Dog - 3. Confinement

Chapter 3

“I can't believe you were this stupid,” a gruff voice told me.

I moaned. I tried to bring the room into focus, but everything was dark. And my head was spinning. Something hurt but it wasn't even sure what.

"It was a lure, in case you didn't notice," the voice continued. I struggled to place it. I had heard it before, for sure.

I tried to answer something, but all that came out was an incoherent mumbling. Why was everything still dark?

"Anyway, he's got you now. Good luck."

I heard footsteps moving away and the sudden blinding glare of a square of light forced me to squint. I caught a momentary glimpse of a tall figure with broad shoulders leaving through the open doorway.

Greg. I remembered his name with sudden clarity, and then everything came crashing back. The money I had taken. My attempt to escape, and the electric fence.

"Wait!" I yelled, and tried to stand up.

That's when I realized I couldn't move.

Greg left the room and the door shut with a heavy finality that only added to my surging panic. There were restraints around my ankles and wrists, I could feel them now.

"Greg!" I shouted. "Come back!"

I tried fighting against the ropes that bound me, but they dug against my skin painfully and the more I struggled, the more it hurt.

"Anyone! Help!"

Nobody answered. I kept trying to break free until the skin around my ankles and wrists felt raw, throbbing every time I moved, but I remained trapped. No one came to help.

I shut my eyes tight, even though it made no difference in the complete darkness. I had to remain calm. Panicking was the worst thing I could do. I'd been in bad spots before, and I had always come out on the other side in one piece because I'd kept my cool so I could think. Like my first month out on my own, trying to survive. It had been scary, sure, and even worse when I ran out of money faster than I'd expected. The day I realized I didn't have any more money for cheap motels had been terrifying, but I hadn't run crying back home. I'd sat down on a park bench, thought hard, and then decided to use my last few dollars in one of the few remaining Internet cafés in the city to look up the address of the local shelter. They'd taken me in, and I didn't have to spend a night out in the open until much later.

Same thing applied here. I had to think.

At least I could move my head. It wasn't strapped to anything, so I could lift it and look around. There was nothing to see, though. When my neck got tired I had to lie back down on the hard, unyielding surface to which I was bound. It felt like a table, but I had no way of knowing for sure. I couldn't move an inch, would never be able to get on my own, and whoever had decided to keep me here could simply abandon me and I would slowly starve to death, although probably the thirst would get me first and I would become delirious…

Think.

Okay, okay. With an effort, I reined in my thoughts and focused on what I knew.

Fact one: whoever had put me here, probably Max, hadn't killed me, so he wanted me alive.

Fact two: Greg had said that the money had been a lure.

Fact three: I had been set up, and I had fallen for it.

I could've kicked myself if I'd been able to move. Creepy rich guy hires a teenager with no experience to come to some godforsaken town in the middle of nowhere, offering him a lot of money? I mean, I knew it had been suspicious from the beginning, but then I'd received money up front. It had been too good to resist.

It had all been a trap, obviously, probably the same one for which all the other guys before me had fallen. And hadn't someone in the town bar said that all the others hadn't been heard from again?

If this had been horror movie or something, Max would have appeared right about then and said something like I want to play a game. No one came, though. Nothing changed.

I tried everything I could think of to get out. I shouted out for Greg, for Max, and even for that creepy butler, but no one answered. I tried throwing my weight left and right as much as I was able to, but the table or whatever I was lying on did not even budge. I tried kicking my sneakers off so I could use my feet to feel around for any mechanism I could trigger, maybe, but I only managed to kick off one shoe and there was nothing within reach.

I said I was sorry for taking the money like a million times. I called out for Rex until my throat was hoarse. I offered to work for free, or to leave and never tell anyone about anything I had seen.

Eventually, I was forced to stop struggling around because the pain around my ankles and wrists was too much to bear. I felt nauseated now, too, and it became hard to concentrate. I wondered if it was some kind of aftereffect of the electric shock, and I tried to fight against the drowsiness that came and went in waves. I wondered if I had a concussion and I got scared of falling asleep, but it was hard to stay awake.

It felt like hours passed, and I began to nod off. I couldn't keep my eyes open, and before I knew it, I gave in to sleep.

I woke up with a jolt after what had felt like just a moment. At first I didn't know what had woken me up, but then I saw something.

Up on the ceiling, right above me, a small red dot blinked and then went out.

"Hello? Max? Greg?"

Nothing happened for nearly ten seconds and I began to think I had imagined the red light, but then the little dot came back and blinked off again.

It was a camera. Had to be. I couldn't see it because it was so dark, but that little light must have meant that it was on. Or recording.

"Hey! Hey, up there! Help me! Please!"

As before, though, nothing happened in response to my shouts. All I could hear was my own breathing, and all I could see was that annoying light that soon became an obsession for me. I began to count the seconds between each interval, and then I counted series of intervals. I went all the way to five hundred and thirty-seven before I gave up on that.

