by S. B. Caves
She looked through her fingers and saw that he was with another man. Someone she’d never seen before. He appeared tall and strong, with a red beard and a bald head.
‘Wakey, wakey!’ Joseph said. ‘Stop squirming around, it isn’t that bad.’ He clapped his hands together rapidly to get their attention. ‘Straighten out, people. You are all going back upstairs into the house, but first I want to introduce you to Abraham. Ladies, are you paying attention?’ He put his hands on his hips and waited. ‘I said, are you paying attention?’
‘Yes,’ they all croaked.
‘Good, I am glad to hear that. Abraham here is going to be your new keeper, and I want you all to treat him with the same respect and kindness that you showed Lesley, God rest his soul. Now I’m sure all of you are going to help him get into the swing of things while he learns the ropes, and I’m praying to the Almighty that you don’t give him any problems. Because, you see,’ he patted Abraham on the back and grinned up at him, ‘things are going to be slightly different to when Leslie was letting you all go around doing your own thing. Abe here is going to run a tight ship, because he knows how lucky he is to have landed such an important role in our family.
‘Now, I’m going to come along and let you off your leashes. I know I don’t have to stress this to you fine young ladies, but please don’t do anything to embarrass me on Abraham’s first day. I might be a soft touch, but he certainly is not. Maybe one or two of you will find that out before the day is over.’
Joseph began unlocking the rings from around the girls’ necks. They stood up in turn and swayed on the spot with their eyes closed, massaging their throats. He introduced Abraham to each one as he went along, giving their name and the length of time they had been here.
‘And this is Melody,’ he said, when he reached Autumn. She knelt before him with her head bowed and let him unhook her. ‘She’s a veteran here at the camp. She’s been here longer than me, even. She’s our longest-serving member now. Isn’t that right, Mel?’ He patted her on the head and an explosion blossomed through her skull.
‘Y-e-s,’ she rasped.
Joseph reached down, grabbed her gently by the arm and helped her to her feet. She squinted through her lashes and tried to smile but only succeeded in splitting her dry lips afresh.
‘We’ll get you cleaned up,’ he said softly, almost kindly.
‘She’s a lot older than the rest of them,’ Abe observed. His voice was deep and the words came from low in his belly.
‘Yes, but she’s been a model resident. All the higher-ups really like her and she isn’t much trouble at all. Never tried to hotfoot it out, and she’s had plenty of opportunities to try when that imbecile Leslie dropped the ball.’ He stroked Autumn’s shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Plus you might not think it to look at her, but Mel here is one of our best breeders. What are you on now, Mel?’
‘Four,’ she whispered.
‘She just keeps popping them out.’ Joseph grinned and moved on to the next girl.
They were led up through the house in single file. Autumn guessed it was early morning as she looked out over the grounds through the barred windows in the corridor. It was raining, and through the leafless branches of the trees on the perimeter of the field she saw smoky white daylight.
Upon entering the shower room, they were made to strip, dropping their sodden gowns where they stood.
‘You are all real funky at the minute and I think we can agree that isn’t how ladies should smell.’ Joseph walked over to a hamper and began removing bottles of shower gel before handing them out to the girls. ‘Please be diligent with this because I want you all smelling of roses. No more mucky hair, no more dirty nails. I want you all scrubbed pink – well, that doesn’t go for you, Gloria,’ he laughed. Gloria was black, twelve years old. She’d been at the house for almost three years. ‘Clean, clean, clean, that’s the name of today’s game.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Come on, don’t be afraid. You’ve all used these showers before.’
Autumn went to a stall and twisted the taps, flinching as the cold water sprayed her. She tilted her head back and drank, then squeezed shower gel into her hands. She lathered her hair and massaged her scalp with her fingers, scratching the dirt away. Her eyes were achy and dry, so she rubbed them. When she turned to let the shower spray on her back, she looked down the line of girls. One of Mia’s eyes was swollen shut, purple and shiny, and the whole side of her jaw was puffy. Too bad for her. That lack of dexterity in her mouth would probably mean she’d be taken out back and put to sleep.
