Chapter 3 Below
Below
I count the food again. Tuna and salmon and chicken in little plastic packets, packs of crackers, a jar of peanut butter scraped clean. It’s not much. Two days’ worth, I think. Three if I stretch it.
It’ll take a lot longer than that to starve, won’t it? People last for weeks. Months, even. But I’m already weak, and it won’t be the hunger that kills me.
The water has stopped running.
I have what’s in the toilet and two bottles more, and then I’m done. How long can you last without water? Two days? Three? Not more than that, I think.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do,” I whisper.
Listen.
The word is like the sound of a sharp stone scraping over wood. The other gossamer girls shift and flutter at the edge of my vision—-my lack of vision, really—-but this one sits next to me on the bed.
“I’m running out of time.”
But you have more than you’ve ever had. Listen.
“Then tell me.”
But the girl is gone (was never there). How can I listen if there’s no one to speak? Except, of course, they did speak. They left their words for me to find.
I lie down on the floor, moving my ankle carefully to keep the chain from tangling me. I work my body under the bed, and my practiced fingers find the small flashlight hidden between the mattress and the slatted frame.
Fifteen seconds. That’s all I allow myself, because I don’t know how long the batteries will last, and once they’re gone, the dark will truly own me.
The flashlight is a gift from one of the others.
So is the warning about the batteries. One warning of many, scratched into the wood with the sharp edge of a rock (too small, too dull to break skin; not a weapon, not salvation, not yet) or scrawled with a dull pencil lost before I ever entered this place.
Don’t waste battery
Don’t use name
Save food
Toilet = water
I don’t know which of the girls first wrote the words. I think there must have been others who were here before the words began, or who never found them. Those who slipped silently into the dark. But some have left their mark.
At the center of the middle slat, not drawn but carved with some unknown implement, are five lines, gathered together at the base: a thumb, four crude fingers. The wood along each spindly digit is stained dark with thumbprints of blood. I’ve added my own, but I wasn’t the first.
My name is Amanda.
My name is Madison.
They’ve left their own memorials, clustered around the carving.
Did they know that they were going to die when they wrote their names?
Did they still think they might escape, might break the chain, might make it up twelve cruel steps, might claw their way into the light again?
Or did they only leave their names when they realized it would be all that was left of them?
My name is Stranger.
I run my fingers over the words. They are the truest here. I am a stranger to myself, to anyone who knew me. What I have become down here is not who I was, and will never be again. That, too, is real.
I crab my fingers over the boards, searching for the words I need among these secrets passed from tomb to tomb. Voices babble in my head. Made a knife from can lid. There are never cans anymore, only those sealed pouches of food.
The messages warned me I would get one attempt at escape.
If you get caught once you get to live. I used mine foolishly—-running for the door in one of the rare moments when the manacle was removed from around my ankle.
I didn’t even make it to the bottom of the stairs before a hand caught my hair and yanked me back with vicious efficiency.
Punishment followed. Punishment, but not death.
You’ll know better now.
The girls before chronicled their attempts.
They were caught fashioning tools, cobbling together makeshift weapons, picking the padlock that holds the chain around our ankle.
They were cleverer than me. I’m too ashamed to add my own failure to the list. What could I say?
Be faster. Be smarter. Be better than me.
I’m going to try again, one message reads.
I know it was her last. I know, from the shape of her words, that her name was Madison.
And I am certain she knew she was going to die.
They all did. There’s no other reason to leave those messages, except for the girl who came next, and the one after that.
The girl who scratched checks toilet tank, don’t hide things there had to know her words would only be read after she had died.
THE CHAIN IS FIRST.
The words are bigger, bold, in the center of the slat. I splay my fingers under them. Yes. I’ve been thinking about the stairs, the door, the food, and the light, but I need to start smaller. If I can’t get the chain off, nothing else matters.
DON’T GET CAUGHT.
I breathe out. Almost laugh. Because all the girls before have tried and failed, but I have something they didn’t. The same thing that’s killing me.
Time.
Because the door hasn’t opened. Which means that maybe it won’t open at all.
Maybe I don’t need to worry about being caught.
If I try and it opens again, I’ll die. But if I do nothing and it stays closed, I’ll die anyway. Slowly.
I have to take the risk.
So many avenues of escape have been cut off because any attempt would be discovered. But if things don’t need to be kept whole or hidden, there is so much more I can try.
And if the light comes again, if I’m discovered—-
Then I will die quickly and become gossamer. And either way, I will be free.