The faint light on my helmet blinking out.
the cave?surrounding me.
The ground scraping against my knees felt soft, squishy, but with give.
Unsplash / Joshua Sortino
My voice echoed, the on stretching for seconds.
You have five senses, I heard someone say.
Five ways to suffer.
But the voice had come from my waist.
How did you get me in here?
I asked after unhitching the walkie and jamming a thumb down on the button.
Unsplash / Joshua Sortino
Id swung my arm back, reaching toward the backseat, groping for my Michael Kors.
A pocketknife swam somewhere inside, drowning beneath stray lipsticks and granola bars and crinkled receipts.
A needle against my vein.
My foot might have slipped off the break and rolled my Camri into the intersection.
The stranger might have reached over the center console and yanked the emergency break to avoid causing a scene.
I had no idea.
The memory stopped where the drugs started.
The faint light on my helmet blinking out.
Darkness wrapped its limbs around me.
This darkness stole the room away.
It made the gray cracks in the walls and the piles of pebbles across the clay disappear.
Where the hell was I?
My best guess was inside of a cavern, which meant the figure must have brought me further upstate.
Maybe they had a redhead fetish.
Or maybe they spotted my car and chose me at random.
I could no longer hear the hum of electricity, the bristle of static.
The room went quiet.
Not a speckle of sound.
No background noise of birds chirping or cars passing or trees rustling.
Like I had gone deaf.
I was stuck in an anechoic chamber with no sound entering or escaping.
My girlfriend had paid to enter a manmade one in NYC for an article.
Shed lasted seventeen minutes, but the hallucinations hit her at the fifteen-minute mark.
Theyd made her realize no article was worth subjecting herself to that kind of mental torture.
Was I dropped inside?
Lowered down with a rope?
After twenty minutes of searching (or ten?
), the walkie clicked back on and a new voice said, Anna.
Did this fucking psycho touch you?
I wrote off the plea of my brother as a hallucination.
A side effect of the silence.
But then the jogger came through the speaker: Your brother.
Are you at the house?
Or are you in the caverns too?
Where are…
My brother released a gruff scream.
Guttural sounds that could have been mistaken forsexin any other context.
What are you doing to him?
What the hell are you doing?
I asked, knowing he couldnt hear a single word I said.
When I eased my finger off the button, expecting the screams to return, I heard coughing.
Like he was being strangled.
Or had his throat cut.
And then it went quiet.
As if the struggle had ended.
As if my brother had…
Do you think sound is the worst form of torture?
Or do you think another sense will be worse?
the voice asked, no trace of humor to the voice.
Like he really wanted to know.
I crawled toward the direction I thought it landed, crinkling my nose once the smell hit.
A flowery, sweet scent with an undercurrent of rot.
I outstretched my arm and brushed my fingertips against something cold.
I moved my hand up the body.
And the wide slit in the neck.
No no no no no.
No, I said.
In the middle of a sob, I realized a fresh body would not smell this strong.
And then I realized who SCENT had an arrow pointing toward.
How long was this shit planned for?
My father had spent the last two weeks out of town on a business trip.
After that, we hadnt heard from him aside from an occasional text.
Did the jogger have a gun to his head, forcing him to lie?
Threatening to harm us if he failed to cooperate?
He would have said anything if he thought he could save us.
Lets move onto sight, shall we?
My helmet stayed unlit, but a projector flickered on, brightening the room.
The bump Id felt on the wall earlier must have been the lens.
Without a screen, the image cast onto the bumpy wall looked colorless and distorted.
But I could still make out my mother sprawled across a metal table with her limbs bound.
Then I saw him wrap his skinny fingers around a scalpel and place it beneath my mothers eyebrow.
No sound eked out of the screen or from the walkie.
It dangled by squishy red veins, falling off the side of her face, close to her ear.
I never heard her scream.
Never smelt her dead body.
But having a front row seat to her mutilation made me to vomit up everything in my stomach.
Without my mothers corpse stealing my attention, I scanned the background of the projection.
