Gallery of the Dead

Ninety-Eight

It’s astonishing how light and darkness can completely alter one’s perception of time. Take, for example, every casino in the United States. The intensity of the lighting in their gambling floors is controlled and constant — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week — just the right balance of brightness and colors so as not to overexpose and tire the human eye. Consequently, gamblers often lose track of time. What to them might feel like an afternoon spent at the tables, turns out to be a day and a half.

Heather Fisher was being subjected to the exact same experience, but in total darkness and without the luxuries of a Las Vegas gambling floor. Her notion of time had left her long ago.

After the man had allowed her to speak to her mother on the phone, he had put her in that dark room and Heather had waited and waited and waited. Her mother had said that she was coming to pick her up, but she still hadn’t turned up. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, Heather had cried herself to sleep.

The girl missed her mother dearly, but what had really made her sad was the fact that she had been unable to go to the park after school to meet the boy. She really liked him. He was just like her, different, but they understood each other and they always laughed together. She liked that very much. She liked when he sat next to her, when he held her hand, when he smiled at her, and she had felt the warmest of feelings inside when he kissed her cheek last Friday.

The man had taken away her cellphone, so she had no way of telling the boy that she couldn’t be there. She was terrified that the boy wouldn’t want to go to the park to see her anymore. That he wouldn’t want to sit next to her again, or smile at her, or hold her hand.

Why was that man so mean? She had never done anything to him.

When Heather woke up again, the room was as dark as it had always been. She felt hungry, thirsty and cold, and the mattress she was lying on felt like it was made out of cement. Every muscle in her body hurt, especially the ones on her neck. As she sat up, blood throbbed in her ears, making her feel dizzy. Her clothes felt soaking wet and they didn’t smell so good. She really didn’t like that.

Tears welled up in the girl’s eyes again. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her. Why was she in that room? Who was that man? Why did she have to sit in the dark? And why didn’t her mother come pick her up like she said she would? Her mother never lied to her.

Then a new thought came to the girl. Maybe the man was the boy’s father. Maybe he had found out that his son, Thomas, was meeting her at the park after school and he didn’t want that, he didn’t want his son sitting next to her, or smiling at her, or holding her hand. The man didn’t want that because she was different. But Thomas was also different and she really, really liked him. If she could, she would sit next to him every day.

Heather closed her eyes and the tears became sobs. She cried for a long while before she heard footsteps approaching from outside the small room. She quickly wiped the tears from her eyes and jumped to her feet.

‘Mommy?’ she called, feeling her way in the darkness toward the door. ‘Mommy, I’m here.’

Heather heard a key being inserted into the door lock. It turned once, twice, three times.

‘Mommy?’

The door was finally pulled open and light spilled into the room from the corridor outside. Heather blinked, turning her face away from the door. The sudden bright light hurt her eyes.

‘Mommy?’ she called one more time.

‘No,’ the man replied, his voice firm and strong. He used the remote control in his left hand to switch on the lights inside the room.

Heather blinked a few more times before her vision finally could handle the brightness.

The man stepped into the room and allowed the door to close silently behind him.

Heather shivered.

‘Mommy isn’t coming for you.’ The man returned the remote control to his trouser pocket, from where he retrieved a pair of latex gloves. ‘Nobody is ever coming for you... Except me.’