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a voice I could barely hear myself.
    “I’m on Saxon Avenue,” I whispered.
    I didn’t know what town I was in. I didn’t know the house number. I didn’t really know anything. I was crying. Somebody came on the line.
    I must have said it too loud. The feet and blue jean clad legs in front of my wildly shaking body made that clear. John reached down, and he took his big carpenter hand and yanked the phone away from my ear and slammed the phone into its cradle. I never really saw him coming—I had my eyes closed tight—I could only feel the phone snatched out of my hand. Then, he picked me up and threw me like a rag doll into the closet and raged, “Don’t touch that phone again!”
    Sharp sticks of pain instantly shot through my shirt and into my back as I realized that I had landed on a wall of exposed nails. Inside of the closet was the back of something he had built in his kitchen. He threw me up against it with such force, I was certain I was bleeding. I was crying hysterically. John went back to work as blood dripped down my back. He finished cranking up the concrete slab revealing a hole in the floor. It was dark in there. He worked and said nothing. The only sounds were my now uncontrollable sobs.
    I still don’t think he said anything. And if he did, I might have been crying so loud that I didn’t hear him. He then stepped over the hole, came and got me, and picked me up. I remember he was crouching in thecloset. The closet was built under a staircase, so it had a high ceiling on one side and then it came down on a slant. He stooped over and held me at the edge of the hole.
    The concrete slab was now dangling above the opening in the floor and John moved it to the side and ordered, “Get down the fuckin’ hole.”
    “No, I don’t want to. What is it?”
    “A bomb shelter,” he barked and scooped up my shuddering body and dropped me feet first into the black hole.
    “Start crawling,” he yelled after me.
    It was straight down, too dark to make out a bottom. There were wooden planks for makeshift steps, but they did me no good. I was dropped too hard to make use of them and landed on the cold plywood of a cramped tunnel.
    I was in a dark hole. It seemed almost like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole. I remember when she was falling, it was a cartoon fall, and it took forever. She was screaming the whole way; it seemed in the cartoon like five minutes. That’s how it felt, being dropped down that hole. Just like that.
    He was still up in the office, getting ready to climb down when he shouted again to me to crawl, to where, I had no idea. But I started crawling.
    First John was behind me, and then he maneuvered in front of me. Next I heard drilling. Something very noisy and shrill. The drilling went on for a minute or so, and then there was an opening. There was a small room at the end of the tunnel. I could tell right away there was no way out and I knew that I wasn’t going to get out unless he wanted me out.
    John made me go in first, and I plopped myself down into the stifling chamber. Then he followed.
    I quickly sized up the landscape. It was bleak. There was one square area no bigger than the closet in Mastic Beach and then elevated off the floor what looked like an enclosed cabinet, not much more than a coffin-sized box, outfitted with a door padlocked shut. The outer room had a toilet in the corner —not hooked up to anything – but with a black plastic garbage bag in the hole. There were two wooden shelves attached to the wall. I could see on one shelf what looked like a security monitor.
    The room felt like an animal cage. There was yellow soundproofingand cork covering the walls. John opened the padlock hanging on the small door leading to the enclosed box.
    “Get in.”
    Terrified, I reached up and climbed in. There was a thin blue-striped camping mattress and a pillow, blankets and a television sitting on a shelf on the narrow wall. I noticed that there was a 101