My curiosity gets the best of me and I tiptoe downstairs. Scoot and dad went fishing around dawn, so it's just me and mom. The house is quiet and I think she's still in bed. I don't make a sound on the way to our front window, where I watch the people moving up close.
There's a girl standing in their driveway, which butts up to our lawn, jumping rope.
She's singing some sort of song, I can't make it out, but I hear her cheerful voice muffled through the window. She's wearing a baby blue dress with white ruffles and pretty white socks that have ruffles too. I want to be friends with her. It's been so long since I have been outside, but the stitches are out of my face and I can walk fine now. I only have a few bruises left.
Normally, I would be shy, but there's something about the way she hums the song when she jumps rope, like maybe she'll be the one person who treats me different.
I open the front door and step outside, still in my PJ’s. With my chin down, I drag my feet as I make my way to her until I am standing close, but I don't say anything. I'm afraid the words will come out funny because my heart is beating so fast.
“Hi,” she says.
I don't say anything back.
“You live in that house?” she asks.
I nod.
She doesn't stop her staggered rope-jumping as she speaks to me. “My grandma is moving into this house but I don't live with her. What's your name?”
I move my lips and hardly a whisper comes out.
“S-sam.”
“How come you’re out here with no shoes or shirt on?” she asks.
I shrug.
“My grandma said I could ride my bike as long as I wasn't alone. You have a bike?”
My heart sputters at the invite. But I know my mom would be so angry if I rode down the street on a bike again. Especially after what happened. Nevertheless, I nod to let her know I do have a bike. Really, it's Scoot's.
Her rhythmic jumping stops and I look up to see what's changed. She drops the handles to the floor. “What happened to your face?” she asks.
Now my heart sputters for a different reason. Will she laugh when I try to speak? Is she part of the group of people trying to hurt me? Is this a trap?
“I had an aaaaa-cident.”
“How?”
“C-c-c-car hit m-m-me.”
“Wow,” she says, her eyes going wide as she reaches to touch my face. I jump back. I've never had a girl touch me before, and I regret that I don't let her. I want to tell her to touch me, it's okay now, but I'm too embarrassed.
“How come you talk like that?” she asks.
The question is so straightforward, but I don't feel so bad when she asks it. It's like she wants to know about me instead of just already thinking she does.
“It's a sp-sp-sp-eech—” Right now, the word 'impediment' might as well be supercagafradgulisticespialidotious, so I change direction. “I st-st-st-uter. B-b-b-but I go to classssss-es for it.”
“Oh,” she shrugs. I wait for her to laugh, to tell me to beat it. “So, you wanna ride around?” she asks.
A friend. Could she be that person? The one I always thought was out there, who wouldn't gang up on me? And she's so pretty.
“Sam!” a panicked voice calls out from the front door of my house. “Sam!” mom says more firmly as she marches towards me. “You're not supposed to be out here.”
She's wearing a housecoat and looks sleepy.
“Sam, you need to be home resting,” she puts her hands on my shoulders.
“I'm f-f-f-ine.”
“Sam, what have I been telling you?” she whispers. Our little secret.
The girl watches our back and forth.
“Hello,” my mom says with a nervous sweetness in her voice. “He is a very sick boy and he cannot play today.”
“Oh,” the girl, whose name I don't know, responds.
My mom drags me back home, and my heart sinks watching the pretty girl in her ruffled socks disappear from my eyes.
“Mom, I want to play.”
“What have we discussed?” she snaps, pointing her finger at me. “It's not safe out there! You think that pretty little girl moving in next door was a coincidence? She is the perfect plant for a boy like you.”
“She was n-n-nice!” I protest.
“Sam, honey, girls will be nice to you to get things. They will use you to get money, or connections. You are special, but they don't understand that. Little girls are shallow and they would rather be with a boy like Scoot. He's simple, but he's like everyone else. You are complex.”
