The Punished

by Peter Meredith

  2

  Curt sat back staring at it with his mouth hung open.

  He had done it, but instead of elation, he felt a cold dread and now that the possibility of escape was just barely in his grasp, he scarcely had the temerity to seize it. This was one of those moments in life when decisions could have fatal consequences and Curt fully understood this. Going through that door could very well mean his death, still the lure of escape was stronger than his fear.

  With a light breath in, he opened the door slightly and peeked through the gap. There wasn't much to see, but a set of stairs leading up and a dim light coming from somewhere in the attic. In his mind, he pictured the window that he had been hoping for and his heart began to thump heavily inside him.

  Shutting the door only partially, he pocketed the homemade keys and zipped to the bathroom. Now his senses were on full alert, his ears straining to catch even the smallest noise, the soles of his feet sensitive to the least vibration. Furtively, he checked in every direction before he grabbed a large stack of sheets and slunk with more than his usual caution to the attic door. There he stepped in and watched as the door swung gently and silently shut behind him. It locked by itself. This gave Curt a heavy feeling in his stomach and he reached out and tried the door. It opened beneath his hand and he let out a sigh of relief.

  Turning back to the stairs, he paused to let his eyes adjust to the dim light, and for his heart to cease its tremendous pounding. Curt had broken into and explored many places in his short life, but had never felt so strangely out of place than he did at that moment.

  The dust and the cobwebs and the little bits of trash strewn about the steps, the musty smell, the dim light, all made him feel like he had just stepped into a stairwell leading to an attic. It was of course exactly what he had done, but after so many days spent in the perfectly ordered and near sterile cleanliness of the rest of the house, it felt out of place; wrong even.

  He was tempted to open the attic door behind him just to see if it would somehow magically lead to another home. But logic stayed his hand, he knew he hadn't left the house, he could still feel its angry presence in the air. It was less, however. Almost he could describe the feeling as faint and taking up his habit once again, he reached out a hand to the wall.

  The house's attention was focused elsewhere, if it was indeed focused at all and beneath the dim and distant vitriol of it, Curt sensed the creature deep in the basement. It seemed to slumber as an old man would after a feast. The fact steadied Curt and he began moving up the grimy steps quickly, feeling a mounting desperation to be finally rid of the place.

  Gaining the top stair, he saw that the attic was a large one, with a diagonally sloping unfinished ceiling. The rafters were exposed, criss-crossing the area high above his head and forming an 'A' with the sides of the roof. Whether the walls were also unfinished, he couldn't tell since the dark attic was filled with the belongings of a person who had clearly lived through the great depression.

  There were heaps of magazines from a remote time, decaying and broken furniture, bookshelves lined with books whose pages were yellow with age, and perhaps a hundred fading and dusty boxes heaped in great piles stacked higher than his head. There was more, a lot more, and Curt's head swiveled round and round at it all. Normally this was the kind place that he would have loved to hunker down and explore at his leisure, but his sense of urgency kept him from tarrying. However, he did pause at a great jumbled mound of children's toys, nothing seemed more out of place and there was something about them that made his stomach knot up.

  Gladly, he turned away from the pile and made his way through the maze of junk, moving toward the light. As he walked, his eyes darted about the mountains and stacks of unkempt items, but his mind was on escape. The first thing he would do is call the police. And then an ambulance and then the fire department, he'd even call Miss Gladys.

  A smile lit his face at that, picturing the great brown form of Miss Gladys in a towering rage, storming up to the house and hammering on the door with her large man-sized hands. He would pay good money to see that.

  3

  His smile faltered though, when he found the source of the light.

  It wasn't coming in from a window. In fact, there were no windows in the attic at all. The illumination came from a hanging bulb that sat suspended over a pair of simple steel framed beds. Two people, a young man of maybe twenty and a girl of perhaps sixteen lay in the beds. At the sight of them, he stepped back in shock, prepared to run, but he hesitated, unsure whether they were dead or simply asleep. For all the world, they looked like corpses to him.

  They were dead pale, white to the point of translucency and thin blue veins could be seen making a map at their temples. Though there skin seemed young, unblemished by the slightest wrinkle or crease, their hair, which was a light sandy brown was exceedingly thin. So thin that Curt could see their scalps clearly through it. Only very old people had hair like that, he mused.

  If they breathed at all, he couldn't tell, despite his watching for any movement of their thin chests. Cautiously, he took a few careful steps closer, and still couldn't decide if they breathed or even lived. Knowing that the dead soon began to stink, he gave them a tentative sniff, but the musty air of the attic only held the penned up aroma of an antiquated house.

  The smell was wonderful. He breathed in deeper. Filling his lungs with the stale air and enjoying it. It was an odd moment, he had been so keyed up with getting into the attic and finding a way to escape that he hadn't taken the time to truly notice the fragrance. At any other time, the attic would have smelled as just that, but deprivation had turned it into a circus of smells, bubbling with scraps of memories.

