by Keri Lake
“Are you there?” she asks.
I don’t answer her. I don’t want to give the impression that we have any connection, she and I, but something tells me he already knows. Something tells me, of all the punishments I’ve suffered at his hands, this will be the worst.
“Get up.” His muffled voice behind the mask carries the clip of a tense jaw.
“No.” The girl whimpers and breaks into a sob.
“Don’t kill her.” The words fly out of my mouth on a panic.
“Kill her?” He almost sounds amused by the question. “If I wanted to kill her, she’d be dead.”
“Why is she here, then?”
“To play with. But you … you’ve tainted her. You’ve touched her skin, and now it’s spoiled.”
“I didn’t touch her. I swear I didn’t.”
“Then, why is her blindfold off, hmmm? You’re lying. You’re a lying, little bastard. A snake.”
My mind is a tornado of thoughts, trying to decide if it’s better that he doesn’t want her. Because maybe then he’ll feed her the drugs, just like he did the others, and dump her somewhere. “I did touch her. I’m sorry. I did.”
“She’s impure. And I can’t keep her if she’s impure.”
“I’m sorry.”
Striding toward one of the shelves, he yanks a skinny chain that hangs from the ceiling along the way, before flicking on a naked light bulb in the center of the room. From behind a paint can set upon the shelf, he pulls a small vial of clear liquid, unscrews the cap of it, and draws the fluid up into a syringe, setting my stomach at ease.
I’m not sure what drug he uses on the girls, but it tends to make them sleepy, weak, kinda goofy sometimes, smiling and pawing at him. “We can take her somewhere. Drop her off.” With a quick glance at the girl, I nod toward her, encouraging her to go along with it.
With brows upturned, she nods back.
Coming to a stop beside her, Carl grips her jaw, urging her head back, and inserts the syringe into the corner of her mouth. He dispenses the entire syringe, and I flinch. He’s never given so much before. “Swallow it,” he commands, giving a harsh shake of her head. “All of it.”
“We can let her go now. She won’t remember a thing.”
The girl frowns, when he releases her, sinking back against the wall.
Twisting on the ball of his foot, Carl faces me, but I can’t see his expression behind that mask. Surely, he’s furious with me. “No. No we can’t. See, she’s not like the whores. There will be people who look for her. People who will want someone to answer for this.”
I glance toward the girl, whose eyes are squeezed shut, her lips pursed as if something is wrong, and I’m certain he’s given her too much of that drug. “Carl. Just let her go.”
He strides toward one of the shelves and nabs a can of paint thinner. Before I can react, he pops it open and hurls it across the room. The can slams into the wall beside the girl, who lets out a shriek, and the fluids pool around her. The pungent chemical odor assaults my nose, filling my lungs, until I’m practically tasting it in my mouth.
My eyes go wide, my heart damn near beating out of my chest, as his intent becomes clear. “What are you doing?”
“Tell me something, if given the choice …”
Eyes clamped, I shake my head. The last time he played this game, I watched a cat burn alive with a blowtorch. “No, no. Don’t. Please, don’t.”
“Would you fuck her? Or watch her burn?”
I snap my attention back to him, my heart in my throat now. “What?”
“She’s already tainted. So, you can fuck her, and I’ll let her go. You’ll be the one they come after, because your fluids will be inside of her.”
The sound of that leaves a cold hollow in my chest. My stomach flips over on itself, as I mentally block the visuals he’s planting in my head, both of which make me sick. “No. No, I won’t.”
“Or …” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of matches. As he strikes one until lit, the girl screams.
“Please! Please don’t! Oh, God, please don’t!” Her voice is hoarse and weak, as the effects of the drug slowly kick in.
“Carl …” The warning in my head fails to carry in my tone, arriving as something more fearful. I can’t watch this girl burn. I won’t. My gaze flits over our surroundings, searching for something I can use to hurt him. Something within reach that will incapacitate him enough for me to get away with her.
“Your choice, Barrett. Fuck her, or watch her burn alive. It’s not like she’ll remember a thing. In fact, the drugs will make her enjoy it.”
