I tried again with the left clamp but it was no good and I figured if I wasted any more time trying to get it off then he’d come back and catch me. With one foot free I had at least a little bit of maneuverability and I decided I had to try to get out one way or another.
The little metal door that formed the entrance of the hole easily came away in my hands. I could see the space inside was around a foot and a half wide, just enough for me to crawl through. So I got inside and dragged myself along, trying to get out as far as possible. I was outside now – I knew because I could feel the wind on my face and it was broad daylight. The yard was littered with trash and I could hear voices coming from the front of the house.
I wriggled as far as possible so that most of my body was out of the hole, except my left leg, which was still attached to the chain inside, and I started yelling for my life.
‘Help! Help! Please help me! This guy’s got me chained up in his basement and he’s raping me. Somebody get me out of here.’
I paused, waiting for someone to answer me, for someone to come and help. But all I heard was the low murmur of those voices standing out the front of the houses.
I tried again. ‘Please come and help me. I’m in the basement of this guy Gary’s house. He’s got me locked up down here. Someone please call the police. Someone please help me. Please help me.’
Still, no response, so I switched to schoolgirl Spanish.
‘Por favor, venga y me ayude. Estoy en el sótano de la casa de este hombre Gary. Me tiene encerrado aquí abajo. Alguien por favor llame a la policía. Alguien por favor me ayude. Por favor, ayúdame.’
I was out there, lying on the ground and I was yelling and yelling, hoping and praying someone, anyone would answer me. They had to be able to hear me. I could hear them! Loud and clear.
I grabbed the only thing within reaching distance – a wooden stick – and started beating the fence dividing Gary’s yard from the neighbor’s yard. I beat on that fence and kept right on screaming and I was beating so hard that the whole fence was starting to come down.
I must have been out there for twenty minutes, screaming myself hoarse, but no one took any notice and the next thing I knew, I felt a yank on my chain.
Gary was back – he’d got hold of the chain inside and he was trying to pull me back in, reeling me in like a fish on the line. But I wasn’t giving in that easily. I resisted with every bit of strength I had left in me, wedging my free foot against the opening to the hole so that he couldn’t get my body back through to his basement. There was nothing to hold onto outside so I just put my arms down flat and pushed my torso off the ground so I was in the strongest position possible. He was pulling and pulling and I was still screaming, desperate now, desperate for someone to come to my rescue.
‘Please, will someone please just call the cops. He’s crazy – he’s chained me up. Please help. I know you can hear me. Just call the cops. Call the goddamn cops! This nut is gonna kill me – please help! HELP!!’
I felt the chain relax on my leg and I knew that he’d left the basement. Still I was screaming and nobody was responding.
And there he was. Gary came into the yard and towered over me, a stony-eyed look of fury on his face.
Without saying a word, he tried pushing me back into the hole but I fought him and he couldn’t get a hold on my limbs to push them back in. We were scuffling in his backyard, a naked woman on the ground with one leg chained inside the house. It was broad daylight, and still nobody responded.
I was shrieking now: ‘Get off me! Let go, you bastard! GET OFF!’
After five minutes of this he gave up and returned to the house. I didn’t know what else I could do except keep right on shouting. I still had hope that somebody would hear me and call the cops or do something.
OH SHIT!
I felt a jolt up my leg as if someone had just tried to rip it right out of its socket. Gary was tugging on the chain with all his might. This time there was no messing around. The force on my leg was so immense I felt it might break.
He gave the chain another yank and I realized with gut-wrenching clarity that unless I let go right now he was going to break one or both of my legs.
I relaxed my free leg and let it slide next to the one inside the hole just in time for another heft so strong that it nearly pulled me through in one go.
There was nothing I could do as I felt myself slide back down onto the basement floor. His force was so great I could tell he would have broken every bone in my body before letting me get free.
Now he set to work again, redoing the clamp on my leg and setting it with the Krazy Glue again.
All the while he was talking to me, almost in amazement.
‘I can’t believe you got out there!’ he said, as if the very idea of there being a hole in his plan, or his basement for that matter, never even occurred to him.
‘Jeez, you were out there hollering and screaming for ages. But you know why nobody responded? It’s because they’re all the drug guys and I help them out and give them money and stuff so they like me, they leave me alone. That’s why they ignored you and didn’t pay you any attention.’
He was working and talking quickly, high on the adrenaline from the drama and the effort, excited by his victory.
Now he was redoing the other clamp too, just to be sure neither of them came off again. I felt utterly despondent. I had one chance and it failed.
I couldn’t believe in all that time nobody responded. Nobody called the police. If I heard a girl screaming ‘Help! Help! Help!’ at the very least I’d pick up the phone to the police and say: ‘Hey, something’s going on, somebody’s screaming and hollering for their life.’ I wouldn’t just ignore them! Shame on those people. The tears began to well up behind my eyelids again.
