Dangerous

The house was dark and dingy. She kept it tidy, but the walls had become dark now, no longer bright and vibrant like they were when she was little. Years of dust and grime, dirty hands and no one washing the walls had taken its toll. They had little, anyway, to keep clean. The carpets showed signs of wear from foot traffic, with occasional stains. The windows had layers of filth on them, practically blocking out the sun.

She recalled, when she was little, there was laughter there with her mother. Though now her mother was gone. For four years, she felt so alone. Her dad told her that her mom had just left. Her mom hated her, she hated her brother, Rick, and she hated her dad. That is what she kept being told.

Taking care not to step on any of the sweet spots that would alert her father or brother, she slowly made her way down the stairs. She had painstakingly learned where every squeaking spot was. She’d walk on her tippy toes down the steps, with her heart racing so fast and beating so hard inside her chest that she wondered if someone were standing beside her, if they would hear it.

She knew they were up to something, her dad and brother. It was something bad because they were horrible people. They did nothing good. Everything they did was selfish. Selfish to the core. They made her sick inside, but she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. She had practically become invisible, not that she cared. It was nice to be invisible after the things her own father let other men do to her. Hell, her father tried to get her own brother to rape her one day and her brother down right refused. He got beat that day. Beat hard.

They claimed she was the bad one. The dirty whore. The unwanted bitch. Anything that they could throw from their tongue that they thought would hurt her. They never did, though. Not anymore. Not after everything they had done to her. She was used to it. Numb to it. There was a time where their ignoring her would hurt her, but not anymore. There gets to be a point where it just makes you so numb. You learn to detach yourself and go some place good. Even if it’s some place you read in a book or imagined up yourself.

As careful as she was being, she hit a squeaky board that seemed to echo through the house. Stopping instantly, she froze. She held her breath, waiting, and listened to see if she had alerted them. The house was quiet. Hearing the squeak of the hinges on the old rusty storm door, she knew the back door was half open, swinging open a bit and slamming back in place whenever the wind would take it. She hated this place. She always had.

When she was little, she dreaded leaving her school. Most kids couldn’t wait for that three o’clock bell to ring. She hated it. Life at home it wasn’t easy. She wasn’t like the other kids. There was very little “love” in her house. Sure, her mother loved her and she strongly believed that she was the only who loved her, other than her grandparents, her mom’s parents. However, her father was a drunk and her mother was weak to standing up for herself.

She wasn’t grown, only 15, but she even knew that her mother submitted to her father’s authority. All her mother did was do whatever it was her father told her mother to do. Apologizing anytime he even looked disappointed, telling him she’d do it right next time and if she could, she’d fix whatever she did wrong. Realizing it now, her mom was extremely frightened of her father. He beat her mother daily. It was normal to her, when she was little. She didn’t like it when she saw it, but now she understood.

At six, she learned what a blow job was because her father told her mother to do it in front of her. He hadn’t cared. She didn’t realize what was going on. Now that she was older, she understood her mom had battered wife syndrome. They had learned about it in health class. That day, her dad made her mom do what he did in front of her. Her mom was sobbing and her dad was laughing.

He was a horrible, horrible man.

She remembered the tears streaming down her mom’s face. Her dad’s hand on the back of her mom’s head, and her mom gagging when he’d push it down fast. She remembered the screaming and the yelling from everyone. She couldn’t take it.

But there were moments in her life filled where there was love, caring, and hope. Before he had broken her mother down to a shell of a person. Her mom had talked to her once about running away from the man that fathered her. About taking her baby girl and escaping. Though that day never came. She had longed for it, wanting it so badly, even at a young age, but it never happened.

