Originally she wanted to drink first, for some courage. But if she were drunk, it would demean her claim to be clear of head. She wanted to be sober. And if or when it got out, she didn’t want anyone saying it was the booze. So she willed herself up the front driveway. At least it was a respectable house. He wasn’t living in poverty. She rang the doorbell.
The man opened the door. It was him. Aged a few years, but him. She couldn’t help stare. “See, the way it works is you came to my door, so you start,” he said when she remained silent for too long.
“No one knows I’m here,” she blurted out. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Okay, glad to hear it. Who are you?”
“I’m Ariel Josephson!”
The only signal he gave was his lack of response. He just stared at her for a while, neither frowning nor smiling, not that he would smile over her. “You got some hidden camera? Hidden microphone? What the fuck do you want from me?”
“No, none of that. No one knows I’m here. Not a single person, and I didn’t leave a note or even any hints.”
“And you’re telling me this?”
“I did the math,” she said. “I’m twenty-two years old. Twenty-two, and a hundred-seventeen days.”
“So?” he asked, looking around suspiciously. “Is that…” He trailed off. “Okay, I haven’t calculated it that much. Is that how old I was when I was sentenced?”
“Arrested,” Ariel said. “For raping my mom and knocking her up with me. Which you never did, and everyone knows it now. That’s why they let you out of prison.”
“Twelve years later!” he growled. “Get to the fucking point. I don’t owe you shit.”
“No, but I owe you,” she said. His hands clenched into fists. He probably took her meaning wrong. “Well, my mom does, but she won’t pay. So I owe you. I spent a decade thinking you were my rapist father. I cursed you, but I was wrong. And someone has to pay. So, no one knows I’m here. You know?”
“Well look at you, Ariel Josephson, big girl paying for her mommy’s sins.”
“No one knows I’m here,” she repeated, hoping he would get the hint. She wasn’t offering, but she was allowing him to take.
“Fucking hell, get inside before someone sees you,” he said, stepping aside. She walked in. It looked like a normal house. A sparse, normal house. But with no signs of normal human life. No photos or souvenirs or anything. Just furnishings and appliances. He closed the door behind her and locked it. “So, what’s your game? Fuck the old pervert and make yourself feel better? Slum it a little?”
“I know you had a big porn collection,” she said. “It had lots of rape stuff, and they used it at your trial. No one knows I’m here.”
“You keep fucking saying that? Are you offering your body, girl? Or do you think I’m going to seize some poetic fucking justice and attack you?”
“I’m not offering,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that, that I’m here alone.”
“This is the worst entrapment I’ve ever seen,” he snapped. “You’re either setting me up or you’ve got some complex and you think I’ll do to you what I never did to your whore mother or to anyone else! Fuck you.”
“I…”
“No, tell you what. It’s on you, Ariel. Either take your own clothes off and give me a real sign, or get the fuck out of my house.”
She stood there, trembling. He was angry. But he wasn’t rising to the bait like she wanted. She had every belief he would attack her and she would deserve it. But now it was up to her, not him. She didn’t know what to do, but her hands seemed to. They went to her blouse and began unbuttoning. She was going to take that extra step, so she wordlessly began a blunt and unsexy strip. He watched without a word. She half expected him to taunt her with vulgar insults, or at least mock her weight. She was a good thirty or forty pounds overweight. But he said nothing.
“Here I am,” she said, standing in front of him, arms at her sides.
“Yeah. Alright. You want to play nice, fine. Go downstairs. The stairs are through that door. When you get there, do what seems like the right idea. I’ll join you when I feel like it.”
He stood, waiting for her to act. She wasn’t sure what to expect. Did he have a sex dungeon down there? It was fine if he did. She arrived expecting the worst. So far that meant angry glaring at her. But he hadn’t quite kicked her out. So she turned and walked naked to the door. He didn’t move as she opened it and flipped on the lights. The stairs led down and a basement area was off to the right at the bottom. The door swung shut behind her, on a spring. She stepped down slowly, expecting still to see the sex dungeon.