  Curt took the time to breathe in deeply once more, closing his eyes as he did, relishing the air as if he were at a feast instead of in a musty attic standing over two bodies. But the moment passed as his sense of urgency forced him to the task at hand and he walked around the two beds. Even up close, he couldn't tell if they alive or dead and in truth his curiosity over them waned with each passing second. His need to escape eclipsed his inquisitiveness and soon he left them and went about exploring the rest of the attic.

  Unfortunately, there wasn't much else to it.

  Just beyond the bodies, in a dark corner, he found where Miss Feanor slept. Here, there was another simple bed, a chest of drawers, a filing cabinet and a computer. But no windows.

  Feeling a touch of desperation, Curt began peeking behind the towering stacks of junk. Going from wall to wall, he moved with more haste than silence and within minutes had attracted unwanted attention. Not from the house, but from Miss Feanor. Curt finished checking the last of the walls and decided to see if Miss Feanor had a weapon stashed in her belongings. There were no thoughts of swords left in him, he was all logic now and hoped to find a gun. But as he went, he paused to stare again at the two people.

  They appeared harmless. However nothing about the place was, as it seemed and Curt started to wonder what part they played in the weird nature of the house.

  "Get away from them!" The voice hissed out of the darkness just behind him. With a little cry, Curt dropped the sheets he had been carrying about with him and spun to face the angry sound. At first, all he saw was a looming shadow and involuntarily he stepped back.

  "I said, get away." It was Miss Feanor. She moved forward into the light of the single bulb and in her hands, she brandished a baseball bat.

  The bat had been sitting in with the pile of children's toys, he remembered the handle sticking out and now he wished he'd had the foresight to have grabbed it. Miss Feanor waved it over her head threateningly and he stepped away from the bodies, never taking his eyes from the bat.

  It was old. It was chipped and nicked, and in places gouged where some boy from long ago had used it to hit rocks instead of baseballs. The Louisville Slugger logo that had been branded onto it was faded practically to nothing. The knob at the end was notched, and despite all of this, Miss Feanor could cave i
n his head with a single swing. It occupied most of Curt's mind, but there was still a part of him that could think past the fear of that skull-crushing bat.

  "Who are these people?" he asked her with eyes as big as saucers.

  "None of your damn business." Her voice stayed low and menacing. "Now, give me the key and get the hell out of here. If I ever catch you up here again..." Her eyes, black and malignant in the light finished her sentence for her.

  "I...I...I don't have a key...I picked the lock with this." He pulled from his pocket a single paperclip.

  Her hateful eyes focused on the tiny piece of metal, "You picked...? You can't do that. Where did you get that?"

  "Matt gave it to me," he lied smoothly, the words tumbling out of his mouth, naturally like a leaf in blowing wind. The lie strangely enough, calmed his nerves somewhat and he was able to continue, "He beat me up when I told him I wouldn't do it. See look." He showed her his battered face.

  Confusion entered her mind; Curt could see it cooling the anger in her eyes. "You are lying, the monster did that to you, and... and Matt wouldn't..." She stopped, knowing in truth it was something Matt might do. "Empty your pockets," she ordered suddenly.

  His lie was going to become quickly obvious.

  Worry over what would happen next, made his breath hitch and his heartbeat hugely, thundering in his slim chest, while his stomach formed itself into knots, but all that was on the inside. On the outside, he demonstrated the very interpretation of serenity.

  "Matt gave me these ones too," he said, handing over the remaining paper clips, as if he were eager to get rid of them.

  He wasn't of course, but the piece of bent metal from the lid to the comet container was far more important. This he palmed as he handed over the paperclips. It was another slick move; showing her, what she expected to see all the while hiding the truth. The paperclips had been good for the small pins in the lock of the attic door, but now that he had found the attic devoid of windows, he'd have to summon the courage to tackle one of the doors leading to the outside. And he knew it would take something more substantial to deal with the large pins and tumblers in the workings of the antique locks in those doors.

  And then again, there was the fact that if she would find out where the little piece of metal had come from, his newly discovered source of picks would surely disappear. He'd be trapped, completely without hope.

  Miss Feanor took the small pieces of metal and her fury mounted, "Where did...?" She stopped and stared at the bent clips, "Matt didn't give these to you...you're a thief. That big social worker told me all about what you are. What you are capable of. Now, I said turn out your pockets."

  Curt did so, but he had to do it slowly lest he make it obvious that he held a slim piece of metal in the palm of his right hand. To distract her, he asked a few questions, though he wasn't expecting any real answers from her.

  "Who are these two people?" he tried for the second time as he pulled out his pockets.

  "Nobody," she retorted in flat anger.

  "Are they kids like me...are they foster kids that got too old? Is this what happens to us?" Curt hadn't thought about this until the words had actually darted from between his lips. The idea was terrifying.

  "I told you they are nobody." Even though she was clearly in a great fury, she kept her voice amazingly controlled and quiet. "You forget about them, damn it. Now turn around, let me see those back pockets."

  Putting his back to her was the last thing he wanted to do. The very idea sent a cold shiver down his spine, but there was nothing that he could do. Turning slowly, he faced the two people in the beds, he thought that they were definitely foster kids that had turned eighteen and instead of being released, where they would surely tell somebody, they had been stuck up here.

