You'll have to bear with me while I tell you my story. So much of it is written from the hazy recollections of someone who was in captivity. Don't misunderstand. I wasn't abused in the traditional sense. I was well-kept, I was well-fed, and I really wanted for nothing except my freedom.
It all started one day when I visited a new therapist.
Dr. McAllister had been recommended by a friend of mine. He said that he was very good and that he had helped him get through a lot of the issues he had with his mother and discover some things about his sexuality. He put you under and put you in touch with your real self, and that was how he overcame a lot of your issues. It all sounded great to me. I'd been having trouble sleeping and was looking for some way to get the sleep I needed to function. My insomnia would sometimes last for days, and it was starting to affect my life.
So, I made an appointment, and two weeks later, I was lying on his couch listening to Dr. McAllister countdown from ten as he put me in a suggestive trance.
It was very sudden, like blinking, but everything changed after that trance.
When I came out just as suddenly, Dr. McAllister looked strange, and I asked if something had happened?
Strange may not be descriptive enough.
He looked somehow enraptured, enlightened, utterly worshipful.
"You…you spoke to me about things that you couldn't possibly have known. You talk to me about my childhood. You helped me get over the death of my mother. You helped me more in this hour-long session than I've ever helped anyone."
I wasn't sure what he was talking about, but when he gripped my hand, his eyes shone with the light of a zealot.
"I need more. Please let me put you back under so I can discover more."
I pulled away from him and took a huge step back. What the hell was he talking about? I had come here for help, but suddenly he wanted me to help him. I had to get out of here. I had to leave now. McAllister tried to stop me, but I was out the door before he could say much more than stop. I didn’t sleep well that night either, and it became a real problem. Sometimes I would lay in my bed and swear I heard whispers, but I put it off as auditory hallucinations. I hadn’t slept well for the past three weeks, and I knew it was starting to catch up to me. When I would force myself out of the house for work or to run errands, I could swear I felt someone watching me. What's more, I could swear I’d catch glimpses of someone out of the corner of my eye, but they would always be gone when I turned to look at them. It never happened in my house, always when I was out and about, and the paranoia on top of the sleep deprivation was slowly eroding my sanity.
So when I heard someone open a window in my living room one night, I rolled over and just thought it was me having paranoid hallucinations.
Turns out it hadn’t been hallucinations.
When I heard someone open my bedroom door, I rolled over and found Dr. McAllister standing there watching me. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well either, and his eyes looked crazed as we stood looking at each other. I wasn’t sure if he was real or not, but when he lunged at me, I curled into a ball and cried out for him to stop. He didn’t attack me though, didn’t hurt me at all, though I now wish he had killed me right there.
Instead, he just slipped a needle into my arm and as I watched his thumb push down the plunger, I felt waves of warm and inviting sleep roll through me.
I woke up in a finished basement, the lights turned down low, strapped to a chair as Doctor McAllister made sure my bindings were comfortable. I struggled, my limbs heavy and uncoordinated, but he held up a fresh needle and told me that if I didn’t calm down, he was going to put me out again. I made myself as still as I could, not sure what to expect here. This didn’t seem to be a sexual thing, I was fully dressed, and the way he was tending to me almost felt worshipful.
“I didn’t want it to come to this, but I can’t live without the knowledge you possess. I know you don’t believe what I’m saying, but while you were unconscious you told me about things that may very well change my life. You spoke to me of things that opened my eyes, ideas I had never even conceived of, and the longer I went without hearing your voice again, the more I felt my newfound serenity crumbling. I’m sorry, I’m not usually like this, but I had to possess you, to have your knowledge, and to understand your words. I can promise you that while you remain with me you will want for nothing. You are, to me, as a captured God that I wish to understand.”
We talked a lot that night, though I mostly yelled at him to let me go, but, in the end, he just injected me with something to knock me out and I drifted off into a peaceful unconsciousness.
And that was how I became Doctor McAllister's captive God.
I will say that, while I was with him, I never wanted for restful sleep.
This was due in part to the fact that I spend most of my time in a near-catatonic state. Doctor McAllister kept me restrained in a large underground area that I always thought of as The Basement. I was seated in a large comfortable chair, my hands secured to the arms with soft straps. There was a remote at hand, I was allowed to watch anything I wanted on television as long as the Doctor was away. If I was hungry all I had to do was push a button and a short blond woman who I would later discover was the Doctor’s Wife would bring me anything I wanted.
