‘You’re just the start, Nicole. You gonna have my baby down here. But not just you – I want to get ten girls down here so you can all have my children and then I’ll be able to raise my own kids without anybody interfering.
‘You said you got kids so I know you can get pregnant – it’s just going to be a matter of time.’
I didn’t think I could feel any more scared but his words sent me shivering – I was here to have his babies? He intended to hold me captive down here for years, bringing another life into this nightmare world, and to bring more women down here too? It made me feel nauseous, with a sick creeping fear, especially when I thought about having a child here in this basement. It was obscene beyond belief and I was too dumbfounded to speak.
I knew he didn’t want to kill me but it was little comfort to think that his plan was to keep me here for years to reproduce for him like a farmyard animal. Just the thought of having his child was enough to make me feel repulsed but knowing how he would keep and treat a baby born in this basement made my head swim.
How could he do that to a child – to any child – let alone his own?
Meanwhile, he rambled on: ‘Damn child protective services keeps taking my children, interfering with my family life so that now I got to take matters into my own hands. The state takes one damn child after another off me and expects me to just sit there and take it, like an asshole? They owe me a family and one way or another I’m going to get one. After all this damn country has taken from me, it’s the least I deserve.
‘They took my mind first – hah! Took my damn mind and I didn’t even know it.
‘I was in the army. I worked as a medic in the army and I was real good too. Passed all my exams and did well – other fellas were jealous. I excelled above all of them. But did they give me the chance to work in the military police like I asked? Did they hell! Sent me to Germany as an orderly and that’s where I got sick. Started having these pains in my stomach, dizzy spells, headaches and stuff. I went to the army doctors and they told me it was gastroenteritis. They start me on a load of drugs – I start seeing stuff, you know, visions and shit. I’m out for like three days and the next thing I know they’ve got me on some serious tranquilizers. That’s where I reckon they tested all these mind-altering drugs on me. You heard of LSD?’
I nodded.
‘That’s what they tested on me. I went to the doctors with a medical complaint and by the time they’d finished treating me I was out of my fucking mind, doped up on Stelazine. That’s some serious shit. Now I’m in and out of mental institutions because something has gone totally wrong with my brain and I didn’t even realize until years later that they were the ones who did it to me! I was transferred back to Pennsylvania where they put me in a loony bin because I was seeing all this crazy shit that wasn’t there. You know, like hallucinations. I didn’t want to leave but after just a few weeks they gave me an honorable discharge on a disability pension. At first it was like just 10 per cent but they soon put it up to 100 per cent and backdated it from the date I left. So they must have done something to me there because they wouldn’t have given me $2000 a month if it wasn’t their fault in the first place.’
I was listening to his story, nodding my head as if I believed him. I was terrified, and confused, and I didn’t know why he was telling me all this. Why did he feel the need?
‘I know something’s not right but the doctors, none of them are real clear about my diagnosis – they keep giving me labels like schizophrenic or schizoid personality, depressive, and so on, but nobody can agree on how to treat me and I’ve been on every kind of drug going because nothing seems to work right.
‘There were plenty of times I knew I might do something bad so I’d put myself into the mental institution by telling them the type of stuff that gets their attention. I always knew what to say to get myself in and out of those places. Maybe I’d quit talking, or I’d swallow a load of rat poison. One time I got admitted by hitting my brother over the head with a wood plane. Those doctors, they think they’re so damn smart. In the end, I was the one who was in control, not them. I always manage to make sure I get my disability payments, wherever I am.’
He talked and dug while I listened in silence – I felt the cold metal from the clamps cutting into my ankles as Gary continued to shovel earth from the hole, slowly, rhythmically, piling up the soil next to him into a crumbling pyramid. The more he talked, the more I could hear something underneath all the boasting and bragging, the bizarre life story. I hadn’t quite got a hold of it yet, but I kept listening, trying to get a sense of what he was really saying.
‘Anjeanette – she had my child. She was my girlfriend about ten years back and we lived at 2331 North 58th Street. Nice place, neighborhood like this one, but our place was okay. She wasn’t too bright – I don’t know, a lot of folks say she was retarded. Well, maybe she was. I can’t say for sure. It didn’t matter to me. She loved me and she would do anything for me. I think that made her happy – doing stuff for me like cleaning and cooking. She was completely happy being a housewife and liked to take good care of her man, you know? She loved me so much she would do anything I asked, including having kids. So when she got pregnant I was really pleased – I always really wanted kids but I’m scared, you know, cos she ain’t too bright and child protective services don’t like it when retarded women have children.’
I wasn’t on best of terms with child protective services either, but I wondered whether it was more that they didn’t want Anjeanette to have a child with this man, rather than worrying about her mental capacity.
‘They wanted her to have an abortion – right from the off. These people who were meant to be looking out for her and helping her live her life you know, they just couldn’t tolerate her being so happy with me and they plotted to try and get her to leave me. But Anjeanette wouldn’t go. She’d tell me what they all said to her and how they conspired against my interests. And because I could tell that child protective services and her sisters were against me I stopped her going to hospital for her check-ups, cos I was afraid that one day she just wouldn’t come back home. I’m a licensed nurse – I got my LPN certificate after leaving the army – and I knew I could treat her pregnancy at home instead of her getting all mixed up with the hospitals and all that. So that’s what we were planning – she stays home and she’s doing really well with me. But then her no-good fucking family start interfering and mess it all up.
