(Note: Doesn’t really capture the story well.)
The nice thing about being kidnapped and locked in a basement is that you start to appreciate the lesser benefits a basement offers as a residence.
For example, the insulation a basement offers makes the music the neighbors keep playing only a low hum. It isn’t just bearable, it becomes kind of pleasant, though I must admit, something that wasn’t screaming rock would be nice. It is December, after all.
That’s another perk: the temperature. Sure, whatever the chain and handcuff… things… are around my limbs are cold, especially in the morning, and because it is wet in the morning they starting to dig into my skin and cause me to bleed. But, the basement’s temperature, on the whole, is stable. Fortunately I was wearing my coat, fortunately it was not taken from me. It is a crisp sleeping temperature, and it makes the soup that is brought to me…
Oh, there’s the door now. There’s a dim light in the basement, it is dusty and the glass of it is burnt on the inside. Worse, it hangs out of my reach so I can’t turn it off at night. When the door opens, however, there is a bath of bright light in the basement. My kidnapper, evidently, lives in a world of flash photography. It makes it evident that I am still alive, because it makes the bones (what are they from?) in the opposite corner of me visible.
Yes, I am going to die. That’s a major drawback to being locked in this particular basement. But let’s say I was saved, and I won’t be, would I consider setting up a living space in my own basement? Sure.
There are 13 steps between this person’s basement and their main floor. When he comes down, he yells in his cold voice that I need to close my eyes. This is the eighth time he has come down in the last two days, and I wonder which time will be the last. He lumbers down the stairs while blustering, and it makes every step infinitely louder and longer. His snorts and gasps for air are not very flattering.
Of course, he was flattering when I came to the door. I am a door-to-door vacuum salesman, though I suspect I’ll probably find a new line of work should I escape from here. He has black hair, which reached just below his neck, and is styled into something of a feathery helmet. His eyes are dull, brown stones, but he has a large smile and remarkable teeth. There may not be better teeth in the state, maybe the country. The world? Well, who am I to say that?
So when he seemed interested in buying my vacuum, how was I supposed to know he would hit me in the back of my head with something; it felt like the bottom of a plastic two-liter bottle. I didn’t know the head was so fragile as to be knocked out by something like that, but so it was. When I woke up my feet were shackled to a wall, as well as my right hand, and my head throbbed.
But there is something of a benevolence to him, because there were also two aspirin and a glass of water for me when I woke up, which I had no choice but to appreciate. Except for the headache, I would have spent the next hours screaming for help. I did that this morning, but it amounted to nothing. Of course, I should have known it wouldn’t work because of the volume of the neighbor’s music. This has been a learning experience.
Now he makes me close my eyes and he brings me down a different kind of soup each time (once yesterday night, again this morning, and now), and leaves a note on which he writes “Needs?” but he doesn’t leave me a pen to answer. I would like to write back, “juice” and maybe I would have the nerve to write “liberty.”
After his 13 laborious steps upward, I discover that today’s soup is lentil. My least favorite, but so be it. There is no note this time, though, and I feel a little less hungry.
The other thing about being locked in a basement is that it makes you detail-oriented. The 13 steps, for instance; the fact that the furnace turns on once every half-hour with a loud bang that woke me up all night; I’ve noticed there are three spots in the walls where water drips in, and they seem like easy fixes. You count every spoonful of soup, not only might it be your last, but you also just want to know if it was good sustenance.
Upstairs, there’s a hammering. The bangs and crashes are disturbing, I have to admit, but I am glad to have my mind occupied with something to think about. This morning, for example, I heard him running a vacuum. Was it the one I brought in for demonstration? And did he like it? Did he know about the switch on the back right side that makes it especially effective on wood floors? Probably not. I tried to tell him about it this afternoon when he came down with a glass of water, but he just kicked me in the stomach, so I stopped.
It’s hard to stay positive when you are locked in a basement with bones, and all you are eating is soup, and really you just want to go home. There’s nobody home, but I left my phone in the car outside, there were probably some messages on it now. What if someone came looking for me and saw my car outside? I figure that’s probably my only hope, but I just went through a nasty break-up the days before I came here, so I didn’t have much. My friends had no use for my physical presence for the most part.
Let’s say I don’t escape and I’m dead because this guy kills me, which he will. He’s not going to let me go from a change of heart. It’s hard to find Dickens in the real world. What advice would I give someone who was in my position?
First of all, don’t waste too much energy struggling. You aren’t going to escape, and let’s say you do. Your captor would hear you bumbling up the stairs, and then how would you get out? You would probably only hasten your demise.
Don’t bother shouting. My shouting this morning led to me getting only a half a glass of water and three-quarters a bowl of soup. I think that’s a bit unjust of my captor, but this is a learning experience. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.
Lastly, if the kids are outside singing a nursery rhyme about the house you are about to approach, and it goes something like “There’s a house over there, which nobody dares,” just skip it. Your life is not worth a sale.
Oh, there’s another thing. I had heard that if someone is holding you up, or otherwise threatening you, a good way to stop them from killing you is to tell them personal details about yourself. Your name, your hometown, something about your parents, anything. I’ve found this doesn’t work with kidnappers (serial killers?) who lock their victims in the basement. It earned me another assault on my stomach, and my captor wears steel-toed boots, so you can imagine it is quite the difficulty.
