Secrets to the Grave

42

I’m dead.

But if she were dead, should she have been able to have that thought?

Gina drifted for a time in the blackness with no answer. She couldn’t feel her body. It was as if her soul had abandoned it, as if it were no longer of any use to her.

That was the definition of dead, wasn’t it? The body died and the soul went on. If a person believed in the soul, then that belief extended to include an afterlife. Heaven and hell.

Was she in hell?

Should she have been?

She wasn’t a bad person. She hadn’t done a bad thing. But she hadn’t stopped a bad thing from happening either.

Maybe that meant she was in purgatory.

Her mother’s crazy aunt Celia had always told the kids purgatory was full of dead babies. She hadn’t seen any dead babies. She hadn’t seen anything but blackness.

She floated then for a while longer. It seemed very peaceful to be dead.

Then—slowly at first—something began to impede on the quiet calm within her. Her mind didn’t register what it was. Sound? Feeling?

Pain?

PAIN.

Oh my God, the pain!

Gina came to consciousness with a gasp, like a swimmer breaking the surface from a deep, deep dive. Her eyes opened. Her mouth opened. Her whole body strained as she came free of the blackness that had enveloped her and protected her. She gasped for air once, twice, a third time. Each breath hurt worse than the one before it.

She learned very quickly then to take only shallow breaths, but she took them too quickly and her vision began to dim again. Good, she thought. Dead was better.

But she wasn’t dead, and she didn’t die. At the edge of consciousness her body was able to regulate its breathing. Gina lay there trying to corral the pain into something she could comprehend. Were her bones broken? Were her organs damaged? What had happened to her? Where was she?

She was no place she had ever been.

Pinpoint beams of sunlight came down from above her, penetrating the dark like lasers. The wall in front of her appeared to be coated with layers of dirt and grime. The thick root of some plant was growing into the space through a jagged crack in the concrete like a long bony finger reaching in to point at her.

Was she in a cell? A basement?

The pain burst out of the flimsy confines of her will and engulfed her, choked her, convulsed through her until there was no room in her being for anything else—not air, not consciousness.

She had no idea how long she was out. It could have been moments. It could have been hours. When she came awake again, nothing seemed to have changed. She hadn’t been dreaming—unless she was dreaming still.

No dream. Nightmare.

She felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. The stench of her surroundings went up her nostrils and down the back of her throat. Feces and urine, rodent and decay. Garbage. Sour beer. Her stomach turned itself inside out and she retched and retched.

She wanted to push herself up with her left arm so as not to vomit on herself, but her hands were stuck behind her back. Then she remembered the masking tape around her wrists.

The tape wasn’t tight. She twisted her right hand and plucked at it with her fingers, working it off. She went again to support herself with her left arm, but the arm collapsed beneath her, sending a searing pain through her.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

No dream. No nightmare. She was wide awake.

Tears came then, and fear. Where the hell was she?

The memory came back in strobelike flashes. Night. Walking. Choking on her fear. Begging for her life. A gunshot.

A gunshot. She’d been shot. She looked down at herself. Her T-shirt was soaked with blood, a hole burned through the upper left shoulder. She didn’t know if the bullet was still in her body or if it had passed through her. Whatever it had done, it hadn’t killed her. Hours had to have passed and she hadn’t died from loss of blood.

That was one good sign.

Slowly she took stock of her body. She had feeling in her left arm, but it seemed to be useless. Her right arm worked. She moved her left foot, bent her left knee. No damage there. Her right leg was a different story.

The attempt to move her right foot was excruciating. She struggled up onto her right elbow and looked down, panic knifing through her. The foot was turned inward almost perpendicular to the leg bone, as if it had been snapped off at the ankle.

“Help!” Gina called out. “Help! Somebody help me!”

She called out until her throat was raw. She was in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to hear her.

The space she was in was maybe five feet wide. It was a long way to the light. She was a poor judge of distance, but it had to be more than twenty feet. She remembered now the doors, like cellar doors. The doors—cracked and dilapidated—were the ceiling of her prison.

She reached out with her right hand to touch the wall, rough and hard. Concrete. Filthy. Beneath her was garbage—old boards, collapsed cardboard boxes; stinking plastic garbage bags that had been ripped and torn, their contents spilling out: eggshells and coffee grounds and putrid food and milk cartons. And beneath it all was the smell of stagnant water.

She was in an abandoned well, and she wasn’t alone.

Slowly she became aware of the feeling of being watched. Her heart pounding, Gina turned her head left inch by inch and came face-to-face with the biggest rat she had ever seen in her life.