A few strides took him across the cabin and to the doors that I assumed led onto the bedrooms and bathroom. He opened each one in turn, checked inside, and shut them again. The final one opened onto a large store cupboard.
“This will do.”
“For what?”
He didn’t reply but approached me with an expression I didn’t like across his handsome face. My legs still weren’t bound, so I staggered backwards, though I wasn’t sure where I thought I could go. My hands were still tied, and he’d locked the door. It wasn’t as though there was anywhere I could run. I eyed the picture window which had a view onto the lake. What kind of glass was it made from? Would it be reinforced? I had images of sprinting towards it and throwing myself at the glass. I might go through it and get badly cut, or I might just rebound, concussed and possibly with a fractured skull.
I didn’t risk it. Instead, I skirted around the sofa so the piece of furniture was between us.
“Really?” He arched an eyebrow. “You’re going to make me catch you?”
“I’m not going to just let you throw me in a cupboard!”
“Aren’t you worried I might enjoy the chase?”
There was a dark glint to his eye. A ripple of fear went through me. I should be scared, I knew that, and I was. But a life growing up around men like him had also tamped down my fear of them. I imagined it was like those wild children who grew up with wolves. While the rest of us would be terrified of the wolves, the child knew and understood them.
I darted one way, and he followed, and then I went the other. He matched each of my movements, and the glint in his eye deepened. He threw himself over the back of the sofa, rugby tackling me around the waist and throwing me to the floor. He landed on top of me, his weight crushing me, and I wished I hadn’t tried to avoid him. My body must be covered in bruises, and I’d just added a couple more.
He remained on top of me, his long body pressing into mine. I tried not to focus on the part he ground against me, and I twisted my face away.
He laughed and got up, then grabbed me by the upper arm and yanked me back to my feet again. “Enough messing around. I’m hungry.”
He dragged me towards the cupboard. I dug my bare heels into the floor and pulled back on him, but he was far stronger than me. The thought of ending up in there filled me with fear.
“No, no, please. I don’t want to go in there. I’m...” I struggled to think of the English word for it. “I don’t like small spaces.”
“Claustrophobic?” he said. “You’re claustrophobic?”
I nodded. I assumed that was the right word. It sounded familiar.
“Good.”
He threw me forward, and I stumbled in. The door slammed shut behind me. I heard a scraping sound, and a shadow darkened the gap beneath the door. Had he jammed something under the doorhandle to keep me in? My hands were tied, so it wasn’t as though I could open it easily anyway, but I guessed he thought I might get free and so took extra precautions to keep me in.
My breath sounded too loud, my pulse thudding in my eardrums. Other than the slat of light beneath the door, I was surrounded by darkness. The walls seemed to press closer, the ceiling sinking down to meet the floor. I couldn’t catch the air in my lungs, and my heart knocked against the inside of my rib cage. I dropped to my knees to bring myself closer to that thin line of light, picturing myself turning to a liquid or gas and sliding right out under the door and into the open space of the cabin beyond. I was so caught up in myself that I didn’t even know if he was still out there or if he had left already. Had the vehicle’s engine started? I wasn’t sure I even cared.
“Please,” I begged, “please, let me out.”
Memories filled up the dark spaces around me. I pictured myself at seven years old, running around my father’s compound, calling out my four-year-old brother’s name;Arri! Arri!
I remembered how the panic had built as each minute had passed and I still hadn’t been able to find him.
I’d blamed myself for so long, even though I’d only been a child. I’d felt much older at the time and believed I was the ‘big girl’ everyone kept telling me I was. Arri had seemed so much younger.
It had been a harmless game, or so I’d thought. A simple game of hide and seek to keep us entertained. It had been his turn to hide, and so I covered my eyes and counted to fifty as best I could. After I’d counted, I checked all the usual spaces he liked to hide—he wasn’t very imaginative about it and often picked the same places. I teased him about it, rolling my eyes and telling him how crap he was at this game. It was something I beat myself up over for a long time after, wondering if only I hadn’t teased him, maybe he wouldn’t have chosen somewhere like that.
When I hadn’t been able to find him, I was confused at first and then annoyed. How had he beaten me? I’d given up and shouted it to him ‘come out now, you win, I give up.’ But still, he didn’t materialise. My anger morphed to worry. Selfishly, I was nervous about what our father’s reaction was going to be when I had to go to him and tell him that I couldn’t find Arri. It meant interrupting him, and he hated that. I delayed going—something else I tortured myself with after. If only I’d gone to him sooner and explained I couldn’t find my brother, maybe we’d have found him quicker and then it wouldn’t have been too late? It was impossible to know that, of course, but that didn’t stop my brain turning it over and over.
As I’d anticipated, my father had been angry at me for interrupting him for what he took to only be kids messing around. He’d told me to go away, and I almost had, but my concern for my brother at that point was greater than my fear of him. I’d burst into tears and insisted he come. He’d shaken his head at me and let out an irritated sigh, but he’d relented. He’d asked me where I’d last seen my brother, and I told him, but said he could be anywhere, that we’d been playing hide and seek.
Our father walked around, shouting my brother’s name, telling him to come out, but there was no sign. Now I could tell he was worried as well, and he called in a couple of his men to help with the search. My father told me to stay near, but I was frantic, and he was distracted.
I went to the dilapidated barn used for storing old machinery. Anything that had stopped working over the years had ended up in here. I didn’t know what half of it was. I’d already been in here when I’d first started looking for Arri, but something had pulled me back. It was like there had been a magnet drawing me in. My gaze had fixed upon something near the back, an item I hadn’t noticed before. It was a large chest freezer, one used for storing venison after a deer had been shot but had stopped working a while ago and been left.
I’d known. I don’t know how, but I did. It was as though someone had whispered it into my ear—your brother is in there. I remember screaming for my dad to come. I pointed at the freezer, my hand shaking, and said, ‘Arri is in there.’
He paused for a moment and stared at me as though he was trying to figure out if I was joking or not, and then he broke into a run and crossed the barn in a few long strides. The catch had fallen down and caught, keeping the lid shut, so he had to flick it back up to open the freezer.