It was by lamplight that Michael Deal awoke. The first drab damn thing the college student sees is a table lamp without a nightshade, standing on the floor a few feet from where he’s sitting. The place (wherever he is) would be pitch darkness if not for the slight radiance from the bare light bulb. He’s confused about the area and begins to ruminate where he hopes not. In some weird abandoned piano factory, in one of those haunted New Orleans cemetery mausoleums, or in the torture dungeon of a mad king.
The crown of his brown-hair-covered head is pounding. There’s a lump or a bump up there that he wants to touch but can’t. His arms and wrists are tied behind his back. Both legs are bound to the chair support he’s uncomfortably resting on. The back and seat aren’t cushioned, and the feeling reminds him of those rickety kitchen table chairs from his Granddad’s house.
The last few things he remembers are being at the gym on Wednesday night. He flirted with the new hot brunette trainer, looking at his flexed arm muscles in the gym mirror, and his sports car keys jingled in his hands before leaving the gym. My kidnappers, whoever they are, must’ve grabbed me in the parking lot. I’m sure I didn’t come easily. Michael imagines fighting three men in ski masks in front of the gym. He visualizes knocking the first kidnapper out with a roundhouse kick to the head, then the second with a lunge punch to the chest, and then himself getting coldcocked by the third with a sucker punch to the back of his head. He thinks, hell yeah, to the kick and lunge punch! That’s, of course, how the kidnapping happened.
He’s strangely calm about this awful situation besides some aggression intervals trying to break free like an animal in a noose trap. “Hey, is anybody out there,” Michael screams, “I’m injured over here. Does anybody have some Tylenol? Some nice people smashed my head, and it feels broken.” He waits for what appears to be nothing. If anyone is around, they aren’t answering him. There’s only silence except for what he’s putting out. He chooses not to cry yet. “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall…” He decides to sing instead.
“…thirty-seven bottles of beer on the wall, 37 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around–” Michael stops the song after hearing a door open. Then he hears a clump of multiple footsteps coming toward him and halts beside the lamp. He sees two figures on both sides of the light dressed in black hooded robes and wearing Halloween animal masks on their heads. The one on his left is wearing a white alpaca mask, and the one on the right is wearing some sort of a demon duck mask. Looks like he’s about to meet his kidnappers, and he’s getting nervous.
The kidnapper in the alpaca mask pulls something from their robe. Michael’s heart begins to beat many hopes that it’s not a weapon for affliction. His view reveals that the “something” is just a smartphone. But should he be relieved? The kidnapper pushes the play button on the phone. He hears a robot’s voice ask, “Michael Deal, where were you on the night of December 21?”
“What! I don’t understand,” Michael gasps. The kidnapper plays the message again. Michael listens to what the robot voice says again. He understands enough that he needs to give them an answer. But Michael isn’t the most honest person. His answers are typically lies. Not the occasional white lie we tell to spare someone’s feelings but the bold-faced variety told to stay out of trouble. His untruth this time, “that was a few months back. I believe I watched the basketball game at the Hunters Lodge with the guys. Yeah, that’s right, because we lost to State by twenty points.” He sits there waiting to see if his masked abductors bought into the deception.
The kidnappers look at each other and then back at their prisoner. The kidnapper wearing the devil duck mask bends over and turns the table lamp off. This can’t be good. One of them shrieks “liar” into Michael’s right ear like a banshee screaming an omen of death in the night. He then feels a sharp slap come across his cheek. Smack! Which is followed by a backhand blow to his other cheek. Whoosh! His eardrum is pulsing in pain. His face is also really hurting now. He’s the opposite of calm now. This isn’t good. He didn’t order a stinging face with his already aching head.
He hears them stomping away and the door that the kidnappers used close. He’s now alone in the dark. “Thirty-seven bottles of beer on the wall, 37 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, 36 bottles of beer on the wall,” he weeps now.
####
It was by a bucket of ice-cold water that Michael Deal awakes. He suddenly comes alive from his deep sleep when two freezing splashes on the sides of his face. Then he pipes out, “As you wish!” unrestrained in real life, which would’ve been his following words from his Princess Bride Dream. From his recurring dream where he stars as the Dreaded Pirate Roberts.
Wet and irritated, he looks from his confinements and sees the kidnappers in front of him holding empty buckets, like the other times before they woke him up with chilly water. Maybe three times or maybe four times now. He quickly remembers he’s captive but still doesn’t know who they are or where he is. Michael wishes they would let him go back home or to Captain D’s for a fish sandwich, anywhere familiar. He wants to fall asleep in one of his Dreaded Pirate Roberts fantasies.
Michael is unfortunately familiar with how these interactions begin. The kidnapper in the alpaca mask plays the message, “Michael Deal, where were you on the night of December 21?” Then he repeats his untruth. He lied that he was watching a basketball game at the bar with his buddies. He’s too drained to lie again. The kidnappers broke him like a sheet of glass moving across the road in one of those comedy movie chase scenes. Maybe if he tells the truth, they’ll let him go. What’s the saying? The truth will set you free. And we know that Michael hasn’t been the most honest person. “Okay. I’ll tell you what you want to hear. I wasn’t watching the basketball game. The truth is I was cheating on my girlfriend with a classmate from microeconomics class,” he admits.
Finally, a breakthrough. “Did this classmate know you had a girlfriend?” the kidnapper with the devil duck mask asks in an awful impression of an English accent.
“No, she thought I was single,” Michael explains. His eyelids feel almost as heavy as his drenched clothes. He’s felt dizzy, sluggish, and stunned since waking up. They’re barely open enough to catch the kidnappers looking at each other and then back to him. He wants to rock himself but can’t because there’s not enough slack from the bindings.
