Mortified, I wiggle away from her and collapse to the floor. I’m dizzy and embarrassed and when I look up at her she is so naked, right there in front of me—I’ve never seen anyone so naked—and this is wrong it’s all wrong, all wrong, all wrong.
She kneels next to me on the floor, takes me in her arms and tells me to do as she says and everything will be all right. Trust me, she says. Trust me.
I don’t want to do this.
It doesn’t matter.
Darkness closes in and she swallows every bit of me, devouring scraps I can never regain, pieces of me I can never rebuild.
Wandering through the house now in this new darkness, I stumble about, hands reaching for the walls, hoping they might guide me or give me some bearing. None of the light switches work and I can’t find any of the windows—where are the windows?
And then I am back in the same living room, and she is there on the couch, smiling at me. Her breasts are bloody, the nipples ringed in crimson and dripping. The sight sickens me, but she wanted me to; demanded that I hurt her like that with my teeth, and so I can taste her too—on my lips—her blood, her life, her soul. All that is inside her is now inside of me, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid.
She reaches out, walks her fingers up my leg like a spider and grabs hold of me. It’s OK, she says, no one will know unless you tell. She drops to her knees; whispering her demented prayers again and smiling at me like a mannequin—hollow beyond her exteriors, void of anything real.
I am inside her again, this time between her legs.
She is warm, wet, empty and soulless.
I can feel blood running through my veins; can hear my heart pumping it.
Something from deep inside her crawls into me, slips beneath my skin, slithers through me like a garden snake, its tiny head and scaled skin slinking up the back of my throat, gagging me as its tongue flicks at the roof of my mouth.
More echoes from the past taunt the present. Someone calls out to the angels, calls them by name. Someone screams in agony.
I’m certain it’s me.
When those memories part like dark curtains, I again find myself at the top of the stairs peering into Linda’s bedroom, listening to the sounds and watching all that is happening to her there. Her eyes meet mine, though briefly. She knows what I have seen, knows by the grimace on my face that I am terrified and repelled, but she is neither.
She is pleased.
Good… good… good boy, she whispers, though not to me.
I back away and move as quietly as I can down the staircase, my heart racing. I can see the door, am moving toward it, but it seems impossibly far away—painted on a distant backdrop—a light at the end of a tunnel I can never reach.
And then it’s quiet, gone from me, buried so deep that maybe it was never there at all.
It wasn’t until I came awake that I realized I had either fallen asleep or passed out.
My first thought was that I’d been sealed into a tomb of some sort, because the darkness I opened my eyes to was no longer dreamlike. This was real. The flooring beneath me was cool and damp, and at the farthest reaches of my peripheral vision I could make out only slivers of faint light. Visions of being deep in a grave, of having been buried alive flashed through my mind, and I tried to move as I came awake, gasping and lurching into a sitting position all at once.
What I intended as a screech strangled the base of my throat and came out as a gagging cough instead, and I scrambled around, flailing, slipping on the cement beneath me while trying to gain my bearings.
As the haze cleared and my eyes gradually adjusted to the near dark, I saw that I had somehow ended up in the basement of the house. The light was from a series of squat windows positioned along the foundation. The stale smell was worse down here, but despite the heat wave it was relatively cool.
I leaned against the brick wall and ran a hand through my hair. How the hell had I ended up here? I had no memory whatsoever of having left the upstairs. Slowly, I sank back down into a squat and tried to collect myself.
Across from me was an area that had once housed a washing machine and dryer. A bit further down the wall was the bulkhead, the doors intact but rotted and splintered in places. I followed the light to one of the windows and on tiptoes, saw the backyard from ground level. There was still daylight but it was burning fast.
Night was on its way.
Behind me was a wooden staircase that led back upstairs. I remembered that on the other side of the door at the top of those stairs was a small pantry off of the kitchen. In my state of sleepwalking, hallucinating or whatever was happening to me, I must have wandered back downstairs, through the kitchen and down these stairs to the basement. “But why?” I asked the walls, the darkness. “Why here? Why here, Bernard?”
Something told me to look back over my shoulder to the section of cellar I had awakened in. Empty space. Brick walls and a cement floor. Nothing.
I walked back across the cellar, glancing at the array of thick cob and spider webs lining the rafters overhead. At the spot where I had awakened, I looked more closely at the rafters, at the wall, and finally the floor. I had either subconsciously put myself here or had been placed here by some external force for a reason, so I crouched down and searched the area for clues or some sign that might explain why.
On hands and knees I swept my hands along the floor. It was damp and a bit grainy from small particles of sand and dirt but I found nothing out of the ordinary.
Until my hand came across a small pile of dirt where the floor met the wall.
I looked closer, and though the light was sparse I managed to see that it was a small mound of some substance, though not dirt. I grabbed a handful and let it slide back to the floor between my fingers. It was gray in color and had a granular feel. Cement.
Cement from an interior wall that had been constructed to separate the washing machine and dryer from the rest of the basement.
Tracing the short jog of brick wall with my finger, I followed a logical path upward to a point where the debris had more than likely originated. The first few rows of bricks were intact, so I followed the narrow avenues of cement between them with a fingertip, running my hand along as if following a maze, and eventually hit a soft spot a bit higher up the wall.
On my knees, I looked at the brick more closely, and saw a small divot. I pushed my finger against it and it gave way, widened and grew as more loose granules fell to the floor and joined the little pile below. I continued working the area with my finger, pushing and scraping until enough had given way for me to get two fingers into the crevice. The brick began to loosen rather easily, and I realized then that it had been fitted back into this section of the wall and made to look intact when in fact it was anything but. I grabbed the face of the brick and wiggled it, and with minimal effort pulled it free of the wall with an eerie scraping sound.
Dust motes flew about from the now open segment of wall like tiny escaping entities.
I placed the brick on the floor and peered into the hole I had created, but I couldn’t see a thing, so I tried one of the bricks next to it. To my surprise, it too gave way with little effort, and suddenly, the one beneath it fell out as well.