There were fleeting moments of kindness from her brother, reminiscing about their early days when he would play with her tenderly and read her stories. Together, they’d venture outside to gaze at the stars, him naming each one. However, a transformation occurred within him, mirroring their father’s monstrous nature. The most prevalent act of kindness she recalled was when their father subjected their mother to a horrifying ordeal, with her father shouting and laughing maniacally, demanding her gaze remain fixed as he effectively raped their mother. Rick intervened, shielding her eyes and guiding her away, apologizing for their father’s despicable fucking behavior. It was the first time she heard him curse. He promised to protect her indefinitely...and he did until he didn’t.

For years, she remained confined to her room; the lock positioned on the outside, rendering her a captive. Inside, there lay a solitary mattress on the floor alongside a scattering of toys, gifts from her grandparents that her father failed to convert into cash. Possessions were sparse—a handful of books, worn from countless readings. She sought solace in the pages of “Little Women” and “The Secret Garden,” losing herself in their worlds. Her maternal grandmother had sent her the cherished “Anne of Green Gables” series, resonating deeply with her, for Anne’s journey paralleled her own feelings of loneliness and longing for affection. Despite yearning for a place to call home and to be cherished, such dreams seemed futile. Yet, she clung to the hope of departure in two years’ time, a meticulously crafted plan to flee without turning back.

She considered herself fortunate to have the freedom now to do certain things that were previously not allowed.

During her grade school years, the expectation was for her to return home promptly. Upon arrival, someone would hurry her into her room, forcefully pushing her inside, and then slam the door shut. The metallic lock clicking ominously behind her. Eventually, they’d bring her a plate of food, though it often arrived cold.

In middle school, she finally received permission to take part in after-school programs and sports. She was stunned. Her parents, keen to avoid drawing attention to their family, encouraged her to engage in extracurricular activities, believing it would lend an air of normalcy to their situation. Reflecting on this, she realized they recognized that what was going on was wrong, even though it was only a prelude to worse things to come. Learning to use the showers in the gym locker room became a routine. The PE teacher kept spare, clean clothes in the lost and found boxes. When washing her clothes at home became impossible, she would often resort to taking garments from there. Joining the Track Team and Photography Club, among other social circles, provided her with a sense of belonging, at least a little. She was still shy.

No matter how good she got at things, she never experienced cheering parents at her events.

Then there was also the time where her dad brought other men around and they would eye her so hard. They’d make her sit on their laps and touch her. They’d kiss on her with their stinky breath and awful mouths. One guy even reached between her legs one day, but she had screamed. Her dad grabbed her by the hair and threw her across the room.

She hit the wall so hard. Her head hurt instantly, her eyes got blurry, she ended up throwing up all over herself. Her mom had come running in and yelled at her dad. That night, they both got beat. It was horrible.

Things still got worse.

If she didn’t let the men touch her, there had been horrible consequences.

It was horrible either way.

They told her that if she ever revealed what was happening at home to anyone, they would kill her. Knowing he would do it, she didn’t dare. She did whatever was allowed, so she could be home a lot less. She took every opportunity not to be home.

It was then that the regular beatings started. He took pleasure in hitting her in concealed locations, where others were less likely to notice. It was something he adored. He would do things to her, cut her with knives, electrocute her while she was sleeping, waking her up. Even getting on top of her and choking her until she got tunnel vision and almost passed out. Living in terror was hard, pretending it never happened was harder.

It was around the end of middle school that her mother disappeared. One weekend there was an out-of-town track event and she could stay with a friend. It was the first “best weekend” of her life. When she had come home, he told her that mother ran away.

She spent some time hating her mother. Hating her with every fiber of every cell inside her. How could she run away and leave her there? How could she leave without her? She cried that night, all night.

Her brother received a completely different treatment than she did. Their dad treated him like the prodigal prince. He did anything their father said and was as twisted in his sick mind as their father was. Especially now that he wasn’t in school. She remembered when he used to protect her. He’d take a beating for her when she did something wrong. Then one day, the light in his eyes just changed. He became scary and angry.

When she started high school, she continued with track and photography. She also joined a Writing Club, eventually the school paper and yearbook.

They no longer locked her in her room because she didn’t leave her room. She preferred to be as far away from them as she could.

