Chapter Two: It’s a Boy

CHAPTER TWO:

It’s a Boy

Patrick Young wandered through a dark tunnel, lost and cold and blind. Every so often a brief flash of light would reveal images that he recognized but could not connect in any way that made sense to him. A dirty cement floor, a rusted metal bucket, a water-stained ceiling, a single dim bulb behind a wire cage. He didn’t have time to adequately ponder these images because the light flares lasted only seconds and then he was plunged back into utter blackness. Not just an absence of light, but a treatise against the very concept of light. A declaration that light had only ever been a myth, something imagined but not anything real. The darkness was so total, in fact, that he began to doubt he had an actual body, believing that he merely floated in an abyss that had swallowed the world.

And there had once been a world, hadn’t there? And he had been a part of it? Yes, he’d been a young man with a rich life, a sophomore in college with a boyfriend he thought he might love, an interest in impressionist art and Middle Eastern food, a fitness freak who liked to lift weights and go hiking.

Or had all that merely been a dream?

Patrick became aware that he’d made his way out of the dark tunnel only when the light started to hurt his eyes. And not a brief flash of light, but a steady frosty glow shed from the bulb behind the wire cage in the water-stained ceiling.

He no longer doubted the existence of his body, either. He’d never been quite so aware of it, in fact. He lay against a cold hard floor, and pinpoints of pain pricked his flesh all over like pushpins stuck in a map. The worst pain was concentrated in his head, a thunderstorm rumbling behind his eyes. He lifted an arm that felt as if it weighed a ton and touched his left temple. His fingers came away tacky with blood.

Patrick pushed himself up to a sitting position, though it took more effort than he would have imagined. The pinpoints of pain became hammer blows, and the room swam and spun around him. He felt vaguely nauseated and the darkness began to reassert itself. He leaned his back against the wall behind him and took a couple of deep breaths to increase his oxygen levels for a boost of energy. Gradually the darkness receded, like shadows fleeing from the rising sun, and his stomach settled. The aches in his body remained, as did the pounding in his head.

Sitting up seemed all the movement of which he was capable at the moment, so while he rested he scanned his surroundings. A small, windowless room, a perfect square that he’d guess to be about ten feet by ten feet. The floor was gray cement, three of the walls—the one at his back, the one to his left, and the one straight ahead in which a heavy-looking door was centered—were rough stone. The wall to his right was blank white plaster. The room was empty except for two buckets sitting next to him. Leaning forward, even that small motion making him feel faint, he looked inside them. One was empty but with dark stains and a foul smell he didn’t want to contemplate, the other filled with what looked like dry dog food. Roughly midway down the back wall, a water spigot with a wheel-shaped valve.

Reaching up again, he gently probed the wound on his head, a knot the size of a walnut with an inch-long gash just below the hairline. Even though he barely pressed at the knot, it sent lightning bolts of pain ricocheting inside his skull. What the hell had happened to him?

The last thing he clearly remembered was leaving his dorm room for an early morning jog around Furman Lake. He still wore his gray jogging pants, maroon sweatshirt, and Puma sneakers. He’d taken his usual route, down through the rose garden from the main campus before he started the circle past the dining hall and amphitheater, through the woods then around by the clock tower and Frisbee golf course. He could vividly recall coming up to the large parking lot by the bookstore, because he’d noted how few cars there were that morning, but then everything disappeared into that abyss from which he’d only recently escaped.

Had he been in some kind of accident, maybe slipped and banged his head? That might make sense, except this certainly was no hospital room. Bracing his back against the stone, he slowly pressed his way up the wall until he was standing. The nausea returned and he thought for a moment he would have to use one of the buckets, but gradually the queasiness subsided.

He pushed away from the wall and swayed there for a moment. When it became clear he would not be able to stay up under his own strength, he planted one hand against the stones for support. He began to shuffle to the right, and each step felt unsteady, as if the floor beneath him was unstable and rubbery like one of those bouncy houses for children. He closed his eyes to lessen the vertigo and let his hand trailing the wall lead him. At the corner, he turned and followed until the next corner. Only when his fingers moved from rough stone to smooth wood did he open his eyes.

