The door slammed behind them, and I was left alone in the flooded cellar.
For a couple of hours, I guess, I waited. I was sure that they would come back to get me. But they never did.
Eventually, my tired body gave out on me, and I somehow fell asleep.
***
The creak of the cellar door combined with the sun coming into the room awakened me the following morning. I didn’t have any idea what time it was, but was struck with joy just to see the sun. I’d thought I’d never see it again.
Beau walked down the stairs, wearing the same dirty overalls he’d been wearing the night before. He held a small bowl in his hand, and I was elated. My stomach felt like it was eating itself from the inside, as I hadn’t eaten anything in almost a full day. A spoon hung out of the top of the bowl, and it looked rusted. But honestly, I don’t think I really cared. I just wanted food.
He approached me, and kneeled down with the bowl just in front of my face.
When I took a look at the contents, my stomach churned.
Some kind of slimy looking soup or stew filled the bowl. The water that I had sat in all night, sleeping upward against the wall, looked cleaner than the wet food in front of me. My stomach turned, then the smell hit me. The substance smelled awful and had already attracted the swarm of bugs in the air. I wanted to puke, but there was no food inside of my stomach to regurgitate.
“Eat.”
I glared up at him. There was no way in fucking Hell that I was going to eat that garbage.
“Eat, or I make you.”
My eyes welled up. The smell had gotten stronger and my empty stomach was in knots.
Beau kneeled down to me.
“No, please don’t,” I pleaded.
He took the spoon, filled it with the contents of the bowl, and brought it toward me.
As an instinct, I slapped his hand away.
He grunted, and brought the back of his hand across my right cheek. The back of my head hit the brick wall behind me, and I immediately felt my skull begin to swell.
Then I felt his hand wrap around my neck.
Beau slammed my head back against the wall, pushing against my throat. The pain worsened as my head hit the brick wall in the same place it already had. I know my eyes must have bulged out of their sockets as I watched him bring the spoon closer to my mouth. I squirmed and shook my head the most I could, but his large hand was restricting my movement. It was also delaying air from making its way down my throat.
As the spoon approached my lips, he spoke again.
“If you don’t swallow this, I swear to God you’ll regret it.”
He leaned in and licked the cheek that he had slapped moments earlier. I took the hint. The man was threatening to rape me if I didn’t eat the slop.
In one fluid movement, he forced the spoon into my mouth. If the smell was awful, then the taste was pure Hell. The soup tasted like I was eating straight out of a sewer, and the texture didn’t help. It felt as if I was swishing runny fecal matter around in my mouth. Some of the swarming insects had followed the spoon to my lips, and I’m not sure how many flew into my mouth, but I’d swallowed some of them. The slop was so disgusting that I almost spit it out and faced whatever would lie on the other side of that mistake.
But I didn’t spit it out. In my mind, I tried to pretend that it was anything else. I thought of birthday cake, a juicy porterhouse, a slice of New York style pizza; anything that wasn’t this filthy excuse for food.
Beau stayed there, feeding me until the bowl was empty. I could still feel on my face where he had licked me which, combined with the taste and texture of the food, just made it more difficult for me to hold the mixture down.
When the food was gone, he used the back of his hand to wipe the remains from my lips. I could feel the dirt from his hand transfer to my cheek, and he didn’t seem to get angry about me trying to spit that taste out.
He stood, looking down upon me for a moment. Then he turned and left the room, taking the light from the sun with him.
***
For hours, I took naps on and off. It seemed that every time I was almost asleep, a mosquito would land somewhere sensitive on my body, such as my neck, causing me to jerk and move further away from sleep.
Jackie still hadn’t come back. Though I wasn’t sure, it seemed like she had been down in this cellar for quite a long time before they’d brought me down here with her. Why had they all of a sudden decided to take her? And where?
The cellar doors swung open once more. This time, though, no natural light came through; it was night, and the sun had long since gone to sleep.
I watched as, once again, Beau came walking down the stairs toward me.
He reached down to pick me up, and I didn’t even try to fight it. At this point, I’d begun to go mad from being stuck in the dark cellar all night and day. My head pulsated from only eating the little bit of disgusting food that morning. I was starved, beaten, tired, and ready to give up.
The fresh air was a relief. It hit my nose right as my body left the cellar. I took in a deep whiff of it, not even caring if I also smelled the dirty man who carried me.
Beau set me down into the wheelchair I had become all too familiar with. Like before, he strapped in my arms and my feet, just as tight as he had before, reminding me of the blistering wounds on my wrists. But then I noticed one important modification to the chair.
My head now sat in between two boards that didn’t allow me to turn my head. Whatever they were about to show me, they wanted to make sure that there was no way I could turn away from it. I tried to turn my head a few times, but my cheeks would press against the boards, leaving me stuck facing forward.
For now, I was still facing the cellar. On the ground before me, a shadow appeared, and I looked up to see Don standing before me.
He looked down on me. His long, thin hair covered his shoulders, and he had a narrow smile across his face.
