25 Days, page 12
Abby
UNLIKE HER MOM, Abby hasn’t been isolated in a small, dark cell. She’s in a large room with high ceilings. It’s some kind of engine room, judging by the collection of old machines and generators at one end of the room. However, it seems like only a few of them are still in use, while the rest are covered in dust and spiderwebs, with occasional glimpses of rusty, oil-stained surfaces.
The air in here is also thick with the stench of old metal and oil. There is something else underneath as well. A nauseating smell that has Abby thinking of rotting wood beams, even though she hasn’t seen any in here.
It is humid, though. That much is clear, as there are several small puddles of water scattered around the floor, and there is a constant, aggravating sound of droplets falling on the hard concrete. Along with the sparse lighting—some old fluorescent tubes that flicker irregularly and cast disturbing shadows on the walls—this creates an atmosphere of desperation and hopelessness.
So yes, the room is different, but that doesn’t mean Abby enjoys more freedom than her mom, because along the concrete walls on both sides of the engine room runs a complex network of cables and rusty pipes. And Abby is tied to one of these pipes via a chain that only allows her about ten feet of freedom to move.
However, the main difference between her situation and her mom’s—which is both a blessing and a curse—is that Abby has something that she doesn’t.
Company. For Abby isn’t the only one chained to one of the pipes in this eerie, reeking engine room. Chloe is here, too. Like her older sister, she’s wearing a heavy ankle shackle, the chain of which is only long enough to allow her to stand up and move a few yards. Her chain is locked to one of the pipes on the other side of the room… which means that while the two sisters can see and hear each other, they’re just too far apart to reach each other’s hands.
At the moment, Chloe is sleeping. She does most of the time. Abby has a feeling that it’s some sort of defense mechanism. That Chloe’s body shuts down because it prefers the world of her subconscious rather than dealing with reality. It’s painful to witness, and at first, Abby did everything in her power to try to comfort and distract her.
Gradually, though, she has started to think that her sister might be onto something with that strategy. After all, Chloe’s breathing is way more relaxed when she sleeps. In the waking hours, she alternates between hyperventilating, sobbing, and asking questions that Abby is unable to answer, let alone think about, without it hurting.
Their abductor, the man with the ski goggles, would probably be able to answer most of those questions. He knows why he has taken them prisoner, and he knows what has happened to their mom, but he doesn’t say anything. He limits himself to two forms of communication when there’s something he wants Abby to do. He points and gestures—and if that doesn’t work, he clenches his fists and takes a step toward her. Then she’s suddenly able to push the empty plate back to him. Because no matter how much she desires to defy him, fear always wins in the end. She curls up and becomes small… which she hates herself for. Especially when Chloe is watching. But what the hell is she supposed to do? The man is a psychopath, and even though she can’t see his face, she can feel his revulsion when he looks at them.
Oh yeah, he hates them just as much as they hate him. You don’t need a doctorate in body language to figure that out; you just need to look at the way he forces them to pee in a bucket while he uses the toilet behind the door in the back wall of the engine room. Hell, if their chains were ten feet longer, they’d be able to use that toilet, too.
In addition to the one leading to the toilet, there are two other doors in the room. One is the door he uses when he brings them food. It’s over on Chloe’s side, only at the other end of the wall.
The final one is a sliding door that hangs on a rusty metal rail. She has only seen him open it once, but that was also enough, because the brief glimpse she got of the room behind it was pretty disturbing. At least if the dark, glossy puddle on the floor is what her brain concluded it was.
On the other side of the room, Chloe starts twitching anxiously, almost as if Abby’s thoughts have somehow made their way into her dream.
“Shh, you’re all right, Chloe. You’re just dreaming.”
As soon as she has said the words, hopelessness latches on to Abby’s heart like a malicious parasite, sucking all the strength out of her. Because it’s a lie. Nothing is all right. Their dad is missing, probably dead, and their mom… who knows?
