Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

And she must be alive because Ian can hear her breathing.

‘Good girl. The man who kidnapped you, what does he look like?’

‘He’s. . he’s big,’ she says, ‘as big as you, maybe bigger, and he’s old. Like a grandpa. And balding. His head is shiny on top. And his nose, it’s. . it’s like all these broken veins and. . oh God, Daddy, he’s coming!’

His heart is in his throat; he swallows it back so that he can get words out.

‘What are you wearing?’

‘What? He’s coming!’

‘What are you wearing, Mags?’

‘A dress. A blue dress with pink flowers.’

‘Do you know the man’s name?’

‘It’s H-’

But that is all and that is it. That followed by a scream.

Ian can hear the phone on the other end bang against something as it swings on its cord. It bangs again and again as it swings, the space between each percussive thump longer than the one before until the final thump does not arrive and the space is infinite.

Maggie escapes only because of an open door.

If it weren’t for that door being left open she would never have tried to get out. Years of imprisonment have caused whatever hope she once felt to grow cold inside her, and now she does not feel it at all. She has not felt it for a very long time. She doesn’t know if it’s there anymore. Maybe it is: some small spark.

Days and nights she spends in this miserable concrete-walled basement. She is alive but below ground all the same. Buried. Trapped in what she has always thought of as the Nightmare World. Trapped with its moist stink. Trapped with its seemingly living shadows. Trapped with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.

And sometimes Borden. She’d been here for several days when she first saw him. He was hiding in the shadows, a small, skinny boy in Chuck Taylors and Levis and a red button-up shirt tucked into his pants. He did not have the face of a boy, though. He had a shiny brown coat covering his face between forelock and muzzle and a black mane and shining black horse’s eyes and flaring nostrils and large square teeth. Maggie was afraid of him at first, but her loneliness was stronger than her fear. Now he is the only friend she has.

He doesn’t talk about how he got here, and Maggie is the only one who knows he’s here at all. He hides when anyone opens the door at the top of the stairs, when anyone starts making their way down the wooden steps. Maggie does not hide. It would do no good. They know she’s here. They brought her here. Here to this horrible place. It is a small place, keeping you from the rest of the world. Keeping you from the sunlight and the grass and trees and playing with friends.

The only way to remember that the rest of the world even exists is to look out a single rectangular window and see it. All you can do is look. It is too narrow for even a cat to crawl through. But the sun shines on Maggie in the morning and it is bright and warm on her skin. After noon the shadows begin to lay themselves out before her, growing long as the hour gets late. But mornings are hers.

The window is partially covered by a few thatches of weeds growing from the ground right outside, and it is splattered with dirt. Her biggest fear is that the weeds will grow so thick that she will not be able to see outside at all, or stand in the light that cuts its way into the darkness for half the day every day. Most days. If the clouds are heavy all she gets is a hollow gray illumination that for some reason reminds her of having a cold. But this is summer and the sky is clear and the light is bright.

Was bright.

It is now after noon and, though it is still daytime, the sun is on the other side of the house and sinking toward the horizon.

When the sun’s light cuts into the room she stands in it. She stands in it as long as possible, moving as the light moves across the floor, but the sun is gone so she is merely sitting on the mattress in the corner of the room with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. A book sits on the mattress beside her-sometimes Donald brings her books and even gives her lessons-but she does not feel like reading right now.

‘Borden?’ she says to the shadows, but there is no response.

So she counts. One two three four five six seven eight. She likes to count. When she is not counting all sorts of terrible thoughts enter her mind and make her stomach feel sour. Even reading cannot always keep out the thoughts. But when she counts she can keep them out by filling her mind with numbers. Not at first: the small numbers are too easy, they don’t require full concentration, and bad thoughts can still snake their way into her mind between them. But once she counts high enough, two thousand twenty-three, two thousand twenty-four, the numbers are big enough to fill her head and nothing else can squeeze in. Everything goes quiet inside her and she does not feel afraid.

She’s only up to three hundred and seventeen when Beatrice comes downstairs to collect her lunch plate. It is sitting empty on the small card table at which she usually eats her meals. Sometimes Borden will sit across from her while she eats and they’ll talk about things, though she can never really remember any of their conversations, and he has never eaten any of the food she has offered.

Three hundred and-

The door at the top of the stairs creaks open and Beatrice’s large frame fills the doorway. She flips a switch. A yellow bulb hanging from a brown wire in the middle of the basement comes to life. It chases away the shadows, filling the room with pale light. Maggie squints and watches Beatrice make her way down the stairs. First she steps down with her right foot, and then follows with her left, setting it next to the other. Once her feet are side by side again she pauses to breathe. Then she progresses once more with her right foot.

‘How are you, Sarah?’ she says once she gets to the bottom of the stairs.

‘Okay.’

‘Good.’

Maggie says nothing.

‘Do you want me to brush your hair for a while before I do the dishes?’

‘ No.’

‘Do you want to brush my hair?’

‘ No.’

‘Are you feeling okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’

Beatrice walks to the card table and collects the empty plate. It is white with blue flowers and vines decorating its edge. Maggie hates it.

‘You ate all your food.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me ma’am.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I wish you would call me Momma.’

‘Okay.’

‘You always say okay, but you never do it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’

Beatrice turns around and heads back up the stairs. When she reaches the landing she pulls open the door and turns to face Maggie again.

‘We’re having meatloaf for dinner. With lots of grated carrots, like you like.’

Then she flips off the light, steps through the door, and pulls it closed. But Maggie does not hear the click of it latching, nor does she hear the sound of the deadbolt sliding into place. She sits and waits and listens, but she hears nothing.

After a moment she gets to her feet and pads barefoot to the bottom of the stairs. She looks up to the top of them. A sliver of light cutting its way into the darkness between the door and the wall. The steps at the top are visible in the light, rounded and worn smooth by shoes sliding up and down them, a few rusty nail heads jutting up.

‘Borden,’ she says. ‘Borden, it’s open.’

Something within her shifts. A long eclipse of the sun ends and light comes into her.

Even before she knows what she’s doing, even before instinct becomes thought, her heart begins to thump and her mouth goes dry. Her hands form fists on either side of her. The fists grip the fabric of her dress tight within them. She steps up, her bare feet moving one at a time from the cold smooth concrete floor of the basement to a warmer textured surface. The grain of the wood feels good beneath her feet, alive somehow, more part of the outside world than anything else down here.