by Stella Noir
After I took the roast out of the oven I went to Avery’s door and unlocked it, then knocked and told her that I had picked the things up that she had asked for. She opened the door and came out into the hall.
“Smells good, again,” she said. “Where did you learn to cook so well? Everything you make smells and tastes so good,” she said with a slight smile. I figured she must be trying to get on my good side because I couldn’t figure out any other reason she would be smiling at the horrible person who was holding her prisoner.
“I’m going to make a salad and then dinner will be ready,” I said as I turned and walked to the kitchen. Things just didn’t seem to be going very well and I wasn’t in the mood to stand there and listen to her lie to me.
“What is that on your arm?” I asked after ten minutes of eating in silence. We had barely spoken since we sat down at the table, but my eyes kept going back to her forearm with the design burned into it. The dots were starting to heal and fade, but today she was wearing a t-shirt and they were clearly visible.
“Nothing, really,” she said as she put her fork down and rubbed her right hand over the area.
“It looks kind of like a tattoo. Is that what it is?”
“No. Well, it’s not permanent, but I guess it’s kind of like a tattoo since it’s a design.”
“Did you do it yourself?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
She didn’t answer right away and I imagined that she was uncomfortable talking about it. I had started feeling a little bit better after we sat down and began eating and I really wanted to talk to her about it. I felt like it was something we had in common, in a way. And as I waited for her to respond I realized another thing that seemed really similar. It was a hard thing for her to talk about.
“I’ve watched you,” I said, knowing I was headed down a dangerous path, but for some reason not able to stop myself from saying it. This hadn’t even been my plan, it was just happening and I didn’t want to stop it. I wanted to talk to her. And I wanted her to know exactly how I felt about her, even if she never wanted to see me again.
“What do you mean?”
“I watched you do that to your arm, for over an hour. You sat in your window seat in front of a candle and you heated a pin and burned your skin, one dot at a time. When I finally saw it up close I was … mesmerized by how intricate and how beautiful it is.
“Then why did you ask me what it was?”
“Because I wanted you to tell me.” I didn’t know where all this was coming from. Maybe I had made an unconscious decision that I had to do something. I had to stop being a total wuss and tell her how I felt, no matter how idiotic it all seemed.
I kept my eyes on her and waited for her response and she didn’t look away. It felt like a full minute went by before she started talking and in that time we just looked into each other eyes and I swear she felt the same way I did.
“I guess I do it so that I don’t feel so sad sometimes.” She finally looked down and when she did I got up and walked around the table and sat down in a chair that I had moved right next to her.
“How does it make you feel less sad?” I asked as I reached out and ran my fingers over the design.
“I don’t know. Maybe the pain takes my mind off of my sadness, or maybe it makes me feel something other than sadness. It feels like relief afterward. Like I’m floating and peaceful and at ease,” she said as she closed her eyes, like she was trying to feel those feelings right then.
“What does it feel like while you’re doing it?” I was holding her arm with both of my hands now, looking at her arm, then up to her closed eyes, then down at her arm again. When I looked back up she had opened her eyes and was looking at me.
“It’s exciting. It feels like I’m actually doing something. Like I’m creating something that’s all mine. Just for me and no one else,” she said as tears started to pour over the edge of her lower lids.
I was stunned. I couldn’t even speak, I just stared at her, holding her arm in both of my hands with my mouth hanging open. I wanted to wrap my hand around her head and kiss her. I wanted to devour her and make her part of me so that we would never be apart again.
I had just listened to her tell me exactly how I felt when I was taking the parts off the girls and using them to create the faces on the mannequin heads. How I had always felt. That it was my secret, my thing. It wasn’t for anyone else and that made it feel special to me. It made them mine.
I showed them to Landen after years of avoiding the subject because I felt like I had finally found someone else who might appreciate them. But it was something completely different to hear Avery say that exact same thing I had been feeling right back to me. She was somehow experiencing the same thing as I was, only she was doing it without killing people.
“Is that how you feel too?” she asked.
“How do you know?”
“Because … I don’t know what it is … you seem so … familiar to me somehow. I don’t know why but I almost feel like I understand you in a way. I don’t understand the killing and the bloody girl in the basement at all, but there are other things.” She stopped talking and reached up and touched my face and for a moment I couldn’t see anything else but her. It felt like the room, the whole world, was melting and moving around us, revolving around us.
“Can I ask you about it?”
“Yes,” I said. I hadn’t told anyone about anything I did except Landen, and I was incredibly lucky to have him. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate through all of this without having someone to talk to.
“How many people have you done that to? Like the girl that was coming up the basement stairs.”
“A lot. I’ve never counted. I’ve been doing it for about ten years now and sometimes I’ll bring a girl home once every two weeks for a while. But then sometimes I will go for six months without bringing anyone back here.”
