by Dan Wells
‘Forman is like . . . he’s like an emotional vacuum. Anything you feel, he feels. That’s why he gets so scared when he scares you, and that’s how he always knows what’s going on down here.’
‘Can you kill him if I get you out?’ asked Melinda.
I hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He might be stronger than we think. He might have some kind of power beyond the emotional thing. Fangs and claws, like I said.’ Gears turned in my head, connecting ideas, and I started to form a plan. ‘Bu we might be able to surprise him.’
‘How?’ asked Jess.
‘Can you actually get me out?’ I asked.
‘I can almost reach the barrels from here,’ said Melinda, and I heard her chain scrape the floor. ‘I can probably push one of them far enough out of place to let you move a board.’
That would be enough; I could squeeze out and lie in wait for the next time he came down. But if he sensed anything out of the ordinary - hope, excitement, anticipation - he’d know we were planning something. I might be able to mask my own emotions, but the women needed to do the same.
‘Everybody, think about your families,’ I said. ‘Think about how much you miss them, and how long it’s been since you’ve seen them, and anything else that will make you sad. I know it sounds horrible, but you’ve got to be sad. Ignore Melinda, ignore me, just try as hard as you can to feel that emotion.’
‘But what are you going to do?’ asked Jess.
‘Sadness first,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to trust me.’
Silence.
‘Please,’ I begged.
There was a long pause, and finally Radha spoke. ‘We’ll do it,’ she said, ‘but when he catches on, I’ll tell him everything. I’m not going to jeopardise the trust I myself have earned.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Melinda, go for it - but don’t think about what you’re doing. Just be sad.’
I heard her chain clink, and then a low grating sound as the barrel scraped across the wood - not far, but it did move.
This will never work, I told myself, trying to dampen any emotion of hope. I’ll never see my family again. I’ll never see Brooke again. She’ll grow up, get a job in the wood plant, and marry Rob Anders - and he’ll beat her every night. I felt myself growing angry, and tried to tone it down. No, she won’t marry Rob, I decided. She’ll die young: hit by a car in a freak accident. Young and innocent, splattered across the highway.
The barrel above me moved again.
Lauren would die too, and Margaret, but not Mom - she’d live on for decades, old and alone. In fact, it was probably her fault that the other two died; she’d blame herself for ever. I paused. It wasn’t working. That should have been sad, but I wasn’t feeling sad. Why not?
Because bad things that happened to others didn’t bother me. I was a sociopath.
I heard one of the girls crying; I couldn’t tell which. How close were we? How much longer would it take? The barrel scraped again, and a moment later light flooded into the pit through a gap in the boards. It wasn’t a gap exposed by the moving barrel - it was a long line that stretched the entire length of the board. Someone had turned on a light.
Forman was here.
‘How very interesting,’ said Forman, almost too quiet for me to hear. He was still far away, but his voice grew slowly louder and I guessed he was coming down the stairs. ‘A house full of scared, angry, desperate people grows suddenly sad - positively despondent, almost at the drop of a hat. Did you think I wouldn’t notice something like that?’
The women were silent.
‘And now I find that someone’s been trying to open the pit,’ said Forman, much closer now. ‘And you all know, rather acutely if I recall, that you are not allowed to open the pit. Isn’t that correct?’
Silence.
‘So I figure if one of you was touching the pit, that means you want to be in it, right? Please allow me to help you with that.’ There was a massive crash above me, then another, and another. The barrels were gone, and Forman kicked away the boards. Light flooded into the pit, blinding me, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
‘Come on out, John,’ said Forman. ‘One of the toys has volunteered to take your spot - and I’m guessing she wants a little bit of the good stuff, too.’
I forced my eyes open and saw him standing by the wall with a long extension cord. The plug had been cut off, and the two main wires had been stripped and separated, leaving two long tendrils tipped with three or four inches of bare wire. He tapped these together and they sparked.
‘You already know how much fun this is on your chains,’ he said, facing the women. ‘Imagine how much fun it’s going to be in the water.’
I stood up slowly, grabbing the edge, my legs stiff and painful.
‘So all I need to know,’ said Forman, ‘is which one of you was trying to open the pit?’ He paused, waiting, and after a moment he sparked the wires together again. ‘Anybody?’
I looked at Radha; all of the women were looking at her. This was exactly what she’d warned us about, and it was her time to do exactly what she’d promised. This was her chance to gain Forman’s trust. It was smart. It would take longer, but it would work eventually. She could be free.
Radha caught my gaze, her large eyes deep and clear. She held them a moment, then turned her head just slightly so that her dangling hair hid her face from Forman’s view. I peered closer and she mouthed a phrase: Never give in.
She turned back to Forman. ‘I did it,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’ said Forman.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I meant, “I did it, you wart-brained bastard”.’
What was she doing?
‘Get in the pit,’ said Forman, as cold as steel.
