Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories Read online

I hear they’re making robotic sex dolls that you can keep in a box. Whatever happened to the good old days when you could just kidnap my daughter?

  What’s that old equation: Comedy = Tragedy + Time?

  I guess you can create a formula like that for everything. Look at the very fabric of reality and you’ll see: Love x You’re Fucked = Life.

  The karmic irony, if you believe in such things, is that her abductor now lives in a cage, whereas Meagan can roam free. Given, it’s not a narrow box cut an inch too short so that his neck stays bent. And he doesn’t get raped several times a day. At least, not that I’m aware of. The food’s pretty bad, though, from what I understand.

  So I hear about her being found through the radio, immediately make the drive back to our old town. Get there in time to see the wannabe pallbearers ushering the box out of the pervert’s home. Their shit-eating grins chronicled in camera flash. The whole scene looks like a party that’s just winding down. The man who provided the tip is standing amidst a sea of congratulators who all appear drunk or high on crack.

  Meagan’s in the back of an ambulance, a wool blanket that looks just as rough-hewn as the plywood box is wrapped around her torso. If I saw this young lady on the street, I’d pass her by without a second glance. I could buy a Starbucks from her and not think a thing. There’s nothing left of my little girl in this nineteen-year-old’s gaunt and ruddy face. Those bruised and vacant eyes.

  It takes some convincing, but they let me through to see her. All I can feel is a nervous tingling in my testicles. The feeling you get when the roller coaster drops and you promised to keep your hands in the air but you can’t. A kind of soundless vertigo. A kind of Zen state. A wash-out of emotion as it collects itself in the seismic undertow and becomes a tsunamic wave. She looks up, sees me. No, sees through me. Looking into her eyes, I doubt she sees anything at all. The wave hits, pulls me under. I drown.

  Here’s the first night together at home. Not the old home where she was stolen during the daytime like Nugget might have been. The new one that Debbie’s never been to, so instead of smelling like spring air fabric softener it smells like moldy parmesan cheese. It’s only got one bedroom; I had mentally said goodbye to Meagan years ago. The walls are painted in whatever off-white color they came in. I forgot to buy groceries so the fridge is bare.

  “Honey,” I say. I used to call her Fish-Face. I used to call her Mug-Head. “We can talk. We can just sit. Maybe we can watch a show? You want something to eat? Maybe I can order something? I don’t want to be too pushy.” I don’t want to leave her alone.

  She just stands there. She’s still got that scratchy wool blanket wrapped around her and she keeps cinching it tight. Underneath, she’s wearing a tank top undershirt and boxer briefs. She shrugs, stands there some more.

  For how small the room is, there seems to be a chasm forming between us. I’ve never been comfortable around other people. I’m fine on stage, but face-to-face? No. My therapist would call what’s happening here exposure therapy. It’s when you’re forced to do the thing that makes you most uncomfortable so that you can try and get over it. This, I learn, is that thing.

  I walk slowly, cautiously, as though approaching a feral cat instead of the daughter whose diapers I once changed. We’re next to each other now. Her vacant eyes, I see, are staring at a copy of Cracked magazine that is laying by the couch on the floor. Should I do it fast or slow? I don’t know, and hardly remember what I decided. Next thing I know my arm is around her, ungainly and stiff, unsure if I feel resistance or acceptance or total indifference. I try to pull her toward me but it’s like tugging on the trunk of a tree.

  My daughter died in that box. I have to bring her back.

  I almost forget I’m supposed to feature for an act at the Improv that night. I wonder if a little comedy could do her some good, but quickly decide it would not. Honestly, I’m frightened of slipping up and telling one of my more inappropriate jokes. Which basically means my whole act.

  “Why don’t you lie down,” I say. “In a warm, comfortable bed for a change.”

  She nods and I lead her to my room. Her room, now. The only room.

  Keeping the blanket wrapped around her, cinching it ever more tightly, she lies down atop the bedspread. Her neck is bent, head thrust forward, so I place another pillow underneath it so that it doesn’t just hang in the air. Gaunt and pale with those deep-set eyes staring straight up overhead, Meagan has become a mummy. I watch as her body curls into its accustomed pose. Boxed in atop a king size bed.

