“I know. I’llbegood.”
“Thank you,” she said, laying her head on my shoulder. We sat quietly for a moment, looking out over the expansivegrounds.
“This isn’t the worst place ever,” Iconceded.
“No.” She laughed. “It’snot.”
“It’s just… these places she’s showing us are just showpieces. It doesn’t feel like anyone actually lives in them. I guess I just pictured something more homey – you know, instead of a football field, just a lawn with a swing set. And, would it be too much to ask for a white picket fence? I mean,comeon.”
“In this neighborhood?” Casey asked, amusement clear in her voice. She turned toward me, taking my face in her hands, and peppered a half a dozen small kisses onto my lips. “What am I going to dowithyou?”
“If you haven’t figured that out by now, I feel sorryforyou.”
She laughed and stood up, bringing me with her. “You know what? You’re right. Let’s go find usahome.”
* * *
Jamesand I had been meeting two times a week for the past few months, and although it was slow going, I had worked my way through some important issues, mainly about fatherhood. We talked at length about the type of man Ray was, and I began to see with my own eyes that I was nothing like him. I’d almost forgotten the manipulations and the mind-games he’d played on me, until James had brought those memories back to thesurface.
To a thirteen-year-old kid, Ray loomed larger than life, powerful beyond measure, a giant among men. But looking back now, I could see him for who he was – a small-minded man who was only as strong as I was weak. Using pain and fear as his weapons of choice, Ray swiftly and brutally shut down rebellion before it could take hold. Ray knew I was strong. He knew I would fight. So he tore my wings off before I could ever takeflight.
It took a person void of a conscience to callously and viciously destroy the lives of so many. Ray lacked the most basic of all human traits – empathy. No, I wasn’t like him at all, because despite the extended period of time I’d spent with the man, he’d never managed to beat the compassion out of me. And despite the drastic measures I’d been forced to take in order to save my own life, I crawled out of Ray’s hell with my humanityintact.
I knew then that I’d be okay, that my future children would be okay, and with those opening credits out of the way, James and I were able to return to the place we’d been the day I’d stormed out of his office the yearbefore.
“Tell me what life was like for you in thebasement.”
On the surface, it didn’t seem like a loaded question, but to this day, the secrets I kept and the burden I carried all went back to the answer to thatquestion.
“It was a torture allitsown.”
James looked up from his legal pad, no doubt checking me for signs of stability, but also urging me with his eyes to continue. This was why I was here – to get it out of my head so I wasn’t the only one carrying the weight. The memories poured from me then, as I told him about the dwindling food supply, the bugs, and the mattress I slept on that was covered in dried blood. I shared with him the fear I experienced every time the lights went out, shrouding me in darkness, and how Ray would sometimes throw me a bone in the form of a tea candle, which I would then watch obsessively until the flame eventually fizzled out and died, just like everything else in the tomb of death I wasimprisonedin.
But it wasn’t the darkness or the lack of food or the hopelessness that caused me to flee from that final conversation I’d had with James. No, it was the seemingly harmless dripping of water that triggered my dramatic exit… or more importantly, what those leaking and creaking pipes meant to me while I waited for the endtocome.
“It wasalive.”
“What was alive?” James asked, appearing more than a littleintrigued.
“The basement. The pipes were so loud, and they dripped and screeched. Sometimes they made these groaning noises that sounded humanlike. I started hearing things that weren’t there… and seeingthings,too.”
“What were youseeing?”
“Ray’s othervictims.”
James lifted his eyes, no doubt trying to determine whether I was messing with him. “You were seeingghosts?”
I shrugged because answering his question seemed redundant. I was the only survivor, so anyone I was seeing in that basement of horrors was mostdefinitelydead.
“Did Ray tell you others diedthere?”
He didn’t have to. The minute I was dumped into the basement, I knew it was a death chamber and that I’d never make it out alive. Flashes of memory flooded my senses, and I could feel my blood pressure begin to rise. Yes, there had been others; and yes, he had told me plenty about them; but it didn’t take more than opening my eyes to know the fate of those who had come before me. I could see it on the blood-streaked walls, on the tally marks made on the frame of the bed, and in the box of souvenirs he’d kept with the belongings of each of his victims. Mine was already there, waiting to befilled.
But it wasn’t those victims that haunted me. As warped as it sounded, they were the lucky ones. When the nightmare ended for me, so did it end for them. Those were not the ones who haunted my dreams, nor were they the ones who appeared to me from the faultyplumbing.
My ghosts were the forgotten ones… the victims even the police knew nothing about. In their late teens or early twenties, most had led hard lives before colliding head on with Ray. Unlike me, they’d been tricked to their deaths, mostly through promises of drugs or money. They were Ray’s first victims, the ones not killed in the basement or dug up around his home. There had been no justice for these guys, no closure, no funerals, and no tearful goodbyes. They were the forgotten ones – the ones left in unmarked graves never to be heard from again. These were the ghosts who haunted me in my sleep, the ones I’d been running from for halfmylife.
I tried my best to explain all this to James, and when I was done and he was staring at me like I was the apparition in this story, I articulated in a clear, even tone. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but they spoke to me, James. They still speaktome.”
