Stolen (3 page)

I screamed and struggled all the way back. I bit you again. Several times. I spat, too. But you wouldn’t let me go.

“You’ll die out there,” you snarled. “Can’t you see that?”

I kicked you hard, in the shins and in the balls and anywhere I could. It didn’t loosen your grip, though. It just made you drag me faster. You were strong. For a thin-looking guy, you were bloody strong. You dragged me the whole way across the dirt, back to the house. I made myself go heavy, kicking and screaming like a wild thing. You pulled me through the kitchen and threw me into the murky bathroom. I hammered and yelled and tried to kick the door down. But it was no use. You locked the door from the outside.

There were no windows to break. So I opened the door at the back of the room. As I’d thought, there was a toilet there. I stepped down the two steps toward it. There was no floorboard around it, just bare ground which stung my feet again. There were no windows, either: The walls were thick, splintery planks with tiny cracks between them. I pushed against them but they were solid. I lifted the lid of the toilet. Inside was a long, dark hole, stinking of shit.

I went back into the bathroom and looked through the cabinet above the sink. I hurled everything I found in there against the door, as hard as I could. A bottle of antiseptic smashed and went everywhere, its strong smell filling the air. You were pacing backward and forward on the other side.

“Don’t, Gemma,” you warned. “You’ll use everything up.”

I screamed for help until my throat ached. Not that it was any use. After a while, my words just turned into sounds, trying to block you out. I banged my arms against the door until they had bruises all the way to the elbows, and bits of skin were coming off around my wrists. I was desperate. At any moment you could come into that room with a knife, or a gun, or worse. I looked for protection. I picked up a piece of glass from the antiseptic bottle.

The door jolted as you pressed your body up against it. “Just calm down,” you said shakily. “There’s no point.”

You sat in the hallway, opposite the bathroom. I knew because I could see your shoes through the crack underneath the door. I sat back against the wall, smelling the antiseptic and the acidity of the piss in my jeans. After a while, I heard a soft clunk as you took the key from the keyhole.

“Just leave me alone,” I yelled.

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“What do you want?” I was sobbing now, curled up tightly. I dabbed the blood on my feet, the scratches and mess I’d made from running.

I heard you slam your hand, or your head, against the bathroom door. I heard the rasp in your voice.

“I won’t kill you,” you said. “I won’t, OK?”

But my tears only came heavier. I didn’t believe you.

You were quiet a long time then, and I wondered if you’d gone. I almost preferred hearing your voice to the silence. I held the glass shard from the antiseptic bottle tightly in my hand, so tight it started to cut my palm. Then I held it up to the light from a crack in the wall. There were tiny rainbows in that glass. I turned it so a rainbow danced across my hand. I pressed my finger against it and a small bubble of blood appeared.

I held the glass above my left wrist, wondering if I could do it, then brought it down slowly. I slit a line into my skin, sideways. The blood started to seep out. It didn’t hurt. My arms were too numb from banging against the door. There wasn’t that much blood. I gasped as two drops fell to the floor, not quite believing what I’d done. You said later that it was the aftereffects of the drugs that made me do it, but I don’t know. Right then, I felt pretty determined. Perhaps I preferred to kill myself than wait for you to do it. I moved the glass to my left hand, and I stretched out my right wrist.

But you came in then. Fast. The door swung open and almost immediately you were taking the glass from my hand and bundling me in your arms, wrapping your strength around me. I punched you in the eye. And you dragged me into the shower.

You turned the tap a little. The water was brownish and came out in spurts, making the pipes groan. There were black things floating in it. I pushed myself backward into the corner. Blood from my wrist was mixing with the water, swirling round and round. I liked the water being there, though, separating us. It felt like a sort of ally.

You took a towel from a box near the door and put it under the water until it was thoroughly wet. Then you turned the tap off and came toward me. I stuck myself to the cracked tiles and screamed at you to leave me alone. But you kept on coming. You knelt in the water and pushed the towel to the cut. I pulled away quickly, hitting my head on something.

And after that, nothing.

When I woke, I was back in the double bed with a cool, damp bandage around my wrist. I was no longer wearing the jeans. My feet were tied to the bedposts with hard, scratchy rope. There were bandages wrapped around them, too. I pulled away, testing how tightly I was tied, and gasped as pain shot up my legs.

