by Jack Jordan
I emerged from beneath the stairs with my eyes on his back, terrified that he would turn around and spot me, or see me moving from the corner of his eye. I placed one bare foot on the first step. I stepped again, and again, climbing higher and higher up the stairs, closer to the door, the nearest I had been to freedom in ten years. My heart was pounding hard and echoing in my ears. We were going to make it. And then Jacob began to cough. I turned to see Maxim’s eyes on me. I ran up the stairs, waiting to hear his heavy feet bounding up the steps behind me, waiting for his hand to snatch my shirt and pull me back down. I positioned Jacob so I could reach for the door handle, and grabbed it.
As tears began to fill my eyes, I heard Maxim laughing at the bottom of the stairs. I turned, defeated, and saw his wide grin; he was laughing so hard that tears came to his eyes.
‘You didn’t really think I’d leave the door unlocked, did you?’
***
I knew exactly what he had planned for me, even before he opened the cupboard below the sink and turned back around with the bottle of bleach and the toothbrush covered in old blood and yellow crust.
He slammed the bottle on the table in front of me.
‘You know what I have to do.’
He had to punish me for trying to escape. He had already told me what he would do to the children if I tried to escape again. But still, it wasn’t enough. I had to be taught a lesson.
He opened the bottle of bleach and squeezed the yellow cream onto the toothbrush.
‘Open.’
I closed my eyes and opened my mouth.
The worst part was waiting for the bleach to hurt. At first, it only tasted rancid, but then it began to burn my gums and tongue, and then the agony would come.
I felt the toothbrush pass my lips, and the bleach began to burn. He brushed so hard I could taste blood with the first few thrusts. I winced and whimpered, so he did it harder, until the toothbrush was hitting the back of my throat and making me gag. The nerves in my teeth began to react to the bleach with painful shocks, as though I had bitten into an electrical cord. Tears streamed down my face and I heard the children crying. He liked it when they watched – it taught them to stay in line and know who was the boss. I choked when he squirted bleach from the bottle straight into my mouth. I couldn’t take it anymore. I opened my eyes and looked into his, at the smile on his face, and tried to pull away. His hand snatched my jaw.
If I swallow the bleach I might die, I thought to myself, longing for the escape. But I can’t leave the children. They need me.
I let him throw me to the ground and straddle me. He pulled the toothbrush free from my mouth and covered my lips, trapping the bleach inside. I screamed behind his hand, which made the bleach bubble and swish around my mouth, sear my gums, pierce the nerves.
I thought he would never stop. I thought this was the time he would finally kill me. But then he took his hand away.
Bleach and blood shot out of my mouth like vomit. I coughed and heaved. A puddle of bleach and blood grew on the floor beneath me, but my mouth still burned, the shocks were still agonising, and the tears continued to flow. Yellow and red saliva slid out of my mouth like a slug’s slime and joined the puddle beneath me.
‘You know what I have to do if you try this again.’
I did know. I couldn’t risk the lives of my children. I would never try to escape again.
TWENTY-FOUR
Jacob’s health had worsened. He hadn’t eaten for two days, and had only managed a few sips of water. He was so thin and so weak that he hardly opened his eyes anymore, as though even the thought of it was exhausting.
I hadn’t got out of bed. I did nothing but hold Jacob, stroke his hair, and cry silently so Mary and John wouldn’t hear me.
It hurt to speak. There were so many ulcers in my mouth from the bleach that my cheeks swelled up. My throat was burnt and my gums wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Please don’t die. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t break my heart.
Each breath he took wheezed in and out through his mouth, as though his airways were slowly closing shut.
Hurry up and come home, I thought, as though Maxim would hear my thoughts and come home with the antibiotics he promised to get. Don’t let it be too late.
It was the basement. I hated it. It was damp, deprived of natural light and hidden away from fresh air and the big wide world.
Jacob was dying, and I had no way of stopping it.
