On the suspiciously-stained concrete floor, peeking out underneath the bed—if Rossi could really call that threadbare cot with a mattress thin as cardboard a bed—lay an aged sheet of paper. It was yellowing around the edges, the color of a neglected tooth. The CSI tech beside him snapped a photo. The flash briefly illuminated the dim and dusty air, casting a quick blaze of white across the room's frayed alphabet wallpaper. It was the kind that adorned the walls of preschool classrooms—A is for Apple, B is for Bear, and so on and so forth. Here, though, it looked almost eerily innocent; such happy, juvenile decorations belonged in far less hallowed places than this one. The basement reeked of sewage and stale sweat. Rossi reached a gloved hand down and gingerly picked up the paper.
One one side, scrawled in neat penciled handwriting, there were two lists. Exactly what set one column apart from the other wasn't specified, but the two sides were markedly separate. Underneath the first list, Rossi could tell that some names had been haphazardly erased and then rewritten in the latter category.
Funhouse, January 1st, Year #5
Spencer - 14
Jennifer - 16
Emily - 16
Penelope -16
Derek - 17
Aaron - 17
In the second column, an addendum was added to each age.
Elle - 14, four years gone
Stephen - 17, one year gone
Ashley - 14, two years gone
Alex - 15, three months gone
Jason - 18, three years gone
Luke - 14, six months gone
Rossi swallowed. Delicately, as though the paper could disintegrate at any given moment, he flipped the page. The commandments listed on the other side looked to be penned by many different hands.
Year #5. This is the Funhouse and these are the rules.
1. First names only. Full names tend to promote remembering, and remembering is the bane of detachment. When you arrive at the Funhouse, you're reborn. You're a Roycewood now. Don't let them catch you forgetting it. -Aaron
2. Aaron is the photokeeper. If you look in the old shoe box underneath his bed, you'll find the polaroids. He writes the names—just first names; see rule number one—across the bottom. There are twelve photos in the box. Six show the faces of ghosts. Six show the faces of soon-to-be-ghosts. -Emily
3. When a new resident arrives, JJ must be the one to tell them the rules. Emily's too crass; Penelope, too excitable; me, too timid; Derek, too brooding; Aaron, too numb. JJ, of course, is all of these things as well, but her resolute facade seems to calm the fresh initiates. -Spencer
4. Birthdays are to be carved (by way of Derek's favorite rusty nail) into the wooden frame of his and Spencer's bunk bed. They can be quietly celebrated each year. Birthdays are allowed to be remembered. They just are. -Penelope
5. When one of the Roycewoods comes down, there's no speaking unless spoken to, no crying, no fidgeting, no laughing, no breathing too loudly. If Mr. Roycewood takes someone upstairs, no one is to fight or resist. He'll return them later. -JJ
6. If someone returns back downstairs in poor form, Spencer must be the one to tend to their wounds. He's read Mr. Roycewood's old anatomy textbook sixty-seven times, so he's the unofficial medic. -Derek
7. Disobeying the Roycewoods is never safe, but doing so on a family outing is to be avoided at all costs. Remember Elle, and unless you feel like paying as dearly as she did, learn from her missteps. -Aaron
8. Consider any moment without the Roycewoods a blessing, even if you've run out of food, and the lone toilet is broken, and you've all begun to drink the yellow-tinged bathwater. It's always better than the alternative. It's always better than his rotten-toothed grin, and her bony hands, and the belts, and the black eyes, and the upstairs. Always. -JJ
9. On the quiet days, when they've given you food and left you alone, it's alright to laugh with each other. There's room for brightness, sometimes. There has to be. -Penelope
10. No matter how cold the Funhouse gets in winter, no matter how insane you're going down here, no matter how hurt you are, inside and out, no one gets to kill themselves. It wouldn't be fair to the ones we've lost. You're alive—deal with it. -Emily
11. Penelope will gather everyone in a circle in the girls' room each night. When she starts listing the dead, close your eyes and picture their faces. It's important to forget life before, yes—but you cannot, under any circumstances, forget those who've died. And everyday, as you feel your heart thump and your lungs inflate, think of them. Remember them. -Spencer
12. There is no escaping. There is no way out. The sooner you accept that the Funhouse is your world, your universe, and the moons that orbit you are your fellow captives, the sooner you'll be able to quit thinking about life before. -Derek
13. Life before is over now.
Five years and three months prior to the date on which David Rossi stood gawking at that sheet of paper in the thick must of the Roycewood's basement, a twelve year old boy with dark hair and angry eyes (one of which was already blackened, courtesy of his foster father) had been running away from his false-home in the witching hours of a January night. Limping away, Aaron supposed, was a more fitting term. Moonlight shone cold against his neck, and the jostling of his backpack thoroughly irritated his sore ribs. Aaron's foster father's trip to the liquor store that evening had culminated in the beating to end all beatings. His very bones seemed to ache.
