‘He’s got a plan,’ I told her. ‘He wants to get ten women down here, all chained up, and he wants us all to get pregnant with his babies and then he’s going to bring up all the children down here, in the basement in secret, so nobody can take them away.’
‘Hmm, he’s been wanting babies for some time,’ said Sandra. ‘Child protective services kept taking them and it always really upset him. He had a mail-order bride and they had a kid together but she ended up leaving him.
‘She used to come to his church before she left but she wouldn’t like to pray so he’d make her stand in a corner on her own. You know, I think he was trying to teach her a lesson but she didn’t want nothing to do with the church and she ran away.’
Sandra paused. I could feel that she was starting to shiver – whether from the shock or the cold I couldn’t tell. I tried to be positive.
‘Look, Sandra, we’re going to get out of here. I don’t know how this is going to work yet but I’m going to think of something. Don’t worry.’
At some point we must have both fallen asleep because the next thing we knew, Gary was pulling the board off and yanking us up from the hole in order to have sex with us. He lay us both down on the air mattress side by side and had sex with first me, then Sandra.
There didn’t seem to be any pleasure or passion in it – it was straightforward sex, up and down, mechanical like a chore. And we both submitted. What would be the point of resisting?
I tried to switch off from what he was doing and concentrate instead on the radio – they were playing ‘Smooth Operator’ by Sade.
I sang along to the song in my head, ignoring what was happening to my body.
When he was done he showed us he’d brought down a portable loo so we could use the bathroom when we needed to, which was an improvement on the bucket I’d had to use previously, and he gave us each a shirt to put on. It was the first time I had worn a stitch of clothing in three days and I felt stupidly grateful. It was the middle of winter and in the unheated basement, the cold was relentless, unforgiving.
Then he picked up the spade and started digging out the hole again. Sandra and I just sat there in silence, watching him.
* * *
Our lives now settled into a strange new routine. First thing in the morning Gary would bring down a couple of slices of bread each and some water. He would then have sex with us and afterwards, while he was digging, we just sat there in the basement. He’d brought down a battery-powered black and white TV so when he put us back in the hole afterwards, he placed the TV down in there with us so we could watch TV for a couple of hours. That was all the batteries could last for until they ran out of power.
One time, we were sat watching Wheel of Fortune when suddenly I sensed the air around me thicken and my breathing became heavy and difficult.
‘You all right?’ I whispered to Sandra.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t breathe.’
‘Me neither.’
The air around us seemed to be seeping out of the hole, like something was sucking the oxygen out of there. In a few moments we were both gasping for breath.
So we started banging on the board and screaming but of course the music was still blaring throughout the house so Gary couldn’t hear us.
Now, I was panicking. My head became light, I felt dizzy. I didn’t want to die down here! I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t see my children again, not tell my mom I loved her. I couldn’t allow that to happen.
‘Here, come on!’ I urged Sandra as I tried sliding my arms underneath the heavy, weighted-down board in order to try and get some air in the hole. We managed to both wriggle our forearms underneath the board, just enough to let in some fresh air. It was such a relief. Instantly my head cleared and the cool air allowed us to take in big lungfuls of oxygen. We stayed that way, our bodies angled awkwardly to allow the air to rush in, for about half an hour until we heard Gary’s footsteps. Then we quickly pulled our arms back in but the board was so heavy it scraped along our arms, leaving us both with scorched bleeding scrapes.
‘Hey,’ he said as he pulled us both out of the hole. ‘What’s up with your arms?’
‘We had to put them under the board,’ I told him. ‘To let some air into the hole. We ran out of air to breathe.’
‘Hmmm, I wonder why that could be.’ Gary looked thoughtful. Then he spied the TV still on in the hole. ‘It’s that thing,’ he said, pointing to it. ‘It must be the batteries, sucking all the oxygen out of the hole. You girls got to learn how to limit your time with that thing otherwise you’re gonna suffocate yourselves. And you better keep those cuts clean because if they get infected and I can’t treat them, you’re gonna be in trouble. Nobody’s going to hospital.’
So we learned to eke out our precious two hours of TV over the whole day. We switched on for a sitcom that Sandra liked called Amen. It was set in a church near to where she grew up so that’s why she liked it. She found it real funny but I gotta say, it didn’t do much for me. It was a distraction, nothing more. Just something to take my mind somewhere other than that hole. We didn’t watch anything serious or depressing. We didn’t even watch the news – it was hard to think of the world outside, a world where everything was normal. If people were looking for us I just hoped they found us quickly and if they weren’t looking for us, I didn’t want to know. So we only tried to watch happy, upbeat stuff – sitcoms, game shows, panel shows. I didn’t even like seeing the weather channel. What was the point?
I was thinking about my kids a lot too – LaToya, Zornae and Ricky. I had only been with Ricky for such a short amount of time, but I had memorized everything about him – his little fingers, the whorls of dark hair on his head, his little rosebud lips. I was thinking about Zornae and her shy but winning ways, such personality, even for a toddler. I imagined they had probably been taken in by a foster family and hoped that whoever they were with, they were taking good care of them both. And Toya, of course, my funny cheeky girl, now with her father. Thinking about my kids gave me hope and a reason for getting out of there.
