CHAPTER 10

 

For the rest of the summer, there are no more excursions outside the hospital—it is one of Luke’s imposed conditions to keep his mouth shut. At first, he also insists Finn stay away from me, but that sanction is lifted after a few days when he realizes how miserable I am. Though Luke hates to admit it, Finn gets me to open up to him. Since both Finn and I went through a traumatic experience others can’t relate to, I feel connected to him. He empathizes with my vulnerability without judging me and that is the one thing Luke doesn’t get. It upsets him, but is something he grudgingly learns to accept. He even agrees that this is the first big step I have taken toward my recovery.

I meet my obligations and attend group and individual therapy but only go through the motions. I don’t like Dr. Malcolm, the psychiatrist, and talking in front of a group has always terrified me. Yet, according to the clinic, I’m making progress. As a sign of goodwill, I even allow my mom and Roy to visit me in the beginning of August. After all, I can’t hold a grudge forever. It’s an awkward situation when they also drag my dad along, and for an hour, we sit under a tree, making small talk. I’m thrilled when they finally leave.

I expect for Luke to stop by afterward to smooth over the waters, but he is busy with his summer job in his dad’s law firm and his visits have become a rare treat. It’s irritating since he has always been there for me, no matter what. Now it almost seems he is excluding me from his life, especially since Finn has been coming around.

My sulking is cut short when Finn pulls his truck next to the garden a couple of hours later. He was finishing a project for summer school in the last few days and I’m dying to catch up with him. When I join him by the flowerbeds, he is just starting to fumble with the garden hose.

His face lights up when he sees me. “Hey, Kelsey. What’s up?”

“Not much.” I lean against the truck. “How did your project go?”

“I’m sure I aced it. It was history, something I particularly like.” He turns on the water, spraying the flowers that we planted a little over a month ago. They are flourishing. “Just my finals left in two weeks and I will have officially graduated high school.”

In many ways, I envy him. It has always bothered me that I just quit before the end of my junior year. After the kidnapping, I dragged myself to classes every day for a few months but could not stomach the stares and whispers behind my back. When Justin broke it off after I had refused to be affectionate with him, I stopped going altogether. The pain of losing him was the final straw and I felt punished all over again. That’s when the cutting started.

“I’m glad you don’t have to repeat your senior year again,” I say.

“It’s not that I had that much of a choice.” He grimaces. “My probation officer was going to violate my probation if I didn’t get my act together. After the summer, I’ll work in my uncle’s shop, which will hopefully shut him up.”

“What about college?”

He chuckles. “College isn’t for someone like me. No one in my family has ever even graduated high school. My mom is third-generation welfare.”

“So the way it was at Tyrone’s house, that’s how you grew up?”

His face darkens. “No, Tyrone’s place is like paradise in comparison. There’s always enough money for food and he doesn’t allow any of the hard stuff in the house. My mom’s a major crackhead and would sell her kids for a fix. Luckily, I don’t have any sisters or that boyfriend of hers would have probably sent them hooking.”

“That must have been tough. How do you even know Tyrone?”

His forehead wrinkles. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I flush, shuffling my feet. “I thought he was your drug supplier.”

For a second, I fear I offended him, but he laughs instead. “I was never into drugs and only smoke weed from time to time. I bunked with Marcel’s nephew in juvenile lockup. When I came to Maine, he helped me out with money a few times. I met Tyrone through him.”

“Oh.” I can’t believe he likes to hang around people like that. “So Marcel is your friend? I felt he was a little creepy.” I grimace, once again not sure if I put my foot in my mouth. All this talk about shady characters is new to me. People like Tyrone and Marcel don’t tend to walk around in places like Stonehenge.

Finn is a good sport about it. “Marcel just looks scary, but all in all, he’s a nice guy.” He turns off the water. “Tyrone is the dangerous one—he has connections to the Colombian cartels and is not someone to double-cross.”

I wrinkle my nose, glad I got out of that house alive. Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind if I never have to see any of them again.

When I am just about to ask Finn what he has planned next, a nurse approaches us, an Amazon package in hand.

