Right to Life (3 page)

    
Look for weaknesses.

    She had maybe two feet between her chest and the lid above. Maybe she could press the lid off. She raised her arms, took a deep breath and pushed with all her might until her neck was straining, the muscles of her arms and shoulders spasming.

    It didn't budge.

    She let go of the breath and rested. Then took another and tried again.

    She brought her knees up under her as best she could until they pressed tight against the lid, trying to get more leverage, took a third deep breath and pushed until finally all her strength leeched out of her. She lay back, exhausted.

    The footboard and headboard, she thought. Maybe there. She slid down until the soles of her feet touched wood, the slip riding up her thighs and then drew her arms up over her head, the palms of her hands against the headboard. She was sweating now despite the cold, as in clammy film, all over her. She pushed and felt the headboard give a quarter inch and then stop. She relaxed immediately and used her fingers to explore it on either side.

    She touched metal. The headboard was hinged to the left. That meant there was probably some kind of lock on the outside. Which also meant the headboard was the entrance. How had they gotten her in here?

    She lowered her arms and felt around the base of the box opposite her thighs and found a half-inch space between the base and sideboards on either side. On a hunch she pushed off with the soles of her feet and felt the base slide minutely toward the headboard and then stop.

    She was on rollers, casters.

    They'd rolled her in.

    Then locked the headboard behind her.

    Somebody had gone to a whole lot of trouble planning this, constructing this. Building this trap for me.

    It didn't change anything knowing that except to scare her further.

    
Who were these people?
Suddenly she was desperate to know.

    There was a woman involved. The woman with the needle. She'd been driving. Why would a woman do this to another woman? How could somebody do that?

    She willed herself to stop thinking, to go back to the original plan. The lock might give. It was possible.

    It didn't.

    She pushed until every muscle in her body was shaking with the strain and that was when the fear set in deep and final so that she lay still, trembling wide-eyed in the dark. Because she had no choice then but to accept the fact that there was no way out until they decided to let her out to whatever purpose they had in mind, which could be to no good purpose because here she was. Half naked. In a hand-built coffin. Alone in the swimming dark.

    Or maybe not alone.

    She heard scratching, light raspings, like claws, something working at the top of the box and growing more and more determined-sounding as she lay there helpless, frozen, listening.

    Something wanted in.

    A rat?

    She took a deep breath and shouted. "HEY!" Why that word she didn't know. The word simply burst out of her, angry and scared, unnaturally loud in that closed space.
Hey!
She listened. Waited.

    The sounds had stopped.

    The trembling didn't.

    
What do they want with me?
she thought.

    
Am I going to die here?

    
Why me?

    There was no answer she could think of to any of these questions that wasn't frightening and nothing to do but ask them over and over again while she waited for whatever deliverance would come in whatever form, in however vast and slow an eternity.

    The scratching sounds did not return. The cold did not relent.

    
Greg,
she thought.
Somebody. Find me.

    
I'm here.

    

    

    
1:05 p.m.

    Was it day or night?

    She was so cold. Colder every minute. She was thirsty. Her throat was sore from screaming, her hands and knuckles raw from pounding.

    What time was it? How long had she been here?

    Inside the box there was no benchmark for time, nothing to do but wait and think, thoughts turning in on themselves like the track on a model railroad, like the double-ring symbol for eternity, the snake swallowing its tail.

    
Why me?
bled seamlessly into
what do they want from me,
which dovetailed into
is anyone looking for me, searching
or
when will I get same water
or
see some light
or a thousand other questions which all line down to one question,
how will I get out of here? Alive. Sane.

    She felt permanently stunned to find herself here. The feeling colored all reality. As though suddenly she were not even who and what she thought herself to be anymore. The Sara Foster she knew had come unstuck, uprooted from everything that grounded her. The Sara Foster who taught English and drama to LD kids at the Winthrop School on 74th Street, who was daughter to Charles and Evelyn Schap of Harrison, New York, lover to Greg Glover and pregnant with his child, who was once the mother of a wonderful beautiful boy drowned in a lake, who was ex-wife to Samuel Bell Foster and best friends with Annie Graham since childhood - all these people who had cradled her identity in embraces loving and not so loving for as long as she could remember meant nothing here. Were now almost irrelevant. What mattered was not the known world but the unknown world beyond the box.

    These people.

    They mattered.

    What the dark held mattered. The meaning of the box.

    And when she heard the footsteps on the wooden stairs they mattered. So that her heart began to race and the air seemed to thicken so she couldn't seem to get her breath, worse as she heard them on the landing and then move toward her, shoeleather scraping concrete and she began to twist and turn inside the box in a frenzy to get out of there to whatever freedom or whatever fate those footsteps might imply, clawing at the box, slapping at the box, her voice a shrill high-pitched squeal in her ears and while still she gulped for breath. And when she heard the man's laughter at the sounds of her fear and struggle and heard his fingers rattle the lock outside the headboard, rattling it again and again, playing with her, her body betrayed her utterly and she saw a sudden burst of red and fainted away.

    

    

    He lifted her out and placed her on the bare stained mattress. Studied her a moment.

    She didn't move. She wasn't faking.

    He lifted her head and set it carefully into the headbox.

    Then he clamped it shut.

    The headbox was half-inch plywood about the size of a hatbox, split in two and hinged at the top, with semicircular neck-holes carved into its base on either side and a padlock to secure the halves together. It was insulated and carpeted inside. It muffled all sound, shut out nearly all light.

    He'd tried it on himself.