He does, she thinks as tears blur her vision, transforming the door she’s staring at into a surreal, dancing Rorschach shape. The psycho knows.
* * *
In the first confused second, Abby thinks the scream that woke her up came from Chloe. But when she looks over there, she sees Chloe sitting on her knees, appearing just as mystified as herself.
And when Abby’s brain rewinds and re-analyzes the sound, she realizes that it couldn’t possibly have been Chloe. Because the scream came from a man.
“What is happening?” Chloe asks in a voice on the verge of breaking. “Oh God, Abby. What’s going on out there?”
Another scream—louder, and most definitely closer—interrupts Abby’s response and makes the hairs on her arms stand up. Not least because she’s pretty sure that she caught some words hidden within the animalistic scream this time around.
Please, not again! I’m begging you!
Instinctively, she looks at Chloe to see if she heard the hidden plea as well. It doesn’t look like it. She looks upset, but no more than before.
New sounds emerge. Footsteps, scraping, bashing, and muffled sobs. It sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the wall on Chloe’s side.
No sooner has Abby finished that thought than the door is opened over there. No, that is too mild a description. It’s torn open, after which their abductor comes marching into the room.
His one hand points ominously at Abby as if to say not a fucking word! His other hand is clasping the coat of the elderly man he is dragging behind him across the floor.
“Chloe, don’t look!” Abby exclaims as the man on the floor gets far enough into the room for her to see him clearly. Sadly, it’s too late. Chloe has seen him—and the sight has drained all color from her face.
The man on the floor is Bill, their holiday host. The last time Abby saw him was when he said goodbye after giving them the key to the cabin. Back then, he shook their dad’s hand out in the driveway and then waved to her and Chloe, who stood at the window in the living room. Bill wouldn’t be able to do either of those things anymore, given that his hands have been reduced to two crooked lumps of flesh at the end of his forearms. They’re wrapped in some kind of bandages, but they don’t cover much, and Abby can easily see that all the fingers have been amputated on his right hand, while the left has only the thumb left.
In one place, the bandage is completely open, so she can see the exposed wound behind it. Or rather, she can see a cracked, grayish-black crust. Because naturally, the maniac with the ski goggles has made sure to close the wound again by scorching it.
Now, Bill’s eyes find her, and slowly—chillingly slowly—recognition dawns in them. And with it comes panic.
“No, no, no, they’re just kids. What have you done?” he mumbles, looking up at the man with the goggles, who answers him with the usual silence.
Bill’s gaze drifts over to Chloe and, from there, back to Abby. His eyes are wide, desperate. They’re the eyes of a prey animal on the run. He opens his mouth to say something to her, a warning of some kind, judging by the look on his face, but before he can do so, the man with the goggles plants a boot heel on the sad remains of Bill’s left hand and steps on it, hard.
In an instant, the words turn into a scream—and when it has died down, Bill’s quavering lips stay sealed while his tormentor drags him on through the engine room.
Their destination is the room behind the sliding door.
* * *
“Make him stop! Please, make him stop!”
The first few times her little sister shouted those words, Abby thought Chloe was talking to her. She no longer believes that. Because Chloe isn’t looking at her. Chloe isn’t looking at anybody. She has her eyes closed, and she covers both ears, while those same words pour out of her mouth in a constant stream.
Abby has no idea what the official symptoms of shock are, but she’s pretty sure that Chloe is showing at least a few of them. She is crying uncontrollably, and her whole body is shaking.
Abby is shaking, too. Especially her hands. She tries to steady them by wedging them between the floor and her shins while she kneels, but it doesn’t really work, and it hurts her fingers.
At least you still have all your fingers.
As an eerie extension of that thought, another cry of pain emerges from the room behind the sliding door. It’s Bill, but he hardly even sounds like a human being anymore. He sounds like the crows who always sat on the power lines outside their grandma’s house in the countryside.
