AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As I continued to dig with the small shovel, I worried the police would show up. Surely they kept a closer eye on cemeteries on Halloween. But it was early afternoon, and the troublemakers wouldn’t be out until after the sun had gone down. I thought about kids out making mischief stumbling upon my dug-out grave and having a ghost story to pass around.
I finally got to the coffin. I had the momentary fear I would open it and see my body in there, that I really was gone and somehow didn’t know it yet. But when I opened the lid there was no body, only things of mine. Old ballet shoes, journals, photographs. Things that became me in the absence of a body to put in the earth.
Now, out in the fresh air, looking at what was meant as evidence of my passing, I couldn’t let myself think the wordmaster. But I had nothing else to call him, exceptthe monster who had taken me. In the end the most monstrous thing he did was let me go. Especially in light of the fact that everyone else had let me go, too.
I wanted to get in the car and go back to him, throw myself on his mercy and hope that at least one person in the world still wanted me. But I knew I wouldn’t. He’d broken me, but he’d been so strangely gentle about it that somehow I was still me inside.
I wasn’t a shell, a hollowed-out zombie of a human being, though at this moment, with graveyard dirt covering me virtually head to toe, I looked like it. For whatever reason, he wanted me to be free, and I’d been trained to obey. I could keep going if I thought of it as obedience.
I gathered my stuff from the coffin and took it to the car. I’d found a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, so I stopped at a drive-through for some food. My master must have slipped money into the jeans before he’d tossed them to me that morning.
Thinking of how well he took care of me ripped me apart inside, and I had to hold back the floodgates because I was in public. The girl at the drive through looked at me oddly as I paid for my cheeseburger meal.
“I’m a zombie,” I said dully. I almost laughed at my own joke.
The light bulb went off over her head as she looked down at her clothes and remembered it was Halloween. She was about seventeen with blonde hair that had pink streaks in it and going for a slutty Punky Brewster effect with her clothing. Probably she was passing it off as a costume because she didn’t have the nerve to wear it any other day.
“Oh, right. Clever,” she said. “The dirt makeup looks real.”
I smiled, biting back the urge to say it was real dirt. I ate in the parking lot, then started the car again. I needed to get cleaned up, but I knew I didn’t have a house to go to except for my parents’ place, and I wasn’t ready to see them just yet.
I hadn’t been in the house for long when I’d been taken, and still had my storage unit. It had held all the things in my house before they went into my house, and I’d paid a year in advance because you never know when you might need a storage facility.
I hadn’t been sure the new place would work out. I blame my mother for this insane level of over-planning. I have no other excuses.
My storage unit, like all of them at the ultra-modern facility, worked by a combination keypad, and I was the only one who knew the code.
My fingers trembled as I punched it in, then drove the car into it like a garage and turned off the ignition. I’d known from the moment I got out the door I wouldn’t call the police. I would never tell them anything that had happened, or lead them down the winding roads to the house that had been my prison.
I sat in the car, going through the things that had been buried in the coffin, reading the journals, looking at who I’d been, or who they’d simplified me down to in order to fit me into a box, and it struck me how much they didn’t really know anything about me. Whether it was by my own omissions or their lack of observation I would never know.
My house was fifteen miles away from that of my parents, and it was that way because it was the opposite end of town, as far as I could get and still be in the same place. The storage facility was only five miles from their house, which made walking much easier.
Once the car was taken care of and I was walking down the streets through the residential neighborhood, the enormity of my situation hit me.
Kids were running down the streets beside me all dressed up like pumpkins and pirates and ghosts, shrieking and laughing, their candy pails swinging from their arms as exhausted parents tried to keep up with them.
It was too much. Everything was too loud. Even the drive-through had been difficult. To have a human being speak to me. To have any set of eyes on me but his . . . it was unnerving, an invasion. It made me feel naked and exposed.
Over months of being with him, my prison had become my sanctuary, and now that I was free, the world was my prison. There was nowhere left to run.
No one paid much attention to me as I walked. I’m sure part of it was that the sun was setting behind the trees, and the stark afternoon brightness of a few hours before was long gone. I wasn’t recognizable as Emily. Anyone who saw me didn’t look horrified or shocked. I was just wearing a costume like everybody else.
It was full dark when I reached my parents’ house. Their porch was lit with the typical Halloween array, a giant lit-up pumpkin, bats hanging from the porch, a bloody scarecrow lying over a bale of hay in the front yard.
They really had just erased me, had some kind of psychotic fit that allowed them to shut that door and open another one. To lay me to rest and the next day give out candy to neighborhood kids and do the normal Halloween things without it necessary to give me a second thought. It was obscene.
I’d seen them when Katie had died. I knew it was because the only way they could survive was to behave like this. Still. To not openly grieve and mourn, to instead hide and bury and erase. It wasn’t the way normal human beings behaved toward those they were supposed to love. Even if those they loved were only a memory now.
When I knocked, my mother shouted from behind the door, “Ted, get that!”
I heard something fall and break, a stream of curses, and then the door flew open. My mother’s irritation turned to shock.
“Ted!” she screamed, as if her shouts could protect her from the daughter who wouldn’t die and be gone forever like a good little girl.
My father came to stand behind her in the doorway, “Donna, what is it?” His face went pale when he saw me, looking morbidly as if I’d crawled out of my grave.
I wanted to say it served them right for burying someone who wasn’t dead in the first place, but it wasn’t my dad’s fault, not really. He just went along with whatever my mother said to do.