He was so limp and he hardly moved. Each breath seemed to be more difficult than the last. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and one landed on Jacob’s face. I wiped it away and stroked his hair while I took in the sight of his angelic features; I knew that one day I would only see his face in my dreams. I ran my fingertips over his face, feeling his thin eyebrows, the curves of his eye sockets, his button nose, the arches of his lips, and the softness of his cheeks.
‘Please don’t feel any more pain, Jacob. You don’t deserve it.’
I sobbed silently, my chest aching as though my heart had truly broken, and held him tight to my chest. My tears ran down his face as I held him to me.
The door opened, but Mary and John didn’t rush to the bottom of the stairs to greet their father like they usually did. They knew something was wrong. I listened to his footsteps and the creaking of the staircase. He didn’t say a word. Maxim appeared in the doorway of the bedroom and looked in at us: a mother clutching her dying son, rocking and sobbing silently. He was a dark silhouette without a face. I couldn’t see his expression and I didn’t care. I hated him for not bringing the medicine sooner. He had said he could steal some when he visited Christian patients at the hospital. He had taken too long. This was on him.
He held a box of medicine in one hand and a bouquet of tulips in the other. Flowers to apologise for the bleach in my mouth, as though flowers and a smile would make the act, the memory, the pain, disappear.
‘I’ll deal with it,’ he said, coldly.
‘No! Not yet. He isn’t going yet.’
‘Paige—’
‘I said no! You are not taking him from me yet.’
I held him tight and rested my head against Jacob’s. Maxim left the doorway and began talking to the children quietly.
I won’t let him take Jacob away.
I couldn’t quieten my sobs any longer and wailed in agony, lying down on the mattress with Jacob in my arms, my tears dampening his hair.
It wasn’t long before Maxim appeared in the doorway again. He was coming for Jacob.
‘Not yet.’
He wasn’t listening. He was going to take him away.
‘I said not yet! He’s not dead yet!’
He lunged forward and I held onto Jacob as tight as I could.
‘You can’t take him! You can’t have him yet! Listen to me! Please, listen to me!’
My head jolted back as his fist smacked my jaw. There was a cracking sound. I was instantly disorientated, the room was almost spinning, but I could feel Jacob leaving my arms.
‘NO! PLEASE, DON’T TAKE HIM FROM ME!’
I screamed, I begged, I tried to get up. Another punch to my face threw me back into the wall. The room spun and I instantly felt sick. Blood filled my mouth. His shadow wasn’t there anymore. I could hear the staircase creaking under heavy feet.
‘BRING HIM BACK! PLEASE, DON’T TAKE HIM AWAY FROM ME!’
I lay down and sobbed, screaming into the sheets, turning them red with the blood that poured from my mouth.
TWENTY-FIVE
I sobbed until I fell asleep, or perhaps the punches knocked me unconscious. I blinked quickly to unstick my eyelids from the dried tears. The memory of Jacob leaving the basement hit me within seconds, and the sorrow weighed down on me so hard that I struggled to breathe.
My jaw felt broken; the skin was swollen and hot, and my mouth still tasted of blood. My lip had split with the second punch. I licked the scab and tasted the old blood on my tongue.
I looked into the other room: Mar
y and John were asleep, but the lights were still on. A bouquet of tulips was lying on the dining table, drying out, dying like everyone who inhabited the basement. Innocence didn’t belong there; it couldn’t survive. We would all die within those walls, except for him. I had so many nightmares about him locking the door to the basement and never coming back, leaving us to starve to death, locked in our own hell with no way to escape, our bodies left to rot. Maybe he wouldn’t be that cruel. Maybe he would decide to let us die as we slept from a gas leak or breathing in smoke from a fire. Either way, cruel or not, I felt it was inevitable: we would all die and he would survive unpunished and unscathed. He was the monster from under my bed, the villain in my dreams, and the man who took everything from me – and would be the one to take my life.