When the big room came into view, it was nothing special. No sex dungeon. No sex toys of any kind. The closest match was a big old metal-frame dog kennel in one corner. Granted, it was large enough to fit a human, even lying down, and probably strong enough to hold her. Someone had a big dog in it once. But she glanced around and found nothing else. There were old boxes, some camping gear, and old exercise bike, paint cans, a modest workbench with a few tools. The most used looking spot was the washer-dryer set. Some frosted windows set high in the walls would keep away prying eyes but they hardly seemed built for that purpose. It was an ordinary, cluttered, somewhat dusty and chilled basement.
Her heart was pounding hard enough to feel it. She was still naked in an angry man’s basement. She was still alone. She wanted him to change his mind, but she still cringed thinking of what he could do to her. She wandered around, looking at everything. There were some steel shelves full of junk. She found coils of rope. Did he want her to tie herself up? There was a single post in the middle of the room, probably load bearing, so sturdy. She could try to tie herself to it so she couldn’t free herself.
That was when she spotted it. A padlock, just sitting on the shelf. The key was in the lock. She tried it a couple times. It was the right key and the lock worked. She took a closer look at the old dog cage. It was not self-locking. It required a lock to be attached. The padlock in her hand fit.
Was that the plan? Did he even remember the padlock was there and would fit the cage? The shelf was on the other side of the room. The cage was dusty and unused. But it would work. So, he wasn’t going to attack her. So be it. She unlocked the lock and put the key on the top of the dryer. Then she squatted down and crawled into the dog carrier. It was a tight fit through the door but it was sized for a big dog. Ariel could be the big dog. She pulled the door closed and snapped the lock shut on it. That was it. She wasn’t going anywhere now unless Fred Riley allowed her to.
She sat and waited. And waited. And waited some more. He wasn’t rushing down to look after her. So be it. He could let her stew all night. It was up to him. She’d told him the truth, that no one knew she was there. He could kill her. He might never check on her until she died of thirst. He might wait long enough to see she was reported missing and then finally take his vengeance out on her. It could take five minutes or five days. She had no way to know or to find out other than to sit there in the cage, naked and alone, and wait.
He went the slow route. The frosted high windows let in daylight, but not much of it, and less as the hours ticked off behind her. The overhead lights turned off on a timer. The room grew dark. She heard not a sound in the house. Not footsteps. Not a TV or stereo. She realized as she sat in near darkness that there was one problem she hadn’t assumed would come up. She needed to pee, badly. The kennel cage was the kind with a shallow bottom and bars set into it a few inches up. So if doggy had an accident, it went into the papers or pads, not the surrounding floor. Except Ariel wasn’t a doggy and there were no absorbing materials of any kind. She was just sitting on cold metal.
The basement floor did have a drainage hole. She’d spotted it earlier though it was lost in the gloom now. Presumably the floor would slope towards it. She didn’t want to antagonize Fred Riley, but she did have to bend her will to medical reality. She was going to go, like it or not. As she slid her ass forward, trying to aim as much out the door as possible by pulling her legs back in the cramped space, she stopped. Maybe in time, but she was supposed to be atoning. She slid back to an upright seated position, took a deep breath, and let loose. Her warm piss pooled around her ass as she let her bladder completely drain. She wrinkled her nose but kept going. Atonement meant some kind of unpleasantness. So, sitting in her own urine qualified. Prison bathrooms couldn’t be pleasant. Neither was this. She sat back and waited. And waited.
It was pitch dark when she heard the sound of the front door closing. She had been dozing, leaning against the wall to avoid lying entirely in urine. Then footsteps. So he’d gone out without her even realizing it but now he was back. The lights stayed off, though, and the sounds retreated into another part of the house. Ariel lay back to rest and realized she wasn’t going to avoid lying prone. It just wasn’t shaped right for anything else. The cage was five feet by three feet, so diagonally she could stretch out. It was three feet tall, so she could sit up if she hunched a little. But to rest, it was really lie prone or don’t sleep. So she laid down on her side, letting her hair soak up some of her cold pee, curling up for warmth, wondering how long he was going to torment her with waiting.