  I turn on the TV and flip through channels. It’s primetime on a Thursday night and guns blaze from every station. I may as well make her watch Taken 1, 2, and 3. Then I remember how I kept her books. The ones we used to read to her as a little girl. Maybe that could help soothe her, anchor her in some way to her former self.

  “Stay here,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”

  The books are in a box in a storage room by the garage. I rip it open and look.

  Goldilocks, Hansel & Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White

  Christ, I think with mounting dread. Every story involves some little girl who leaves home and almost gets killed.

  Okay, keep it simple. Basic pleasures here: a warm bath, clean clothes, comfort food, a soft bed. She’s still my daughter, I’m still her dad. I can do this.

  The bathroom is off the bedroom, so I have to pass by her first. I open the door and almost cry out. She’s gone. How is that possible? Was she taken again? I run to the bathroom, it’s empty.

  “Meagan!” I shout so loud it hurts my ears.

  Then I hear a muffled voice. Coming from down by the floor. I look and see that the bed skirt is ruffled. I dip to my knees and peek under the bed, and there she is. Her head thrust forward so that her forehead is pressed into the underside of the box spring. That wool blanket pulled so tight I’m surprised she can breathe.

  Tired of your daughter forgetting to make her bed? Easy fix. Just have her kidnapped by a man who keeps her in a box and she’ll never sleep in it again.

  Thank God I didn’t perform at that night’s show.

  Of all people it was the police who saved me, because they sure hadn’t saved her. She had written instructions on the underside of the box lid. Had scratched instructions, I mean. With her fingernails. The police used carbon paper to lift all the inscriptions and emailed scanned copies to me. Meagan had scratched into the wood the things she wanted to do when she got free.

  Pet animals (I’d never missed Nugget as much as right then)

  Swim in the ocean

  Something about wanting ice cream or to scream

  Never have a boyfriend

  Days are nights and nights are days

  Please let me suffocate

  There was a lot of other stuff. I wouldn’t send much of it to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. But it gave me a place to start.

  Two weeks and she still hadn’t talked. I figured she would have to cry first. Just flush all the toxic sludge that was clogging the pipes. She went to therapy every day, although that didn’t seem to do much. The therapist said it would take time: weeks, months, years. She charged $175 per hour.

  We’re on the way to the zoo. It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. August. 96 degrees out, but the heat index says it feels like 99. The index is optimistic. Even still we have to wait in line.

  The ticket teller is around Meagan’s age, maybe a few years older. She’s dressed from head to toe in khaki and wearing a safari hat. Blonde hair with a beautiful face.

  Beauty = Symmetry—% of Facial Herpes

  If I wasn’t with Meagan, I’d try and flirt with this girl. I know I’m a degenerate when I stroke her hand when taking our tickets just so I can touch her skin.

  Erection = Impulse to Procreate x Foot Fetish +/- Shame

  I know why Debbie left me; I’m not sure why Nugget did.

  We walk in to the scent of flamingo shit, and keep going. All I care about is getting her to the panda exhibit. It doesn’t matter how down
you are; a panda will cheer you up. We pass the warthogs and meerkats and bongos. The howlers and lemurs and orangutans. It’s too hot even for the animals. They’re all hiding in shadows or covered in mud. Meagan tugs on my shirt while I’m craning my neck to find the emaciated lion; it’s the first contact she’s initiated on her own. She leads me to a small grey building with a sign that reads, “Mole Rats,” and we walk inside.

  I’m not a therapist, but I’m seeing the psychology here. These little hairless mutant rats are stuffed in tunnels, buried underground. Just lying there amidst their piss and shit and whatever else. They don’t make a playground or a swimming pond or a sports stadium, they just burrow tunnels barely wide enough to fit through that lead to dead end apertures where they lay.

  I sigh, reach down and grab hold of her limp hand. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  She nods, and I consider that the breakthrough of the millennium. Then she speaks. “Every beautiful creature,” she says. “Lives inside a cage.”

