eighty-two : vera jones
Vera wasn’t fooling anyone. Not that there were many people left to fool. She pretended that nothing had ever happened, but even senile old Marty Gale in the room down the hall could tell she was hiding something.
In her younger years, she had considered telling someone. But she hadn’t known what to tell. Any way she looked at it, the whole story sounded crazy. If she had just said it, blurted out I was kidnapped, the first thing anyone that knew her would say was when?
She could remember the day clearly. It had been June 14th, 1952, three days after her 21st birthday, and she had spent the afternoon at the library. On her way home, she had felt a wave of dizziness, then nausea, and rushed into the trees on the side of the road to be sick. But she never was. As soon as she was out of sight of the road, something dark and heavy washed over her, and the next thing she knew she was laying on a cold concrete floor in a musty room. At first, the dark thing came to the room every day. Each time, it took something from her. Some piece of her mind. She could feel herself getting further away with every day that passed. She kept track of the days as they went by tearing pages out of the library book in her backpack. Birds of Australia. After five weeks she could barely think straight. The dark thing began to leave her alone for days at a time. She was up to the Dusky Moorhen, Gallinula tenebrosa, on the day she saw a way out. The tiny window on the wall was far too small, but directly beneath the bricks were crumbling. She waited days for the dark thing to come again before she started digging out the grout from between them. It took her nearly a week of scraping and digging and prying the bricks from their places, then dug through the dirt on the other side. Altogether, fourteen weeks had passed. She ran through the trees, out into the road she had disappeared from, and up the gravel driveway of her home. When her mother opened the door, all she said was “What on earth have you done to your blouse?”
Because when she got out of that dark cellar and scrambled through the scrub to safety, it had been the same time as when she went in.
Since then, her family noticed a quietness in her that had never been present before. She retreated back into herself, and thats where she stayed until a cool June afternoon 57 years later, when sitting in her easy chair at the care home where she lived, a heavy dark thing washed over her, and she found herself, once more, trapped in another time.
