by Jeff Lindsay
It was Samantha Aldovar.
Without a moment’s thought I grabbed for the handle of the door and pulled. It was not locked from the outside, although I could see that it could not be opened from the inside. “Samantha,” I called to her. “Are you all right?”
She gave me a weary smile. “Really great,” she said. “Is it time?”
I had no idea what that meant, so I just shook it off. “I’m here to rescue you,” I said. “Take you home to your parents.”
“Why?” she said, and I decided that she was indeed doped. It made sense; drugs would keep her calm and reduce the amount of work it took to watch her. But it also meant I would have to carry her out of here.
“All right,” I said. “Just a second.” I looked around me for something to prop the door open, and settled on a large five-gallon cooking pot that hung from the rack above the stove. I grabbed it, stuck it between the refrigerator door and the frame, and went into the refrigerator.
I got just two steps in when I realized what was in all the jars that filled the shelves in the big refrigerator.
Blood.
Jar after jar, gallon after gallon, they were filled with blood, and for a very long moment I looked at the blood and it looked back and I could not move. But I took a deep breath, let it out, and reality slid back into focus. It was just a fluid, nicely locked away where it couldn’t hurt anybody, and the important thing was to get Samantha and get out of here. So I took the last few steps to the cot and looked down at her.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re going home.”
“Don’t want to,” she said.
“I know,” I said soothingly, thinking that this was a clear example of Stockholm syndrome. “Let’s go.” I put an arm around her and lifted her off the cot and she came up without resistance. I slung her arm around my shoulder and walked her toward the door and freedom.
“Wait a sec,” she said, and the words were a little slurred. “Need my purse. On the bed,” she said, nodding toward the cot, and she took her arm off me and held on to the shelf.
“Okay,” I said, and I returned to the cot and looked down. I didn’t see a purse—but I did hear a clatter, and I turned around to see that Samantha had kicked the five-gallon pot out of the way and, as I watched, was pulling the refrigerator door closed.
“Stop!” I said, which felt even stupider than it sounds, and I guess Samantha thought so, too, because she didn’t stop, and before I could get to her she had slammed the door shut and turned to look at me with an expression of half-glazed triumph on her face.
“Told you,” she said. “I don’t want to go home.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS COLD INSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR. YOU MIGHT THINK that would be obvious, but obviousness doesn’t provide any warmth, and I had been shivering since the shock of Samantha’s betrayal wore off. It was cold, and the small room was filled with jars of blood, and there was no way out, not even with the help of my tire iron. I had tried to shatter the small glass window in the refrigerator’s door, which shows how low I had descended into panicked unreason. The glass was an inch thick and reinforced with wire, and even if I had managed to break it, the opening was barely big enough for one of my legs.
Naturally enough, I had tried to call Deborah on my cell phone, and of course, more naturally, there was no reception at all inside an insulated box with thick metal walls. I knew they were thick, because after I gave up trying to break the window and then bent the tire iron trying to pry open the door, I had hammered on the walls for a few minutes, which was almost as effective as twiddling my thumbs would have been. The tire iron bent a little more, the rows and rows of blood seemed to close in on me, and I started to breathe hard—and Samantha just sat and smiled.
And Samantha herself—why did she sit there with that Mona Lisa smile of perfect contentment? She had to know that at some point in the not-too-distant future, she would become an entrée. And yet when I had arrived on my white horse in perfectly serviceable armor, she had kicked the door shut and trapped us both. Was it the drugs they had obviously fed her? Or was she so delusional that she believed they wouldn’t really do to her what they had already done to her best friend, Tyler Spanos?
Gradually, as the impulse to hammer at the walls faded and the shivering took over, I began to wonder about her more and more. She paid no attention at all to my feeble and comical efforts to break out of a giant steel box with a cheesy piece of iron—it should have been called a “tire tin” in this case—and she just smiled, eyes half-closed, even when I gave up and sat beside her and let the cold get at me and take over.
It really started to annoy me, that smile. It was the kind of expression you might see on someone who had taken too many recreational downers after making a killing in real estate; filled with a relaxed sense of complete satisfaction with herself, all she had done, and the world as she had shaped it, and I began to wish they had eaten her first.
So I sat beside her and shivered and alternated anxiety with thinking terrible thoughts about Samantha. As if she hadn’t behaved badly enough already, she didn’t even offer to share her blanket with me. I tried to shut her out—difficult to do in a small and very cold room when you are sitting right next to the thing you want to forget, but I tried.
I looked at the jars of blood. They still made me faintly queasy, but at least they took my mind off Samantha’s treachery. So much of the awful sticky stuff—I looked away, and finally found a patch of metal wall to stare at that was not filled with either blood or Samantha.
I wondered what Deborah was going to do. It was selfish of me, I know, but I hoped she was starting to get very worried about me. I had been gone just a little bit too long by now, and she would be sitting in the car and grinding her teeth together, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, glaring at her watch, wondering if it was too soon to do something and, if not, what that something ought to be. It cheered me up a little—not just the thought that she was certainly going to do something, but that she was fretting about it, too. It served her right. I hoped she would grind her teeth so hard she needed dental work. Maybe she could see Dr. Lonoff.