  Meagan used to tell me she thought flipping the bird came from Big Bird only having three fingers, so he was always raising his middle one. That was about as deep as she got. I guess she’s had a lot of time to think living inside that box.

  It’s dark in here and it feels safe. A good place, perhaps, for her to open up.

  “Listen,” I say, and then the door opens behind us. Harsh, August light blinds us to the three chubby boys who barge through. They’re around the same age as Meagan when she was taken.

  “Ewww! These fucking things are gross!”

  “Look, James! That fat one looks like your grandma!”

  Meagan shrivels. I expect to see her clothes fall limp to the ground like when the bad witch of Oz gets dowsed with water. I hurry her out; her legs are stiff; she’s stumbling like she’s forgotten how to walk. I escort her as fast as I can to the panda exhibit, where I learn that some conditions are immune to a panda’s charm.

  The next day, she ran away. Or maybe that night, I’m not sure. She tried to go back under the bed and I wouldn’t let her. It can’t be healthy. It has to be holding her back. Fortunately, finding her was easy. A construction worker found her squeezed inside one of their concrete culvert pipes. Her forehead had an abrasion from rubbing against the rocky underside.

  The police brought her home and she wanted to go back under the bed, but again I wouldn’t let her.

  “Please, just talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. How can I help you?”

  She won’t look at me. There is no possible way for me to catch her eye.

  “Meagan, I love you so much. I’m so happy you’re home. I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through. I want to make it all better. You still have a whole life ahead of you to make up for those terrible years.”

  When she talks now, it’s in a kind of mumbling Morse code.

  “Nothing . . . can be . . . done.”

  “Honey,” I used to call her Mug-Head, “that’s not true. I know it seems like that now, but it’ll get better over time.”

  “Everyone’s watching . . . I hate . . . when they look.”

  “I know it feels that way. But no one around here even knows who you are. You’re safe now. I promise you.”

  “You’re . . . watching.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I don’t . . . like it when . . . you look at me.”

  She’s shaking, she’s bone white. Terrified or freezing cold, the look is the same. Her chin is tucked deep into her chest trying as hard as she can to hide her face. From me.

  I turn and leave the room and listen as she crawls underneath the bed.

  She refuses therapy. Doesn’t talk when she’s there, doesn’t want to go. I can’t pay $175 for two people to sit in a room in silence. The therapist says she’d like to bring in a specialist who charges twice as much. “Wouldn’t we all,” I tell her.

  I try the beach, find a place that’s fairly private. Just one other family a few hundred feet away teaching their toddler son to fly a kite. We walk along the shoreline and the water feels refreshing against my bare feet. Meagan lets it soak her Converse shoes without seeming to notice. I spread out a large blanket and set down the picnic basket containing the combo meals I got from Quizno’s. Meagan starts digging in the sand. Slowly, at first, then scooping out large handfuls with both hands. I see what she’s doing, and decide to help her. Working together it only takes five minutes to have her buried up to her neck.

  “Cover my head,” she says.

  “No, honey. I can’t.”

  “Please.” Her eyes film with tears of anger or frustration.

  “Honey, I can’t.”

  “Please!” she screams. Her face is shaking, staring at the ocean with a desperate rage.

  I’d brought a beach bucket with us. I grab that and place it on her head and pat it down until it covers her face. Now it just looks like I’m sitting by myself with an overturned bucket beside me. I can hear her crying, for the first time, and it sounds faraway within the hollow inside of the bucket.

  “Better?” I ask, as tenderly as I can.

  The bucket rocks back and forth as she nods her head. Soon the crying stops, and we sit in, what feels like, comfortable silence. This gives me an idea.

  The pervert’s name is Derrick Patterson. He’s a white guy in his fifties. Short, skinny except for a watermelon size beer gut. He had lived with his cousin, and my daughter, in a ramshackle, piece-of-shit house. Guy probably lives more elegantly in prison. For all I know, he may even have a new sex slave. I don’t know whether or not to be surprised that he agreed to meet with me. I don’t know what I expect to feel when I see him.

