Page 43 of The Wrong Man

It’s small. Cramped, almost, with low ceilings and no windows that I can see. The only furniture is a sofa that looks like it belongs in a museum exhibit about the 1970s. Orange and brown floral print, worn and faded and deeply ugly. There’s a coffee table in front of it with water rings stained into the wood. A lamp in the corner that casts a dim, yellowish light.

That’s it. That’s the whole room.

No pictures on the wall. No bookshelves. No personal items of any kind. Just that ancient sofa, a dusty flatscreen TV, and the lingering sense that no one has spent any real time here in years.

This is where Dante lives. This sad, empty, soulless space. It’s almost more disturbing than the torture chamber I know is somewhere in this building.

I shake off the thought and keep moving. The hallway continues past the living room, leading to what I assume is the front door. Or maybe the kitchen. Or maybe...

I reach another door. This one is heavy, reinforced. Different from the others.

My hand hesitates on the handle. Something in my gut is screaming at me to turn back. To leave this door unopened and return to the relative safety of the bedroom.

But I’ve come this far. I have to know.

I push the door open.

The smell hits me first. Cold concrete and metal and something else. Something chemical underneath that I don’t want to identify.

Then my eyes adjust to the dim light, and I see it.

The chair. That horrible metal chair, back in place, bolted in the center of the room. The table along the wall with its neat rows of tools, each one gleaming under the faint emergency lighting. The concrete walls stained with things I refuse to look at too closely.

The room where Dante broke me.

The room where I watched a man die.

Memories slam into me with the force of a freight train. Vinnie’s screams. The wet sounds. The way he kept calling me Declan, kept begging me to save him, kept looking at me with desperate hope until the light finally left his eyes.

The cold. The darkness. The zip ties cutting into my wrists until they bled.

The pliers rising toward my face before everything went black.

The freezing, unending cold that made my muscles ache and even my bones hurt.

The sheer and utter helplessness.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe and I can’t move and the walls are closing in and Vinnie is screaming and screaming and I’m going to die here, I’m going to die in this room and no one will ever know what happened to me.

My legs give out. I hit the floor hard, knees cracking against concrete, but I barely feel it. All I can feel is the panic, the terror, the absolute certainty that I am not safe and I will never be safe again.

I crawl. On my hands and knees like an animal, I crawl back through the doorway and into the hall. I pull the door shut behind me, but it doesn’t help. I can still see it. I can still smell it. I can still hear Vinnie begging for his life.

I try not to wonder where his body is. I try not to be glad that it is gone and I didn’t have to see it.

Somehow I make it back to the bedroom. Somehow I drag myself up onto the bed and burrow under the covers like a child hiding from monsters. I pull the blankets over my head and curl into the smallest ball I can manage, and I shake.

The panic attack lasts a long time.

I don’t know how long exactly. Time has lost all meaning again, swallowed up by the terror and the memories and the desperate struggle to breathe. At some point, the shaking stops. At some point the tears dry. At some point I’m just lying here, hollowed out and exhausted, staring at nothing.

On the television, another episode has started. Someone is making bread. The dough needs to prove, the contestant is saying. You have to give it time to rise.

I laugh. It comes out broken and slightly hysterical, but it’s still a laugh. I’m losing my mind. I’m lying in a murderer’s bed, recovering from a panic attack triggered by accidentally finding his torture chamber, and I’m listening to someone talk about bread proving.

Aunt Moira would have something to say about this. She’d say I wasn’t losing my mind. That I’m coping just fine. She’d tell me some piece of Irish wisdom about God never giving you more than you can handle. I always believed her when she said that. Now I’m not so sure.

I pull the covers tighter around myself and try to breathe.