‘It’s her damn sisters – interfering jealous little bitches. They didn’t understand why Anjeanette had such a good life with this rich man who takes her out all the time to nice places and has not one but two Cadillacs in his garage. I know they’re thinking – how come she gets it so good while we’re all sitting round on welfare? And with her being retarded and all that. They were jealous, that was all. But Anjeanette did something that her sisters never did, she loved a white man. Her family didn’t like that.’
Or perhaps they just didn’t like you, I thought to myself.
‘They take Anjeanette out of our home and admit her to the University of Pennsylvania hospital and now they’re accusing me of all sorts of shit like starving her cos she’s only gained five pounds the whole pregnancy. But that’s just because she’s so healthy. Anyway, they claim the baby could never have been born naturally because she had a tumor and they cut it out of her and took her away to foster her. What do you think of that bullshit?’
‘Yeah, that sucks,’ I murmured. I figured I had to play along for now. ‘Maybe she’s retarded but you’re not. You could have looked after the baby.’
‘Exactly! As the father, don’t I have rights? And anyways Anjeanette wasn’t too retarded to clean and feed the little girl. I got visitation rights to start with but they took those away too. These people, they don’t let me have nothing of my own.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ I agreed. ‘But you know, common sense will tell you if you want children you shouldn’t be having them with retarded girls.’
&nbs
p; ‘She wasn’t that bad. Anyway, she loved me. She had a sister – Alberta. After they took the baby she was real upset and she wanted to go visit Alberta in this institution they’d had her locked up in since she was thirteen. Alberta wasn’t much smarter than a four-year-old – couldn’t count change or read or write. But she could feed and dress herself. She’d been locked up so long I took pity on her. I knew what it was like in them places. I told you, their family didn’t give two shits about those girls. Alberta was just rotting away there – I took her out for the day with Anjeanette and we went for lunch. Like I said, I treated Anjeanette right – always took her out to eat and stuff. They were so happy to be together again. It was so touching to me to see Anjeanette happy after losing the baby so I wanted her to stay that way. Well, we take Alberta out shopping, buy her a dress and a new wig and she’s really pleased to be with us. But when it comes time for Alberta to go back to that institution, the girls they don’t want to be separated and they’re weeping and sobbing all over each other, so much so it near breaks my heart.
‘So we just don’t take her back.
‘I’m a nurse, like I said, and I saw they’d neglected her care because her hands are all sore – I started treating calluses on her hands and feet and trying to teach her about money.
‘But the family and that damn institution where they’ve locked her up for twenty years goes crazy and they make it all out to be such a big deal. They come banging down my door and even though Anjeanette is begging me to hide Alberta so they don’t find her, they track her down in the storage bin.’
This wasn’t sounding good – he clearly had a history of abducting women. This was something he had done at least once before. I didn’t like the sound of what he was telling me.
‘And they take her away, claiming I’d abused her and abducted her, which I hadn’t because I was only doing what she wanted and she was scared to go back to that place. She just wanted to stay with us.
‘But the judge gets persuaded that I’ve kidnapped Alberta because they found her in my basement. I only told her to hide there because she didn’t want them to find her. Now she couldn’t take the stand because she don’t know what the fuck’s going on and all the felony charges like kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment, they have to drop all of those because they can’t find enough evidence. Instead that damn judge gives me three to seven years for a load of bullshit misdemeanors like unlawful restraint, interfering with the custody of a committed person and one other, I forget what it is. My attorney can’t believe the judge is being so harsh because I’ve got no prior convictions. Anyway, it don’t make any difference. I get sent down and like I said, I know how to work the system, so instead of doing hard time I spend the next four years bouncing round the hospitals, tying all those doctors up in knots trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.’
He broke out into a self-indulgent chuckle. ‘I stop speaking for a while and I tell them it’s because the devil has put a cookie down my throat. I just couldn’t be bothered to be talking to no one at the time. I didn’t have nothing to say. It didn’t matter – it was all a game to me. I had to have ways to keep these guys guessing. They got me on Thorazine mostly now – I don’t like it but they say I got to take it or I’ll wind up back in the nuthouse.’
Gary had worked up a good sweat digging out the hole and he stopped for a moment, leaning on his spade to get his breath back.
‘Them four years they stole from me though, they mattered, because when I got out I couldn’t find Anjeanette. She just disappeared. So now I’ve lost a child and my girlfriend and all I’ve ever wanted is just to have family round me, my own family.
‘But at least I’ve got money. I make sure that the army keeps up its disability payments to me every month. They owe me that and in the meantime you see I’ve managed to use that pension money to get into the stock market and I’ve turned that around for myself. So now I’ve built up a good amount of money and I’m not poor. That’s how I can afford my cars – I’ve got a Rolls-Royce too.
