by Zan, Koethi
CHAPTER 34
When at last I pulled myself out of my dark thoughts, I realized Adele was poking around in Jack’s desk.
“I still think,” she was saying, her eyes focused on the contents of the top drawer as she rifled through it, “we can find something here to … help us. Maybe a key, or something.”
She was beginning to look scared, and she was having trouble holding on to her otherwise extraordinary self-possession. Her movements were more frantic now, as she pushed aside pens and Post-it Notes to reach into the very back of the drawer.
“What are you really looking for, Adele?” Tracy’s voice rose. Was she starting to feel panicked too? “Research papers? Do you think there’s something in there that will make your career? You know, Adele, in case you hadn’t noticed, you can’t exactly have a career when you’re dead in some house up in the mountains. Wait a minute—maybe I’m wrong. I suppose you could type up something now and have it published posthumously.” She thought a second. “In fact, that’s probably your fastest road to fame and fortune. A book written while held captive in a psycho’s house.”
She turned to me. “Sarah, why don’t you get going on one, too? All about how you saved us once by accident but by hook or crook managed to get us right back where we started.”
Adele stopped rummaging through the drawer and looked up.
“Wait a minute, Tracy. The way I understand it is, if it weren’t for Sarah, you’d still be Jack’s prisoner. And he’d be sitting at this desk right now instead of me.” With those words, she got up and quickly stepped away from it.
I looked at her and thought I could sense a glimmer of feeling behind her eyes. Was she trying to help me here?
“Actually, Adele,” Tracy replied, “in case you hadn’t noticed, I am still here, and that’s thanks to her, too. Back here anyway. So maybe the intervening ten years don’t add up to all that much. It looks like I have a very good chance of dying in this house after all.”
I could feel the color draining from my face. I thought Tracy had been on the verge of forgiving me. That this search together was healing our old wounds. I had obviously been wrong. And now the stress of our situation seemed to be forcing her true feelings back to the surface.
I knew Tracy thought I hadn’t sent help for them when I escaped. She had told the press at the time that if it hadn’t been for the police grilling, she was sure I would have left them there forever. Because I’d been upstairs for a while, as far as she knew, I’d been gone from the cellar for six days before they were saved. Six days during which Jack could have easily killed them to cover his tracks.
She was wrong. I had sent for help.
It would have been simple enough to explain what happened. But I had always been unable to talk about how I’d gotten out and had never even attempted to defend myself against her accusations. I had never discussed it before with anyone, not my mother, not Jim, not Dr. Simmons. They didn’t know what happened, and anytime they had tried to get me to discuss it, I slipped into an almost catatonic state.
I could feel the panic descending upon me, but I knew it would only hurt me in Tracy’s estimation if I let it show. Still the poor PTSD victim. Tracy had handled the past bravely, she had processed it and even used it for a purpose, shutting out the pain of the experience for herself and using it instead to promote an agenda—exactly as the modern world demanded. She had no time or pity for those who could not find a purpose in it all, as she had done.
If I wanted to explain, it was now or never. Maybe I wouldn’t even have time. Maybe Noah and Jack’s men were outside right now. But if there was one thing I wanted Tracy to understand, it was this.
I walked over to Jack’s desk. I’d seen him sitting behind it so many times before, when I was there on the rack, exhausted from pain, and he would scribble away in his notebooks. In its perverse way, that desk was a symbol of peace for me. I knew when he started writing, I would at last have a few moments of respite, and there would be no more torture that day.
I pulled out the oversize oak swivel chair and sat down. I felt like a child sitting in the grown-up seat. It engulfed me, but in a strange way, I thought being there might give me the power to speak.
I looked over at Tracy, who would still not look at me; at Adele, who was watching me carefully, giving no hint of what lay behind her gaze; at Christine, who had stopped sobbing and was nestled in the window seat, her eyes staring vacantly ahead of her. She’d found a tissue somewhere and was wiping her eyes.