For no other reason than because I was anxious and bored, I took out my cell phone and tried to call her again. It still didn’t work.
“That won’t work in here,” Samantha said in her slow and happy voice.
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“Then you should stop trying,” she said.
I know I was new to having human feelings, but I was pretty certain that the one she was inspiring in me was annoyance verging on loathing. “Is that what you’ve done?” I said. “Given up?”
She shook her head slowly with a kind of low-pitched two-syllable chuckle. “No way,” she said. “Not me.”
“Then for God’s sake, why are you doing this? Why did you trap me in here and now you just sit there and smirk?”
She turned her head toward me and I got the feeling that she actually focused on me for the first time. “What’s your name?” she asked.
I saw no reason not to tell her—of course, I also saw no reason not to slap her, but that could wait. “Dexter,” I said. “Dexter Morgan.”
“Whoa,” she said, with another syllable of that annoying laugh. “Weird name.”
“Yes, completely bizarre,” I said.
“Anyway,” she said. “Dexter. Do you have anything in your life that you really, really want?”
“I’d like to get out of here,” I said.
She shook her head. “But something that’s, you know. Like, totally, totally, ahh … forbidden? Like, really wrong? But you want it anyway, so much it’s like—I mean, you can’t even talk about it to anybody, but it’s all you can think about sometimes?”
I thought about the Dark Passenger, and it stirred slightly as I did, as if to remind me that none of this had to happen if only I’d listened. “No, not a thing,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, her lips parted but still smiling. �
��Okay,” she said, as if she knew I was lying but it didn’t really matter. “But I have. I mean, there is something. For me.”
“It’s wonderful to have a dream,” I said. “But wouldn’t it be a lot easier to make it come true if we got out of here?”
She shook her head. “Um, no,” she said. “That’s just it. I have to be in here. Or, you know. I don’t get to—” And she bit her lip in a kind of funny way and shook her head again.
“What?” I said, and her coy act was nudging me even closer to an uncontrollable urge to rattle her teeth. “You don’t get to what?”
“It’s really hard to say, even now,” she said. “It’s kind of like …” She frowned, which was a pleasant change. “Don’t you have some kind of secret that, you know … you can’t help it, but it makes you kind of, like, ashamed?”
“Sure,” I said. “I watched a whole season of American Idol.”
“But that’s everybody,” she said, waving a hand dismissively and making a sour-lemon face. “Everybody does that. I mean something that … You know, people want to fit in, be like everybody else. And if there’s something inside you that makes you … You know it’s totally wrong, weird; you’ll never be like everybody else—but you still really want it. And that hurts, and it also makes you maybe more careful? About trying to fit in. Which is maybe more important when you’re my age.”
I looked at her with a little bit of surprise. I had forgotten that she was eighteen, and rumored to be bright. Perhaps whatever drugs they had given her were wearing off, and maybe she was just glad to have somebody to talk to for the first time in quite a while. Whatever the case, she was finally showing a little bit of depth, which at least removed one small layer of torture from durance vile.
“It’s not,” I said. “It stays important your whole life.”
“But it feels so much more hurtful,” she said. “When you’re young, and it’s like there’s a party going on all around you, but you weren’t invited.” She looked away, not at the blood, but at the bare steel wall.
“All right,” I said. “I do know what you mean.” She looked at me encouragingly. “When I was your age, I was different, too. I had to work very hard to pretend to be like everyone else.”
“You’re just saying that,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s true. I had to learn to act like the cool kids, and how to pretend I was tough, and even how to laugh.”
“What,” she said with another of her two-syllable chuckles. “You don’t know how to laugh?”
“I do now,” I said.
“Let’s see.”
I made one of my perfect happy faces, and gave her a very realistic that’s-a-good-one chuckle.
“Hey, pretty good,” she said.
“Years of practice,” I said modestly. “It sounded pretty horrible at first.”
“Uh-huh, well,” she said, “I’m still practicing. And for me it’s a whole lot harder than just learning to laugh.”
“That’s just teenaged self-involvement,” I told her. “You think everything is harder for you, because it’s you. But the fact is, being a human being is very hard work and it always has been. Especially if you feel like you’re not one.”
“I think I am,” she said softly. “Just a really, really different kind.”
“Okay,” I said, and I admit that I was starting to feel a little bit intrigued. Who knew she would turn out to be such a person? “But that’s not a bad thing. And if you can just give it some time, it might actually turn out to be a good thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“And you can’t do that if you don’t get out of here—staying here is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
“That’s cute,” she said.
She was back to being flippant again, which frayed at my new human temper. She had begun to seem interesting, and I had opened up, started to like her, even felt real, actual empathy for her—and now she was slipping back into her aloof, teenage, you-can’t-know disguise, and it made me just a little bit cranky and filled me with the urge to shake her up. “For God’s sake,” I said. “Don’t you understand why you’re in here? These people are going to cook you and eat you!”