She stumbled upon music. Once, she bought a clock radio for a quarter from a garage sale. The people noticed her gaze and offered it to her after a brief discussion. Before they changed their minds, she quickly fled from that garage sale.

She noticed her brother was constantly watching her. It made her feel so on edge.

Then one night her door opened, and her dad came in. He had just taken a shower and was only in a towel. Her gut twisted inside her, as if to warn her she’d never be the same. He let the towel drop. When she screamed, she thought she could hear her brother laughing from the hallway. He had come to her throughout her 7th grade year. He would bring friends. Sometimes he tied her up, but he always covered her mouth so her screams couldn’t be heard. Eventually, she just stopped screaming.

Then one day … it just stopped. She didn’t care why; she had just been thankful.

Her brother got a girlfriend. Several months later, her brother’s girlfriend disappeared. The police kept showing up, dragging her father and brother down to the police station to question them. Eventually, that stopped too. Her father would laugh at how they couldn’t pin anything on them. They had nothing. Her brother had just looked sad and angry, all at the same time.

Then she noticed there were more and more women going missing around town. She’d hear about it around school. “Did you hear about so-and-so disappearing?” Girls in her class talked about it, some saying some older students had been disappearing.

Her dad was spending less time at home and after he’d leave, her brother would leave… when they were home, they were usually in the basement. When she was a kid, she noticed a padlock on the basement door. She always wondered why. Someone cut off the access with that pad lock when she was about 7 or 8, maybe 9. In her gut, she knew. Now that she was older, and actually understood some things, she had to be sure.

She stopped, holding her breath. She had noticed no sounds from them. No one came around the corner to hit her and tell her to go back to her room. Though she felt sick and she had this sense of dread.

She was only 15, just a few weeks from being 16, and it felt like she had lived a lifetime of hell.

However, the previous night, when the house lay eerily quiet, and she was engrossed in reading, she could have sworn she heard someone screaming. As she strained to listen, to be sure she had indeed heard a scream, there was nothing. She convinced herself she had misheard an animal. A few minutes later, someone desperately cried for help following that scream. Instantly, her heart raced, and she froze, sitting in silence, straining to listen. The sound of her father’s heavy footsteps echoed through the house, accompanied by the creak of a door opening. In a fleeting moment, she dared to hope the door remained ajar as she heard cries and frantic pleas, followed by more screams for help. Then, abruptly, the door slammed shut, enveloping the house once again in an unsettling silence.

At this moment, the squeak didn’t appear to have grabbed their attention. She couldn’t determine their whereabouts or if they were even present at home. They stuck together, venturing out together or pursuing their own interests, often vanishing for days. Those were the moments she cherished the most when they were absent for days on end. Yet, inevitably, they would return, almost predictably, around the same time.

She took a deep breath and continued down the stairs. She was debating if she should make some noise to draw them out if they were home, or if she should just be sneaky.

She thought for a moment, mostly holding her breath.

She allowed herself to breathe again and continued down the stairs. She tip-toed through the living room and into the kitchen, again, avoiding any sort of squeaky board. That’s when she heard them coming up the stairs from the basement, talking. She hit in the corner of the pantry wall and the kitchen wall. It was just big enough for her to flatten her back against and hide, stand on her tippy toes. She prayed they were heading out the back door and wouldn’t walk past her. Surely, they would see her if they did. Surely, she was in for it, a beating and who knows what else. Something would happen if they found her. She tried to make herself as small as possible, willed herself to form into the tiny box the walls made.

“What are you going to do about her?” It was her brother’s husky voice. It was raspy and you could hear the anger dripping from every word. Like venom from a snake. It seemed as if anything coming out of his mouth had rage dripping from it.

“Well, we will do what we do with them all.” Her dad growled. Neither of them knew how to talk. They both sounded completely uneducated and like cave dwellers.

“What about the parasite upstairs? When are we going to take care of her?”