“You bastard. You sick fucking bastard!” I lurch toward him, stopped short when he nabs one of the tanning knives he uses from one of the shelves beside him.
“What will you choose?” When I don’t answer, he looks to the girl. “Here, let me make it easy on you.”
“No, wait—”
“What would you choose, Girl? Do you want to burn alive?”
She shakes her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. “No,” she whispers.
“Would you prefer to have him take you? To taint you.”
Lips trembling, she lets out a sob and nods. “Yes.”
“There. You see? It isn’t rape, Barrett. She chooses you.”
It is rape. The most horrible, vicious kind of rape there is, because her alternative is something so abhorrent, it makes such a violation the better choice.
A torrent of vomit climbs my throat and expels past frozen lips to the concrete, splashing up in my face. Chunks of dinner scattered across the floor, stringing from my lips, and I weep. For the girl. For what he’s forcing me to do. I weep for the situation I can’t change, because I’m trapped with a psychopath. One who is charming and intellectual, who knows what to say to the social workers. Who’ll find me if ever I run away from this place and hunt me down, just to be sure no one else ever finds out who, or what, he really is.
When I lift my gaze, Carl has her lying down just outside of the halo of paint thinner, but close enough that her clothes will catch fire if he lights the match.
He crosses back toward me, and I flinch when he stops and crouches beside me. “C’mon, Barrett. If I’m not mistaken, she’ll be your first?”
He’s right. I’ve never been with a girl that way. Not more than kissing, and certainly never more than they’d allow.
When I don’t move, he glides the blade down the outside of my eye, down over my cheekbone. Pain doesn’t register, at first, but on instinct, I slap a hand to the wound, and a zap of panic jolts my muscles. “Ah! Shit!” Did he cut my eye? The burn that trails after tells me my flesh is torn open, and I fall backward, the tears in my eyes blurring his form. With a shaky finger, I probe the jagged edge of the slice, daubing the warm blood.
He just missed my eyeball.
“Remember those European mounts I did a while back? How I slid the knife right alongside the eyeball and scooped it right out? So perfectly, and with such precision. Fuck her, or I’ll slice your eyeball out of your skull.”
“Fuck you!”
He props the blade beneath my throat, and I look him in the eyes, my jaw tight. Every muscle in my body is trembling with determination and fear. Anger and rebellion. “Do it,” I say past clenched teeth.
From such close proximity, I can see through the holes in the mask, at the evil flicker in his eyes, and he tips his head with an amused curiosity. “No. I’d prefer to watch her burn, instead.”
As he pushes away, I grab for the knife, but miss the hilt, and it slices across my palm with a cold bite. “Fuck!” I tuck my hand between my legs, trying to douse the burn there.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulls the pack of matches again.
Hands at my ears, I clamp my eyes and tuck my head into my knees to shield out the sound of her screams I know are coming.
I can’t.
I can’t listen to her burn. Not like that cat in grandfather’s shed.
The one that sti
ll haunts me.
“No!” the girl screams, and, from the burnt smell in the air, I have to assume he’s lit the match.
Fingers digging into the back of my skull, I shake my head. “No! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!”
Match lit and burning, he pauses, and I push to my feet, stumbling backward into the wall behind me. I catch a glimpse of the girl, whose eyes seem heavier, more sedated, as she rolls her head against the floor, tears streaked down her temples. My mind disappears into the blank space it usually goes when Carl torments me. The void inside my head, where nothing is real, none of this exists.
It’s all a bad dream. A nightmare.
Like a robot, I stride toward the girl and fall to my knees before her. I close my eyes, and swallow hard, shaking my head. “I’m sorry.”
In my dream, I hear whimpers and sniffling, and I clench my eyes tighter, covering my ears, drowning them out with the sounds of a groan inside my head.
I vow to be gentle and slow, but I can’t open my eyes. I need to stay in blackness, where it’s all inside my head.
