Fortunato Avenged

“So, Brad, how long do you think you could handle it?” Dan asked with that mischievous gleam in his eye.  The gleam he gets just before getting himself-and all those around him, into serious trouble.  I should have spotted impending disaster then, but my curiosity overrode my good sense. 
“I could easily handle a weekend of solitary confinement” I answered, with a shrug of my shoulders.
         Both of us being Psychology students at the local university, there was a shared interest in abnormal psychology.  Specifically, how stress affects the human mind.  Today’s subject was solitary confinement.  Dan was all over this subject, for reasons that I could not discern and was afraid to inquire into.
         “Would you be willing to put yourself to the test?” Dan asked.
         “What do you mean?”
         “Here’s what I’m suggesting” said Dan, leaning forward in his chair “a night spent locked in solitary.”
         “What?  You’re crazy” I laughed “You want me to blow a whole weekend holed up in a homemade prison cell?”
         “Something like that” he smiled.
         I shook my head, even though I was inwardly intrigued.
         “Hey, it’s for the benefit of science” he said “besides, there’s a hundred bucks in it for you if you make it twenty-four hours.”
         “I’ll be helpless those twenty-four hours…and at your mercy” I protested.
         “We’re buds, right?  You can trust me.  I’ll have fail-safes in place.  Just in case of an emergency.”
         “Okay, I’m interested” I said exhaling, “But I want details before I commit to this sadistic experiment of yours.”
         “I don’t want to give too much away right now, to preserve the integrity of the experiment.  Here’s the plan.  Do you remember my grandfather’s place up in the hills?”
         I nodded, but in reality only vaguely remembered the place.
         “Well, we’ll meet here this Friday afternoon and I’ll drive us up there.  I’ll have everything in place ahead of time.”
         “Sounds good…I guess” I replied, although not completely convinced.
         “It’s a deal then?” he asked, extending his hand.
         “Deal” I said.
         We shook hands, neither of us knowing that both our lives were about to be changed forever.

         Dan picked me up at my dorm that morning, and drove us out of town and up the twisting mountain road to our destination.  We arrived at his late grandfather’s old farmhouse where I found it to be in various states of renovation.  My heart sank when I saw where I would be spending my much valued weekend.
         “Does this place even have electricity?” I asked ruefully.
         “Power, water, food-everything you need” Dan replied enthusiastically.
         He beckoned me up the front steps like a mad scientist from a 1950’s B-movie.  I followed, my feelings a mixture of regret and curiosity.  We entered through the front door, passed through a parlor with ghostly, sheet-covered furnishings, and entered a half-finished kitchen set in disarray.  He then led me to a narrow door which led down a twisty flight of stairs into a small anteroom which held another mysterious door set in a cinderblock wall.
         “Okay, this is it” he said, turning to face me.
         He then opened the door wide and, with a gesture of his arm, bid me enter.  Upon entering, I found myself in modestly furnished room lined with shelves stocked with canned foods, bottled water, and various other essentials.  A brown colored daybed sat facing a television set on the other side of the cramped room.  The only wall décor was a yellow sign with a black radiation symbol in its center.
         “It’s a fallout shelter” he explained. 
Evidently his grandfather was some sort of kooky conspiracy theorist.  I now saw where Dan acquired his madness.
         Dan’s grandfather had died alone in the house a year earlier.  It had been two weeks later that Dan had found his body-severely decomposed and partially eaten by rats.  The room smelled as if the corpse were still there.
         “I sort of figured that” I said, as I took in my surroundings. 
         I heard a creak of hinges and a rustling of materials from behind me.  Instinctively, I spun around at the thought he was leaving me and locking the only escape.  Instead, I found him digging through a small closet that I had failed to notice upon entering.  To my horror, Dan immerged from the closet dragging a chain with a large padlock attached to it.
              “Have you ever read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado?” He inquired, while fingering the metallic padlock.
         “I sort of remember it from English Lit…a couple of semesters ago” I replied.  I reached out to touch the chain.  It felt ice cold to the touch-like death.
         “Well then, you know what I’m going to do to you next”