Morning came with the return of daylight, topping off a night of repeating, awkward dreams. He hadn’t been down yet. Her stomach growled at her and her throat grew increasingly dry. Maybe he was going to kill her with thirst or starvation. Or chill. It wasn’t that warm for a naked girl to lie in her own piss overnight. But finally she perked up with the sound of the basement door and the lights coming back on. His feet and then the rest of him came into view. He looked around slowly, taking in the view.
“Well, ready to run home now?” he asked.
She really wanted to. She’d come in with no real expectation except that he would fuck her. Not that she wanted that, but he deserved to do it. “No one knows I’m here,” she said. He rolled his eyes and walked to the dryer where the key sat. “I didn’t leave any records. I searched for you on public computers with guest logins, the kind where they scrub the browser after each user. No one can find me here. No one.”
Now he walked over to her, holding out the key to the padlock. “I don’t know what’s in your head, girl, but I never raped anyone. Not your bitch mom, not anyone else. I don’t do that. So if you think that’s the kind of revenge I’d take, unlock yourself and fuck off.”
She sat there, hands down. He was testing her, testing her resolve, her commitment, her sense of justice. He finally shook his head and set the key down on a shelf. “Have it your way,” he said. Then he grabbed the front of the kennel cage and pulled it out from the wall to the middle of the room with Ariel in it. She wasn’t a light girl, but it was a cement floor and he was able to slide it along the floor. Her pee sloshed a little, but it was spread over a wide area of the cage floor. He pulled her and the cage out to the floor drain, stopping with the cage over the drain.
“What are you doing?” Ariel asked him.
He made no reply but, as he grasped the bars in front, he lifted up and tipped the entire cage onto its far back side, dumping her pee out over the back lip onto the floor and dumping Ariel into the new bottom of the cage, lying curled on her back against the far wall on the floor.
He left the cage there to take hold of something out of her sight before returning, standing on the other side of the solid cage floor. “You’ll want to close your eyes,” he said to her.
“What are you—” she began. There was suddenly a high-pitch whirring, like a dental drill but far louder and scarier. Sparks began to shoot through the cage floor as whatever cutting tool he had began ripping the metal apart. She screamed and turned her head. The loud shrieking of ripped metal continued, pausing after a while as he fiddled with something. It sounded like he was changing out a tool part. The sparks and whirring continued again and finally a piece of the flooring fell out onto the basement floor. Ariel looked up to see a hole six or seven inches wide roughly cut out of the quarter-inch thick flooring in the middle of the cage.
She figured it out as he tipped the cage back onto its base. The hole in the cage floor allowed fluids to drain out, and he slid the cage with her in it so the hole sat over the floor drain. That was his solution to her hygiene issue. It seemed like he was going to act on her offer, somehow. She wasn’t sure she was going to like it, but then that was the idea.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked as he stepped out, returning up the stairs. He made no reply, but returned a few minutes later with two big aluminum pet bowls, shiny and new. He opened the front door padlock and put both bowls into the kennel cage with her. Before closing and locking it, he stood back, with the door gaping open.
“I know what I said,” she finally said. He shrugged and put the padlock back in place, but not locking it himself. He just stood over her, arms crossed, looking down at her. She reached out and closed the lock herself. “I’m serious, you know. I owe you. Mom owes you.”
The cage bars were set in a grid lattice, with each bar about three inches from its nearest neighbor. They were not thick like a real prison cell, but strong enough to keep a person from breaking through them. It was a sturdy cage, and Ariel would not be leaving unless he allowed it. But it was also open enough that he could open a jug of drinking water and pour it into one of the new bowls, filling it with half of the jug’s contents. For the other bowl, he opened up a can of stew, unheated, and dumped it from above into the bowl. It splattered on her as it landed, but most of it went into the bowl. So, he was going to feed and water her like an animal.
“I’m glad you’re taking me seriously,” she said. “So, about bathroom facilities.”