I imagine heat and wetness and softness inside this place, a mishmash that is both terrifying and exhilarating. Little sounds in her throat that tickle the back of my neck. Breathy, feminine sounds, as if we were somewhere private, and I could say her name, look her in the eyes as I do this. There’s heavy breathing and things that feel good, encouraging me to open my eyes.
So I do, and suddenly my reality comes crashing into me.
I’m not staring down at the girl. I’m standing in my grandfather’s office beside him, reliving the fateful day I watched him violate my mother.
Her head is turned away, as she surrenders her body to him, and the anger inside of me is unbearable. It stretches and grows within me, until it’s too big for me to contain anymore.
“Why are you letting him do this?” The venom in my words lashes out at her, not even a fraction of the rage I feel. “Why do you just lie there? Fight! Fight him!”
Carl’s laughter grates my spine, and I shake my head, breaking from the visual. I stare down my body, where I’ve not yet penetrated the girl, keeping myself hoisted away from her on both arms. I won’t do this. I won’t violate her this way.
The girl is still, and aside from those breaths, she doesn’t say anything.
Rage explodes into flames, and I barrel forward, straight toward Carl’s midsection, knocking him backward into the shelf behind him. A can of paint crashes against my spine, but it hardly registers as pain, with the rush of adrenaline pumping through my blood like ice in lava. Carl tumbles to the ground, the knife falling to the floor with a clang.
I scramble over him, and I’m staring down at my grandfather. His face still red with climax after he strangled my mother to death. I hammer a fist into his face, kicking his head to the side. Another punch. And another. Slivers of pain shoot up my knuckles, as I pummel him senseless, until one sharp punch finally knocks him out.
Breaths burn inside my lungs, while I drag myself off his body and fasten my pants back in place. I crawl back toward the girl, whose face has gone pale, her lips an unhealthy shade of white. Hands shaking, I cover her back up, drawing her dress back down, and slide my hands beneath her.
“I’m getting you out of here,” I whisper to her. “I’m not going to let him hurt you.” With every ounce of strength left in me, I lift her from the floor and carry her limp body up the staircase.
7
Nola
I sit in Oliver’s room, staring through the window. It’s been two days since I last saw my son. I remember once, when he was younger, we were at the zoo, the polar bear exhibit. Sunlight beamed down against the surface of the glass tunnel beneath the pool that housed the animals, giving the magical sense of being underwater with them. We were so fascinated by it, we didn’t notice when Oliver was no longer standing beside Denny. The packed underwater exhibit suddenly turned suffocating. Like it was closing in on me.
We found him just up the aisle a bit, hands pressed to the glass, as a polar bear swam up and rested its paw on the other side.
In those frantic seconds, I most vividly remember the thought of never finding my little boy. How much it tore at my heart, to think he could’ve been swiped from right under my nose.
Taken somewhere and hurt.
Thoughts that stayed with me, reminding me to always be vigilant. To never get caught up in the world so much that I fail to notice my son again.
The planets painted on his wall almost feel like they’re bouncing around me, the dark spaces between, getting bigger and bigger, swallowing me. It’s those dark spaces I fear most. Without the shred of hope offering a small bit of light, the narrow possibility that we’ll find him soon, I’ll be consumed by that obscurity. Every day that passes, that shred of light dims.
From downstairs, Jonah’s voice carries up through the hallway, as he talks with colleagues who’ve been out scouring the streets. Jonah, himself, has been out three times today already, has directed a group of volunteers, who offered to help look for my son. My neighbors, whom I speak to on the rare occasions I run into them, have been bringing me meals each day. I probably have a week’s worth of meals in my refrigerator. And Diane. I suppose she’s been something of a sponge to me, sopping up my tears, crying with me, worrying with me.
Because all of this feels too familiar.
I remember, as a child, being so fascinated by the kindness of strangers who brought us meals and tried to comfort my mother after Nora disappeared. Back then, I couldn’t understand why she acted so ungratefully. So unappreciative of those trying to help, but as I sit here in the dark room alone, I get it. She wasn’t ungrateful, at all, but looking for escape. The one break in her day when she could slip into a quiet void, let it lull her to long periods of sleep when she wouldn’t have to think, because thinking is always the worst. Thinking manipulates a person into believing the things about which the darkness whispers.
