The Cellar

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Black and dark purple bruises marked her skin. She had been cut too, in shapes that looked like words, some kind of script I could not read. The gash at her hairline had stopped bleeding and was thick with drying blood.

  She stood suddenly and extended the towel to me. My breath shortened. She saw my eyes widening as I looked at her breasts, the butterfly tattoo on her shaved pubis. I fought back the urge to lick my lips.

  "My back," she said. "I can't get all the blood off. It hurts to reach it."

  I clenched the wet towel in my hand, chewing at the inside of my mouth, unable to stop the blood rushing to my cock. "Turn around," I said harder than I should have.

  She turned away from me and stepped back towards me. I felt my hot breath bouncing off her skin back at me. I could barely breathe. I touched her through the balled towel and wiped at the blood between her shoulder blades. With my other hand, I held her blonde hair out of the way. The blood was dried, hard to pull from her skin.

  "I'm sorry. It's dried."

  "Wet the towel."

  I soaked a corner of the towel in the sink, and in the mirror, I could see that she had turned to look over shoulder at me, eyes edged with tears.

  I turned back to her, cupped her shoulder, and scrubbed at her skin. The blood lifted. A single watery drop raced down the valley on her spine disappearing between her buttocks.

  "We need to get you some clothes," I said. I stared back towards the door, holding the towel in front of my groin.

  "Amanda," she said. "My name's Amanda."

  A few minutes later, I sat on the living room couch with the others. Then the bathroom door opened and Amanda stepped out wearing a black t-shirt with a dragon across the front and a pair of striped swim trunks that Lipsky had brought. Even though she was fully clothed, I could not free myself of the image of her naked in the bathroom. I stared at her as if she wore nothing.

  I felt like an old pervert. I shook my head to try to clear my thoughts but my eyes kept returning to her, remembering the shape of her breasts, the twist of her belly button, beneath the clothes she wore.

  She looked at the four of us, sitting there, a slight smile on her lips, but then she glanced around the room, eyes suddenly widening. "Just you? Haven't you called the police? Is there no help coming? Where are they?"

  "The bridge is out," said Tug. "No cell service here." He touched the gun tucked in his waistband. "We'll wait it out here. Everything will be okay."

  Amanda shook her head wildly. "No! Everything is not going to be okay. You get that! He's still got them! He's got them!"

  "Slow down," said Jay. "What are you talking about?"

  "My friends!" she screamed. "He's got my friends! And he's going to kill them. Oh my god, oh my god..."

  29

  There can't be heroes without monsters, and in the time since the Sandman, I've tried to understand the heart of monsters to see if somehow that could help me make sense of what happened that weekend.

  Famous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer ate people. Who eats people? He ended up killing seventeen boys and men. A sexual perversion lying beneath the murder. What triggers a person to commit the heinous crimes that he did? Could one thing in his life have been different so that he passed unnoticed among us, a lonely quiet man? Or was it simply in his blood and DNA to be a beast?

  They say that his disturbance began early. His childhood friends, yes, apparently even cannibalistic serial killers have childhood friends, later talked about what they remembered. Imagine the horror of finding out that your early years had been spent with such a beast. But, if he had never been revealed to be a serial killer or had never become so broken in that way, would the cruelties and obsessions of his childhood simply have faded with time? Were any of us so perfect as children? Looking back, could our friends not have found faults, things that later could paint a picture of a nascent evil?

  With Dahmer, they say it had something to do with bones, animal bones being dug out from underneath his house by his father, who said the boy became strangely obsessed with the sounds of the bones rubbing together. Did they whisper? Did they sing? Young Dahmer would later search beneath the house for more bones and even palpate the bodies of live animals feeling the heft and weight of their bones, running his hungry hands over them trying to understand their shape and how they connected to each other. Could this same incident not have been the beginning of the path for a surgeon or a physical therapist? One incident gathering gravity because of what would happen later.

