‘Hold on, Detective.’ Russell lifted his hands. ‘I’m not that cruel, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve kept them locked in here, yes, but I’ve never once touched them. I’ve never hit my father, or my mother. After all, they’re myfamily. And family is sacred, remember?’
A bead of sweat pearled on the back of Garcia’s neck before slipping down along his spine.
‘At first, I thought I would,’ Russell revealed. ‘Physically hurt them, that is. I thought that when I finally got them down here, I’d chain them to the walls, like they did to me, and beat the shit out of them. Make them pay for every little scar they gave me… every nightmare that haunts me… every tear I cried… every lost day of my life.’ He paused, his gaze distant, clearly taking him back to years ago. ‘It took me years to build up the courage to finally do something. I used to be so terrified of them, so scared of fighting back, that there was a time when I believed that I would never be able to break free… I would never get out of this house.’ The pause came with a smile. ‘But I did that night. The night before my eighteenth birthday.’ Russell turned to face his parents. ‘Do you remember that night?’
Once again, there was no reply from Russell’s mother, but Garcia saw tears beginning to well up in her eyes.
‘They always had a drink before going to bed,’ Russell explained. ‘So it was easy… a lot easier than I had imagined. Just a few drops in each glass and that was it. When they fell asleep, I dragged them down here and chained them to the walls, but when it came to hurting them… I lost my nerve. I just couldn’t do it. They were still my father and mother.’ Russell took a breathing pause. ‘So instead of hurting them, I went out. I just wanted to get out of this house… out of the hell that I had lived in for so long. I walked for hours, until the sun came up. In the morning, I sat in a park somewhere and just watched people walk by, not knowing what the hell I would do… trying to dig deep inside myself tofind something… some hope, maybe. Hope that things would get better. Hope that I wasn’t too fucked up already.’ Russell shrugged. ‘But there was no hope inside of me. There was no love, no compassion… no feelings at all. All I really had locked inside was sadness and what I was given by my parents. The one true thing that I found down in this cellar. Do you know what that is, Detective?’
‘Anger?’ Garcia ventured.
‘Darkness,’ Russell corrected him. ‘All I could find inside of me was darkness. A darkness so deep that I felt like I was drowning in it. So, on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, sitting alone in that park, I decided that that was exactly what I would do – drown. I decided that I wouldn’t come back to this house ever again… that I would just leave my parents chained to the walls in this godforsaken cellar, and that I would get up from that bench and go see the ocean.’
The question inside Garcia’s eyes didn’t go unnoticed.
‘I’d never seen it before,’ Russell explained. ‘I was eighteen years old. I’d lived all those years in a city where there are several different beaches. And I’d never once seen the ocean. My parents never took me to the beach.’
Garcia’s gaze scooted over to Russell’s parents, but there was no reaction from either of them.
‘So I decided that as my last act in this life,’ Russell carried on, ‘my own eighteenth birthday present to myself, I would go see the ocean and then simply walk into it. For someone who was already drowning in darkness, the ocean sounded like a much better option.’
‘But you didn’t,’ Garcia prodded. He had no escape plan, but he knew that he had to somehow keep Russell talking until he thought of something… if he thought of something.
Russell shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t. Thanks to a little girl and her father.’
Fifty-Eight
Russell said nothing else after mentioning the little girl and her father. Instead, he turned to face the instruments table again, which Garcia quickly figured out wasn’t a good move… at least not for him.
‘A little girl?’ he asked.Keep him talking… just keep him talking.‘Which little girl?’
Russell studied the instruments on the table, trying to decide which one to take this time.
‘Her name was Nancy,’ he replied. ‘But I didn’t know that at the time. I’d never seen her before. Like I said, I was never allowed out of this house. I was just in the park, trying to figure out what to do, getting my head wrapped around the idea that I was just about to leave my parents chained to a basement wall and go drown myself, when I saw this little girl and her father walk by. He was dragging her by the arm so firmly, she looked like a ragdoll. The poor girl was in tears… her tiny little legs trying so hard to keep up with how fast her father was dragging her. As they walked past the bench I was sitting on, he yelled at her and pulled on her arm harder. Her shirt hiked up a little at the back. That was when I saw the bruises. Right then, the little girl lifted her head and looked straight at me.’ Russell nodded at nothing at all. ‘There was so much sadness and pain inside her tiny little eyes. The kind of sadness and pain that I understood. The kindof sadness and pain that I knew so, so well. She didn’t have to say a word. One look and I knew exactly what her life was like.’ His gaze met Garcia’s. ‘Right then, I understood that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one going through the kind of hell that I had been going through. There were others… thousands of others. That was when I realized that the darkness that I’d been given by my parents – the darkness that lived deep inside me – didn’t have to be a curse. I could make it into a gift – an eighteenth birthday gift.’
‘So you decided to become a vigilante?’ Garcia asked. ‘At the age of eighteen?’
‘No,’ Russell replied. ‘I decided to help them. I decided to help people like me… people whosefamilywas never a family… people made of scars… just like I was. So instead of drowning myself, I came back to this house and started to re-plan my life. There was no mortgage on this house anymore. It had all been paid off by then, and my father had enough savings for me to live off for a few years.’ A humorless chuckle. ‘At last my father had done something right.’
Garcia finally saw movement coming from Russell’s father. He slowly turned his head to look at his son and some dormant muscle on his lower jaw twitched once.
Russell saw it too, but he didn’t seem to care.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘I used those years of savings to learn and train. I needed to get strong because at the age of eighteen, I had the body of a ten-year-old.’ He gave Garcia a matter-of-fact shrug. ‘Gaining muscle was hard. It took me a long time and a lot of effort, but learning…’ He shook his head while pursing his lips. ‘That was a different ballgame altogether. It turns out that I have a very logical and analytical mind, which means I learn fast. Certain subjects make more sense to me than others, like programming, medicine and anything to do with numbers, like the stock market. So I read – book, after book, after book – until I got good at all three. It took me a few years, especially to get goodat medicine. For you to do that you need to practice.’ He smiled. ‘Lucky for me that I already had a pretty well-equipped surgical room in my cellar. All I needed were practice subjects. Would you like to guess who my first practice subject was?’
Garcia blinked a thought. ‘The little girl’s father.’
Russell’s non-existing eyebrows arched again.
‘You followed them home that morning,’ Garcia deduced.
Russell nodded. ‘I did, but this was four, almost five years later. I was just about to turn twenty-three at that time. I didn’t know if they’d still be living in the same house or not.’ He angled his head to one side. ‘He was. She wasn’t.’
Garcia waited.
‘Her mother,’ Russell explained, ‘his wife, had finally had enough and gathered the courage to walk away. It turned out that she was also being beaten up by him. He was a drunk. So I simply approached him at a bar one night, bought him a couple of drinks, and slipped a sedative into one of them. Once I got him down here, I hurt him in the exact same ways he’d hurt his little girl and his wife. And I did it slowly. Just one injury at a time. Until he was gone. It took him almost two months to die. But he was the one who gave me the idea of how to find others just like him.’
‘Support groups,’ Garcia said.