“Here, Kelsey, this was delivered for you. It’s a book.”

A small smile automatically appears on my lips. It’s probably from my mom. She told me earlier that she had ordered me a few novels.

“Thanks.”

When I pull the book from the package, it takes a few seconds for the title to register in my brain. It’s Messenger of Fear by Michael Grant.

The book goes flying and I shriek as hundreds of little legs run across my skin. I try to shoo them away, but my lungs are crushed at the same time. I gasp for air, my voice shrill as I slap my body, trying to get rid of the crawling feeling.

Two strong arms enclose me. I punch my assailant, my screams so loud that they almost split my eardrums. I struggle as tears run down my face. The tingling sensation is everywhere on my skin, my breath caught in my throat.

“Kelsey, concentrate on your breathing. You can get through this.” Finn’s voice is muffled through the heavy fog surrounding my mind that has stolen all sense of reason.

I fight harder as the small legs continue their assault until a piercing pain in my upper arm takes me away into darkness.

 

~~~~

 

As I slowly wake up, I keep my eyes squeezed shut when I hear Finn’s and Luke’s low voices.

“And you have no idea what made her freak out like this?” Luke asks.

“No clue, but it must have been something about the book.” Finn exhales heavily. “Did you see the gift card with the get-well message from Jed?”

“Yeah, pretty sick.” Luke’s voice is full of fury. “That bastard must have figured out where she is. I could kill him. In one afternoon, he destroyed two months of therapy just like that. Why can’t he leave her alone?”

“It must have triggered some horrific memory. As soon as she saw the book, she totally lost it.”

“But she got you pretty good.” Luke chuckles. “That black eye is class.”

Finn snorts. “My probation officer won’t like it and will probably think I got into a fight. I can already hear his lecture.”

“That sucks.”

Silence follows Luke’s words and I ponder whether I should let them know that I am awake. They will likely ask for an explanation, but that is one memory I never wanted to relive.

 

I was already in captivity for over a month when Jed showed up one morning with the book. My whole body was throbbing from an especially hard night with Napoleon, who had punched me a few times in the ribs when I didn’t remain still in my shackles.

“Here, honeybun, I brought you something. Your voice is lovely, so I want you to read it out loud.”

My throat was raw from all the screaming and crying. “I need water, Jed.”

He got a bottle from the shelf in the next room. “For every page you read, you get a few sips.”

So I read the book, page by page, so that I could get some relief in between. It was a story about a bully meeting the Messenger of Fear, who brought justice to people who wronged others. They had a choice—play a game or face their greatest fear. Yet, if they lost their challenge, they had to face their fear regardless. The book wasn’t very long and we were finished after a few hours.

“Well, honeybun, since you’re also a bully, let’s just pretend I’m your Messenger of Fear. Do you want to play the game or face your biggest fear?”

I stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I am.” His smile was smug. “The challenge is not very hard. I hid ten things around the house and all you have to do is find them.”

A sickening sensation spread in my stomach. There was no way it would be as easy as he claimed.

I really had not much of a choice. “Yeah, I’ll play your stupid game.”

“Great. You’ll see, it’ll be so much fun.”

He allowed me to put on panties and a bra before ushering me aboveground to the cabin and handing me a list. “You have twenty minutes. Good luck.”

I stumbled through the cabin, trying to find random items. A bar of chocolate, a condom, a pair of shoes. The sight of the bracelet my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday brought tears to my eyes, but it was the DVD that cost me most of my precious time. He forced me to turn it on when I located it in the player.

With trembling lips, I watched Jed raping me while I was screaming at the top of my lungs. It must have been recorded a few days ago, just after Napoleon left me.

“You sick bastards are taping me,” I yelled as tears rolled down my cheeks.

“We’re thinking of putting it on VideoTube. You could be an Internet sensation, honeybun.”

I bit the inside of my hand to hide my horror. The humiliation would be for everyone to see. Yet I wasn’t able to take my eyes off the TV screen even though it was blurred through my tears. Utter disgust raged through me.

Jed finally turned off the recording. “Only a few minutes left. You should hurry.”

