Categories > Original > Mystery > The Allure of Virginity
Gold is Thicker than Blood
As Eddie and I walked around trying to find Lily, the little boy seemed less sad than he was before and kept talking about his pornography collection. I nodded and pretended to be interested with what he had to say.
We arrived at a stone door with the word BANK engraved above the door in big letters. The place sparked our curiousity. After Eddie and I entered, we realized the bank was different to other rooms because the walls, ceilings, and floors were made of steel. The room looked like it was divided into two. On one half Eddie and I could freely walk. The other half, however, was filled with gleaming safes, deposit boxes, piles of gold, and bags presumably filled with cash. Neither Eddie nor I could move to this half of the room because it was protected by vertical metal bars.
On the right was a door that led into another room. I opened the door to find a room about the size of a normal bedroom. It was filled with weapons.
“Wow!” said Eddie as he walked in.
Attached to the walls neatly were many rows of Uzis, semi-automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenades, shotguns, machine guns, and chain guns. On the floor were boxes of ammunition, holsters, gas masks, knives, nylon rope, handcuffs, and grenades.
Eddie went inside the weapons room to grab an AK-47. The little boy underestimated the rifle’s weight and had difficulty carrying it. The weapon was almost as big as the kid.
When I walked into the weapons room, I grabbed a grenade from a box and looked at the green metal object in my hands. It was rather heavy and the metal shell felt icy cold against my palm. I looked at the grenade, amazed that what I held in my hands--a lump of heavy metal--could be so lethal. All I had to do was remove the pin and I could die.
“If we want to save Lily,” said Eddie, “we should bring some guns.” He lifted up a bolt-action rifle.
I suppressed a smile. Eddie sounded like he was in a movie or at least he tried to sound like he was in a movie.
There was no way Eddie was going conceal a huge rifle under his clothes, so I gave him a small revolver. Eddie certainly hadn’t used a gun before, so I was worried. I had never fired a gun either, so I didn’t know what to expect. I have, however, played many video games before, games like Counterstrike and Quake, so I regarded myself well educated in firearms.
I grabbed a Colt-45 automatic pistol and concealed it underneath my white robe.
Eddie pointed to the vertical metal bars that separated us from the gold. “You know, if we blow up this place maybe we can take all that money.”
The thought of making lots of money quickly temporarily excited me, but then I thought more carefully.
“Ella works here,” I said. “Maybe her money’s in there.”
Eddie shrugged. “Who cares?”
“If we blow up this place, everyone will hear the explosion. They’ll all come for us before we have a chance to get all the money out.”
“Hey, what about that key you found in your pocket? Give it a try!”
I remember finding keys in the pockets of my white robe. After taking out the set of keys, I tried each one on the lock. Luckily the second-last key I tried worked and now we had access to a pile of gold and cash.
“Oh, man!” said Eddie. “We can sneak out of here with all that money.” The little boy walked inside and grabbed two bars of gold. “These are heavy!”
I picked a bar up to see for myself how heavy they were. Each bar was about the same weight as a desktop printer, so at the most Eddie could carry two at once while I could probably carry three at once.
“I know the way out!” said Eddie. “We’ll take all we can carry now, go out, hide ‘em in the garden or something, and then come back here to get more.”
I looked at all the piles of gold and bags of cash. “If we together can only carry five bars at once, it’s going to take a long time to get all this out of here. The longer we stay the more likely someone will catch us.”
Eddie nodded in agreement. “Okay, we won’t take it all then. We’ll just take enough to make us rich.”
“How much is each gold bar worth?”
Eddie thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
----
Eddie and I had a great idea. I took off my white robe and used it as a sack. I filled the robe up with about seven bars of gold before lifting it up over my shoulder. I felt like Santa Clause holding up a sack of toys, although these bars of gold were worth much more than your average toys. Eddie too took off his top till he wore only his t-shirt. He was able to carry four bars of gold.
