Tom, Sarah and I stood around Mother’s body, watching while her blood spread slowly in a puddle around her head. She was lying face up, her eye twitching occasionally and her limbs moving involuntarily.
The movements were getting faster and more frequent with each passing second.
She was going to wake up soon.
“Quick! We need to do something,” I whispered.
“Let’s tie her up,” Tom said. “That was the plan, remember?”
“What plan!?” I whispered back, feeling on the verge of hysteria. “There was never any plan! This just happened!”
“Where’s the rope,” Sarah asked, searching desperately through the cupboards. She was throwing everything on the floor and all I could think was how angry Mother would be to see the mess we were making. Bottles of cleaning supplies lying crooked and tipped over on the floor.
“Rope, or duct tape! We need something strong!”
“There isn’t any!” Sarah shouted.
“I know everything in this place and there isn’t anything like that,” I said, sitting down on the bed, feeling dizzy.
“We need to think! What else can we use!?” Tom was yelling.
Mother was starting to moan slightly and her eyelids were fluttering up and down.
Tom saw this and picked up the hammer, gripping it nervously in his hands. He gulped, looking at me with worried eyes, as if asking what we should do next.
“The bed sheets!” Sarah yelled, running over to pull them off in a heap.
I got up from the bed and felt so lightheaded that I almost passed out. I wasn’t used to all this commotion and noise, it was overwhelming.
Sarah began to twist one of the thinner sheets into a rope-like material, turning it in her hands over and over again.
I was beginning to realize that with her clear mind she was more clever than both of us combined at that moment. She hadn’t eaten or drank much since arriving, meaning mother hadn’t been able to drug her properly yet. Plus, as I would find out, Sarah was an extremely bright girl.
“Help me!” She yelled, and I sleep-walked over while Tom stood guard over Mother.
We managed to get two sheets turned into short lengths of rope, then used those to begin tying Mother’s wrists together behind her back. Sarah did most of the work, her small hands working quickly and expertly with the handmade ropes. I couldn’t help but wonder where she’d learned to do that.
“Girl Scouts,” she told me, as if reading my mind. “My parents made me go.”
Her bottom lip trembled for a second and she wiped away tears, then set herself to work again.
I felt terrified each moment we were within reach of Mother, worried she could wake up at any second. I imagined her eyes snapping open and her arms shooting out to grab my throat, and reached up to touch my neck involuntarily.
We tied Mother’s feet together, and finally finished it all with one more blanket-rope which we attached to a load-bearing pole at the center of the room. The other end of that blanket we tied to her wrists.
By the end of it all, she was essentially handcuffed to the pole at the center of the room. How strong those bonds were, we’d find out soon enough.
Despite my fear, I couldn’t help but worry about her injury as Mother’s head continued bleeding. Reluctantly, I used a towel and put it on her temple, where blood was still leaking out in a steady drip. We had positioned her so that she was sitting upright, with her back against the pole, as she was starting to wake up.
“Why are you helping her?” Tom asked me, looking annoyed. “She’s gonna be mad when she wakes up. You know that, right? These blankets aren’t gonna hold her.”
“What are you gonna do?” I asked, suddenly feeling worried for Mother in her already injured state being hurt even worse. “What are you going to do to her if she gets free, Tom?”
He smacked the hammer against his palm meaningfully.
“Whatever I have to. But we’re getting out of here today.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but before I had more time to negotiate, Mother’s eyes snapped open, like a zombie waking from temporary death.
The three of us gasped and took a step backwards. My heart sped up and felt like it skipped a beat as she began to strain and pull on her bonds.
“Stop. Right now,” Tom said, walking over to her with the hammer in his hands. “If you keep it up I’m gonna hit you again with this. Don’t think that I won’t.”
She actually snarled at him, snapping her teeth like a wild dog as he came closer. But she didn’t say anything. Her eyes just locked onto his with a cold stare, daring him to approach. And she continued to pull and twist, trying to free herself.