The screaming continues for a while—it could be two minutes, it could be twenty, Abby has no idea—and then it suddenly stops. It happens without warning, in the middle of a scream, just as abruptly as when you press Stop on a remote control and kill a music track.
The ensuing silence is only broken by Chloe and Abby’s ragged, uneven breathing, along with a few short thudding sounds from behind the sliding door.
“Is he… dead?” Chloe whispers.
Abby makes a strained swallowing motion and states, with a headshake, that she has no idea.
Now, the door slides aside with a shrill screech, and the man with the ski mask steps back into the engine room. Behind him, Bill lies on the floor, motionless and limp like a pile of dirty laundry. One of his boots and the sock underneath have been removed. So have a couple of his toes. Where they were is now a wound, paved with the same charred surface that Abby saw on his hands.
Whether he is unconscious or dead, she can’t determine. A part of her hopes—for his sake—for the latter.
After casting one last glance in the direction of his victim, the man with the ski goggles goes into the bathroom. He is probably going in there to wash the blood off his hands because they’re completely—
It’s like an explosion in Abby’s brain when the first real idea of how they could escape hits her.
She looks down at her ankle shackle. Would it work? The answer is maybe… and maybe is more than enough justification to try.
Her gaze leaves the ankle shackle and instead moves up to the toilet door. There it’ll remain until…
Now it happens. The door swings open, and… yes. The soap is on the sink next to the tap. And it’s a bar of soap. Not some wall-mounted dispenser, but a small, smooth bar of soap in solid form. If they can get ahold of it somehow, they may be able to use it to free themselves from the ankle shackle.
Of course, there is the obvious problem, that the man with the ski goggles always closes the toilet door behind him—which he does now as well. At this very moment, however, it doesn’t matter.
Because for the first time since waking up in this horrible room, Abby feels a glimmer of hope. And she intends to focus on it with all her heart.
Just like she does now… as she catches one last glimpse of Bill’s lifeless body before the man with the white ski mask closes and locks the sliding door and then strolls out of the engine room as if nothing has happened.
DECEMBER 16
Chloe
“I’M NOT EXACTLY loving it, either, Chloe, but we have no other choice.”
Somewhere deep down, Chloe knows that her older sister is right. But it being the only solution doesn’t mean she has to love it, does it? And she really doesn’t. She hates the idea that Abby wants to distract the man with the goggles the next time he comes out of the bathroom. That’s what Abby calls it, distract him. Yet, Chloe knows that it really means that she’s going to make him angry.
“Can’t we just try the handle again?”
Abby shakes her head and sighs.
“We can’t pull it far enough down,” she says. “You know that. We have tried and tried and tried. If we keep trying, I’ll have no strength left to get the soap out, even if we got the door open. And that’s a big if.”
Chloe looks down at the long, improvised rope twisting like a snake on the floor in front of Abby’s feet. It’s made with pieces of their clothes, tied together; Abby’s sweater and coat, and Chloe’s shirt.
In theory, it should work, but every time they’ve managed to get the knot at the end of the rope wedged behind the door handle, they haven’t been able to pull it all the way down because the angle is too sharp. At least that’s what Abby says.
“I don’t like it. What if he’s… mean to you?”
Images flicker by in her mind—Bill being dragged across the floor, unable to fight back because his hands have been turned into two useless lumps of flesh, her dad’s confused face just before he tumbled over the edge of the canyon—and tears begin to run down her cheeks.
“Listen,” Abby says in a voice whose shaky timbre makes her determined facade crack, revealing how scared she actually is. “I’m going to do it no matter what, but I’d prefer that you, um… that you accept it, okay?”
“Why does it matter if you’re going to do it anyway?”
“It just does, Chloe! Okay?”
A pause. Chloe spends it with her eyes fixed on the concrete floor. Then she nods slowly.
“Say it,” Abby insists.
“I… accept your plan. Happy now?”
Abby responds with a faint smile and a nod. Then she motions for Chloe to move toward the center of the floor.