I hardly noticed as Gary pulled my arms behind me and put the cuffs on again. And I hardly felt the blows as he took up his wooden stick and started to beat me, dull thumps landing all over my body.
‘Try something like this again,’ he grunted. ‘And not only will you fail, but I’ll kill you.’
I didn’t doubt him for a minute.
Gary tramped back upstairs, leaving me lying there on the floor, my body covered with fresh bruises from his beatings and my hands cuffed behind me. I was so exhausted all I wanted to do was sleep but if I thought sleeping was hard enough in the hole or with the chains on, sleeping in the cuffs was impossible. There was no way to get comfortable. I tried rolling onto my front but my head was forced to the side and I could barely breathe for the pressure on my chest.
So I rolled onto my side but soon the arm I was lying on began to ache and then it went to sleep. Eventually I tried leaning my back against the wall, my legs bent slightly to support myself, and let myself fall forward so my head rested on my knees.
* * *
Time moved in strange ways now – I couldn’t tell how long it had been since I’d been like this. All hope had left me. I was too exhausted and wrung out to even think straight. I guess my body was probably suffering from drug withdrawal too, but I didn’t think about crack once.
Finally, Gary returned and this time he brought down some bread and water. He uncuffed my arms and they just flopped down uselessly by my sides. I couldn’t even lift them up – my brain was telling my arms to move but they refused.
I took a tiny sip of the water – it felt amazing, instantly bringing me round from my woozy state. Then I picked up one of the two slices of white bread Gary had put down next me and tentatively, scared almost of what it might do, I took a bite. Until that moment I’d hardly thought of food at all – I’d missed several meals but nothing could have been further from my mind. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to eat. Aside from anything else, my lips were cracked and swollen and my tongue seemed too big to fit in my mouth properly.
At first, my jaws were stiff, like they’d rusted up from lack of use. I tasted the floury, sweet bread and let it sit in my mouth awhile, accustoming myself to
the sensation of food again. Then I worked the morsel round my mouth, chewing and breaking it up into smaller and smaller pieces until it was small enough to go down into my stomach. My throat must have closed up some because it felt like I had to work that bread for ages before I could get it down.
But the effect, like the water, was instant. As soon as the food reached my stomach I felt a yawing hunger scream out from inside me. I’d been starved and now my body needed food like nothing else. I took another bite, working this piece quicker, getting it down easier than the first, and slurping a quick drink of water to help it down.
All the while Gary had gone back to digging the hole, carrying on like nothing was unusual, like this was just a regular day for him. I didn’t have hope that anybody would come – I knew that if there was going to be a visit from the cops, it would have happened by now. All I knew was that there wasn’t any crawl space in the wall anymore. Gary had filled it in with white plastic bags and bolted the metal door to the wall.
After he finished his digging, Gary laid me back down on the air mattress and had sex with me. He pulled down his jeans, shifted his large long body over mine and then just began pumping up and down, his mouth set in a fixed line the whole time. His tousled brown hair bobbed up and down, his heavy torso pounded on top of me and I could smell his sour breath, like old coffee. I turned my head away. When he was done, he rolled off, reattached the handcuffs and returned upstairs.
I began to despair, wondering if I would ever get out of this place alive. I drifted off to sleep without realizing then awoke, thinking I was still asleep.
This is all just a dream, I told myself drowsily. I’ll wake up soon in my own bed and then I can go back to the hospital, see my little Ricky and call my mom.
I lapsed into unconsciousness again but I never woke up in my own bed. Every time I opened my eyes, I was still in that basement, my arms pinned behind my back, the clamps digging welts around my ankles, the harsh glare of the overhead bulb punishing my sight while the radio blared monotonously on and on in the background. I was locked into a frightening new reality, one that seemed further and further from the one I used to know.
* * *
Gary returned some hours later for another round of bread and water. He had sex with me and afterwards he put me in the hole. It was bigger now and before he put me down there, he crammed the air mattress in. Now I was in the hole and I wasn’t crumpled up any longer – there was enough space for me to sit up with my arms and legs in a normal relaxed position. It felt comparatively luxurious.
Shortly after that I realized he had put me in the hole because he was leaving the house. I knew this because a few minutes later I felt a strange vibration through the ground and the unmistakable roar of his Cadillac. He was moving his car out of the garage.
I started to panic.
Gary leaving the house was scarier than him being in the room. What if something happened to him while he was out there? What if he got knocked down and killed or arrested and locked up? Nobody knew I was here. I’d just rot away and this hole really would be my grave.
Every time he walked back upstairs I knew it could be the end. But now that I had a little food and water, I felt my mental strength return and my desire to live kicked in with full force.
I wanted to see my kids again – I wanted to see my mom, to have her put her arms around me and tell me everything was going to be okay. I wanted to build a better future for myself, give my kids a chance at a good life. This wasn’t how it was going to end, not like this.
I knew I had to get out of this and I was going out the same way I came in – walking through the front door. Nobody’s gonna take me out of this hellhole in a body bag!