Since Eddie carried fewer bars of gold, he walked ahead of me. The gold was much heavier than I anticipated. Since I was using the white robe as a sack, I no longer had a disguise, so it would be a disaster if someone saw me. It was a risk I was willing to take though because I was going to be rich.
As I walked I saw stone doors to my left and on each of these stone doors there was a large peephole. I remember looking into these holes before and seeing people having sex.
Behind the next stone door I walked by was a little girl sitting on a wooden chair. She was naked except for a skirt. Even though she was topless she was too little to have breasts. She was tied to the chair. Her eyes were blindfolded with cloth; her mouth gagged with masking tape. I noticed straight away from the child’s flowing brown hair that she was Lily Jenkins.
“Eddie!” I said. “Come here.”
Eddie walked back “What is it?”
I nodded at the stone door. “Lily’s in there.”
The little boy looked through the hole. “What should I do?”
“We’ll get her out of here.”
“What about the gold?”
“We’ll untie her first. Then maybe she can help us carry more gold.”
Eddie nodded. “Okay but be quick! You get the girl and I will carry this gold back.”
“Do you want to carry my gold?” I offered him my sack of gold.
“I can’t carry all that.”
I softly dropped the sack of gold on the rock floor. “I’ll leave it out here. I’m going in now. Wait for me out there. If I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, call the police, okay?”
After saying goodbye to me, the little boy walked off.
The stone door opened easily. The room Lily was in was strange because it was empty except for the little girl, the chair, and a hole in the ground around two feet in radius. You could fit a human in this hole. I walked inside, making sure I closed the door behind me as I entered. Lily could sense someone entering her cell because she moved her head towards the sound. I’ve heard on TV that one should rip off band-aids quickly in one go to minimize pain. The same, I thought, must apply to masking tape on mouths. I kneeled down and faced the little girl. With my left hand I grabbed the top of her head. She seemed to resist, probably because she was blindfolded and didn’t know it was me. With my right hand I started peeling away the tape. With the tape over her mouth, her screams underneath sounded like faint humming. I pulled the tape harder. The glue was strong. It felt like I was twisting the girl’s head, like I was ripping her head into two. I got worried when I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.
I gave the masking tape a quick, hard tug and it came off finally. At first I thought the tape might have ripped some skin off the child’s lips because her mouth was bright red, but it was more likely her lips were bright red because she had been biting them. When the tape came off, the little girl started dribbling from her mouth uncontrollably. She tried to clean herself up with her tongue, licking her lips and sucking up some of the saliva that oozed down. I still had my left hand on the little girl’s head, and with fingers on my right hand I helped her clean the mess, wiping away the mixture of dribble and shiny mucus on her face. My fingers glided over her skin, my touch almost tender. Lily, however, interpreted my touches differently and moved her head away from my fingers.
“Don’t hurt me,” she softly moaned.
I took off her blindfold. I should have done it earlier but was too busy with the masking tape. Lily was astonished to see me.
“Keith.”
“What happened?” I asked her, taking my hand off her head to give her more freedom to move.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I had to jog her memory. “This lunch, at school, when I went back to the canteen, what did you do when I didn’t come back? Did you try to find me?”
She nodded. “I went in a room and this boy saw me. He said I wasn’t allowed in there and he hit me.”
“Then what happened?”
“They were carrying me to someone. They were talking and then they put me in here. I said I need to get to school, so I tried to run away, but they got me and tied me. A big boy took my clothes off and he put them in the toilet.” She nodded towards the hole in the ground.
I looked at this hole in the ground. It seemed to be bottomless. Usually toilets had water at the bottom. Perhaps this toilet had water at the bottom but it was so deep I couldn’t see anything. It was like a deep well. There was little chance I could recover Lily’s clothes from the toilet, so I took off my grey jumper to give to her and, before putting the grey jumper over the small child, I remembered that I had forgotten to untie her from the chair. She was on the chair with her neck turned in my direction, looking at me with those big eyes, probably wondering when I was going to untie her.
