Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction

by James Newman Benefit Anthology

  “Oh come on. Get real, why don’t you.” And that’s Galen. “I mean, let’s say you’re right about this. Not that I’m saying you are.” Galen speaks more slowly, and lower in volume, as though he weighs every word before turning loose of it. The schemer. “What if I have to be gone somewhere a day or two, and she needs food and water. You’d just let her do without, is that it?”

  “In that case, you’ll have to plan ahead, I guess, won’t you? And make sure she understands to ration it out.” You picture Nelson up there banging around the stove, busy in his nervous way, a hive of energy. “You don’t think she needs a doctor? Sure looks like it to me. Who’s the one letting her do without that?”

  Galen now, the voice of calm and reason; he could be hiding anything: “She doesn’t need any doctor.”

  “A thing like that coming out of her, and she doesn’t need a doctor? I don’t know if you’re blind, Galen, or just dumb.”

  “Besides, have you heard her complaining?”

  “No. I sure haven’t.” Except Nelson sounds as though some point has already been proved for him. “And that doesn’t worry you either?”

  “The reason it doesn’t worry me is because her not complaining is the surest sign there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  Whatever physical appeal you’ve managed to retain after all this time, you suppose you’ve been counting on it being enough to preserve your life. That despite your not once during captivity having taken a proper shower — you can only wash in a basin — or been touched by the sun, Galen will still manage to see in you whatever it was that first drove him to kidnapping, imprisonment, worse.

  Now, though? Now even that slim guarantee is likely to be lost. Love is blind, everybody knows that, but realistically, just how much is it prepared to ignore? You’re starting to feel as though you bear less and less resemblance to the woman who was originally carried down those stairs.

  You had a name once.

  It was written down here somewhere, two days into captivity, scratched into the gray block wall with a pebble pried from the waffled sole of your shoe. Words alone couldn’t have fully explained the compulsion you’d felt to do that. It arose from someplace deep and instinctual, as if knowing that one day, stripped of a future and your past becoming the ghost of someone else’s life, you would need a concrete reminder of something as basic as your name.

  You had a job once, too.

  Not a lot of prestige had come with it, but it had been secure. Good pay, good benefits. Seven hours of every shift of eight you got to be completely autonomous. Got plenty of exercise from those walks between the van and people’s doors. On summer days, your legs, already tautly defined, would gleam a golden brown.

  A few dozen times each shift you became a force for happiness in the world. You were proof that civilization worked, that it ran on time. Nobody ever displeased to see you, everyone always eager to open up, to sign for their package. Then, just as suddenly, they would gently shut the door on your back as each of you went your own separate ways. It had been such a clean existence, such a nonentangling sequence of daily interactions. It gave you a kind of invisibility — you and the people on the other side of the doors smiling at each other, even meaning it, while five minutes later they wouldn’t even remember your face.

  Or so you thought. In this house, at least, you must’ve left more of an impression that you’d ever imagined.

  Pressed blue shorts, pressed blue shirt, both of them a perfect fit since the express service frowns on slobs — early on, you joked with herself that for Galen and Nelson it must have been your uniform that had driven them crazy for you.

  He’d professed love, Galen had, during those first weeks, and you figured he even believed it. Believed himself capable of such an emotion. But a man doesn’t put someone in a basement for months, for a foreseeable lifetime, unless he’s picked up some awfully perverse ideas about love.

  You know nothing about their childhoods, have only imagined that with names like Nelson and Galen they probably got their asses kicked on a regular schedule. The only other thing you’ve surmised is that Galen has derived his ideas about relationships from fairy tales. That his eyes see a world in which it’s perfectly acceptable to imprison a woman for as long as it will take for her to love him back. And if he doesn’t have a tower to lock her in, then a basement will serve as well.

  No windows, not even barred. Just one stairway, one door, and four stone walls. The Ross brothers’ house is an old one, solid, built in a time when people had needed coal chutes to get through their winters, but the iron hatch inset high along one wall has been welded shut, maybe even since before you were born.

  Early on, you would run your fingertips along the bubbly metal seam and imagine that it might dissolve beneath your fever to be free. Early on, you tried squeezing yourself nails-first into minute cracks in the blocks and mortar separating you from good natural earth. Early on, you would recall every story you ever heard about wonder-workers who were rumored to have walked through walls, and try to figure out their secrets.

  The good old days, those were — before you exhausted the basement’s supply of challenges. Had you cared enough to take that pebble with which you wrote your name and put it to more ambitious use, you could have charted the course of what the basement has done to you: terror giving way to rage giving way to a slow, general apathy.

  Oh, go ahead and kill me, why don’t you, you might direct upstairs, like a grim prayer. Or … don’t.

  It all feels the same anymore.

  Probably they possess all kinds of tools to do the job. Not just standard home and garden utensils, handy in a pinch, but truly dreadful implements of pain and destruction made expressly for lethal outcomes. The irony, of course, is that you were the one who brought them straight to their door.

