LONDON
I once counseled a woman who was afraid to be alone. Her husband had left her for a younger woman, her daughter had fled home for college, and she found herself uneasy all the time. Unable to sleep, unable to cope. She suffered daily panic attacks.
The house is too quiet, too still, she said during one of our sessions. I hate the silence.
It was this patient in my early career that propelled me toward my passion and away from the bored housewives and midlife crises husbands. I remember how much I loathed her as I sat across from the hand-wringing woman. I couldn’t sympathize with her; I had never hated the silence. Nor had I ever had that anxious need to be surrounded by people.
Solitude is a test, I told her.
Solitude reveals who we are. Isolation is not loneliness; it’s the absence of noise and distraction. It forces you to acknowledge your worth. If you must surround yourself with people, you invite distractions from the one person deserving of your time: you.
Truthfully, I believed she was an empty, worthless woman who might as well be knitting doilies in front of daytime TV. She was wasting my valuable time with her pathetic existence, simply because she couldn’t bear to be alone with herself. She was selfish. She didn’t like who she was, so she was going to subject me to her monotony, too.
That was my last session as a general psychologist.
Past sessions tend to creep up when the silence gets too loud. When I’m given too much time to think. Like now, the quiet is damn near tangible, the blackness muting the world.
Solitude is a test.
I’ve always savored my alone time, never fearing being truly isolated—but maybe I was too harsh on my patient. Maybe this is the kind of alone she felt. The absolute deprivation of all senses.
I would compare it in part to death, if I hadn’t already experienced being buried alive.
I reach my hand outside the cage, toward a sliver of light bleeding through the blacked-out window. I have no concept of time, but it must be day. I’ve spent what feels like hours in this dark room, in the cage, huddled in a corner, trying to wait Grayson out. But time is relevant, right? For Grayson, maybe it’s only been minutes.
He’s testing me. This is a test that I can’t fail.
That blade of daylight is just out of reach, but I still reach for it, imagining its warmth touching my fingers. It’s a strange comfort.
I pull my hand back. Somewhere in this room is a camera. Grayson’s watching me the same way he watched his victims before. If it was anyone else, I’d offer them money. I have plenty of money. I might even offer my body. I have very little shame or emotional connection to physical touch and sex. A breathy laugh escapes. Except when it comes to Grayson, apparently. I admit that much; being with him…that fire so tempting…I crave that bad thing. I hunger for him.
It’s like a drug habit you can’t shake. I tug his shirt up and inhale his scent on the fabric. It’s like the craving between fixes. Your hands get shaky, skin clammy, awaiting the next taste. So, so bad for you—but absolutely satisfying when you get that first hit.
I drop the shirt. Grayson can’t be bought or bribed. He has his own cravings to feed, and I have to satisfy his deviant desires if I’m going to make it out of here alive. I have to find a way to give him what he wants without sacrificing too much.
The smell of the spaghetti gnaws at my stomach. I’ve tried to ignore it, even push it out of the cell. It could be laced with something. However, if taking the chance gets me one step closer out of this hellhole…
I bring the food closer and pick a pill off the plate. I break it in two and swallow half, then pocket the rest. I eat the noodles and tomato sauce with my hands instead of the fork, grinning as I’m reminded of when a woman doused me in pig’s blood and called me an animal. I lick the plate just like the caged animal I’ve become.
Then I slide the dish toward the cell door. It hits the corner bar with a disruptive clank. “Satisfied now?” I ask. Too famished to care, I inhaled every noodle, disregarding the fact that it’s probably drugged. Likely with a hallucinogen to enhance my experience. I laugh out loud at the thought. Grayson’s traps are never so simple as to only lock one of his victims in a cell. I’ve watched hours of torture, the elaborate traps always having a gruesome twist. I suspect I’ll start hallucinating soon, a frantic meltdown where this cage becomes my father’s basement.
Because that’s what he wants, right? Just like the grave, I’m to suffer as my father’s victims suffered. I’m to be punished in the Hollows Reaper’s place for his crimes.
Only as the seconds tick by, nothing happens. “I’m disappointed in you, Grayson. You missed a prime opportunity. This could’ve been your best trap yet.”
But the thought sticks. My home basement manifests from my mind, as if I gave life to the memory by simply thinking it into existence. It wiggles around in my head, slithering from the dark corners. The seams of the cell bend and warp. The shadows play tricks.
I squeeze my eyes closed against the darkness. Curse that meager ray of light. I wonder if Grayson allowed it in here on purpose to fuck with me.
Once the seed is planted, I can’t uproot it. I pace the length of the cell. Back and forth. Trying to tear the thought out of my head, or tire myself out.
Maybe I never made it out of my father’s basement. Maybe I’ve lived an entire lifetime inside a delusion, and in reality, he’s had me trapped in that dank prison all this time.
“Fuck this.” I crouch in the corner and wrap my arms around my legs. I can wait him out. He can’t just keep me here. I have to eat. I have to use the bathroom. With a sudden flash of fear, I recall spotting something on the other side of the cell.
I crawl my way there, feeling my hands out before me, until I find it. I circle my hands around the rim. A bucket. “Oh, my God.”
