Jack Ketcham - Right to Life

Why? she thought. What am I doing here?

What do they want with me?

It was cold.

She was not underground but it must have been some kind of basement she was in because it was summer, the day was warm and yet in here it was cold.

Where was she?

She was crying. The tears went cold on her face the moment she shed them. Gooseflesh all over her body.

She kicked harder. Kicked until her feet were sore and maybe bleeding and then kicked and pounded again. Her breath came in gasps through the sobbing.

Calm down, she thought. This isn't doing any good. Think. Control yourself, dammit. Concentrate.

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.