She looked away again. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “That’s what I want.” She looked back at me, her eyes large and moist. “That’s my big secret,” she said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
IT’S FUNNY HOW MANY LITTLE SOUNDS YOU CAN HEAR when you think you’re sitting in absolute silence. For example, I could hear my heartbeat lub-dubbing away in my ears, and right next to me Samantha took a long, slow breath—and beyond that there was a metallic whirring sound as the little fan ticked on and blew more cold air across the length of the walk-in refrigerator, and I even heard something scuttling in a piece of paper under the cot I sat on, probably a palmetto bug or cockroach.
Even with all this thunderous noise, the most overwhelming sound was the all-enveloping white noise of Samantha’s last words as they crashed and echoed around the little room, and after a while they stopped making sense to me, even the individual syllables, and I turned my head to look at her.
Samantha sat unmoving, the annoying smile once again in place on her face. Her shoulders were hunched and she looked straight ahead, not really avoiding eye contact so much as just waiting to see what might happen next, and at last it was more than I could stand.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When I said they’re going to eat you, and you said that’s what you want—what the hell do you mean?”
She was silent for several seconds, but at least her smile faded and her face settled into a look of dreamy thoughtfulness. “When I was really little,” she said at last, “my father was always away somewhere, at a conference or whatever. So when he finally came home he would read these stories to me to make up. You know, fairy tales. And he would come to the part where the ogre or the witch eats somebody, and he would, you know. Make these eating noises and pretend to eat my arm, or my leg. And, you know, I mean, I’m just a kid, and I love it, and I’m like, ‘Do it again, do it again.’ And he’d go, ‘Gobble gobble,’ and I’d be laughing like crazy, and …”
Samantha paused and pushed a tuft of hair off her forehead. “After a while,” she went on, quieter now, “I started to get older. And …” She shook her head, which made the hair fall back down onto her forehead, and she pushed it away again. “I realized it wasn’t the stories I loved so much. It was … my dad gobbling on my arm. And the more I thought about it, the more it was just the idea of somebody eating me. Of having some witch or, you know, just somebody slowly, slowly roasting my body, and cutting off little slices, and eating me, and really … liking it. Liking me, and liking the way I tasted and …”
She took a deep breath and shuddered, but not from fear. “And I get, you know, puberty and all that. And all the other girls are talking about, ‘Ooh, this boy, that one, I’d like to do whatever with him, and I’d let him do anything to me’—and I can’t really get into that at all, all the squealing and comparing boys and—Because all I can think about, all I really want is, I want to be eaten.” She began nodding her head rhythmically and speaking in a low husky voice. “I want to be slow-roasted while I’m still alive and can still watch these people chew me up and go, ‘Yum, yum,’ and come back for more until …”
She shivered again and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, hugging herself tightly, and I tried to think of something to say, something better than asking if she’d thought of trying counseling. But nothing came to me, except a favorite remark of Deborah’s.
“Holy shit,” I said to Samantha.
She nodded. “Yeah, I know,” she said.
Beyond that there did not seem to be very much to say, but after a moment I remembered that I was paid by the City of Miami to investigate things, so I asked her, “Tyler Spanos?”
“What?” she said.
“You two were friends,” I said. “But you seemed to have nothing in common.�
�
She nodded, and the half-dreamy smile slid back onto her face. “Yeah. Nothing except this,” she said.
“This was her idea?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “These people have been here for, you know, years.” She nodded at the jars filled with blood and smiled. “But Tyler, she’s a little wild?” She shrugged and her smile got bigger. “Was a little wild. She met this guy at a dark rave.”
“Bobby Acosta?”
“Bobby, Vlad, whatever,” she said. “So he’s trying to impress her, you know, to hook up? And he says, ‘I’m in this group; you wouldn’t believe what we do. We eat people.’ And she says, ‘You can eat me,’ and he thinks she doesn’t get it and says, ‘No, I mean really eat them.’ And Tyler says, ‘Yeah, well, I mean really, too, me and my friend.’ ”
Samantha shivered again and hugged herself tightly, rocking back and forth very slightly. “We had talked about finding somebody like this. I mean, we did the Yahoo chat groups and all, but it’s mostly bullshit and porn, and anyway, how can you trust somebody you meet online? And now this guy comes right out with it and says, ‘We eat people.’ ” She shivered more, really big this time. “Tyler comes to me and says, ‘You won’t believe what happened last night.’ Which she says a lot, and I’m like, ‘Okay, again?’ And she says, ‘No, really,’ and she tells me about Vlad and his group.…”
Samantha closed her eyes and licked her lips before going on. “It’s like a dream come true,” she said. “I mean, it’s too good. I don’t believe her at first. Because Tyler is—was—kind of flaky, and guys could see that and they would say stuff to her just, you know, to have sex with her? And I’m sure she’d taken X or something anyway, so how can I be sure this guy is for real? But she takes me to meet Vlad, and he shows us some pictures and things, and I think, ‘This is it.’ ”
