The Basement Doll--parental discretion advised -- Unicorn Short Story Forum

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Date Posted: 17:09:20 03/20/04 Sat
Author: Paris Lovecraft
Author Host/IP: cdm-66-233-64-243.bnvl.cox-internet.com / 66.233.64.243
Subject: The Basement Doll--parental discretion advised

The Basement Doll
A Short Story
By: Infinity Smith

I�m not crazy. I want that made clear from the beginning. I know I�m not crazy. I mean, I�m not saying I shouldn�t be, but I�m not. Not many kids who�ve been kidnapped could retain their sanity after being kept for so long. For awhile there, I wasn�t even sure of my name anymore, but I am absolutely positive I�m not crazy.
I was kept in a basement, I was their doll. The basement�s floor was made of dirt, it was big, with a flight of stairs directly in front of me. I never actually got to see the staircase, or anything else for that matter. I was chained to the wall by way of a manacle on my ankle. The chain had sixty-one links. I know because I would put my thumb through each one, counting them silently, finding a sweet little kernel of irony somewhere inside. I mean, sixty-one links of prefabricated metal kept me from my mom and sisters.
There was a bucket as far from me as I could reach that was used for my urination and defecation purposes. Along with a roll of scented toilet paper. Every day Spoon Man would come down and empty it for me. There was also a mattress pushed up against one wall, and I�d sleep on that throughout most of the day, unless Blunt Fingers got a tickle in his crotch.
You must excuse my crudeness, but I�m learning about forgiving now. I�ve successfully graduated, but I can�t help but be just a tad imbalanced. My time down there hasn�t hardened me. I always promised myself that if something like this happened, something so traumatic, that I wouldn�t dare be some wimp who goes crazy and cries on Oprah�s shoulder. No, I�d be strong and shrug it off. And I haven�t hardened. I won�t allow myself the luxury of hating them.
It was dark in the basement, no light for the little doll down there. I could almost believe I was made of china, with little painted eyes and rosy red lips, soft hair. The darkness kept me from seeing anything; it was so very absolute, so unrelenting. I think I was praying against light for the last year I was there.
I named the men who took me. Blunt Fingers, the rapist and Spoon Man, the kind, indifferent one. Blunt Fingers was the rapist; of course, after awhile I didn�t even think of it as rape, merely an inconvenience that kept me from sleep. He was a large man, as far as I could tell, but most of the time he rather preferred me on all fours and him behind me. I called him Blunt Fingers because he would put a large hand over my mouth to keep in the screams. He was well-endowed and it hurt. I got used to it after awhile, though. And every time he put his hand over my mouth, I could feel thick fingers, long, with short nails. They usually smelt of motor oil, as if he were a mechanic or some such.
Spoon Man was the man who fed me. Three times a day he�d bring down a bowl of some edible something, be it chili or soup or cereal. But it was always in a bowl, something he could feed to me with a spoon. Hence his name.
It got to where I could home in on that spoon like an eagle after a salmon. I could find it in the dark, just as well as Blunt Fingers could find me in the dark (although he didn�t have to look far).
One day Spoon Man came down, his slow, deliberate gait making the stairs squeak and groan. He knelt down in front of me and began spooning beef stew into my mouth. I leaned forward and slurped it down, like a baby bird takes a pulverized worm from the mama bird�s beak. The beef stew was good and I was hungry. I was hunkered down, as always, and I duck-walked closer, putting both of my hands on Spoon Man�s wrist. He never said anything to me, and the only sound I ever heard from Blunt Fingers was grunting or sighs.
�Settle down now,� Spoon Man said.
It had been like music to my ears! He�d spoken! I�d eagerly opened my mouth, smiling in the dark. But I realized I could not speak. Oh, I had screamed like a lunatic when they first brought me here, begging and pleading, then promising swift and deadly retribution.
�My dad is gonna tear your fuckin� guts out, you sonofamotherfuckingbitches!�
I�d done the hero-in-the-movie-tunneling out-with-a-dessert-spoon thing too. Or at least tried. It was clear that they meant to keep me for awhile, and my hand grew raw with trying to dig through the hard-packed dirt.
But after the first week I stopped talking and stopped trying to escape altogether. And that day with Spoon Man was as effective as Blunt Fingers� callused hand over my mouth. Because when I parted my cracked lips, all that issued forth was a dry croak. I sounded like a bullfrog. Spoon Man had sighed, given me a sip of lukewarm water and trudged back up the stairs.
Sometimes, at night, if I stretched out the chain as far as its sixty-one links would reach and stretch out my body flat, like a snake sunning itself, I could lay under a patch of basement ceiling where the TV sat in the living room and listen to Pat Sajak sell vowels or Matlock solve daily murders and other nefarious deeds. Afterward, I�d crawl back to my mattress, face the wall, and go to sleep.