“This isn't f-f-fair!” I argue, a tear coming down my cheek. “I t-t-t-thought she liked m-m-m-m-me…” the sobbing makes my chest shiver and the stammer act up.
“Sam, you cannot fight me on this. Those people are strangers. They could be planted here by the CIA—anyone! I'm trying to protect you.”
“I want to go outside! She was nice. She was going to be my only friend!” I shout, frustration finding a way to break through the tension in my mouth and chest that holds back my words.
She looks surprised for a second and a little sad.
“That's it!” she says throwing her hands up in the air. “I am your mother and I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe! I don't care what your father says. I don't care what anyone says. We can't stay here anymore. It's too easy to find you. It's too easy for you to be manipulated and lured out there.”
She grabs my hand and yanks me up the stairs and into my parent's bedroom, pulling a few suitcases out of the closet.
“Wh-wh-wh-ere?” I ask.
She tosses a large suitcase on the bed and unclips it. “To the ranch. You'll be safe there. I can home school you. We can stay there until you are old enough to protect yourself,” she says, her face covered in sweat, her eyes bouncing around like two ping pong balls.
I know this morning will be different when I open my eyes and see the newspaper on the chair that usually seats Night.
These breaks from the monotony are welcome surprises, like bits of treasure. Since that night when I spoke to him and he stormed off, he doesn't sit around watching me much, instead, he comes in only to take what he needs from me, or give me my essentials.
Lately, during the few seconds it takes him to put his clothes back on, I have been hastily begging him for things that I believe will help me long term: books, magazines, music, origami—fucking anything. I'm starting to feel different, like my mind is slipping in a way. I have no stimulus other than fucking him, and I'm afraid eventually something will snap. I think about him all the time. What he's doing out there. If he's still going to houses. If he's been with other people. I think about what will happen if he gets into an accident and dies out there. I will slowly starve to death and no one will ever know what happened to me. My mind has to breathe, to see a glimpse of a world that has to do with anything but him.
He hasn't heeded those pleas, and the newspaper might just be another veiled message, but it's full of stuff I can read.
So when I see this paper, I almost trip rushing out of bed to devour its contents, ignoring the small breakfast waiting for me on my bedside table. Naturally, the first thing I do is look for stuff about me. I skim front to back, back to front, multiple times. Nothing, not one fucking article. Based on the date on the paper, if it's even today's issue, I have been here for about four months.
A tear trickles from my eye, but I wipe it before it can trigger a flood. I am numb to my former life. It's just a memory at this point. I read the entire thing front to back, not leaving one article—even the most boring financial crap—unread. It's funny how I used to bitch about all the textbooks I would have to read for school. What I wouldn't give now for an anatomy textbook to pass the hours.
Setting the paper down, I feel as satisfied as someone who has just consumed a gourmet meal.
But as I sit there eating my breakfast, staring at the beam of sunlight that pours down to my bed, a dull panic sets in.
Will Night visit me today? Do I
have to face another day trapped in these walls with nothing but silence?
So I start humming to myself. A song I used to sing to myself as a little girl.
Jimmy crack corn I don't care,
Ole Massa gone away.
My head bobs side to side, then I tap my feet. But I bore with that after a while.
“What the fuck are you going to do today, Vesp?” I ask. “Stare at this wall? Or this wall?” I point to identical adjacent walls. “No, you'll just wait here for the psychopath with the annoyingly perfect body and terrifying temper…” I let the words drift away, talking is boring when you're alone. My attempt at comic relief isn't working on me, only reminding me how tragic this all is.
I look around the small, but well-appointed space, as if something new will pop up. Of course, nothing does. Nothing ever happens unless he does.
So there's only one thing I can do at this point with myself, one way to entertain my idle hands and mind.