The collective water pooling at their feet was brown from dirt, the remnants of excretion and menstrual blood. Autumn stepped away from it and concentrated on getting clean. While the girls washed, Joseph stood talking to Abe, occasionally pointing at them, supplying trivia.
‘All right, let’s get you lovely ladies dried off.’ He walked to the bench, picked up a stack of scratchy brown towels and began to throw them at the girls. Autumn’s fell short and landed in the coppery puddle by her feet. She picked it up – it was already soaked through – and wrapped it around her. ‘Chop, chop, chop, this isn’t a beauty pageant. We still have the day’s chores ahead of you, but first Daddy requires your attendance in the assembly hall. So we are going to go to the dorm, get dressed in our nice new gowns that have been freshly washed and pressed, and smile like this.’ He cocked his head and offered a huge plastic grin that seemed to stretch his cheeks all the way back to his ears. Abe did not smile. He glowered at the girls, his prominent brow almost shading his eyes. ‘Ah! One other thing I should mention. Daddy is not in the best of moods, so it would be in your best interests to listen carefully and not make so much as a sniffle while he talks. Is that understood? I said, is that understood, ladies?’
‘Yes, Joseph,’ came the scattered reply.
‘Excellent. Well let’s skip to it.’
The dorm was exactly how they’d left it. The linen on the bunk beds remained unmade, the pillows lay askew. Barefoot, they hurried across the wooden floor to their respective bunks and stood to attention, waiting for their next command. Two rows down from Autumn, Mia leaned on the metal frame of her bed with her head slumped, holding her wounded jaw with both hands as though trying to keep it from falling off.
Joseph pulled back the door of the closet and fished out a bundle of white dresses, offloading them to Abe. ‘They’re all the same size, so it doesn’t matter who gets what.’ As Abe went about his duties, Joseph addressed the girls. ‘I want you all ready to go in ten minutes.’
Abe handed out the dresses, pausing here and there to admire a cleavage or a rump. After four children, Autumn’s breasts were large and full, and he noticed these immediately, though beyond a cursory glance he seemed uninterested in her.
‘What’s your name, princess?’ he asked Alma, taking a second longer when holding out the dress. Alma was fourteen, but not yet ripe. She was short and petite, with mousy hair and freckles. Occasionally, after a particularly long day of chores or when they were screamed out of bed with only a few hours’ sleep, she would break out in acne. Now, after weeks in the basement with no sunlight, her skin was an angry landscape of zits.
‘Alma,’ she replied.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, his finger stroking her hand before he continued on.
Joseph and Abe stood outside the dorm talking while the girls got ready. Autumn slipped into her dress. On some of the shorter girls it would be a decent length, but on her it fell just above the crease of her ass. The dorm was chilly, her nipples protruding against the fabric, standing out like jellybeans.
‘Mia’s gonna get it,’ Wendy said, ruffling her hair with her towel. ‘Look at her face.’
‘I see it,’ Autumn replied, busying herself with her own appearance. She checked her lips in the steel mirror fastened onto the wall by the bed. Her warped reflection emphasised the severity of the cuts, but even so, it wasn’t good. She rummaged around the communal dressing area for the Vaseline,
then removed the lid and scooped a chunk out on her finger, applying it to her mouth.
‘This is all Lena’s fault,’ Wendy said. ‘I was thinking about it, and that’s why they’ve kept us down there all that time. Don’t you agree?’
Autumn casually looked over at the doorway to ensure Joseph and Abe weren’t listening or watching. ‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Maybe she’s made it out,’ Wendy said, a little too excitedly. She was seventeen years old and had given birth to her third child, a boy, about two months ago. Her stomach was still swollen from the pregnancy and her face hadn’t lost its puffiness yet. ‘I bet you anything she’s made it out.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Autumn warned, running a comb through her sopping black hair, which cascaded over her shoulders, dampening the fabric of the dress. ‘They must have got her. That’s the only reason we were let out.’