2

The only way I had to interpret time was the length of my hair. Month by month I could feel it reaching for my shoulders, until it finally made it, then past them, until it was almost to my nipples. Every other day Spoon Man would bring down a large tub of hot water, a washcloth, and a bar of Ivory soap, and he�d wash me in the dark. An unseen hand exerting pressure atop a wet, warm washrag. It was those times I begin thinking of Spoon Man as a big tomcat, his tongue was the washrag. The hot water would release the Ivory�s light scent and I�d revel in the warmth of it all. I came to love my sponge baths.
I came to first realize that something was amiss when Blunt Fingers came only once a week. Though Spoon Man still came everyday, Blunt Fingers� libido must�ve been winding down. When he did come, his actions were slow and tired. It was almost like an obligation to himself. And since I�m being brutally honest, I�d have to say that I missed Blunt Fingers� enthusiastic rutting. I�d come to crave the contact that he gave me. God knows I didn�t have a mom to kiss my cheek and tuck me in at night. Being fucked by a grown man was all I had at the time. Forgive me.
As time passed, Blunt Fingers sporadic visits slowed down even more. He might come twice in one day and then the next time would be two weeks later. Or maybe a month. The longest stretch of Fingers� abstinence was at least six months. I was sleeping, having just had my sponge bath, and the Ivory�s sent lulled me to sleep like an olfactory lullaby. I was still half asleep when I heard someone behind me. I thought at first it was Fingers, and scooted over on the mattress so that he might lay down beside me. But before sleep overwhelmed me, I heard my chain rattling, a shaky breath, and I was again in a deeper darkness.

3

That night some internal clock told me it was time for Wheel of Fortune and I scurried off my mattress to stretch towards that little patch of ceiling that lent me an auditory paradise. I thought it a little strange that Spoon Man hadn�t brought me my breakfast or lunch. He always did each without fail. But I could imagine some kind of minor emergency that had negated my meals.
It took me probably an hour of laying there on the dirt floor, my legs stretched far, thinking my chain was stretched just as far, when I realized the manacle was off my ankle.
Yeah, right, Einstein, I thought self-deprecatingly. There�s a bigger chance for Angela Lansbury to come ask me to dance than there is for my ankle manacle being off.
But some primitive part of myself, some part that ached for sunlight and some human contact that didn�t involve blood-engorged male organs and spoonfuls of scrambled eggs or soggy biscuits in sausage gravy infected my chest with some sort of hopeful disease that proliferated like madness and made me short of breath.
So I sat up and folded my legs Indian style. No hard, unyielding iron cuff to bite into my anklebone. A sob exploded out of my lips and I stood up. My face was hot and my bowls were icy cold. Goosebumps multiplied on my arms by the dozen, and I ran around the room like a psychotic track star. I tried making jubilant sounds, but my �whoops� of joy were no more than cheerful croaks, like the sound a dog makes when being scratched. I walked forward, in the general direction of the stairs I had been on exactly once, and walked up them. My legs were stiff from disuse and they trembled like an old man�s when I arrived at the top of the stairs.
Rather than a door being set into the wall, I felt about me and discovered it was directly above my head. And there were seven rungs nailed to the wall. I hurriedly climbed these rungs and exploded out of the door that was set into the floor.
I found myself in a kitchen. It was a large kitchen with a backdoor, pleasant yellow counters, a big white double-door refrigerator, and several foodstuffs in glass-fronted counters. It looked like a kitchen that might belong in a house that is owned by an old spinster aunt. I crawled out of the hole in the floor and walked quietly through the swinging door into the living room. There were La-Z-Boys with a small table between them. A large, old-fashioned TV sat a few yards in front of the chairs, and a camelback couch off to the right, perhaps for company.
I walked down a narrow hall and into a bedroom. There, on a king-sized bed, lay who I took to be Blunt Fingers and Spoon Man. Blunt Fingers, I assumed, was the biggest of the two. He lay on the left side, unmoving, his chest not rising and falling with the rhythm of breath. Spoon Man breathed shallowly.
Blunt Fingers wasn�t exactly an ugly man. He had a beard, wide-set eyes, broad shoulders, and a paunch of a belly. Spoon Man was long and thin, his hands small, fingernails clipped evenly.
When his eyes fluttered open, I was drawn to his side.
�We�re sorry,� he said gutturally.
I nodded dumbly and his last breath was an unburdened sigh.
There was a nightstand on Blunt Fingers� side of the bed that held a small table fan, its blades whirring on High. Around the fan�s base were several little brown bottles of prescription drugs. Blunt Fingers smelled of death. His face was gray, the outside edge of his nostrils black, the places around his eyes looked bruised, deep blue and gray. He�d been sick?
I covered up their bodies with the thin chenille bedspread and white linen sheet. I turned off the fan and opened the window to let in a fresh, rainy breeze. I gulped the outside air.
I tottered on shaky legs back out into the hall, into the door directly across from the bedroom. It was a bathroom, the toilet a dark blue color with a matching shower curtain. Little yellow flowers danced in endless horizontal lines across the shower curtain. There was a washer and a dryer off to the right in a little niche I believed must have been built especially for them.
I stood in the doorway, and I could see the sink and the mirror above the sink out of the corner of my eye. I stood very still. I wasn�t sure I wanted to look there. It might tell me a secret I might want to keep in the dark. There was a washer and a dryer off to the right in a little niche I believed must have been built especially for them.
Forgoing the mirror, I instead stepped into the shower, turned on the hot water. I stood under the spray, sometimes drinking it, sometimes bowing my head, as if to receive anointment. I smiled when I ran the slick bar of Ivory across my arms and filthy hands. My shoulders and my belly, my penis and testicles which were now nested in a thatch of pubic hair. I washed my hair in cherry-scented White Rain shampoo, rinsed it, washed it again. Rinsed it again.
I stepped out of the shower when I was finished. The house held a quiet that gave me a sense of silky peace that infused me with a sense of time. Like taking a deep breath after having been born in water.
There was a cabinet above the toilet, attached to the wall. I opened it and was rewarded with the sight of a stack of yellow fluffy terrycloth towels. I took one down and wrapped myself in it. I dried my hair that was now past my nipples. I looked into the opened cabinet again, took down a can of aerosol Degree antiperspirant, and a pair of silver scissors. They were the old kind, with the little nub of metal on the thumbhole that made it look like a capital Q. I took handfuls of my hair and sawed at them with the scissors, opening and closing them against the thick, clean locks. The scissors squeaked and sighed until the hair came off in my hands. I used a black comb to get through the tangles, dressed in a too-big pair of jeans that was on the dryer, and sprayed some Degree on my underarms where there was now hair. I pulled a too-big sweatshirt over my head, also from the top of the dryer. Only then did I look in the mirror.
I hadn�t forgotten, completely, what I looked like. I�d remembered I had yellowish-gold eyes, with brown flecks. My hair was blond, I remembered upon looking through the mirror. And the greatest shock was the start of a beard and a mustache. I�d been taken from mama and my sisters when I was 9, before puberty had shown its dubious head. I was a man now. I didn�t know exactly how much of one, but a man I was.
I stared into the mirror for a long time, at least an hour, marveling at the effects of age. Relentless and scary, if you think about it. When the future is just a day away.