  Until you first regained consciousness down here, awakening on the pallet and mattress where you’ve been sleeping ever since, Galen and Nelson Ross had only seemed a little sad to you. From a year’s worth of stops along your route, you’d been just familiar enough with them to believe them harmlessly odd, disinclined to getting out very much. Two thirty-something brothers still living together in a hand-me-down home — pitiable, really.

  Their packages were nearly always heavy, and always merchandise they’d ordered, never anything sent by someone who might’ve been construed as friend or family. The shipping labels and manifests originated from mail-order businesses whose names suggested home security and self-defense and espionage on shady neighbors. The pair of them never struck you as being survivalists — neither ever answered the door in military garb, and you even had a tough time imagining them willingly getting dirty — just suburban paranoids.

  In all this time, you’ve never seen the upstairs, except for the same dim slice glimpsed through the open doorway while standing on the front porch as Galen secretly succumbed to the most possessive kind of love. From that recurring glimpse you’ve constructed the rest, overall not much more inviting than this musty, raw-walled basement: the kind of house you imagine has stayed exactly the same for decades, because that was how their mother always kept it, and now that she’s dead they can’t bear to have it any other way.

  “You ever think it’s just your mind playing tricks on you?” Galen is saying. “Like, she just found something down there, some old plastic flowers of Mom’s or something, and had ‘em stuck in the front of her shirt.”

  Nelson isn’t buying it, you can tell from the way he slams cutlery. “Why would she do something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you always burn my eggs even though you know how long they take to cook? Does everything always have to make perfect sense? I just know I didn’t see anything different about her, not tonight or any other night.”

  “Of course you didn’t. I saw her this morning when she was still asleep. For you she was awake and ready. She had everything tucked away inside her shirt so you wouldn’t see it. Besides … you know how I know it wasn’t just
some old thing she found down there?”

  “How?”

  “It was moving. All on its own.”

  Sometimes it seems no less than a miracle, what people can get used to in their lives, what has become of their lives. You no longer know how many months it’s been since you’ve thought in terms of escape, or of anything that resembles freedom. Looking back, even your job was a kind of prison, sentenced to forty years with time off every night for good behavior. All you’ve done is exchange that for the ultimate in security, with no doubts about the roof over your head, and always knowing exactly where your next meal is coming from.

  Sometimes, when you still feel motivated to think at all, your thoughts will drift to the Man in the Iron Mask. Some mysterious historical figure you’ve heard about, seen a movie about, thought to have been a problematic heir to the throne of France, and imprisoned and made anonymous.

  You’ll wonder how he’d been able to stand the mask, forced to carry this secondary prison around with him wherever he went. Probably he felt revulsion and hatred for it at first, although you wonder if eventually he came to feel a strange love for the cell forged over his skull. If he depended on it for a sense of protection. If he would’ve felt naked without it. If he found it hard to imagine a time he’d been any other way.

  Whenever your hands or gaze stray down to your belly, you think you must be a little closer to those answers.

  The basement seems to let more sound in than it lets out. The rumble of passing trucks and airplanes, the forlorn whistle of a distant train, the fanfares blaring from their TV … used to, you’d listen to these with subtle contempt, because of their proof that the world has been so willing to go on without you. Not once has the world ground to a halt on its axis. Not once has a helicopter circled overhead with some urgent voice calling your name on a loudspeaker.

  Because you did have a name once, remember. But so did everyone else lying beneath gravestones rendered illegible by time and rain and vandals.

  Planes, trains, and TV theme songs … now they only break up the monotony of the day, even if that too is a thing of the past. Down here there’s no such thing as day or night. Down here there’s only the light switch. Sixty watts for a sun and a moon to keep you company as you try to categorize the people you used to know, wondering which ones still hold onto hope you’ll turn up alive, which ones have given you up for dead, and which have given you up for merely rude — yes, I’m off to start my new life, and no, you can’t know anything about it. There really are people who think that way, grudgingly acknowledging that, okay, people like Galen and Nelson Ross exist, but backing off from the possibility that their spheres of existence could overlap.

  He comes back down to see you, Galen does, just as you’ve known he will have to, even if it’s taken him longer than you thought it would to get around to it. A day and a night, or a night and a day, maybe more than one of each. Down here, time has ceased to have any relationship with clocks and dawns.

  As always, he’s preceded by a weapon that you yourself put in his hands. They’ve never trusted you, never ever, just as they’ve never trusted themselves to be able to handle you without hardware to keep you at bay in case you decide to fight. Electricity — they like that. It was how they brought you down in the first place, with a taser, which they followed with an injection. Not on their front porch, though. By then they’d known where you lived, canny enough to avoid your disappearance looking as though it had anything to do with their occasional place on your route.

  “Well?” Galen says.

  You still give him nothing when you look at him. “Well what?”

  “Do you, um, have…” He’s looking as though he wishes you’d make this easy on him. He should be so lucky. He points at your body. “…something to show me?”

  You pretend you don’t have a clue. “Haven’t you seen it all by now?”

  “Not lately I haven’t.”

  Just listen to the two of you. Bickering like some old married couple.