         One hour had passed since Dan had left me alone.  The last thing I heard was the jingle of keys as he locked the door behind him.  Then, I heard the retreat of his footsteps on the stairs as he departed.
         I lay back on the couch, trying to get as comfortable as I could with a logging chain wrapped twice around my waist and padlocked.  He had first wanted to secure the chain around my neck, but I protested that I hadn’t signed on for a hanging.  Then I reminded him that in the Edgar Allen Poe story, the chain had been attached around the guy’s waist.  So, for the sake of my safety and literary integrity, he acquiesced.
         The chain was long enough to allow movement about the entire room and into the small bathroom that sat adjacent to the main room.  There were three windows that let in sunlight, one of them being located in the aforementioned bathroom itself.    The windows were oblong and narrow, and sat high on the walls at ground level above.  I was thankful to have a view of the outside world, albeit a scant one.  This would be the focal point that would help me keep my sanity throughout my self-imposed confinement.
         I had spent that first hour orienting myself to my surroundings.  At one point, I thought I heard the creak of footsteps on the floor above me.  Perhaps it was the ghost of Dan’s crazy grandfather roaming the house in search of rats and communists.  Then the thought occurred to me that perhaps Dan had never left the house at all, and was planning to scare the wits out of me come nightfall. 
         Nightfall.  A shudder passed through me as I imagined the lonely, old house shrouded in darkness. 
         I then decided that it wasn’t beneficial to ponder such things.  I grabbed up the remote, and turned on the television.  Much to my relief, I found that the television not only worked, but was connected to cable.  I surfed through the lineup until I found ESPN.
         What a shame Fortunato didn’t have cable television.

         I awoke with a start.  Apparently I had fallen asleep while watching a rerun of Seinfeld.  It was dark outside.  The only light in the room was that of the flickering glow of the television screen.
         Had I been awakened by a noise?  On the television, a perky blond was ballyhooing the benefits of some weight-loss product on an infomercial.  I quickly grabbed the remote and muted the television.
         Silence.
         Then, I heard it-a sound of scratching…or clawing.  As If something were trying to get in, or perhaps out.  I assumed it was Dan trying to frighten me, as I had earlier predicted.  But then I heard a sound emanate from the adjacent wall, where there was no door.  It was the sound of small, scurrying feet followed by an inhuman squeal that sent all my hairs standing on end. 
         Rats!
         I quickly jumped to my feet and ran to the point on the wall that housed the overhead lights.  The sound of the heavy logging chain dragging the floor behind me split the silence like a lumberjack’s hatchet.  I flipped on the lights and quickly scanned the room for traces of movement.  Nothing stirred.  Then it occurred to me that this room was encased by cinderblock.  The floor and ceiling were solid concrete. 
         Of course there were surely a million unknown ways in which they could get in.  They always got in eventually.  One way or another, they would get to me.
         SNAP OUT OF IT, I screamed to myself.  Tomorrow afternoon, it all ends.  This experiment will be over.  There is no need to lose it now.
         I walked over to the refrigerator, dragging my fetters behind me.  Pulling open the door, I scanned the contents within.  It was remarkably well-stocked.  Dan was certainly taking good care of his agreeable prisoner. 
         Taking my place on the couch once again, I spent the rest of the night with the lights on.  I snacked on potato chips and drank soda as I watched television in silence.  My ears were straining to hear the slightest rustle of movement.  I knew that I was making myself crazy, but I couldn’t help myself.  Something was out there, watching and waiting.

         Sometime around midnight, I must have fallen into an uneasy sleep.  I was remembering something in my sleep about Dan’s words: “…you know what I’m going to do to you next”.  The words repeated themselves like a broken record in my mind. 
         Suddenly there was a deep searing pain in my right foot.  I rose up in bed suddenly as if having just been shot.  There at the foot of the couch sat a scene of such infinite horror that it seemed to steal my very breath and take my very life from me!
         On my right foot, where my big toe had been, there remained only a bloody stump with a fragment of splintered bone protruding.  Blood squirted sequentially from the fresh, grotesque wound.  And sitting on the arm of the couch was a large black rat!  The animal was filthy, and appeared to be emaciated from starvation. But it was what it held in it’s forepaws that made me pallor in abject disgust.  It was holding a plump, white, clump of bloodied flesh.  Its eyes glowed devilish red as the cursed thing savagely gnawed upon my severed appendage.
         The next thing I remembered was falling hard from a standing position onto the cold, concrete floor.  Apparently I had jumped to my feet in my terror and became entangled in the logging chain.  I immediately looked to my wounded foot, only to find my big toe exactly where it should be.  There were no traces of blood and no traces of any savage, black rat.
         Just a nightmare.  A horrible, vivid nightmare.
         Although the rat attack was a mere contrivance of a disturbed subconscious, I was not entirely exempt from injury.  My forearm throbbed from having fallen upon it in my struggle.  For a few moments I sat upon the floor examining my arm for potential fractures, or other serious injuries.  I then wiggled my fingers.  There were no apparent injuries, but it would undoubtedly be bruised the next day. 
         For the remainder of the night, I sat watching television with the volume turned down low.  I dared not return to sleep.