I watch Vesper, eager to see her reaction when she realizes that she's pretty much forgotten. Her case is already as cold as the brook running behind the cabin. The flyers stapled to every tree and telephone pole have become faded and tattered. She now gets an infrequent mention in the news or an occasional small article. But while her case was headline news for the first couple of months, there hasn’t been anything to report. They don’t have a body, they don’t have leads, and The Night Stalker has gone dormant. And if there’s no new information, you don’t make the paper.
Last time I gave her the paper, she had a little meltdown. Knowing what I know now about her relationship with her mother, I think I know what part of the article set her off. I watched that raw moment, fascinated by the different stages of emotions as she reconciled her mother had already proclaimed her dead.
I thought it was odd too, to be honest. Most people are quite the opposite. Their loved one is dead and they medicate themselves with hopeful denial. When they finally believe their daughter is dead they usually wait before publicly announcing it. But her mother seems to have given up on her almost as quickly as she was snatched.
This time she wipes her eye once. Just one tear. I have tasted those tears, consumed her grief. She's running lower on them now, usually stone-faced unless we are in the heat of fucking. Then her face contorts and animates with pleasure, pain, and fear. That one night she told me the story of the necklace, I got something in between that. I liked it. I hated it. It's too much of a gamble to let her get under my skin like that again.
She starts to hum a song. It's faint and distorted by the time it breaches the cabin walls. But still, it stirs up a sense of a memory. I reach into the depths of my mind to recall the details, but I can't quite recollect.
She starts to talk to herself after she quits the song. She's been doing that more. Pacing back and forth, saying nonsense to herself sometimes. I can't quite hear her unless she's loud and in this case, she's not. But she's animated enough to make me laugh. I've been thinking about giving her things so she doesn't go crazy, but I'm still not sure I want to give her the power of entertaining herself yet. I like being her sole source for that. When I am certain I have her fully, I'll consider it.
I fall into the zone of watching—it's a calm, almost hypnotic state as the intrusive thoughts, which have been less frequent in the past few weeks, fade away when I view the mundane through an extraordinary lens.
But what she does next, violently rips me out of the trance. She sits in my chair—I call it that because despite me never stating she cannot, she never sits on it—and pulls her feet up, spreading her knees apart.
She pulls out one of her plump tits, tits I have feasted on so many times and yet still cannot get enough of—and massages it with one hand. She dips her head back, running her pink tongue along her lips, like an invitation, or a taunt.
She pulls up the little nightgown I made her to replace the one destroyed the night I chased her, exposing her shaven pussy, so I can see the pink wet lips, and begins to finger fuck herself.
I've watched many people masturbate. Usually they're quiet, save for a few climaxing moans, because there is no one to put on a show for. Until this point, I was certain she didn't know I was watching. But she's loud, her body fucking her hand vulgarly, as if she wants men to watch and jack off to her. The contrast of this lovely, innocent woman, so vulgarly fucking herself, simultaneously pisses me the fuck off and gives me an angry erection. She shouldn't be entertaining herself like this. I own that pussy. I own her sex, period. Yet she's finding a way to circumvent that.
“You sneaky little bitch,” I sneer under my breath.
Then she moans my name. Well, not Sam. But my alias, one that we stumbled upon the first time we fucked to completion. I'm not there and she's still fucking me. My rage converts to an almost emergent need to come with her, so I pull out my cock and grip it, biting back my own moans as I watch my handiwork: a woman reduced to just a few needs—me being one of them.
“Fuck me, fuck me!” she says as her hips rise up against the chair, her finger fumbling with her tanned nipple.
“Oh fuck, Vesp,” I grunt from my belly as my dick builds up to its precipice.
Her moans burst through the cabin walls as I move my hands faster to meet her, the cabin wall catching my cum. Though I wish it was her pussy or mouth, knowing I made her come without even being there is intensely gratifying. And yet, it's not enough. It never is. There's never enough sex. There have been days I fucked her four times, and then had to switch to her ass or mouth because her pussy was swollen from all the fucking. Yet, she's always ready for me. Always coming.