‘I don’t think so. If they didn’t catch her after all this time, then she’s out.’ There was a smile on Wendy’s lips. ‘Mel, she got away.’
‘Don’t be so stupid. Lena used to get lost just walking around the house. There’s no way she would’ve made it out of the woods.’
‘Maybe she just went in one direction and stuck to it. Kept on going until she found a road or something.’
‘No. They caught her. They were keeping us in the basement until they found Leslie’s replacement.’ Autumn was extra vigilant about whispering Leslie’s name, especially after the way Daddy had reacted when they’d all got back to the house and heard the news. He had gone ballistic and had all the girls taken down into the basement. Shortly afterwards there had been gunshots.
‘But what if they didn’t, Mel? What if she actually got away?’
‘Then she got away.’ Autumn shrugged. ‘Good for her.’
‘And if she got away, then—’
‘Don’t, Wendy. Just stop.’
‘But you said it yourself. Lena was crazy as a bag of frogs and thick as two planks, and she made it. If they did manage to catch her then they would’ve brought her back to the house and strung her up for us to see.’
Autumn found her garland and sat it atop her head. The grounds here were lush with foliage and she often wound buttercups into headdresses or made floral crowns for the others as presents. Her hobby offered her a means of distraction. It had become her trademark of sorts, a trick she’d picked up long ago and one she tried to instil in the others. Go the extra mile – that was the key to longevity in this place. Do what they want you to do and more. It needn’t be much, a dab of rosewater here, a smear of glitter there. It stopped you from becoming dull and exhausting your usefulness.
‘She’s dead, Wendy. She probably wandered around for a while and ended up back at the house. We won’t be seeing her again.’ Autumn placed her fist in front of her mouth and coughed to rid her throat of the lump that was lodged there.
Wendy reached over to grab her hand. ‘Mel, listen, what if—’
‘That’s enough now, people,’ Joseph said, stepping back into the room. ‘We don’t want to keep Daddy waiting. Let’s get going.’
They all hurried across the dorm, their bare feet slapping the hardwood, and were led up the spiral staircase. Joseph, ever the gentleman, held open one of the double doors while Abe herded the girls through.
The carpet in the hallway was the first soft thing Autumn’s feet had touched in a long time, and it felt wonderful. She exhaled softly and then gritted her teeth when she had to step off the carpet and enter the assembly hall. It was even colder in there than in the dorm, with a frigid breeze wheezing through the large open space. The girls took their places on the benches facing the stage, and sat with their backs straight and their eyes forward. Behind her, Autumn could hear Mia sucking up the saliva that drooled from the side of her broken mouth. That’s bad, she thought. That’s really bad. She wanted to turn around and tell Mia to stop it, to wipe her stupid mouth and just shut the hell up. She wanted to tell her that unless she got the swelling down and made herself presentable, then she would be going out back.
The twenty-three girls sat in silence. Abe and Joseph stood off to one side by the rear exit, watching the procession solemnly. The guards, most of them new faces, lined the opposite side of the hall, awaiting the arrival of Daddy.
Autumn’s eyes rolled to the ceiling. In the plastic casing surrounding the lights she could see the shadows of entombed moths and flies and wondered how they had managed to get inside in the first place. She wanted to yawn but knew not to. Worse, she could feel her eyelids beginning to droop. If she fell asleep while Daddy was talking, she may as well hand him the knife herself. She pinched her wrist as hard as she could, nipping the skin between her ragged fingernails and leaving little crescents in her flesh.
The whine of rusty door hinges echoed through the hall and was followed by footsteps, slow and heavy, from behind the stage’s curtain. Horace appeared first, partially concealing Daddy from view as he helped him along, guiding him by the arm. It took a long time for Daddy to reach the armchair that had been left in the centre of the stage, and longer still for Horace to sit him down in it without causing him any distress.
