Revenge13 min read
I Drank the Wrong Bottle and Bought a Door to Hell
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They told me the job would be quick. They told me to trust a man who posted in a group about shoots and bookings. I wanted work. I wanted money. I wanted a chance.
"My name is Hilary," I said into the phone one afternoon when a man in the WeChat group said he had a shoot. "I can do it. I'm available."
"You look like a good fit," he answered. "Meet me tonight. Come alone."
"What's the pay?" I asked.
"Three thousand, day job," he said. "Pretty face, can last long hours. Come to the car."
He called himself Eric Jackson in messages. He looked like a smooth city man in the dark inside his black Audi. He smiled, handed me a bottle of water, and said, "Drink. We'll talk."
I drank.
"I felt dizzy," I told you, but words do not carry poison. It wasn't until my vision went soft and the inside of my head hummed that I knew I had been betrayed.
"Hey, wake up," someone said later. The voice was not my rescuer. It was a man's voice that had no softness left.
I opened my eyes to straw and the smell of animals. My legs burned like they had been hit. My clothes were torn. The room smelled of sheep and old sweat. I was in a wooden shack. The small window had bars. My mouth tasted of metal.
"Who are you?" I croaked.
The man who had given me the bottle stood in the doorway. "Eric," he said, like the name could make me safe. "You were a good find."
"You drugged me," I said. My voice was thin. "You sold me."
Eric's smile was a knife. "You were a good find," he repeated. "You looked ready to work."
"Please," I said. "Please—let me go."
Eric looked down like I was an item. "You're worth money," he said. "Don't make this hard."
They came at night. Men I did not know. Some laughed. Some did not. One man smelled of cigarettes and old anger; another smelled of iron. They left and came back, left and came back. The shack became a rotation of hands and hunger.
I slept little. I kept watch for a chance. I ate nothing, pretending I could starve myself into escape. The first time I tried to run, I collapsed into a ditch and was brought back. My skin was bruised. My ribs ached.
"Eat," the man who guarded me said once, dropping a battered tin into the doorway. He had a metal collar around his neck like a joke. "Fat keeps you strong."
"You will let me go," I said. I thought to bargain the way some of the models always do—smile when scared, promise what they do not mean.
"Who told you that?" he snarled. He took my tin from me and shoved me back. "You belong here."
I tried to remember my life before the bottle. My mother saying, "Don't go alone." My feet on a concrete stage. I tried to remember the last time I laughed. Memory is a soft thing; it keeps you alive like a hot stone under the skin.
The bigger man who ran things—Kenneth Schmitt—showed up sometimes. He smelled of sweat and predatory patience. He kept a ledger, counted money, and never looked me in the eyes as if I could fall into his thoughts and escape.
"You're not a girl," he said once, flipping through a small notebook. "You're a coin. A coin that keeps rolling. Don't think."
I learned how the trade worked. Eric found. Kenneth kept. A man named Bryant Clement bought. The vet, George Fitzpatrick, fixed what they beat and took pride in the instruments that removed life.
One day a young doctor—Andre Elliott—came to give me soup. He was not like the rest. He had intelligent eyebrows and clean hands. He touched my forehead like he believed fever could betray where a person hid mercy.
"Give me a reason to help," Andre whispered when he thought Kenneth wasn't listening.
"I will do anything," I said. That was the first promise I meant.
Time is a long knife in a place like that. The seasons moved without calendars. I saw girls die. I watched a girl's body emptied and pushed into a carry box and men count the notes as if payment could replace breath. I scrubbed the floor for a living and listened to the men outside ring deals like church bells.
"You're brave," Andre told me once, offering me a piece of candy. "Careful. Brave isn't the same as safe."
"Tell me where the county road is," I begged.
"I can't," he said. He looked at me like a man drowning with both arms in pockets. "If I help... they'll kill me."
"Help me," I said that night, more press than plea.
He came again. He brought pills and sugar and the small human things that keep a body from being only pain.
"You are not made for this," he said simply.
"Who made me for this?" I asked.
He did not answer with words. He sat and held my hand.
I got pregnant. I feared a new life like I feared fire, like I feared being loved enough to be used for another man's greed. My body rounded into something else, and the men argued about its value as if human futures were cattle prices.
"She is worth more if she has a child," Kenneth said, teeth bared.
"You breed them and sell them," Bryant said once, staring at my belly as if he could put a price tag on the shape.
I could not be a mother in that place. My body held a small life I could not promise. When a baby's cry spilled into the dawn, something cold nodded in my chest.
