happening and I just had to go with the flow until I figured out what I was going to do.
“Do you like ham and cheese?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want anything in your coffee?”
“Cream and sugar, please. Thank you.”
“Do you want some toast?”
“Why am I here?”
I was really starting to dread looking her in the eye … into those beautiful, perfect eyes. And I still had no idea how to answer that question, so I just kept my back to her and continued making breakfast.
“You were in my house yesterday. You came in here on your own. I didn’t bring you here.”
“I know, but it was an accident. My friends dog got in here somehow, I don’t even know how. He broke away from his leash and disappeared and the next thing I knew I was in here looking for him. I called out but no one was home. I know I shouldn’t have come in. I’m not sure why I did. I wasn’t trying to spy on you.”
“I know. I didn’t think that you were.”
“So then why can’t I go?”
“Well, for one thing, you saw the girl in the basement.” But even as those words came out of my mouth I knew they weren’t the slightest bit true. The fact that she saw the girl didn’t have anything to do with why I wanted to keep Avery here, but there was no way I could even begin to explain to her how I was feeling. I wasn’t even sure what it was that I was feeling, but I knew there was no way I was going to let her leave this house.
I set the omelettes and coffee down on the table and sat down across from Avery.
“Why don’t you go ahead and eat. I’m sure you must be starving. You didn’t eat any of the food I brought down for you last night.”
“You really think I can eat now? Just because you’re not chasing me around
with a knife doesn’t mean anything to me. You keep telling me that you won’t hurt me, but you’re keeping me locked up in a cage in your basement. What are you going to do with me?”
As tears started to spill from her eyes I felt the old familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. The one from my dreams and the one I had every time my mother yelled at me when I was a kid. The feeling that I was doing something that was so wrong that there was no way it could ever be made right.
It’s me. I always ruin everything.
“I promise you, I won’t say anything. I know there’s no reason for you to believe me but I’m not lying. I’ll leave today. I won’t tell a single person where I’m going and I’ll never talk to anyone about anything I’ve seen here.”
“I’m sorry, but that wouldn’t work. That’s not what I want.”
“Then what do you want? I will do anything.”
“I can’t let you leave, Avery.”
She stared at me with her mouth slightly open like she wanted to say something, or a hundred things, to me that would make me change my mind, but she didn’t say one word.
“Your food’s getting cold,” I said as I started to eat.
After we finished with breakfast I stood up and asked her to come with me.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Back down to the basement.”
“Please, I don’t want to go back down there. Don’t take me back down there,” she begged as her eyes filled up with tears again. I couldn’t stand to look at her eyes when I knew that I was the one that was causing those tears. I felt like the most heartless person in the world taking her down there because I knew just how horrible it was to be in that cage.
“It’ll only be for a little while, I promise.”
“What do you mean? What’s going to happen after a little while?” she asked, a panicked look starting to spread over her face.
“I’m going to try and figure out a way I can keep you up here where it’s more comfortable. Go ahead,” I said as I gestured for her to walk in front of me.
It was slightly unnerving how compliant she was, but I figured she must be completely terrified, maybe even in shock, and she knew that I was right behind her and could overpower her within seconds.
I didn’t know how I thought I was going to win her over or what I was expecting to happen between the two of us, but I never in a million years imagined having Avery in my house would be like this. And all I could think about was how much she must hate me. I put her in the cage and locked the padlock and she turned around and put her fingers on mine through the fence again.
“Can you leave the lights on please? I really don’t like being in the dark.”
“Of course, I wouldn’t do that to you. I’ll be back in a while. I’m not going to leave you down here, I promise,” I said as looked at her finger as it rested on top of mine. I was hoping that a least a teeny part of her could see how much I cared about her, even if nothing I was doing made it seem that way at all.
“Thank you,” she said.
If there was a possibility, no matter how small, that she might be able to forgive me for everything I had done and could somehow see me as something other than the evil monster that I was sure she saw me as, I would do everything in my power, anything she wanted, to be given another chance.
14. Avery
Five minutes in that basement felt like an hour and an hour felt like a whole day and a whole night, maybe more since I couldn’t see outside and I didn’t know how many hours had passed. I had no idea how long it had been since I’d been upstairs with him and eaten breakfast, but I felt like it had been days. I’d walked around the cage at least twenty times, trying to find a weak spot in the chain-link fence, or trying to see if there was some sort of object I could use as a weapon the next time he came down to the basement, but there was nothing.
All I kept thinking about while I was pacing around in that cage were all the girls that Barbara had told me about. All the girls that had disappeared in the last fifteen or twenty years. And I wondered how many he was responsible for. He wasn’t that old, he looked like he might be about thirty, so he couldn’t possibly be responsible for the ones a long time ago. But what was it she had said? That the disappearances in this area stopped for a while, but then started up again, sometime in the nineties, was it? That would actually make sense. And now I was stuck in the maniac’s his basement.