“Where do you find them? The girls you bring back here.”
“The salon. I have a system that I use to find girls that no one would look for right away. College girls that need money or aspiring actresses usually.”
“Do you do it for sex?”
“No. I don’t ever have sex with the girls I bring home.” I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable, but I wanted to keep talking to her so I took a few breaths and tried to relax.
“And you always kill them?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s not sex, what do you want from them?”
“I want … the beautiful part of them. The part that’s perfect.”
“So, you kill them to get it?”
“Well, yeah … that’s pretty much the way it works out,” I said as I leaned back a bit. I wanted to talk to Avery, but I didn’t really want her to know all these horrible things about me. It felt like as I was getting closer to her I was being pulled further away by because she was finding out what a truly disgusting person I was.
“Why haven’t you killed me? Why haven’t you taken any part off of me?”
I looked up into Avery’s eyes; at the most genuine look of sincerity that I had ever seen. She wasn’t mocking me or laughing at me. She was just interested somehow.
“Because you’re perfect. I wouldn’t have to change anything about you at all,” I said as I reached up to touch her cheek but then stopped when I realized what I was doing. I immediately stood up but it all happened too quickly and the chair behind me fell backward.
“I … have some things I need to do now. You should probably to go back to your room.”
“Wait, Colin …”
She just sat there and looked up at me while I waited for her to get up and when she realized that I wasn’t going to say anything else, she stood and walked ahead of me out of the kitchen and into her room.
16. Avery
I sat up in bed, startled by the feeling of my mattress moving and I almost screamed when I saw the outline of a person at the foot of my bed. But when I realized it was Colin the fear tha
t came with the pumping adrenaline quickly switched to a protective feeling. And as I sat there and watched him I realized that the person I wanted to protect was him.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head hanging down and resting on the palms of his hands. He looked so lost and I was having a hard time fighting the feeling that kept bubbling up inside me that just wanted me to wrap my arms around him. I was also having a hard time keeping myself from reaching forward and running my fingers down his muscular back and sinewy arms. In the dark room, with nothing but moonlight streaming in through the window, his bare back and arms were like a glowing beacon, drawing me towards him.
“Colin?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”
A week had gone by since the conversation about why he hadn’t already killed me and, although I still had some doubt as to his intentions, the look in his eyes was so sincere that I couldn’t help but believe him. When he looked at me I felt like I could see inside of him, like he was more than an open book, he was an open sea that was spilling out and surrounding me. And when I looked into his eyes for too long it almost made me feel like my soul was being taken from me. That he held it in his hands somehow and the scariest part was that I didn’t want to take it back.
“I’m sorry if I scared you, Avery. I just … I had a bad dream … and I wanted to be near someone. I understand if you want me to leave.”
“No, you don’t have to leave. I know what it’s like to want to have someone around, just to know that someone is there. Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why you would want to hear about it.”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t know either, but I do. I am interested in you.”
Colin looked over at me and in the dark I could see those eyes of his. They looked completely black now, with a sharp glimmer of moonlight that seemed to highlight a look of pain that magnified their intensity. He sat there in silence for a few minutes, like he wasn’t sure if he could believe me, but then he turned so that he was facing away from me again and reluctantly started to tell me about his dream.
“It’s the same dream I’ve had since I was a little kid. I mean, I’ve had other dreams, some good and some bad, but this one just keeps coming back and no matter what I do I can’t seem to shake it. It won’t happen for a while, but then suddenly I’ll wake up covered in sweat and it will be there in my mind like it was the first time I had it. And it always makes me feel like I did when I was a little kid. Trapped, and scared, and alone.”
He sighed deeply and continued.
“Basically I’m downstairs in that cage, the one that I put you in that first night. And maybe … I don’t know … I didn’t like putting you in there. I didn’t want to put you down there at all. But, maybe the dream has been happening recently because of that. How I felt about putting you down there. The thought of you being down there alone made me feel so terrible. I’m just really sorry I had to do that.”
“But didn’t you put other girls down there? Like the one I saw coming up the stairs.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want you down there. Never in my wildest dreams would I have pictured myself putting you in that horrible place.”
He paused for a moment and I was afraid that he was going to stop talking. I really was interested in what had happened to him as a child, and why he did the things that he did, but mostly I was just interested in him. I was inexplicably drawn to him and I wanted to know who he was. The parts of him that hurt people and the parts of him that had been hurt. I wanted to understand how someone could be so kind and generous, but could also hold someone prisoner. Especially someone they claimed to never want to hurt. It didn’t make any sense to me but I wanted to understand.
“So, like I said, in the dream I’m down in the cage. I don’t know how old I am but I feel like I’m really small. I guess it could just be that that’s the way I felt all the time when I was a kid … scared and small … so it seems logical that I am that age in the dream.