I remembered the game and realized I still had three items to find. It was a losing battle. Jed grinned from ear to ear when he informed me that I had failed.

“Time to face your biggest fear, honeybun.”

I pleaded all the way back to the dungeon. “Please, Jed. I never meant to bully you, I just wanted to belong. You know how it is. Please, we were just stupid kids.” The whole time, my heart clamped in my chest in terror and fear.

The words fell on deaf ears. He dragged me along, threatening to throw me into the hole when I refused to climb down the ladder. As soon as we were back in the room, he made me strip and secured my hands and ankles with cable ties.

His eyes were glinting with malice and excitement when he approached me with a large bucket. “Ready, honeybun?”

Before I could even respond, he poured the contents over me. Hundreds of little spiders began spreading over my skin. I had always been deadly afraid of anything that crawled and I screeched until the air was totally pressed from my lungs. The assault continued, but my arms and legs were safely secured. I couldn’t even fight back. Bile rose in my mouth, mixed with salty tears and blood from my lips, as I begged for him to make it stop in between my shrilling shrieks.

Jed laughed the entire time, at some point taping my ordeal with his phone. Soon, the crawly spiders were in my ears, nose, and mouth. The skin on my ankles and wrists was torn off my bones where I tried to loosen my restraints, my lungs burning in agony as I fought with all my strength. There was no relief. I was totally helpless as thousands of little legs used my body as their personal playground.

“Now you know how it feels, honeybun, when something terrifies you and you can’t do nothing about it.”

When my voice was reduced to a croak, Jed finally showed mercy and poured water over me until the crawling stopped. Soon after, I drifted into a deep sleep, totally exhausted, though I woke up every so often when my muscles twitched. It was one of the times during my abduction where I would have preferred death over life.

 

I snap out of my horrific memory when Luke’s deep voice penetrates my mind.

“You want half an apple?”

“Sure,” Finn says.

Luckily, they haven’t noticed that my hands are curled into tight fists. It takes all my effort to continue to lie still, my skin crawling from the vivid memory. I want to itch myself badly, but only dig into my palms with my newly grown fingernails to stop myself from tearing off my skin.

They munch, an occasional crunch from a bite breaking the silence. I still don’t want to talk because I fear their intrusive questions. My breath stays even. I have pretended so many times that I was asleep when my mom checked on me at night to avoid her noticing my tears that I manage to fool them.

When the door opens, rescue is near.

“Excuse me, gentlemen, but visiting hours are long over. You really need to leave. She could be asleep for a few more hours and you should check back in the morning.”

I hear the guys get on their feet.

“No problem, ma’am.” That’s Luke. “Just make sure you take good care of my little sis.”

Something drops in the bin beside my bed, probably the leftovers of the apple. The door closes with a low click. The room falls quiet. I finally dare to peek and confirm the coast is clear. The small lamp by my nightstand is still on, covering the room in a dim light. I sit up and rub my eyes before shaking off the little bit of heaviness in my head.

My gaze scans the nightstand and my heartbeat accelerates in delight—I just hit the jackpot! Luke’s Swiss pocketknife has been carelessly left behind, next to a small apple stem.

I bite my lip when my trembling hand reaches for the knife—I will kill the rampant pain in my chest with the best medicine there is. Tonight, I will be able to sleep without nightmares or haunting memories. My heart dances in my chest as I unfold the blade and allow the tip to gently scratch my skin. A shudder shakes my frame as an ache spreads alongside my arm.

Without the slightest hesitation, I slice deeper, indulging in the pain as it radiates in small waves throughout my body. The blood oozes from my arm like red rain, washing away the deep-rooted agony left behind by Jed’s torture. Tears run down my cheeks as I sink back into the pillow, this time controlling my breath to stay conscious.

When the imminent pain is suppressed by the adrenaline released into my bloodstream, I cut myself again, repeating the exercise in shorter and shorter intervals. My body’s survival instincts cause the throbbing pain to flare, demanding me to stop, yet nothing can compete with the incredible urge to soothe my tormented soul.