14

Ultimately, U led me to a private residence. I won’t deny that I was taken aback by that. Now, I know it’s me we’re talking about, but I could still separate fantasy from reality back then (if anything, my ability to do so has only gotten worse now), so I wasn’t indulging in delusions that U was some kind of undercover agent who would direct me to her secret hideout (gotta say, I love the phrase “indulging in delusions” and its amazing irony. I dunno who coined the phrase, but the guy must’ve had some incredible delusions). But even with that off the table, I had never figured U would direct me to a regular, residential house in a normal neighborhood.

We’d been walking the whole way, and rather slowly at that, so it had felt like we’d been traveling forever, but overall I didn’t think the place was all that far from the apartment complex I lived in.

Cell phones are so much more advanced now that it’d be easy to use a map function and gauge the exact distance, but that wasn’t a possibility back then. I could only fancy a guess, but I had figured at the time we were at best a mile or two away, not much more than one or two train stops.

I never ended up checking the exact distance, so take that with a grain of salt. The point is, I was kidnapped to a residential home that wasn’t far from my apartment.

I could only speculate, but I was pretty sure that U had taken a long, roundabout way to get us to her house. I think she had even looped a few times in the effort of making it more difficult to figure out where exactly the house was. If we had been in a car, then the tactic might’ve been more effective, but since we were on foot, I couldn’t help but think she put in a lot of effort for no reason. But I also didn’t want to write off that tactic as a child’s immature judgement.

Because that would mean my life was in the hands of a child with immature judgement.

I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced anything that would have been as terrifying as admitting that.

Now, I’ve mentioned that the home was a private residence, so naturally, it had a family nameplate on the entrance. The nameplate displayed the name, “U”. It was the girl’s surname… which meant it was her house.

I call it a private residence because I don’t know any other name to call it, if there are any more, but it was much larger than the standard, singular building you’re probably picturing for a residence. It seemed to be owned by a fairly wealthy family. It wasn’t obnoxiously huge, like a mansion in some kind of manga, and it fit in with the other neighborhood buildings, but it had a natural air of elegance and refinement, I suppose. Like the way the garden was arranged, and the type of car parked out front.

So this is the kind of house U was raised in, I thought. It explained the sense of being well-bred I had gotten from her earlier, making me a little more relieved.

It’s definitely odd to describe feeling relieved after arriving at the destination for my kidnapping, and it definitely wasn’t going to turn out to be some kind of surprise party, but just imagine my situation, and I think you’ll understand. The fact is, the most terrifying part of the equation wasn’t the knife, or the kidnapping, but the girl, U.

I was scared of the unknown, of how incomprehensible she felt, how I couldn’t ever seem to grasp what she was thinking or why she was doing anything. Add to that her strange prioritization of actions, and I was shaken to my core. The whole time, I had felt like I was faced with a small, wild animal rather than a child.

But when I saw that she lived in a house, a residence with a nameplate and a family behind it, I couldn’t help feeling a tad reassured about the whole situation.

Honestly, I felt like I had already been saved. Now, that feeling was far, far too hasty, and this story has only just begun. But that rushed emotion was due to a sense of relief that the girl called U did in fact live a normal, down-to-Earth life.

She wasn’t a monster hiding under the bed, and not some kind of demon spawn.

She was a resident of the same town I was.

That reality made me feel much better, and I felt relieved from some of the overall tension. Looking back a decade later, I can see how foolish that relief was.

“Go in. Ple-”

Obviously I had been standing in front of the gate too long. I felt the knife poke my back once more. Her words had cut off in a strange place, but I could only assume she had meant “please” and I hadn’t heard.

I did as instructed, opening up the gate and entering the premises. Then, after climbing the stone steps up to the front door, U did the most shocking thing yet.

As I stood before the door, she slipped in front of me, pulled out a door key necklace from the collar of her dress, and began working on the locks.

Obviously, she had to use a hand to open up the locks, which was preceded by pulling out a key with said hand. Meaning she had put both knives in one hand, because she wasn’t going to pocket a bare knife.

…Wait, what? I was completely stunned, my thoughts thrown in disarray.

To say I was shocked hardly does the situation justice.

Going through what happened detail by detail would be incredibly nitpicky and ridiculous, but I’m going to do so in the effort of proving that what U did had no ulterior motive or dastardly plan behind her actions.

Basically, U stopped poking my back with her knife, stopped holding me at knifepoint altogether, turned her back to me, and worked on unlocking her house door.

Normally, the right thing for a kidnapper to do… okay, kidnapping is always wrong, but I’m just using an expression… U should have kept one knife on me, dropped the other, taken her key with her free hand, and slipped it to me under my arm so I could unlock the door.

She made me lock the door coming out of the apartment, and in the same way she should have made me unlock the house door.

But that was evidently not the plan.

