The Never List

rudimentary code she tapped on its sides. It only took a few months for the tapping to stop altogether.
    Of course, my suffering over Jennifer did not end with her death. He made sure of that. He liked to tell me how he would digher up to look at her sometimes. She had been so beautiful in death that he wanted to see it, even though it took him hours to unearth her body. He loved to tell me how, in killing her, he’d been careful not to damage her pretty face, which had more eloquently than anyone else’s expressed the terror and loneliness of captivity. Her fragility, the unique quality of her vulnerability, made her his true favorite. It was why, he said, he chose her for the box.
    So now here I was, with this letter in my hand. Touching what he had touched, reading what he had written. I spread the sheet out flat on the table before me and prepared myself to withstand the force of his words.
    Dearest Sarah:
    I wish you could understand the secret as well as I do. If only you had read in the Book Room that beautiful passage, scrawled in the mind’s eye in the darkness.
    On the banks of the lake in the flat, low land by the ocean, danger lurked for so long, silent, waiting, and then it struck. If only you will be brave enough to shed your costume and walk with me into the holy sea where there is no weakness or sorrow or regret.
    Sylvia can help you. She can show you the path. She has seen the innermost recesses of my heart. I have shown her the landscapes and vistas of my past, all of it. And she has forgiven me. She has opened my eyes and blinded me from evil. She is an angel of mercy with a candle in the darkness, filling my heart not with shame but with redemption.
    Soon—I can feel this—we will be reunited. I will come for you and together we will walk through the valley of death, unharmed.
    Like the Apostles, we must learn. We must sit at the feet of the Master and learn. Only listen to the teachings, Sarah. Read the teachings. Study the teachings.
    Amor fati,
    Jack
    I read the letter slowly, five times, trying to find the meaning hidden in it. The only thing that was clear was that if they let him out, he was coming for me.
    But there was also something new here—an urgency in this letter that I had not detected in the others. He was trying to tell me something else, the sick fuck. Probably sending me on some wild-goose chase, which would be just like him. But at the moment I had nothing else to chase. There was something here. I just needed to think. Only thinking could save me.

CHAPTER 4
    The first day in the cellar was probably the hardest, even though he did not come down at all. It was my orientation into a life of total disorientation.
    The cellar looked exactly the way I would have expected a dungeon full of abducted girls to look: stark, dismal, forbidding. I had been left on a small mattress covered with a white fitted sheet that seemed clean enough. Cleaner in fact than any we’d had in our dorm room. The room was large, and the steep wooden steps that ran along the right-hand wall led up to a solid metal door. I would learn to memorize the creak of those steps.
    Our prison had dingy gray walls, dark stone floors, and a lone bulb hanging from a cord above us. The box stood in the smaller space to the left of the stairs.
    Tracy, whose name I would learn later that day, slept next to me, chained to the same wall facing the cellar steps. She lookeddeceptively frail that first time I saw her, balled up tight in the crevice where the wall met the floor. She scowled in her sleep, the grimace on her pallid face visible beneath her overgrown bangs, blackened at the tips from some long-ago dye job.
    Between Tracy and the wall to the right was a small corridor. I couldn’t see where it led from my vantage point, but would discover soon that Jack had installed a serviceable but spare bathroom, containing only a toilet and a sink. I would quickly come to realize how immaculately clean we were expected to keep ourselves with only those bare-bones facilities.
    Christine was shackled to the wall on the right, about five feet from the steps. She lay on her side, asleep or dazed—it was hard to tell—her limbs contorted awkwardly, splayed across the floor. Her matted blond hair had been twisted tightly and draped over her shoulder. The combination of her position and the tiny, even features of her face gave her the appearance of a china doll that had been played with too roughly and then discarded.
    Each