Chapter 6
Anything You Want
I remember everything. Suddenly, after seeing the hole in the wall, it all comes back to me.
I remember that I helped Shanna off the fire-escape ladder and that we left our neighborhood to search for 779 Sterling Place.
I remember arriving to find nothing but an iron fence, and I remember easing the gate open while Shanna begged me to leave and go home.
I remember that just as I stepped into the empty lot a voice, filled with hope, whispered: "Is that you? Did you really come? . . . There's something I really needed to tell you."
And then I remember realizing the voice was coming from the dark hole in the wall, and I remember kneeling beside the hole, and I remember how hopeful I was that the voice was Damon's, even as my sister implored me to step away.
Then I remember a hand reaching out through the hole.
And I remember realizing that it most certainly was not Damon's hand. It was pale and thin, but strong. It grabbed me by the shirt collar, and in one quick, rough tug, it pulled my body head-first into the hole in the wall.
I fell onto a concrete surface.
I had no idea where I was. It was too dark to know even whether I was indoors or out. I felt only a strange object, hard and plastic, about the size of the tip of a pen, thrust up my nose. Then, from it, a spray of foamy fluid invaded my sinuses.
After that, all of my terror just faded away.
I lay there in the dark, breathing calmly, strangely at peace with some unknown man's arm locked around my neck.
Looking back on this moment now, I realize that the fluid he sprayed up my nose must have been the ketamine that was later found in my blood.
But at the time, the drug's affects immediately eradicated all fear from my consciousness. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that I was in some kind of abandoned basement. There were shelves filled with tools and greasy auto parts, covered in dust. In the corner was a twin-sized mattress with a filthy sleeping bag bunched into a heap. Atop a milk crate nearby burned a single candle, and beside the candle lay a pair of bolt cutters. A cockroach skittered over my palm and darted beneath a deflated car tire. Normally I would have screamed in abject terror. But with the ketamine soaking into my sinuses, I may as well have been lying in a field of wildflowers. I was in a blissfully numb state of indifference. If someone had held a gun to my head and swore that they were going to pull the trigger, I would have just smiled and been like okay . . . whatever.
Then, my sister tumbled into the basement.