“I just constructed you some,” he said.
“What about number two?” she asked.
He finally gave the faintest hint of a smile. “Push it through the grate on the drain. It’s a big drain pipe and it connects to the sewage outflow.”
She sucked in a bit of her breath, but maintained her composure. So, it was going to be that gross. So be it. “Very well.”
He turned and walked out, leaving Ariel alone again. After a while the lights timed off. So, he was going that route with her. Locking her away. Making it a dull, miserable captivity. She could go along with it, if that’s what he wanted. He’d given her several chances to leave. He was going to make it on her to decide when to end it, but she was going to hold out. At least a week, she figured. More if she had the fortitude. If he wasn’t going to fuck her, so be it. It would be his choice, though.
And his choice seemed to be to make her bored. She expected it, now, but he did not return for the rest of the day. She just sat there, naked and cold, staring at the walls and ceiling through the frosted-window light of day. Peeing into the hole worked. It was in the middle of the floor, so she could seat herself right over the drain and let loose. So far she hadn’t had to poop, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. But peeing turned out to be the most excitement she had as the light slowly changed and eventually began to fade. Ariel just laid there, then sat there, then laid there some more. She’d been far too inactive to fall asleep easily, so she sat there in the dark. She thought there was a TV playing somewhere in the house above her, but it was far too dim for her to even guess what was playing, never mind actually hear it.
After the long darkness, morning came and she sat there braving the boredom until he came downstairs, carrying laundry. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said.
“No worries. You’re in charge,” she said. He nodded and started a wash going. Then he re-filled her food and water bowls, the food bowl with another can of stew. When he came back down to change over the load to the dryer, he held out the padlock key to her, holding it right outside the door.
“I’m here to atone,” she said, not without hesitancy. His petty revenge was dull and, and more dull. There was no other way to describe it. He put the key back on the shelf and went upstairs. He came back once more for the dry clothes, and then he stayed out of the basement for the rest of the day. Again, Ariel stared at the walls. Her resolve was shaking, but it was only day three. She would do at least a week. If he wanted nothing more, well, she couldn’t make him take a proper revenge. If she had to stare at a throbbing wall, so be it. She tried to meditate or daydream, but nothing came. So she sat and stared.
Again, night came and went. He came downstairs, but this time with a large bucket, which he proceeded to fill in the big wash basin by the laundry machine. She stared at it, wanting to ask about it just for the conversation. But she knew already.
“Bath time,” he said. “Spread yourself out if you want to be clean.” She laid down on her back and let the water douse her. Of course it was a few seconds and over. Then he topped off her water bowl and dumped more canned stew into her food bowl. Once more he offered her the padlock key.
“No. I won’t,” she said. She wanted to. So badly, she wanted to. After he went upstairs, she was faced with a new reality. He’d hardly fed her during her time there, but even on a low calorie diet her body was going to expel waste. She had to poop, and she realized it would have been better before the bucket than after it. She fought back a tear as she leaned back over the drain and pushed. It wasn’t much, but she had to deal with it, resting atop the drain. Push it through with her hands or with her feet? She settled on her feet, squishing it out of her presence and then peeing on the drain to try to wash it off. Her timing was off, of course. She should have waited for before the bucket or before a full bladder. But she hadn’t known about the bucket. Well, she was on day four. It wouldn’t be a worry for long. Maybe one more time, unless she could work up the nerve to go longer. But she was devoted to that week.
Day five, and he came down with the same food and the same key offer. “How often do I get the bucket?” she asked.
“Do you have a wish? Are you making demands?” he asked.
So that was his game. “Just curious,” she said. She refused the key. He left her alone to lose it a little.
Day six. No bucket. She rejected the key. No words were spoken. She cried a little in the afternoon.
Day seven. But it had to be a full week. He bucketed her and offered the key. She ignored it. No words were spoken. She cried a lot in the afternoon, but knowing it could end the next morning. If he wasn’t going to take his retribution on her, then she could walk away knowing she gave every option to do so.