  What was there, at that point, for his childhood friends to stop him? He was a boy. We all poked road kill with sticks. We all collected bugs in jars, leaving the lids tightly shut and watching them slow down, tiny legs scrabbling against the glass, until they no longer moved. We all stared at fascination at the tiny bleached skulls of mice discovered in the detritus beneath a house, eye sockets vacant, teeth long and sharp as if even from death they still might take a bite out of a curious finger.

  Was Dahmer evil as a child? Did all strange loners grow up to be monsters? Or could they also sometimes grow up to be heroes?

  30

  "Who's going to kill them? What are you talking about?"

  We had risen in chaos, the four of us nearly bouncing off each other, lips fumbling, eyes wide, horrified at what Amanda had just told us.

  Tug grabbed her arm, her flesh furrowing in the spaces between his fingers. She turned her head, eyes closed. He spoke through gritted teeth, spittle spraying. "What game are you playing with us?"

  Amanda fell to her knees. Tug held her by her one arm, making it look like she was a string puppet. "Oh god ..." she blubbered. "I want this to end."

  "Make her talk!" barked Jay. "Find out what's going on?"

  Lipsky was back behind the kitchen counter, pacing, talking to himself. He looked as if he might dart for the front door at any moment.

  "Jesus, Tug," I said. "Let her go. You can't beat it out of her."

  His lips peeled back in a snarl. "That how you see me? You think that's all I'm capable of."

  "Let. Her. Go."

  He fixed his gaze on me and my stomach tightened. I was no match for him physically. Even the three of us together against him were not good odds. At that moment, I didn't think either Jay or Lipsky would come to my side if fists began to fly. Tug would beat me to a pulp.

  "Please."

  My words penetrated what I could only imagine was a blood rage. The look in his eye softened. I could almost see the monster in him returning to its depths. I let out a deep sigh of relief. He let go of her arm and she crumpled to the ground, shaking in sobs.

  After Tug backed away, pouring himself another shot from the counter, I crept to Amanda's side. She smelled of copper and lavender, of blood and soap. I lay my fingers on her shoulder.

  "You're safe with us," I said. "We won't let anything happen to you. Tell us what's going on. Your friends? Who's trying to hurt them?"

  I thought she would sink further from us, trembling and weeping, but instead, she gathered a deep breath, her back swelling, and then she pushed herself up to sitting. She wiped the tears, pale red with blood, from her cheeks and eyes, and then told us about the monster.

  Told us about the Sandman.

  31

  "It was supposed to be fun," said Amanda. "The adventure of a lifetime. Not a nightmare."

  Amanda had graduated this past summer from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, and like most young people from the heartland, she had dreams of California – the golden sand, the sun so bright, the freedom of standing at the edge of the country and seeing nothing but opportunity ahead.

  So she and two of her friends – Bethany and Gigi – had bought an old VW bus, kissed their boyfriends and parents goodbye, and rolled out of the corn fields heading west towards the mountains with eyes on the ocean beyond. None of them had plans after college, maybe distant thoughts of graduate school or returning home to orient, but in the short term it was all about freedom.

  They smok
ed limb-numbing weed in the desert. They celebrity spotted in Hollywood. They swam naked in the frigid Pacific. Gigi even fell in and out of love in a matter of two weeks.

  But eventually, the thrill wore thin. Rains hammered them along the Southern Oregon coast. The hippie goat farmer near Shasta grew irritable and dangerous when the girls repeatedly turned down his requests for an artistic photo shoot, and maybe a short video too.

  The girls also grew tired of each other. What was snug and comfortable in the VW bus became overly ripe, cramped, and sniping. The height of the summer burned bright but then it was over too quickly, and the long days eroded to fast-approaching darkness and a growing iciness that burrowed into the metal of the car.