I took the baby to the river. I held her for only a small handful of minutes and then let the water take her. The river did not care about my reasons. The river did what rivers do. I watched the infant bob and disappear. I told myself, "She will not know this world." I told myself anything to quiet the part that was human.
When Bryant discovered what I had done, he beat me like a man empty of mercy. He thought he owned my sins and my body and my choices. He wanted a child to be his, and instead he had a corpse in the water.
"He will make them pay," I promised myself flatly as I sat on the dirt, holding my belly where the baby had been. I learned to be a thing of plans. Survival forced a clarity into me like glass into the palm.
I started to play a dangerous game. I let Andre touch me with something like gentleness and plotted like a woman at a chessboard. I let him pass sugar. I let him bring me medicine. I told him, "You can take me if you like."
He hesitated like a clean-handed man who had not touched a woman for a long time. "I can't," he said. "I won't—"
"Then help me," I said. "Help me kill him. Help me end this."
"You have to promise it's for the good," Andre said, voice small. "Not for revenge that eats you alive."
"I promise," I said. Promises are tools. I learned to use them.
We set a trap. Kenneth drank, laughing at how much power he still believed he had. He bragged about sales and appointments. "Eric brings the girls," he said. "We make money. We keep the girls. The world is simple."
That night, after much planning, I hit Kenneth with the heavy bottle I had kept under the bed. Andre didn't like the sight of it. He held his face and looked away. He helped where he could. Kenneth fell. He roared like an animal, but pain takes the edge off bravado.
"Finish him," Andre hissed through his teeth, shaking.
"I didn't ask you to help me make a corpse," I said fast. "You promised me a way out. Help me get out."
We beat him until he stopped moving. We wrapped him in old blankets. In the cold light of morning, we watched the body cool. Andre was sick. I traced the lines of his face like proof we were alive.
"You did this," he said. "You could have been free, but now you have a murderer in your hands."
"I had a murderer in my hands before," I said. "Now he's quiet."
We buried him deep under a pile of rocks. The village dogs never stopped circling the place until the bones did what bones must do.
Eric came later with another girl—a bright one with dyed hair named Audrey Svensson. She looked at me the way every lost person looks at someone who has mapped the exit.
"Help me," she whispered. "Please."
"I am not your savior," I told her, with a voice that had learned to be small and sharp. "I am the only one who knows the route."
She clung to me like a map. I taught her how to walk quietly, how to pretend, how to hide her panic.
Eric never truly trusted me. He suspected me—good. Suspicion keeps a predator awake. But he came with money and greed and tasted the notion of more. He did not know his end was being written.
"We have to make him pay," I told Andre. "He will not stop."
"He sells them," Andre said. He put a hand to his mouth, the way people touch a wound.
"So will we sell him," I said.
We laced the meat Eric ate with poison—slow enough to be agony, not instant release. I watched him eat like a man who had never been taught to value the humanity he trafficked. He rolled on the floor later, clutching his stomach. He shouted, and his voice broke into parts.
"You bastard! You—" he choked. "You poisoned me!"
He crawled like a wounded animal. The men around him laughed at first, then kept their distance as the sound of his suffering filled the dark shack.
"Why are you doing this?" he gasped at me, face grey and knotted.
"For every girl you sold," I said. "For the hands you put on them. For the body I had to try and keep. For the child I couldn't keep."
"You're a monster," he rasped.
"A monster you made," I answered.
He begged. He cursed. He made threats that turned thin as his breath left him thicker than the screams he'd heard before. I sat and watched him fold. I did not feel triumph like the stories say. I felt the drop of water on hot metal—inevitable and cold.
When Eric died, his body lay in the dirt. We did not celebrate. We cleaned the floor as if to say we were only workers sweeping up a mess. But his death did not end the chain. George Fitzpatrick, the vet, who had helped them harvest parts once, remained. He feared exposure. He feared losing his small, crude empire. He brought a new man to buy girls, a man who smelled like city money and slick hands.
A new trafficker came to the village, believing he had discovered a cheap route. He had no idea the house already had contempt hiding in it.
I had learned to use money as bait. I had learned to write out ledgers and say the things that make men greedy. I fed them false promises and asked them to trust me with very small pieces of their plans.
Then I did something worse: I planned for an audience.
I went to the county market with a basket of clothes and the money we had taken as part of the trade. I went to the only place that had people who would speak aloud and gather. I walked to the square where men drink tea and talk about weather and roads. I asked to borrow the vet's new buyer—a man who had come into town to sell the idea of a route. I asked that he come to the square with me and meet "investors."
