Chapter 6 Below
Below
My fingers are raw, my palms lashed with abrasions, but I have pried free the lowermost slat of the bed—-a slender length of brittle wood. Rather than nails, long staples jut out of the ends. It’s almost nothing. And it’s everything. Because it’s proof of what I can do, and it’s a declaration.
I can’t turn back now.
What can she even do with that? the girls ask.
Too flimsy to be a weapon.
It won’t break the chain.
It’s nothing.
Useless.
She’ll die down here.
They’re a chorus of insects, wing--buzz chatter, flitting shapes.
Some are more distinct than others. The girl with round eyes, the one with glasses (broken, bent), the one who holds her hand over her throat at all times.
These are the ones who wrote the messages.
They’re more real to me, easier to imagine into being.
But there are others. I can’t count them—-they’re only quicksilver shapes that merge and split and watch soundlessly.
I can’t give them voices unless I have their words, after all.
I can’t know how many might have never left their mark.
I wonder where they’ve gone, the girls who came before. Buried deep or left in the open for flies to crawl across their staring eyes.
Stay focused. The girl sits next to me, head high, unafraid—-nothing to ever be afraid of again.
“I don’t want to die,” I say.
Is that the truth?
“It was supposed to be my choice.”
And that makes it different.
“Of course it does.”
The gossamer girl lowers her chin a fraction, acknowledging the point. Think it through. What do you have?
A length of wood. Pine, probably. No real weight to it. Only the pricks of the staples at the end, little strength to them.
What do you have that you didn’t before?
I imagine the layout of the room. The sweep of the chain.
The toilet. Beyond my reach, the chairs.
The table. They’re outside the range of the chain; they’re a privilege to be earned.
The farthest stretch of my fingertips won’t graze them, but now—-now I have reach.
Maybe I can snag them, pull them toward me.
The chairs, definitely. Maybe even the table.
They’re cheap aluminum things. Hollow legs, flimsy surfaces. They won’t be strong enough to chip away at concrete, to break a chain.
But they’re more than I have now.
Good, the gossamer girl says, satisfied.
I wonder if I’m going crazy. They seem more real than ever, these ghosts of my invention.
The first time they appeared, they were only a shiver in the air and a yearning not to be alone, my mind fixed on those scattered words.
I shaped them bit by bit in my imagination, but I can’t tell the difference anymore between what I see and what I wish I could see.
My eyes have been starved of light too long for reality to matter.
Think, the gossamer girl says, or I say to myself (is there a difference?).
What do I have? A length of wood; some strength yet; an improbable desire, after all this time, to survive. A bed, my breath, enough food for another few days, enough water for less than that.
Water—-the water in the toilet tank, which means the toilet, too.
The top of the tank is covered with a flimsy plastic lid taken from a storage box, ill--fitting, and even if the original ceramic had been there, I don’t think it would have been strong enough to break the chain, strong enough to do anything but shatter (but the pieces might have been sharp, might have been useful).
But the toilet isn’t just the toilet. It’s the mechanisms inside.
It’s the pipes, and it’s the bolts driven down deep into the concrete slab to hold it in place.
I kneel down next to the toilet, running my fingers over the cold porcelain. I follow its contours to the base, and there I find the rusted lumps of the bolts and nut heads. My fingers find no purchase on them. I’ll never get a grip tight enough to turn them, but I can tell they’re substantial.
There are places where the chain is weak. Links waiting to break. If they’re long enough, strong enough, those bolts might be enough leverage for the task.
She’s fooling herself, one of the girls says, contemptuous. Her scorn ripples over my skin.
Maybe I am. But I’m done waiting in the dark.
The chatter of the girls is near constant.
A voice slips in among them, and I don’t notice that rather than the distant, dry echoing of the girls, this voice is muffled to softness.
It comes not from the alcoves of my own mind but from beyond the walls of the room, beyond the stairs and the door.
I register it only when it’s gone, the sound of it lingering like a question never to be answered.
By the time I’m sure of what I heard, I’ve already convinced myself that it was only my imagination.