I sniffled but squelched the fear before it could grow. Being trapped like this would have been awful under any circumstances, but it was much worse because I had no idea why it was happening, or what was going to happen next. I imagined dozens of scenarios, most of which involved my dead body being thrown in a ditch afterwards, and soon I began to shake with true fear.

My angry shouts became pleas. My voice broke several times. And still no one answered me.

Eventually I simply slept, for a long while this time. My dreams were half formed nightmares, and I thought I had noises in the dark, but they were always gone when I opened my eyes. Then I slipped back into my dreams, trapped in there too, until total unconsciousness finally took hold.

My head ached when I woke up again. It was a pounding in my temples that throbbed with every heartbeat, and I massaged them gingerly with my hands to try and ease the pain.

Then I gasped. My hands were free! I sat bolt upright and looked around.

I felt myself all over and discovered that my feet were also free. I didn’t waste any time. I jumped down from the table I had been bound to, tripping over myself because I couldn’t see anything in the dark. I managed to keep my footing, though, and knelt down to find my shoe. I found it soon enough and put it on in a hurry. Then I stood up fully, rubbing my wrists. The skin around them was still raw and painful to the touch, but I didn’t pay much attention to that.

I had to get out of here.

I stole one last anxious look at the blinking red dot on the ceiling. If they were watching me, then fine. I didn’t care.

Stretching my arms out in front of me like a blind person, I took careful steps away from the table, feeling my way until my fingers bumped against a wall. I felt it all over, but it was smooth and cold to the touch. No trace of a door anywhere. I tried jumping to see how high I could reach, but I didn’t feel the ceiling and so I decided to start walking to the right and see what I found.

Nothing. I found a corner, turned and walked until I found another corner. Here I ran into something at knee height which almost tripped me. I felt it over until I identified it. A toilet. It was bolted to the wall and the floor, but there was no door around it. I kept going until I ran against two more corners, and I realized I had walked all around the room without once feeling anything that might have been a doorknob or even the faint outline of where the door was supposed to be. Which made no sense. I had definitely seen Greg leave the room.

Maybe I had missed something. I walked around the room again, this time to the left, being much more careful. My fingers found nothing, and I couldn’t see anything besides that infuriating red dot that blinked on and off in the ceiling, almost as if it were tracking all of my movements.

I made a circuit of the room three more times before I gave up. Then it occurred to me that there might have been something hidden in the middle, where the table was, and I walked over there with care. I used my hands to feel over every inch of the table, but it was as smooth and featureless as the walls. There weren’t even any signs of the restraints that had bound me before. There wasn’t anything on the underside of the stupid table either aside from a little depression covered by what felt like glass.

I climbed on top of the table, bouncing awkwardly in the dark. Then I tried to reach up to see if I could grab the blinking light, but the ceiling was much higher up than I had supposed.

“Hello?” I said, breaking the silence at last. “Anybody there?”

There was no answer, predictably. And I started to get angry again.

“What the fuck are you guys playing at?” I spat. “What do you want? Tell me!”

But I was left alone, in the darkness, for a long time.

Minutes passed, and then hours. Maybe. I used the toilet, then sat down with my back against one of the corners in the room, looking up at the blinking light. I counted how many times it blinked and tried to concentrate on that instead of the growling in my stomach. I hadn’t eaten anything or drunk any water since the night I had tried to escape with the money. Had that been last night?

I got bored. Then angry again. Then really scared. I tried kicking the table a few times, but it wouldn’t move. I explored every inch of the toilet to see if there was anything I could unscrew or disassemble to use as a weapon, but in vain. I tried jumping up on the table to see if I could get at the maddening blinking dot, but I managed to do was tire myself out. The hunger was always there, at the edge of my thoughts, and when I finally began to get sleepy I welcomed the sensation. I let my head rest against the cold wall behind me, close my eyes, and drifted off.

When I woke up again it took me a moment to realize where I was, and when everything came crashing back into my conscious mind it was twice as awful. I examined the room again, just in case something had changed, but everything remained as it was. My back hurt and my neck was stiff from sleeping like I had, propped up against the wall.

And I was hungry. And thirsty.

I took care of the thirst easily enough after discovering that the water tank the toilet used was, indeed, detachable. Which was strange, since yesterday I had checked and double checked it and I had found no moving parts. Whatever. The water in the tank was clean, and I was thirsty enough not to care so I drank my fill. The hunger, though, was another thing.

It was awful being there with nothing to do, nothing to see, and nothing to hear. I began humming to myself just to break the monotony, and then I switched to singing every song I knew the lyrics to. My voice sounded wooden and it echoed strangely in the room, but I preferred it to the silence.

I paced around. I sat on the table, or lied down on it. I threw my shoes at the blinking light, and although I heard them connect a couple times, nothing happened to the little red dot. Throwing my shoe up like that gave me an idea, though. I sat back on the floor of the room and threw my sneaker up until it bounced against the ceiling. I did several times until I got the height right, and then I counted the number of seconds it took the shoe to fall back down to the floor after throwing it. Three seconds.