  The bus also ate their savings and the little money they earned along the way. The promised gas mileage only served to pass their cash out of their hand into that of the smiling salesman back in Lawrence. Worse though was the bus kept breaking down. New tires needed in Barstow. A snapped clutch cable in Morro Bay. New brake cylinders in Mendocino. It had felt like their stops along the way were dictated by the maintenance needs of the bus.

  After Shasta, they decided it was time to head home. The heat in the bus never quite fully worked. The bus gathered the night's coldness making it more comfortable to sleep outside in their bags. They knew it was only a matter of time before something major happened to the car and they all dreaded the call back home, tail between their legs, admitting defeat, asking for money to buy return plane tickets. Better to arrive with a false triumph with black smoke sputtering out of the van. Better to let the dream still limp along with them.

  Then the memories would be of the adventure and not of the defeat.

  So they said goodbye to the Pacific with a naked plunge, and stomped on the pedal afraid to stop, afraid that one more breakdown would mean defeat.

  They made it this far, pulled off the main highway by the almost forgotten story from a fellow traveler from Australia. She with her lilting accent had talked of a magical lake in the Sierras, off the beaten path, a place where summer homes were untended after Labor Day. The Australian had told them that if Amanda and the girls were clever they could have warm beds, pantries filled with food, and even near full bottles of liquor. Only as long they did not mind jimmying a lock or breaking the pane of a back door.

  One more adventure. One more last hurrah. One more surge of adrenaline.

  And then back to the lives they had been so desperately trying to avoid.

  It had almost gone all wrong at first. The house they thought abandoned turned out to be a rental and their sneaking around the edges had resulted in an angry German tourist, red-faced, waving his fist at them.

  They had almost given up then: crossing the bridge into town, sitting in the bar for one last beer, looking at a map and figuring out whether they could make the drive to Lawrence in one long stretch, and imagining the smiles on the faces of their families when they rolled back into town.

  While Amanda and Bethany traced possible routes on the map with their fingers, calculating times and mileages, and debating whether to stop at places they might not ever visit again in their lives, Gigi was at the bar, the three beers still on the countertop, a heavily-bearded man, flannel shirt, faded jeans, flagging down the bartender for two shots.

  Gigi came back, flushed, the men at the bar leering.

  "Got yourself another boyfriend?" Bethany asked, chewing flat the end of red straw.

  "Better than that. I've got an address. Told him we were looking for a place for a wedding next summer. A cabin at the end of the lake. Just vacated for the summer. He said he was sure the folks wouldn't mind if we had a look-see."

  "That what he said?"

  "A look-see." They drank until they were past sober, and then with blown kisses over their shoulders, they promenaded past the lip-sucking men with their never finished drinks.

  Half an hour later, the girls were sprawled on the couches of the abandoned cabin, their laughter bouncing off the purloined bottles of whiskey and gin littering the coffee table.

  The next day, they were in his dungeon.

  32

  "He still has them. The Sandman has Bethany and Gigi. He's going to kill them," said Amanda. She retreated further from my touch, cowering against the wall. "Then he's going to find me and kill me too."

  Lightning cracked across the sky and bathed us all in a pale consuming glow. For a moment we looked like black and white drawings from an old comic book.

  "He knows where we are," she whispered. "This is the only house on the lake with lights still on. That's why I came here. We need to go now. He'll track us down."

  Tug's eyes had lit up again, impossibly wide, as if the lightning has poured electricity straight into his veins. "Just him?" He shook Amanda's wrist. "Just him?"

  "Yes. But he's a monster."

  "So the fuck am I."

  Jay began pacing by the front door. "Oh, you've gotta be kidding me. We need to just get the heck out of here. They got police for a reason. We're just going to end up getting ourselves killed."

  "Jay's right," I said. "Sure, you got some military training but..."

  "More than some, son."

  "But the rest of us? We're not going to be any help at all. Let's get the police out here. It's what they're trained to do. They deal with criminals all the time. They're professionals. A whole bunch of them, armed to the teeth, can swarm the house, rescue the girls, and get rid of this Sandman character."

