Strings

by Dickson, Allison M.

  The woman kept her head bowed, eyes averted. Shamed, or so Nina hoped. “You are not ruined,” she murmured. “It isn’t as bad as you think.”

  She grunted and swallowed back her tears. “That’s not saying much, you know. Maybe I won’t have to piss through a tube for the rest of my life, but as far as being readily identifiable as a woman down there, I highly doubt it. Am I right? I mean unless hamburger is now a gender.”

  Maybe it’s all for the best, her mother’s voice intoned. The way you’ve been treating it over the last few years, it probably doesn’t look much different. Cubed steak versus hamburger. “Shut up, bitch,” she muttered.

  The woman looked at her. “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. What’s your name?”

  She hesitated. “Kali.”

  “Okay, Kali, maybe you can patch things up down there, but what next? Why are you helping him? You saw what he did to me. He’s done it to dozens of other girls. I saw them. One girl I know committed suicide, and I’m sure she’s not the only one. So why are you here doing this? Is he holding you prisoner, too?”

  She paused what she was doing, but still made no eye contact. No answer.

  Nina sighed. “Well can you at least open the goddamn curtains? I need sunlight. Something. This place is like a cave.”

  Kali whirled around in an eddy of red cloth, her eyes burning within her face. “No! Stop asking me things. Stop talking to me. I never should have left you awake.” Pulling out the needle again, she pushed it into the port of Nina’s IV tube and pressed the plunger. Her veins flooded with whatever tranquilizer lurked inside. Soon she’d be out again, and this woman and Junior and whoever else he had stashed in his hell house would be able to do whatever they wanted with her.

  “Listen, I just want to go home. Don’t you get that? I just want to go home.”

  “You are home.” The woman’s grin was cold, and it never touched her eyes. Just like the Madam, just like Janie Quick.

  As Kali left, Nina wanted to call after her, to beg her not to leave her alone in here, to have an ounce of fucking humanity for crying out loud, but the drug was already taking effect. Her eyelids felt weighted, and the world’s light narrowed to a pinpoint. Before she ventured off to oblivion, her mind called up the image of something she thought she’d seen when Kali was doing the injection.

  Her wrist had a scar around it, like a bracelet. Nina’s mind drifted to human puppets and then into the welcoming darkness.

  ***

  She awoke, stiff-necked and groggy. However long she’d been out this time, she couldn’t say for sure, but there was another plate of food sitting beside the bed. The maddening buzz of the bug light hanging from the bedpost was the only sound. No heavy breathing or creaking ropes from overhead. At least for now, the web remained devoid of its human spider. Nina wondered why he hadn’t been back. Of course, she couldn’t say for sure one way or another. He probably had most of his fun when she was unconscious.

  After gobbling down the bologna sandwich and chugging down the milk, she threw the blankets back. She was in a new gown, this one pale blue with purple flowers. The thought of being manipulated and put through clothing changes while unconscious was almost more unsettling than everything else that had happened to her since she stepped through the doors of this place. Either way, it was time to get the hell out of here.

  She didn’t have much of a plan, other than to move as fast as she could. It wouldn’t be far. She was pretty sure she was still on the first floor, in the same room where it had all begun, and she had a good idea in which direction the front door lay. Just run down the hall and dart to the left through the dining room and into the foyer and out the door. Once she was out, she thought she’d have enough adrenaline to make her fly.

  Her mother was quick to answer. Run. That’s hilarious. Yes, by all means, run. You can’t even move your legs without thinking you’re gonna to die. Besides, who’s to say all your plumbing won’t fall out as soon as you stand up?

  She winced. That was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  You wanna find out?

  Nina closed her eyes, squeezing her temples with the heels of her hands, as if that would quiet the voices in her head. She would not let them talk her out of this. Lying here in this bed and waiting for whatever horrors Junior had in store for her was not an option.

  But she had to admit if he caught her, he would probably kill her.

  Torture is more like it. If he wanted to kill you, honey, he would have by now.

  God, just shut up!