“Brat! Ungrateful, good for nothing…”
She twisted and jerked her upper body side to side, and the blankets could be seen visibly loosening.
My heartbeat got a little faster as Tom stepped closer.
“I’ll do it!” he yelled, raising the hammer over his head.
I could tell he was serious. And I guessed Mother could tell that too, since she stopped moving and just looked at him hatefully.
“You were a mistake,” she hissed. “I should never have given birth to you. Demon child! You would kill your own mother!? The one who raised and nurtured you? Who fed you and sheltered you? I am your mother! I made you! You should treat me like your God because that’s what I am! You’re nothing! You’re just a filthy, worthless brat!”
She kept rambling on and on incoherently and Tom tried to get her to stop but she refused to listen. She just kept talking about how bad we all were, and how terrible our sins were.
“Forget it,” Tom said. “I’m getting that door open. You watch her. Let me know if she does anything and I’ll bash her brains in.”
He turned around and went to pull the wallpaper down. Mother began to screech and scream about the mess he was making, but he ignored her.
When he had torn down the entire sheet of wallpaper, I had one panicky second where I couldn’t see the seams of the hidden door. I had a flashback to my nightmare, and imagined there was no way out of this place. What if she had sealed it up while we were sleeping? What if we were really, truly trapped?
But then I saw the black marks Tom had left with the hammer and breathed a sigh of relief.
The door was still there.
Mother was still screeching, no longer making any sense, as Tom pried open the door with the back of the hammer. It wasn’t as fine a blade as the knife, so the wood splintered and split at first, but Tom didn’t seem to care, he just dug the blade in deeper, wiggling and prying with a straining effort until it popped open with a bang!
He pushed it open and now there was no chain holding it shut. The dusty concrete steps leading up to another door were right there in front of us, and I instinctively walked towards them, leaving Mother behind.
I couldn’t help it, I was drawn to those stairs like a moth to light, and didn’t even notice the sounds of Mother struggling to get free.
Tom saw her, though. Just as she was pulling the bedsheets off from her wrists, he broke into a run and raced past me.
“No! She’s getting out!” He yelled, and I realized in an instant how badly I’d failed him. But I had no idea how much that failure would cost him.
I was supposed to be the one watching her. But it happened so fast.
Tom pushed Sarah out into the stairwell where I was standing and turned to face Mother with the hammer.
She pulled the blankets off her legs and stood looming over him, looking down at him and seething with rage. Her face was red and she was vibrating with hatred, just waiting for him to make a move.
But he didn’t.
Instead he looked back at us over his shoulder and yelled:
“Close the door. Lock it behind you.”
“No, Tom!” I shouted. “No, you’re coming with us!”
But Sarah was wiser than me. She knew he wasn’t going to make it. And that he wasn’t going to try to get out. He was only going to try to stop her.
My stepbrother was sacrificing himself for us. The kid who had started all of this by showing me that there was a way out of this prison, he was going to throw himself at the mercy of Mother, just to save us.
As she started to close the door, Tom looked back at me, and mouthed the words, “Run.”
And then the door slammed shut and Sarah locked it with the chain.
It began to pound on the other side, as Mother screamed with rage and tried to get it open.
“We can’t leave him in there!” I yelled. “We can’t!”
I reached up to unlock the door and Sarah grabbed my hand.
“He knew what he was doing. We can’t stop her if we go back in right now. But we can leave and get help. The police can come stop her. But we need to go, right now!”
She pulled me up the stairs by my hand, even though I resisted at first. I had been trained to be obedient but I didn’t know who to listen to anymore, or what was right and wrong. But I went along with what she told me. I followed her up the stairs and watched as she tried to open the door.
But it was locked. Of course it was locked.
And Mother had the key.
The other door was rattling in its frame, pounding as Mother struck it with her fists.
It popped open and we could see her eyeball, staring out at us.
“I see you…” she said quietly, then disappeared to get something.