The white ropes looked very smooth and new. I wouldn’t be surprise if they were purchased from a high-quality hardware house. The knots were complicated. They weren’t tied in a random way as I had expected from people who lived in caves. The person who tied the little girl tied her in a very economic way, strongly fixing her small arms and legs to the chair’s limbs while using as little rope as possible and using the fewest knots possible. And yet the knots were extremely hard to untie.
After two minutes I gave up and kicked the wall, not in frustration though. Frustration and anger rarely achieve anything. Rocks on the wall crumbled as I kicked it. I picked up from the floor a rock with a sharp edge, sharpening it even further by rubbing it against the floor. While slicing through the ropes with the sharp rock, I made sure only the wooden chair was underneath the blade as I sawed. After all, I wouldn’t want to cut off Lily’s lovely little arms and legs, nor did I want to scar her smooth and perfect skin.
Halfway through the rope-cutting, Lily gasped. I looked up at her face to see her staring at the cell door, so I followed the path of her vision and looked at the cell door myself.
There was someone there. He wore a white robe like everyone else and his face was covered with a thin black plastic mask. He didn’t have his hood on, so I could see his scruffy brown hair. I stood up, holding the sharp rock in my hand, trying to conceal it in my palm in case I needed it.
“Who are you?” he asked, closing the cell door behind him.
“I work here,” I said. “I’m one of you people.” I pointed to Lily. “I’m moving her to a different cell.”
“Is that right?” The robed man walked towards me. When he was about a meter away from me, he suddenly ran up and punched me in the belly.
I never expected the punch. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. My vision went black, then blurry. I heard Lily’s screams. The girl didn’t scream for long though. When I fell, I fell on her. The chair was crushed to pieces under my weight, and Lily, who was tied to the chair, must have been hurt, but she didn’t scream--the impact certainly silenced her.
The sharp rock flew out of my hands. I had no idea where it landed.
Lily was so scared of the robed man in her cell that she didn’t seem too bothered with me over her and a broken chair underneath her. When I got off the little girl and tried to stand up again, the robed man picked me up.
“You don’t work here,” said the robed man, grabbing me by the neck. “You’re a fucking liar! You’re that guy from the canteen.” He took off his mask and threw it to the ground, exposing his face. “Remember me?”
I certainly did. He was that chubby-faced guy I saw in the canteen storage room. He wasn’t a man, just a boy, probably in his late teens. He and his friend had been putting something into the school’s food supply. This was the real Leon.
I noticed that the chubby-faced boy’s robes were long. They flowed off him like a wedding gown. I could sense a punch coming soon, so I had to think fast. I stomped on the white robe with my feet. The chubby boy was about to throw a punch at me but as he did, he swung his body around too much. With my foot on his robe, his clothing wasn’t able to swing around with his body, so the chubby-faced boy tripped and fell over.
Lily had freed herself from the chair. She was sitting on the ground, watching wide-eyed as I wrestled the chubby-faced boy to the ground. My opponent was about two times fatter than I was, but much of that fatness must have been muscle because he was much stronger than I was. He got up quickly, grabbed me by the hips, and threw me against the crumbling rocky walls. To Lily it must have looked like a wrestling show.
My head felt hot. I started to sweat. There were multiple cuts on my arms. I lied on the ground, about to get up, but I didn’t because I was scared. The chubby-faced boy took off his robe, revealing his bare hairy chest and rolling muscles. He threw the white robe to the floor.
“That was cheap of you to step on me clothes like that,” he said. “You don’t fight fair, huh?”
I didn’t say anything. The chubby-faced boy came up to me again. I could only hold up my hands and look away as he reached down, grabbed me by my arms, and lifted me back up again.
“When I’m through with you,” he said, “I’m gonna drop yer down that hole over there.” He pointed to the toilet on the floor, the one that looked like a well. “That’s where the sewerage goes, so you’ll be with yer own kind!”
His fist flew towards me. I felt a sharp sting on my face. All my senses went numb for a while as I fell to the ground. When my head bounced on the rock-solid floor, it was like my senses were jolted back to normal. I heared Lily crying. Her eyes were red.