Day eight. He held out the key. Ariel sat there, staring at it. She’d given herself permission, days ago. She could take it and walk away, guilt free. Even if he didn’t return her clothes, she could walk out naked and be certain she’d atoned for her mother’s grievous sins. But she didn’t take the key. He said nothing. The week deadline was hers, not his. He just fed and watered her and returned to his life. So Ariel sat there again. She didn’t cry. She was pushing herself.
Day nine came. She shook as he offered the key. They hadn’t spoken to each other for several days, but he had a life upstairs and out in the world, while Ariel just sat there, a naked lump, watching the walls decay in microscopic time steps. Still, she waited too long. He doused her, fed and watered her, and left her alone. She cried some, several times. She was at the end. She knew that now.
When the tenth day came, she shot her hand out, but hesitated. She was supposed to be making up for her mother’s crime. A very serious crime. She’d spent ten days in a cage by choice. He’d spent twelve years because of her family’s lies about him. She slowly pulled her hand back. “I want to atone,” she said, their first words in five days. He made no reply but left her again. She screamed a little as the day passed.
The eleventh day came and he dumped the bucket on her, washing away her grime and shit, giving her the illusion of slight cleanliness. Then he fed and watered her and offered the key. Her hand shook. She reached through the bars, touching the key with her fingertips. She could walk out. But now she had a new goal. Two weeks. Two full weeks, a fortnight. She pulled back, and had a good morning cry and afternoon scream-fest.
On the twelfth day she didn’t reach her hand out, or even look at him as he offered her an out. She was already whimpering in front of him. He may have shrugged. He always did, but she wasn’t looking. He walked away, leaving her to her thoughts, her worst possible companion. It was a long cry, lasting into the evening.
Day thirteen came. She had two more for two full weeks. Or she could do the next day and have a single partial day. After all, she’d showed up early enough that first day. She refused to look at him, even as he bathed her with the bucket.
Day fourteen was the same. They were all the same. One more. Just one more. She’d wildly exceeded her estimates. No one could ask for more. No one had asked for anything, but that was the problem. If she looked at the key, she would take it. So she didn’t look. She just cried, even as he was there watching her.
Day fifteen came. At last, she could let herself leave. Again her fingertip touched the key. She felt the metal. The cool metal of freedom and an end to her self-inflicted torture of living in that single cage. Her conditions had to be worse than his had been. Prisons didn’t put people in tiny cages. Even in solitary. But… Maybe a fixed day was the wrong choice. It was supposed to be his choice to free her, not hers to leave. He pulled the key away before she acted, so again she sat there, screaming, crying. She masturbated herself for the first time that day, stroking her clit and pushing her body to an unhappy climax.
Day sixteen arrived and again she touched the key. As she felt it, she realized she was stroking her clit again, right in front of him! He didn’t even smile, but she pulled back. He bathed her and left. She rolled on the floor, screaming at herself. She had to end this. He wasn’t going to respond. That was obvious. He wasn’t going to fuck her. He would not try to rape her. He hadn’t even touched her except a few brushings of fingertips.
On the seventeenth day, as she sobbed on his arrival and stared at that key in his hand, she gave up. She gave in. It was over. She snatched the key away. She sat, staring at it. It was real. It was over. “So, finally made up your mind,” he said. “Think anyone noticed you were gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“They did, don’t worry. You’ve been a minor news item, but it’s looking like you just up and left. I imagine you’ll have some awkward conversations.”
“Yeah.” She put the key into the lock and twisted. Nothing happened. “Um, okay.” She tried again. It seemed to be jammed. “Hold old is this lock?”
“The lock’s fine,” he said. “So is the key. The real key. It’s up in my bedroom night stand.” He’d been crouching but now stood up and leered down at her. “Now that we’ve reached a mutual understanding, your twelve years two months six days starts now.”
Ariel felt her throat tighten, constricting. Her chest felt heavy. The blood rushed to her face. Or drained from her face. She couldn’t tell which, and she wouldn’t until her screaming subsided as he walked upstairs and turned out the lights.
