Chapter 12
Chloroform doesn’t work the way movies say it does. You’ll wake up in a few minutes unless the rag stays on or is put back repeatedly.
That’s why when I surface enough to find myself lying flat on a hard surface with voices drifting in and out around me, and they bring out the rag again, I know that I’m probably going to die.
Doctors stopped using chloroform to knock patients out years ago for a reason. Sometimes they just didn’t wake up.
I fade in and out to hands on my skin, cool air blowing over my face, the tidal motion of being lifted and carried. Voices, always voices, speaking around and over me. A rag is pressed to my mouth for the fourth, maybe tenth time.
And then, finally, I surface for real.
I blink up at buzzing fluorescents and ceiling tiles, then throw myself to my side to hurl up everything I’ve ever eaten.
What comes up is nothing but water and stomach acid.
I clear my throat and spit onto the carpet, then lie on my side.
I lie there, drifting, until the drum pounding away in my temple can’t be ignored.
I go to touch my temple and stop short. My hands are bound. Cuffed together. They’re so tight that lines have formed under the metal where they cut into my skin. It doesn’t feel real, this thing restricting my movement.
It takes a beat to realize why my palms look so strange above the handcuffs.
They’re clean.
My fingernails are trimmed and rounded, and my cuticles have been oiled. Any trace of the woods, of the black gunk in the killing field is gone. I hold my hands to my nose, and my skin smells like I’ve been crushing lemon rinds and sage.
There’s a hummingbird trapped in my chest. Its wings beat faster and faster as I push up my sleeves to find bruised but clean skin underneath. And then faster still when I see I’m not pushing up a grimy flannel, but a soft white dress.
The hummingbird propels me off the thin carpeted floor. I don’t get far before there’s a hard jerk just under my ribs.
A chain, silver and thick, is secured around my waist. It’s tight enough to leave marks.
The chain, in turn, is secured to a metal plate screwed into the cinder-block wall.
The air is musty and cool. I’m in a basement.
No amount of pulling or clawing could get the chain free.
You’d need bolt cutters—big ones—to make a dent, and then probably not even then.
Trapped, the goblin says.
What comes next isn’t a word, but a feeling. A torrent of feelings of being trapped, unable to move, unable to escape, stuck in the dark—
And then I scream.
If my throat was raw before, now it’s bloody. Every thought that isn’t Get out, get out, get out, get it OFF, pours out of my head. I scream and try to push the chain down over my hips but the—
walls press back, contorting your limbs and trapping you in the dark
If I had something sharp, I could carve away my flesh until it fit over my hip bones. I could carve off my breasts and dislocate my shoulders and gnaw off any bits that were keeping me—
locked in this box
—chained to this fucking wall.
Arms wrap around my chest from behind. Again.
A moment of vertigo takes me, and then I throw my unpinned arm back as hard as I can.
The crunch of cartilage under my elbow is almost satisfying enough to overshadow the instant pain radiating up my arm.
There’s a warm rush of liquid on the nape of my neck, and then I’m released.
Before I can turn to face whoever it is, I’m thrown on the ground.
I’m being held down by people with faces smudged out by a thumb.
They tell me to stop, to calm down, other things that don’t make sense.
I shriek and kick and tell them to go fuck themselves.
One lets out an “Oof!” when I get him in the gut.
He presses his forearm to my throat. Footsteps pound down the stairs. Let them come. I’ll hurt them all.
Haircut’s face materializes out of the blur. The man whose nose I crushed with my elbow pulls away, choking and sputtering blood. I recognize him. It’s Greg.
Haircut is in my face, shouting. “We’ll kill her! We’ll fucking kill her if you don’t stop!”
He fists a hand in my hair and yanks. The world goes blurry from the pain radiating from the gash at the back of my skull. A whine whistles out of my lips.
“Look! Just look!”
I do. It’s two people—one standing in front of the other. I know one of them.
Her arms are behind her back and she’s gagged with a bandanna. A bruise swells her left cheek. Hair has escaped from the claw clip at the back of her head and sticks to her sweaty skin. There’s a wickedly curved knife pressed to the soft skin of her neck.
“Emma?” Her name is more wheeze than word.
Haircut leans more heavily on my throat. He’s panting. “Are you calm?”
Every tendon and muscle in my body is ready to kick, to bite, to claw. I swallow it down and nod.
“Doing that again would be very bad. Do you understand? We have plenty of sedatives here. Or we could tie you up so you can’t move at all. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to hurt your friend either. Okay?”
I nod again, tasting the burn of bile in the back of my throat.
He retreats to stand between Leah and the youth pastor–looking motherfucker holding Emma.
“Jesus Christ!” Greg says. It comes out more like “Jeshush Chisht.” He glares at everyone around him. “She broke my noesh again!”
Leah says, “Calm down.”
“Fuck you, Leah. Anyone elshe notishe I’m the only one getting my shit kicked around here? Thish ish sho fucked!”
Haircut orders, “Go upstairs.”
Greg flees up the stairs at the far end of the room.