Finally, I picked up a pen on the desk, a Waterman, and started to push and pull the cap on and off in a steady rhythm. I waited, hoping that eventually Tracy would crack. She would look at me. She had to.
And then she did. She turned slowly to face me, peering out at me from under her dyed-black bangs. Only then did I start, in a halting voice, to explain what had happened that day. My throat was dry, but I pushed myself on.
Those last months in the cellar, I had worked hard to get Jack to believe I was coming around to his way of thinking. I was manipulating him, just as I knew he was manipulating me. I knew one day he would test me, though I didn’t know how. He had been treating me differently now for weeks, no regular torture, just the large looming threat of it always in the air. He pretended to cherish me. Almost … almost to love me.
I knew if he believed I was under his spell, he might give me a longer leash. Might ask me to do chores for him outside, might even take me out of the house.
Finally, that day, he opened the door. The same door that kept us imprisoned in the house now.
He opened it. I was standing there before an open door. Granted, I was naked and sore and hadn’t eaten in days, so I was weak, but there, there, there, in front of me … was an open door.
I looked ahead. Jack was right behind me, his breath on my neck. I saw the barn, the yard in front, his car. I walked slowly, steadily out the door, hoping I could get more than an arm’s length away from him where he couldn’t easily yank me back. I was in a daze.
He had told me I could see her, and he kept his promise. There on the ground, just at the edge of the barn door, wrapped haphazardly in a dirty blue tarp, was a long lifeless form. At the bottom I could just see a bloated chunk of flesh, blue and black. A human foot.
I had been begging, begging for months to see her body. I needed to say good-bye, and I thought that was the one thing he would do for me. And there she was. When I saw her there, when I saw that flesh peeking out from under the tarp, the body he had dug up for me to see, I suddenly didn’t want to see her anymore. I realized, at once, what the reality of her dead body would mean to me. The finality. I had seen enough.
At the same time, I couldn’t think clearly about whether I needed to put in more time convincing him of my loyalty. If I hadn’t been so hungry, if I hadn’t been in pain, if I hadn’t feared the body I saw in front of the barn, maybe my own body would not have reacted as automatically to the sudden taste of freedom and the exhilarating feeling of fresh air on my skin. Something lit on fire at that moment, the innermost part of me that only wanted escape. My legs found their strength, and my heart found some current to lift it up. With a sudden start, I broke into a run. He must have thought I would be too terrified to do anything so bold so quickly, because there was a split-second pause before he followed me.
I knew if he caught me, all my hard work for the previous four months would be lost. He would never trust me again. I would never have another chance. This was it.
I ran as hard as I could, gasping for air almost immediately. My muscles had been deprived of even normal physical exertion for three years, so I was weak. My legs could barely carry me, much less pull me free of him. But my fear drove me on, and I bolted away from him. He was prepared for such an attempt, though. He jerked into swift action, running behind me. Fast.
At that point, the world switched into slow motion. I moved as though through molasses, my breath loud in my own ear. I could hear his steps behind me, crunching eac
h twig, his feet pounding hollows into the earth. He was strong, I could feel it.
My lungs wanted me to give up. I couldn’t breathe anymore. My arms and hands were numb. I couldn’t feel my legs either, but I knew they must still be moving because he didn’t have me yet. I turned the bend in his driveway, going down the hill. I couldn’t see the end, but I could sense it far ahead of me. In a way I felt trapped, thought the gig would soon be up, but I knew I had the will to live on my side. He had only evil.
I made it another hundred yards, which, when I really reflect on it, was a kind of miracle. I had practically taken flight. But I didn’t have the strength to keep up the pace, and he was driven by rage at that point, his body fortified by it.
Only a few seconds later I felt his strong grip on my right arm. I will never forget that moment. I knew what pains and torments I had survived for the past three years. And I knew my punishment now would be far worse.