  All right, so what would happen when (not if) she got away? Who exactly did she have to call? The cops? Not a chance. There were so many cops on the Cassini payroll the Madam would probably be on her way to collect her within the hour. She thought maybe she could flag someone down on the road, someone who was driving out of the state who could get her far enough away from this place that she would be out of the Cassini family’s reach.

  That’s another great idea, sweetheart. Escape one sadistic rapist and fall prey to another!

  Or maybe she would get lost in the woods and die out there instead. Her bitch mother had no snappy retort for that one. Probably because it was the one option all parties could agree on. Survival wasn’t her priority at this point. She just didn’t want to die in this stinking place, in this stinking bed, her mind turning slowly to scrambled egg with the help of heavy narcotics. Let some hunter stumble across her bones one day. The image of lying down beneath a tree and opening her veins with a sharp rock was so strong, she almost smelled the dry leaves beneath her soaking up the blood.

  When that’s the best solution you can come up with, honey, you know you’re better off dead.

  She searched for something she could use as a weapon of sorts, just in case he or Kali did come after her. Nina didn’t like the idea of killing the nurse. In fact, she had a feeling the woman was as much a prisoner as Nina herself, but Nina wasn’t cut out to be someone else’s hero. She probably wouldn’t even be able to save herself. Besides, the woman probably had a raging case of Stockholm Syndrome. She was now as much the enemy as the freak.

  There didn’t appear to be a sharp object anywhere in the room. She studied the tray. Paper plate, paper milk carton. No fork, and certainly no knife. Then she remembered a story Joey once told her about a stretch he did in prison, and how his cellmate had broken off a piece of a lunch tray to use as a shank.

  She moved all the stuff off the tray and picked it up. It was the wooden kind with folding legs. If it had been a solid piece, she would have been out of luck, but this . . . this would work. She was weaker than she’d ever been in her life, but the tray was old like everything else in this house, and after some wiggling, one of the legs snapped off right where it met the table. Looking at it, she wondered if she could hurt anyone with it. The broken end was jagged enough to maybe scrape someone up a little. The tapered end might fit nicely in an eye socket, provided she would be able to aim straight at an assailant, but overall it was a shitty weapon. It was the best she could do.

  She placed it between her teeth as she moved, biting down when the pain struck, letting the cheap wood absorb her pain. Finally, she was sitting up on the edge of the bed, at least as well as she could. She had to lean to the side to keep from putting weight on her wounds, and she realized why a lot of pregnant women sat on those inflatable donut seats after they gave birth. Then something brushed her legs and she nearly screamed, until she looked down and saw a run of plastic tubing. She was still wearing the damn catheter!

  She bent down and sure enough found the bag hanging from a hook attached to the bed frame. It was half full of urine. Why wasn’t she wearing a diaper? She wondered when she last took a shit, but she had enough experience with narcotics to know they caused major constipation. So did trauma. She grabbed the bag and, after a moment of indecision, draped it over her arm like a strange purse. After taking some deep breaths and wiping beads of sweat off her brow, Nina grabbed onto the bedpost and pulled he
rself up to her feet.

  A wave of daggers traveled up her body, and she almost fell back to the bed, but she held tight, gagging, trying not to faint.

  Oh put your big girl panties on! You’d think you never felt pain before!

  The common refrain her mother would use when she ripped the knots out of crying little Nina’s hair after a bath. More words she hated that she now embraced. In the great unlikelihood she ever saw her mother again, she supposed she would have to thank the miserable old bitch.

  She edged her right foot forward on the worn wood floor. Then the next. By the time she’d made it halfway to the bedroom door in her odd waddle-shuffle, she was trembling, the film of sweat on her body making her feel feverish. She had bitten down hard enough on the wooden tray leg to leave deep imprints with her canines.

  Just a little farther and she would be able to reach the knob, and maybe lean against the door for a minute to rest. And listen for your sadistic captor, don’t forget about that. She knew she wasn’t really thinking straight enough to do this right. Gonna get yourself caught lickety-split. And what do you think he’ll do to you then, girly?

