Crawlspace

  ***

  Time passed. Tom didn’t know how much. He’d been trapped in the crawlspace for days, weeks – maybe even months; he didn’t know or care anymore. Tom no longer had a sense of time, of day or night.

  Everything was night now. Everything was cold.

  He had kicked at floorboards, pulled at pipes, pried at foundation stones, but to no avail.

  He had survived as best he could. He had moved the water bottles nearer to the light bulb in the center of the crawlspace, had pulled the plastic sheeting there as well. He had formed a makeshift shelter around the light, to capture its warmth in a bubble of plastic.

  He had tried to dry his sopping clothes, but there was never enough heat to make a difference. They sat in a soggy pile, unworn, forgotten. He had ventured from his shelter from time to time to revisit his useless attempts to escape, to sit nude and freezing by the crawlspace door and call for help until the cold drove him back to the warmth of his shelter by the light bulb.

  That had been back in the good old days here in the crawlspace, back when he had still had light and warmth, before he had accidently broken the solitary incandescent bulb.

  Since the light bulb had gone, there had been nothing but dark and cold and silence.

  Tom lay on his back in the dark, nude and wrapped up in plastic in the spot under the house where the dirt was the driest. The clearance there was only fifteen inches, but Tom didn’t mind. He’d rather lie flat on his back pinned under the beams in dry dirt than to be in the cold mud with more room.

  Things were better that way, he would probably have told you; but Tom didn’t talk anymore. He’d been quiet for a very long time.

  Tom’s plastic cocoon was surrounded by a strange variety of objects, tossed about him in no particular order, stuff he had pried from underneath the house a long time ago, back when he still believed escape from the crawlspace was possible.

  One of the objects was a three-foot length of pipe he had managed to detach from the plumbing, flooding half of the crawlspace in the process. In a pile of stuff next to his feet was quite a bit of insulated wire of various lengths; he’d once had an idea for how to use it, but had since forgotten and the project had been abandoned.

  Further off to his right side were a dozen or so water bottles filled with stale urine, neatly lined up along the edge of the crawlspace wall. A few more bottles, slightly fresher, were carelessly littered here and there around him.

  In the corner of the crawlspace, near the spot where Miranda’s undisturbed corpse once lay, was a small, smooth circular indentation in the dirt. It was the remnant of a puddle of tears, long since dried. There was another indentation in the dirt near Tom’s waist - a puddle of urine, still quite full and wet.

  Situated about thirty feet from where Tom reclined motionless in the dull, dreary and otherwise unremarkable crawlspace was a large and rather comprehensive collection of human bones.

  Tom had discovered that dark, cold and silence weren’t the unholy trinity; they were the first three horsemen of his own personal apocalypse. He had realized this when the fourth and most fearsome horseman arrived: hunger.

  Tom had fought valiantly to resist this strongest temptation of the flesh, but had lost the fight in the end.

  The larger bones in the collection had been picked mostly clean of flesh, and were still attached to the festering, open carcass of a nude young woman, sprawled out in the mud up against the crawlspace wall.

  The cold had provided plenty of refrigeration for Miranda’s tender young flesh. Tom had gnawed her thighs, calves, and biceps down to the bone; only her face and the furry parts between her legs remained entirely unmolested.

  “Enjoy your fresh young meat,” Kelly had written on the back of Miranda’s photo, and Tom had done exactly that. He had been devastated to find her body here at first, but eventually discovered that Miranda was a companion with truly exquisite taste.