"The boy," I said. "There was a boy."
I jumped out of the bed and went into my closet. I pulled out a big flashlight. I put on a bathrobe and started walking downstairs.
I had found the key. How had I found the key? The way most curious four-year-olds find almost anything, especially when they know they're not allowed to.
I remembered how the key had felt in my hand as a child and walked to the hallway downstairs. I found the old armoire and pulled out the drawer. I gasped. It was still there. Reaching in I grabbed it in my hand. My heart was pounding as I looked at it in the light of the flashlight.
How did I know? How did I know what it was for?
I remembered how I had tried it on all kinds of locks in the house. The strange house I was visiting with my dad. I remembered how it made him grumpy just to be here. I never understood why.
I found the hatch first, then I tried the key on it. I didn't know it would fit. I was playing explorer and wanted to see what was down there. Oh my god. I tripped over the hatch just like Victor did and then I decided to try the key to see if it would fit.
I walked through the living room out into the yard. The trees looked big and creepy in the darkness. The sun hadn't risen yet, but it wasn't going to be long. I walked with determined steps in between the trees still with the many pictures of this boy with the spider on his face before my eyes.
I found the hatch and wiped away leaves to find the lock. It was rusty and old. I put the key in and turned. It opened. The door was heavy, so I had to use both hands to pull it open. A couple of stairs appeared and at the end of them was another iron door with a lock. I walked down and put the key in just like I had done back then. It opened immediately. I pulled the door open and peeked in. In a quick glimpse I thought I saw the boy again, standing in the opening with his pale face, glaring at me like I was the strangest thing he had ever seen.
I sniffled and breathed heavily. I didn't understand. What was that boy doing down there? Why was he in this old bunker all by himself? And why was the door locked?
I didn't like to think about it. I lifted up the flashlight and let its light fall inside of the bunker. Two beds, nicely made, lots of empty shelves, blankets, pillows, books and old magazines on some of them. I lit up the walls and gasped. They were plastered in drawings. Time had turned the paper brown and dirty. I stepped inside and lit them all up with my flashlight. Hundreds of drawings made by a child. Drawings of a little boy and his mother sailing on a boat, drawings of a little boy and his mother on top of a mountain. I stared at all the many drawings wondering who made them and why they were in here?
A spider climbed up the wall and startled me. I stared at it for a long time. I felt tears roll across my cheeks and wiped them away. What was all this? I didn't understand. I didn't want to understand.
45
1985
Old Mrs. Frost read about the boy in the paper. Someone had found him on the ferry headed towards the mainland. How he had managed to sneak on board nobody knew and now they didn't know where he came from, where he belonged to and they asked people for help. A big picture covered the front page, but Mrs. Frost didn't need any picture to recognize him. She sighed and looked out the window into the yard where the boy and his mother had lived for so long.
After coming back from the hospital with a new hip, Mrs. Frost had walked down to the bunker at the end of the yard on her crutches. She could tell the door was open from afar and knew it was bad. The bunker turned out to be empty. The boy was gone. With much difficulty she climbed inside.
Damn those old bones that she should fall and break her hip right then when they needed new supplies. Mrs. Frost had cursed every day she needed to stay at the hospital, and to be frank she thought she would come back only to find both of them had starved to death. But somehow the boy had survived.
She walked down the many stairs and walked inside groaning and moaning and there, inside on one of the beds was her answer to how the boy had managed to stay alive.
She walked closer, humping on her crutches trying to have as little weight on her new hips as possible. The stench from the dead body was horrendous. Mrs. Frost found a handkerchief in her pocket and held it in front of her nose as she examined the body and especially the lower parts of it.
Half of the meat on one side of her stomach was missing and so was most on the right side of her leg. Now it was covered in flies and ants. Mrs. Frost shook her head in disbelief. As she walked back to the house, humping on her crutches she mumbled under her breath.
"You little bastard. You ate her, didn't you? You ate your own mother to survive."
Now she was staring at his picture in the paper and she got the feeling he was somehow staring back at her. The article stated that he hadn't spoken a word so far, so they didn't even know if he was Danish or maybe a German tourist who had somehow gotten away from his parents.
"So you've decided to keep quiet, huh?" she said to the picture. "Well you're smart, my boy. Very smart."
Mrs. Frost picked up the phone on the end table next to the chair she was sitting in and dialed a number.
"Mrs. Heinrichsen. Have you seen the paper? No. No. I don't think he will pose any problem for us. After all he is just a young boy. What can he do? Yes. I'll make sure to notify the pastor as well. Do you think we need to speak to Irene Justesen as well, tell her he is on the loose? No, no. You're right. She doesn't need to know. She is busy with all that fitness mumbo-jumbo. She is no longer one of us. We risk she'll try and find him or something and then it will all blow up in our faces. I believe in keeping a low profile. He won't say anything if we don't, I'm sure. Goodnight Mrs. Heinrichsen and God bless."