My first attempt to escape had failed but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t succeed at some point.
I just had to be smarter about this, work out a way so that the next time I tried to leave, I did it right. Of course, I didn’t know how on earth I was going to achieve this – right now, I was completely stuck.
But if I just waited, I told myself, something would turn up.
Just hang on. Hang on, Josefina, and don’t give up the fight.
Chapter Five
Sandra
I heard the girl before I saw her.
I was in the hole and I could hear sobbing coming from upstairs and two sets of footsteps padding down the basement steps.
Then I heard Gary hollering, ‘Shut up, Sandra! You know you know me. You know I’m not going to hurt you. Just shut up – why are you crying?’
The footsteps got closer and closer until they were right over the top of me – the bags were removed, the board slid away and Gary pulled me out of the hole by the arm.
He was holding a naked black girl with his other arm; her hands were cuffed behind her back, just like mine were when he first brought me down here, and she was weeping uncontrollably.
‘Sandra, Nicole. Nicole – this is Sandra,’ he said, as if introducing a pair of strangers at a dinner party. I looked at the poor girl, naked and shivering, obviously confused and scared as hell. Just like I when he had brought me here, three days ago by my calculations.
Round, frightened eyes peeped out from behind large, thick-lensed glasses.
‘I don’t know why Sandra here is crying.’ Gary went on, now taking a new pair of muffler clamps and attaching them to her ankles, just like he did with me. ‘I know Sandra. She’s been in my house many times. She knows I’m not going to hurt her.’
But Sandra just wouldn’t quit sobbing and my heart went out to her. Snot dribbled down her nose, she was gasping now, taking big gulps of air. I could see why she might be distressed – after all, if she’d been here before I’m sure she was wondering why he was chaining her up this time instead of letting her out the door as usual. This can’t be good, I thought. This can’t be good at all. Now he was taking women he knew.
Gary went through the same routine with the clamps as he did with me – screwing them on, applying Krazy Glue then drying them with the hairdryer. The sheer strangeness of the process was enough to stop Sandra crying. She looked like she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. It struck me that until this moment I hadn’t imagined Gary taking any more girls. He’d told me of his plan but the whole thing seemed so crazy, so unbelievable, I guess I hadn’t imagined it would ever happen.
Now here he was, bringing down another girl and I realized with sickening clarity that the baby farm had begun in earnest.
Gary attached Sandra’s chains to the same water pipe with a padlock, undid her handcuffs and put us both in the hole together.
He slid the board back over, replaced the bags on top and went back upstairs.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ she sniffed. I couldn’t see her any longer but I could feel her thighs next to mine as we lay side by side on the air mattress in the dark. Now we were two naked women, complete strangers, lying side-by-side in little more than a shallow grave. It was crazy, weird and extremely frightening.
‘I don’t understand it. Gary’s my friend – why’s he doing this? I been here a ton of times.’
Sandra talked slowly, I could tell she wasn’t all that bright – just Gary’s type, I thought – but she was sweet. She knew something had gone horribly wrong in her life.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘We been friends a long time. He’s always been so nice, takes me out to eat and stuff. We met at Elwyn Institute and we’ve been friends ever since.’
‘Elwyn – what’s that?’
‘It’s a place for mentally handicapped folks – he’s there a lot. Anyways, we get to talking one day and it goes from there. We been friends a few years now.
‘He picked me up today and took me to McDonald’s like normal. Then we came back here to have sex but afterwards he started strangling me and that’s when he brought me downstairs.’
‘That’s the same thing that happened to me too,’ I said. Now Sandra was over her
crying fit, she seemed quite well recovered. There was something about the way she was talking, like she couldn’t quite believe Gary, her friend Gary, could possibly do anything to harm her.
I wondered now if my being here had helped calm Sandra down – after all, when I arrived there was no one here at all, nobody to reassure me and say ‘It’s okay, he doesn’t want to kill you’. Sandra had regained her composure in a matter of moments. Now she was talking fluently and without erupting into tears.
I wanted to know more about this Gary she knew, the one who was nice and took her out to eat. The more I knew about him, the better chance I had of getting out.
‘He’s got a church,’ she said. ‘It’s called the United Church of the Ministers of God and he holds his sermons here, in his house, and lots of us folk that like Gary and feel he understands us, we come and he teaches us hymns and reads to us from the Bible. He’s always real kind – afterwards he usually takes us all out for lunch to McDonald’s or Roy Rogers. He never collects any money from us – his church don’t have a collection plate, which is good, because a lot of us can’t afford to give away none anyway.’
‘A church?’ I repeated. ‘Here – in this house?’
It seemed so unlikely. How was this apparently soft, generous God-fearing man related to the monster who locked up women in his basement to bear his children?
It didn’t add up.
‘What’s going on with all of this?’ Sandra asked me. She seemed so innocent, so naïve. I felt very protective towards her.
Cellar Girl Page 5