“Stop it!” she said. She sniffed loudly and gulped the air, struggling to breathe normally.
I wished she could stop because she was attracting attention from the chubby-faced boy, who was now walking towards her.
“Are you telling me what to do?” asked the man, standing in front of her. “A little cunt like you thinks she can tell me what to do, huh! I outta slap ya!”
As I lay on the ground, I stared at the big boy towering over the little girl, but I noticed something else more important. The chubby-faced boy was standing right next to the heap of wood and rope where the chair use to be. The little girl was screaming and crying again, this time because her hair had been grabbed and yanked upwards.
I got up instantly, ran towards the chubby-faced boy, and pushed him hard. The push forced him to step back a few feet, but that was enough. His feet landed in the heap of wood and rope that was once a chair. He tripped over and fell right into the toilet, screaming out loudly at first but his screams quickly softened as he fell further and further in.
Lily seemed quiet now. I placed a palm on her head and straightened her hair again. I remembered how smooth and neat her hair used to be, how I used to stare at it, even sniffed it once in a while. She kept looking up at me while my hands were on her head.
I picked up from the ground my warm grey jumper and threw it at her, telling her to put it on because we were leaving and it was cold outside. I briefly laughed after she put my clothes on because the jumper went all the way down to her knees. Lily spoke to me.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Do you know how to get back up?”
“I think I do,” I said, trying to remember how I got in. I remembered the door at the girls’ toilets. If I took the same path I took coming here, there was a good chance Lily and I could make it back to Dendy Park.
Lily blinked nervously.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“Promise?” asked Lily.
“I promise.”
“You’re lying,” she said softly.
I paused, not knowing what to say. I looked at her face, looked at her small, bright-red lips, her little nose, and those big brown eyes that sparkled as a puddle of tears formed at the base of both eyelids. Glistening tear droplets descended her cheeks like little crystal ladybugs running down her face. She stood there like a little mouse, so small and helpless.
As I walked out from the cell carry the sack of gold, Lily ran up from behind and held my hand. She gripped it tightly.
As Eddie and I walked around trying to find Lily, the little boy seemed less sad than he was before and kept talking about his pornography collection. I nodded and pretended to be interested with what he had to say.
We arrived at a stone door with the word BANK engraved above the door in big letters. The place sparked our curiousity. After Eddie and I entered, we realized the bank was different to other rooms because the walls, ceilings, and floors were made of steel. The room looked like it was divided into two. On one half Eddie and I could freely walk. The other half, however, was filled with gleaming safes, deposit boxes, piles of gold, and bags presumably filled with cash. Neither Eddie nor I could move to this half of the room because it was protected by vertical metal bars.
On the right was a door that led into another room. I opened the door to find a room about the size of a normal bedroom. It was filled with weapons.
“Wow!” said Eddie as he walked in.
Attached to the walls neatly were many rows of Uzis, semi-automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenades, shotguns, machine guns, and chain guns. On the floor were boxes of ammunition, holsters, gas masks, knives, nylon rope, handcuffs, and grenades.
Eddie went inside the weapons room to grab an AK-47. The little boy underestimated the rifle’s weight and had difficulty carrying it. The weapon was almost as big as the kid.
When I walked into the weapons room, I grabbed a grenade from a box and looked at the green metal object in my hands. It was rather heavy and the metal shell felt icy cold against my palm. I looked at the grenade, amazed that what I held in my hands--a lump of heavy metal--could be so lethal. All I had to do was remove the pin and I could die.
“If we want to save Lily,” said Eddie, “we should bring some guns.” He lifted up a bolt-action rifle.
I suppressed a smile. Eddie sounded like he was in a movie or at least he tried to sound like he was in a movie.
There was no way Eddie was going conceal a huge rifle under his clothes, so I gave him a small revolver. Eddie certainly hadn’t used a gun before, so I was worried. I had never fired a gun either, so I didn’t know what to expect. I have, however, played many video games before, games like Counterstrike and Quake, so I regarded myself well educated in firearms.