In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. I was kept in a sluggish state from the drugs he used on me to induce the state he wanted, but it wasn’t bad. I watched tv, I ate, and I existed. Given that I had worked forty-plus hour work weeks and lived off crappy food for most of my adult life, it felt almost like pampering. I was free to do what I liked, except leave or talk to people who were likely wondering what had happened to me. My mom, my dad, my friend, did any of them wonder what had happened to me? It may seem odd to you that I never tried to escape, but my head was always in a cloud of some sort. The drugs left me just lucid enough to consume tv or audiobooks, but I never felt able to really settle my thoughts on anything in particular. I knew I should want to escape, but it was always a hard concept to catch hold of.
Those days were the good days, back when Dr. McAllister was still operating his practice.
That was when McAllister was still pretending to have a normal life.
He would come down in the evenings and talk with me, just telling me his problems and asking me to help. He would ask me about stocks or bonds, the housing market, business ideas, patents, and inventions, and I would try my best to direct him in the way he wanted. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, my head was too foggy most of the time to make any sense of it, but I would try my best to help him without the need to be placed into an unconscious state. We’d talk for hours about everything from the state of his marriage, the depraved childhood he had lived through, the future of psychology, and even the condition of his soul. I didn’t always want to hear what he had to say, but I understood that it didn’t really matter what I wanted.
It didn’t seem to matter, anyway.
We would talk for hours but the end result was always a needle in my arm or my neck and several hours of blissful unconsciousness. I remember little from these periods of blackout, fortunately, but sometimes I would go to a dark place and just hang suspended in the murk. Things would whisper to me there, tell me things I couldn’t understand, and I was powerless to stop them. This happened very rarely, but it was still too often for my tastes. I don’t know what I said to Doctor McAllister in those times, but there was always a drastic change when I came back to myself.
It wasn’t always for the better, either.
Once I came back to myself and felt something wet in my lap. I glanced down, which was difficult because my head was strapped to the headrest, and found that someone had thrown a head into my lap. I flinched away from it as my soggy brain finally clicked it all together, but it was little more than a shudder in my current state. The head had wispy gray hair, a pair of broken glasses hanging across the face by one ear, and a nose full of broken veins from a lifetime of drinking. I didn’t recognize it, but as it soaked the pants of my pajamas, I did feel like it was familiar somehow.
Doctor McAllister was sitting across from me, looking expectantly at the gift he had literally dropped in my lap, and I looked at it with confusion as I asked why he had done this?
“You told me to,” he said, a little shocked, “You said if I meant to truly get over the cruelty and abuse that my father had given me, then I had to destroy the icon of my father within myself. So I did. I told him that I wanted to meet so we could discuss our past and reconcile. He was ecstatic, he hadn’t seen me in twenty years, and oh did we reconcile. I waited for him to turn around and I bashed his head in with a hammer, choking him to death as he lay twitching on the floor. Then I took the body and disposed of it, cutting the head off so I could show you that I had followed instructions. You are so wise, so correct, and I am your loyal disciple.”
I started screaming, mindless gibbering noise, but he just bowed to me, and when the head hit the ground next to him he didn’t even flinch.
That was my first inclination that the things I was saying in my sleep might be used in ways I had never considered.
After that, he started bringing people down to see me.
At first, it was his wife, the blonde woman who had been feeding me. She looked skeptical as she approached, content to keep her husband's secrets but unsure of joining him in this new experiment. I knew from our talks that he was afraid she would leave him, but enjoyed the financial stability of their marriage.
He stuck me with the needle as she sat a few feet away, and when I came to she was bowing and crying and she thanked me for helping her see the truth.
“My husband was right. You are truly a God. I was wrong to ever doubt him, or you.”
After that, it was friends and colleagues.
They all seemed confused when he introduced them to me, calling me his God of Knowledge, and some of them laughed, thinking it was a joke. They would sit and talk to me, listening to my answers and looking at McAllister as if to ask if this were some elaborate prank? In the end, though, when I came back from the little naps he would subject me to, it was always the same. Their smirk of disbelief or scowl of confusion was replaced with rapturous awe and they would pledge their undying fealty to me.