Dirt and mud and clay surrounded his sneakers.
He was in another section of the cave.
A wider section with more room to work.
But no experiment is perfect.
Is that what this was to him?
The girl I had been in a relationship with for over three years.
The girl I had moved into an apartment with, went on double dates with, cooked breakfast with.
The first and only girl to hearI love youescape my lips.
Since this stage of the experiment is already faulty, Ill allow audience participation, the man said.
Would you rather have me kill her before or after?
My mouth opened, not even an inch, before snapping shut again.
What the hell was he asking me?
He slowed down his words, like speaking to a class of kindergarteners.
Would you rather have me penetrate her now, while she is fully conscious, andthenslit her carotid arteries?
Or would you rather death first, followed by the penetration of her corpse?
My girlfriend thrashed on the table, her shoulder blades slamming against metal.
I could see her mouthing something, but the walkie was off and I sucked at reading lips.
I wanted to keep her alive as long as possible to give us a chance to escape.
To give the helicopters a chance to swoop down and scoop us from this hell.
But he killed everyone else I loved without consequence.
He would do it again.
I had no doubt about it.
Kill her, I said, my voice rasped.
I saw her eyes widen.
All I saw was the blood billowing out from her hair in a thick, dark oval.
I hadnt want her to hurt more than she had to.
I had helped her in the only way I could.
I closed my eyes.
I refused to watch a second of it.
Taste is the last one, he said minutes later, wiping globs of white off his gloves.
And then you are free to go.
There must have been an opening somewhere in the wall.
Someone must have removed a chunk of rock to let the dog through and then covered it up again.
Which meant the psycho must have been working with a partner.
Maybe with a whole team of people.
Come here, buddy, I said to Chester.
He scampered over, but hid his tail between his legs.
Even when I kissed his nose and ruffled his ears, he kept looking back at dad and whining.
It took me a minute to notice the sliver of silver dangling from his collar.
Cut off a piece of your canine and swallow it.
A paw will due.
you’re free to choose.
The sound of a pen clicking.
you’re free to also choose whether to let him live or die.
He isnt going to give out any classified information.
I dont mind him walking out of here with you.
Youre a bigger threat than him.
I ignored the walkie to scratch Chester behind the ear.
No way, buddy.
Im not hurting you.
Dont worry, I said, voice hoarse from all the tears.
Do you think you’re free to show me the way you got in here?
Find the exit, bud.
He tilted his head, confused, so I groped the wall to check for hinges again.
But if you attempt to escape you will be killed.
And if you fail to comply with the rules, you will be left down here until you do.
There was no way in hell I would hurt my dog.
I spent entire afternoons apologizing when I stepped on his foot.
I could never rest a knife against his fur.
You want me to see what flesh tastes like, right?
Because this part is taste?
The first twitch of a smile appeared on my face.
The man might have been psychotic, but he was also intelligent.
He had put this entire thing together without getting caught.
Hed kept pointing out the flaws in his own system.
He wanted to learn more, to become better.
So I asked, Are loopholes allowed?
I rested my left hand on a large slab of rock.
I see, he said.
I slammed the blade down, digging the blade deep into my flesh.
The texture felt like uncooked meat or maybe stiff taffy.
Luckily, Chester lapped up my middleandmy index finger and swallowed with single bites.
Every so often, bile rose up my throat, but I swallowed it back down.
Thank you for your time, the voice said during my final swallow.
You were the perfect candidate.
Obedient, but intelligent.
Cooperative, but cunning.
The scouts did well with you.
The wall behind me shifted.
A well-known name in charge of a multi-billion-dollar company.
A company that described itself as progressive and innovative.
I tried to sue, but no lawyer would accept my case.
No news channels or magazines would listen to my story (other than tabloids nobody believed).
Even strangers on Twitter called me crazy after I posted a thread about my real life horror story.
No one wanted me to challenge a man like that.
No one wanted to believe that a respected company was capable of something so horrible.
No one wanted me to be telling the truth.
So they called me a liar.