I grabbed a Colt-45 automatic pistol and concealed it underneath my white robe.
Eddie pointed to the vertical metal bars that separated us from the gold. “You know, if we blow up this place maybe we can take all that money.”
The thought of making lots of money quickly temporarily excited me, but then I thought more carefully.
“Ella works here,” I said. “Maybe her money’s in there.”
Eddie shrugged. “Who cares?”
“If we blow up this place, everyone will hear the explosion. They’ll all come for us before we have a chance to get all the money out.”
“Hey, what about that key you found in your pocket? Give it a try!”
I remember finding keys in the pockets of my white robe. After taking out the set of keys, I tried each one on the lock. Luckily the second-last key I tried worked and now we had access to a pile of gold and cash.
“Oh, man!” said Eddie. “We can sneak out of here with all that money.” The little boy walked inside and grabbed two bars of gold. “These are heavy!”
I picked a bar up to see for myself how heavy they were. Each bar was about the same weight as a desktop printer, so at the most Eddie could carry two at once while I could probably carry three at once.
“I know the way out!” said Eddie. “We’ll take all we can carry now, go out, hide ‘em in the garden or something, and then come back here to get more.”
I looked at all the piles of gold and bags of cash. “If we together can only carry five bars at once, it’s going to take a long time to get all this out of here. The longer we stay the more likely someone will catch us.”
Eddie nodded in agreement. “Okay, we won’t take it all then. We’ll just take enough to make us rich.”
“How much is each gold bar worth?”
Eddie thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
----
Eddie and I had a great idea. I took off my white robe and used it as a sack. I filled the robe up with about seven bars of gold before lifting it up over my shoulder. I felt like Santa Clause holding up a sack of toys, although these bars of gold were worth much more than your average toys. Eddie too took off his top till he wore only his t-shirt. He was able to carry four bars of gold.
Since Eddie carried fewer bars of gold, he walked ahead of me. The gold was much heavier than I anticipated. Since I was using the white robe as a sack, I no longer had a disguise, so it would be a disaster if someone saw me. It was a risk I was willing to take though because I was going to be rich.
As I walked I saw stone doors to my left and on each of these stone doors there was a large peephole. I remember looking into these holes before and seeing people having sex.
Behind the next stone door I walked by was a little girl sitting on a wooden chair. She was naked except for a skirt. Even though she was topless she was too little to have breasts. She was tied to the chair. Her eyes were blindfolded with cloth; her mouth gagged with masking tape. I noticed straight away from the child’s flowing brown hair that she was Lily Jenkins.
“Eddie!” I said. “Come here.”
Eddie walked back “What is it?”
I nodded at the stone door. “Lily’s in there.”
The little boy looked through the hole. “What should I do?”
“We’ll get her out of here.”
“What about the gold?”
“We’ll untie her first. Then maybe she can help us carry more gold.”
Eddie nodded. “Okay but be quick! You get the girl and I will carry this gold back.”
“Do you want to carry my gold?” I offered him my sack of gold.
“I can’t carry all that.”
I softly dropped the sack of gold on the rock floor. “I’ll leave it out here. I’m going in now. Wait for me out there. If I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, call the police, okay?”
After saying goodbye to me, the little boy walked off.
The stone door opened easily. The room Lily was in was strange because it was empty except for the little girl, the chair, and a hole in the ground around two feet in radius. You could fit a human in this hole. I walked inside, making sure I closed the door behind me as I entered. Lily could sense someone entering her cell because she moved her head towards the sound. I’ve heard on TV that one should rip off band-aids quickly in one go to minimize pain. The same, I thought, must apply to masking tape on mouths. I kneeled down and faced the little girl. With my left hand I grabbed the top of her head. She seemed to resist, probably because she was blindfolded and didn’t know it was me. With my right hand I started peeling away the tape. With the tape over her mouth, her screams underneath sounded like faint humming. I pulled the tape harder. The glue was strong. It felt like I was twisting the girl’s head, like I was ripping her head into two. I got worried when I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.
