Held (8 page)

Ron left me naked in the basement. Normally, he allowed me to wear my panties. Not this time. He had taken everything. I still tried to look on the bright side. At least I wasn’t tethered to the floor and spread apart the way Stephanie was. I could pull my knees up to my chest and cover myself somewhat. So at least there was that.

I tried to talk to Stephanie. After many times of saying her name, she finally turned her head slowly toward me. In her eyes, I saw nothing. Whether they were empty because she’d given up or because he’d stripped her of everything that made
her a person, they were empty.

I asked her if she was okay, but she said nothing. A few minutes later, she closed her eyes.

The temperature in the basement was cool. With no clothes and no blanket, I did the best I could to stay warm. I curled up in the fetal position and eventually fell into a restless sleep.

Throughout my life, I’d occasionally had nightmares. Usually, I was being chased by a man trying to kill me. Sometimes, he stabbed or shot me
, and I always woke right before I died. This time, when I woke, the nightmare that haunted my sleep was nothing compared to the nightmare taking place only a few feet from me.

I slowly rolled over, every muscle in my body aching. Blinking rapidly to clear my vision, I focused on Stephanie and what was happening to her. I wished I’d stayed asleep.

Ron was beating her with a fireplace poker. Over and over, he raised the poker and brought it down with a thud against Stephanie’s frail body. But that wasn’t the scary part. The scary part of the scene was the lack of movement coming from Stephanie.

I watched carefully but saw no signs of life. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t yell or scream. She did nothing. She was dead. She had to be.

After many more blows to her lifeless body, Ron stopped. He threw his head up toward the ceiling. I could see his back and shoulders heaving as he gasped for air. With his back to me, I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t think I wanted to.

Moments later, I didn’t have a choice. He whirled around and glared at me.
He raced across the room toward me and in a flash he was standing beside my mattress looking down at me, still holding the poker.

“T
his is your fault,” he screamed, pointing the poker at my face.

Still pushing away sleep, I asked, “How the hell is this my fault?”

“I went to your room this morning to get you up and dressed. But you weren’t there,” he said, his voice rising and falling as he spoke.

“No. I’m not there. Because you brought me down to this dungeon,” I screamed up at him. “I didn’t ask you to bring me down here. I didn’t want this. So it’s your fault,” I yelled
, clearly having learned nothing yet.

His nostrils flared with anger.
My attention focused on the poker and I thought maybe I should stop yelling at him. I knew I should, but I also knew that my back-talking sassiness was what he liked most about me. It was a fine line that was sure to be the downfall of me once I stepped across it at the wrong time.

For a while longer, he stood over me
, though he had at least lowered the poker and now held it at his side. I watched as he slowly calmed down. His nostrils stopped flaring, his chest quit heaving with his heavy breathing, and he finally relaxed his grip on the poker.

As he calmed down, so did I
, though I was still terrified. I’d watched him kill Stephanie. And if she was already dead before I woke up, then I’d watched him beat the hell out of a corpse. Either way, I knew I wasn’t dealing with the average feller. This man was truly a psychopath, flying from one extreme to the next in the blink of an eye. Professionals who had spent years studying and researching people like him didn’t know how to deal with them, so how was I supposed to know how to handle him? And unlike the pros, my life depended on it.

He tossed the poker aside, but too far for me to reach. Even if I turned myself around and stretched my body as far as it would stretch, I wouldn’t have been able to reach it with my foot. Even in his madness, he was smart enough to know not to leave it where I could get to it. That made him ev
en more dangerous in my opinion because even when it seemed that he’d lost all touch with reality and his thoughts and emotions, he still knew what not to do. Scary.

Thinking of a way to get back on his good side and back to the main floor of the house, I asked, “What are you going to do now?” I hoped he didn’t detect the tremor in my voice.

“I’m going to have to get rid of it. It’s going to start smelling soon, and I don’t want you to have to smell that.”

Good. He was looking out for me, in a sick sort of way. All hope wasn’t lost.
I felt certain that soon, maybe later today or tomorrow, he’d take me back upstairs. He still liked me enough to not want me trapped down here with the smell of a rotting corpse. Of course, my hope was destroyed when I asked for food.

“
Ron, what time is it?”

“Why? Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

“Yeah. I need to be at home with my family, but since that isn’t possible, I was just wondering.”

Glancing at his watch, he answered, “Seven thirty.”

“I’m hungry, and I need to pee.”

After staring at me for a few seconds, he put his foot against a plastic bowl that
set on the floor between Stephanie’s body and me and pushed it my way. I watched the bowl slide toward me and stop a foot or so away from the mattress. I reached out and pulled it the rest of the way to me. Looking inside, I thought he was joking. He must be.

“What’s this?” I asked, looking up at him.

“If you’re hungry, eat that. It’s what I fed Stephanie until she quit eating. Poor thing starved herself to death,” he said looking over his shoulder at her body.

“No, I’m pretty sure you bea
t her to death with that there poker.” When I saw him snap his head back to face me, I quickly moved on. “If this is what she had to eat, no wonder she wouldn’t eat it. What is it anyway?”

“It’s dog food.”

“Are you serious?” I looked into the bowl again. It didn’t look like dog food. Of course, with the maggots and flies covering it, who could tell what it was?

“It’s the good kind. None of that cheap stuff.
Besides, dog food is required by the FDA to be fit for human consumption. People eat it during recessions like this. It’s fine.”

“It’s got bugs all over it.”