My mother was very … strict … and I would get punished a lot and one of the most severe punishments I could ever get was being put in that cage. For the most part, I didn’t even know what it was that I had done that got me put in there. Sometimes it would be for just one night but sometimes it would go on for a week or longer. But it always seemed so arbitrary to me, the reasons I would get put down there and the amount of time I would have to spend there. And I lived in fear of being put in that cage.”
“Oh my God, Colin, that’s horrible. That’s so awful for a little kid to have no feeling of security. In your own home and with your own mother. How did you survive down there? Did she bring you food?”
“Yes, she would bring me food and she would come down and visit me and act like everything was completely normal. But if I would ask to be let out she would instantly turn on me and tell me that I deserved everything I got because I was an evil little monster.”
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Colin.”
“You don’t have to say that,” he said as he sat with his back to me. I couldn’t see his face but his voice sounded so sad.
“I’m not just saying anything. I really mean it.”
He sat silently for a few more minutes and then continued on with the story.
“So, at one point, after I had been left down there for days on end repeatedly, I decided that I would make a copy of the key that unlocked the padlock on the cage so that I could get out of there for a little while without her knowing about it, like when she was asleep. I snuck downstairs one night and took the key ring off the wall and made copy of the key out of piece of metal that I filed down myself, then I hung it on a paperclip at the very back of the bottom bunk against the wall so that my mother wouldn’t find it. And the next time I was put down there I used it to get out of the cage, and then I unlocked the big meat door at the back of the basement that leads into a vast system of underground tunnels.”
“Yeah, I’ve been down there, but I haven’t seen much at all. They’re a little bit scary to walk around when you’re alone. Weren’t you afraid to go into the tunnels? You were just a little kid.”
Colin turned and looked at me like he was thinking about something but then continued talking.
“Well, I was at first, but going out into the tunnels sounded a lot safer to me than going up into the house with my mother and risking her hearing me walking around. The tunnels became like a safe space for me, where I could go to get away from her and feel like I was free.
So in the dream, I’m in the cage and I realize that the door is open and the door to the tunnels is open but for some reason I’m scared, but I decide to go out there anyway. The weird thing is, the further away I get from the house the more scared I get, almost like I know that someone is following me and watching me and that I am going to be punished even worse for doing what I’m doing.”
“So in your dream you’re more scared of the tunnels than the house?”
“No, in my dream and in real life I was always more scared of this house. You have no idea how much … my mother just seemed to change at the drop of a hat. One minute she would be happy and smiling and the next minute she would be screaming at me that I had dropped a fork or not cleaned the counter properly or put on the wrong color socks, for Christ sake.
And she always seemed to have a new way of punishing me in that moment. She would burn me or whip me with a cord or just beat the hell out of me, but it seemed like after a while those little punishments weren’t enough and it would build up to the point where she would suddenly send me down there.
This all went on for years, and in that time I became really familiar with the whole tunnel system and I met quite a few people who used it for different purposes. One of them was a man who was very kind to me. We became friends and, as I got older, I realized that he wasn’t really that much older than me, but when I was a kid he seemed almost as old as my mother. His house is at the end of a really long tunnel that goes uphill from the rest of the m
ain system and I met him while I was exploring that section.
I was never allowed to go to school with other kids. My mother thought that they would be a bad influence on me, so she basically home schooled me, although that mostly consisted of me reading books off somewhere by myself. It was really helpful to have Landen back then. I talked to him about a lot of the things that went on in my house, and with my mother, and he’s still my closest friend … well, my only friend.
“That’s amazing. You still talk to him?”
“Yeah, I’ve talked to him pretty much every day since I was a kid, except for about a year when my mother figured out I was sneaking out of the cage at night. She never figured out how I got out, but in order to make sure I stayed put she would sleep on the top bunk whenever I was down there. That was when I was about sixteen, and I had no way to get away from her until she died.”
Colin sat there for a while staring at his hands. I couldn’t believe he was telling me all this. I wanted to move across the bed and touch him, to have some sort of physical contact with him while he talked, but I was afraid he would get up and leave if I did.
“How did she die?”
“She was killed by a pile of old wooden boxes that fell on top of her down in the basement. I was locked in the cage when it happened.”
“Oh, God. How old were you?”
“I was seventeen, almost eighteen, so legally I was able to live on my own. I arranged to have her buried, I wasn’t going to have a funeral or anything because she never had a single person come over to the house that I was aware of, and she never talked about any family.
So, after I had her body and burial clothes picked up by the funeral home the director called … he called to ask me if Mr. McNab was supposed to be buried in a dress. I didn’t know what to say. I asked him what he was talking about and he said perhaps he had the wrong information, but the person that had been brought in was a man and he was double checking to make sure that he was supposed to bury that body in the dress that had been brought in with him.