He Caged Me for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Cage Door

Maeve unscrews the cage hasp with a ground-down spoon, finds Niall asleep on the stairs and puts his own knife to his throat; he tells her to go ahead, and Fergus appears at the top with a shotgun.

That night Niall brought my supper down on a tin tray.

Stew, a slice of bread and a spoon.

He set it on the floor inside the gate, and then he locked the gate from the outside with a padlock through a steel hasp.

"Eat," he said.

"Go to hell."

"I've been there. It has worse food." He stood with his hand on the bars. "Your back needs fresh gauze in the morning. Don't pick at it."

"Is that the only thing you came to say?"

"Yes."

He climbed the stairs.

I waited until the cellar door shut. Then I looked at the spoon.

I had decided something in that kitchen with Fergus's men watching me.

Nobody was going to decide what happened to me while I lay on a cot and waited.

I looked at the lock.

The padlock was solid, and I had no key and no pins.

But the hasp holding it was bolted to the gate frame with four screws, and the screw heads had slots.

I could reach them through the bars if I pushed my arm out to the shoulder.

The shoulder Niall had set screamed at me for it.

I did it anyway.

I broke the spoon handle off against the drain and ground one end flat on the concrete floor.

It took more than an hour.

When the end was thin and square, I pushed my arm through the bars again and fitted it into the first slot.

The screw would not turn.

I pushed harder, the bar cut into my arm, and the spoon slipped and nicked my wrist.

I swore, wiped the blood on my jeans and tried again.

The first screw gave a quarter turn.

By the time the cellar's one small window went grey, three of the four screws lay in my hand.

The fourth came out at last with a squeal that made me freeze.

I stood still and listened. Nothing moved upstairs.

I swung the hasp away, and the padlock hung loose on the gate, still locked and no use to anyone.

The gate opened.

I walked out of the cage in my bare feet with the spoon in my fist.

The stairs were pitch black at the top, and the cellar door at the head of them stood ajar.

On the third step sat Niall.

He was asleep with his back against the wall and his head tipped sideways.

A knife lay in a sheath on his knee.

It was the same blade. I knew it by the handle, which was worn pale where a hand had held it for years.

I went up one step at a time, and I took it.

He did not wake.

I drew it from the sheath, and the steel shone dull in the grey light.

I put the edge against his throat, just under his jaw.

His eyes opened.

He did not jump or grab me or shout.

He looked at me, and the green of his eyes was perfectly steady.

"You got out," he said, very quietly.

"Don't talk."

"Four screws. I wondered how long it would take you."

"You left me the spoon."

"I left you the spoon."

I pressed the blade, and a thin line of red showed on his skin.

"Go on," Niall said.

My hand shook.

"Do it quick. Cut straight across, not down."

"Why are you telling me how?"

"Because the cellar door's open, and my father's two best men are asleep on the kitchen floor."

I went still.

"If you walk out of this house, they hear the gate. If you cut me, they hear me. Either way you are not leaving, Maeve."

"Then why leave me the spoon?"

"To see what you'd do with it."

I hated him for how calm he was.

I hated that I knew he was right about the kitchen floor.

I hated more that the knife in my hand felt like the first thing I had owned since the party.

I did not move it.

Niall did not move either.

"Take it with you," he said. "Hide it. You'll need it more than I will."

"You're giving me a knife?"

"I'm letting you keep the one you took."

Behind me, at the top of the stairs, a floorboard creaked.

I turned.

Fergus stood in the door with a shotgun resting in the crook of his arm and an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

He looked at the knife in my hand. He looked at the blood on his son's neck.

Then he looked at the empty cage below us, with its gate standing wide.

"Well," he said. "That's the first night."

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