He laughed the arrogant laugh of a man used to saying yes. He came with a few of his men. The town's square was full of midday life: women bargaining for vegetables, children running, old men playing chess under the awning. The sun made the dust golden and the benches filled.
"What's this about?" the new trafficker asked, tired.
I set the basket down. "Just business," I said. My voice was steady.
Andre stood beside me, hands clenched. Audrey was at my back. We had planned for witnesses, and the market gave them to us like a theater.
"Is this a show?" one old man called. "Who are you?"
"I'm Hilary O'Brien," I said loudly. "Do you know Eric Jackson?"
Murmur. Faces turned. Eric's name carried. I pointed at a man in a neat jacket standing nearby—the man the vet had brought. "He works with him. He thought he could buy girls for a small price and hide in the dark."
The man's smile faltered. "What are you saying?" he asked, suddenly small under the sun.
"I'm saying," I called, "that they trade in girls. They sell them for parts and money. They take them from towns like ours. They rob families of children. They make farms out of women."
A woman who sold tea stopped pouring. "That's a lie," she said.
"Is it?" I asked. "Do you want to hear one woman's proof?"
I told the market part of the story—short, sharp. I told them about the water, the shack, the smell of the river, about girls taken and never returned, about puppet bodies in a box. I said the names I could: Eric Jackson. Kenneth Schmitt. Bryant Clement. George Fitzpatrick.
"You're accusing a man's friends," a man said from a table. "This is serious."
"It is," I said. "Do you want the money we took?" I pulled out a stack of notes—dirty, small. "He has money on him. He trades it like it's fruit. Here is proof. Here are the girls who survived." I gestured at Audrey and another woman, Elsie Eklund, who had her arm in a bandage.
People's faces changed. Shock was the first coat. Then curiosity. Then anger, like a roll call in a room getting bigger.
"You sold girls?" an old woman in a red scarf asked the square junta suddenly.
He coughed, searching. "I—no—"
"Look at him," I said. "He was part of it."
Someone in the crowd spat. "We have daughters," a man shouted. "We have sisters. We have mothers. We will not have traffickers sitting in our market."
The new trafficker did not fall to his knees. He tried to buy silence with a few gestures to his men. One of them reached for a phone. Another started to walk away. The market had turned. They were outnumbered by everyday life.
"Call the police!" a woman yelled.
"Call them yourself!" he replied, suddenly nervous. "You don't know what this woman is capable of."
"Enough!" a young shopkeeper shouted. He walked forward, eyes hot. "Tell us where the boys keep them. Tell us where these girls were taken from."
We told the names and places and the shallow graves we had left. We told of the river and the coldness of being used. People gasped and the old men set their chess boards aside. A crowd gathers fast in a small town when something smells like a lie being exposed.
"Do you deny this?" I asked him, my voice cutting through the noise.
He looked around, and fear finally filled his neat jacket. "This is impossible. People like me don't do such things in public."
"People like you do them in dark rooms," I said. "But you didn't teach them to be quiet. You taught them to think they could get away."
The crowd moved like a tide. The shopkeeper slapped his hand. "If there's a crime, then a crime is here," he said. "You—stand up. Say what you did. Today you will know what shame looks like."
"Shame?" the man laughed, but it was a broken sound. He tried to push past, but a boy with a sack of grain stood in his way.
"You let them hurt girls," the boy said simply.
"You're a liar," the man said.
"Then come with us to the square," I said. "Let them ask you. Let them look at the money and the boxes."
One of the buyer's men tried to grab Audrey. The crowd hissed. The shopkeeper took off his shirt and slapped the man's face so hard the man reeled. People shouted. Others pulled the buyer across a bench. The square became a courtroom of angry lives.
"You used us," Audrey screamed, finally loud and clear. "You took me from my home. You lied. You saw me cry and you sold me for notes. You think your jacket hides you? Look at your hands."
The man swore. People circled him. Someone started to take photos. Someone who owed a favor to the deputy held out a hand and said, "We will not let this pass. We can take him to the station if you'll sign a complaint."
"Take him to the station then," he demanded. His voice broke.
"They will check the records," I said. "They will come with papers. But first, you must answer in front of these people. You must hear the women you hurt tell it. You must feel the shame."
He tried to push. The crowd closed. People who had never lifted a hand in anger lifted fists now. "Look at your streets," an old woman cried. "Look at our girls. We are tired of burying them quietly."
He began to tremble. His bravado failed. The market watched as the man who thought himself untouchable shrank. Sweat ran down his face like a confession. He tried to laugh. The laugh died.
"How many?" a man demanded.
"How many did you bring?" another asked.