Probably something heavy and slender like a hammer, to break the lock as we had tried to do. The tables had turned, but not for long at this rate.
“Oh no,” Sarah said. “We’re trapped in here.”
A second later Mother’s shoulder was banging against the door again, and it looked as if it was going to fly off its hinges at any second. Or if not that, the chain lock we had struggled so badly with would break and snap off.
Then the hammer began to swing through the gap, striking the chain forcefully. It looked about ready to break when suddenly she stopped.
“You little brat! Give me those! Now!” Mother screamed.
A set of keys suddenly came flying through the gap in the door, and I realized Tom had taken them from her somehow while she was distracted.
Sarah ran and picked them up, then turned the key in the lock a second later, opening it to reveal the brightest, whitest light I’d ever seen.
“I got it! Come on,” yelled Sarah, pulling me by the hand.
It was daytime outside.
The bright sun above was shining down, so intense that it blinded us. I blinked my eyes and shielded them from the harsh light.
Slowly, they began to adjust.
And then my knees buckled as I saw what was around me.
I fell to the ground, staring in awe at our surroundings. At the huge farmer’s field we were standing in, a thousand times bigger than anything I had ever seen in my life. And through the spaces in the trees I could see beyond that. A road that stretched forever into the distance.
I was seeing the world for the first time that I could remember. It was like being a tiger who has been caged its entire life being released into the wild.
It overwhelmed me so much I forgot to breathe. I felt tears running down my cheeks and my knees were shaking as I felt the dirt beneath them and the patchy grass between my fingertips.
But I didn’t have time to admire the scenery.
Sarah dragged me towards a strange-looking contraption, which I would find out was called a car, and practically threw me inside. She shut the door behind me and got behind the wheel, looking too short as she tried to see over the dashboard.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said nervously. “But I watched my dad teach my brother. At least this isn’t a stick-shift.”
I had no idea what any of that meant, and couldn’t really bother to care at that moment as the sound of the door being broken could be heard coming up the stairs.
“Shit,” Sarah whispered, putting a key into the ignition and starting the engine. “I think she’s out.”
She put the car in reverse, then began turning around, just as Mother came up the stairs and flew out the door, screaming.
I realized at that moment we hadn’t locked the exterior door. And we should have. But in our rush to escape we hadn’t thought much of the possibility of her breaking down that door at the bottom of the stairs, especially with the chain in place. But she was very strong.
As Sarah put the car into drive, Mother approached my window, screaming at me to open the door.
I almost did, that’s how engrained in me it was to obey her. I can’t explain it now, but it was like she had cast a spell over me. I needed to listen to her, and to do as she commanded.
But then I thought of the punishments and the horrible things she would do to us, and I dug my fingernails into my palm and told myself to stop listening to her.
It was time to think for myself.
Her eyebrows furrowed as she saw that I was not going to listen to her. Even me, her golden child, was disobeying her.
“You ungrateful brats! You will clean up this mess! I will make you clean it! YOU CAN’T GET AWAY FROM ME! I’LL FIND YOU. NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, I. WILL. FIND. YOU!”
Those last words were what got me, as she pounded on the glass, trying to break it, and Sarah hit the gas and peeled out as fast as she could.
A second later we were driving rapidly down a dirt road away from her, and I looked back to see Tom standing next to her. She was gripping him tightly by the wrist. And I could tell she wasn’t going to let go of Tom anytime soon.
He was her only child now.
Poor, poor Tom.
*
The police were surprisingly skeptical about our statements at first when we told them what we’d been through.
I guess this sort of thing doesn’t happen every often.
Thank goodness for Sarah, who at least knew how to explain it in words they would understand. I just stood there silently for the most part, nodding my head when they asked me questions.
The main thing they couldn’t understand was how she could keep me hidden for so long, without anyone finding us.
I’d been reported missing over a decade prior, from a children’s hospital ward. I was only four years old when she took me.
That was what got them looking deeper into things. Since Sarah had also been abducted from a children’s hospital.
