Chapter 24 Chapter Twenty-Three

Catherine Baker-Martin lay seventeen feet below the basement floor.In the dark, her breathing and heartbeat were loud.Sometimes fear weighed on her chest, like a trapper killing a fox.Sometimes her brain can still think: she knows that she has been kidnapped, but she doesn't know who the kidnapper is.She knew she wasn't dreaming; in the absolute darkness, she could hear even the tiniest sound of blinking. She was better now than when she first regained consciousness.The terrible dizziness is basically gone, and I know that there is enough air, I can distinguish up and down, and I can roughly figure out where my body is.

On the side lying close to the concrete floor, the shoulders, buttocks, and knees all felt pain, and this side was the lower side.On it was the rough futon under which she had crawled during the dizzying light break before, and the "chugging" pain in her head had subsided by now, and the real pain had subsided. Only the fingers of the left hand.She knew that her ring finger was broken. She was wearing a patchwork paratroop suit that seemed strange to her.Clothes were clean and smelled of fabric softener.The ground was also very clean, except for the chicken bones and a little vegetable scraped from the hole by the person who captured her.The only other things were the futon and a plastic sanitary bucket; a string was attached to the handle of the bucket, which felt like the kind of cotton string used in the kitchen, extending upwards in the dark, all the way to the bottom of the bucket. out of her reach.

Catherine Martin was free to move about, but had nowhere to go.The ground she is lying on is oval, about 8x10 feet in size, with a small drainage hole in the middle.This is the bottom of a covered pit.The surrounding bare concrete walls stretch upwards, forming a gentle inward slope. There was a sound from above at this moment, or was her heart beating?It's the sound above.The voice came to her ears clearly from the top of her head.The underground dungeon containing her is located in the basement directly under the kitchen.Now there were footsteps on the kitchen floor, the sound of running water, and the scratching of dogs' paws on the linoleum.Then there was nothing, until the lights in the basement came on, and a faint yellow light appeared on the open cake top.Then, a blinding light came into the pit, and this time she sat up and let the light shine, with the futon on her lap, and after her eyes adjusted to the light, she tried to peek through the cracks in her fingers, determined to look around. .A floodlight was put down in the pit, and the wires were hanging, dangling high above, and her figure also swayed around her.

She shrank back, and suddenly saw her sanitary toilet move, and was lifted up, hanging on the slender rope, swinging upward towards the lamp, slowly spinning while rising.She tried hard to swallow the fear, and pressed a large amount of air into her mouth, but she still managed to speak. "My family will pay for it," she said, "in cash. My mother will pay you now, no questions asked. It's her private—" Oh!A shadow floated down and fell on her, just a towel. "This is her personal phone number, the number is 202—" "Wash yourself." It was the same eerie voice she heard talking to the dog.

Another bucket was let down on a string.She smelled hot soapy water. "Take off your clothes and wash your whole body, or let the hose run down on you." His voice became weaker and weaker, and he could only hear him whispering to the dog, "Yes, this thing needs to be hosed down, right? Sweetheart? Yes, with a hose!" Catherine Martin heard footsteps and dog paws on the floor above the basement.The double image that had appeared before her eyes when the light was first turned on was now gone.She can read.How high is it to the top?Are the wires for hanging the floodlights strong?Can you use this paratrooper suit to go up?Hook something with a towel?Gotta do something damn it!The wall is so smooth, like a tunnel stretching upwards.

There was a crack in the concrete wall a foot from where she could reach it, the only blemish she could see.She rolled up the futon as tightly as she could and tied it with a towel.She stood on the futon and wobbled to reach the rip.She dug in with her fingernails to keep her balance, and then struggled to look up at the light above.The light was blinding, and she squinted to look into it.It was a floodlight with a shade, and it swung just a foot into the pit, and she stretched one hand up, about ten feet from it, and it would have been better if the moonlight had done it, and here he was, The futon was shaking, and in order to maintain her balance, she scratched at the crack in the wall, and finally jumped down.Something, flaky, brushed her face and fell.

Something coming down through the light is a water pipe.The cold is just a splash of water, which is a bad omen. "Wash yourself. Wash all over." There is a piece of bath in the bucket, and there is a plastic bottle floating in the water, which contains expensive foreign body lotion. She did so, with goosebumps on her arms and thighs, her hair aching, shrunken from the cold.She leaned as close to the wall as possible, squatted down next to the bucket of warm water and washed it. "Now dry off and put body lotion on top and bottom. All over." The body lotion was still warm from the bath water, so it was so damp after I applied it that the paratrooper uniform stuck to the skin.

"Now pick up your trash and wash it on the floor." That's what she did, gathering the chicken bones together and picking up the American peas.She put all these things into the bucket, and gently wiped off the oil stains on the cement.There's something else here against the wall.It turned out to be the piece that fell from the crack above.It was a piece of human fingernail, covered with shiny polish, snapped back from the base of the nail. The bucket was pulled up. "My mother will pay for it," Catherine-Martin said. "Ask you no questions. She'll give you enough money to make you all rich. If it's anything, whether it's Iran or Palestine, or Black Liberation, she'll pay for it too. All you have to do is—"

Lights went out.All of a sudden it was dark. When her hygienic toilet on a rope fell beside her, she flinched with a "woo--", she sat on the futon, her mind was churning rapidly.Now she believed that her kidnapper was single, American, and Caucasian.She tried to give him the impression that she didn't know who he was, what color he was, or how many people he was with; her memory of the parking lot was all gone because of the blow on the head.She hoped that he would trust himself and release her safely.Her mind was spinning, spinning, and finally, it turned out an excellent result:

That piece of nails shows that someone else once stayed here.A woman or girl has been here.Where is she now?What did he do to her? If she hadn't been overwhelmed with shock and bewilderment, it would not have taken her so long to think of this result.Even so, it still reminded her of the body lotion, skin!At this moment, she understood who was holding her back!This realization weighed on her like every human ghost on earth.She screamed, screamed, got under the futon, climbed up again, clawed at the wall with her fingers, screamed again, until something hot and salty came out of her mouth, and her hands fluttered. On his face, he wiped the sticky stuff on the back of his hands, lay down stiffly on the futon, and rolled to the ground with his body arched from head to toe, his hands grabbing tightly into his hair.