I took a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer and unwrapped the flowers. One by one, I chopped at the petals and the stems; chunks of petals fell to the floor and the blades scratched the table top. I chopped wildly as tears streamed down my face, until the bouquet was a pile of sheared leaves and petals.
Him. This is all because of him.
Hatred filled every part of me until I was shaking with rage. I longed to break down the walls, snatch up my children and run. Run until we were free of him. He was poisonous, toxic – everyone around him died.
I heard the clicking of the lock on the door and instantly became scared again. I grabbed the bin and put it by the table so I could brush the chopped flowers into it. When I turned around, he had entered the basement and was sitting on the sofa. He looked utterly defeated. I couldn’t stop thinking of Jacob: what had Maxim done? Where was our son?
‘Why?’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘Why us?
You, I thought. This is all because of you.
I stayed at the table, watching him, waiting for his anger to emerge, but instead, he cried. His shoulders shook as he sobbed into his hands. It was the first time that I had ever seen him cry.
He came towards me, tears shimmering on his cheeks, and dropped to his knees. He wrapped his arms around my waist, held me, and sobbed into my T-shirt.
Jacob is dead.
I hated myself for it, but I stroked his hair, tended to him as he cried, and found myself whispering, ‘I don’t know why.’
I stood there as Maxim held me, sobbing into me, with tears of my own rolling down my cheeks.
We will never escape you.
I listened to him sob, wishing I had the strength to break his neck, to free the children and myself of his hold on us. But instead, I stroked his hair and continued to whisper reassurances to him. Even when I had nothing left to give, he still had me in the palm of his hand.
TWENTY-SIX
John and Mary kept asking me where Jacob had gone. They had heard me screaming and saw their father carry Jacob in his arms as he went up the stairs and locked the door behind him. What could I say? That the only way either of them would leave the basement was when they were dying like Jacob?
They stopped asking me when they noticed me crying. They played quietly on the floor. I sat in the rocking chair and rocked back and forth, thinking of Jacob’s first words, first steps, his dark green eyes and his heart-melting smile. I would never let myself forget his face; I might have lost the memory of my mother and father, but I wouldn’t lose Jacob.
Maxim hadn’t been down to the basement for a few days. He must have known that he wasn’t wanted, that his face made me feel ill. I began to fear that he would never come back, that he had left us to die.
For the first time in ten years, I daydreamed about murdering Maxim. I considered how I would do it, what weapon I would use. I had always thought of escaping from him, but never killing him; I wasn’t sick like Maxim. Now I wanted him dead.
I told myself that Maxim couldn’t keep us inside the basement forever, however hard he tried – that one day we would be free. I had to believe it. But how would I protect the children?
The key turned in the lock, but the children stayed on the floor by my feet. For the first time, they were hearing the voice of another person: a woman was screaming, followed by scuffling and voices at the top of the stairs.
‘You’ll come around,’ Maxim said. ‘You’ll remember what we had, and you’ll learn to love me like you used to.’
‘Maxim—’ the woman’s voice said.
A body was hurled down the staircase and flew through the air before landing on the stairs with a hard thud. The woman tumbled down the last few steps and crashed onto the concrete floor.
I darted to the floor and held my children to me. We all stared at the mysterious woman lying on the floor as the key turned in the lock at the top of the stairs.
She had red hair like us. She was groaning, only just feeling the pain from her fall. As the woman looked around, dazed, her eyes met mine, and we stared at each other, remembering the features we had both lost from our memories. For the first time in ten years, I was looking into my mother’s eyes. Our faces crumpled, and tears filled our eyes and spilled down our cheeks.
‘Is… is it really you?’ Mum said.
I nodded furiously, trying not to sob. ‘Mummy, you found me. You finally found me!’
We rushed into each other’s arms and held each other so tight that I could barely breathe. Memories flooded back to me as I sank into the familiar shape of my mum’s body, just like I had ten years before – before I became a young woman, a mother. We sobbed in each other’s arms as the children watched, confused and terrified; they stared at the first person they had ever seen who wasn’t a sibling or a parent.