  She remembered something Kali said about him not wanting to “repeat the procedure.” But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t if he was angry enough with her. He might just kill her in a rage, even if he didn’t mean to. In her line of work, she’d seen a lot of men like that. They were the ones who paid a little extra to slap her around a bit. Maybe even choke her. The Willow girls weren’t required to perform such acts if they didn’t want to, but Nina always did, and so did most of the others. Every little bit toward their balances was worth some humiliation, a sore throat, a black eye, a risk of a violent sex fantasy taken one step too far.

  So he would probably take her to the brink of what she could tolerate if he was angry enough. Maybe even beyond that brink to the point of catatonic madness. And maybe that was okay with her. No, she didn’t want to die here—she had a feeling her spirit would be stuck in this dreadful place if she did—but it had to be better than living here until she actually wanted to stay and possibly do Junior’s bidding with some other girl, like Kali.

  When she reached the door, she leaned against it, trying desperately to slow her breathing and keep it quiet. Her gown was sticking to her back and chest like a second skin. Pressing her ear against the door, she listened for any kind of movement on the other side. It was difficult to hear anything other than her grating breath and trebling heart. The wood was thick, solid. Not the cheap hollow cores she’d grown up with. She couldn’t stand there forever. At some point, one of them would come to check on her. She reached down and turned the knob. It was unlocked. Jesus, they really were giving her a long leash, weren’t they?

  Leash? More like a trap.

  Nina was done listening to the unflappable Janie Quick for now. Fuck off, Mother.

  She inched the door open and peered out to see a hallway lit by rays of murky sunlight. Suddenly everything felt a little more possible and a little less excruciating. But she had to move fast, no matter how much it hurt or how scared she was.

  Just go!

  Ignoring her pain as best she could, she limped down the hall in a waddling tiptoeing jog, the bag of her piss sloshing with every step. She remembered some of the things she’d seen the night she first arrived. The scratched out pictures, the skeletons of dead animals nailed to the walls. In better light, she briefly noted how filthy and deteriorated everything looked. Dirt ground into the cracked plaster, insect and rat droppings, graffiti, cobwebs. She was halfway to the dining room. Once there she would be as good as gone, but she had to pick it up.

  Easier said than done. Her lungs were burning and she felt a strange bulging between her legs, like something the size of a basketball trying to fall out of her. Swelling. Had to be. Or maybe it was the catheter tube working its way loose. I can’t deal with this right now. Have to stay on target. Almost there, almost there . . .

  Then the scream came—the inevitable, indignant, inhuman screech of her captor, followed by the familiar sound of wheels rolling along the floor behind her. Nina chanced a look over her shoulder and saw the butler corpse with its black diamond eyes bearing down quickly.

  She lurched farther ahead, turning her awkward waddle into an awkward sprint. Her nightgown snagged on something jutting from the wall a few feet from the dining room’s elaborately carved doorway, maybe a nail, maybe a claw or a tooth belonging to the passive monster that was this horrible house. She yanked, but the cheap cotton remained stubborn. Of course it did.

  “Come on, come on!” she screamed through gritted teeth, tugging every which way. The cart was gaining, and she could hear Junior laughing up above, like he was enjoying this. Motherfucker.

  Finally, she heard a low rip as the cloth pulled free, and she rounded the corner into the dining room, not more than a second or two before she heard the sound of the butler’s cart colliding with the wall and apparently getting stuck there given the puppeteer’s frustrated blat. Nina stumbled through the cluttered dining room, knocking over chairs, tripping over debris, sobbing harder as she closed the distance to the other doorway, where the sunlit foyer and her eventual freedom lay. So close so close!

  Three more steps and she reached out her hands.

  Please God please God please!

  As her fingertips brushed the tarnished brass knob, she felt the rope slip around her neck, and as she was lifted from the floor, she kept pumping her legs, running in mid-air as the freak’s furious and triumphant howls filled her world.

  Chapter 8

  Ramón’s Bond

  He waited outside the little brick house in his newly purchased 1987 Buick Riviera. It was his first real buy with the cash, and it only cost him a couple grand plus a little extra to convince the seller to wait a few weeks on transferring the title. He signed the bill of sale with an alias he pulled out of his ass: Hermann Sanchez.