He could not answer. He muttered, "I didn't—"
The crowd repeated things I had told them. Names. Places. Wounds. I saw a change like a door opening. The man fell to his knees as if the weight of all the women he'd traded finally sat on him.
"Don't touch me," he begged. "I have kids."
"We have kids too," an old woman spat. "We have daughters. You let them vanish."
He reached for the pocket in his jacket and pulled out a little notebook. "It's nothing," he said weakly.
"Then show it," I ordered. He opened it, and the town saw names, numbers, offers. One by one, the faces recognized the handwriting. The vet's mark. Eric Jackson's signature. The market breathed in information like it would fix a wound.
The man stood up, hands shaking. His men tried to push forward, but the market refused them. The people around him hummed with a new power—an ugly, righteous thing that feels like justice when the law sleeps.
"Do not go back to the road," the shopkeeper said. "We will watch now."
They made him sit in the shade while people walked by and spat and told him their daughters' stories. Someone slapped his face. Someone took a picture of his sweaty hair and sent it to the deputy. Someone called the station and told them they had witnesses and evidence.
He tried to bargain. He offered them money. They threw it back.
"How does it feel?" Audrey asked, voice steady. "To be spit at? To be known? To be recorded?"
The man's hands shook as he tried to cover his face. He could not look at the women he had put in boxes and sold. The market demanded he stand on a bench and speak. He stammered some words that fell like rotten fruit.
The punishment was not a sentence of law. It was a people's verdict. They forced him to stand and confess in a square where children listened and old men watched, where he could no longer hide behind sleek sleeves and city talk. He cowered under the long gaze of his neighbors who had not known until then what danger had walked their roads.
"Do you promise to bring them back?" someone asked.
"I—" he tried to say he would. He lied. They did not believe him.
They beat him only with words first; then they beat him with the knowledge that where he walked no one would smile. The butcher refused him meat. The inn denied him a room. His men deserted him one by one.
This is the public punishment: the stripping of dignity where others can see. It is worse than being alone because it is being seen. People photographed him, named him, gave his name to shopkeepers and bus drivers. He could not travel without someone saying, "That's the man."
At the end of that long day, the town had not put hands on him until they had shown him every life he had touched. Then, when the sun went down, a group of neighbors who had daughters and sons walked him to the deputy's office with their signatures. The law could take him now because the people had made a record of him—names, dates, witnesses—no one could whisper the crimes away.
He was a man who had once held girls like coins. Now the market would not let him spend them.
After the public day, the men who had made the trade scattered like rats. The vet pretended he didn't know anything. The deputy took the files and, to my surprise, did the quiet work the market could not. There was a slow sink of the ring as men were questioned. It was not all. The chain was elastic. A few men escaped. A few went to jail. Some were publicly shamed and lost everything: their businesses closed, their acquaintances turned away, their names put in the light.
I did not celebrate like a child gets candy. I watched people whose faces had been soft harden. I watched Audrey walk next to Andre, and she held her head higher. I watched the square like a wound heal.
Months passed and then didn't; time is a liar. I stayed in the village. I became the woman people whispered about—Too soft to be safe and too dangerous to cross. They called me monstrous for things I had done in the name of survival, and I kept my face even.
"Are you glad?" Andre asked me one night, when the river's sound stitched the dark.
"I am not glad," I said. "I am not proud. I have done what I had to. I cannot make the past right."
"You saved them," he said.
"I saved the ones I could," I answered. "I could not save my baby."
"You saved Audrey. You saved Elsie."
"You saved yourself a little," I said. "But a little is all I can hold."
I went back to the shack one dusk to test the lock on the door. The village had light now. The beast's gate had a keeper of another kind. I guarded the road in my fashion. People heard there was a woman who would not let men slip in with promises. They taught their daughters to say my name like an omen.
"You will scare them," Andre told me once.
"Let them be scared," I said. "Fear will do what laws sometimes will not."
At the river, late at night, I thought of the child I let go. I thought of the market's shouting faces. I thought of a man on his knees being known for what he was. I did not feel victory, not truly. But the square had given me what the shack never could: witnesses. The town forced the world to see the crimes.
I could not destroy an entire system. I could not reach every hand that crushed girls and sold them like animals. But I learned how to make one rusted gate close and break the key.
"You will be remembered," someone said to me once, with a mixture of fear and admiration.
"I will be remembered," I said, "but I am not a saint."
I keep that line. I tell new arrivals there is a guard at the gate now, and in the quiet I sharpen my blade with small, careful hands. Some people call me the butcher of the traffickers. I do not mind. I learned to hold a knife the day a man handed me a bottle of water and told me to drink.
The End
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