The situation had entirely changed… without the knife on my back, and with U‘s back turned, there was practically no risk of confrontation or getting hurt any more. Actually, the chances were 0. I could just give U a hard shove and bolt. Not even the slightest risk.

But why had U acted that way? Why go through all that trouble, only to give me a perfect window? Those were questions I couldn’t answer until much later… Now, I’m no mind-reader, and I’m even worse at guessing a person’s true intentions, so I’m just predicting, but given what I later discovered about her, I think this is an accurate prediction.

U had chosen to prioritize the common sense instruction of, “Don’t give your house keys to a stranger.”

She could let me lock my own apartment, but when it came to her house, she could not trust me to work the lock… I know, right?

It’s a wild conclusion to draw, not to mention entirely contrary to all the work she had done to get me there in the first place. A common sense rule just doesn’t take priority there.

But at the time, I had nothing to go on, and no way of understanding U‘s behavior. At that moment, I couldn’t even hope to read her intentions, and I was paralyzed with the notion that it was some kind of trap.

But, a trap? Seriously? What kind of trap did I expect a kid to be able to set for me in a one-on-one scenario? I don’t think the most creative author in the world could take what we had there and craft a scenario where the little girl ends up saying, “You fell for it hook, line, and sinker, you fool!” And I was just an aspiring author, one who had finally felt like he found a real human connection with U that made her somewhat less frightening.

But what was U thinking?

I couldn’t answer that question, and the lack of knowledge gave way to a greater depth of fear. Ultimately, I was just reading too much into it. All U was doing was following her values and selecting her priorities, exactly as she had done a week prior.

Granted, that in itself is terrifying, but I was so cautious about it that I lost my singular, long-awaited chance to truly escape, the one that I had been looking for all that time.

I was so caught off-guard that I couldn’t do anything but stand there in shock.

As I stood there in fear, U unlocked her front door and slipped back behind me. I never saw it, but I’m sure that she re-armed her free hand with the second knife.

“Please go inside,” she stated. Her voice felt closer, and not because she was talking any louder. She was physically closer to me, almost pressing against my back. She seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, which was showing in her sudden change of distance.

I reached out for the front door. I was so taken aback by the girl’s behavior that I didn’t even process anything, just doing as I was told.

I opened up the door and stepped inside.

Exactly as commanded.

Just so you’re aware, going into someone else’s house is an incredibly rare occurrence for me. I’d say that in all my 30 years, I’ve probably only visited some 10 people’s houses… and that includes relatives. But in all honesty, that may be an exaggeration, something that my memory is trying to hype up, so all I can guarantee is that the number is less than 20.

I don’t like other people in my house, but I don’t like going into other people’s houses, either.

I’ve already said that I don’t like other people touching my things, but I also don’t like borrowing things from anyone. I don’t like touching other people’s stuff, to the point that I don’t even like sitting in a chair that someone else has sat in. But despite knowing I don’t like it, I can’t really explain why, unfortunately.

As far as I can tell, I’m just a very territorial person.

I don’t know where I learned the concept that what’s mine is mine and what belongs to someone else is theirs, but that’s one of my most basic instincts in everyday life.

All this to say that the moment I crossed the threshold into U‘s house, I was assaulted by a torrent of stress. I already felt like hyperventilating. Walking into another person’s house, on top of that a whole family that I knew absolutely nothing about, was an incredibly painful experience.

I do not like dealing with the unique scents that each house has. Even if it’s just a specific air freshener, every house has a particular smell, a reminder that it’s not mine. I can’t stand having to be in the air that belongs to someone else.

Of course, in that instance, my ability to deal with it was less important than the knife on my back, so I stood in silence as the door closed behind me.

Another wordless poke came across perfectly well, and I removed my shoes. I forget what shoes I was wearing then, but it became clear later on that U entirely disposed of them. That was the last time I ever put on or took off that pair of shoes. I wasn’t particularly attached to the shoes, but even writing about it 10 years later I get angry at the thought of somebody else disposing of my belongings without telling me. And yes, I know that’s petty.

Looking at it one way, it’s possible she got rid of them because they were so worn out it looked like it was time to throw them out. What counted as sneakers to me may very well have registered as trash to U, and in her mind I could have been a strange man walking around in garbage.

Walking is something of a hobby for me, and to this day, both for stress relief and general health reasons, I try to walk at least 20,000 steps every day. I wear out most shoes within a month. Even then, when I rode my bike a lot and didn’t have a job to stress me out (I was writing, but that wasn’t a job), I still walked much more than the average person, and my shoes were worn out more often than not.

I guess normally, shoes would be tossed out anyway as outlying evidence during a kidnapping… Well, either way, I took off my shoes and stood on the entrance mat. At that point, the “I’ve entered somebody else’s house” feeling took full effect.

My first emotional response was a wave of guilt, as if I’d trespassed for a burglary or something, even though that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Quite to the contrary, I’d been threatened and forced inside.