‘Sure thing,’ said Radha. ‘I’ll just pop out of these chains and saunter on over there. Good plan.’
Was she an idiot? She was getting angry - angrier than usual - which was forcing him to get angry back. But why? It didn’t make any sense.
‘Out of the pit, John,’ he said, throwing down the wires and storming past me. Radha readied herself to fight but he hit her easily, a backhanded slap across the face that sent her sprawling to the floor. She looked thin and spindly, like a starved scarecrow. Forman pulled out his keys and unlocked her chain from around the sewer pipe, then used it to drag her over to the pit. ‘I said out of the pit, John!’
I stumbled backwards, up and onto the filthy cement floor, sopping wet and shivering. Forman threw Radha into the hole and started stacking the boards back on top of her, keeping the long length of chain firmly under his foot.
‘Get the barrels, John.’
‘No.’
He pulled out his gun and fired at my feet, missing by inches. ‘I said get the barrels!’
The three barrels were small but heavy. I rolled one onto the boards and righted it, then started back for another when a voice floated up from underneath, strained but defiant.
‘Can’t even do this to my face, you coward?’
Did she want him to kill her?
Forman stormed past me, picked up the extension cord and brought it back to the pit. He touched the bare wires to Radha’s chain and she screamed; the boards shook, and I imagined her body spasming against them from inside the pit. He pulled the wires away just half a second later; they had barely touched the chain.
‘You might kill her,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Forman, ‘you might kill her.’
He held up the wires, gesturing for me to come. Radha choked and gasped for air, then started screaming insults at Forman.
‘No,’ I said.
He shocked her again, and her sudden scream was cut off by a gargle as she fell below the surface of the water. The boards rattled, even the heavy barrel shook in place. Forman pulled the wires away.
‘You can stop this whole thing, John,’ he told me. ‘The shock you give her will be her last one, you have my word, but until then . . .’ he shocked her again, and the boards above the pit jumped with her
. . . ‘I’ll just keep doing this.’
What was I supposed to do? What was Radha’s plan? She’d spent a year trying to earn his trust, and now she’d thrown it all away - for what? To save Melinda from a few shocks? It didn’t seem worth it.
I could save her. I could walk right over and shock her, and Forman would let her go. But could I trust him? And even if I could, and he let her go, what had Radha’s choice accomplished? Nothing, except to make me obey Forman. That couldn’t be what she wanted; she’d told me to ‘never give in’.
He shocked her again, and her scream was loud and primal. The other women were crying, shrinking into themselves, trying to hide from the world that had gone mad around them. Forman pulled back the wires and again offered them to me.
Was Radha’s plan a trick? Had she known that Forman would ask me to help? Was this whole thing designed to give me a weapon - to get my hands on the wires so I could attack him? But she couldn’t have known that would happen, could she? All she had known was what I had told her - that I was a killer, and that I didn’t want to be.
Never give in.
I stood my ground. ‘I won’t do it.’
‘You’re sure?’ he asked.
‘I won’t.’
‘Burn in hell, Forman,’ said Radha, her voice weak and raw.
‘You first,’ said Forman, and touched the wires to the chain.
She screamed again, and the planks over the pit shook and jumped and rattled. Forman didn’t pull the wires away this time; he held them there, watching the commotion. I rushed at him but he held up his gun with one hand, keeping the wires on the chain with his other. All three of the other women were screaming now, and I watched helplessly. We were scared out of our minds, but Forman’s face was a snarl of rage. Radha was filling him with rage, and he was embracing it fully.
And then, abruptly, the boards stopped shaking and Radha’s rage disappeared.
It was a visible, physical change: the muscles in Forman’s face and body, so tense with anger, grew softer, then rigid with fear. Instead of hunching over the chain, leaning forward like a predator, he leaned back, eyes wide, horrified. His breathing quickened and he dropped the wires, clutching his chest, sweating and swallowing hard. He scooted back, then tried to stand and run but his legs gave way. He crawled towards the women as if seeking shelter, but this only scared them further and they flinched away. Forman howled, an animal scream of terror, and curled up in a foetal position on the floor. The gun lay discarded on the floor nearby. Forman was helpless.
This was Radha’s plan. She’d told me before that he broke down whenever he killed one of them, since the emotions from the other women, and from the victim herself at the moment of death, were simply too much for him to handle. They’d never been able to take advantage of it because they’d always been chained up, but I was free. She’d sacrificed herself to put him in this state, for this moment when I could take advantage of it and finish him off.
The wires were closer than the gun, just a few steps away. I picked them up quickly, careful to touch only the plastic, and walked towards Forman. His screaming dulled - he was feeling my clarity now, pushing away the women’s fear and pulling himself together. I didn’t have long. I ran the last few steps and jumped out with the wires, but his hands shot up and caught my wrists at the last second.
How could he be that fast?