He’s never coming back.
He’s gone.
Unfortunately, sleep doesn’t come so easily. It’s not come for me, at all, in the last two days, and I wonder how many hours a person can stay awake for, before collapsing. If it’s possible that I may never sleep again.
When I close my eyes, I see Oliver. Not as the angry, upset boy he’s become over the years, but the baby I held in my arms and swore I’d protect with my life. I see the innocent blue eyes of a child whose world was only just beginning. Who hadn’t yet been touched by the things in those dark spaces.
Just as it was with my sister’s disappearance, I don’t know if he left to get away from me, or if he was swiped up by something in that darkness.
I tuck my head into my knees and let another exhausted sob break through me.
“I’m going to meet with a few more volunteers. They’ve offered to hand out some flyers.” Jonah’s voice reminds me of my father’s, soft and comforting, whenever he approached our mother. As if the volume of his words alone could crush her.
I raise my head, wiping away more tears. “Okay.”
“I won’t be long. Maybe a half hour, tops.”
“You don’t have to stay here with me, Jonah. You have a wife. A job. I’ll be fine.”
“My wife wants me here, as much as anyone. And I’ll still have my job after …”
“After what?”
“After we find him.”
“You still think that’s a possibility, Jonah? Be honest. You’re the one with all the statistics on missing kids.” Knees tucked into my chest, I rock back and forth, trying to settle the anxiety pounding through my muscles, the constant string of jitters that’s become as much a part of me as blinking, or breathing. “Thought it was like … after forty-eight hours, the possibility decreases. A lot.”
“The first few days are critical, yes. But kids have been recovered later than that.”
“Yeah. The ones held captive. The ones used and beaten and kept in basements and—” Another sob chokes my words as the scenarios
take hold inside my head again.
“Listen to me, Nola. I’m not giving up. I’m not going to stop until Oliver is back in this house. I’m going to use every available resource to return him to you. I promise you this.”
“I know. I know you’re trying. I appreciate it.” Swallowing a harsh gulp, I wipe my nose on my sleeve, and Jonah disappears out of the room, returning with a box of Kleenex. An empty box sits on the bed beside me, filled with used tissues that have collected hours of snot and tears. “How long before the surrogate delivers?” The question is out of place, maybe even awkward, judging the confused look he returns, but it’s necessary.
As much as I fear changing the subject, I need to. I need distraction from the thoughts that Oliver could be hurt in all of this, while I sit here helpless to save him.
“She’s due in about eight weeks.” He casts his gaze toward the floor, as if he should feel guilty about the joy of a new baby.
“Boy or girl?”
“We’ve decided not to find out. Wait until delivery.” Shoving his hands into his pockets, he doesn’t even allow himself the slightest crack of a smile. One I know would be plastered to his face if circumstances were different. “When I come back, we’ll go for another drive. Think you’ll be up for that?”
Tissue pressed to my nose, I give a tearful nod.
Jonah plants a kiss on the top of my head and exits the bedroom.
He’s right. We shouldn’t give up yet. I can’t give up on my son yet. He’s counting on me to find him, whether he’s out somewhere in the cold, or taken hostage by someone, he won’t be found with me lying here, sobbing about the what ifs. The what ifs don’t matter.
My father never gave up looking for Nora, not even when he knew, himself, the possibility of finding her was no longer a possibility, at all. Every night, he went to bed looking over files, with clues and notes that he kept nearby, in case something came to light.
I push off my bed and enter my bedroom. The necklace my father gave me, the twin to the one Nora was wearing when she was taken, sits out on my dresser. I found it while searching my things for the Valium prescription my psychiatrist wrote me a couple months back. I don’t know why I bothered to keep the script. Maybe I knew there was a small part of me unable to face everything life threw at me. Thankfully, it was already expired, otherwise I have a sick feeling I’d have filled it that first night Oliver went missing.