That being the case, what was I actually up against? I noticed just then that not a single set of shoes adorned the shoe racks. I got a vague, uncertain feeling that the house was more of a deserted space than it should have been.

If I was really on top of it, I would have concluded that U‘s parents weren’t even home given her obvious status of latchkey kid. All in all, I had been put into a very problematic situation that I had no quick route out of. If only I had noticed sooner.

But I was too busy feeling relieved that I was in a regular house rather than an abandoned factory or some suspicious secret hideout. In fact, my only concern at the time was the possible misunderstanding that U could have created by bringing me into her home. As in, what if her parents walked in?

It was a very dangerous what if.

U may have been holding me at knifepoint, but the obvious conclusion would be that she was wielding a knife to try and fend off a random university student intruding in her home.

I could probably come out on top with a logical explanation, but it wasn’t fair to expect U‘s parents to be ready to listen attentively to my logic in that scenario. I considered the effectiveness of showing them the scars on my back and calf, then quickly ditched the idea of showing off my calf once I realized how much more convincing showing my back would be.

Looking from 10 years in the future, it’s clear how misplaced my very serious yet somewhat idealized worries were. My mind was simply overwhelmed with the pressure of being in someone else’s house, and I was losing it. I began seriously considering running away, even at the risk of personal injury, even if it meant damaging my hands. My future as an author was starting to look a whole lot less important than my future as a human being. Dying was one thing, but living in the shame of false accusations would arguably be worse.

But I couldn’t make such a monumental decision on such short notice, and U very quickly removed her shoes and came up on the step behind me. She jabbed my back again (I was sure that I had several bleeding cuts at that point).

“That way.”

I didn’t know which way she meant, but it seemed that she was directing me towards the stairs. But my assumption was immediately corrected.

“No. That way,” she asserted, slashing her knife across my back in the direction she wanted me to go. If it were modern times, I might want to reprimand her and say not to swipe people’s backs like a tablet, but I couldn’t have come up with such a clever comeback in a time where touch screens were barely accessible. And even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have said it.

U pointed to a storage room near the stairs. By all appearances it seemed to be a regular walk-in closet, but as we got closer, another command came forth.

“Open it.”

I pushed the sliding door to the side, discovering it really was just a storage closet, packed with all sorts of odds and ends. The closet didn’t even sport a light bulb.

I assumed she wanted me to get something out of it.

Just as the thought crossed my mind, U issued another command. She had become much more comfortable with giving me orders. Her voice no longer fluctuated in volume, and her tone was staying consistent.

From my perspective 10 years later, I can pinpoint that as the spot where she reclaimed her ability to speak. I can hardly think of that as wholesome growth, though.

“Go inside,” she commanded.

I figured that confirmed my guess that she wanted me to get something for her. So I thought I knew her purpose, which meant I knew her intentions, which gave way to understanding her logic, and my emotions began calming a little bit.

My fear of her only came down to not being able to understand her thought process… Even as I had that thought and my volatile emotions started to settle, I was still cautious, and never for a moment assumed that U had done everything just to get me to play chauffeur.

But in the end, or to be more blunt as quickly as I could manage, I got into the closet as U commanded, meaning I had followed each and every one of her orders to the letter by that point.

Looking back, given that my opponent was a girl ten years my junior, I feel kind of pathetic about how acquiescent I was. Especially since my compliance had no further goal like revenge or seeking escape.

And so I ended up climbing into a closet just to go with the flow. Any third party who walked in would definitely just call me a thief if they saw me there.

But the situation took a completely different turn.

For just a moment, I was relieved from the fear that U would be pushing me around for all eternity, as she did not follow me into the closet.

She had, in fact, stopped right before the entrance.

She may have been behind me, but I could ascertain her presence and distance from her breathing, among other things. If someone had stuck to your back for such a long time and finally stepped away (as she had at the entrance), then you would notice it, too.

On reflex, I turned around.

U was standing in the doorway, watching me. Observing me. Suddenly, her hand swiped horizontally as she slammed the door shut. There was a loud thump, followed by a click.

The distinct click of a lock turning.

A lock? A key?

Wait, what just happened to me?

I’ve been locked in? Inside a closet?

The door was closed in a closet with no lightbulb, so I was instantly plunged into pitch-black darkness. The closet was so packed with stuff that I couldn’t really move, but that didn’t stop me from raising my voice in protest to U as she stood outside the door. I demanded to know what she was doing.

Compared to everything else, like getting a knife pointed at me, getting slashed, or having my bike get wrecked, being locked in a closet wasn’t all that much worse. But it was a different fear than the threat of direct harm.

A reply came to my many protests.

“You saw me, so…” the voice said. “So I have to do this. I have to lock you up and take responsibility for you.”

Take responsibility?

She said it like it was the most obvious conclusion in the world. I was stunned into silence.

“Or else you’ll tell. About who I really am.”

And so it began.

My one week of imprisonment.