“Are you satisfied with that?” the devil duck asks the other kidnapper in that English accent again. Until now, the only time he heard one of them speak was the scream in his ear. The kidnapper’s accent seems recognizable to him. The words don’t matter, but that accent. He remembers but is too tired to place it. That same style and manner. Damn! I know now. Really. It can’t be her.
“I might be a little concussed, so I might have some memory problems, but Heather, is that you?” Michael directs this question to the devil duck, who sounds much like his theater major girlfriend did when she did that My Fair Lady monologue for class. He remembers her practicing the Eliza Doolittle speech and talking the lines in that terrible English accent.
“Well, it looks like Sherlock Holmes has figured it out,” Heather snickers, “I guess we won’t need these unbearable disguises anymore.” She takes off her demon duck mask and lowers her black hood.
The alpaca does the same, removing both mask and hood. Damn! It’s Kim, that classmate he cheated on Heather with. This really isn’t going to end well. “Guess who? The other woman,” Kim yells in Michael’s face, “Michael looks more like Angela Lansbury to me.” He closes his eyes, bracing, and expecting to get another slap.
“Who’s Angela Lansbury?” Heather inquires.
“From the show, Murder She Wrote,” Michael mutters, “Angela Lansbury played Jessica Fletcher, the mystery writer and amateur detective character from Murder She Wrote. You know. Everywhere she went, someone died.”
“Shut up, Micheal,” Heather commands, “no one asked you.”
Kim explains, “You called him Sherlock, I assumed because he made you as one of his kidnappers. He solved that mystery like Angela Lansbury did in her show. I wanted to keep the detective thing going, which was the only thing I could come up with.”
“You also could’ve used Columbo. Peter Falk was the actor in that show. I would’ve got it if Heather didn’t,” Michael chimes in.
“Please shut up, Michael,” Heather throws her duck mask and hits her target in the chest. She happily sees her pitch knock the wind out of him.
Michael momentarily loses his breath. He leans his body forward, grasping, but only as far as the ropes tying him up will allow. Almost back from the spasm, he wheezes, “Why did you do that? You know I watched much television with Mom as a kid.”
“Well, Michael. You’re probably wondering why Kim and I would go to such an extreme as kidnapping you?” Heather enjoyed watching Michael hurt but moved on.
“I might have some shape of an idea,” Michael said, still having trouble breathing.
“Well, please indulge us,” Kim roars like a lion.
Michael takes a deep breath and says, “because I lied to you both.”
“You’re getting warmer, but try again with more specifics,” Heather demands.
“Okay. I believe you two clubbed, kidnapped, and tortured me because I deceived you both and wanted my confession. I lied about cheating on you, Heather. And I told you, Kim, I was single when I wasn’t,” Michael restates.
“Are you good with that?” Heather asks Kim.
“Yeah, I feel vindicated,” Kim says, “what about you?”
“You know Michael deserves more. This wasn’t the first time he cheated on me,” Heather states.
“We could let him rot for a little bit longer,” Kim suggests.
“You could let me go,” Michael interjects
“Nope, I like her idea better,” Kim chuckles.
Heather leans in and gives him a kiss on the lips. “You know this means we’re broken up, right?”
“Yeah, I figured.” Michael watches the two women leave, past the lamplight, and hears the door shut. They left him tied to the chair without knowing when they’d return. They’re coming back, right. Then the bare light bulb burns out. “Damnit!” Daniel sighs.
####
It was by a house phone ringing that Michael Deal awakes. The day is Friday. Forty-eight hours after Heather and Kim kidnapped him. Just six hours after they released him from the Business building basement. That’s where they tormented a confession out of him and the place where Heather got cheated on. He swore to Heather and Kim that he’s a changed man to be released. And promised never to mislead, belittle, agonize, or be nasty again. “Consider me Michael Deal 2.0,” he declared between Heather cutting his arms and legs free and Kim videotaping him collapsing from the chair.
He rolls over and picks up the phone on his bedside table on the fourth ring. “Hello Michael, it’s your mother. I’m just calling to check if you’re still alive. I haven’t heard from you all week.”
“Hey, Mom. Yeah, sorry. It’s been a busy week,” he yawns. Sleep hasn’t found him since getting home.
“Busy, you say? What tied you up this week?” Mrs. Deal asks her son.
What did she just say, Michael thinks. He’s suspicious and reasonably sure he just heard his mom say “tied up” in that last question. Does she know? He flashbacks to being lashed to that janky wooden chair in the very dark basement. “Mom, sorry, but could you please repeat that last part?”
“Sure, I just asked why were you so busy this week?” she repeated.
“Oh! I had an ethics test this week. It was a doozy,” Michael 2.0 gives her a cryptic but partially true answer.
“I’m sure you did very well on it,” Michael’s Mom says.
“Yes, Ma’am. You could say I passed in the end.” Just then, he’s profoundly and carefully remembering what he did. Some anxiety reappears like evil magic. He’s worried that it’s going to happen again. Convinced that someone else he lied to is going to get him. There are too many to make right. The thoughts are overwhelming. He gets out of bed, stands up, and clenches his shirt. He’s still wearing the gym clothes from Wednesday. He reeks of his awful past and must change. There’s an instant urge to get off the phone. “Hey, Mom, can I call you back?”
“Of course, dear. But, did you get that thing sorted with Heather and Kim?”
I must be paranoid, or did Mom just mention Heather and Kim, Michael thinks. He asks her again to repeat her last question. Which she does.
“Did you get that thing with Heather and Kim sorted?”
Michael is flabbergasted, discombobulated, and many other things that words can’t describe. He drops the phone. Bang! The phone hits his bedroom wood floor. Not her too. Not Mom.