* * *
A noise had wakened her. And her head was throbbing relentlessly.
Sydney slowly opened her eyes and it took a moment for her to remember where she was. She was lying on a musty carpeted floor curled up in a fetal position. She unfolded her stiff limbs as she looked around the room. The darkness was startling. The only light coming in was from under the door and the cracks around the boarded up window. Everything else was bare…with only a stripped bed pushed against the back wall.
She sniffed at the air. It was still stale and smelled like mold. Everything looked the same as it had last night when she had been tossed in here like a stray dog. The memory flooded back to her and she shivered. It had been real. For a brief moment, she truly felt as though it had been a realistic nightmare.
“Sydney?”
Her gaze flickered around the room to find the small voice that whispered her name and she zeroed in on the little boy hunched over in the corner. Her little blonde neighbor. His skinny arms were wrapped around his knobby little knees and he shivered in the heat. Sydney decided that he must be in shock. It had to be at least 90 degrees in the cramped room. The memory of watching his small body get bound, gagged and thrown in the van beside her turned her stomach. Whoever did this clearly didn’t have a conscience and that made him dangerous.
“Are you okay?” she murmured softly. He nodded silently, but his eyes glistened with unshed tears. It tugged on her heartstrings that he was trying to be brave. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember your name right now. Can you remind me?”
The longer she was awake, the more the back of her head throbbed from the blow she had received the night before. She ignored it- and the dizziness that resulted whenever she moved.
“It’s Danny—after my dad, Daniel.”
She could hear the pride resonating in his small voice, even through the tenor of fear.
“Danny, why are you here? Why did he take you?”
She scooted towards him so that they didn’t have to speak loudly. She spoke in low, hushed tones. She had no idea if their captor was on the other side of the door, but there was no reason to chance it. She kept glancing at the crack under the door- trying to see shadows moving on the other side- any movement that would signal that someone was there. But so far there was nothing.
“I got up to get a drink and I saw someone sneaking around your house from our kitchen window. I tried to wake up my parents, but they wouldn’t wake up, so I came outside to get a better look so I could call the police. He saw me, though.” He sounded guilty, as though he had done something wrong, so Sydney was quick to reassure him.
“Danny, you tried to be a hero. Thank you. Most people wouldn’t have bothered. But I wish you wouldn’t have. Then you would be safely in your own house, instead of here with me.” He shrugged his bony shoulders at her words.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does,” she insisted. “But we’ve got to figure out a way to get out of here. Have you heard him outside of the door?”
Danny shook his head. “Nope. I think we’re in the country somewhere. And there’s a knocking sound on the wall every once in awhile.”
That surprised her. It hadn’t occurred to her that someone else might be here.
“Can you show me where?”
Danny got up and walked across the room, knocking lightly on a spot on the wall. Two seconds later, an echoing knock resounded through their little room.
Sydney jumped up, ignoring the overwhelming dizziness that threatened to overtake her, and ran directly to the spot. She put her ear against the wall and knocked again. Another knock in response. Someone was definitely there.
“Hello?” she called as softly as she could, yet still loudly enough to be heard in the next room.
“Thank God, Oh my God. Please, can you help me?” A frantic female voice answered, as pounding commenced from the other side of the wall.
Sydney jumped, as the pounding resonated in her ear and enhanced the pain in her head. Then she leaned close to the wall again.
“Please stop—he might hear you. We’re in here, but we can’t help you. We’re locked in, too. How long have you been here?”
The pounding ceased and Sydney breathed a sigh of relief. She instinctively knew that they should try and draw their captor’s attention as little as possible. The girl didn’t answer her, so she tried again.
“My name is Sydney. What’s yours?”
The only response was a desolate cry that creshendoed into a wail. Sydney beat her fists against the wall to try to get the girl’s attention.
“Please calm down. Let’s not draw his attention, okay? Calm down. It’s alright.”
There was sudden silence and then the girl hissed, “Are you crazy? Nothing is alright. Not anymore. You’ll see.” She began crying again, this time more softly, but Sydney could plainly hear it through the wall. She turned to Danny and looked at him helplessly.
“You and I have to hold it together, okay? We can’t figure out a way to get out if we aren’t thinking clearly.”
He nodded wordlessly and visibly began examining the room for anything that could be of use to them. His search was short-lived. There was nothing. They were alone with four walls and a bed. There was absolutely nothing that they could use to escape. The boards were so tightly screwed into the wall that there was no getting them off with their bare hands. Danny’s gaze locked with hers again. Both of their faces reflected what they each knew. They were helpless.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The days ran together in the tiny, isolated room. Time became an abstract concept. It was there, but they couldn’t fully grasp it. There was nothing to mark it by. Sydney tried to come up with games to play to keep Danny’s mind off of their current situation, but the entire time she was playing, she kept one section of her brain moving to try and hatch an escape plan. She kept coming up empty.
On her more hopeless days, she allowed herself to acknowledge that there was no way out of the room. The only thing she was left with was to think of some way to outsmart their captor. If he ever returned.