Then I saw you beside the window. The curtains were open a little, and you were staring out. I saw the frown on your forehead. There were bruises around your eye. My handiwork there, I suppose. At that moment, with the sun turning your skin light, you didn’t look like a kidnapper. You looked tired. My heart was hammering but I made myself watch you. Why had you brought me here? What did you want? Surely, if you’d wanted to do something to me, you would have done it already? Or perhaps you were making me wait.

You turned then, saw me looking. “Don’t do that again,” you said.

I blinked.

“You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Does it matter?” My voice was only a whisper.

“Of course.”

You looked at me carefully. I couldn’t hold your gaze. It was those eyes of yours. Too blue. Too intense. I hated the way they looked almost concerned. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. It was made of curves of metal.

“Where am I?” I asked.

I was thinking about the airport. My parents. I was wondering where the rest of the world had disappeared to. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched you shake your head slowly.

“It’s not Bangkok,” you said. “Or Vietnam.”

“Then where?”

“You’ll find out, I suppose, eventually.”

You rested your forehead in your hands, pressing your fingertips softly on the bruises around your eye. Your nails were short and dirty. Again, I tried pulling my feet away. My ankles were sweaty and wet, but not slippery enough to pull them free.

“Do you want some water?” you asked. “Food?”

I shook my head. I felt the tears on my cheek again. “What’s going to happen?” I whispered.

You took your head from your hands. Your eyes flashed at me for a moment, but they weren’t icy. They’d thawed a little. They looked wet. For a second I wondered if you’d been crying, too. You saw me studying you and turned away. Then you went out of the room and came back several minutes later with a glass of water. You sat beside the bed and held it out to me.

“I won’t do anything to you,” you said.

I stayed in the bed. The pillowcase got thin from my tears. The sheets sealed in my sweat. Everything stank. At some point you came in and changed the bandages on my feet. I was limp by then, melting away like my body heat.

You told me later that it was only for a day or two. It felt like weeks. My eyelids swelled from crying. I tried to think of ways to escape, but my brain had melted, too. I got pretty acquainted with the ceiling, the rough walls, and the wooden frame around the window. I drank the brownish earthy water left beside me, but only when you weren’t watching. And once I nibbled at the nuts and seeds you left in a bowl, touching them gingerly with my tongue first in case they were poisoned. Whenever you came in, you tried to talk to me. The conversation was pretty similar each time.

“Do you want to wash?” you asked.

“No.”

“Food?”

“No.”

“Water? You should drink water.”

“No.”

A pause while you thought about what I would like. “Do you want to go outside?”

“Only if you’ll take me to a town.”

“There are no towns.”

One time you didn’t leave the room like you normally did. You sighed and went to the window instead. I saw that the bruises around your eye had changed color from deep blue to a jaundice-yellow; my only indication that time had passed. You looked at me, a wrinkle deep in your forehead. Then, quickly, you ripped open the curtains. Light flooded in, making me shrink back against the sheets.

“Let’s go out,” you said. “We can look at the land.”

I turned away from the light and you.

“It’s different out the back to out front,” you said. “We’ll go there.”

“Will you let me go, out back?”

You shook your head. “There’s nothing to escape to,” you said. “I’ve told you. It’s a wilderness.”

You wore me down in the end. I nodded to say I’d go. It wasn’t because you wanted me to, though. It was because I didn’t believe you when you said there was nothing out there. There had to be something: a town in the distance, or a road, or an electricity pylon. Nowhere is a wilderness really.

You untied my feet. You unwound the bandages and pressed your hand against my soles. It didn’t sting like I thought it would. You checked my wrist, too. The cut was scabby and brownish red, but there was no fresh blood.

You tried to lift me from the bed but I pushed you away. Even that small action set me shaking. I stretched across, and got out of bed on the other side.

“I can do this myself.”

“Of course, I forgot,” you said. “I haven’t chopped your legs off yet.”

You chuckled at your joke. I ignored you. My legs started to shake so much that it was hard just to stand up. I made myself take a step. My foot twinged with pain. I swallowed hard. But I knew I couldn’t stay in that room forever.