The door was thick, as thick as the wall surely. He grasped the knob and turned, but the door would not budge. Not even remotely. He rammed his shoulder against the wood several times, but even if he had not felt so weak, he doubted it would have made much difference. The door was solid, the lock sturdy.

Patrick slapped an open palm against the door. “Hello,” he called, barely recognizing the husky, quavering voice as his own. “Can anyone hear me? I want out!”

“I don’t think he’s here right now, but even if he was, he wouldn’t let you out.”

Patrick whirled around so quickly he nearly lost his balance and toppled to the floor, leaning heavily on the door to keep upright. He scanned the small square again, sure the voice had come from somewhere in the room.

Which was impossible. The area was small and open, no place for anyone to hide. He was alone.

“What’s your name?” the disembodied voice said again, and now Patrick realized it came not from the room but next to the room. On the other side of the plaster wall.

Patrick made his way over, leaving the security of the door to cut across diagonally. His gate was awkward and unsteady, like that of a newborn calf just learning to walk, but he made it without falling. He placed his forehead against the cool plaster and said, “Is there really someone there?”

“Yes, what is your name?”

“Patrick. What’s yours?”

“Clare. Are you hurt?”

“Yeah. I think I hit my head or something. I don’t really remember. Can you let me out of here?”

A few extended seconds of silence before the reply came. “No, I’m locked in myself.”

The pain clouded Patrick’s mind, making it hard for him to concentrate or think clearly. He even wondered if he were talking to anyone real or if he were experiencing auditory hallucinations. Could head trauma cause such a thing?

“Are you still there?” the girl asked from the other side of the wall.

“I think,” Patrick said and laughed, the sound shrill and brittle. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know. I woke up in here, same as you. I haven’t been outside of this room since.”

“How long have you been with me?” Patrick said then gritted his teeth as if the act of thinking were as strenuous as bench pressing two hundred pounds and tried again. “I mean, how long have you been here?”

“It’s hard to say. I don’t have a watch, and there are no windows here, so it gets hard to keep track of day and night. Like, right now I have no idea if it’s morning, noon, or midnight. As best I can tell, I’ve been here two or three months.”

Patrick turned around so that his back was now against the wall. He let himself sink down until his rear hit the floor. “How did you get here?” he asked, hoping her answer to the question may help him answer it for himself.

“He brought me here. He found me in the park, knocked me unconscious with a baseball bat, and I woke up here.”

Indeed, her words brought a revelatory spark of memory. He’d been jogging through the parking lot toward the bookstore. Behind him he’d heard a car door open and a voice call out, “Hey, son!” He’d turned, but that was where the memory began to break down. There had been a figure there, but he couldn’t make out any details, and the blur of a long cylindrical object rushing toward his face. Could have been a bat, he supposed.

“How old are you?” the girl asked. What had she said her name was? Caitlin, Connie, Clarice . . .

Clare!

“I’m twenty. How about you, Clare?”

“Fifteen. I’m a freshman at Riverside High.”

“That’s in Greer?” Patrick asked, finding that the gears in his brain were moving with a little more ease.

“Yeah. I live just off Highway 14.”

“I go to Furman in Greenville.”

“Greenville, huh? He’s branching out. The lady before you was from Greer like me.”

“The lady before me?”

“Yeah, there was a woman in that room before you. She was already here when I got here.”

“What was her name?”

“Linda,” Clare said, then added, “I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, honestly, she gave me different names on different days, but Linda was the one she gave me most often. I kinda think that was her real one.”

“What happened to her?” Patrick asked, not really wanting to know but feeling like he needed to know.

“I . . . I don’t know. He took her out of here maybe a week ago.”

“Took her out? Was she . . . I mean, had he . . . ?”

“She was still alive at the time,” Clare said. “I don’t know what happened to her after that.”

“Did she fight him?”

Silence stretched out for a moment before Clare answered. “No, by that point there wasn’t much fight left in her.”

Patrick experienced another of those moments where he wanted to avoid asking a question even though he felt the information was vital to his situation. Not yet ready to face the question head-on, he instead asked, “How long had she been here?”