I fought to bring the wires down, to touch him anywhere with the exposed metal, but he was too strong. Slowly he grew more focused, more determined, and began to bend my arms back. I expected him to push the wires towards me, but he pushed them out to the sides - he didn’t want the wires to touch me because he was touching me, and I was soaking wet, and any current that passed through me would shock him as well. He didn’t want that to happen.
But if it would hurt him, I wanted to do it.
‘Never give in,’ I said, and reversed the direction of my hands, pulling them towards me instead of away from him. I felt a white fire tear through me, every muscle in my body screaming and flexing and burning at once, and then everything went black.
Chapter 19
My third date with Brooke was a continuation of our second: we dressed up in gaudy tourist clothes and went to the Shoe Museum, holding hands and laughing at the rooms and hallways stacked high with shoes. There were greyed felt spats from old military uniforms, and bright Velcro sneakers from the 1980s. There were adjustable wooden moulds from England, high wooden sandals from Japan, and heavy wooden clogs from Denmark; there were boots of alligator skin, snake skin, and shark skin. There were novelty slippers with faces and tiny lights. There were running shoes with long metal cleats. There were snowshoes. There were stilts.
I could hear someone’s voice down the hall, familiar but impossible to identify. I turned to ask Brooke if she recognised it, but she was gone. I heard the voice again, and it was Brooke’s voice, and I followed it down a maze of shoes and shelves. The hallways were long, stretching out and converging on a single point; each corner revealed more rooms, more shoes, until at last I realised that the walls themselves were made of shoes, vast piles of them, like a cave hollowed out in an endless mountain of shoes. Brooke’s voice called me on, urging me to wake up. My own shoes were gone now, and my feet were wet and cold. I reached for a pair on the wall and my hand touched bare cement.
I was in Forman’s basement, awake and cold. I was handcuffed to a pipe in the corner. My feet were bare, and my mouth tasted like vomit. I touched my chest gingerly, my muscles sore, and felt two burns where the current had forced its way through my skin and into my body.
‘John?’
I looked up and saw the other women staring at me. Stephanie had joined them, chained into the corner where Radha used to be. I didn’t know the others by sight, only by sound, but outside of the pit it was hard to recognise their voices.
‘What happened?’ I asked, still groggy.
‘You got shocked,’ said one of the women. She was younger than the other two, but maybe a little older than Stephanie. Jess, maybe? ‘It knocked you both out.’
‘He fell too far for any of us to get at him,’ said another. ‘I think I dislocated my wrist trying to reach him.’ That had to be Melinda.
‘To reach his keys?’ I asked.
‘Or to kill him,’ she said, shrugging coldly. Definitely Melinda.
‘Wasn’t the gun right here?’ I asked.
‘It got knocked over there,’ she told me, gesturing towards the stairs. She spoke softly. ‘He took it when he left.’
‘So he woke up first,’ I said. Maybe he could regenerate, like Crowley had. ‘How long was he unconscious?’
‘An hour, maybe two,’ said the last woman; I recognised her voice as Carly’s. ‘Same as you. You actually started to move first, but then he woke up and gave you some kind of a shot. We thought it was poison.’
‘It was a sedative,’ said Jess. ‘That’s the same way he kidnapped me.’
So my guess about the electrical shock had been right - Forman was just as susceptible to it as a normal human. Maybe he couldn’t regenerate at all. If I could find a way to shock him without getting myself electrocuted next time, I could stop him.
‘Where is he now?’ I asked. From the pit in my stomach I guessed that I’d been asleep for several hours; I’d been here for maybe forty-eight hours now, and hadn’t eaten a thing.
‘He left,’ said Jess. ‘He chained you up, then he brought her down, then he left.’ She pointed at Stephanie, and I looked at her closer. She was terrified and quiet, curled up in the corner with tears streaking her face.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked. She nodded dumbly. ‘What about the woman in the wall?’
She started to cry. ‘The eyes?’
‘She’s still there?’
Stephanie started sobbing uncontrollably.
I closed my eyes. I felt . . . not empathy. Not concern. I felt responsibility. Just like I had with Mr Crowley, I swore that Forman wouldn’t kill anyone else if I co
uld help it. I’d kill him, and that’s where the killing would end.
Suddenly, the three longtime prisoners stiffened, heads cocked and listening, eyes going wide. ‘He’s back,’ said Carly.
I listened carefully, but I didn’t hear anything until the front door opened. Footsteps crossed the floor above us, followed by a dull, heavy scrape. He was dragging something. Another prisoner?
We listened in silence as the footsteps moved into the kitchen, then the hall, and on into the back of the house. Several minutes later they came back, and we heard a burst of water in the kitchen sink. The pipe I was chained to rumbled with the noise of rushing water, and a moment later another pipe, thicker this time, trickled lightly as water ran down the drain. It was as if the whole house was an extension of Forman himself, moving and reacting with everything he did. He surrounded us. He controlled us completely.