No matter how many of them I begged to release me, the outcome was always the same.
Over time, a religion of sorts began to form.
Over time, McAllister drew in his cult.
It was only a few at first, five or ten, but it began to grow into a sizable flock. The followers began to take care of me, washing and feeding and seeing to my every whim except the most important. I would ask them to release me, beg them to let me go, but it was always interpreted as a test of some sort. Their God was testing them to see if they were loyal to the here or to the hereafter and they would thank me for helping them fortify their belief in me as they slid my hands back into the restraints or pushed my head back into the buckles. I yelled at them, called them idiots, and tried to push them, but the constant use of sedatives and the lack of exercise had made me weak. I wasn’t wasting away, but I wasn’t getting the exercise I needed, to be certain. I could do little to free myself, my bonds always replaced, and after a while, I just gave in.
The funny thing was that whatever I was telling them while I was under was working.
McAllister showed me the money he had made, won, earned from stock and selling property, and the Cult thrived. What's more, they all claimed to have cast off whatever addiction or mental health problems or childhood trauma had plagued them and were addicted now to nothing but serving me. Like McAllister had said, those who tried to leave or to return to their lives reported feeling hopeless and manic unless they could return to my presence and hear my words, whatever they were.
That was when things began to get bad.
McAllister was truly addicted to my influence and it led him to overstep.
McAllister had been gathering his followers at his home, and while it was large, it was becoming too small to hold all of them. I can’t really speculate on how many were there, but the basement was standing-room only. I sat beneath a small bar that he was standing on, and the sea of bodies was dizzying. Though he was speaking, they all looked at me as if I were speaking through him. So many eyes looking at me, my body still held in the chair I had sat in for God knew how long, was something I never got used to. It never made me feel like a deity, it never made me feel powerful to have them worship me.
I always felt like a pet, its freedom just one opened door away.
McAllister said they would be moving to a new place soon, a place that would house them all comfortably. They could all stay there indefinitely, leaving their jobs and lives behind so they could care for their captive God. He didn’t say where it was, but he said they would all go this afternoon and to prepare for a long journey. They were all so happy, their faces enraptured as he told them of their new home, but I began to feel that this would never end.
When he began to bring people to see me, I had hoped that someone would fail to see me as he did and get me out of here. They would take me away from him, they would call the police, and I would be saved from my captivity. That never happened, whatever power I had held them in sway and after a while I doubted that I would ever get out of here. I didn’t know how long I had been McAllister’s Captive God, but I knew that no matter how comfortable the life, this had to end.
I decided then that if they weren’t going to get me out, I would have to do it myself.
Strangely, my chance came that very day.
They had all left me so they could prepare, and as I sat in the shadowy basement, I realized that my wrist strap was undone. This had never happened before, and for a moment I wasn't sure what to do. It took all the energy I had to focus enough to get that hand to undo the other strap, and when I bent down to undo my legs, the effort seemed to take years. My mind was like unraveled yarn, and it was hard to focus on any particular task. When the bonds came off my legs, I got shakily to my feet before bending to rub some life into them. They were prickly from lack of use, and I took shaky steps as I made for the stairs.
I got to the top before I was discovered.
I peeked through the door and into the barren kitchen beyond. The cupboards were empty, the countertops clean, and I could tell that this room had already been cleaned out for the move. I had just decided to take a step out and make for the back door when someone walked into the kitchen and saw me. They called for McAllister, walking to me as they insisted I return to my chair. I pushed at them, telling them to get out of my way, but as I lunged for the back door, I heard others coming in to stop me. I made it to the backyard, squinting as the sun hit my eyes, but found it fenced with tall wooden boards. I was grabbed then by many hands, and when someone slipped a needle into my neck, I looked back to see McAllister instructing them to get me to the car.
I came to some time later and I was laying in an elaborate bed, my hands cuffed to the frame.
That began the worst part of my confinement, though it was thankfully the end of it.