“I don’t know for sure. She wasn’t very clear on the subject; sometimes she said she’d been here forever. If I had to guess, I’d say a long time. Her mind was pretty much gone after everything he did to her.”

He closed his eyes and tried to steady his nerves. He had never been a praying man, didn’t believe in divine intervention or deus ex machinas; he believed only in himself, in his own innate abilities, his strength and intelligence and perseverance. If he hoped to find his way out of the nightmare in which he’d awakened, he had to trust in himself. Which meant not lying to himself, not shying away from things that frightened him. These were the very things he needed to face head-on. It was the only way he could hope to figure a way out of this mess.

“What did he do to her?” Patrick asked, his voice steady and sounding more like his own again.

“Well, obviously I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear plenty. Too much. I tried to cover my ears, but it didn’t help. I still hear it in my dreams.”

“Hear what? Tell me what he did to her.”

“He raped her. Repeatedly and violently. Sometimes several times a day. She would scream and cry and a few times she called my name and begged me to help, but none of that was the worst part.”

When she didn’t continue, Patrick was tempted to let it go. Did he really want to know the worst part? No, but what he wanted wasn’t important.

“What was the worst part?”

When Clare spoke, her voice was soft and tremulous. Patrick had to actually place his ear against the wall to hear her better.

“The worst part,” she said after a shaky breath, “was afterwards. The screaming was usually over by then, though sometimes I could still hear Linda whimpering. In the quiet that ensued, I mostly heard what he said to her.”

“Was it vile?”

“No, it was sweet. It was tender. After violating her so brutally, he would tell her how much he loved her, how beautiful she was, how happy she made him, how lucky he was to have her in his life. Like they were a pair of newlyweds or something. It was grotesque.”

The nausea returned, though for different reasons this time. Patrick swallowed it down and pushed forward. The more information he could gather, the better. Knowledge was power, as the cliché purported.

“Clare, I don’t mean to be indelicate, but has he ever done that to you?”

“No, thank God. I think it would run contrary to his delusion.”

“And what delusion is that?”

A creaky, coughing sound came through the wall, and it took a moment for Patrick to realize it was Clare laughing. “He thinks we’re his family. Isn’t that a riot? He seemed to think of Linda as his wife and me as his daughter. Earlier, when he brought you in, he knocked on the door of my cell and said, ‘It’s a boy! Congratulations, you have a new brother.’”

Patrick placed both hands on the wall, his head still leaning against the plaster. “Who is this guy, Clare? Do you have any idea?”

“No. I’d never seen him before that night in the park, and I have no idea what his name is. He told me and Linda to call him Big Daddy. Like in that stupid old play we read in English class, something about a cat on a roof. You know the one I’m talking about?”

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams,” Patrick said, thinking, Who cares about the title of an old play from some dead closet-case? We have more pressing matters before us.

He knew he was being unfair. Clare was just a kid, and she had been through trauma like most people never had the misfortune to know. In that situation, people clung to anything they could to try to keep their sanity from completely fracturing. He’d learned as much in his Psych courses. He’d also learned that in such situations, people had a tendency to lose themselves in their own minds so they didn’t have to face the horrors happening to them. That was dangerous, a trap he couldn’t allow either one of them to fall into, not if they wanted to get out of here alive.

“Clare,” he said, making his voice firm, “I have a motto that’s gotten me though life thus far, and I want to share it with you now. I want you to adopt it and make it your own, okay?”

“What is it?”

“No giving up. Pretty simple, I know, but I want you to say it. No giving up.”

“No giving up.” She sounded uncertain, but at least she’d said it and that was enough for now.

“That’s good. No giving up. You just keep repeating that, in your head and out loud. No giving up.”

“No giving up,” she said again, this time with slightly more conviction.

“Clare, you said he didn’t do to you what he did to Linda. Has he done anything to you, anything violent?”

“Yes, he’s hit me a few times. Mostly right after I got here, because I’d try to get past him and out the door when he’d come to feed me.”

Now we’re getting somewhere!

“How often does he come to feed you?”

