Megan sat Indian style in Dr. Mattingly’s chair, eyes closed, arms resting on the overstuffed wings. In a deep mode of hypnosis, she could barely hear Dr. Mattingly’s voice. She was careful not to venture too far on her own. His voice was her lifeline. Her safety net in case things went wrong and she needed to quickly exit this part of her brain where her suppressed memories were buried. But part of her, Megan knew, wanted to be free from the tether of his voice. Part of her wanted the liberation that came from venturing off on her own, without Dr. Mattingly’s influence to guide her movements or control her destiny or limit her progress. Megan had grown frustrated during the last session when he so quickly pulled her back to consciousness just as she was ready to discover the thing that bothered her for so long. She could not tolerate being restrained when she was inches from unveiling the mystery buried in her memories. If only she were able to peel back the blanket of suppression that concealed it, that secret was waiting to be discovered. Megan just needed to get there.
For a moment now, in this session, Dr. Mattingly’s voice disappeared. Megan felt like an astronaut on a spacewalk, leaving the familiar view that framed the earth to journey to the dark side of the space station. But, not able to advance farther due to the tether that held her, she unclipped herself to drift freely in space. The wrong move now would send her floating away with no way to return to safety. In her hypnotic state, Megan moved freely in the cellar of her captivity, released from the leash of Dr. Mattingly’s comforting voice that she had always clung to during these sessions.
She stood from the bed. It squeaked as she rose, the springs expanding without the compression of her weight. She shuffled to the plywood-covered windows, her feet scraping against the concrete floor and her shackles clinking as the chain became redundant upon itself. Every noise, Megan noticed, was amplified now that she was free from Dr. Mattingly’s voice—from the bedsprings, to her shuffling steps, to the shackle. She ran a hand over the plywood and listened to her skin skate against the grain of the wood. An airplane soared overhead and she listened to that familiar sound of jet engines high in the sky, having just made the long journey across the Atlantic and now on the descent into Raleigh-Durham.
When the plane was gone, she stayed still and continued to listen, unmoving and expectant. It came after a moment, that long, low whistle. Megan knew now, after hours of research, that it belonged to the freight train that ran through Halifax County. When the whistle was gone, eaten by the midnight darkness of the cellar, she turned from the plywood windows and walked blindly to the only piece of furniture she could reach—the small table near the stairs where he left her meals. She ran a hand over the surface, hearing her unclipped fingernails scratching the wood. She came to associate the food and drink left for her with a deep, groggy sleep that came afterward. The nourishment was where he’d placed the ketamine, Megan had decided. The drug that made her dance above her sleeping body. The preparation that brought hallucination and out-of-body experiences in that dark, lonely cellar. The medicine, which after two weeks of ingesting, she had worried she was coming to depend on.
Empty now, she shuffled from the table and made it back to the bed, lying on its thin mattress and hearing again the coiling of the springs under her weight. She lifted her legs onto the bed and heard the chain of her shackle clanking against the bedframe. She closed her eyes, which had little effect in the darkness. All the noises disappeared as she lay still. No planes. No whistles. No walking. She heard her breath leaving her lungs, but nothing more. No shackles, no chains. Dr. Mattingly’s voice was nowhere in this place Megan had found. The place of her captivity. It was a new place without Dr. Mattingly. She knew, as she waited on her bed, that it had to be this way. Despite the desire to reach for the familiar voice that could so easily pull her to safety, that could rescue her in an instant, Megan needed this isolation from her therapist. She needed seclusion and loneliness, the way it had been for the two weeks of her captivity. She needed to be vulnerable. She needed to be back in the place where she had been, with no one to help her but herself. She needed to find her dying spirit and revive it. It was, she had determined, the only way to find what she was looking for.
Then, through the subtle sounds of her slow and calm breathing, she heard it. A car engine. Far off at first and then closer. Wheels crunching over gravel. Brakes crying in a small whine as the car came to a stop. The thump of the driver’s-side door closing. The footsteps climbing outside stairs. The door opening and closing behind him.
She’d made it this far before only to be pulled back by Dr. Mattingly’s voice, betrayed by her rapid heart rate and hyperventilating lungs. Megan had prepared herself for this moment, studying as she sat in the empty filing room of the courthouse the nuances of meditation and the methods used to calm her pulse and slow her heart rate and settle her lungs. She knew, even without hearing Dr. Mattingly’s voice, that if her vitals went wild, the good doctor had ways of reaching a patient lost in hypnosis. So, in order to avoid being saved by Dr. Mattingly, Megan put to use all the tools of meditation she had learned during the long, boring hours spent at the courthouse.
Now, despite the fear that overwhelmed her as his footsteps thumped overhead and the cellar door opened and the stairs creaked, Megan worked to keep her heartbeat at a slow and controlled grandfather-clock rhythm, her breathing at a measured in-and-out, and her eyelids at a reasonable state of flutter as she listened to him descend the stairs.
His comings and goings had told her there were thirteen stairs into the cellar, and she listened to every noise, each sound that came and went as he made his way down them, closer and closer and closer.
Ten, eleven, twelve . . . thirteen.
Then he was there. But Megan had arrived as well. Finding after so long what she had been searching for. Uncovering that thing she needed. She let go of all her breathing techniques. Abandoned all the methods she had utilized to keep her heart from racing, and let her eyes run wild under her lids. It had the effect she wanted. She heard Dr. Mattingly’s voice, not the calm, collected voice of her psychiatrist, but the hurried and troubled voice of a hypnotist who had lost control of his subject.
“Right now, Megan! I want you to come to my voice!”
But returning was not as simple as in the past. She was stuck in the cellar. Unmoved by the pull of Dr. Mattingly’s voice. And her captor was there, in the darkness. Placing her meal on the table. Ready to make his advance upon her after she was properly sedated.