When he was positioned in the chair, Daddy took a few moments to gather his breath, panting open-mouthed from the effort of his journey. At first Autumn couldn’t understand why he’d bothered to walk at all – he’d been wheelchair-bound for years, his back so grotesquely hunched that nobody had been sure he could walk. And then it dawned on her: he was trying to show that he was still able-bodied, that he could still get around, just in case any of the other daughters tried to test him. Foolish old man, she thought. *You need someone to help you on and off the toilet, to mush your food and spoon it to you, to tuck you into bed at night like some little baby, and we’re supposed to be awed because you made it across the stage without collapsing like a house of cards? *
But she could tell that his little display had awed some of the girls. They were transfixed, their eyes gleaming with wonder, unable to comprehend how a man who was almost two hundred years old could perform such a miraculous task. Two hundred!
* * *
Had there ever been a time when Autumn believed that? Yes, there had, when she was a little girl and new to the house. And then, one night when she was around thirteen or so, she was taken out of bed by a new guard and led into Joseph’s office. He had guided her by the hand, informing her that he thought she was mighty cute, and that she didn’t need to be afraid of him. In the office, he had forced her over the table before attempting to sneak her back to bed. The whole thing had lasted less than ten minutes, but in that time the guard had managed to make three very crucial mistakes. The first was that the idiot either forgot or completely disregarded the fact that the house was filled with security cameras. The second mistake was in holding Autumn’s face down against the table as he thrust inside her, because it allowed her a look at a very important book that had been left open on Joseph’s desk. As her eyes wandered over the text on the pages, she saw the real names and addresses of some of the girls at the house, as well as the schools they attended and their parents’ occupations. At the bottom of the right-hand page was the name Cherry.
The third mistake the brazen young guard had made was informing Autumn of Daddy’s real age. He’d laughed at the suggestion that Daddy was two centuries old. ‘Shit, are you really that stupid? Ain’t nobody can live that fuckin’ long. It’s common fuckin’ sense,’ he’d said, pulling his underpants back up over his dripping flaccid penis. ‘You ain’t completely dumb, are you? Humans don’t live to see a hundred most times, let alone two hundred. What you think he is, a dragon or something? Motherfucker’s pushing ninety, if that.’
The next night, Autumn was once again woken from her sleep, but this time it was by the sound of the young guard’s protests. A girl called Latoya who used to occupy the top bunk by the barred windows said that they had led the man out onto the lawn in a cage. He was naked, and the men who brought him out were carrying fla
ming torches.
They poured gasoline over the cage and touched their torches to it. The girls listened, terrified, as the screams escalated into something beyond human agony. Then he stopped screaming entirely, and the only sound to be heard thereafter was the laughter of the other guards.
Autumn had expected Daddy to do the same to her for having seen the book, but he never did. Perhaps the fact that she was pregnant with her first child saved her life; it was the only way she could rationalise it. A girl’s firstborn was always of great significance at the house.
* * *
Now, Daddy’s tongue slithered out of his mouth to lick his lips in preparation for speech. ‘I expected better from you all,’ he began, his neck craned out like a turtle’s from its shell. ‘While you were all partying and enjoying yourselves, one of our helpers passed away. He had been with this family for over twenty years, long before any of you were born.’ His rheumy eyes rolled around in their sockets, his square yellow teeth gnashing between words. ‘Do not make the mistake of thinking that Lena’s actions won’t affect you.’ He pointed a shaky finger at his daughters. ‘You operate as a whole. If one of you misbehaves, then you are all under punishment. This is the only way I can ensure that you will actively …’ he wiped his mouth, ‘dissuade any of your sisters from doing something stupid.’ The sudden rise of his voice made a few of the girls jump.
He did not speak again for a long time, and Autumn thought he might’ve fallen asleep. But as Horace began walking towards him, he snapped out of his stupor and continued. ‘Lena betrayed each and every one of you. And for what? Leslie took care of all of you, made sure that you had food in your tummies and clothes on your backs, and how did she repay him? By stepping over him in his time of …’ he faltered as though losing his train of thought, ‘in his time of … need. She left him to die. Don’t forget, it is we who have looked after her all these years, we who have given her a better understanding of the world and allowed her to be part of something majestic.’ He paused again, his dusty, cluttered mind trying to peck out the next lines of his speech.
