I'm in this big house, it's at least three stories (that I have access to) and all the walls are white-washed cinder blocks. There are stairs (made of cinder blocks) on both ends of the house, but one set we aren't allowed near but it doesn't lead to the main downstairs area. Each floor is huge, and has several rooms. I spend days wandering around, looking in to each room, trying to weigh what I am allowed to touch and what I'm not. I don't know who is friendly and who is not. There are at least nine other kids/teens/young adults.
The rooms are all well-furnished, sort of. There are three small rooms on the end of each hall on each floor. Some have just a mattress in them, but not a real mattress, not some dingy mattress with just a sheet on it on the floor, no- it's beautiful modern furniture, or a beanbag-style bed made at adult level, not dorm room style. Every piece of furniture is wider than normal and could double as a bed as well as a couch or chair. It's like a super classy furniture arrangement inside a school or hospital, or medical ward.
One room has a stack of painting supplies in the corner. Watercolor notebooks, sketchbooks, canvas, you name it. At least five painting trays, a bucket of paints, brushes, rinse-containers. But they aren't the cheap ones you see at schools that look like they've been used since the dawn of time. Most of the supplies look new. All the trays are brightly colored plastic, with no paint staining the inside. Four or five easels are in the corner. There are books of artwork on a shelf, and some posters of landscapes are on the walls.
We are dirty, scared to sleep, scared to touch anything, don't know what month it is or where we were taken from. The man who roams through to check on us is mean, and we stay out of his way. He has a temper. He always seems angry and frustrated. We've seen someone come in to paint a few times, I think it's a woman. She doesn't acknowledge us.
There are showers and a laundry room in the small rooms. One of the showers is just a shower head out of the wall and a drain in the concrete floor. One of the boys got locked in overnight once.
Don't remember how they feed us. Probably a room on the "main" floor. There's a living room at the base of the stairs but most of us don't go down there unless we have to.
Eventually I go and explore the back staircase. It goes up, and there is a large open "living room" with a double king sized bed as a couch. There's a beautiful oriental rug, and some nice lighting. The woman is up there, reading. I beg her to let me use the paints, to let me do something, to let me learn while I am being held captive, in between torture sessions. (We get beat twice a day. Before bed and sometime in the middle if we can't find a place to hide from him. We've found a lot of hiding places, but not quite enough for everyone, so at least three of us get beat mid day). She puts down her book, with a bookmark, not on the spine and explains this is how you don't damage the book, then has me crawl onto the bed.
She wants me to prove that I actually want to learn. That I will obey, and not damage her things. She makes me lie on my back and begins suffocating me with a giant fring-y throw pillow. At first if I'm slow and careful, I can breathe through it. She pushes harder, and I turn my head to the side, and can still get a little bit of air. I try to accept it, they might kill me now or later anyway, so it doesn't matter much, but I have to submit to her will if I expect to have a chance to survive. She reaches under the pillow and turns my head so that I am facing upward, and then his strong hands push the pillow down on all sides of my face. I can't even get air out of me, it's like I can't move my chest is so tight. I try to stay conscious, and I keep closing my eyes, and catching myself, and forcing myself to open my eyes again, and forcing myself not to fight back. And I keep trying to breathe out, or in, or ... Something. The dark and the blue and gold pillow fringe start to blur, and I jerk my arm, and try to push it off my face, I can't even control my motions, and a hand grabs my arms and holds them. They might kill me here, I could never wake up, swims through my head.
I wake up later.
I begin reading, using the different rooms, learning a skill. They give me new clothes. They let me use a dresser (cubby sort of thing. Drawers and shelves) closet? , to keep "my" things.
What I don't know is that they send out packages several times a year as they see fit to the parents of the teens they've kidnapped- Christmas cards, paintings, bird houses, any project that kid has done or worked on. They punish failure and reward progress, and do some random torture as well, but that's less often - with a houseful of kids you always have a reason to punish one of them, so why torture for no reason? Teach a lesson. After a while we are allowed to pick what to send out. They deliver the packages easily, they never mail from the same place. He maybe drives a truck (or something, plot point?) and uses multiple post offices, or doesn't even mail it himself. He will put a package into a truckers cab while he's away, and the guy doesn't find it for a week or more sometimes. And it will have an address and enough postage, and so some of them drop it in the mail, or open it, or take it to the police. There is a recurring place that is being painted and they can't find it. (It's the landscape hanging up in the art room.)
They always know when someone is thinking about escape. We don't know how. There are no electronics in the place, no tv, computer, cameras. Thankful there is a microwave, and stove and blender. In fact it's a beautiful kitchen with a shelf full of books...
The ones who refuse to learn or can't keep up progress, or make a mess and don't clean it, or... Whatever, begin to disappear. At first just at night, then sometimes during the day, then for a few days.
If it's not a tiny-room, it has something to learn in it. Math, science books, technical stuff, animals, effective communication, literature. Languages. Music.
No comments:
Post a Comment