“Soon,” her father said as they opened the back door. Her heart stopped, her breath held. “Can’t do it too soon. They’ll look at us cuz of your mother and Vicky.”

Her heart dropped. She had been wondering lately if they had killed her mother. They could have killed Rick’s girlfriend, Vicky. Both had just disappeared into thin air, never to be heard from again. This confirmed it for her. They had been involved with the disappearance of her mom and her brother’s girlfriend.

“I want to do her,” her brother said. She could almost see the disgusting smile spread across his face with the thought, like the Joker in Batman. She had watched that movie at her best friends’s house with her family.

Gabby’s family actually liked to spend time together. It was weird for her to see a family love each other so much that there were game nights and movie nights, and everyone actually enjoyed it. She didn’t get to watch television or movies much, only at Gabby’s house.

“I want to watch her bleed.” Her stomach knotted up, and she felt like she was going to throw up. They were going to kill her, she realized.

Her dad laughed, “Soon, right now you can imagine these other women are her,” and the back door opened and shut after they shuffled out. She stayed pressed against the wall until she heard the roar of the rundown, beat-up car that her dad had.

They were leaving.

If it wasn’t for her close friendship with Gabby, she didn’t know how she could have survived. One night, she recalled her father threatening to do to Gabby what he had done to her. It was the reaction he had wanted out of her when she started screaming, fighting, and she realized later. She deliberated over distancing herself from Gabby, but ultimately couldn’t. It was Gabby who started calling her Bella. It was the first nickname, besides bitch and whore and whatever else her father and brother called her. They certainly never called her Maribel. Her mom had called her Mari when she was little, but it had been so long, she had almost forgotten.

She sighed in relief when the sounds of the car grew further away. She hurried through the small kitchen, through the mess they had created and never cleaned up. With her mother gone, she was now solely responsible for the cleaning, and they hardly bothered to ask her anymore. She saw the cockroaches crawling all over everything; they didn’t bother to hide anymore. Usually she could find an army of ants in the kitchen too. She never ate there anymore. The only meals she had were the ones she could get at school.

With the belief that it would happen again, she anticipated they would soon enter her room, forcefully pull her by her hair, as they had done, and demand that she take care of their mess. Before, they forbade her from eating with them, and if she was fortunate, she would receive scraps once they finished. She chose not to eat them. Either she put them in a bag and gave them to a neighborhood dog, or she would flush them down the toilet. Unless she was at school, she refused to eat. There was a hint of fear in her they were planning to poison her.

She made her way to the basement steps, which were by the back door. As she went down the stairs, and saw they had added another lock to the door. She panicked for a moment. Then looked around. On the windowsill were a couple of keys. She grabbed them and prayed it would open it. When the first lock clicked, she took a deep breath. After she got the second one unlocked, she let out a long breath as she opened the door.

The smell that escaped the room was horrible. What she was met with first was the horrible smell that escaped the room. It was so horrible that she had grabbed the top of her shirt to cover her mouth and nose with it. Flipping on the light, she saw blood. So much blood. There was a woman in a cage, tied up and gagged. She didn’t respond to the light. She remained with her eyes closed, slumped over in the corner of the cage.

Was she dead? It was all she could think.

She almost vomited as she walked over to the cage, taking a few cautious steps inside. Turning quickly, facing the door and stairs, she almost ran. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Her breathing was getting so rapid and ragged, she felt like her chest was tight.

Turning, she looked again. That’s when she noticed all the padding on the walls in the basement. On the back of the door. Everywhere. Blood splatter could be found in every corner of the room. The dried blood splatter covered most of it. There were weird things hanging from the ceiling. Different things built into the walls. She thought it was like a torture chamber that she read about in books. All these weapons and things that could easily hurt someone badly. So many thoughts rushed through her head as she was taking stock of the room.