I vaguely remembered studying something in high school about the acceleration of falling objects or something like that. It had to do with gravity and some special number. What was it? I had nothing better to do, so I tried to remember it, but it was no use. My time in high school was a blur of working and studying, then coming home to the mess that was my life. I'd had no time for friends, and I doubt if anyone even noticed when I finally dropped out of school. That was just a few weeks before I ran away from home.

Funny, but now I missed going to school. When I was a kid I used to hate going there, hated having to sit quietly in a spot for hours and hours on end. I hated the homework, I hated studying and the teachers. Now, though, I looked back on those days and I realized I’d had it easy. I had been just a normal kid, not… Whatever I was now.

My stomach brought me back to the present. I was even hungrier than yesterday, and I was also feeling lightheaded. I'd developed a mild headache at some point, and the pounding in my temples kept pace to the beating of my heart. I kicked against the walls of my prison at different heights for a while, trying to see if I could hear any difference which might indicate that one of them was hollow. I got nothing.

Every now and then I called out for Max, or Greg, or anyone. All I got in reply was the sound of my own voice.

After several more hours, or at least what felt like it, I developed a system. I would count 100 blinks of the red light, then pace once around the room to see if anything had changed, and then shout for help. If nothing happened, I would just sit back down and count 100 more blinks.

I did 237 cycles of that before I gave up. By then I was exhausted, and my last shout was more of a whisper. I fantasized about food, particularly the giant feast I’d had just two days ago. Or one. However long it had been. I began to wish I was back there, stuffing myself with everything in sight, and I could almost taste the delicious and expensive delicacies I had been treated to.

I fell asleep without really meaning to, but I didn’t sleep very long. Even though my body wanted rest, I kept on waking through what I supposed was now the night, thinking I heard noises. Each time, I had to do a circuit of the room just to make sure, then I would lie back down to surrender to dreams which were a mixture of nightmares of being trapped and tantalizing memories of food.

Eventually, I found I could not doze off anymore and I supposed that another day had come.

This time, though, the hunger became torture as the hours crawled by.

My stomach would cramp painfully now, and no amount of toilet water I drink helped. My headache had become a constant drilling in my brain which muted out my thoughts and made it hard to concentrate. I found I could not sing anymore. I lost track of the tune almost immediately, and all I could cling on to was the improvised routine of the day before. Except now I couldn’t count all the way to 100 blinks of the red light. I settled for 20 since that was more manageable. I still made myself walk around the room, which I knew perfectly by now, even in the dark. Maybe something would change. Maybe someone would come back.

It was awful. My stomach hurt, I felt weak and deathly tired. There was nothing to occupy my mind, and I started feeling scared of the silence and the dark. I would hum tunelessly to myself just to keep the echoes and the silence away. Hours passed in a blur of pain and tortuous thoughts. Eventually, even the thought of getting up was too much trouble. I simply sat where I was, my back against the hard wall, trying not to go insane.

When the red blinking light died off I lost it. I had been looking at it, trying to muster the concentration to follow it past 30 blink cycles, when it simply stopped. I waited, but it didn’t come back.

I whimpered in the dark. At first I told myself that maybe I had counted wrong, but that couldn’t be right. Or maybe I was dreaming. I tried closing my eyes and opening them again, but the ceiling was dark.

Maybe the light had moved? I stood up to check and nearly fell back down from how badly my head spun. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears and the headache got much worse. I was even weaker than I had thought, and although my plan had been to climb on the table and check it out, I couldn’t make myself do that.

“Light? Where did you go?”

The sound of my own words startled me. I felt myself all over to make sure that I was still here, and then I sat back down on the floor. It was too much of an effort to keep standing up. Why was I even doing that?

The light did not come back, though, and it was like a yawning maw of emptiness where before there had been something to cling on to. I had no way to measure the time afterwards. I was alone, with my wandering thoughts and growing fears. I began to wish I was still tied down to the table so I would at least have the distraction of trying to get out and break free.

I broke down crying several times, but nothing changed my situation. I fell asleep a couple times, but I always woke up startled, and not rested at all. I was surrounded by emptiness and darkness. By nothing.

I gave myself up to nightmares one more time, expecting nothing more than a brief pause from the pangs of hunger. Dreams came and went, twisted by my desire for food, and my mind was so confused that at first I didn’t realize I was hearing something.

I jerked up awake to complete and total shock.

Someone was whistling. There was a tiny light on in the room, shining from below the table, but to me it was blindingly bright. I covered my eyes in pain, heart racing, feeling dizzy. Then, slowly, I was able to look at the light.

Below it, set on a silver tray, was a loaf of bread, a steaming bowl of soup, and the biggest steak I had ever seen.

The whistling stopped. I fell upon the food like a starving wolf.