Mrs. Frost hung up the phone suddenly feeling uncomfortable in her own living room with all those big black windows. She got up and leaned on her crutches. She pulled the curtains to cover all the windows to stop the eerie feeling of someone watching her from the outside. As she grabbed one of the curtains a spider jumped right at her face and landed in her hair. Mrs. Frost screamed and let go of her crutches with the result she fell to the ground with a loud crash and hurt her leg.
Lying on the floor she moaned for someone to please help her, please help an old lady. But there was no one but her and the spider left in the big old house.
46
2012
I ran into my dad's bedroom and woke him up.
"What's going on, sweetie? Is it something with Sophia? Is she not feeling well?"
"No. No. It's not her." I was gasping for air after having stormed across the yard, up the stairs and into his room.
"Is it one of the kids?"
I shook my head. "No. No. That's not it either." I felt my eyes tearing up and couldn't hold it back any longer. My dad saw it and wiped a tear away with his thumb.
"What's the matter then honey?"
"Do you remember when we came to visit Grandma when she was at the hospital when I was only four years old?"
My dad rubbed his eyes. "Vaguely, why?"
"Do you remember I was in the yard when you called for me, when Grandma came back and we all ended up yelling at each other?"
"No. I do remember her yelling at you, though. That's when I decided we had to leave again. We had been staying at the house for several days, cleaning and making sure it was ready for her when she got back. I remember I was angry that she wasn't the least bit grateful for what we had done. We left right away and that was actually the last time I saw her alive."
"There was a boy," I said and tried to press down the tears. "Do you remember I told you there was a boy? Right before Grandma came home."
"You have a very detailed memory of that day all of a sudden, don't you? No I don't remember that there was a boy or that you said that."
"I dreamt about it. I thought it was just a dream, but it wasn't. It was real. There is a hatch that leads to a hole, a room underground in the yard."
"The old bunker, yes."
"Have you ever been down there?"
"No. My mom kept it locked up. But I do know that she kept it ready in case a war broke out again. She did grow up during World War II you know. Always afraid it was going to happen again. She never forgave the Germans."
"There was a boy inside the shelter that day. I found the key by coincidence a couple of days before and then I tripped over the hatch and found it was locked. I went back to get the key and it fit. When I unlocked it and opened it there he was. Looking back at me. What was he doing down there, Dad?"
My dad shook his head. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you sure you're alright, dear? Maybe you just had a very lively dream or something? Do you have a fever?"
"I'm not sick, Dad. I'm not sleeping either. I'm very much awake. I don't think I've ever been this awake before in my life. I need to know what that boy was doing down there, Dad. Why was he locked inside of the bunker in the ground?" I was almost yelling now and my dad looked at me, frightened.
"What's going on here?" he asked. "I don't understand anything of what you're saying."
I sighed and turned away. "Neither do I. But I have a bad feeling about this Dad. I went down there again. I went into the bunker."
"Now? At this time at night?"
"It's six in the morning. It's hardly night anymore. The kids will be waking up soon anyway. And yes, I went back into the bunker. I found the key in the same place and went in there. And guess what I found?"
My dad sighed and rubbed his face. "I don't know? Another little boy?"
"Drawings, dad. The walls are plastered with drawings, made by a child. Old drawings like they were made a long time ago."
"I really don't know what to say to all this," my dad said and leaned back on his pillow.
"Do you think your mother kept the boy down there for some reason? Do you think she had locked him down there?"
"No," he chuckled. "My mother was many things, among them bad tempered and controlling, but I refuse to believe she could be that cruel."
47
2012
The man was looking down the pot and inhaled the wonderful scent coming from it. He added some more bouillon and rosemary. It had been cooking since seven this morning, but that's the way he preferred it. Letting it simmer for hours and hours softened the meat and made it very tasty.
He was planning an early dinner for himself since he was going to have a busy night. The heart was what needed the longest cooking so he had put that in first. Now he found his knife and threw a big lump of meat up on the table. He started cutting out the lungs into smaller edible pieces before he put them into the pot as well. Lastly it was the liver. He took it out of the refrigerator and threw it on the table that was covered in blood from all the chopping and preparing. He lifted his knife up high and closed his eyes as the blade went through the meat and produced the most intoxicating sound to him. He cut it into slices that all ended in the pot along with the rest of the meat. Then some thyme and more rosemary. Now all it needed was time.
"A good nice meal strong on proteins," he said and put the lid back on. Then he turned the heat down.
It was a little after lunch but he still felt he deserved a glass of red wine, so he opened a bottle, poured some in the pot and drank some of it from the bottle.
"It's five o'clock somewhere," he said to himself looking at his reflection in the mirror on his wall. His skin was still pale and never did cope with much sunlight. Even after all these years. You could still see all of his blood veins through the skin. It didn't matter. Made him kind of special, he thought. Unique. And he was one of a kind. He knew that much.
They had given him a new name. After finding him on the ferry, the police and social workers had tried everything to make him speak. But after weeks of silence and no one turning up to claim him, they didn't know what to do with him. So they sent him to an orphanage where he was given a new name. For years he still didn't speak, not until he was much older and by then they had stopped asking questions.
