I don’t like horror stories. I don’t like a lot of them because of how they make me feel. What I feel isn’t what you feel watching a scary movie or reading a scary book. It isn’t the thrill, the fear, the uncertainty. It isn’t the typical emotions of the average person, at least.
I know only one guy who understands what I am talking about and that’s because we went through together. I see a lot of people use fake names and unlike them, I have a good reason. I know some people who know me, who can find me, so you can call me Max and my friend’s name is Sam.
Sam and I robbed a few stores together. He owned guns and I didn’t. I did the talking and I can be pretty intimidating without a glock in my hand. We hit four stores and the fifth us walking away in handcuffs. We thought it only had one guy, but then a second one appeared with a shotgun. Nobody was hurt, Sam and I were cornered, and cops came and picked us up.
We just wanted money. We didn’t want to kill anyone, we didn’t want to die. You will be surprised how many criminals think that way, how many would back down if you challenged them - but still not nearly enough to take that chance.
Anyway, a few years in prison taught us a lot.
First of all, the prison we were sent to barely had anyone in it. That should tell you that Sam and I are not American, but that’s all I will give you. Most of the prisoners were getting in years. There were two guys younger than us, but they just kept to themselves, messed around in the yard, that kind of thing. The older ones read and stared at their feet. Most were like Sam and I, just bored out of our minds, knowing we could be doing something better with ourselves.
The funny thing is, I was kinda hoping for a movie moment. Classic prison dialogue, or a fight with one of the inmates, something. I guess a combination of regret and frustration was what we felt all the time. I didn’t leave prison with some inner sense of peace, or a better attitude for the future. I didn’t leave angry and ready to take my revenge on the world either. I just felt it was one big waste of time.
Sam left nearly a year after me. I visited, I picked him up and we were driving back to a shared apartment when I finally told him I was done with the illegal work. I found a job that was making me decent money, thanks to another friend. There was also a place for Sam, but I don’t think he ever completely accepted that idea. I think he felt a bit lost after he left prison.
Sam didn’t get a job. He just hung out at my place, getting his head straight. I couldn’t blame him. Instead, I thought I’d show him a bit of fun to help get him hopeful about the future - a trip down to the sea.
I rented a cheap place on the internet, borrowed a car, and had enough money for beer. There were bound to be a few hot chicks at the beach too. Even if he didn’t have the guts to talk to any of them, I sure as hell did and I could use a little fun.
I’d never driven down to the coast before but had been there with my parents. Sam had never been down there, so for him, it would be an eye-opening experience. I would like to say the drive was an easy one, but I think we both felt the toll it took on us after the first three hours.
Eventually, we were out on this thin road heading along the sea, sand on both sides, but only one had the ocean - you can guess where we kept looking.
“Well, what do you think? Is that not the best-looking view you’ve seen in your entire miserable life?” I asked him.
“It’s something alright,” he said calmly, but I could tell he was blown away.
“‘It’s something alright,’” I repeated. “It’s better than alright, it’s incredible. Do you ever get tired of staring at the same brick wall outside your apartment building? The same ugly broad you work with handing you a styrofoam cup of cheap coffee that might as well be dirt with hot water? The same six-o-clock on-the-dot motherfucker that keeps honking his horn on the street as if it will make traffic any better?”
“Are you getting to your point?”
“I’m getting there. What I’m trying to say is, you can look at the ocean every day of your life and it will always look different. It’s alive, Sam. It’s not a crappy bunk bed, three cement walls, and a set of iron bars.”
Sam didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. I just focused on getting us to the place, which was proving to be tougher than I thought. The sand to our right was almost as endless as the ocean to our left. Yet, everywhere I looked, there wasn’t a road sign, a building, or anything that suggested life along the ride we were on.
We drove for another hour and after getting over a hump in the road, we saw a building. It had a Spanish villa appearance. Jutting walls with rounded corners, a rounded arch at the entrance, niches in the walls for candles or flowers or whatever. That’s what I imagined they would have, but those niches were empty.
There wasn’t a sign outside suggesting it was anything more than a house by the ocean, but it was odd to call it even that. No number on the wall, no mailbox, nothing. Still, I wanted to confirm we were heading in the right direction for my sanity. Sam and I got out of the car and approached the entrance.
“Is this the place?” Sam asked.
“Maybe, but I thought we would have found it sooner than this,” I told him honestly. “Let’s just ask.”
There were two empty pots beside the arch, just dirt, no flowers. Through the archway, we entered a cool reception. There was a reception desk, a water cooler, two plastic chairs against the wall, and a stack of aged brochures gathering dust at one end of the desk. Behind it was a teenager, skinny and bored.
When he looked up and saw us, two tough-looking ex-cons, his eyes widened and he stood up quickly. It was like we were military officers.