Time and time again, she tried to talk to the girl in the next room, but there was never a response. Every once in a while, they would hear low moans and crying, so they knew she was still there. And still breathing. Her guttural howling attested to that. Sydney couldn’t help but wonder how long she had been in there. The girl was clearly emotionally broken.
She and Danny huddled together on the sparse bed to sleep and she lost track of how many night falls had come and gone. Five, eight, maybe ten.
She only knew when it was night time because the tiny crack under the window went black and the room became entirely shrouded in darkness- an abyss so black that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. As if it could get any worse, they had no water and no food. Sydney knew that at this rate, they would be completely dehydrated soon and would die that way.
For the first few days, they had used the bathroom in the corner, their bodily waste creating an acrid odor in the room. It was humiliating and degrading, but they had no other option. Since they didn’t even have a bucket to use, she was pretty sure it had been planned that way. It distressed her now that neither of them had used it for at least a day. She knew that it was a bad sign and tried to remember what dying by dehydration was like from what she had learned in Science. Did a person just go to sleep? No, that was hypothermia. She just couldn’t remember. But then, her mind was slowing down as her body dried out.
She would kill for a drink. Of anything… water, coke, milk, juice. The memory of a slushie from 7-11 caused her to squeeze her dry eyes painfully shut. What she wouldn’t give for just one single sip. Just one. It was incredible how she used to take such an important thing for granted. A one dollar slushie could literally keep her alive right now. Her life for a dollar. She shook her head at the irony.
Little Danny was getting weaker by the minute. He was smaller than she was, so dehydration was going to claim h
im first. She felt strangely maternal toward him, and gathered him into her lap, stroking his hair back from his forehead and offering him empty assurances. She knew she was lying even as she spoke, but she couldn’t help it. This was so unfair.
He lay limply draped over her legs, his small body trembling from time to time. She had never realized how quickly someone lost their strength without fluids. But why would she? She had never been so deprived of anything. From time to time, Danny curled up into a ball, crying as his legs cramped. She had also never known that cramps were a side effect of dehydration.
“It’s okay, Danny. It’s alright. There, see? It’s gone.”
She massaged his calf and he relaxed again. He was pale, even paler than normal, and his lips were cracked. They had been bleeding, but even the blood had dried up now, forming a cakey mess around his mouth. Hers were cracked too and she ran her dry tongue over them. Of course she found no relief. The arid coating of her tongue snagged on the deep crack in her lip. She had never been so parched. The dryness of her mouth seemed to make the room feel even hotter. It was a sauna now.
As she mentally tried to overcome the misery she was feeling, a new sound encroached on the periphery of her consciousness. Tires crunching gravel and the slight metallic squeak of brakes. A car was pulling up to the house. Someone was there. She yanked her head up in alarm.
“Danny? Wake up. You’ve got to wake up, okay? Someone is here. It’s probably him.”
She shook him lightly, and he opened his eyes groggily. He was no longer fully cognizant and he struggled to focus. He stared in confusion at the blank wall.
“Danny? Can you hear me?”
He nodded his head and tried to sit up. Dizziness caused him to sway and he leaned into Sydney as he tried again. Her brain felt like mush and she couldn’t think very well but she decided to drag him behind the door so that when it opened, he would be protected even if only for a minute.
She wasn’t sure what her plan was yet, but she wanted Danny out of the way. She leaned him carefully against the wall and crept back to where she had been, directly in front of where the door would open. Dizziness caused the room to spin and she closed her eyes.
She heard footsteps falling outside of her door. Then another door opened and clicked closed. Muffled voices came from the room next to them and then terrified screaming and a thumping noise.
The screams went on and on and Sydney clapped her hands over her ears to block them out. Her heart pounded as she tried not to think of what was going on in there. She couldn’t help but realize that she had heard a similar sound before through the thin walls of a hotel room. The thumping had a rhythmic, regular pattern. It was a bed lurching against the wall.
The screaming finally wound down into sobbing and the door creaked open again and latched closed with finality. The footsteps resumed and stopped just outside of her own door.
She took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself and waited nervously. The door handle jiggled lightly and then opened, bringing with it a mild gust of fresh air and tinged with the pungent, musky odor of sex. Light flooded the room and Sydney squinted her eyes against it. She couldn’t see a thing. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness over the past few days. As she struggled to see, the man spoke. This was a different man than had abducted her and his familiar voice chilled her to the bone.
“Hmm. I see you’re still alive. Impressive. Did the boy die?”
Detective Daniels stood in the doorway, filling it.
Her eyes were getting used to the light and she could make out his shape and then his face. He had a cold smile on his handsome face as he stared at her with callous indifference. His voice was eerily empty of sentiment as he asked about Danny.
“Why have you done this?” she whispered.
Her throat was so raspy that it took effort to speak. She watched him with dry eyes, waiting for an answer. She had trusted this man. He was a police officer! Suddenly, what little hope she had left was spiraling down to puddle around her feet. She found it morbidly ironic that in this moment, the worst moment of her life, her eyes were too dry to cry.