“Why, good evening, Ms. Long.”
I think that even if I had wanted to respond, I probably wouldn’t have been able to, as weak as I was.
“Did you enjoy your breakfast?”
I saw him look up at Beau, who I presumed was standing behind me and shaking his head.
Don looked back down to me and cocked his head.
“No? How come? I found it quite delicious. After all, it was homemade.”
He put his hands behind his back and began pacing back and forth in front of me.
“See, we have a great Huntcher here.”
He looked down at me and saw the confusion on my face.
“Oh, of course. What’s a Huntcher, you ask? Well, our butcher doesn’t like to just grab any ole meat and cut it up for us. No, no. Hank likes to hunt down our dinner, then butcher it. So, we came up with that name for him. Hank the Huntcher.”
Don stopped in front of me and focused on talking to me.
“Didn’t she taste fresh?”
My eyes went wide.
She?
“I thought she was quite good in the soup. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how it was going to be. We had let her get quite thin. Much thinner than we’d let the others get. But she tasted sweet, don’t ya think?”
Everything began to register in my fragile mind. I began to unravel the decrepit truth.
Jackie.
I began to cough, doing whatever I could to try and get the taste out of my mouth. They hadn’t given me any water all day, and my throat was dry as I heaved. There was nothing I wanted more than to empty my stomach all over the ground before me. But my throat was so dry, I couldn’t imagine passing anything through it.
In front of me, Don was smiling much bigger now. He knew that I had made the connection in my mind. That they had turned me into a cannibal without my knowing it.
“You son of a bitch,” I mumbled.
Don laughed. “Since you liked it so much, maybe we can feed you leftovers later. It’s much better heated up, I promise. I had some before I came o
ut here.”
I began to cry. The thought of eating that human soup again was a nightmare.
“But, don’t worry. Before dinner, we have another show for you. First, though, I need to ask you something. Is that okay?”
I wasn’t going to respond, and I could see his eyes urging me to do so, as if threatening to hurt me if I didn’t. So, I nodded my head, and continued to play along with his game and listen.
“Have you ever heard of Scaphism?”
I shook my head.
Don put his hands out to the side and dropped his jaw. “Damn. Don’t they teach you anything in history class? Aren’t you in fuckin’ college?”
He sighed and continued.
“Scaphism is a method of execution that was used by the Persian Empire. It’s slow, it’s painful, and to be honest, it’s downright fucking disgusting.”
Don knelt down in front of me.
“See, what they’d do is place the criminal in these little boats, with their hands and feet bound. They’d force them to ingest an insane amount of milk and honey, which would cause them to shit something that would have a sweet scent to insects. They’d rub honey on vulnerable places all over the person’s body: around their eyes, mouth, genitals, anus. So, by the time the victim would shit all over themselves, the honey on the body would have already attracted a slew of bugs. The shit would bring even more. Then, they’d put the boats out into the river, tying it to a tree or something so that it wouldn’t float away, and let whatever bugs and insects that were around begin to just eat at their flesh.”
I slumped my head and continued to cry, forced to keep listening to what he was telling me.
“Sometimes, this would go on for days. See, the body is an amazing machine. As long as you feed it and water it, you can pretty much keep it alive for any amount of time. There were reported cases of people sitting in their own mounds of shit for weeks before infection finally set in and killed them.”
He looked up to Beau, who gripped the wheelchair and began to turn me around.
And when he did, I realized I wasn’t going to have to go far to witness my next nightmare.
Because it sat before me, right in the middle of the abandoned town.
15
“There’s no water around these parts,” Don continued. “At least not for a few miles away. But a cast iron tub will do just the same.”
And there he was.
My beloved Blake was before my eyes. He appeared to be naked, but I couldn’t exactly tell from the angle I had. His arms hung over the sides of the tub, and while he looked conscious, I couldn’t be sure. Bugs swarmed all around him. I could see that his chest and face were both lathered with honey. The tub was about twenty feet away from me, and even from where I was, I could see the bites on his face. They were a dark red and were puffy on his face. His cheeks had begun to swell, and his eyes were so cloudy that I could hardly make them out.
A fire burned beside him. It was a few yards away from the tub, and had birthed from a collection of logs and sticks. Of course, it was July and we were in Mississippi. Mosquitoes would already be all around us, but the carbon monoxide from the flames had attracted a whole swarm of them.
“Blake,” I cried out. I could only muster a little more than a murmur. My throat was dry and my voice was hoarse.
Tears rolled down my face as I repeated his name over and over again.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, but didn’t bother to look up.
“He’ll be fine right there, darlin’,” Don said. “But for now, we got somethin’ else to show ya.”
I was able to get one last look at Blake before the chair turned around.
***
They rolled me toward another one of the buildings. The one good thing about the barriers they’d put on either side of my head was that I no longer had to feel and smell Beau’s breath on the back of my neck. It was one small luxury in the Hell I was living in.
I decided to try and speak.
“H-ho,” I began.
“What the fuck you say?” Don asked.