“Rough day for Greg,” I say.
“I understand this is very traumatic for you,” Haircut says.
“What you’re feeling right now is understandable.
It’s valid. Regardless, we’re going to need you to calm down and listen to what we say.
We do not want to hurt you. I’d rather you be comfortable.
But, if you don’t cooperate, we’ll punish your friend.
If that doesn’t sway you, consider that your dog is upstairs.
We’d like to spare her, but, again, if you choose not to listen, she will die in pain, wondering why you aren’t there to make it stop. Is that what you want?”
“How do I even know she’s alive? You could be lying.”
Haircut nods to Leah. While she’s taking her phone out of her pocket and flipping through it, I’m watching Haircut.
Who’s the boss? Is it Ellis or this guy?
Haircut is ordering people around, and they’re listening to those orders.
Was Haircut communicating with the sheriff?
Or someone else I haven’t met yet? How many people are in on this?
Leah turns her phone around so I can see the screen. It’s Ripley. She’s lying on a blanket in a bright room. Her eyes are closed. For one heart-stopping moment I am certain these people are showing me a picture of my dead dog, but the angle shifts, and I realize it’s a video.
“Riley,” a voice says. A bell rings in the back of my head, then goes quiet. “Hey, doggie, look here. Yeah, that’s it. Good dog!”
Ripley opens her eyes. There’s a spot of red on the blanket under her snout. She blinks slowly. The video ends.
Leah puts her phone back in her pocket. Her lips are smug, and her hair is in a stupid messy bun that’s still the perfect amount of messy despite everything.
Hurt her, the goblin says.
I would if I could—
reach the hand dangling too close to the cage, small bones crack between your teeth, warm blood coats your mouth, the thrashing animal on the other end shrieks and shrieks
My hand goes to my mouth. No blood dripping from the corners. No flesh stuck between my teeth. Still, the ghosts of porous bone and wet meat linger in my mouth.
Haircut looks relieved. “Right now, you just have to wait. That’s it. Just sit here and wait. Do you think you can do that?”
“What are we waiting for?” I ask.
“Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
I stare at him. He didn’t answer my question, and he’s not going to. He keeps the same polite, unbothered look on his face.
“We’re going to head out now. Leah will be down—”
“I don’t have any money. Don’t know anyone with any either. If that’s what you want, you’ve got the wrong person.”
Leah huffs and rolls her eyes.
Haircut continues to ignore me and helps Youth Pastor secure Emma to another chain bolted into the cinder-block wall. She jerks out of their grip when the padlock clicks in place, linking the handcuffs around her wrists and the thick, metal chain together.
There is a series of chains spaced out on the white walls that I hadn’t noticed. One of which sits directly under a rusted brown stain on the wall.
Haircut motions Leah to the stairs. Before he turns to leave, he says, “We’ll be back. Please keep calm in the meantime, okay? We’ll know if you don’t.”
Panic hits me as they clomp up the stairs. What if they leave and don’t come back? What if they leave us here and flies lay eggs in our eyes? That strange déjà vu finds me again. This time it’s—
panic as they retreat and the meager dark descends; hunger twists and burns and twists and burns and eventually sleep comes but not true sleep and then the light again and the hunger again and the pain again again again
The basement door snicks shut.
Emma stands stock-still, glaring at the bottom of the stairs.
She blows air out of her nose like an angry bull, then says something I can’t understand through the bandanna.
She kneels, and after much wriggling and many angry muffled words, manages to work the handcuffs under her feet.
She yanks the bandana down as soon as her hands are out front.
“Wow,” I say.
“What the fuck! Like, literally what the fuck, Lou.”
I hold up my hands. They’re shaking, just like my breath.
“I’m not saying I told you so, but I fucking did tell you so.
I warned you, dude. What did I say? You were going to be serial-killed.
” She stands and holds up an angry finger.
“You may be thinking, ‘But it’s a cult, Emma. Technically you were wrong.’ I submit the fact that they’ve clearly done this before to other people. It’s a serial-killing cult!”
She motions to the other chains on the wall, then begins to pace as far as the one attached to her will let her go. I don’t have words. If I did, what would they even be? She stops and turns to me.
“Why are you wearing an ugly prairie dress from Target?”
Her tone makes the question into an accusation, like out of this whole situation it’s the thing she’s angriest about. There’s definitely something wrong with me, because it makes me laugh. The skin on my face pulls weird and too tight when I smile.
“Maybe it was on sale.”
She scowls at me, then slides to the ground. Her arms go around her knees.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
All the anger she had before has drained away, leaving a quiet despair I’ve never seen from her. Despair is infectious. It’s airborne and insidious. When they come for us, they’ll crack my ribs and find nothing but dark, despairing air inside.
I draw my knees up too and press my back to the wall.
The chain cuts into my middle. I resist the urge to dig my fingers into my skin and tear.
I ache all over. Did the person who undressed me feel anything when they saw the bruises decorating my skin?
Were they gentle or did they press down on purpose?
“I don’t know.”