“Why do you think?”
His voice was still icy, but now it was taunting, as well. He took one step inside the room, wrinkling his nose in distaste as he did so. His expensive clothing was in perfect order- his shirt tucked in, his tie straight. Even though he had just raped the girl in the next room. Every cell in her body screamed at her to run but there was nowhere to go. Panic rose in her chest and she fought hard to control it.
“You made me think it was my father…”
The dryness of her throat cut her off and she coughed. It felt as though her tongue was permanently stuck to the floor of her mouth, as though a puff of dust would come out when she exhaled. The thought made her cough again and the detective laughed.
“Of course I did. Why wouldn’t I?”
“What do you want from me?” her voice was panicked, as he appraised her with cold eyes. “Are you going to rape me, too?”
She couldn’t contain her disgust for him as she spoke and his face hardened again.
“No. I don’t want to rape you. What fun would that be? I know you won’t beg. Yet. Maybe later, kitten.”
Chills ran down Sydney’s spine and she froze in apprehension as he took a step. He grinned maliciously, amused at her poorly concealed terror. He then walked further into the room and dropped a water bottle into her lap, his eyes locked with hers at every movement.
He watched in amusement as she greedily tore the top off and began guzzling, streams of liquid running down her chin. Tepid water had never tasted so good. She kept her eyes trained on him as she drank but lowered the bottle when she remembered little Danny. She started to scoot over to him, but the detective stepped in front of her, halting her movement.
“No. That water is for you.”
“Please. He’s going to die. Soon.” Her eyes beseeched the detective’s hard face.
“Am I supposed to care?” His face was an emotionless mask as he spoke.
“Please. He’s just a little boy.”
“He’s unimportant. But I need you alive.”
“Detective. I’ll do anything you want me to do, but please- please let me help him. He hasn’t done anything to deserve to be here.”
Her face was pleading as she begged. Her eyes kept flickering to Danny as she realized that she hadn’t seen him move since she had placed him behind the door.
“And have you?”
Before Sydney could even respond, he continued.
“Why is this one little boy so important to you? He’s nothing.”
The detective walked over to Danny and gazed down at him for a moment, his lip curled in contempt. He nudged Danny’s leg with the toe of one polished Italian loafer before he turned his gaze back to Sydney. “He’s beyond help, anyway.”
“No, he isn’t!” Sydney insisted. “Please, just let me give him a drink.”
“ Stop begging. It’s beneath you.”
He jerked his head toward the boy in one curt gesture and Sydney immediately jumped up and ran to Danny. She knelt beside him, cradling his head in one arm as she gently held the water bottle to his mouth.
“Danny, drink it. Come on, be a good boy.”
His eyelids fluttered and then opened. He looked at her and then weakly drank the water.
“That’s right, that’s good. Drink just a little more.”
Her voice was soft and encouraging as he drank the life-sustaining liquid. The entire time, Harrison Daniels stared at them both in disgust.
“I’ll never understand women.”
His lip was curled and she could tell that he didn’t want to understand women. She suddenly understood from his tone why he had been so cold to her from the very beginning.
He disliked women. He felt as though he was above trying to think like one. She knew it as surely as she was breathing, but couldn’t imagine what had happened to him to make him feel in such a way.
<
br /> “You don’t like women. Why?” she questioned, staring up at him.
He stared at her coldly.
“It’s cute that you think you are in a position to question me.”
He turned his back on her for a moment, a brief second- the space of one breath. Then he turned back to her.
“Do you want to live?” His smile glittered in the light.
“Of course. But I know you aren’t going to allow that. So why don’t you just go ahead and kill me now? Why stretch it out? Do you need to make me suffer? You need to break me so that I will beg while you rape me?”
“Partly. But I need you to do something for me. And then I might let you live. You’re going to be a movie star. You’ll like that, won’t you?” His tone was mocking.
“What kind of movie star?”
“Any kind I want you to be. But for now, I’m going to give you a script and you’re going to memorize it. Then you are going to perform for me on camera- perfectly. Or he dies.” He jerked his head toward Danny again. “But if you are good, I’ll let him live.”
Sydney eyed him carefully. She knew that there was no way in hell that he was going to let either of them live, not when they could both identify him. She chose her next words carefully.
“I promise to do what you ask if you will give Danny food and water. Will you do that?” She watched his reaction, trying to gauge his intent from his expression.
“That’s a small enough price to pay. But what about yourself? Don’t you want to eat?”
“Of course I do,” she whispered, hating herself that she would admit it to him.
But she was so, so hungry. Her stomach felt as though it had collapsed upon itself. It had been overshadowed completely by her desperate thirst, but now that she could think a little more clearly, her hunger pangs were almost overwhelming.
He smiled at her again, the perfectly polite smile of a host, before he ducked out the door, closing it behind him. He was only gone for a minute before he returned with a large box. He set it down in front of her.