“H-how long?”
“English, bitch! How long, what?”
I cleared my throat and it felt like someone was stabbing me with a thousand knives in my esophagus.
“How long has he been out there?” I finally got out, asking about Blake.
Don snickered. “I was planning on leaving that detail out but, since you asked.... He’s been like that since he got here, though we’ve moved him around a little bit. And let me tell ya, the night ain’t nothing compared to the day. That tub is made of iron. You could say that it gets a little hot under the Mississippi sun all day.”
“Why?” I mumbled through floods of tears.
“What?”
“Why?” The second time, I screamed it as best I could. Though it probably hadn’t come across as a scream, I think he heard the pain in my voice. “Why are you doing this to us?”
All he did was let out a laugh. Again, he completely ignored the question. Probably because it had no answer. Why would anyone do this to five innocent people? Hell, kids. We were still so young and innocent; ignorant even. And here we were, being slaughtered one by one for absolutely no reason.
We were nearing another one of the buildings. Don stepped out in front of me and grabbed the door.
“Well, here we are. I hope you enjoy your show tonight. This one is real hot!”
Beau rolled me into the room, locked the wheels, and left me in the darkness.
I simply sat there and waited for the lights to come on.
While I waited, I listened to the squeaks and the moans in front of me.
16
This time, it was taking a little bit more time for the lights to come on than it had before in the other buildings. I sat and waited, hearing the groans over and over again.
“Hello?”
The groans intensified at the sound of my voice.
“Rob?”
Again, the groans got louder.
Then I heard a large slam, and the lights came on. The noise I’d heard had to have been a power lever being thrown in another room, because the place lit up immediately.
And there was Rob, directly in front of me, hanging upside down from some kind of rack. His feet hung from a crossbar across the top, and there were posts on either side of him. His fingertips were just inches away from the ground. Rob’s legs were bound to independent chains, which kept him from spinning.
His naked back faced me. Patches of dried blood, which had darkened around the small pieces of eaten flesh, were all over his backside: on his legs, his ass, and in various places on his back, all the way down to his shoulders.
I heard footsteps coming from another room.
Out of a doorway on the other side of the room, I saw James and Don coming, each carrying a knife. The other times, they had left the dirty work to other people who I had presumed lived inside this Hell town. Now, it appeared as if they were going to get involved.
“You didn’t think we didn’t have our own fun, did you?” Don asked, smiling at me and running the side of the blade back and forth in his hand.
He approached me and looked down at me with the knife at his side. He pretended to lunge at me and I squirmed, which just made him laugh.
“Stupid bitch. I ain’t gonna kill ya. Least not yet.”
I looked past him to James, who was working the knife very close to Rob. He stood on Rob’s front side. I watched him point the knife toward Rob’s groin and heard Rob yell out, which confirmed that he was awake and conscious.
Don moved aside so that I could get a clear shot of Rob.
“See,” Don began. “By hanging him upside down, all the blood rushes to his head. And do you know what that means?”
He waited for me to respond and I didn’t. Then he grabbed me by the hair and pressed the tip of the knife into my stomach, right at the belly button.
“I swear to God, I will fuckin’ gut you if you don’t answer me.”
&
nbsp; My eyes were wide and I shook my head against the wooden barrier rapidly.
Don released the tip of the blade from my stomach and I let out a crying sigh. He walked over to Rob and pointed the knife to his foot.
“It means that anything we do from here to here,” he said, moving the knife down Rob’s body toward his head. “He will stay awake for all of it, with all the blood stuck in his ant-sized piss brain.”
Don smiled at me.
“So, if I do this...”
Don took the knife and cut the sole of Rob’s foot. Little to no blood came out, and Rob screamed a high-pitched shrill.
“Then I can make your friend here squeal like a fuckin’ pig. You hear that?”
I nodded, crying more than I think I had since I’d been kidnapped, even before he could come over and threaten me with the knife again.
“And he won’t even fuckin’ bleed.”
Don pushed his thumb into the cut and rotated his hand from left to right, digging into the wound. Rob began to swing, yelping out helplessly.
“Plug this bitch’s mouth,” Don told James. “Both of ‘em. I’m not going to be able to listen to all this shit in this little room once we really get going.”
Another dirty sock was suddenly in my mouth, and I would again be forced to watch a nightmare unfold before my eyes.
17
Both of the men just circled Rob at first. The minimal silence between his sobbing was only filled in by the click of their boots as they walked around him.
“Please,” Rob said.
Don kneeled down in front of him.
“Please, what? Huh? What, you fuckin’ puss?”
“Please, stop,” Rob begged.
Don smiled, before pulling back his fist and punching Rob in the ribs as hard as he could. The crack went straight to my ears as I heard one of them break. The helplessness in him shattered me. He had a nasty cut on the bottom of his foot and now one of his ribs was broken.
“Stop? We haven’t even begun.”
When Rob reached to clutch his broken rib, Don glared at him and kicked him in the mouth.
The Witness: A Slasher Horror Novel Page 7