  But for what purpose, he wondered.

  Miss Feanor dug roughly at his back pockets for a few moments, pushing him closer to the bed occupied by the older male. Curt looked at him, wondering if this was the boy that he had replaced and if this would be his fate as well. But it struck him suddenly that this couldn't have been the boy. Amber had described him as blonde, also the person in the bed was too old, he was obviously older than eighteen.

  "Who is this?" he asked aloud, but more to himself than to Miss Feanor.

  She yanked him about, and held the bat to his face, "You leave them alone and stay out of here, or I will have you punished for a week straight! Do you hear me?"

  Without waiting for a reply, she started pushing him roughly to the stairs and as he got to the bottom, his jumbled thoughts came together and he turned back to her. She stood two steps up and from there she looked huge. Curt was frightened of her and of the punishments she had threatened, but his need to know why he was there at all overrode his fear and he asked a last question.

  "Are those two, the reason we are trapped here?"

  Her eyes told him that they were. She tried to hide it, but he had read it clearly, before she could cast her face into hard-set marble.

  "You won't leave it alone, will you?" Her countenance grew splotchy and red, "You need a punishment, not to mention a fucking spanking!"

  He had gone too far and fear blasted through him, "I'm sorry, Miss Feanor. I'm just trying to understand." His pleading tone was wasted on her and she only eyed him with a look that Curt had trouble reading. She jerked her head toward the door leading to the second floor hallway, the one that he had picked triumphantly not even ten minutes earlier. Now he'd go through it with a punishment looming over his head and perhaps worse, Miss Feanor as his enemy. She would be impossible to stop.

  As he opened the door, he turned back to give her one last apology and caught just the blur of motion as the bat came slicing through the air at his head.

  Chapter 22

  Legacy Of The Bat

  1

  At first, he was kicked, not cruelly so, it was more of a quick nudge.

  Then he was shaken, but it was for seconds only. It brought him around...barely. His first vision, when his eyes cracked briefly was a blurry view of the hardwood floors. For some reason he lay upon them, yet Curt lacked any sort of curiosity as to why. He closed his eyes for a span of time that couldn't be accounted, at least not by him. When he opened them, he saw again the floors just as before and felt vibrations running through the wood. A part of him thought that he should care about these vibrations... he used to care, he understood that much, but just then, the vibrations were without context or meaning and he only closed his eyes once more.

  Amber shook him awake some time later. Maybe it was a second later, or two or perhaps an hour, he couldn't tell, however he did notice that she had changed into her pajamas.

  "Curt get up! You have to get up...Curt please," she whispered to him, shaking his shoulders. His eyes had a great deal of trouble focusing and the shaking only made the world around him spin.

  "Huh?" he half groaned the word.

  "Curt look at me. You have to get in bed it's..." She stopped all of a sudden and turned her head, listening. The bat had rattled him so much that though he heard her words, he couldn't understand their meaning, still the hysteria in her voice helped to concentrate his mind.

  "It's almost time! Get up, please," she pleaded.

  And then she was gone. One second her teary-eyed face was above him, the next all he saw was pink blur, fading into a great distance. He blinked his eyes hard trying to focus them, but everything more than a few feet away came to him as only vague colors.

  There seemed to be a remote voice within him that was telling him to get up and so he rolled to his side and saw again the hardwood floors, they were close to his face and now he understood that he was laying full upon them. Still, he didn't care. His mind had not progressed to that point yet, it was only now processing the simplest facts.

  However when the lights went out suddenly and he sensed new vibrations running along the floor and up into his cheek, he started to care. The voice within him became more urgent, but the loss of light
had effectively blinded him and he only felt about on the floor as if looking for something.

  "Good luck tonight with the monster."

  Miss Feanor's dry quiet voice came out of the dark and he rolled back over with a low groan. She leered above him. With his vision impaired, she appeared nothing but a head floating in the darkness.

  "Perhaps now you will learn your place here and obey the rules," she whispered and then, just like with Amber she seemed to disappear. Through the floor he heard her moving and then came the tiny sound of the attic door closing.

  With that soft noise, the voice within him began an urgent cry, 'Get up!'

  Curt pushed himself over, and slowly, very slowly got to his hands and knees, but he couldn't find it within him to go any further. Even when he felt the first vibrations of something moving deep in the house, he couldn't push himself up. Instead, he swayed as if in a heavy wind, back and forth on all fours.

  "Come on," a voice whispered in the dark.

  Someone appeared next to him, and now hands roughly yanked him to his feet. Unable to hold himself up, Curt pitched forward onto the person and didn't recognize that it was Paul. In the older boy's anxiety and fear, his twitch had distorted his face into a horrifying mask, and Curt shrank back away from it in dismay.

  "Come on!" a second time Paul pleaded with terrific urgency and now Curt understood who it was that was helping him and as he did, he became conscious of a tremendous fear running throughout the house. There was a real terror rippling through the air. Curt had felt this once before, when he had been out of bed after dark, it meant the creature was coming and with it came dread.