Chapter 41
Adriana looked around the room. Books, cans, bottles, newspapers, garbage, cups, cardboard boxes, clothes, cartons of dried noodles, and cereal boxes were scattered everywhere. The sharp smell of urine—from her earlier accident—mingled with scents of bitter paint and rotting garbage. But there was something different now.
It was not the same room that it was ten minutes ago.
The hairs on her arms stood straight up. Her scalp felt loose and her neck tingled. Something was with her, watching, waiting.
“Hello?” she barely whispered.
Why hadn’t Cindy followed Adriana? It sure looked like she wanted to a minute ago.
Where was she? Was she afraid of something in this room? Did she know something Adriana didn’t? Maybe something escaped from the box. Maybe it was here now and dangerous.
She felt something behind her and quickly twisted around.
Nothing was there but the fortress of stuff covering the ornamental wooden box.
No creature could escape it through the plastic wrap and prison the adults had built. Could it? The adults seemed confident enough.
She had to help Cindy. If she found the box and it was empty, then she could assume something already escaped. She would have wasted time, but at least she would know for sure.
She knew she couldn’t abandon her friend. Adriana wasn’t like that. She would never do what her mother did. She didn’t abandon people.
She continued to pull cartons, books, cans, and bottles out of the prison walls, but much more quietly now, wanting to hear anything sneaking up behind her. With trembling arms, she moved jars of jelly and peanut butter. The contents of little box—if they were still inside—had the power to snap Cindy out of her trance. And she was sinking deeper under the influence of her awful parents.
But what if she was already beyond saving? Or if nothing was inside the box, how would Adriana save herself? Cindy would scream to her parents, and then Adriana would be tied back to the pole.
But she couldn’t, just couldn’t, leave her friend in need. She would never do that, even if that friend would turn on her.
Adriana started to cry.
She would have died if no one had saved her after her father chopped off her leg. Luckily, a neighbor heard her screams and called the police. They broke down the front door and saw blood everywhere—Adriana had been crawling around the house, pleading with and begging her father to take her to the hospital. The police searched the house and found her unconscious in her bedroom, where she lay in a pool of blood on the floor.
Just sitting by and letting evil have its way was wrong. It was simply wrong. If Adriana had learned anything in life, it was that. You had to fight. Just sitting by was bad because it allowed bad things to continue. More people would be hurt. Evil would keep winning. It would keep getting rewarded.
Adriana didn’t have any siblings, but if she did, she would have never wanted them to go through what she had.
She would not let her friend down.
She worked faster, feeling more desperate. The hairs prickling on the back of her neck were driving her insane. She kept seeing shadows floating by just out of sight, but when she turned her head, only the ugly gray walls stared back.
Did that moth come into this room? Was it flittering around by the ceiling light? She looked for it, but it wasn’t up there.
Feeling something fluttering beside her, she whipped her head back. Nothing. She looked back to the beanbag and door. Nothing. Her heart pumped so hard that with each beat, the arteries in her neck felt like thick ropes.
She couldn’t get rid of the cold feeling crawling her spine, so she just kept working, pulling cans of peas and bottles of Coke from the pile, pulling another layer of plastic wrap from the next wall of stacked items.
Why did Mary use plastic wrap? What did she think was in that wooden box?
Adriana heard a bang and crash behind her and jumped forward into a stack of cans, spilling them. A dark shadow moved away as she turned. Two bottles of Coke had fallen to the floor, and brown bubbles fizzled out from underneath the cap of one.
Something was after Adriana.
She could feel it as sure as a mouse stalked by a cat. It was in this room. She didn’t know how, but it was.
As she began pulling items out and piling them behind her again, she felt weak in the knee.
She found herself missing her friend, even if the girl was a bit crazed right now.
Close to the bathroom door, picking up cartons of macaroni and cheese and cans of refried beans, she worked faster. Coming to three layers of plastic wrap, having difficulty tearing them, and ...
There it was.
On the floor, wedged against the wall, wrapped tightly in a dark green garbage bag, was the box. She ripped open the bag and found the box mummified in more plastic wrap. Nothing could have escaped that. Right? She spent a good two minutes wrestling with the layers of wrapping, finally tearing away the last layer.
She felt the smoothly carved surfaces. It felt good on her fingers. The small inscription on the top read: Inside Out.
Looking behind her at the mounds of stuff she had discarded, she wondered how on earth she was going to get out of here. She would have to make a little path through the litter of cans, bottles, cartons, magazines, and books.
She set the box down beside her foot and began working on clearing a path.
Thunder shook the mobile home.
The ceiling light began to flicker. When it blinked off, shadows ran from the corners of the room eating up all the light. When it flashed on, they scampered back underneath chairs and into corners. It was quite frightful.
Adriana had enough of this room.
Crawling ahead, throwing aside several pots and pushing over a stack of National Geographic magazines, she forced a passage to the door. At that point, the light clicked off again. She waited there in the dark for a few moments. It wasn’t clicking back on.
Turn on!
She could hear herself breathing faster.
Great, Adriana thought, stuck here in the dark, not sure where the box is, and God knows what else is here with me.
Feeling her way on the floor, extending her fingers for the touch of that smooth wood, she crawled. She felt her knee dip into cold, fizzling Coke. This reminded her how thirsty she was. She swallowed several times, trying to wet her dry throat, and promised herself she would get a drink as soon as she could.
Something whispered to her left, to her right, then behind her.
Adriana trembled and began to sweat. She continued to crawl forward, still feeling for the box.
“Adriana,” they whispered.
Turn on lights! Click on!
Shuddering so violently, her hand slipped on a can and she smacked her head against the floor.
“We sssee you … Adriana. Come with usss.”
Click on! Then she thought that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to be able to see the owners of these voices.
She wasn’t even aware she passed the box until she kicked it with her bare foot. Spinning around, sitting on her leg, reaching for the box, finding bottles and cans instead, throwing them aside, she finally touched the smooth yet textured wooden surface.
“Come with usss. Join usss … Adriana. Come with usss.”
Adriana huddled there, holding the wooden cube close to her stomach, terrified of moving and accidentally running into one of the voices.
She put her thumb in one ear and bent the other side of her head into her shoulder, covering her other ear, but she could still hear them. Her body shook so badly she worried the cube might slip from her grasp.