‘Then I get this white woman pregnant but she disappears with my son, Little Gary. So now I realize this isn’t going well and I have to have another plan. I’ve seen that film – The World of Suzie Wong. You seen that film? I watch it and I think that maybe all those oriental women, they’re far more accommodating to men, especially white men. So that’s how I meet Betty – I sign up to this matrimonial bureau for oriental women and I see Betty’s picture, beautiful girl. Stunning. We’re writing pretty regularly to each other and then I propose because I think this is going to work. Betty comes over to the States from the Philippines and I do everything for her, and we get married.
‘But it turns out she’s not obedient like them Japanese and Chinese women – I didn’t think I did the right thing by getting myself involved with a Filipino woman because she was always objecting to stuff. I tried to get her to adapt but she was very difficult. In the end she ran out on me when she was pregnant and now she’s taken herself off and my son is out there somewhere but she won’t let me see him, even though I supposedly still got to support the bitch.
‘Turns out them Filipino women aren’t so accommodating after all and now she’s trying to bleed me through the courts but I’m fighting her all the way because if she thinks she can take my money and my son she’s just plain out to lunch.’
I was just sitting there, listening to him rant on and on. His money, his son. It wasn’t that he was sounding crazy to me, he was sounding entitled. As if the world owed him for what he had been through.
‘That’s the problem – that’s been the problem all along, Nicole. Everyone taking stuff from me, just takin’ advantage and never thinking it don’t have no consequences.
‘So, you see, that’s how I came by this plan. This way, nobody’s going to leave and take my kids anywhere. Eventually I’m going to move us all to the country – buy a big house with lots of acreage and away from other people so I can bring up my commune of kids in peace. That way the kids can run around outside and play. Kids should be outside, in the fresh air.’
I was too stunned to speak. And it was a good thing too because if I’d recovered slightly I might have shouted at him: ‘Are you crazy? This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life and it will never, never in a million years work!’
No, instead I just sat there and my silence spoke to him. It told him I was compliant. It told him I understood his plight, I understood what was going on.
This man was lacking very basic common sense. And underneath all the madness, all the cunning and boasting there was that sense of something he was reaching for, something I could understand, something in him that I could actually connect with.
Finally I spoke. ‘You’re lonely, aren’t you?’
Gary turned and looked at me as if for the first time, as if finally acknowledging the shivering, cowering woman he had stolen from her life, now shackled and chained up in his basement.
He seemed surprised.
‘I don’t usually go for Hispanic girls,’ he said after a while. ‘I usually prefer black girls. And ones that aren’t too smart, you know?
‘That way they’re not always nagging you the whole time and bitching at you. I picked you because you looked like Diana Ross.’
I almost laughed – the whole thing was so ridiculous.
‘Maybe I made a mistake with you,’ he went on. ‘You’re not dumb.’
Gary left to go upstairs again. This time he didn’t put me back in the hole and he didn’t put the handcuffs on either.
I sank to my knees and clasped my head in despair, letting my body rock forward so my head and hands met the ground. Could this be real? The whole thing seemed too crazy and far-fetched to be true. This man wasn’t planning some sick torture for fun, he was serious, and it looked like his plan was set to last years, not days, weeks or months. Years!
Dear God, I prayed silently. Please give me the strength to get out of here. Please give me the mental resilience to ma
ke it through this alive, to keep my wits about me and not let me falter.
That night I prayed and prayed and prayed.
Chapter Four
Escape
I awoke on the floor, naked and freezing. Worse, I hadn’t had anything to eat now for nearly two days.
These, however, seemed like the least of my worries. Now I knew what fate Gary had in mind for me, I knew that somehow I had to get out of here. There was no way on earth I wanted to become part of his sick baby-making harem.
The guy was obviously out of his mind. What if he decided it wasn’t such a good plan after all? He couldn’t just let me go – he’d have to get rid of me somehow and I knew he wouldn’t let me walk out of here. Overhead somewhere I heard the front door slam and felt the vibrations as he revved up his Cadillac in the garage. I listened intently as the car slowly rolled away. Now was my chance.
I shook the fuzzy, cloudy feeling from my head and started to look around. There weren’t any windows in the basement. The whole room was set underground and cemented from wall to wall.
I wandered round and round the basement, pulling my heavy chain behind me, examining every part of each wall – luckily, the chain was long enough for me to reach all parts of the basement so inside that room, I was more or less free to move around.
The only part of the room that didn’t seem to be made of cement was this little hole at the top of the far wall with a small door on it.
I walked over to the wall and I put my face against the door – I could feel a breeze coming out of it so I knew it must lead to the outside. For the first time since I got down here I had hope.
Quickly I squatted down on the ground and fiddled with the clamps around my ankles. The left side was completely stuck but there was a tiny bit of give in the screw on the right clamp. In the last few days I’d been fiddling with this screw, running my fingernail along the edges of the dried glue to pick it off. After working on this for days, most of the glue had flaked off and now I set to work again, digging and picking at it like mad. After half an hour the rest of it came away and I could start undoing the screw. It was tough but eventually it spun under my fingers and before long I had one free foot, my ankles red and sore from where the clamps had dug into the skin.
Cellar Girl Page 4