“Hi, is this-” I struggled to remember the name of the place. “Uh…do you have rooms for a ‘Sam and Max?’”
The teenager seemed to hesitate. He looked at us with a fish-out-of-water expression and his eyes darted to the desk. Before he could make a move, a short woman marched inside and checked the desk. Her skin was tanned, her hair graying and her expression tired. The teenager used that moment to escape into the backroom, while she looked up at us.
“Max, Sam, welcome,” she said, taking off her glasses.
The owner got to the point quickly, like she had better things to do. She showed us the two rooms, pointed to a bathroom down the hall, and left to continue her work. She was gone before I could ask anything more.
“I guess this is the place,” I murmured. “Middle of fucking nowhere.”
“Didn’t you check if it was in a town or something?” Sam asked as we marched to the car to get our things.
“I just saw the price and a picture of a bed. Both were good for me.”
“Fair enough,” Sam chuckled. “At least they have beers.”
He already seemed to be at ease, which made me feel a lot better. After unpacking our things, we went down to the water, back to the place, and crashed on our beds when it got dark. It was all a little strange, but we could excuse that after our long journey.
*
Waking up that night was like waking up after a night of heavy drinking. I knew well enough the effects of drugs on the system to know that our beers were spiked, or somebody drugged us while we slept. Either way, my head was pounding as I left the room and so was Sam’s.
Instead of a cool hall and reception area, we stepped outside into an empty courtyard with massive walls all around. The courtyard could not have been bigger than a basketball court, but the walls were taller than it was long.
I was bleary-eyed, but not blind enough to not notice Sam slip and fall forward. He hit the ground painfully. I went to his side, trudging over to him like a drunk puppet.
“What the fuck?” Sam murmured, his face barely moving as he spoke. The drugs were having a heavy effect on his system. I tried to get him to slow down. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, just take it easy,” I said. “I think we were drugged…give it some time, don’t push too hard.”
“I can barely keep my eyes open, man.”
Panic was starting to set in. My heart was pounding like crazy and I didn’t want to think it was the effect of the drugs too. The idea of my heart bursting in that situation still makes me itch with fear.
“Hello,” a voice called. It was coming from the wall to our right. Looking up, I saw a pair of hands, raised and empty, as if an incredibly tall man was behind the wall holding up his arms in surrender. “You see me. Good.”
“Who is it?” Sam asked me. “I can’t-”
“I can’t either, he is behind the wall,” I told him.
“Food will be dropped from here,” the hands touched the wall. “Remember that.”
The hands withdrew, returning with two plastic bags. The bags were dropped and hit the sand in the courtyard. Looking up, the hands were gone and we didn’t see them again until the next day. During that first day, I started looking around the courtyard, all the while thinking I was stuck in some kind of messed up dream.
I was surrounded by flat colors. The white sand, the orange walls, the blue sky. The only break in this cartoon reality was Sam, who brought me back from my panicked state when the drugs were processed by his system. He walked unsteadily after me as I went around the courtyard looking for some fault, but all I found were walls that had been around longer than me and would be around longer still.
Sam placed his hands on my shoulders.
“Slow down,” he said with labored breathing. “We’re trapped. They know it, we should know it too.”
“Trapped…trapped…this is crazy!” I yelled. “We were just at the motel place, right? Those are the same rooms, right?”
“Our rooms had windows,” he said. “These don’t.”
I looked back through the doorway to my room. Sure enough, the window with the view of the ocean was missing. I moved to investigate and saw that a few other important features were missing too, but at least there was a toilet.
When I turned around, I saw Sam investigating the plastic bags. I heard something else, a roaring over the silence.
“We’re still by the sea,” I said.
“I can smell it,” Sam said. “These bags only have apples in them…nothing else.”
He handed me one bag. In it were ten apples, fresh and cool. In the environment I was in, they seemed as fake as the walls, but when I took a bite, they were rich and juicy. Sam looked at me for a moment before he took a bite out of one of his. I didn’t even consider they were poisonous, but he did.
Part of me still wanted to believe I was dreaming.
I sat down against the wall and tried to make sense of it. Sam did the same, the two of us eating an apple in silence, listening to waves crash. I felt something wet hit my face, a droplet of seawater. I looked over to see if Sam noticed - he did.
“We’re right by the sea,” I said. Throwing the apple core over the wall, I went over to it and placed my ear against the wall. “I heard it…I think it’s splashing against the wall.”
Sam and I exchanged looks. The place we were staying at wasn’t that close to the sea. We had to have been moved.
I’d like to say we learned more than that about our prison, but we didn’t. Sounds and smells were all we had. It wasn’t enough to tell us exactly where we were, but it was enough to ground us. We could assume we were in the same area, that we were close to the coast, and that the woman and the teenager had to have been behind our confinement.
Yet, we didn’t know why.