I fix myself, determined to go in there and give her a dose of the reality she's been fantasizing about. But first, I want to study her. She pulls down her dress, a glazed look in her eyes, as if she doesn't understand what's overtaken her.
Vesper stumbles to her feet and fixes herself, trying to erase the evidence of filth. She looks around suspiciously as though, perhaps, it was so immoral that God may have come down just to judge her. She takes a deep breath and runs her hands along her brow and passes them over her head with a great sigh.
“Woah,” she mouths. “I am so fucked.”
I laugh. She can be funny sometimes.
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, her facial expression changes. Instead of shock, confusion and disgust take over. She takes another deep breath, as if trying to settle something. Then she sprints over to the water closet, which I can't see from the peephole I'm using.
The twisted mix of relief and shame I feel after playing with myself to thoughts of my captor are eclipsed by sudden dizziness. The walls swirl around me, the floor moves under my feet.
He's trying to kill me. He's poisoned my breakfast.
My stomach cramps and I run to the miniature bathroom, sticking my finger down my throat, coaxing my meal out. My stomach is relieved instantly, but I break out in a cold sweat, terrified of what will come next. I slam the door, and sit with my back pressed against it, determined to never let Night in. I can't catch my breath as I gasp for air, gripped by a new kind of terror. I'm going to die. I know it. I just do. I had allowed myself to trust him, that if I gave him what I wanted, I would survive, but he's using the very key to my survival to kill me.
My vision tunnels, the poison must be doing its handiwork and I only pray that I threw up enough to halt its progress. I try to calm my breathing but my chest only tightens a bit more every time I suck in air.
Then I nearly stop breathing all together when I hear his footsteps in the main room. Without thinking, I scramble on all fours and reach for the razor. A paltry weapon, but it's my only option. I thrust myself at the bathroom door just as he tries to push it open.
“Go away!” I cry. Using all the strength in my legs to push against him.
He pounds on the door, each thud making my heart bang against my chest.
“Fuck you!” I shout, through sobbing and hyperventilation.
He begins his campaign
against my barricade, pushing the door steadily. My heels burn as they desperately scrape against the floor. But he's too strong and he manages to open it enough to stick his body halfway through.
“Nooo!” I scream, turning onto my knees and lunging at the door, pushing it hard against his body. He grunts, and pushes the door back in one explosive motion, sending me and the door flying back. The door comes swinging back towards him and he pushes back at it again, this time so forcefully that it cracks and splinters. Facing him and on my ass, I push myself away from him, against the opposite wall. It never get less frightening: a strong, masked, man heaving over me. As anonymous and soulless as any monster in a campfire story. All I can do is brace myself against it.
Night grabs me by my shoulders and pulls me up.
“You son of a bitch!” I shout, flailing the razor at him. I get maybe a swipe and a half before he grabs my wrist and pries it out of my hand. He throws the razor against the wall, and it bounces a few times before resting by his feet.
“You're trying to kill me!” I shout. “You're trying to kill me!” Everything is slipping away. I feel myself growing weak. “I hate you!”
I use every bit of energy I have left to kick and wrangle myself out of his grip. I'm well fed now, and stronger than when he had me starving and living in my own filth, even with his poison inside of me.
“You promised you would take care of me if I was good!” I scream. “I've been good!”
I've barely even looked at him thus far, overwhelmed with panic and the sensation of dying, but at that point I notice his frustration. His lips puckering as if he's fighting the urge to say something. His eyes wide and glazed in a way I have never seen.
With no weapons, and rendered almost incapacitated in his grip, I butt him right in the nose with my forehead.
“Fuck!” he says, letting go of me to grab his nose.
I manage to pull the bathroom door open and get to the main door, but he pulls me back by the pretty little nightgown he gave me. Both his arms wrap me as I leave the ground and slam down onto the bed. The joints creak and crack under the force, and I am breathless despite the padded surface taking much of the impact.
Take Me With You Page 15