The Eye Unseen

by Cynthia Tottleben

  Where was my dog?

  I reached for her, but found only my hip bone. Her little body was not beside mine.

  Tippy. Slippy. Clippy. Skippy.

  Where was I?

  I couldn’t see. Could open my eyes only for a split second. My head held a rock band on a stage surrounded by ten thousand jack hammers, all vying for attention.

  The smell of wood. Had she put me in one of her old trunks? Was I in a cabinet? The closet?

  A casket?

  I freaked at the thought of the shed. Banged against my comforter with my feet, trying to kick my way out.

  Then I realized that I wasn’t freezing cold. That the shed would not give off the scent of wood. And that my bedding would only be in one place. My room.

  My breathing calmed. I recalled the small bookcase I had, pushed against the windowless wall. My dolphin poster, hanging above my headboard. The rag rug I had found at Goodwill, the many colors complementing my pink and blue wallpaper.

  I couldn’t move. Couldn’t lift my head, or I knew it would crack open and spill my brains out like yolk into the pan.

  The pan. Mom had clobbered me with the frying pan. No wonder the parade of elephants stomping around in my head wouldn’t go away.

  But where was my dog?

  Tippy. Toppy. Tappy. Tuppy.

  Chapter 41

  Tippy

  I became an earthworm, tunneling through the snow. My stamina wasn’t what it used to be, but I was propelled by the thoughts of my girl. Locked away, again.

  Dying.

  We were all doing a pretty good job of that. Once my tummy was full I could smell it everywhere. The very walls oozed the sweet sticky stench of death.

  But you were still alive, this I knew. After your mother had gone to bed, I’d sat outside your door and listened to you breathe. Whatever she’d done to you had left you sleeping for nearly a day.

  Whatever she’d done to you had left me panicked for nearly a day.

  Burrow, burrow, burrow. Maybe I wasn’t so much an earthworm as a rabbit. Or a badger.

  Yes, I was a badger. Not cute and meek. Not an eyeless, limbless, bit of fish food.

  I ate fish food for breakfast.

  As a badger, I was no longer cold. The snow tomb was my safety. My paws were ten times more powerful than a house dog’s. In fact, I didn’t have to burrow anymore. I was so brawny I could swim through the snow-packed yard.

  And swim I did.

  When I ran into the shed, I turned to the left and came up for much-needed air. Your mother tended to forget about me when she left me outside, and while it usually annoyed me, today I needed that extra time. First I had some personal business to attend to, as I was horrified by the presents I’d left under the dining room table and didn’t want to put myself in that position again.

  Then I needed to find my friends.

  I yowled. Put on my best warrior stance, even though my lips barely crested the white ocean surrounding the house, and tried to appear brave and strong so they knew I’d never falter.

  Perhaps, in my weakened state, I was not loud enough.

  A badger has no difficulty maneuvering through the densest soil. Would my friends consider me worthless if I could not pull myself completely from the snow?

  This time I burrowed around the backside of the shed. Found the stump of an old elm tree that had gotten some weird bug in it and died. Stood on it and was able to push most of my body into the cold morning air.

  When I howled again, I got a better response.

  They were hunkered down in the trees. More than twenty of them. More than fifty. More than I could possibly count.

  My army. I gave instructions, draining the last of my energy as I shouted to my soldiers. They would have to brave the remnants of the blizzard. I had. And they had quite a size advantage on me.

  Not to mention thicker pelts.

  The time was here. The time was now. At any moment I might need their help. And I wouldn’t be able to open the door and escort them in.

  I didn’t believe in God. At least, not this beast that visited my girl, Lucy. I didn’t care about His rules concerning the windows. And this would be the only way they could get in.

  Not an easy task, given the freak weather conditions.

  But at least no one would see them coming.

  The big guy huffed back at me. They understood the urgency; they welcomed the challenge.