But he never forgot the name his mother had given him in the bunker where he was born and when he was alone he sometimes called himself his real name.
"Sebastian." He said out loud watching himself while he said it. "Sebastian."
He had liked that name, but he had never liked that boy that he used to be. He was buried in the bunker along with his mother. With the new name came a new life. Sebastian got an education and once done with high school he got to finally see the world. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant where he picked up a lot of his cooking skills, then saved a lot of money and finally travelled around the world with nothing but his backpack. Sebastian enjoyed the great plains. He climbed mountains, slept under the endless starry sky, surfed waves in the ocean and all the time he thought about how much his mother would have loved this. How she would have liked to be there with him under the open sky with no walls to keep her.
Once he came back he started planning her revenge. He wanted those people that had done those bad things to his mother to suffer. He moved back to the island and began a new life for himself, got close to the people and it didn't take him long to know exactly who he needed to punish. Who had been behind it all. He knew about Mrs. Frost, that she had locked his mother in there while she was pregnant because she didn't want her son to have to marry her, because it was a scandal that she had gotten pregnant outside of marriage, when she was only sixteen, and on top of that, the girl wasn't very bright and especially not suitable for her only son, heir to her fortune. He knew all about that even before he came back. His mom had told him those things while they were still down there. She had told him the truth. The rest he figured out on his own. He came close to them, they trusted him and now ... now there was only the last one left.
"Always save the best for last," he said as he found his set of knives and started sharpening them. "Mother always said. Save the best for last."
48
2012
My dad and I went to check on Sophia right after breakfast. Maya promised to look after all the kids while we were gone.
"Are you sure you can do that?" I asked and looked at my beautiful daughter whose strength in this time of crisis had impressed me. "Five kids ... and Victor. It's a lot of hard work."
"Of course I can," she said and kneeled in front of Sophia's youngest who was sitting on the floor with two wooden spoons and a pot that Maya had taken from the kitchen and now he was playing it like it was a drum. I smiled and blew her a kiss. I think I was the proudest mother in the world at that instant. Seeing my daughter stand up like this had touched my heart.
"We'll be right back. Victor told me he'll stay in his room. I think all these kids kind of get to him, but he'll be fine as long as he stays up there."
I followed my dad across the street and into Sophia's house where he went into the bedroom alone first. I heard him talk to her and then she answered. She sounded more like herself than she had done the day before. It was a relief.
I waited for ten minutes or so until my dad came out of the room.
"How is she?" I asked.
"Better. Definitely improving. But she needs her rest. She should stay in bed for at least a couple of days more. At least," my dad said.
"I'll make sure the kids stay at our place till she is ready. Can I see her?"
"Sure. She was just asking for you. Go right in. I'll head back to assist Maya with all the munchkins before they eat her alive."
I chuckled and watched my dad's face. He looked like he was enjoying this.
"See you over there in a bit, then." I said and knocked on the door to Sophia's bedroom.
"Come in," Sophia said.
I opened the door and went in. Her face was still unrecognizable and all of a sudden I felt really glad that her kids were at my house and that they didn't have to see their mother like this.
"How are my kids? They are not too much trouble, are they?"
I shook my head and grabbed a chair. I pulled it close to her bed and sat down. "No they have been very sweet.
Maya is playing with them now and my dad just went back there to help her out."
"And you're fine with it? I mean it kind of ruins your dad's visit and all."
"Stop worrying about stuff like that. I don't mind having them. You have to focus on getting well. The kids love our place and we love having them there."
Sophia tried to smile, but it was too hard. I grabbed her hand and held it in mine. Tears kept pressing on but I withheld them. "So how are you feeling today?"
A tear escaped from her swollen eyes. "Why would he do this to me? I don't understand."
I held her hand tighter in mine and stroke it on top. "I don't know Sophia."
"I keep thinking if I only ..."
I interrupted her. "No! Don't you even think that, Sophia. This guy is a maniac. He's a psychopath and you really should report him before he does this to anyone else. I think he is a very sick man if you ask me."
"You think he might have done this before?" Sophia asked.
"Of course he has. He is a sick man, Sophia. He needs to be stopped. Let me talk to the police, let me tell them what happened, let them take him in for questioning. All you have to do is tell your story when they come to take your statement. I'll help you with the rest. I believe you're not only helping yourself but all the other women he might run into in the future. A man like this needs to be locked up."
Sophia sniffled. I found a tissue and wiped her running nose. "Okay," she said. "You talk to them and report what he has done. But promise me one thing."
I smiled and wiped her nose again. "Anything"
"Tell Officer Dan Toft. Let him handle everything. I trust him."
I nodded eagerly. "Of course. I'll make sure to talk to him."
49
2012
When I stepped out of Sophia's house heavy grey clouds had gathered in the sky making it almost pitch dark. I started walking when suddenly I heard my name being called.