Candle light.

It's the first thing I see when I peer behind the blanket. The light is dim, but my eyes have become so adjusted to the near-perfect darkness outside that the flickering flames almost blind me.

The room is mostly just as I now remember it to have been when I'd first fallen through the hole and onto the concrete floor a year ago: the shelves filled with tools and greasy auto parts, the dusty workbench, the deflated tires in the corner.

But what catches my breath and sends my stomach into a panicked nausea is what I see lying against the far wall.

Not just one mattress, but six, now line the floor in a crude row.

And atop each mattress is a girl.

Six teens, all about my age, lie with their hands bound by tightly-twisted wire that runs from their wrists to bolts in the wall. Their mouths are gagged, and their bodies—emaciated and ashy—are shrouded in filthy nightgowns. They wear nothing else. 

Their faces, though, are obscured by strips of duct tape. As my eyes adjust to the light, I see that the tape holds narrow tubes in place. The tubes appear to be running from the girls' noses. Each of the tubes leads to a single canister, standing beside the shelves like a massive bullet capped with a pressure valve.

It's obvious that the canister contains the same kind of drug that had been sprayed into my nose a year ago, and that it's now keeping the six girls on the mattresses constantly sedated and compliant.

They're all asleep, perfectly still, barely breathing at all as if they're in comas. I struggle to conceive of the horrors that must have taken place in this basement over the last year. It's obvious that the guy who had touched me on train must have kidnapped all six of them. 

I flash back to him pinching a cigarette between his pinky and thumb, three missing fingers per hand. The gruesome math becomes undeniable when I notice the upturned milk crate at the foot of each mattress. Atop each crate is a cigarette box: a Marlboro box, a Parliament box, other brands I don't recognize. Each box rests on a crate before a different girl like an offering at an altar. I have no doubt that each box contains a finger, and I have no doubt that he must be repeatedly raping each of these girls: six girls taken at the cost, in his twisted logic, of his six severed fingers.