‘I have my girl back!’ my mum cried. ‘I finally have you back!’
III
TWENTY-SEVEN
Paige had thought she would never see her daughter again. She had accepted that her daughter was dead, after years of doubt and denial, only to discover that her brother – her own flesh and blood – had taken her and kept her in his basement for ten whole years. Whenever she had visited her brother in his home, she’d had no idea that her daughter was so close to her, so within her reach, hidden beneath the floorboards. He had watched Paige fall to pieces, he had comforted her – yet he had been the cause of the grief and the agony, the reason her whole world had been torn apart.
For ten minutes the mother and daughter held each other tight, unable to speak in proper sentences, their words lost to weeping. Paige felt her daughter’s long hair in her hands, she felt the beat of her heart against her own chest: Chloe was alive.
She pulled away and touched her daughter’s cheek, staring at every feature, every freckle on her pale skin. Her eyes, framed by long, auburn eyelashes, were still so blue, offset by the bruises and split, swollen lip. Chloe was no longer the little girl Paige had known: she was a twenty-four-year-old woman, a mother: and, from the pain in her eyes, a tortured one.
‘How?’ was all she could say, with the taste of tears on her lips.
‘I don’t know,’ Chloe replied, because it was so surreal to both of them.
‘All this time?’
Chloe nodded, tears trickling down her cheeks. And then her eyes came alive. ‘My babies. You must meet my babies.’
She turned and looked over to the children, who were hiding beneath the dining table and peering out at their mother and the stranger.
Paige took in the sight of them: both had red hair like their mother, but were cursed with Maxim’s green eyes.
‘John, Mary, come out and meet my mum. Your grandmother.’
Grandmother. I’m a grandmother.
‘ Nanny,’ Paige said. ‘Grandmother makes me sound so old.’
They laughed, with eyes still shining with tears.
‘Come on out,’ Chloe beckoned with a comforting smile.
The young girl came out first and ran to the safety of her mother.
‘This is Mary,’ Chloe said. The child stared up at Paige.
The boy followed and sat beside his mother on the concrete floor.
‘And this is John.’ Chloe br
ushed his fringe away from his startling green eyes.
John. Mary. Straight from the Bible. I wouldn’t expect any less from Maxim.
‘This is Nanny Paige; she is my mummy, just like I’m yours.’
They looked up at their mother, and then at Paige, trying to figure it out: other people had mothers, not just them.
‘Why haven’t we met her before?’ John asked her.
‘It’s a long story, but she’s here now.’
‘Is she Daddy’s mummy, too?’ Mary asked.
Chloe looked at Paige.
No, Paige thought. He’s my brother. Your mother’s uncle.
‘No, just mine.’
Paige couldn’t stop thinking about how they had been conceived. It took every ounce of strength to fight back the tears.
I am going to kill him.
‘Mummy and Nanny have a lot of talking to do,’ Chloe said. ‘So you both should sit and play.’
Paige stood up and was horrified to see the children cower below her. She apologised as she backed away and sat on the old, worn sofa. The children took their toys to the furthest corner of the basement, so they could watch her from a safe distance. Chloe sat next to her mother on the sofa, and they instantly held hands. Paige stared at the stump where the rest of her daughter’s arm should have been. Her hand shook as it reached out to touch it, her fingertips stroking the skin on the stump. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how Maxim had severed the bone, or had even been able to conjure up the idea, let alone put it into action.
Paige had never had to digest so much information at once: her daughter wasn’t dead, she had been taken by her uncle and kept in a windowless basement for ten long years. Maxim had been there to support her when Chloe went missing. He had told her everything was going to be okay, when he had known all along that Chloe was alive, right beneath the floorboards of his house. Paige had been staying in the house since hers had burned down, and she’d had no idea that her daughter was hidden directly beneath her feet.