“Yes. It’s been down here a while. Let’s see, she quit eating over a week ago, maybe close to two weeks. Pick them off. Or eat them. They’re full of protein.”

“You know what else is full of protein? Steak and eggs. Why don’t you run upstairs and make that happen for me?”

He laughed. “There’s the girl I love.”

Love? What happened to like?
I didn’t dwell on the use of terms. What captured my attention was that I was back in his good graces. One step closer to getting back upstairs.

He headed up the stairs.

“Are you going to make me something to eat?”

“Eat what’s in the bowl, Nicole. When you’re down here, you don’t get the luxury of my cooking.
And if you need to pee, do it on the floor.” With that, he went through the doorway and closed the door behind him, leaving me alone in the basement with a full bladder, a battered corpse, and a bowl of rotten dog food.

I waited and waited for Ron to return, but he didn’t. My belly growled, but I ignored it. If Stephanie could go nearly two weeks without food, surely I could go a couple of days. That should be long enough for him to allow me back upstairs.

Funny how I h
ad begged him to let me go home, and now I was begging him to let me go upstairs. The worse my situation got, the better off I realized I’d had it before.

Eventually, I could hold my pee no longer. I looked for a bucket or a hole or anything, but other than the bowl containing the dog food, there was nothing. So I squatted on the mattress with my butt hung over the edge and let it go. I cried as I peed, having been reduced to such animalistic ways, but there was no other way. Beside the mattress was better than on it.

After I’d drained my bladder, I sat on the mattress and looked at the mess I’d made as it slowly crept across the concrete floor. As it made its way to the drain in the center of the room, it pooled around Stephanie’s heel. I felt horrible that she had to lie in my piss. Damn Ron.

At some point, I fell asleep. I had no way of keeping track of time
in the basement. If there were any windows, they were tightly covered and let in no light. I never knew what day it was or what time it was.

I woke to the feel of someone’s hand on my butt. Once again, I was curled in the fetal position to stay as warm as I could. I opened my eyes but didn’t move. Focusing on the feel of the touch, I ruled out the possibility of a bug or a rodent. It was definitely a human. A disturbing image flashed through my mind of Stephanie’s cold corpse crawling across the floor and touching me. I quickly rolled onto my back to find that
Ron was on his knees beside me.

“Will you have me now?” he asked.

Immediately, I answered no.

In a huff, he got up. In the dim light of the bare bulbs, I saw that he was naked. And excited. And now, angry.

He paced back and forth for a little bit, mumbling under his breath something I couldn’t make out. I watched him closely, afraid this would be the time he raped me. And if it was, I’d still consider myself lucky that I wasn’t Stephanie.

I watched in amazement that even in his anger and frustration, he kept his erection. It bobbed around in front of him as he angrily stomped back and forth across the room.
Had this been a movie I was watching from the comfort of my own home, I would’ve surely laughed. But here, in this moment, it was the farthest thing from funny.

Then, he saw Stephanie. With no more than a second’s worth of consideration, he walked over to her and got on his knees. With her arms and legs still shackled to the floor, spread wide, he had his way with her.

As if it wasn’t disturbing enough to watch him rape a dead woman, I listened as he said my name over and over while doing it. With each thrust of his hips, he said, “Nicole. Nicole. Nicole.” As he climaxed, he said my name again. This time, it was loud. A long, terrifying howl of my name, sure to haunt me in my sleep.

And that wasn’t even the creepy part.

Worse than watching him rape a dead woman, worse than him repeatedly saying my name while raping a dead woman, was the fact that he stared at me the whole time. His eyes never left mine while he defiled the woman he’d murdered so violently.

My skin broke out in gooseflesh, my throat tightened, my stomach knotted
, and my heart pounded.

He got up from her and walked past me without saying anything. I watched him walk slowly up the stairs. When he closed the door behind him, I released the breath I’d been holding. I noticed I was crying, so I gave in and
let it go, crying harder than I’d ever cried before.

The severity of the situation
was starting to sink in on me. All thoughts of controlling the situation were gone now. All hopes of being let go were gone along with them. I wasn’t capable of handling someone like him. I had no training in dealing with people with mental problems. I don’t know if anyone had the training it would take to deal with Ron. He scared me more than anything I’d ever encountered, either in real life or in my nightmares.

As I fell asleep, I was grateful for the sweet release sleep brought to me
. Even if my dreams were nightmares, it’d be less frightening than my reality.

I woke some time later to the sounds of
Ron beating Stephanie’s lifeless body, but when I rolled over, I was alone in the basement. Well, alone with Stephanie’s body. Ron wasn’t in the room. I must’ve been having a nightmare. The sad part was the nightmare had been a reality just hours before.

When I
escaped, I was going to have to get two jobs to pay for the therapy I was going to need to deal with this trauma.

The next time I woke, it was to the loud clanging sound of
what reminded me of metal striking metal. I quickly sat up and scooted backward until I felt the cold wall at my back. From there, I watched Ron work.

He had an axe high above his head. I watched as he brought it down hard, slicing through Stephanie’s outstretched arm near where it connected to her shoulder. I gasped, but if he heard me, he ignored me and kept on chopping. First one arm,
and then the other. Then, he moved to her legs, chopping each of them off close to the hip.

With each strike of the axe came the sound of a snapping bone, followed by the clink of the metal striking the concrete floor. Also with each strike of the axe, I jumped and closed my eyes.

After decapitating the torso, he tossed the axe to the floor and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

He glanced over at me and saw that I was watching him. “Dirty work,” he said.