  The ride was far from ideal, and a long shot from the Madam’s Lincoln, but that was okay because it was the first thing he’d owned all to himself in years. The suspension was gone, the belts squealed, and it smelled like old cigarettes and dog piss, but it was serviceable enough to get him down south, at which point he would abandon it in some empty parking lot near the Mexican border in exchange for something else. A convertible maybe, if he could manage it.

  He would have preferred to be gone by now, but he found one of the first rules of running was not to run. When first exposed, get into a hole and stay there until you and the shit around you can settle a bit. They wouldn’t expect him to still be here, so that was going to work in his favor while he took care of some business. For about a week, he just laid low in a motel in Hoboken while he thought everything through and then slept like a caterpillar entering a cocoon. Metamorphosis required a conservation of energy. Acting while still in a blind panic would have gotten him caught and killed that night. He didn’t know if the Madam was dead or alive, and he regretted not making sure before leaving her on the side of the highway, but he’d been scared to death. His killer instinct wasn’t what it used to be, but he would get better. He needed to, if he hoped to stay alive through this. Regardless of whether the bruja was breathing, he was now a seal swimming among sharks.

  Finding people who still existed in his old gambling network was about as difficult as he expected it would be. Most of them were dead; folks in that line of work didn’t exactly have long shelf lives. As for the ones not confirmed dead, it was an even split prison or vanishing off the map entirely. If Ramón had to guess whether the missing had gone into witness protection or taken a concrete bath, his keen betting instincts would have gone with the latter. Running some of his names through the low level dealers and runners in Jersey was a little like filtering coffee through a dirty sock. None of it came out worth a shit. He did hear one name more than a few times, though: Jonny Spank. If he needed anything, he had to talk to Jonny Spank. “Jonny Spank’s the man to see, bro,” said one crank dealer with a har
elip and the stupid name of Pitts Perez. “He runs a place out in Hoboken. Set you right up.”

  Ramón didn’t know any Jonny Spank, but he knew a man named Giovanni Spano or “Jonny” to his friends, or “Jonny Spank” to people who gave a shit about ridiculous nicknames. Jonny used to be a runner in Ramón’s old bookie operation back in the Red Hook days, but Ramón soon learned Jonny had gone into business for himself taking bets and peddling illicit substances, using a pawn shop as his front. Original.

  Jonny knew some guys who knew some guys, which was how these things usually worked. After Ramón showed the cagey bastard a few stacks of bills, Jonny made some phone calls and told Ramón to lay low for a few more days while his guys put together the necessary documentation to get him out of the country. For an extra chunk of cash, Jonny was also going to arrange protection for some important people here.

  That should have been enough for him to leave this place behind for good, but here he sat in his Riviera, a mere forty miles from where he’d left the Madam for dead, wasting time and risking his neck all so he could watch his son and granddaughter walk to the bus stop together. Ramón thought of how his mother pushed him into marrying Maria and making something good out of his life before it was too late. Juanita Gutierrez saw the people her son was running with and knew where it was headed. She’d buried Ramón’s father ten years previous, after the cops pulled him out of the river with a bullet in the head and his fingertips missing, the standard calling card of a man who made the wrong kind of friends. Maria was the daughter of one of his mother’s church friends, a quiet and sweet Catholic girl with a plain face. She wasn’t ugly, but she was a far cry from the women he ended up visiting on a regular basis behind her back, the sort with amazing bodies and no hang-ups when it came to using them.

  Maria wanted no part of that life. She had come from a good working class family. Her father was a retired cop, her mother a schoolteacher. They wouldn’t accept a street hood for a son-in-law, and Ramón supposed he’d come to love Maria enough to attempt a legit life with her, and for a while it seemed like everything would work out. He got a real job doing roadwork and patching roofs. She worked part time in an accounting office. They got a small place in Brooklyn and settled into a routine of ordinary but frequent sex and good home cooking. Then Maria got pregnant and had to quit her job, and there was never enough money. The harder things got at home, the louder the siren song of his old life became, and eventually it lured him back. As they say in the storybooks, things were never the same after that.