  In the end, I thanked them for their service. Let them know how much Lucy loved them, and shared her gratitude as well. Put my badger face back on so they’d know I meant business.

  Going home was easier. My tunnel had held, and I slid on my belly half the way to the door.

  She was waiting for me when I made it to the back porch.

  “Get in here, you damned dog. What do you think I am, your personal butler?”

  Her foot pushed against my butt, causing my wet paws to slide across the linoleum.

  I gave her my badger’s eye. Grumbled, low and with a hearty warning.

  My plan was in action.

  Chapter 42

  Lucy

  The dark never gave way.

  For a while, I was convinced she had locked me in a wooden casket. Was I already underground? How had she managed to dig through all the snow and the soil, frozen beneath it?

  Maybe she’d been waiting all this time to kill me. Maybe Mom had dug my grave months ago.

  But none of it made sense. When I finally managed to raise my head off the pillow, I made my headache a hundred times worse by vomiting over the side of the bed. Not that I had anything to bring up but bile. But that’s when the dots started to connect.

  I was on my own bed. In my own room. When I stretched out my arms in all directions, I couldn’t find the walls of the coffin she had locked me in. Surely if she’d buried me alive, she’d have tucked me into the smallest space possible.

  How could I be buried if I was in the house?

  I rolled off the side of my bed. Worried, for a second, that I’d broken my arm, but it held my weight when I crawled on all fours to the closed door.

  Strength evaded me. Just the simple task of turning the handle became an extraordinary chore. I couldn’t balance my body and reach for the knob at the same time. Eventually I gave up and wedged my face between the knob and the door. Turned the handle. Found myself locked inside. Again.

  My heart tripped. This time the door had no give in its frame, like it had before. It felt welded shut. No air seeped around its edges. Only a thin line of light eked over the threshold.

  My fingers made their way across the wallpaper. Past the section Tippy and I had pulled down. Over the closet door. To the corner.

  The smell of wood was stronger here.

  I started on the wall with the window. Almost knocked the ceramic angel off its perch, the one Brandy had given me years ago for my birthday, a promise that someone would always look over me in my sleep.

  When I hit the window frame, I knew. She had boarded it over. Taken the planks piled up in the basement and nailed them over my only escape. Mom had performed excellently. The seal allowed not even the faintest bit of light to seep through, the wood so thick and tight I’d never be able to pull it off with only my hands.

  I couldn’t imagine Mom’s carpentry skills being this proficient. She had always used Brandy for the manly work around the house. But then I remembered who might have helped her.

  God, intent upon my not escaping. His only son, a carpenter. Would He have called upon him to ensure I did not get out?

  My despair came out in full force.

  I made it back to the bed. Didn’t have it in me to cry anymore. Just curled under the blankets and went to grab my girl, so I’d have someone to share my sorrow.

  But Tippy wasn’t there.

  Where was my dog?

  * * *

  The granola bars were a lifesaver. I ate two, parceled out some water, took a mental inventory of everything I had hidden in my room.

&
nbsp; Six packs of raisins. A couple boxes of dried soup, which might not be bad with a dab of water and a vigorous shake or two. Four more bars. Twenty containers of water, all shapes and sizes but enough to keep me going for a while. Some old hard candies I’d found while on my great search for weapons. The plastic bucket of pretzels Mom had thrown out when they expired but that had made their way into my closet before she hauled the trash to the cans beside the shed.

  The pretzels were rock hard and would probably break my teeth, but at this point that didn’t matter. What did I need teeth for if I had nothing to eat? No one to talk to?

  Tippy and I had stashed several batteries. In fact, Brandy had for some reason kept an entire box of them in her room and we had confiscated it for our own. The flashlight would come in handy in the pitch black that was now my life.

  Otherwise, all I had was Evelyn’s book. No dog. No chickens. Just a world full of blackness and no one to share it with.