“Come here and help me untie this. We’ve got to get our clothes back on before he comes.”
* * *
Why has he been in there for so long? Chloe thinks nervously when she hears the toilet flush behind the door and sees her older sister pull off one of her boots on the other side of the engine room. Does he know that something is wrong? Could he tell from looking at us? At me?
She tries to catch Abby’s attention by waving her hand, but Abby’s gaze is fixed on the door, and it doesn’t move an inch. She looks crazy.
Crazy, but also terrified.
“Hey, Abby,” Chloe whispers. “I’ve changed my mind, I—”
Too late. The handle moves downward, the door opens, and Abby’s arm is already pulled back.
“HEY!” she shouts, hurling her boot at him. “ARE YOU HAVING FUN KEEPING US TRAPPED IN HERE? YOU’RE FUCKING SICK, YOU KNOW THAT? ASSHOLE!”
The boot hits the man’s thigh and falls to the floor in front of him. He glances down at it, then at Abby—and in a terrible moment, Chloe is struck by déjà vu. It’s Abby’s outburst of anger that does it. Because Abby sounds exactly like their dad when he stood at the canyon’s edge and shouted into the woods just before he was shot.
And in that terrible moment, Chloe knows that it will happen again. That the man with the ski goggles is going to take her sister away from her, just like he took her dad.
Now it begins. He takes a step toward Abby and raises his index finger in a threat that can’t be misunderstood. One more word and you’ll regret it.
Chloe holds her breath and stares at her older sister, worried what she is going to do. For a moment, it seems to be nothing… but then, as the man starts to turn back toward the toilet door, the mad look of desperation re-emerges in Abby’s eyes.
“OH MY, YOU SURE ARE A TOUGH GUY, HUH?” she shouts, her voice shrill as that of a small child. “THREATENING A GIRL HALF YOUR SIZE. WHAT A REAL MACHO MAN!”
“Abby, n-no!” Chloe stammers, but once again it’s too late. The man is already by her sister, and now, he grabs the arm she is trying to protect herself with.
Abby screams in pain as he twists her arm around, forcing her to lie with her chest and one cheek pressed against the floor. With his free hand, he starts punching her in the side, just below the ribs, causing her to let out a series of involuntary gurgling sounds.
“Leave her alone,” Chloe begs, but the man couldn’t care less about her appeals. He continues to hammer his hand into Abby’s side—and when that starts to bore him, he grabs her hair instead and starts banging her head against the concrete floor.
Chloe shuts her eyes, but it doesn’t help. In the darkness behind her eyelids, the sound is amplified, making every clash between Abby’s head and the hard surface of the floor roll over her like a thunderclap.
Tha-whomp, tha-whomp, tha-womp.
Suddenly, it’s over, and the sound of her own gasping breath is the only thing reaching Chloe’s ears. She opens her eyes and jerks back in fear as she sees the man walking straight toward her. But he doesn’t stop. He turns left, brushes past her, and then disappears out the door, slamming it shut behind him.
“Abby?” Chloe whispers. “Abby, are you…”
Her voice dies out as Abby slowly lifts her head a few inches off the floor, exposing a cheek that is bluish, swollen, and covered with small red fissures. It looks freaky. Her skin seems… cracked. Just like the faces on Chloe’s old dolls in the end before her mom finally told her to throw them out.
“Deh hee worhk?”
“What? I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Deh hee worhk?” Abby repeats, raising a trembling finger on one hand to point behind her in the direction of the toilet.
“Oh, if it worked? Yeah, um… yeah, he forgot all about the door. It’s still open.”
Abby’s quivering index finger is replaced with a thumb. Then she moans, lets her head drop back to the floor, and starts crying.
Chloe opens her mouth but closes it again without saying anything. It can wait. Abby deserves a break.
* * *
They won’t get many attempts. Not without resting in between them, at least. Because Abby has done nothing more than to get ready for the first throw, and her face is already contorted in pain. The man in the ski mask didn’t hold back.