I gave the masking tape a quick, hard tug and it came off finally. At first I thought the tape might have ripped some skin off the child’s lips because her mouth was bright red, but it was more likely her lips were bright red because she had been biting them. When the tape came off, the little girl started dribbling from her mouth uncontrollably. She tried to clean herself up with her tongue, licking her lips and sucking up some of the saliva that oozed down. I still had my left hand on the little girl’s head, and with fingers on my right hand I helped her clean the mess, wiping away the mixture of dribble and shiny mucus on her face. My fingers glided over her skin, my touch almost tender. Lily, however, interpreted my touches differently and moved her head away from my fingers.
“Don’t hurt me,” she softly moaned.
I took off her blindfold. I should have done it earlier but was too busy with the masking tape. Lily was astonished to see me.
“Keith.”
“What happened?” I asked her, taking my hand off her head to give her more freedom to move.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I had to jog her memory. “This lunch, at school, when I went back to the canteen, what did you do when I didn’t come back? Did you try to find me?”
She nodded. “I went in a room and this boy saw me. He said I wasn’t allowed in there and he hit me.”
“Then what happened?”
“They were carrying me to someone. They were talking and then they put me in here. I said I need to get to school, so I tried to run away, but they got me and tied me. A big boy took my clothes off and he put them in the toilet.” She nodded towards the hole in the ground.
I looked at this hole in the ground. It seemed to be bottomless. Usually toilets had water at the bottom. Perhaps this toilet had water at the bottom but it was so deep I couldn’t see anything. It was like a deep well. There was little chance I could recover Lily’s clothes from the toilet, so I took off my grey jumper to give to her and, before putting the grey jumper over the small child, I remembered that I had forgotten to untie her from the chair. She was on the chair with her neck turned in my direction, looking at me with those big eyes, probably wondering when I was going to untie her.
The white ropes looked very smooth and new. I wouldn’t be surprise if they were purchased from a high-quality hardware house. The knots were complicated. They weren’t tied in a random way as I had expected from people who lived in caves. The person who tied the little girl tied her in a very economic way, strongly fixing her small arms and legs to the chair’s limbs while using as little rope as possible and using the fewest knots possible. And yet the knots were extremely hard to untie.
After two minutes I gave up and kicked the wall, not in frustration though. Frustration and anger rarely achieve anything. Rocks on the wall crumbled as I kicked it. I picked up from the floor a rock with a sharp edge, sharpening it even further by rubbing it against the floor. While slicing through the ropes with the sharp rock, I made sure only the wooden chair was underneath the blade as I sawed. After all, I wouldn’t want to cut off Lily’s lovely little arms and legs, nor did I want to scar her smooth and perfect skin.
Halfway through the rope-cutting, Lily gasped. I looked up at her face to see her staring at the cell door, so I followed the path of her vision and looked at the cell door myself.
There was someone there. He wore a white robe like everyone else and his face was covered with a thin black plastic mask. He didn’t have his hood on, so I could see his scruffy brown hair. I stood up, holding the sharp rock in my hand, trying to conceal it in my palm in case I needed it.
“Who are you?” he asked, closing the cell door behind him.
“I work here,” I said. “I’m one of you people.” I pointed to Lily. “I’m moving her to a different cell.”
“Is that right?” The robed man walked towards me. When he was about a meter away from me, he suddenly ran up and punched me in the belly.
I never expected the punch. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. My vision went black, then blurry. I heard Lily’s screams. The girl didn’t scream for long though. When I fell, I fell on her. The chair was crushed to pieces under my weight, and Lily, who was tied to the chair, must have been hurt, but she didn’t scream--the impact certainly silenced her.
The sharp rock flew out of my hands. I had no idea where it landed.
Lily was so scared of the robed man in her cell that she didn’t seem too bothered with me over her and a broken chair underneath her. When I got off the little girl and tried to stand up again, the robed man picked me up.