  * * *

  Sounds amplified in my gloomy cage. Mom rattling around downstairs. Tippy making an agonizing trip to the top of the steps, then turning around to go back. I could hear Mom cleaning. She used the vacuum, ran water in and out of the sink, opened the back door time and time again. Was she shoveling? Had the snow melted enough that she could maneuver through the arctic wilderness to the car? Would she be able to get to the grocery store for food?

  Not that I’d get any.

  But Tippy needed to eat. Something besides the cans of tainted chicken soup.

  I set up the closet the same as before. Hoped God wouldn’t jump in again. How embarrassing if He materialized and landed in my slop bucket!

  With nothing to do but lament about my situation, I grabbed Evelyn’s book and opened it, without shame this time. Tippy was not around to give me her one-eyed look of disapproval. Mom would have to bust down the door to see me with it, and even if she did decide to free me again, I’d have ample warning to tuck it back under my mattress.

  Funny how much I needed a friend, and the only one I had left was this deranged woman and her scary, secret lover.

  I pulled my blanket off the bed and plopped on the floor next to the heating vent. Sitting against the far wall, I could hide the trickle of light I needed to illuminate the diary.

  Not that anyone would be looking.

  So much movement made me dizzy. With my head balanced against my knees, I swallowed the discomfort. Once my eyes could focus, I opened the book back to where I had left off.

  Horror in the Himalayas. The two of them, Evelyn and her man, taking out the kindly Sherpas helping some hikers from Australia make it to the top of Everest. The poor Aussies were lost without their guides, a blinding snowstorm relentlessly dogging their every move.

  They were separated from each other. Terrified. Driven nearly mad by the cold and confusion, the drive to survive the treachery of the mountains.

  Evelyn took pride in her destruction of the men. She slid up behind one and pushed him off a small ledge, watching him tumble but catch himself on a boulder. His left leg was broken, the bone sticking out of his thigh. While the man fought to climb down to their camp, his compound fracture slicing through muscle and skin with every movement, Evelyn made his plight worse.

  She shoved him into an ice cave.

  This time his hip was demolished. Shattered. Excruciatingly painful.

  He screamed for quite some time, while Evelyn reveled in his pain. When she joined him on the ledge where he had landed, precariously perched above an endless abyss below, the hiker had thought she was an angel, sent to help him.

  She started with his ear. Biting it off. Sticking her tongue inside the hole, then slapping it with her hand until his eardrum exploded.

  Evelyn turned the man on his back, jumped on his injured leg, sat with all her weight on his shattered pelvis. She chuckled over agony.

  In the end, the hiker slowly strangled to death on his own entrails. Evelyn had been kind enough to hang him, intestines wrapped around his neck, from one of the pitons he used to climb the mountain.

  She watched while her boyfriend raped the next man to death. Acted as his personal cheerleading squad, the dutiful lover, assisting him as needed, inflicting more pain here and there when she wanted in on the action.

  The third man suffered the most.

  Evelyn cut his lips off with his own pocketknife, then went to town on his tongue, which they split in two and devoured while the hiker watched in horror. She made love to her boyfriend after removing one of her victim’s eyes, wallowing over his body and covering herself with his blood.

  They kept him alive for several days, feeding on his living corpse. Evelyn went so far as to compare their love fest to that of newlyweds, the festivities of their holiday abroad interrupted by fits of deviant sex and gastronomic delicacies.

  I turned off the flashlight before shutting the diary.

  Crawled over to the bed, my blanket in tow, wishing desperately for Tippy to keep me company after reading of such atrocities.

  The kids at school wouldn’t be afraid. They would have laughed at the part where they gnawed off all his toes, screeching with delight. I could hear their cries of “That’s awesome!” and “What a trip, man!” as they listened to Evelyn’s story.

  But I wasn’t like that.