    It was scary.

    The red plush carpeting pressed close to your face, sending your breath right back at you no matter how shallow your breathing. It was hot and claustrophobic. About ten pounds of weight sitting on your shoulders. And once it was on there was no way in hell you could get it off again. It was sturdy. You could bang it against a concrete wall all day long and do nothing but buy yourself a concussion.

    He'd done a good job on this one.

    The first two tries were failures. The problem was mostly weight, too much or too little. He'd built the first out of quarter-inch ply and when Kath tried it on she pointed out to him that if you pressed your face into the carpeting and held it that way, making space between your head and the back of the box so you didn't bash your brains in, one good slam against a wall could crack the plywood.

    She proved this by demonstrating.

    Back to the drawing board.

    He built the second box of three-quarter-inch ply and it was tough as nails. But the damn thing also weighed about twenty pounds. You fell with that on, it could snap your neck.

    The new box halved the weight. Ten pounds was still a lot and he'd have to watch for that but he felt satisfied it was manageable.

    Kath had worn it all day long once just to see. She hadn't wanted to but he explained to her that a trial run was a necessity. He knew she hated the thing from the minute he put it on her. Knew it scared her, made her dizzy and sick to her stomach and later she said it pinched her neck all the time she was in there but that was just too damn bad in the long view, somebody had to try it and it wasn't going to be him. Besides the point was could a woman wear it all day long, not a man. Could a woman stand it.

    When he let her out at dinnertime her collarbone and shoulders were chafed red and sore and she complained about a stiff neck for nearly a week. Nothing that wasn't going to go away. The point was that yes, it was manageable.

    He smiled. If Miss Sara Foster here thought the Long Box was scary - and she obviously did - wait till she woke up again and found herself in this one. He'd have put her in the thing in the first place but he was afraid she might vomit from the pentothol. And vomit was easier to clean off the base panel of a pinewood box than to get out of carpeting.

    He'd have to keep an eye on that too. On the vomiting. Kath had said the headbox was stifling and made her queasy in and of itself, never mind the pentothol.

    He slipped her wrists through the black leather manacles and pulled each of the straps tight and threaded the ropes through the silver rings attached. The ropes depended from the a pair of pulleys at the top of each arm of the brand-new X-frame he'd constructed for her. Taking the two ropes together he slowly and carefully hauled her up until only her feet rested on the floor, legs slightly bent beneath her. Her head lolled forward heavily so that the box now rested on her breastbone. That probably hurt but as yet, not enough to wake her. He tied the ropes off quickly to the the climbers' pitons hammered into the concrete floor and then stepped forward and slipped a small brass hook screwed into the headrest he'd attached to the X-frame through the corresponding eye at the back of the box so that her head would stay upright and take the weight off the back of her neck.

    He'd thought of everything.

    He stood back and looked at her. All his creation.

    You couldn't see her face and that was good. Control was important. And she was very pretty.

    He needed to control himself now.

    The only thing that remained at this initial stage was to finish undressing her but he'd wait until she woke for that and was able t fel the cold blade of the knife cutting away her slip and panties. That kind of control was very important too.

    Afterwards he and Kath could come down and have some dinner and watch her, see how she took it all and he could go over again with Kath what the next step was supposed to be so there'd be no fuck-ups, no misunderstandings. This he'd do daily. There was a progression of events to this that he needed to be sure Kath would follow. They could speak as freely down here in front of her as they could upstairs. Sound not only didn't get out of the box it didn't get in much either.

    

    

    
1:15 p.m.

    And now there was nothing in her life but terror.

    Her legs and arms were manacled and she knew what that meant. She'd read enough in papers and magazines. Seen enough on the evening news. She was in the hands of some sex freak and dear god, she was probably not the first. Not the way he'd worked this out. There was somebody out there beyond her own vivid dark who liked to hear screams and pleas and whimpers. Before they killed.

    Invariably they killed.

    She knew that too.

    She was aware of the terrible frail vulnerability of her body, of her cold nearly naked breasts, her exposed bare arms and legs against the scratchy wooden beams. Inside the box her eyes could not accommodate the dark. The heavy air was suffocating. She could smell her own breath. Sweat stung her eyes. She blinked to clear them and finally closed them while her body heaved with sobs that were wholly beyond her control wrenched from deep inside her. She heard her own quick gasps for breath. They never seemed to satisfied her aching lungs or still her pounding heart.

    She felt the heavy weight at her collarbones.

    The chafe of leather on wrists and ankles.

    Then the cold touch of metal just below her right wrist, sudden, seemingly out of nowhere. Felt it travel from wrist to elbow-joint and stop there. Then from elbow-joint to armpit, slowly, a sharp prick at the delicate flesh there of a knife or sharp scissors and then travelling again, exploring the slope of breast to pause and prick once more at her fear-swollen nipple, her body jerking back then and the blade moving down again sliding over her trembling stomach to her navel and stopping to poke her harder this time at the tender fleshy remains of what once had linked her to life and then moving on.

    She felt rough fingers graze her shoulder pulling away the strap of her slip and then felt that side go slack against her breast and fingers on the other shoulder and then the slip falling softly away across her thighs. The blade inserted itself thin and cold between her panties and the flesh of her hip on the right and she felt it pull and cut and now she was completely exposed to the room and the knife and the man who was doing the cutting, the fingers were a man's fingers she thought, felt herself choking inside the box on tears and mucus, then felt the left side go.

    She was naked but for the box. But for the insanity of the box.