Chapter 7 : Grabbed in the dark

*Chloe*

“Hello? Is there someone down here or what? If this is a joke, it’s not funny.”

No response. I gritted my teeth and froze in place. I hated going down into the basement. At that moment, I hated being a sober sister, too, and having to be responsible for everything and everyone, while my sisters all had a great time.

My mind drifted back to much younger days. I guess I would have been around twelve when they found my father’s body. Mom and I couldn’t afford to stay in the house any longer, and we moved out to a sleepy rural community.

Our next-door neighbor wound up being this kooky old lady named Henrietta. She lived in a farmhouse that looked as if it came from the nineteenth century. There was an old barn, a chimney so big it took up an entire side of the house, and of course, she had the obligatory root cellar.

Mom worked two jobs and still couldn't always make ends meet. So I started being farmed out to Henrietta to do odd jobs around her house. Most of the time this involved crawling into spaces she couldn't reach any longer because of her advanced age. Spaces thick with dust and cobwebs, and the occasional bit of vermin.

It was while working for Henrietta that I developed my dislike of creepy old basements.

But I knew we needed the money. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to hear my mother crying. I’d creep down the steps and peer into the kitchen, where she would be bent over a stack of bills sobbing her eyes out. No way was I going to stop working for Henrietta. No matter how many times I came home with cobwebs in my hair and splinters in my hands and knees.

In fact, when I first started working for her, I liked going into the basement/cellar under her home. It was the middle of summer, so the cool air below the ground felt great. Not to mention it got me out of the hot sun.

Plus, there were all sorts of cool things in the basement. Henrietta kept a lot of things pickled that I’d never seen pickled before. One of them was a Buddha’s hand citrus that looked like it had been chopped off a corpse before being shoved into a jar.

The cellar had a dirt floor, and one thing about a dirt floor is that you’re going to have bugs, snakes, rats, and spiders no matter how many times the pest control guy comes out to spray. It’s just a matter of fact. I wasn’t especially creeped out by any of those things, not really.

Until one fateful day when Henrietta asked me to go down into the cellar and take all of her fruit preserves off the shelf and transport them to the surface. I remember pulling open the heavy cellar door and carefully setting it down so it wouldn’t bang against the house. Henrietta hated when it banged.

I took a picnic basket with me into the dimly lit cellar to make carrying the preserves back out easier. The old house didn’t have any electricity in the cellar. The only light came from the sun shining through the open cellar door.

I feared going too far away from that rectangle of yellow splayed across the dirt floor. Fortunately for me, the battered, cobweb-strewn shelf containing the fruit preserves sat right on the border of light and darkness. I could remain in sunlight while I took the heavy jars from the shelf and put them in the basket.

The only problem was, Henrietta was getting on in years and her memory wasn’t what it used to be. She simply forgot I was in the cellar at all. So when she headed out the door to go to a hairdressing appointment, she noticed the cellar door open and dutifully slammed it shut.

I remember hearing a creak, and then the light dramatically faded as the shadows swallowed me. I glanced sharply up the steps just in time to see the door slam shut tightly.

“Ms. Henrietta! I’m still down here!”

I heard her footsteps retreating. I knew she was hard of hearing, and scrambled to my feet. I knew the general direction of the steps because a tiny line of light still made it around the border of the cellar door.

“Hey! Wait up!”

I tripped on the top step and hit my shin. Crying out from pain, but also fear, I scrambled back to my feet and raced up the steps. I pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t yield. I didn’t have the leverage in my adolescent body to open it from the inside.

I flew into a panic, banging on the door like I had lost my mind. Henrietta got into her car and puttered away, unaware that she had trapped me in near-total darkness.

They say that fear can give you an adrenaline rush. Well, I was plenty scared all right. With a desperate, howling scream of panic, I shoved the cellar door open at last, causing it to fly open and bang against the house.

Only I unbalanced myself when I did so and went tumbling back down the steps. I cracked my elbow and the back of my head pretty hard, but not enough to hospitalize me.

I landed at the bottom of the steps. Laying on my belly, I looked up between the wooden slats forming the staircase and saw a desiccated, belly-up rat. It was only a dead rat, but in my mind’s eye, it became a sinister monster—an undead creature bent on biting me and making sure I never made it back into the sunlight.

I flew up those stairs, bonked head and all, screaming the whole way. I ran all the way home and stood on the porch screaming until I woke my mother up.

I never went back to Henrietta’s after that. I also developed an aversion to exploring dark, subterranean places…exactly like the basement.