I could hear it in the sound that came out of me, like something more from an animal than from a human girl. It was over, and I would suffer from then until eternity. At that moment I didn’t have the wherewithal to reflect on the opportunity I had blown. I didn’t have time to be filled with the regret of a lifetime, but later, in the many hours just after, I would feel a soul-searing pain, knowing I had been so close and had thrown it all away on an impulsive act from which there was no turning back.
He grabbed me and threw me over his shoulder. I immediately went limp, defeated. In my mind, my life was over. Just over. All I wanted was to have the mental strength to check out of the world entirely. I wanted to disconnect from the pain he was about to inflict.
Slowly over the years I had developed that capacity. I had learned to take my mind far away, to stop anticipating either pain or release from pain and to feel everything and nothing as one long continuum. No moment any different from any other, the feelings all evened out over time. Disconnect, I told myself.
He hauled me into the barn, and for a moment, the sheer disorientation of the new space made me panic. Then I willed myself to shut down. No feeling. No engagement. I entered that interior space in which my mind was set loose to wander. My body was an inanimate object, distantly floating in its own space.
I tried not to care. I tried to resign myself to death, or worse, a living torture beyond what I had experienced those years in the cellar. Enraged, he grabbed me by one arm and by my hair and flipped me over into a long wooden box deep in the interior of the barn. A box smaller than the one in the cellar, this one horizontal, coffinlike. He flung my weak body into it, then stepped away.
Instinctively, I grabbed onto the edges and tried to pull myself out of it. As I sat up, I was met by a hard fist, pummeling me back down into the box. I covered my face to protect it from the blows. Seconds later a long, putrid object was thrust upon me. Jennifer’s lifeless body, heavy and cold, descended on me like a blanket. Then he slammed the top of the wooden box shut, and I could hear him nailing it closed, screaming something I couldn’t understand.
For a moment, I felt relief. I was separated from him by a few feet at least, with the nailed door between us. His hands couldn’t reach me. It took me a few minutes to register that there I was, sealed shut into a coffin with Jennifer’s body, preceding me in death but clearly not by that much. With a final nail, and a shuffle outside, everything was suddenly still and quiet. Jack must have gone back into the house.
Eventually I could tell night was falling. I pushed my body into a corner of the box, making myself as small as possible, shrinking away from her body. I began to see and hear things. I thought I saw her move. I thought I saw her fingers reach up to caress me. I thought I heard her voice, asking me not to leave her. I heard it all too clearly. I don’t know when I started crying, but soon enough my own hands were on my face, wiping away my tears and snot and spit. I wondered, despairingly, what would kill me first, dehydration or lack of air. But in that reflection, I noticed there was no lack of air. I could breathe just fine. There must be some small opening somewhere in that box.
I pulled back from my corner, careful not to tangle the strands of dry dead hair from Jennifer’s corpse in with my own. I noticed that the box had been built directly into the side of the barn. And then I looked more closely and saw that something had been happening in that building. That maybe for years before me, somehow anticipating my presence, I felt, hundreds of tiny creatures had been unwittingly working to save my life.
The edge of the wall, the edge that met the outermost corner of the barn, was damp and chewed. Termites, carpenter ants, powderpost beetles—something had weakened the board. I pried at it. It was loose. I could almost break it away, but this time, I thought, this time I would not be so impetuous. I would not live in regret but would wait until morning, to see if he left, since it would have been his normal day for teaching. I was lying there in the darkness, smelling the decay of the body, the dampness of the earth, and all but praying to those bugs, those miraculous bugs, thanking them for living, for desiring the taste of wood. I could have kissed them in my delirium. But I waited.
The next day I heard the door of the house open, and eventually steps coming into the barn. He was checking on me. At first I held as still as possible, hoping he would think I had already died of sheer fright. He banged hard on the top of the box to stir me. I decided I didn’t want him to investigate further, so I moved slightly to show I was there. He gave the box another thump with his knuckles and walked away. I heard his car start and pull off down the driveway. His schedule never varied—I knew he wouldn’t be back for four days, but also that I couldn’t live that long without water. My throat was parched already. The delicate moistness of the earth under me was tantalizing.