Several times a day Gary came down to dig out the hole or have sex with us.
In between Sandra and I slept or talked. She told me she lived with her mom and sisters and liked to go to Bible study or walk in the park. It seemed she lived a simple, uncomplicated life, grateful for the few friends she did have. I told her about my kids and my mom. When we got tired of talking we just lay in silence.
Late in the evening Gary would bring down two more slices of bread and some more water. He also brought down a small portable coffee pot, some tea bags and sugar so we could make sweet tea when we were out of the hole. We rationed our tea bags so we had no more than two a day but we packed each Styrofoam cup with about ten spoons of sugar to try to fill ourselves up and stave off the hunger pangs.
The radios were still blaring throughout the house but after a few days me and Sandra begged Gary to change the channel because we’d realized that on this station they just played the same ten songs over and over again, every twenty minutes. I’d heard that damn Anita Baker song so many times now, it’d driven me half mad. It was like torture. I never realized up till now that the stations all had certain tracks that they played over and over again. I couldn’t even bear to listen to the same radio presenters anymore. Their chirpy, upbeat banter was so fake, so forced. At least, it seemed that way to me.
Whenever Gary left the house he put Sandra and me back in the hole – otherwise he seemed happy to leave us in the basement in our chains. I hated it when we had to go back in the hole again – there was more room now but every time I climbed in and I heard his footsteps on the front porch and felt the vibrations of his Cadillac, I feared he was never coming back.
After a few days, Sandra relaxed – she didn’t stress about whether she was going to live or die. But I was wound up pretty tight most of the time. Every time we were on our own, I grilled her about Gary. She filled me in on how he’d been through a lot of bad episodes in
his life, tried to kill himself a number of times.
She even went to visit him in hospital after one occasion. Apparently he was supposed to take Thorazine every day but he didn’t like to take it and sometimes he hoarded it so that he could take a killer dose when he was feeling suicidal.
The medication thing was something that stressed me out a lot. How can you relax when you’re at the mercy of a madman? I studied Gary now, trying to pick up on any little detail that might help me get out of here. Sometimes I could tell when he hadn’t taken his medication. His movements were jerky, his eyes darted about wildly and he seemed jittery, on edge.
Those nights I stayed awake, gripped by fear.
I imagined him tormented by evil thoughts, his mind plagued by voices telling him to get rid of the girls in the cellar.
‘What do we do if he comes down and he wants to get rid of us?’ I voiced my fears to Sandra.
‘We’ll just have to try and hurt him first,’ she said, in her usual slow, deliberate manner.
‘Yes but he doesn’t bring the keys down here with him. So if we hurt him or killed him even, we’d still be trapped down here. No, we got to try and talk him out of it. How do we do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You ever seen him when he’s like, you know, really out of it?’
‘I’m not sure. But you know, Gary, he don’t like to be told “no” all that much. He sure didn’t appreciate it when his wife said no to him – she got punished a lot for that.’
‘Yeah, I get that.’ My mind was racing on, unable to stay still for even a second. ‘So we have to tell him the plan is working, that he needs to stick with the original idea of getting us all knocked up. Try to keep him on course. We could say that we were pregnant!’
‘That’s a good idea, Nicole. But how do you prove it to him?’
‘I’ve been pregnant before so I’ll just say that I know the feeling and you know, when a woman knows she knows.’
Sandra was silent. I couldn’t tell if she was falling asleep. Was it late? I had no idea. Still my mind kept turning over all the different possibilities. Whatever happened next, I wanted to be prepared. Everything was so out of control, I had to get hold of something.
My one crumb of comfort was Sandra’s insight into Gary and the man she described on the outside was like a different person altogether – a soft, kind man.
It gave me some kind of hope that there was another Gary outside of this basement, a Gary with a heart.
If he had a softer side that meant he could feel kindly towards people, I reasoned. He wasn’t just this cold and calculating baby-obsessed freak, he had humane characteristics. And all these people he was gathering round him at his church, these unfortunates, the outcasts of society, the mentally and physically handicapped like Sandra described who attended his services, these were his folk. He surrounded himself with these types of people because it made him feel good, like King Gary. These people were all those who looked up to him, who accepted him as a man and a person in society.
This was what he needed to make himself feel normal.
All the really normal folk in his life – the doctors, child protective services, and the people of the state – these were the ones who seemed like they were against him.
* * *
The days drifted by, no different from the nights. When we heard a song we liked on the radio we’d hum or sing along – we both loved Prince and occasionally we heard ‘When Doves Cry’, one of my favorites. Otherwise, we tried to block out the constant noise that thrummed through the cellar.
Sandra told me about the simple life she’d led so far, getting no more than a high-school diploma through a special education program. She’d lived at home all her life with her mom, protected by her loving sister Tess and her cousins.
We were the same age, twenty-five, though it felt like Sandra was still a child – a trusting, kind, young girl.
She had something wrong with her jaw – the upper and lower part didn’t quite meet when she ate so it took her a long time to chew and swallow her food.