The funny thing was, I had always thought that dying would be no big deal. That if it were one of those deaths that was over really quickly it would be a piece of cake and that it wasn’t something I was particularly afraid of. I remember telling a friend of mine back home that sometimes I wished that I would just get hit by car or that someone would break into my house in the middle of night and kill me in my sleep. That way I wouldn’t even know what happened and everything would be over before I knew it. She looked at me like I was crazy and that was the first time I realized that not everybody felt that way.
But as I sat in that cage and pictured that girl crawling up the stairs, dying didn’t sound so easy or so romantic. And the thought of being tortured while I was still alive was beyond horrifying. As far as I was concerned, this guy … Colin … could do anything he wanted to with my body after I was dead, I just didn’t want to know about it while I was still alive.
But all I could think about was that girl’s face, and what he was going to do with me when he came back. I didn’t have my phone and there was no way anyone would hear me if I screamed. And there was no way out. I just sat there, terrified that he was going to come down there, but also terrified that he was going to leave me alone in that basement forever.
I decided to take the mattress off of the bed and see if there was anything underneath it that I could break off and use as a weapon and when I did I noticed a small piece of paper wedged in a crack between the floor and the wall. It was folded up to about the size of a quarter, and when I opened it up I realized that it was a piece of lined school paper with the big double lines that had a dashed line going down the middle; like the kind of paper you would use in grade school.
In big letters WHO I LOVE was written in little kid scrawl with a line underneath it, and listed below that were MOMMY and GOD. Then halfway down the paper WHO LOVES ME was written with a line underneath it, but under that there was nothing.
I sat down on the metal bed frame and stared at the piece of paper for a long time. I knew that Colin had grown up in this house and it broke my heart to think that he had written this when he was a little boy. No one deserved to feel like that about themselves, that no one loved them.
I folded the paper back up and put it back where I found it, then put the mattress back on the frame and got back in bed. I didn’t want to think about why that piece of paper would be down here but I couldn’t stop myself. I pictured a sweet little boy down in the basement all alone in the dark, locked up in this cage just like I was and then I remembered what he had said to me.
More than once Colin told me that he promised he wouldn’t leave me down here, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because he had been left down here when he was little. But now that sweet little boy was keeping girls in this very cage and killing them in horrifying ways and I didn’t even know how to feel other than sick to my stomach.
As I laid there, trying to breathe deeply and calm myself down, I noticed something that looked like a diagram of some sort that had been scratched into the concrete. It was hard to see because the light in the basement was so dim and the wall next to the bed was obscured by the shadow of the top bunk, but the longer I stared at it the more I realize that it had to be a diagram of the tunnels outside the door.
I heard the door open and footsteps on the stairs and I sat up on the bed. I still didn’t have a weapon and I prayed I would have a little more time to figure something out. Colin unlocked the cage door and waited for me to come out.
“I fixed up a room for you. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than this,
anyway.”
We went up to the second floor and he took me into a room at the back of the house that looked and smelled like it had just been cleaned. It wasn’t dusty and the curtains were parted, and even though there was heavy mesh screen on all of the windows, it was actually a nice room.
“I hope this’ll be ok for you. I’m going to have to go out and get you some clothes and whatever else you think you might need. You can make a list while we’re eating dinner. I have to work tomorrow, but I can pick some things up for you on the way home tomorrow night,” he said, still barely able to look me in the eye.
I didn’t know what was going on. This wasn’t how I imagined he treated the girls that he killed. It definitely wasn’t how he treated the girl in the basement. But maybe this was part of the whole thing. He would keep them up here for a while and then when he was ready to do whatever horrible thing he did to them, he would put them down in the basement.
“I’m making dinner right now. It should be ready in about a half hour. Would you like to wait in the kitchen with me? I was just getting ready to make a salad.”
“Ok,” I said as I continued to try and make eye contact with him. I couldn’t tell if he was shy or if he was just a straight up sociopath. Everything he said to me sounded emotionless and flat, like he was just giving me the facts. But his eyes … they didn’t seem to be able to hide anything.
He gestured for me to walk ahead of him into the kitchen and he followed right behind me. It smelled like herbs and onions and garlic and crispy chicken skin and as I sat down at the table my mouth started watering.
“Smells good,” I said trying to sound as normal as possible but feeling like it was just about the weirdest thing I had ever said in my life. I was still shaking and I was trying to see if there was any way I could try and escape, but we were on the second floor and he was standing right next to the only way out of the room. I thought that maybe if I could get him to think of me as a friend, or at least a friendly person, he wouldn’t chop me up into little pieces or cut my face off.