For hours I dug my fingers into the crevices of the wood and tried with all my remaining strength to pry it off. After what must have been a few hours, I managed to break off the end of one board, and I could see an open field behind the barn and, farther on, the woods behind it. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, that vista, and it was calling me to freedom.
I hit the board harder and harder with my fists, with my head, and in my frustration opened a cut just above my eye. In desperation, I tasted the blood, hoping it would quench my thirst.
The board was wedged in tightly, and I thought all my efforts might be of no use. I thought maybe I should give up, curl up on the ground with Jennifer, and meet her in whatever cellar afterlife we could conjure. But then I thought how, if I did that, my parents would never know what happened, I could never explain what Jennifer went through, and I could never bring justice to Jack Derber. That last point drove me on.
Eventually, I forced enough of the board free almost to squeeze my shoulders through the open space, but not quite enough. I knew I needed to turn around somehow in the box, so my feet could reach the top of the board, and I could use the strength of my legs to push it out. The box was just wide enough for the two of us, so I practically had to embrace Jennifer’s corpse, which I had pushed to the far side of the box.
The stench was overwhelming, but I could have stomached that. I hated more the stiffness of her body and the coldness of her skin. I was crying, but no tears would fall. There was no water left in any pore of my body.
Finally facing the other way, I pulled my legs up underneath me, mustered all the force that remained in my pathetic form, and shoved my feet down again and again, pounding at the board, my knees shaking the corpse to the side, as we moved together in some kind of strange death dance.
It lasted for what seemed like forever, and then the board came loose entirely. Just like that. My breath came faster. I clenched my fists and closed my eyes, bracing myself to wriggle through the opening. It was a wide board, but I only just fit underneath it. I thanked Jack out loud for keeping me emaciated, and I slid under and out into the open air.
I turned around and carefully replaced the board in its old spot as closely as possible. I wanted to give myself as much running time as I co
uld. For all I knew, he had these woods under video surveillance, and this whole setup could be just the latest game for him to amuse himself with. I knew I wasn’t free yet.
I ran toward the woods. Going down the driveway would have been more direct, but I couldn’t risk running into Jack’s car if he decided to make an unexpected return.
I paused for a moment in front of the house. I thought about saving the others then, but it was too risky. The house was a trap, and I was sure he had coded locks on the doors that I would not be able to open. I would send someone as soon as I could make it back to civilization. I hoped those four days would be enough time before he made it back and discovered I was missing.
So I ran. Stumbled is more like it. I was naked, and the bottoms of my feet had lost whatever protective coating of skin they’d ever had. I felt every rock and stick. Soon my feet were bleeding. I was running hard down the hill, not caring. I felt … I felt uplifted.
Near the bottom of the hill, there was a stream, and I drank from it like I’d never drunk from anything in my life. It was then that I knew I’d survive. Then that I felt the first joy I had felt in three years. After that it seemed I had the strength of a thousand women, and I ran down the hill like a colt in an open pasture. I was still afraid, but I could see a large field at the bottom of the hill, and beyond that a dilapidated old farmhouse. Surely there would be someone there to help me.
When I reached it, I discovered it was empty and locked, but in the barn beside it I found a battered coat and some heavy work boots. Both were absurdly big for me, but I put them on and started out down the road, disoriented by the open space, yet determined to put distance between Jack’s house and me.
A car stopped at last, a young couple with two small children in the back. I asked for directions to the police station. They looked slightly terrified of me, a dirty stick woman in a clownish getup slurring her words, but they seemed genuinely concerned. The woman hesitated, glancing at her husband questioningly, and finally told me to get in the car so they could take me for help. I started crying and said I couldn’t, that I was too afraid. I couldn’t get in a car with strangers. They asked what happened to me, and all I could say, over and over again through my sobs, was that I’d been in the cellar for a long, long time.