  I shuddered under my blanket. Pined for my sweet puppy, thinking about the man with his missing eye, and Tippy with hers. Wondered what kind of story Mom would write when I was gone. Would she be proud that after eight years of keeping me in storage, my bones were picked of all meat by the rodents that shared my room? Or would she simply burn down the house, and all evidence of my presence, before running to Rome, where she could live in hiding and pen her memoirs of being a murderous mother?

  * * *

  Eight raisins and a granola bar do not make a very hearty meal.

  I toyed with the idea of having an enormous feast: pounding the rock-hard pretzels until my teeth shattered, despite the fact that the salt on them would only worsen my condition. Or do nothing for me when, sixteen days from now, I was reduced to bones and a couple drops of blood after I had starved to death.

  Earlier in the day I had felt a bug on my arm and devoured it without even knowing what it was. A tick? Probably not, in this cold weather. A beetle? A roach? We had never had those in the house. Maybe another silverfish, Tippy’s favorite meal when we had lived without food before?

  Time eluded me. The weaker I became, the more I slept. Or felt I slept. Or, at least, wanted to sleep. Perhaps my dreams woke me in twelve-minute increments; I would never know. When I drifted off, it was in complete darkness, except for the light slinking under my door. When I woke up, everything remained the same. Did that mean twenty-four hours had passed, or ten minutes? I did not know.

  I got my book and returned to the heated spot on the floor, blanket pulled all the way over my head this time, trapping the heat and making my body use fewer calories to keep it warm.

  When I went to scratch Tippy, I remembered she wasn’t there.

  I couldn’t bear to think about her future. Or lack thereof. For all I knew, Mom had tired of chicken noodle soup and was making brunch with my dog as the main treat.

  Evelyn would certainly do that. That and much, much worse.

  “Yeah, but she was a good old broad. We had a lot of fun together.” God’s voice came through the pitch black of my room and practically made me jump out of my skin.

  “You did?” I asked, unsure if He was a hallucination or not.

  “Until I tired of her, sure. Evelyn kept me company for many years.”

  I put my marker back in the book, closed it tight.

  When it hit me, my head flung back so hard I knew I’d probably dented the wall. “You mean…this is about you?”

  “Who else would it be, Lucy? Don’t I match her description pretty well?”

  In my mind’s eye, I could see God twirling around in front of me, modeling His rugged look. His red hair.

  “I
guess so.”

  “Well, you don’t sound too impressed.”

  “I thought…you’d be different.”

  “Really, Lucy? You thought I’d be what…not like the other guys? The ones who want to do this to you?”

  I struggled for about seven seconds before I realized it wasn’t worth the effort. Eight raisins do not equal endless energy or strength. I could never fend Him off.

  God was all hands and tongue again, His rough touch invading my every inch.

  But then He stopped.

  “I just thought God would be about…love. Not all of this death and destruction.”

  My words were met with static.

  And then He started to laugh.

  Demonic. Room-filling, dead-rodent breath yowling.

  I pissed myself.

  Chapter 43

  Joan

  The dog forgave me.

  She had to, if she wanted to eat.

  I watched her put her nose against your door, take a sniff, walk away. Since she didn’t linger, I hoped you had already died. That was a nasty hit you took to your head, knocked you out cold for several hours. Well, that and the Benadryl I poured down your throat. What a useful elixir that turned out to be.

  The snow put a damper on things. But I managed. Found the wood stacked up in the basement, where we had left it years ago. Boarded the window shut. Double-boarded it, in fact. I figured you might stand a chance of ripping one section off with your demon-nails, but as weak as you were, two would be impossible.

  And the door…well, let’s just say that neither of us would be getting through that very easily.

  The ax lay beside me in bed. I didn’t fret that the red-headed man would be back. In fact, I hoped he’d use it on me and end our time together once and for all. But I was ready. For you, for him, for whatever it took.

  I pictured Aunt Evelyn the day she died, in the kitchen. Pointing her finger at me, just a child. Thinking that if she pronounced my future, the women of the family would just take me outside and hang me with my own belt.