There was an old workbench, one that used to have tools on it that now had different knives and other things. She saw what looked like leather collars for dogs, some with balls in the middle of them. There was a weird looking saw hanging on the wall. A box of those enormous black trash bags. Then she saw all the pictures, the instant camera kinds with the white frame around them. They were all over the wall above the tool bench. Then she noticed there were more on the back walls, covering the walls. There were so many photos.

She took a step in, intending to look at the photos. Her shoes were sticking to the floor a bit, but she tried not to think of it. All these women, she thought. All of them were in different poses, mostly naked, some screaming, some crying, and some with that blank stare to them. Then she saw a picture of her mom. Bella believed she understood the meaning behind the red line on her mom’s neck, particularly as her mom’s eyes rolled back into her head, exposing only the whites. But Mom? Mom is that … really.. is that you?

There was a noise and then she glanced at the woman in the cage again, and her eyes met the woman’s. They were so vibrate green. The woman let out a scream and started crying.

“I’ll get help,” she yelled. “I’ll get you help!”

She knew … she knew what she had to do. She shut off the light, shut the door and put the locks back on. Leaving it the way they left it. With a sprint up the stairs, she practically leaped onto the kitchen counters, resulting in dishes crashing to the floor and bugs scattering. In order to find the coffee can her mom used to hide money in, she searched on top of the cabinets. Their running away money, she had always said. In her hopes and prayers, she wanted it to still be there. Extending her arm, she patted the top of the cupboards around. The sensation of dead and live bugs moving across her hand made her shudder in disgust. She didn’t scream or flinch because she couldn’t see, and she was too busy praying she’d find the metal can. When the very tips of her fingers touched something metal, she almost cheered. Her finger tips tried to work it out of the far corner and she struggled to get a grasp on it. When she finally did, she grabbed the can, pulling it out as quickly as she could. Taking a momentary pause, she pulled up the plastic cover to investigate if there was any money remaining inside, and upon discovering its existence, she promptly shut it. In a swift motion, she jumped off the counter, falling to her knees, but immediately got up and dashed through the house and up the stairs. Rushing into her room, she quickly grabbed her school backpack, tossing a few things inside, including the can and the her beloved books. She powered up the clock radio she had gotten from the garage sale. She stuffed anything she could find under her blanket on the mattress, making it look like she was laying under the covers.

Once she was satisfied the bed looked like she was laying in it, sleeping, she looked around her room one last time. When her eyes caught the blue teddy bear her grandmother had sent her, the last thing she had ever gotten from her, she grabbed it and opened the bag one last time, quickly zipping it closed again.

Her heart was racing so hard she thought it was going to jump out of her chest. With a flip of the lock for good measure, she turned off the light, slammed her bedroom door, making it look as if they had locked her in. Leaving the house, she ran. There was a moment of indecision where she was unsure about what to do, but she knew she needed to take some sort of action. She had to …

She stood there in the front yard. She looked left; she looked right. Where was she supposed to go? She only really knew one place. So really only had a few people she could trust.

She just knew she was leaving her home for good, swearing she’d never go back. Never.

Just as she was going to run, she stopped, freezing in place. She could hear the car coming down the street. The loud engine was unmissable. She panicked, looked around for a place to hide. The sun was setting, and it would be dark soon. When it got dark, she could go, run. While ducking into a bush, she observed them pulling into the driveway and proceeding towards the back of the house near the garage and the back door. She stayed there until she knew they had gone into the house. She heard the windows rattle a little when they opened the back door, and then rattle again when they shut it.

She had to save herself. She had to save that woman if she could.

Placing her backpack on her back and securing the strap around her waist, she stood up and started running. With her life hanging in the balance, she ran as if her survival depended on it. She ran like there were wolves snapping at her feet. As she ran without direction, she briefly considered going to the police station, but her lack of knowledge about its whereabouts made her hesitant. It was in those few moments that she realized she was instinctively running to her friend’s house. She was running to the only person in the universe she trusted. To the family home that had always accepted her and never mistreated her.

She was running to her safe place.