My mind returned to the present. I had to make sure none of my sisters had drunkenly wandered into the basement. As the sober sister, it was my job to make sure they all made it safely into their beds. I steeled my nerves and told myself I was a grown woman now. The dark couldn’t hurt me. Nothing down there could hurt me…

I got halfway around the corner to the storage center when a dark shape appeared out of nowhere. My mouth flew open to suck in a deep breath of air, in preparation for a scream. The figure resolved itself into a man dressed all in black, a ski mask hiding his features.

He nearly knocked me down on his mad flight past. I caught a glimpse of a colorful neck tattoo just sticking out of the collar of his shirt. I didn’t even have time to scream before he was gone. I stared after him as the sounds of his footsteps on the stairs echoed down into the basement.

“What the hell was that? Some stupid frat boy stunt?” I breathed, clutching at my racing heart.

I could believe some of the frats on campus would pull something ignorant like a panty raid. I’m about halfway convinced that this was the case, and I could return to the safe and well-lit environment of my bedroom.

Only I heard another sound, a foot scraping across the concrete floor. I had to check and see.

“If there’s someone down here, I’m calling the police…” I called out slowly, as I descended the staircase.

I came around the corner, and my mouth flew open. This time, I didn’t suck in a ragged gasp of air. In fact, I found myself unable to breathe at all.

A man lay on the floor, his eyes wide open through the slits in his mask. I didn’t have to check his pulse to know he was dead. His eyes had an unseeing quality to them, and his ungainly position could not have been comfortable for a living person.

My gaze snapped up to the man standing over him. Unlike the masked man, this man kept his face uncovered. A face, it turned out, I recognized. One I was quite familiar with, considering I’d been fantasizing about it for days.

Alexander Cross, Sylvia’s father. I didn’t know why he was standing over a dead man, but it seemed pretty likely that Alex had something to do with the death.

‘Did he just kill a man?’ I thought, still unable to speak.

My eyes went to Alex’s face, then dropped down to the dead man at his feet. Alex looked horrified, maybe even more so than me.

At last, my body ended its fugue. I drew in air deep into my lungs, intent upon letting it back out in the form of a terrified scream.

Alex moved…or should I say, he flowed. His body moved with a sinuous, liquid grace that belied his bulk. In an instant, he crossed the concrete floor separating us. His hand clamped over my mouth while he simultaneously pushed my body against the wall.

“Quiet!” he hissed through clenched teeth. I didn’t detect any anger in him, only desperation. Desperation that I remain silent.

My eyes went wide over his hand, nostrils flaring as I stared up at him. He’d caught me so effortlessly and now held me hard against the wall. I could feel the strength in his hand, and the firmness of his body as he kept me confined against the wall.

Was I afraid? Oh yes, I was terrified. And yet, Alex pinning me to the wall, dictating whether or not I could even speak, carried an electric thrill that shot through me like lightning. I felt my body responding to being so tightly pressed against him.

The smell of his adrenaline-infused fight sweat, the sheer physicality of his thick chest pressing into me, and his wide, fight-aroused pupils meant he was a man on the edge of action.

Alex could have done whatever he wanted to me at that moment, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop him.

He licked his lips and swallowed audibly. “Do not scream,” he said in a much calmer tone. “I know this looks bad, but I promise you it’s not what it seems.”

His gaze flicked toward the basement exit. I wondered if he was thinking about the man who escaped. The one with the neck tattoo who had nearly knocked me over.

Alex leaned in close enough that I could smell his minty aftershave.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Chloe,” he said barely above a whisper. “You understand? I won’t hurt you…but I need to make sure you’re quiet. If you’re not going to be quiet, I’ll have to gag you.”

My heart skipped a beat. Would he really take control of me like that? I was still scared, but that part of me that felt turned on by the whole thing only grew more out of control. I’d thought about Alex pinning me just like that, a lot. Our faces were so close we could have kissed…if only his hand wasn’t over my mouth.

“So please, please be quiet so I don’t have to do that, okay?”

His expression changed, and tenderness reigned in his gaze even more than desperation or fear. Was it the softness, or…the affection I saw in his eyes that made me relax more than anything?

I gave as much of a nod as I could with him covering my mouth and pinning me to the basement wall. Alex carefully removed his hand and stepped away, but I knew he could be on me again in an instant if he wished.

I took in a breath of air, and he tensed up like he was going to jump me again. “Hold up,” I said in a shaky but soft voice. “I’m not going to scream, I promise, but…what happened here?”