Pressure (19 page)

He got up off the couch and retrieved his own glass of iced tea. He took a long swig. “Ah, that hits the spot. You’ll really wish you hadn’t thrown that glass at me, because that means no refills, and you’re going to get thirsty.”

Darren set the glass back on the tray, and then bent down and grabbed a corner of the rug. He pulled it to the side of the room, exposing a small trapdoor. He winked at me and pulled it open. “I dug this all out myself,” he said. “I’ve learned patience, but damn, it took forever. This ground is hard as a freakin’rock. Sorry there isn’t much room, although it should be better than the trunk of my car.

“What’d I do with my gun?” he asked. A moment later he reached inside his jacket. “Oh yeah.” He took out his set of keys, removed one from the ring, and tossed it to me. Then he pointed the gun at my face. “Unlock the cuffs.”

I did so.

“This is the part where you really don’t want to make any mistakes. Get in the pit.”

“Listen to me, Darren. We can work something out.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can. I’m sure we can.”

“You’re getting dangerously close to making a mistake.”

“If you shoot me, the neighbors will hear.”

“There aren’t any neighbors. That was a joke. And if there were, that’d be my problem, not yours.”

“Darren, please…”

“
Get in the pit!
”

I stood up and walked over to the trapdoor. If the pit was bigger than the trunk of his car, it sure wasn’t by much.

“Darren, you’ve got to listen to me. There’s no reason for this. We can be friends again!”

“Treating me like I’m stupid is about as big of a mistake as you can make right now.”

I was completely helpless. I couldn’t let myself get locked down there, but I couldn’t very well protect my wife and daughter lying dead with my brains splattered on the floor.

“I’ll bring Tracy to you.”

“What?”

“If you swear that you won’t hurt her, I’ll bring her to you.”

“See, now, if I believed you, that would be a great little offer. Nice bluff, but sorry, no. Now please get moving.”

I climbed down into the pit. It was just barely large enough for me to sit up, and didn’t appear quite long enough for me to stretch out.

“You’ll be in there for a while,” Darren informed me. “It’ll give you plenty of time to think. Think about your wife and daughter, and what I might be doing to them. See ya.”

He closed the lid, casting me into complete darkness.

Being locked underground by a sociopath is highly overrated.

This is the kind of thought I used to keep myself sane. At first, I kept myself busy by screaming and pounding on the trapdoor until my hands were raw and bloody, not that I could see their condition. Then, for a change of pace, I curled myself up into the fetal position and cried.

Even so, I didn’t realize just how bad things were for me until I’d gone three days without him checking on me. I’d managed the lack of restroom facilities as well as possible, trying to get it into the corner so that I wouldn’t roll over into my own filth while I slept. The smell of shit and piss was sickening, but I could live through it. What I couldn’t live through was a lack of water, and I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to get it.

Darren wouldn’t just leave me to die down here, would he?

I did everything I could to stay sane down there. I played word games. I thought of happy times with Melanie and Tracy. I sang. I tried to recite every single movie I’d ever seen in a theater. I made a game out of trying to guess what time it was before verifying it by pressing the face of my wristwatch.

On the fourth day, the watch light went out.

I felt something drip on me, probably imaginary, but I pictured Tracy lying on top of the trapdoor, Darren going at her with a hatchet, bleeding into my pit.

I stuck out my tongue, thinking how refreshing a drop of blood would be.

I giggled about that. Maybe I’d turned into a vampire. “I vant to drink your blood,” I said. Or thought, since the words didn’t seem to actually emerge from my lips.

Killer Fang the Rescue Dog. Too bad Darren chopped him all up, because otherwise he’d be digging me to safety right now.

I giggled myself to sleep.

When the trapdoor finally opened on the fifth day, I was so dehydrated and delirious that I thought it was Satan reaching down to grab me by the collar. I could see his red glowing eyes, feel the heat pouring from his skin, see his demonic tail swishing back and forth. Finally, he was taking me to hell.

Then I was floating. It was fun.

I became aware of my true surroundings as I woke up, lying on the living room floor. Darren was seated on the couch, watching me carefully.

“Tell me your name,” he said.

“Alex.”

“Good. You’re not completely gone.”

“Water…”

“Oh, yeah. I bet you’d kill for a drink of water, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Too bad you’re so weak. It’d be fun to test that out.”

Either I lost consciousness for a moment or Darren teleported. He was hovering over me with a bottled water. “Here you go.”

I took it from him and drank greedily, gasping for breath as I tried to gulp the entire bottle in one swallow.

“Whoa, whoa, take it easy, the water isn’t going anywhere,” Darren assured me. “This is your mental health day. I can’t have you going completely bonkers. Today you get to stay outside of the pit. We’ve got food, water, books, DVDs; I even hooked up one of the old Nintendo systems. Bath first, though. You really need it.”