I’m trying to remain positive, though. What do I get if I start to weep, if I’m worried that I’m going to die and the hammering upstairs is almost certainly some contraption to make my end a torture? Not much, it would probably only make these end times even more difficult.
The banging this morning was slight, but the bastard who captured me is reinvigorated this evening, and now it comes in furious waves. I can’t even hear the neighbor’s music over it. I wonder if he has ever considered getting his basement finished, though that would require him to dispose of his bone collection. The benefits to the captee, however, would be massive.
The way I’m restrained forces me to lay down, but I can pick whether I’m on my side or my stomach or my back. The floor is a gray speckled cement, clean where I am. In other areas the light reflects off the dust on the ground at me. All I can think, and I know it’s terrible, is how my vacuum would clean that right up.
I’m catching up on my sleep though, since that’s mostly what I do between meals, except it is hard with the furnace. I figure I probably have fiver or six more impacts of it turning on before my captor brightens the room again.
One strange thing about this basement is that pushed into the corner is a foosball table. It hardly seems like something a serial killer would own. It’s the type of thing family and friends might focus on when he’s caught. I can’t imagine the inanity of the coverage. Well, I can.
“Reporter: Could you imagine him doing this?
Family: No, never! I mean, he was friendly and kind. He had a foosball table for his nephews!”
“Reporter: Did you ever think this could happen in your neighborhood?
Neighbor: No, he seemed like a good neighbor, though he mostly kept to himself. He kept his grass manicured, and his siding was the cleanest in the neighborhood. Sometimes, he put his foosball table out in his driveway and would let anyone come play.
Reporter: Was he any good?
Neighbor: Yes, very. He had adroit hands. We should have known.”
Meanwhile, I would never even get to play it, and I had never played foosball. It sure sounded fun, when you were laying on the ground sucking up the watery remains of lentil soup.
I used the plastic green bowl as a pillow and fell back to sleep.
The furnace roared into action, waking me up. How long had it been? The window was dark, but it was late evening, I figure, when I fell asleep. Upstairs, the banging had ceased, replaced with his footsteps which carried him back and forth across the house. He was pacing. Maybe he was more nervous than I.
Three more furnace booms later, each louder than the last, the door to the world opened, and his voice wafted down with a soothing tone.
“Please, your eyes.” he pleaded.
“I would rather not,” I answered.
“You have to. Your eyes!” he said with more command. But I refused. The door closed and he left me. There were two booms, again escalating in their violence, before the door opened again.
There was no voice. Only his flopping body making its way slovenly down the stairs. He turned the corner, and I noticed he had an oxygen tank with him. Where did that come from?
The mask was strapped to his face with a black elastic cord, and every breath he took fogged it up. He was wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves, like this was some sort of movie, but I was finding it hard to breathe, which was not.
Another tip, I guess, since I have time. Make sure to control your breathing, even to the last. Otherwise, it feels like when you most want to hold on to life, your body is rebelling against you and making even basic functions, like breathing, a struggle. It’s disconcerting.
The tank was on a cart with a rusty wheel, and it squeaked as he rolled around the room. His arms looked frail now that they were bare. I should have mentioned, perhaps you may have noticed this first if you were in my spot: he was wearing no shirt, though he did have extremely baggy sweat pants and a belt. But, I must say, the oxygen tank and mask stuck out to me most, then the gloves.
He peered down at me, briefly, just long enough to make my body sweat, to make me beg for forgiveness. For what? I wasn’t religious, I hadn’t been inside a church since I was ten and my uncle got remarried. I guess I felt this was punishment, otherwise how the hell was this fair? Even if I survived, how could I live in a world where this happened to people who didn’t deserve it. But, who deserves this?
He lurched into a room underneath the stairs, and I could hear things behind the wall removed and replaced. I asked a question about the vacuum, but I can’t even remember what it was. I just asked it. What did I say?
The oxygen tank had a leak or something, and it fizzed in the room. The sound of it overtook the neighbor’s music, it seeped into every corner and echoed back to me, and now I couldn’t hear what was happening behind the wall.
A cough broke the tank’s assault, and then the masked, gloved man, the man who I just wanted to help with a more efficient vacuum, approached me with a syringe. I felt light-headed, and I needed to lie down. I was already lying down, you might say, but this isn’t really lying down. My advice to you is don’t give advice to people that have been kidnapped or killed until you’ve been in the situation yourself. It’s not as easy as it sounds. In that way, it is akin to selling vacuums.
Most people already have vacuums. The man bound my free arm to a fourth shackle, and I was rendered immobile. He used a pair of yellow scissors to cut off my left sleeve, making me understand how great my coat was in this basement which was too cold, on second thought.
While he dabbed a wet cloth on my arm and the smell of alcohol clouded the air, at first I considered how crazy this kindness was, but I remembered: he’s the type of person that collects bones in his basement, and he uses an oxygen mask I suspect he doesn’t really need.
I couldn’t see the syringe go in, but it still took my breath away. I know, I know, you can’t feel stuff being injected into you. But I swear I could. I was cold and syrupy, and it made my whole body feel like a hose when there’s a kink.
The hissing tank squeaked away from me, but I couldn’t open my eyes. It was tiring. Being locked in a basement is tiring.
The furnace tried to kick on, but something strange happened this time. There was a lot of red. My body felt warm. I felt thankful.
The John Robert Fair 