“It’s sporadic. Every couple of days I guess, he comes in with the bag.”

“Bag? What bag?”

A pause then, “Do you have two buckets in your room?”

Patrick glanced back at them, a sickening realization dawning. “Yeah, I do.”

“One is the toilet, one is the feeding trough. Every couple of days, he comes in to empty one and fill the other.”

“He feeds you dog food?”

“It’s doesn’t taste so bad, really,” Clare said, and he could hear the shame and embarrassment in her voice. “Sort of like dry cereal, at least that’s what I pretend I’m eating. Beats starving anyway.”

He wanted to comfort her, to assure her she had nothing to be ashamed of, but he needed to get the conversation back on a track that might lead them out of this place. “Clare, you said that you tried to get past him and out the door?”

“Yeah, I even hit him with one of the buckets, but he was just too strong for me. Blacked my eye one time, split my lip another. Said he hated to do it, but sometimes children needed to be disciplined when they misbehaved. He quoted that thing from the Bible about sparing the rod and spoiling the child.”

The wheels in Patrick’s brain were turning. The asshole that held them prisoner here might be too strong for Clare, but Patrick wasn’t a fifteen year old girl.

As if sensing his thoughts, Clare said, “Now he comes with a gun.”

“Damn,” Patrick muttered, but all hope was not lost. A gun was an unfortunate wrinkle, but not insurmountable. “Clare, do you know what kind of a gun it is?”

“I don’t know much about firearms. It’s not a shotgun or rifle or anything like that. It’s a handgun, maybe a revolver.”

“Okay, and can you hear him before he opens the door? Do you know he’s coming?”

“Yes. I think we’re in a basement because I can hear him coming down stairs.”

Good. That was good. If he could hear the guy coming, Patrick could get the drop on him. Be waiting next to the door with one of the buckets, bring it down on the guy’s gun-hand as he entered. Risky, but it might work.

Again, showing an uncanny knack for deducing Patrick’s thoughts, Clare said, “Please don’t do anything to make him mad. He’s fucking nuts!”

“Never give up, remember? Say it.”

“Patrick, I’m scared that he’ll—”

“Say it!”

“Never give up.” Reluctant, but still she said it which was a good sign. She’d been here for months with only a half-crazy woman to talk to. It shouldn’t be too hard to get her to view him as a possible savior. Manipulative, yes, but he couldn’t have her crippled by fear. He may need her help at a crucial moment.

“Clare, you said before that you didn’t think he was here right now. What makes you think that?”

“Shortly after he brought you in I heard his car crank up outside and pull out. I think the garage or carport might be just above me or something.”

“Does he leave often?”

“Not really, not that I’m aware of. He seems to stick close to home, maybe he leaves once a week or something. Like I said, time has gotten a bit wonky for me so it’s hard to say for sure.”

“When he does leave, how long is he usually gone?”

“Not long at all, maybe an hour. Though he’s been gone longer than that this time. I’d say you were out for at least three hours, give or take.”

“And when was the last time he filled your bucket?”

“Yesterday, I think. It’s still pretty full.”

Patrick nodded to himself. He wouldn’t say he had anything as solid as a plan, but he had the skeletal framework of one.

“Hey Patrick,” Clare said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” he answered, figuring he’d pumped her for information enough for the time being.

“Do you know if my parents are looking for me? My name is Clare Barrett. Has there been anything in the news about me? I’m afraid my parents might think I ran away or something. We’d been fighting a lot and I’d threatened to do just that.”

Clare Barrett . . . something about the name rang vaguely familiar, but truthfully Patrick didn’t keep up with local news that much. Or national news, for that matter. This past year, he had developed tunnel vision, his life focused on school and Robert. And the last three months had mostly been focused on Robert, his schoolwork falling a bit by the wayside.

So no, he couldn’t say he knew for sure if Clare’s name had been in the news, but he figured in this instance deception wouldn’t be too great a sin.

“Yeah, there’s a manhunt going on for you,” he said, the lie rolling off his tongue effortlessly. “Half the state is looking for you right now.”

Clare didn’t say anything in response, but he could hear her crying softly through the wall.