Each meal could take up to an hour for her to consume because she spent such a long time chewing her food over and over, slowly, like a cow chewing its cud.
A few days after Sandra first arrived, when Gary was down with us in the basement there was a banging on the door upstairs. We were all surprised – in the whole time I’d been here nobody had knocked. Gary didn’t get visitors. But this person wasn’t just knocking, they were banging away for minutes. Gary kept right on digging out the hole, breaking the earth with slow heavy movements. I think he was hoping that the person would just give up and go away. But whoever it was out there, they weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. After twenty minutes of this, Gary sighed, threw down the spade, put Sandra and me back in the hole and went upstairs. We couldn’t hear what was going on because the radios were on but we heard the banging go on for another ten minutes until eventually it stopped.
Gary returned a few minutes later and let us out of the hole.
‘Just my neighbors,’ he said casually.
At the time we accepted that – we didn’t have any reason to believe any different. But now I know this was a lie. The people at the door weren’t Gary’s neighbors – it was Sandra’s sister Tess and her two cousins. Within hours of Sandra going missing her family had tried to track her down. They knew that Sandra was friends with Gary and they also knew, through Sandra and Gary’s mutual friend Tony Brown, another of Gary’s church followers, that the last anyone had heard of Sandra, she was heading over to Gary’s house.
Sandra’s mother had reported her missing to the police.
An officer, Sergeant Armstrong, visited North Marshall Street, and like Sandra’s relatives, he got no answer when he knocked.
Armstrong managed to track down Tony Brown to try and get more information about Gary.
When he asked him how to spell his surname Tony said: ‘H-E-I-D-A-I-K-E.’
So Armstrong returned to his computers and looked up the wrong name and found nothing. A perfect opportunity to stop Heidnik in his tracks was missed and all thanks to the wrong spelling of a name.
Had Armstrong looked harder, maybe tried different spellings, he would have found out a whole lot of worrying stuff about Gary Heidnik. Like his history of locking up retarded black girls in his basement.
And his mental condition.
As it was, the visits only served to alert Gary to the fact that her family was on his trail. And that set him thinking.
Chapter Six
Screwdriver
The next evening Gary came down wearing a pair of leather gloves and holding a piece of paper, an envelope and a pen. He put the pen and paper on the table where he’d set up the coffee pot and tea and got Sandra to sit down.
‘Here, you take this pen,’ he ordered. She did as she was told.
‘Now, just write what I tell you. Nothing else. Just my words. Do it wrong and we’ll start again. Do you understand?’
‘Yes Gary.’ Sandra nodded obediently.
‘Okay – now write this: DEAR MOM.’
Sandra crouched down close to her writing hand and with extreme concentration, she carved out the letters on the page.
Gary looked at her handiwork – it was the scrawl of an elementary school kid but he had clearly seen her writing before because he seemed pleased with her efforts.
‘Good. Okay next, write: I AM FINE.’
Again, Sandra bent down close to her hand to etch the words.
In the end, the letter he made her write went like this:
‘Dear Mom. I am fine. I am in New York and I’ll get in touch with you soon. Don’t worry. Love Sandra.’
Then Gary made her handle the letter real good so she got her fingerprints all over it and finally he made her write her mom’s name and home address on an envelope.
We both knew what this meant. Gary was trying to throw Sandra’s relatives off the scent. After he’d given us a couple of
slices of bread each he put us in the hole and we listened as his car left the garage.
We were expecting him to be back in a few hours as usual but we were waiting the whole night long and we never heard him come back.
This set my nerves off again – what if he’d got into an accident?
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Sandra drowsily. ‘Don’t worry none. Just try and get some sleep.’
I tried but my mind was racing all night long and my senses were on edge, just waiting to feel that familiar rumble in the ground that signaled his car was back in the garage. It never came.
The next day we didn’t see Gary at all and I was wretched with worry, so by the time his car pulled into the garage that evening, over twenty-four hours since he’d put us down there, we were so relieved and so happy to see him that we were babbling over one another, hardly knowing what we were saying, not realizing our words were giving him cause for concern.
‘Thank God you’re back,’ I exclaimed as he pulled me out of the hole. ‘We didn’t know whether you were ever coming back. Then when we heard your car pull in the garage we were so relieved. We were so happy because, you know, we figured maybe you’d got into an accident or something.’
Gary stopped and looked at me hard as I was saying this.
‘How did you hear my car?’ he asked. For the first time I realized he didn’t know that we could hear him coming and going when we were in the hole.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the radios were on all the time so we couldn’t hear what was going on upstairs and nobody outside could hear us either.
And it was true, if you were in the basement above ground then you couldn’t normally hear a thing because the radios drowned out any other sound.
But in the hole, we were under the ground, where the radio waves didn’t travel and we could pick up the vibrations from heavy movements around us.
Sandra filled him in, unable to sense his shift in mood: ‘We can hear the car from the hole.’
Gary put down some bread and water next to us then he went back upstairs. Sandra was still relieved, happy even, that Gary was back.
Cellar Girl Page 6