“You don’t work here,” said the robed man, grabbing me by the neck. “You’re a fucking liar! You’re that guy from the canteen.” He took off his mask and threw it to the ground, exposing his face. “Remember me?”
I certainly did. He was that chubby-faced guy I saw in the canteen storage room. He wasn’t a man, just a boy, probably in his late teens. He and his friend had been putting something into the school’s food supply. This was the real Leon.
I noticed that the chubby-faced boy’s robes were long. They flowed off him like a wedding gown. I could sense a punch coming soon, so I had to think fast. I stomped on the white robe with my feet. The chubby boy was about to throw a punch at me but as he did, he swung his body around too much. With my foot on his robe, his clothing wasn’t able to swing around with his body, so the chubby-faced boy tripped and fell over.
Lily had freed herself from the chair. She was sitting on the ground, watching wide-eyed as I wrestled the chubby-faced boy to the ground. My opponent was about two times fatter than I was, but much of that fatness must have been muscle because he was much stronger than I was. He got up quickly, grabbed me by the hips, and threw me against the crumbling rocky walls. To Lily it must have looked like a wrestling show.
My head felt hot. I started to sweat. There were multiple cuts on my arms. I lied on the ground, about to get up, but I didn’t because I was scared. The chubby-faced boy took off his robe, revealing his bare hairy chest and rolling muscles. He threw the white robe to the floor.
“That was cheap of you to step on me clothes like that,” he said. “You don’t fight fair, huh?”
I didn’t say anything. The chubby-faced boy came up to me again. I could only hold up my hands and look away as he reached down, grabbed me by my arms, and lifted me back up again.
“When I’m through with you,” he said, “I’m gonna drop yer down that hole over there.” He pointed to the toilet on the floor, the one that looked like a well. “That’s where the sewerage goes, so you’ll be with yer own kind!”
His fist flew towards me. I felt a sharp sting on my face. All my senses went numb for a while as I fell to the ground. When my head bounced on the rock-solid floor, it was like my senses were jolted back to normal. I heared Lily crying. Her eyes were red.
“Stop it!” she said. She sniffed loudly and gulped the air, struggling to breathe normally.
I wished she could stop because she was attracting attention from the chubby-faced boy, who was now walking towards her.
“Are you telling me what to do?” asked the man, standing in front of her. “A little cunt like you thinks she can tell me what to do, huh! I outta slap ya!”
As I lay on the ground, I stared at the big boy towering over the little girl, but I noticed something else more important. The chubby-faced boy was standing right next to the heap of wood and rope where the chair use to be. The little girl was screaming and crying again, this time because her hair had been grabbed and yanked upwards.
I got up instantly, ran towards the chubby-faced boy, and pushed him hard. The push forced him to step back a few feet, but that was enough. His feet landed in the heap of wood and rope that was once a chair. He tripped over and fell right into the toilet, screaming out loudly at first but his screams quickly softened as he fell further and further in.
Lily seemed quiet now. I placed a palm on her head and straightened her hair again. I remembered how smooth and neat her hair used to be, how I used to stare at it, even sniffed it once in a while. She kept looking up at me while my hands were on her head.
I picked up from the ground my warm grey jumper and threw it at her, telling her to put it on because we were leaving and it was cold outside. I briefly laughed after she put my clothes on because the jumper went all the way down to her knees. Lily spoke to me.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Do you know how to get back up?”
“I think I do,” I said, trying to remember how I got in. I remembered the door at the girls’ toilets. If I took the same path I took coming here, there was a good chance Lily and I could make it back to Dendy Park.
Lily blinked nervously.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“Promise?” asked Lily.
“I promise.”
“You’re lying,” she said softly.
I paused, not knowing what to say. I looked at her face, looked at her small, bright-red lips, her little nose, and those big brown eyes that sparkled as a puddle of tears formed at the base of both eyelids. Glistening tear droplets descended her cheeks like little crystal ladybugs running down her face. She stood there like a little mouse, so small and helpless.
As I walked out from the cell carry the sack of gold, Lily ran up from behind and held my hand. She gripped it tightly.
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