That’s something we had to think about day after day after day. Weeks without a shower or a scrap of entertainment. Sam was running around the courtyard of sand, while I sat there with close eyes, trying to imagine myself somewhere else.
We would sometimes wait for the apples to be dropped, and some days we woke up with the apples already there. Sometimes they made us sick, other times they were just what we needed - usually the times we were thirsty. It took me a while to finally start drinking the water out of the toilet cistern. I don’t know how clean it was, but it was better than nothing.
I don’t know what day it was when the routine was broken by something unusual. The hands reappeared, followed by many others which peaked over the walls all around us. Sam and I hadn’t spoken in some time, but seeing that finally got us talking to each other again.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
Before I could reply with my usual, “I don’t know,” movement caught our eyes. A white rope fell against the orange wall, stretching down to us. The hands stood to attention above the walls, waiting for one of us to take it. We approached the rope, and I saw that it was the kind of rope that was used on ships - thick and rough. Perfect for climbing over a wall.
I reached out and pulled it. It held strong.
“Are you leaving?” Sam asked with tears in his eyes. “Are they letting us go? Are you letting us go!?”
Nobody answered his question. That silence was enough to make us hesitate. We tried yelling more things, but they wouldn’t respond. Eventually, the rope was pulled up the wall so suddenly we couldn’t grab it. The hands remained above the walls, but our way out was taken from us.
Laughter.
Laughter all around, joyous and cruel. These were the laughs of the sadistic men and women. We were clueless as to what just happened, but their laughter told us that we had made a big mistake. It didn’t stop. The sky shifted, clouds rolled in, and rain started to fall. The waves would crash against the walls, not a wall. It’s as if we were in the middle of the ocean.
Thunder rumbled and shook the earth.
Once more, it felt like I was in some dream. Yet, when I look at myself now, I know that it was not. It was not a dream when their hands rested on the edge of the wall and they pulled themselves over. Their bodies fell to the ground, hitting it with horrible sounds - these creatures.
Human, but their skin was so pale it was almost blue. More bone than flesh, their eyes empty and gray, their laughter incessant. Looking back on it now, they seemed almost fishlike. Their hands, up close, had sharp black nails. Maybe claws are a better description. The waves grew louder, the rain began to fall. Water spilled over the walls, slowly filling the courtyard to ankle height.
The creatures scrambled to their feet and looked at us. By that point, we had already backed into one of the rooms, but I was caught by surprise as I tried to close the door. A creature had snuck up from the side, surprising me and grabbing my arm, pulling it back through the door. Sam continued to try and close the door, not realizing my arm was in the way.
When I screamed, he noticed, but the pain that followed was far worse. I can’t compare the pain to anything I have ever experienced, but I imagine it wouldn’t be too different from feeding my arm into a wood chipper. I remember distinctly the sensation of my right bicep being torn before the rest of my arm followed.
I remember falling back, my eyes clouding over. The shock was sending me into unconsciousness. Sam closed and locked the door. He braced it with the bed. I saw his terrified face, but it must have been nothing compared to mine. I never felt so scared in my whole life, I didn’t dare look at my right arm, at what remained.
My story ends here.
The rest I had to learn from Sam. Sam used the bed sheets to bind my wound and a belt to cut the blood flow as much as he could. He told me that he watched the door, listening to the sounds of the creatures until they faded with the storm. The water that had seeped beneath the door receded and it was only when he heard the familiar thumps of the plastic bags hitting the courtyard that he opened the door.
The courtyard was empty again, with no sign of the monsters, but there were scratches on the walls.
The day after that, the hands reappeared, the rope fell and they waited for a reaction. Without anything left to lose, Sam tied me to the bottom of the rope and grabbed on tight. Something pulled the rope hard and fast, he thought it would undo the knot he tied.
The hands withdrew, and the two of us went over the wall. Sam said he saw nothing but sand all around before finally hitting the ground. When he looked up, the prison was gone and we were in the middle of the beach. The borrowed car right where we left it by the road.
He said I mumbled something then like I was talking to someone. Arguing about something and its taste. He found the car keys in my pocket - sheer luck that I had them at all, because he didn’t think to get them. The next town was only fifteen minutes down the road.
I woke up in the hospital with him by my side.
He figures we were in the prison for almost four months, I thought it was closer to five. We asked ourselves what the rope was for, and why it was even offered. We asked a lot of questions, including the classic, “Why us?”
It didn’t matter in the end. We got out, mostly intact. We think maybe we got lucky too. Had we never gone to an actual prison, maybe we would have found those months to be a true hell. Maybe we would have turned against each other or…something worse.
And maybe we would have never stuck around long enough for our captors to offer us a way out. I think they did that because they wanted us to make a decision, a decision to stay or to leave. I guess there is a lesson in that.
If there is a way out of hell, take it without hesitation.