I let the empty bottle drop out of my hands. My throat was still raw but I managed to ask: “What did you do to Melanie?”

“Nothing. Haven’t seen her. I’m laying low, buddy. No rush. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

He helped me into the bathroom, where a nice warm bubble bath had already been drawn. The water felt so good, so relaxing, that I wanted nothing more than to just slide under the surface and drown in it.

Put an end to my misery.

But then I’d never see my family again.

I stayed in the bath until the water had lost every bit of its heat. Darren fed me peanut butter crackers while I soaked, and nothing had ever tasted more delicious.

I spent the day eating, drinking, and watching immature comedies on DVD. I also spent it trying to figure out ways to overpower Darren, but I was always either handcuffed to the recliner or being held at gunpoint. Often both.

That evening, Darren hopped down into the pit with some paper towels and a baggie. I was warned of no fewer than six different consequences, all bad, if he heard so much as a scrape of the recliner across the floor. I watched the pit carefully, trying to figure out if I could drag the recliner over there and slam the trapdoor shut before he had a chance to make good on his threat, and decided that my chances for success were pretty decent if Darren happened to suffer a fatal heart attack and/or have all the bones in his legs snap for no particular reason.

And then I went back into the pit for three more days.

“Ready for another mental health day?” he asked, opening the lid. “Too bad. This is torture day.”

He dragged me out of the pit.

Forced me up the stairs.

Showed me his collection of souvenirs.

Laughed as I screamed.

Strapped me to a metal table.

Took his time deciding what to use.

And went to work.

I don’t think there was a regular schedule for the mental health and torture days, except that the two of them alternated and I thought it might have been one of each per week.

If my count was correct, there had been fifteen of each.

No, sixteen torture days. An ill-fated escape attempt earned me a bonus one of those. A long one.

Some days I wanted to die. Some days I vowed that I would
not
die until I’d seen my family again.

My hair grew down to my shoulders, although it also fell out in clumps. I often imagined that a nest of spiders was living in my beard. On my mental health days I begged Darren to let me shave, but he wouldn’t allow me to have a razor, even an electric one.

I was emaciated, scarred, and so ghastly in appearance that if I ever did see Tracy again, she’d probably run screaming in terror from the monster who called itself her daddy.

At the end of what may have been the fifteenth mental health day, Darren disappeared into the bathroom for a long while. When he emerged, he had short blond hair, a dignified beard and mustache, wire-framed glasses, and looked like somebody who might teach Kafka and complain about the state of popular literature at a university.

“Like my disguise?” he asked, running his fingers through the false beard. “Not bad work, huh? Do I look trustworthy? Would I look trustworthy to your daughter?”

I jumped up, nearly wrenching my arm out of its socket.

“I’ve gotta scope things out, wait for the perfect moment, so I might be gone for a while. I’ll put some food and water in the pit this time, just in case. And don’t look so frowny, Alex. You’ve been waiting all this time to see them again, haven’t you?”

The walls of the pit were closing in on me, making it impossible to breathe.

If he hurt either of them, I would kill him. I would pull on those handcuffs until I ripped my own arm off, and then I’d crush his throat with my remaining hand.

Or I’d strap him to his own torture table. Get my revenge, one minute for every minute he’d strapped me here. It would be a lot of minutes.

Or I’d just hug my wife and daughter close and never, ever let them go.

Though I don’t know if this related to actual days, I slept four times before the trapdoor opened. Darren looked pleased as he extended his hand toward me.

“Success, baby! Oh, man, you would not
believe
how close this came to being a complete disaster. One teacher dead for sure, another one questionable, but I did it. I got ’em.” He seemed practically giddy.

Through almost superhuman resolve I kept myself calm. This was it. This was when he might make a mistake. He couldn’t watch three of us at once, and an escape opportunity might present itself.

But I was a little giddy myself. Though I would have given anything in the world, including my own life, for Melanie and Tracy not to be here with this madman, I couldn’t help but feel happiness at the thought of finally getting to see them again.

I had countless questions to ask, but I remained silent.

After I got out of the pit, Darren cuffed my hands behind my back. He pressed his ubiquitous pistol into the back of my neck and shoved me forward.

“You’ve waited a long time for this, so don’t mess up now,” he told me.

We walked into the garage.

Three figures were kneeling on the cement floor, hands behind their backs, burlap sacks over their heads.

The smallest one was unquestionably Tracy Anne. Melanie was next to her, trembling and sobbing beneath the sack.

Darren moved past me. “Ta-da!” he said, dramatically yanking off the third person’s sack and revealing a gagged and bruised Mr. Grove. “Bet you didn’t miss this guy, huh?” He walked around Mr. Grove and kicked him in the back, toppling him over. “I’m sure you don’t mind that I beat the shit out of him.”