You turned away while I put the jeans on. They’d been washed and dried once again, the stains from crawling along the dirt gone. I was desperately weak when I walked out of that room, ready to black out at any moment. I wished I had accepted more of the food you’d offered me. I walked down the corridor, and you followed. You didn’t make a sound as you walked, not even the floor creaked. I turned toward the kitchen I’d found before, but you grabbed my arm. I flinched at your touch, couldn’t look at you.

“This way,” you said.

I shook off your fingers, left a few steps between us. You led me through the living room where the curtains were still drawn, and I had to strain my eyes to see. As I took a step, something pierced my foot. My eyes filled with water but I wiped them quickly, before you noticed. I lifted my foot and pulled out a small gold-colored hook, the kind used for hanging pictures. I wondered what it was doing there when there were no pictures to put up.

We went through a kind of porch area to reach the other side of the house. I squinted at the daylight as you opened the door. There was a veranda running the length of the building.

Then I saw the boulders. They were huge, smooth, and roundish, maybe two hundred feet from the house and almost towering over it. Two larger boulders were in front, with about five smaller ones hugging tight around them. They were glowing red, lit by the sun. They looked like a handful of hot marbles, dropped by a giant. As I peered closer I could see crevices worn into them, cracks sprouting spindly trees that clung hard to the sides. Those rocks were so different from the rest of the land; they stuck out of the ground like thumbs.

“The Separates,” you said. “That’s what I’ve called them. They look unlike … kind of … separate from everything else, around this area anyway. They’re alone, but they’re together in that, at least.”

I hobbled to a wicker couch, tumbled onto it, and cradled my foot, rubbing the red mark from the picture hook. “Why didn’t I see them before?” I asked. “When I ran?”

“You weren’t looking.” I felt you watching me. When I didn’t look back, you moved across to one of the veranda posts. “You were too upset to see anything much then.”

I scanned the boulders, looking for pathways, checking for anything man-made. There was a plastic pipe leading out from them and running all the way along the ground to the house. It fed into a large metal tank at the far end of the veranda, near where the bathroom was. There were wooden posts spaced evenly around the base of the rocks as if there’d once been a fence there.

“What’s on the other side?” I asked.

“Nothing much. More of the same.” You jerked your head sideways, nodding at the dusty ground around the house. “It’s not your escape route, if that’s what you’re wondering. Your only escape route is through me. And that’s bad luck for you, I guess, since I’ve already made my escape by coming here.”

“What’s the pipe?” I asked, thinking that if a pipe led to your house then there could be other pipes and other houses behind the rocks.

“I laid it. It’s for water.”

You grinned, almost proudly, and started feeling around in your breast pocket for something. Then you reached down into your pants pocket and took out a small handful of dried leaves and some rolling papers. My eyes lingered over your other pockets. Were there any small bulges? Could that be where you kept the car keys? You crumbled the leaves and rolled yourself a long, thin cigarette and licked up the sides.

“Where are we?” I asked again.

“Everywhere and nowhere.” You leaned your head against the veranda post and looked across at the rocks. “I found this place, once. It’s mine.” You studied your cigarette as you thought. “It was a long time ago. I was small then, maybe half your height.”

I glanced at you. “How did you get here?”

“Walked. It took about a week. When I got here, I collapsed.”

“All by yourself?”

“Just me. The rocks gave me dreams … and water, of course. It’s special, this place. I stayed here about two weeks, camping in the middle, living off those rocks. When I got home, everything had changed.”

I turned away, not wanting to know anything more about you or your life. There was a bird circling high above us, a tiny
x
against the darkening sky. I wrapped myself up small, cradling my knees, gripping them tighter, trying to stop the fear inside me from opening up into a scream.

“Why am I here?” I whispered.

You patted your pockets, then pulled out a box of matches. You gestured toward the rocks.

“Because it’s magic, this place … beautiful. And you’re beautiful … beautifully separate. It all fits.” You twisted the cigarette between your thumb and forefinger. Then you held it out to me. “Want one?”

I shook my head. None of this fit. And no one had ever called me beautiful before. “What do you want?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“That’s easy.” You smiled, and the cigarette in your mouth hung down, stuck to your lips. “Company.”

When you lit up there was a strange smell to the cigarette, more natural than tobacco but not as strong as weed. You inhaled deeply, then looked back at the collection of boulders.

I followed your gaze and spotted a small gap through the middle of them. It looked like a pathway.

“How long will you keep me?” I asked.

You shrugged. “Forever, of course.”