buried alive

I was watching a television program about an abduction case. It was horrific, although the victim, a young woman, possibly still in her teens, had survived to tell the tale. The program flicked between interviews with the victim, reconstructed 'footage' of the happenings and interviews with the police who had investigated the crime. The perpetrator, a man of about sixty or older, had abducted the girl, and buried her alive in a vault beneath his house that was fitted with a bed, sparse furniture and even some decoration. In the interview, the young woman recollected how, sitting on the bed, which ran parallel to a wall under the low ceiling, with her back to the wall, she looked to her right and saw the cut-out pages of fairytales, particularly Red Riding Hood. The man had selected the most frightening of images of wolves and nightmarish characters to line the walls. She remembered how, in the dim light, she looked around, slowly realising by the strangeness of the air - its gradual depletion - that she had, indeed, been buried. The police talked of how they later found the skins of various reptiles in the man's possession as the camera panned over skin after skin of snakes and lizards. They mentioned that his mind had been affected by drug-use in the sixties. The program also showed a reconstruction of the man's wife and daughter arriving home on the day of the abduction, unaware of his harrowing deeds. They both went into his study, the room from which the underground chamber could be reached. I, somehow, went into the scene and slowly drank a glass of water in their kitchen, waiting for them to come out, knowing that they were about to discover that something was horribly wrong. They walked out of the study and into the kitchen area, stunned, and looked to me for help. I went with them, back into the study, to see the man lurching about. He had a bleeding cut on his forehead from where his wife had hit him with something, and he was ranting about spitting, saying that it was wrong to spit. He staggered toward me and, although frightened and repulsed, I grabbed his hands to steady him, hoping to calm him and sit him back down. He was clearly out of his mind. The worst and most sickening thing about it was that I recognised the man, though now he was disturbingly changed.