I kept myself calm. I had to bite the inside of my cheeks hard enough to draw blood, but I kept myself calm.

“And, of course, you know this lovely lady,” he said, yanking off Melanie’s hood. She was also gagged. Her face was also bruised. Her eyes were wild with fear, but they widened as she saw me.

“Sorry about the marks. Like I said, things didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped. And our star of the evening, the lovely and talented Tracy Anne Fletcher!”

He pulled off my daughter’s hood. If there’d been bruises on her face, I’m not sure I’d have been able to keep myself from rushing forward and trying to kill him, but the only marks on her face were tearstains.

“Nice little family reunion we’ve got here,” said Darren. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if I just shot Melanie right now? I’m not going to, but wouldn’t that just
suck?
”

I said nothing.

“Okay, I’ve got some setup to do, so you’re going to have to go back into your pit,” Darren told me, walking behind me. I felt the jab of a needle in my shoulder. “I hate using artificial means like this to keep you sleepy, but you’re probably just a wee bit emotional right now and you might do something stupid.”

I fell to the floor.

In my dream, Melanie accidentally walked into me with a duffel bag. I grabbed her, kissed her, and asked her to marry me, even while wondering why the bag was leaking blood.

The Gallery of Horrors consisted of two upstairs rooms. The bedroom was where Darren kept all of his souvenirs; mostly articles of clothing and body parts. Most of them were preserved in jars “because of the smell,” although the teeth were in a glass display case.

I knew from one of the torture sessions that a small wooden box contained a shriveled scrap of flesh: one of Killer Fang’s ears. He’d slept with it under his pillow the entire rest of the year at Branford Academy.

He’d murdered twelve people. “Not an impressive count for all those years, I guess,” he’d admitted, “but I make them last.”

The bedroom also contained dozens of drawings, both color and black-and-white, of his exploits. An art critic might say that what he lacked in technical skill he made up for in grisly passion.

And yes, this is where Darren slept each night.

The torture room featured, along with the metal table, shelves of tools. I’d become acquainted with many of them during my months here, including the acetylene torch, but nowhere close to all of them.

I was in this room, seated on the floor, when I woke up. My hands were cuffed together and chained through a metal loop in the wall that seemed to have been installed for that very purpose. Melanie was on the other side of the room, similarly chained. Unmoving. I stared at her, praying for something to indicate that she was alive, and relaxed when I saw her breathe.

Mr. Grove lay on the metal table, shirtless. Also unconscious. Apparently the legs of the metal table were retractable, because it had been lowered to just two feet off the ground.

A kiddie table…

“Melanie!” I said in a whisper. “Melanie!”

She didn’t awaken.

“Melanie, please! Can you hear me?” I tugged on my handcuffs, but Darren hadn’t waited this long only to botch the restraint process now.

A few minutes later, Mr. Grove began to stir. His light stirring suddenly turned into complete panic as he let out muffled screams through the duct tape over his mouth and jerked around as if being zapped with an invisible defibrillator. His terrified squeals were so high-pitched that in other circumstances they might even have been comical.

Melanie opened her eyes.

Focused on me.

And then she too burst into a panic, shrieking and yanking at her restraints. I tried to soothe her, to reassure her, but how much reassurance could I give her when we were both chained to the wall in a house with a serial killer?

But her panic was short-lived. “Alex!” she cried. “Alex, oh my God, oh my God, I thought he killed you!”

I shook my head and spoke loudly enough to be heard over Mr. Grove’s squeals. “No, no, I’m fine. I’m completely fine.” The cuts, burns, and other assorted wounds gave away my lie, but my safety wasn’t the important thing now.

“Tracy! What’s he done with her?”

“Don’t worry about her,” said Darren, coming up the stairs and walking into the room. “How about we keep the noise level down to a dull roar, huh?” he asked, pointing the gun at each of us in turn.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

“Resting. And no, not in the pit, so don’t look at me like that.” He gestured to Mr. Grove. “Is he always this loud?” He set the pistol down on a stool next to the metal table, went over to the shelf, selected a large mallet, and showed it to Mr. Grove. “Don’t make me use this.”

Mr. Grove went silent.

Darren grinned and waved the mallet at me. “See, Alex, if you’d had one of these at work, your problems would have been over.” He surveyed the room. “Looks like everything is all set. I’ll go get Tracy Anne.”

He left and headed back downstairs.

“What’s he going to do?” Melanie asked, desperately.

“I don’t know.” I did know; I knew exactly what he was going to do, but I couldn’t say it out loud. Instead, I said: “I love you.”

“I love you, Alex.”

“We’ll get out of this. I promise. We’ll get out of here, and everything will be back to the way it was…no, it’ll be even better, because we’ll have a book deal and we’ll never have to spend time apart ever again and we’ll…” My voice cracked. “We’ll be fine. We’ll be happy.”