Authors: Koethi Zan
“We didn’t have to break anything,” reminded Christine, “and
since he never wanted us to leave in the first place, I feel like we have full guest privileges.”
I broke the seal of the envelope and slid the paper out, then unfolded it slowly. There, in Jack’s writing, in clear bold letters, were the words
Welcome home.
I dropped the paper as though it were on fire.
At that same moment we heard a door slam, hard, from the hall. The door we had come in. The door I’d propped open.
We all jumped to our feet and quietly pressed ourselves to the library wall. Tracy was in front, closest to the door. We listened, but I heard only our own breathing.
Tracy peered around the corner. No one could have gone farther into the house without passing the library door. She motioned for us to follow her, as she edged out of the room.
There was no one there. If someone
had
been in here, he’d gone back outside after slamming the door shut. But why?
Tracy made her way over and grabbed the doorknob, this time forgetting about prints. And then we understood. It was locked from the outside.
“What the fuck??” she shouted, as she banged on the door, to no effect.
“No way. There is no way we can be locked in this house. NO. WAY,” said Christine, shaking.
“Let’s stay calm,” I said. “There are a million windows, and I have my cell.” I pulled it out of my pocket and held it up. Only there were no bars in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. In my crazed state, I’d failed to check it. “Except there’s no signal.”
“Too far up the mountain,” said Adele. “That makes sense around here. Shit.”
I raced from room to room, peering out the windows. There was no one in sight. But the house was surrounded by dense woods.
There were plenty of places for someone to hide if they were keeping an eye on us. Or planning something worse.
Adele walked into the kitchen and tried opening the windows. They were sealed shut. The locks would not turn. She pulled open cabinets and drawers and finally found in a closet a broom with a heavy wooden handle. In a sudden frenzy, she started beating on the windows in the kitchen. Glass broke and flew around the room. We shielded our eyes and backed out of the way as Adele struck again and again. She was surprisingly strong.
Tracy, staring at Adele in her fury, bent down, protecting her face with her hands, and leaned over to me to whisper, “Maybe I was wrong about Adele.”
I shrugged as we stepped into the hall to avoid the flying shards. “Or maybe she knows even better than we do how dangerous this place is.”
Adele finally stood motionless, panting, her face red, her hair a tangled mess. She still held up her broom, ready to attack, as we cautiously reentered the kitchen to survey the damage. The counters, sink, and floors were covered with broken glass. I moved closer and examined the mullion of one window that had splintered apart from Adele’s thrashing. There was something there between the two thin strips of wood. I touched it. Cold metal. I realized then that each window was covered by a grid of iron bars. The painted wood built around them was only a facade.
The place was rigged.
At that, without a word, we split up, each of us going to different doors, pulling and banging at them all in turn, futilely. They were sealed shut, the doorknobs jammed. I heard screams of frustration from each corner of the house as every possible exit resisted our efforts.
Christine gave up first. She sat in a corner of the library, curled up, and began to cry, moaning words of apology to her daughters.
I couldn’t stop myself, though. I pounded and pounded every available surface. Finally, dispirited, I stood at the kitchen counter, looking out of the broken window over the sink toward the barn.
“Only thinking can save us,” I whispered to myself, drawing on the last bit of my fading inner strength.
As I turned to leave the kitchen, I saw Adele walking toward the door leading downstairs to our former prison. I couldn’t face the idea of anyone going there.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “That goes to the cellar, and I can tell you with utter certainty there is no way out of there.”
She flinched and backed away from the heavy metal door in horror. She didn’t have to be told twice. A few minutes later I heard her hurling what must have been her whole body at the back door, grunting as she hit the solid wood.
Each of us gave up in our own time, then made our way, one by one, into the library. I sank down into the couch in the middle of the room, facing the large fireplace. Tracy slumped down beside me and put her head in her hands.
“He did it. He got us back,” she said quietly.
I shook my head in disbelief.
“How could he have known we’d come here alone?”
“He took a chance, I suppose. What did he have to lose? Plus, if he was counting on us being stupid and arrogant, he was right.”
“It won’t take long for Jim to realize we’re missing, though,” I said.
“Jack knows that too,” Tracy replied, “since he’s obviously got someone following us pretty closely. That just means whatever he’s got planned for us will happen sooner rather than later.”
I scanned the room, wondering where the attack would come from. I felt helpless, panicked.
“We need some kind of … weapons,” Tracy said, looking as frazzled as I felt. I nodded and we scattered, each of us searching for something with which to fight back. Christine returned brandishing
the broom handle Adele had used on the windows. Tracy and I, clearly the most practical, each took a kitchen knife from the block, and Adele found a heavy frying pan.
When we gathered again in the library, I bolted its heavy wooden doors shut behind us. Without discussion, we spread out, as though taking up guard stations around the room. Tracy stood in one corner, I took up a post in the other. Adele squatted over by a window, her eyes just peering out over the sill, into the woods.
Christine pulled herself up and crawled into the window seat, as far from the rack as she could get. Her knees were tucked up under her, and she clung to the curtains, weeping. She had carefully propped the broom handle beside her, but I didn’t have much confidence that she’d be of any use in a crisis this time. The old Christine was back.
“What was that noise?” Adele said suddenly, jerking to attention.
“What?” Tracy said, cocking her head to hear.
“That noise. I heard something, I think from the cellar.”
“I’m not going down there,” I said decisively.
Tracy shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything,” she mumbled.
It’s possible we were in denial.
“So that’s it?” Adele said. “We just sit here and wait for someone to find us? And hope it’s the good guys first?”
“I guess that’s about right,” Tracy said bitterly.
“Well, I for one,” Adele began again, “plan to do what we came here for. I’m going to have a look around.”
Tracy glared at her. “What’s the point? You clearly don’t understand what we’re dealing with.”
I sat in my corner, studying each person. We were starting to turn on each other already. I saw the obvious fear on the surface, but I could also see that other being inside each of us, poised to strike, poised to live at any price. I forced the thought away, telling myself I was only projecting onto them my own gripping fear of being returned once again to my animal self.
It was the place. It was being back in that house. I felt like a caged beast and once again felt I would do anything to escape. Anything. Just like before. I recognized it in a flash, the feeling that all my integrity, all my rational being, would be instantly displaced if it came down to it. Was everyone else like that? Or was I just a base person at heart, incapable of empathy for others, as Tracy thought? Could she have been right all along? And who would I sacrifice this time, to get out of here?
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.