  My therapist would not recommend this. No one would.

  They have me in one of those rooms with little phone booths and a reinforced window separating the people on each end of the line. A door opens and the man who kept my daughter in a box between rapings walks through. Oh, right. One detail I forgot to mention. He doesn’t have a neck. It’s all just withered scar tissue from the surgery he had to remove cancerous tumors. Stupid fuck still smokes, even though his neck barely looks strong enough to support his stupid head.

  I’m already holding the phone. He sits down and picks up his. Raises the voice box to his scooped out throat. He smirks, and I become lost in a fantasy where the reinforced window rolls down and I drag him through to my side and spend the remainder of the day tormenting him in the most sadistic ways my fucked up mind can imagine.

  Finally, I come to. “You know who I am?”

  His teeth look like chewed-up tootsie rolls. His robotic voice is how a talking insect would sound.

  This is something I can’t do. Something I can’t undo. I skip several questions and get right to the point.

  “Tell me how you talked to her,” I demand.

  “What did you say?

  “What did you call her?

  “When did you take her out?

  “When did you put her back in?

  “What did you feed her?

  “Was there anything that made her happy? Anything at all?”

  His buzz saw voice carved trenches in my brain tissue, but I got the info I needed. Then I got to leave and breathe fresh air while he had to go back and inhale body odor and ball sweat. But that’s not nearly enough. Want to know what should happen? They should tie him up and deliver him to me. Leave a guard to make sure it goes my way. Let me take my time, as much as I need. Save the taxpayers a million or two while I enact the only form of punishment that fits the crime. Ruthless, painful revenge.

  Instead I find myself at Walmart, buying discount supplies for this plan I’ve concocted to kidnap my own daughter. There’s no equation for this; I’ve tried. Enter it into a calculator and it’ll return: FAILED TO COMPUTE.

  Ski mask, gloves, sleeping mask, nylon rope. Her sense of smell has gotten much better and I basically wear the same three or four shirts so I buy off-label clothes. Because Lowe’s is closer to my house than Home Depot I go there to get t
he wood. Four rough-hewn boards cut to my exact specifications. I make sure to buy the same cheap brand with the orange logo on the side. Wood so soft I get splinters in my hands loading the planks into the car.

  It’s hard to remember the Meagan who was taken six years ago. My memories seem idealized now. I imagine reading her stories and going on long walks where I espouse my fatherly wisdom. She runs to me and I lift her up and watch the sun shine through her auburn hair as I twirl her around above me. But, if I’m to be honest, those last couple of years were filled with a lot of confusion, hurt feelings, and shouting. I stopped maturing during my teenage years as well.

  I hardly have to prepare. Whether or not she put up a fight back then, I know she won’t now. And I’m right. She barely grunts when I break into her room in the middle of the night and pin her against the floor, wrap the sleeping mask over her eyes and stuff the gag in her mouth. She offers zero resistance when I bind her arms behind her and tie them to her legs. I mean none. Taking her to the rental car in the early morning hours is a breeze. I blast loud music while driving in random patterns through town before returning home a couple of hours later. I park in the driveway because I’ve outfitted the garage, the one room she never spent time in. Her new home.

  So here we are, Meagan and me. But she doesn’t know it’s me. At least, I don’t think she does. I guess it doesn’t matter. She’s happier now than she was before. I’ve got the room just the way it was the last six years. Her box, an inch too short, is crammed underneath a raised bed. She eats the same food—Ritz crackers and Kraft Easy Cheese. Keeps the same hours. Only difference is she doesn’t get raped. Maybe one day she’ll want out and I’ll let her. Of course I will. My therapist would call this thinking outside the box, which is a terrible joke.

  Here we are, her stuffed in her wooden box, me stuffed in my biological one, both condemned to die.

  I knock on the lid, scratching my knuckle. It’s therapy time.

  “Daddy?” Meagan says, just like that pervert said she would. What he trained her to say. Leaning forward, I wonder, if there is a creator, whether He is laughing or if She’s crying.