         The first rays of morning light through the oblong windows were a welcomed sight.  In a few hours, Dan would be arriving to unshackle me.  This appalling night would be behind me.  I laughed when I considered the stories that I had to tell him.  He would be quite pleased with the results of his psychology experiment.

         Noon arrived, but Dan did not.  It wasn’t like Dan to be late-especially when conducting a scientific experiment.  I began pacing the floor in impatient annoyance.  Where was he?
         
         Early evening had arrived, and still Dan was still conspicuously absent.  I progressed from impatient to angry.  I wanted this whole misadventure to be over.  Besides, the scratching at the door was growing more constant now.

         I decided to pass the remaining time with more mindless television viewing.  I turned on the evening local news.  They were featuring a story about a suspicious fire at a local business.  That was all that I needed to hear while trapped in an empty firetrap of a house.
         After concluding the story on the fire, they began recounting a story about a motor vehicle accident.  My blood quickly turned to pure ice water as the news anchor perfunctorily conveyed the story in mock sympathy.
         “In other news” he was saying “there was a single fatality in this morning’s traffic accident on Pine Bluff Road.  The victim was twenty-one year old Daniel Tresser of Springdale.  The cause of the accident is still under investigation…”
         A picture of Dan’s youthful, smiling face had been flashed upon the background screen while the news anchor had been speaking.
         I turned off the television in stunned silence. 
         NO! NO! NO!  THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!
         I should have been mourning the loss of my friend.  But in all honesty, I was too concerned about my own precious skin.  Dan was the only one who knew that I was there.  Who would come to release me?  No one.
         The next several minutes were spent in a blind panic.  I screamed, I threw objects, and I busted out the two of the oblong windows.    My journey to madness was now complete.
         Collapsing to the floor in exhaustion, I began to sob.  It was the first time since childhood that I had cried.  My heart was pounding and my mind was reeling with a full spectrum of emotions-fear, sadness, regret, but most of all: disappointment.  I remembered what Dan had told me about how his grandfather had looked when he had found him.  Rats had eaten away his nose, ears, and lips.  Is this how my life was to end?
         Just then, the scratching at the door began once more-this time, at a more desperate and frenetic pace unequaled before.  They knew I was alone and hopeless.  Somehow, they knew.
         I began throwing anything at the door that I could get my hands upon.  I screamed out at them in my anger and frustration.  I cursed them, and swore at them, all the while feeling the dreaded helplessness of a man who is completely denied of hope.
         It was during this ineffectual catharsis that I heard what sounded like a human voice inside the room with me.  I stopped and listened.
         “Hey, boy, have you gone plum loco?” the voice said in all earnestness.
         It was an old man’s voice.  I looked about the dimly lit room with wide, terrified eyes.  Either the ghost of Dan’s grandfather was haunting me or else I had finally gone irreparably insane.  I determined it to be the latter, rather than the former.
         “Hey, boy, up here I am” the voice said again.
         Obediently, I looked upward in the direction of the voice.  An old man in a cowboy hat was kneeling on the ground outside, peering into the broken window. 
         “What in blue blazes are you boys up to in there?” he asked, poking his head inside the glassless window.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Smithers.  I live up on the ridge up yonder.  Young Dan asked me to keep an eye on this place for him this weekend.  He said some body’s gonna be workin’ here.  I heard glass breakin’ and shoutin’ and I came a runnin’ quick as I could!  Are you okay, young feller?  Where’s Dan?”
“D-D-Dan’s dead” I stammered, wiping tears from my cheek, “He was in wreck this morning…on his way over here”
“Have mercy!” the old man intoned, turning slightly pale.
“Please let me out” I begged, sounding quite pitiful, “I can explain everything”
“Hold on, I’ll be right there!”
The old man’s head and shoulders shot back out the open window.  I soon heard the jingle of keys in the front door of the house.  I would soon be released back into the world of sanity.
I just then remembered Dan saying something about having “fail-safes” in place in the event of an emergency.  Yes, Dan had certainly taken care of his agreeable prisoner.

The End