After that, the drugging became worse. McAllister and his inner circle kept me in a near-constant catatonic state. The drugs he used were no longer just injected, and they began to experiment with other substances. The documents that were found later said they received different outcomes when different kinds of drugs were used, and they often sat around and drank or laughed as I came in and out of reality. I was aware of nothing in those times, a ship drifting on a sea of time. I could have been with them for days, I could have spent decades under their control, but to me, time was only islands glimpsed from afar. I didn’t see many people in that time, just the five or so who were in McAllister’s inner circle, but these men always spoke as if they were doing very well. Often there was cigar smoke around my bed, the smell of expensive liquor, and always the low murmur of talk as they waited for me to tell them what else they might do to gain more power. I had become their oracle, their captive God as opposed to a revered deity, and they threatened to use me up.
These are the times I remember the least about, except for the end.
I spent a lot of my days in a black stupor, and the more they experimented, the more often I was back in the black place. When I came back from these trances, I noticed a change in my captor. Gone were the shining eyes of the enraptured. Disappeared were the weeping orbs of the enlightened. They were replaced by the flinty eyes of the zealot, and I was afraid that he might break his promise. He looked angry, but also resolved. Whatever I had told him weighed heavily on him, but I wouldn’t understand the burden for a while yet.
Not till the day it all came to an end.
I came to one afternoon to find an intrusive light leaking into my dark chamber. They had always kept me in this persistently dark room, but now the door was open, and something was laying in it. On the floor there were others, none of them moving, and I was confused by their sudden stillness. Was this something new? Were they sleeping or…were they… I tried to put that thought out of my mind. They couldn’t be dead, I reminded myself as I shook my chains. If they were all dead, then who would free me so I didn’t die here too.
“I did as you said,” came a monotone voice, and I jumped as I realized one of the slumped forms had only been praying.
It was McAllister and he looked wild. His salt and pepper hair was sticking up at odd angles and his face was spattered with blood. His shirt was soaked in something and it hung on him like a wet sack. He appeared to be praying, but as something clicked in his shaking hands, I saw that he had a gun. I was afraid that he would shoot me too for half a second, but as he put it under his chin, I became even more afraid that he would use it on himself.
“I have risen as high as I can. Your will dictates that I must shed my vehicle to rise any higher. I shall see you on the other side.”
His blood made a crimson line across my face as the gun went off, and suddenly my fear was realized.
I was alone.
Luckily for me, someone heard that gunshot.
I would lay in that bed for two days before the FBI came to investigate the compound. It turned out they had been keeping an eye on McAllister for quite some time, ever since he had started gathering followers at his home. After two years in his new compound, they had been trying to prepare a case against him before he woke up one morning and decided to put an end to his little flock. With the help of his wife, they had poisoned the morning meal and McAllister had drawn his inner circle to a meeting before breakfast where he shot them as they sat and listened to my latest ramblings.
They had found journals that claimed these were things I had told him to do, but after interviewing me, I think they decided he was out of his mind.
At least, that's what Agent Maxet led me to believe.
“We’re going to have to hold you as a person of interest, but it honestly sounds like you were an unwilling participant. I’m going to go and get some things in order, have a seat in here and we’ll make some accommodations for you.”
After he left, I noticed the recorder sitting on the table. It wasn’t running, which I had expected, and when I reached for it, I saw that the tape inside had a date on it that I remembered. It was the date of my first session with Doctor McAllister. I couldn’t imagine a reason behind the FBI having a tape with that date on it unless McAllister had recorded it for some reason. I put the recorder back down, trying to stop my curiosity before it could take root.
I had never heard what I sounded like in that state that seemed to enrapture the old doctor so much.
What had I said to him to make him throw his whole life away in the pursuit of it?
I couldn’t help myself. I hit play on the recording and listened as McAllister told me to be calm and began to count down from ten. It wasn’t the jagged, often flighty voice I remembered from any time after this session. This was McAllister at his most sane, and as he came to one, I heard him gasp and ask what I was doing.
From the recording, I heard a slightly deeper version of my own voice, and it filled me with dread.
“Agent Maxet has listened to the tapes, and he’s becoming as unstable as the good doctor. If you don’t escape now, I fear that he’ll have you just like McAllister did. You’ll have to be quick and you’ll have to be smart, but if you mean to be free, you need to find a way to get out of here. Good luck.”
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