  Tug chortled then sat down on the couch, crossing his arms and legs. "Okay, mister smarty pants lawyer, go do that. Go call them up."

  "You know the phone doesn't work."

  "Ah. That's right. Then hop into your fancy car and round them up."

  The rain hammered down on the roof. We were far enough up the mountain that even if the river further overflowed we were safe. But Tug was right. There was no way we were getting back into town. Not until the rains stopped and not until the waters settled back down.

  "We hide here," said Lipsky. "We turn off all the lights, and we just wait it out."

  Amanda laughed. "You can't hide from him. The Sandman'll find you."

  "And we can't let the other two girls die," said Tug.

  Jay slammed a forearm against the wall. "How do we even know she's telling the truth? I mean who the hell is she really? If this guy was so bad, and you can't hide from him, then what's she doing hiding here?" He stormed over to Amanda, grabbed her jaw, and turned her face towards his. "Look at her. She's lying. I can see it in her eyes. You little bitch, tell us what you're up to."

  I sprung forward, grabbed Jay around the waist, and spun him off his feet and into the living room. He nearly knocked Lipsky off his feet.

  "You going crazy? You keep your hands off her!"

  Jay stayed on the ground, shaking his head. "You blind, man? Can't you read her?"

  "She's fine. She's telling the truth."

  "So you're siding with her rather than me?"

  "I'm going to turn off the lights," said Lipsky. "We double check the doors. We wait out this storm."

  "He'll come for me. For you," Amanda whispered.

  "This is bullshit!" barked Tug. "Enough of this talk! Time to walk the walk. I'm going after him. Hunt him down. Not sitting here waiting to be picked off. We turn the tables. We go hard after the target. As a team. We stick together."

  "I don't know, Tug," I said. I had the feeling that to leave would be a grave mistake, that it would be easier to defend ourselves on familiar territory if it came to that.

  "Skip, he's got two girls with him. Imagine if one of them was Bridget. We can't just sit here and do nothing. We just can't."

  That's what turned me. That's what shifted my mind. That's what drew us one step closer to hell.

  33

  We made it as far as the fallen tree.

  I clenched the steering wheel and stared into the rain-sheeted beams of light.

  "Kill the headlights," said Tug. "We don't want to give
away our position."

  "Are you sure this is such a good idea?" I asked.

  "We can still turn back," said Lipsky. "The cabin. Barricade the doors. The four of us in that house, we can defend that spot."

  "The lights," repeated Tug.

  I hesitated, forefinger and thumb on the dial, then I dropped us into darkness. We were completely blind for a moment. With the blackness came the heightening of my other sensations. The rain rapped against the roof, metal pings. The wind hissed through the trees. I could smell my own sweat, and Tug's on top of that. He had a musky smell, almost like that of a feral animal and it had only been made worse by the booze, the wetness, and the adrenaline.

  My eyes slowly adjusted. The world was dark. Trees bent and swooped overhead. A downed trunk gashed across my sight. My hands glowed pale and ghostly as if by turning off the light I had revealed a part of myself that I had never seen before. They seemed to float before me, disembodied.

  Tug turned in his seat. "You can lead us to the house?" he said to Amanda. She sat pinned between Jay and Lipsky in the back seat, and she nodded. She really had hardly said a word since we decided to go after her two friends.

  "No one else in there with him?" asked Tug. "Don't want no surprises."

  "Just Bethany and Gigi." The words bubbled out of her mouth as if she were about to start sobbing again. I wanted to reach back there, lay a hand on her knee in comfort, but I knew that would be awkward and I doubted it would even provide much in the way of comfort.

  Lipsky reached for the door.

  "Wait!" Tug toggled the overhead light off.

  I shouldered my door open and stepped out into the rain. The road here was mud and gravel and my feet sank into the soft earth, the muck rising up about the edges of my shoes, squelching with each step.