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Dalmatians nightgown on the bedding. I asked Big John if it was for me, and he said yes. I then asked him if he had been planning to kidnap me, and he answered, “Yes, for a while now.”
    “When am I going to go home?” I pleaded.
    “This is your new home now,” he stated. “You are going to live here.”
    John said he was going back upstairs to get me more blankets and left me alone for a few minutes. In that box alone, I was scared to death. He closed the door but didn’t lock it. He came back in minutes with the blankets, a can of soda and some candy bars and told me that I was going to make a recording. He pulled me down from the coffin-box and took a small tape recorder out of his back pocket and recited exactly what he wanted me to say. I had been kidnapped by a man with a knife and here he comes now. I had to practice it several times and then he said he was going upstairs and he wanted me to record it without him in the room. I did what he asked, crouching down as I spoke. And then, at the end, in a very soft voice, after a long pause, I whispered into the recorder, “Big John took me!! He has me at his house!”
    I was afraid he was in the tunnel listening, but when he came back he didn’t let on that he had heard a thing. I thought it had worked. But then, he grabbed the tape recorder and hit play and when he got to the end, he looked at me for a moment, and without a beat, smacked me in the face. I was stunned. He had never before struck me. This was a completely different John than I had ever known. This time he stood directly over me and ordered me to record it again.
    “I’ve been kidnapped by a man with a knife, and oh God, here he comes.”
    Seeming satisfied with my acting skills this time, John then ordered me up into the small box with the wafer thin mattress, a pillow and blankets. He told me he was going to play the tape for Aunt Linda, andI asked him why?
    “Because you’re going to be staying here for a while.”
    “How long are you going to keep me, John?”
    “Forever.”
    His next request scared me more than I had been all day. Big John told me to pose for a picture and make it look like I was sleeping. I asked him why in the world he wanted to take a picture like that.
    “So that the police will not look for you because they will think that you are dead.”
    I refused. He then ordered me back into the box.
    The TV inside the box was on, flickering shadows on the egg-crated walls. He slammed the small door closed and I could hear him securing the door but wasn’t sure with what. Then I could hear the churning of the drill again.
    When I heard the drill stop squealing, I knew he had gone back upstairs. The sobs had subsided now and I was focused solely on getting out. I positioned myself, with my back to the door, bracing my back, kicking at the wall in front of me, not knowing what was holding me in.
    I kicked and pushed and punched and kicked some more, in the flickering light of silent TV newscasts. I kicked for what seemed like forever, with my back pressed as hard as I could to the back wall of the box I was locked in. It may have been hours. It may have been a whole night. Or a day. I have no idea. There was no light in the cage, just the flickering television.
    The door, finally, broke open. When I fell out, into the bigger room, I could see that there was a two by four piece of lumber that John had used to wedge the door closed. I had snapped it in half. I was in survival mode. I just knew that I needed to somehow survive and get out of there. I was trying to figure out my surroundings and scanned the room for what I could use for my escape. But there wasn’t anything. I hid underneath in the shadows of the little box hoping that when John came back, I could run out as he came in, or overtake him. Funny now that I think of it. My plan was short lived. As soon as John stepped back into the chamber, his eyes landed on the broken two by four—and then me, quaking in the