I bound to my feet and scream. I yell until my lungs catch fire and my stomach aches from overuse of muscles. I shout through the angry tears, and when my voice cracks and gives, I curse Grayson with heated whispers.
He has no answers.
The silence builds until my ears ring from the loss of sound.
I change positions. I pace. I do my routine exercise to alleviate the tenderness in my back. I try not to take the other half of the pill. I fail and take it anyway. Then I take the second one. I try to sleep, and I try to count. I sip at the one water bottle he left me. I hold my bladder, refusing to use the fucking bucket.
I do these things repeatedly. I change the order, doing them at random, trying to trigger something…a change.
How far is Grayson going to dispose of the car? An hour…a day…days? The silence grows thick and heavy, weighing on me in the dark. I’m becoming disoriented. My senses confused. With what’s left of the light, I try to see my hands. A cold wetness covers them—that same sensation I felt that day. I remember the thick red…how it coated my flesh, seeped into every crevice of my skin. Blood stains down to the bone.
Wiping my hands through my hair, I attempt to clean them. Get rid of the feeling. The image comes to me too clearly now. The girl in the mirror with blood-streaked hair and dirt-caked clothes. I throw the water bottle at the image, waiting to hear the glass shatter.
But the only sound to follow the thud of the bottle hitting the ground is the crash of thunder. I whip my head around. The light is gone.
“Damn this to hell.”
I jump and reach for the top bars. My fingers skim them, and I come down with a lancing pain to my back. Doubled over, I take in measured breaths, mentally steeling myself. Then I try again. With a groan, I grab hold of the bars. My arms burn, but I cling and start to swing my legs. Building momentum, I rock back and forth, talking myself into it, before I slam my bare feet into the cell door.
Pain webs through my body. I hit the floor, breath knocked from my lungs. Acute nausea grips me before I can cry out, and I hurl myself onto my side. I try for the bucket, but it’s too far. I lose my stomach right here on the floor.
I wretch until my stomach is as empty as the room, and there’s nothing left but bile. Flames lick my throat, and I mentally curse myself for throwing the water. When I roll onto my back, the pain is a living, breathing demon within me. It rages, working its way to my shoulder blades. My breath saws in and out. I blink back tears against the sudden flickering that covers my vision.
The flashes intensify, and I can’t be sure if it’s from the pain or the storm. A roll of thunder booms in time with each flip of the light. Light and dark. My heart picks up the beat, my blood pulsing painfully in rhythm, syncing with the flickering. Like an 8mm film reel, scratchy images bleed through the haze of pain. My mind is losing the battle.
Rain hammers our tin roof. The plinks come faster, harder, creating a sonogram of vibrations against my eyelids. I try to drift away, but the storm outside won’t let me go. It reminds me that he’ll be home soon.
The creek of pines whispers from my past. Voices float through the thin branches to taunt me. You know.
I shake my head against the floor. The motion tips my body over a cliff, and I’m spiraling down, nowhere to land, nothing to catch me. “Stop.”
The creek grows louder. It’s no longer coming from the trees. I see his boots come down the steps, his weight bowing the boards. I hear the clink of the key entering the lock, then the squeak of the door opening.
She’s panicking. Asking me what to do. What are we going to do?
I look to the girl beside me. “Be good girls.”
My eyes open with a start.
No. no, no, no.
I crawl away from the memory, toward that sliver of light. Where is it? God—where the fuck is it?
The fall jarred something inside me. One of the sealed doors came off the hinges.
I hear Sadie’s voice: once you break the locks, there’s no going back.
How far down does the rabbit hole go?
It’s Grayson’s voice guiding me toward that light now as my fingers claw the floor. Each push forward sends a fire-hot whip of pain across my spinal cord. I absorb the lashes, even welcome them, because the pain is real. I know it exists and why.
But the memories flooding my mind are streaming too fast. Overwhelming. My mind fractures, trying to separate truth from fiction.
He drugged me. Grayson had to have drugged me. I cling to that hope, desperate for the images assaulting my head to dissolve back into the abyss. But where there was once darkness, a light shines, illuminating those haunted corners.
I reach the bars and hold on tight as I tunnel down.
I’m not my father’s daughter.
Not by blood. Not by a nameless, faceless woman who died after I was born. That’s not her garden. That’s not our home. I was born the day he stole me. Brought me into his world of locks and keys and bars. I was born into a dark world—after I was ripped from the light.
“He stole me.”
Even as I delve deeper, the psychologist in me denies it all. Repressed memories aren’t credible. They’re rarely ever accurate. They’re the mind’s way of reshelving memories, sorting too many moments that we’re unable to catalogue. I want to continue to deny it, but it’s as if a shroud has been lifted. Everything so clear, so vivid.
So real.
And I’ve never felt more alone.
You know.
I do know. I’ve always known about the girls, because I was once one of them. Until he pulled me from the cell and kept me for his own. He was a cop. He was the fucking sheriff. Of course, he was also my protector. I stayed in his asylum willingly, and left the other world behind, locking it away forever.
The man I killed was not my father. But the patients I tortured to understand who I am, what I am…suddenly, there are too many of them. The doors crack down the middle, light splintering through the shadows, and the overload flips the kill switch.
I shut down.