It turned out Mother was quite a respected citizen around town. She was also an occasional nurse at the local hospital where Sarah had been abducted. That was where she went when she knocked us out for those long periods of time. And that was where she got her drugs, that she used to make us sleep, and to make us follow her commands. To make us compliant.
After they did some extensive digging, making use of new facial recognition software, they found out Mother was hiding quite a few things.
First of all, her real name was Susan Hicks - and she had a dark history of violence after a brain injury to her frontal lobe during her youth. She had several steel plates in her head, which explained her resistance to the hammer when Tom had attacked her in order to escape.
She had been in and out of prison and psychiatric treatment, until her last known release from jail.
It turned out she had managed to create a false identity for herself. This is usually hard to do, but Susan had found a way. She had killed a woman with no close family or relatives, and with no real friends. And she had taken the woman’s identity with all of her ID and paperwork and fled the state.
Tucked within that paperwork was a nursing license. A role which she managed to impersonate after some extensive research.
Then, she used the dead woman’s savings to purchase some land. There was no house there, so it came cheap. There were no structures on the property at all, except for one which was underneath the ground.
An old bomb shelter somebody had created during the early days of the cold war.
Susan stocked it with canned goods and dried beans, Spam and canned tuna, and she hid down there, terrified of being caught for what she had done. She didn’t want to go back to jail or to the hospital, where it was so filthy and nothing was her own.
And so she hid, alone for all those years. And she grew lonely. And she grew paranoid.
I have to fill in some of the gaps because there isn’t a record of all of these years, but I knew Mother well, and I believe her own parents taught her the intense germaphobia and obsessive cleaning habits, because she must have picked them up somewhere. Either way, her obsessive cleaning grew to become a complete fixation. And she became unable to leave the bunker.
Eventually, she did, though.
She needed company. Despite her fears and her worries about germs, she couldn’t stand to be alone anymore.
And that’s when she found me.
Security in hospitals wasn’t as strict in those days. A woman with a nurse’s badge could walk right in and out again, pushing a sleeping child in a wheelchair out to a car, and nobody would say a thing. Not if she looked like she belonged there. And Susan knew how to look the part.
Nobody caught her when she took Tom, either. She was careful, and she was clever.
But eventually she began to run out of money, and had to start to work again.
She ran out of her drugs and that was when we started to wake up and notice her leaving.
She had to restock her supplies, and she wanted another child to replace the one who wasn’t working out as well as she’d hoped.
She wanted a girl, after all.
*
The police went to the bunker, exactly where we told them it would be.
They found the place without difficulty, and it was exactly as we’d described it.
Except Tom was gone. And so was Mother.
*
Despite years of extensive searches, neither of them were ever found. I had a feeling Mother would find me one day, though. I thought about that every night, as I was trying to fall asleep.
It’s been a long time since we got out, me and Sarah. We keep in touch even all these years later.
Although I haven’t heard from her in a while…
She’s got a family now, and so do I.
I see pictures of hers on Facebook and Instagram, and I feel jealous, and wish we looked that happy.
Out in the sun, at the beach, going on vacations.
Tom and I don’t do those things.
I named my son Tom, after my stepbrother. In memory of what he did for us. How he saved us.
Tom and I don’t go out much. I’m scared to go outside most days. Scared of Mother. Scared of the GERMS.
Scared of that big, bright blue space you all know and love so well.
I’m okay with it, though. Don’t feel bad for me. I’m still free. I’m not stuck there with her anymore, and that’s a win.
I worry for Tom, though.
I don’t want him to turn out like me.
His mom left because I was too much of a clean freak. Too afraid to go outside.
Just like Mother.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, after all.
My fears aren’t getting any better after what I found in the mailbox this morning, either.
It was a postcard from Mother. Not the first I’ve received but it was the first at this particular address.
My current town’s famous tourist attraction was emblazoned on the front and there were just three words written on the back of the postcard.
I see you
I think Tom and I might have to move again.