  “I really don’t know what you’re getting at,” you tell him in that monotone that’s become your voice. “But I’m not doing a strip show for you, if that’s what the hints are about. So if you think there’s something you want to see, I guess you’ll just have to come over here and knock me out to get at it.”

  It’s always a risk, but you put it to him this way because you’re pretty sure it’s something he’s no longer able to force himself to do. It’s not like the early days, when he was driven by his own warped version of passion. That’s gone. Whatever he thinks love is, you’re quite sure he doesn’t feel it for you anymore: love giving way to shame giving way to a slow, general apathy. For a long time you’ve been wondering if he maintains this arrangement simply because he doesn’t know what else to do.

  Sometimes you miss the energizing purity of how you used to hate him, him and his wormy little brother. Your exhausted reserves remind you of when you were nineteen and spent a week attending the trial of a young man who murdered one of your best friends, strangling her on a date gone wrong. You’d hated him too, except by the time he came to trial months later and you could face him across the courtroom, you found yourself unable to hate him anymore, feeling instead a crippling sorrow for everything lost and squandered, and it occurred to you that human beings simply weren’t made to hate forever.

  If they were, though, these two deserve it in so many ways, Galen most of all. The first time he raped you, his cock felt as cold as a jailer’s key. A few days later, when he came back for more, still tossing around the word “love” like a cheap poet, something in you snapped and almost forced your throat across the curved blade he wielded, but instead your deepest intuition told you to rape him right back. The muscles in your legs and hips were still at their peak then, and talking dirty wasn’t totally unknown to you, so you forced yourself to become the most grotesque parody of lust that you could, and battered away at his invading loins until they shrank before you, out of you, even as he told you to stop, stop, stop that.

  The third time he never even made it as far as your mattress, Galen seeming appalled to look down and find himself unable to rise to the challenge. You wanted to jeer, but wanted to live, too, and feared that mockery might make him explode with a killing rage. Instead, it was enough to know that if this was all that had come of the third time, there would never be a fourth. And there hasn’t been. You have yourself to thank for that.

  You’re still here, though, now like some vestal virgin that they keep down where normal people store lawn furniture and broken garden statues.

  The two of you stand facing each other, frozen by your own refusal to bare yourself and by Galen’s hesitance to force it. The two of you have long since given up trying to talk sense to each other. You’ll never love him. He’ll never set you free.

  When he shuffles for the stairway in defeat, you watch as he goes and, as you often have, wonder what turned him into this. Not once has he ever indicated that he feels what he’s doing could be wrong — only an uneasy fear that he might’ve gotten in over his head. That he’s not a bad-looking man, for whom this must be the last resort, is the least of it. You’ve gotten the impression that he’s never dated much, or at least very successfully, but so what. You’ve got your own charm bracelet of broken hearts, received as well as inflicted, and not once has the experience come close to making Galen’s course of action seem reasonable.

  He’s halfway up the stairs when he pauses. Uh oh, you think, right on the verge of relief, just before he turns and rushes back down again. Galen moves the swiftest when he’s the least sure about himself and what he’s doing — you’ve got that much pegged about him, his way of bluffing. But what does that matter when he’s the one with the aerosol canister of pepper spray, and you’re still the one who flinches.

  “Just show me. Underneath your shirt.” He brandishes the spray at your face. There’s no doubt that he’ll use it because he already has twice before. “Just so I can go upstairs and tel
l my ignorant brother how wrong he is. Is that too much to ask for?”

  One button, two buttons, three buttons, four. And you’ve given him what he wants. Just to see the look on his face? Maybe. Who’s the ignorant brother now?

  At first he only stares. You’ve expected that. You did a lot of staring too when it first began to extrude and grow from your belly. You stared the way you would when you were a child and crossed paths with someone who wasn’t just different, but wrong somehow, with burn-puckered skin or parts that numbered too many or too few. The difference this time is that you got over the disgust much sooner than Galen will be capable of. This is from you, after all. It’s of you.

  It is you.

  “What … is that?” he asks.

  “You don’t like it?” you say. “You should. You gave it to me.”

  “No,” he whispers, and shakes his head. “No way.” But he can’t tear his eyes from the sight. Considering what it is, at least what you think it is, there’s a strange beauty to it. “That’s impossible.”

  “Yeah, I would’ve thought so too,” you tell him, and turn your back on him for a moment, returning to your mattress on the pallet on the floor, where you sink to your knees with your shirt open loose to either side, exposing the inner half of each breast and the ribs below and this thing so like a regrown umbilical cord.

  By now there’s enough to hold coiled in both hands. It’s stilled, doesn’t move, won’t move. It doesn’t seem to want to as long as you’re awake. It seems to wait for whenever you’re asleep, but you’ve caught it roving free when you’re only halfway between, in neither one state nor the other. Good enough for it, you suppose. Of course it doesn’t have a mind of its own. Like a sleepwalker, it merely takes orders from some other side that the waking half is scarcely aware of.

  Ever since you’ve known, you’ve tried to be careful to keep it secret. Months ago you heard them drilling peep-holes in the floor, to fit with some sort of mail-order lenses to widen their view. You thought you’d blinded them all with food, but must have missed one, or missed them installing another.