4

I walked down the hall, out the front door. The sun was excruciating, cruel and beautiful and ugly. It proudly proclaimed itself master of stars, a fiery orb with which to be reckoned. The sky was an eye-shattering blue, with a mind-aching expansiveness. I wondered if it had stretched bigger than the last time I�d seen it.
I shuffled down the street, stopped, and looked back behind me. The house in which I�d spent a lot of my life was yellow with blue shutters. I guess their shower curtain and countertops explained a lot. A tremulous sob bubbled up my throat and fell out onto the street. I continued walking until I came to a busy thoroughfare where I found a phone booth. I called 911, told them I was a kidnap victim from�some time ago and begged them to find my mother.

EPILOGUE

When I was reunited with my mom, Peggy Hatfield, I was told of what�d happened when I was kidnapped, because I didn�t remember. I was told how old I was because I didn�t know. I�d have to have a childhood while nearly an adult. I was told my dad was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest; I cried only because I did not remember him enough to mourn him.
I learned my name was Isaac Hatfield. I�d been kidnapped by two men on January 15th, 1992. I�d made my escape, after Spoon Man (who I later learned was really named Carl Walters) had died. And Blunt Fingers was James Oswald. They�d kidnapped me from the parking lot of a Texaco station while my mom got gas. I�d been walking back from inside, where I�d peed and bought a Coca-Cola Icee.
James and Carl had been waiting in a 1988 Chevy, motor running, when James had encouraged Carl to snatch me. They were a gay couple who�d been together for several years. Carl was always solicitous of James, fearing James would leave him if he didn�t try his best to make him happy. Hence the thievery of me.
As it turns out, James contracted colon cancer while in his 40s, had finally succumbed to it when he was in his 50s, six days before I escaped, which was on February 9th, 2001.
Carl Walters died from AIDS. He�d been carrying on an affair with an S&M barfly. I know all this because Carl, bless his spoon-shaped heart, had told one Aaron Overmeier every secret detail. I found out later that Carl, knowing he was on the verge of death, had come down to the basement and unlocked my ankle cuff, not being able to face my death staining his soul.
I take flowers to their house, which still has failed to sell, much to the chagrin of Prudence Harrison, the real estate agent. The furniture is gone, including the mattress I slept on all that time. I put a bouquet of white roses on the dirt floor, slowly walk back up the stairs, and put another bouquet in the bare bedroom of Carl Walters and James Oswald. They�re mostly for Carl. I always tie a brand-new stainless steel spoon into the silver ribbon on Carl�s flowers. A kind of annual forgiveness.
I was 9 when they took me, 17 when I left.

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