Only a few minutes into his determined hobble away from his foster home, a white van pulled up beside him. It tittered slowly along next to the sidewalk, keeping a calculated pace with Aaron. He looked up. A brunette boy—who appeared shorter than he, but judging by the whiskers kissing his upper lip, had maybe a few years on Aaron—was sticking his head out the passenger side window.
"Need a ride, kid?"
Aaron—made desperate and naive by the pain that was rolling through his sinewy frame—nodded. The kid hopped out of the van and slid open the side door for him. Aaron climbed in, and the stout boy followed, slamming the door shut behind them both. It was only when his eyes adjusted to the dusky gloom of the car that he noticed the rat-like man sitting up front, his pudgy cheeks curled up into a foul, depraved smile. Aaron whirled his head to the other side to discover a spindly woman lurking in the shadows of the backseat. She appeared to be made only of harsh angles and papery skin.
The shorter boy's face had lost all of it's ruddy glow. All he could offer Aaron were these horribly apologetic eyes. The look exuded danger.
"I-I should actually get going," Aaron stammered, clambering for the door.
The woman in the back smiled. If the man was a rodent, she was a great, swooping vulture, the lines on her skin carved deep with cruelty.
"No, no," she hissed. "Stay a while."
The van lurched forward. The whites of Aaron's eyes shone in the twilight. He opened his mouth to scream, but found something promptly clamped tight over it.
"I'm Jason," the other boy said as he secured the duct tape with a few sad pats. "And I'm so, so sorry."
When Aaron awoke, the air smelled of mildew and dampness. Above him was a wall of rickety planked wood.
A bunk bed, he thought, startled. I'm in a bunk bed.
Woozy and sore, he rolled onto his side. The light in the cellar was dim and slightly jaundiced, taking on a strange hint of fluorescent amber. In the ramshackle twin bed pressed to the far wall sat that same boy from earlier. He appeared engrossed in a tattered copy of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.
Aaron's groggy mind struggled for the kid's name.
"Jason?" he croaked.
Jason looked up from the book, nodded once, then gave a deep, heavy sigh. "Welcome to the fucking Funhouse, kid."
Three months later, on a breezy walk back to the group home, twelve year old Derek Morgan ran into a tall brunette boy with eyes like a stomped-out fire.
"Hey," the boy said, his voice only wavering slightly. "Guess what I found?"
Derek's curiosity outweighed his hesitance regarding the boy's deadened stare.
"What'd you find?"
"A real live snake! It's green and everything. You wanna see?"
His city upbringing meant Derek had a keen interest in all things reptilian—even salamanders seemed as mythical as dinosaurs. He dropped his guard and nodded eagerly. After all, he'd only heard of there being risk in contact with strangers when drugs were involved. Derek was well-versed in the dangerous happenings of drug deals; he'd seen his fair share when he lived in Chicago with his heroin-hooked mother, back in those grim elementary days when his world consisted of cleaning used needles off the kitchen floor instead of spelling and arithmetic.
But this boy was only here to show him a snake. And ever since the court had relocated him to a quiet Virginian group home in a low-crime neighborhood, Derek had relinquished his hold on hypervigilance. The boy, who looked to be about Derek's age, gestured for him to follow.
"Come on. It's just through one of these back alleys."
Derek was too excited to pay any mind to the boy's trembling voice or downcast eyes. He trailed behind the older kid like a lost puppy, mindlessly earnest and so damn unbroken. The boy stopped before a dingy white van that rested at the edge of a sleepy backstreet.
"Where is it? Where's the snake?" Derek asked, his eyes dancing with wonder. The boy never met his gaze; instead, he just pulled a damp rag out of his back pocket. It let loose an acrid, chemical smell into the air. Derek took a tentative step backwards. In one abrupt lunge, the boy jumped forward and shoved the rag against Derek's mouth. Within seconds, his vision grew loose and nebulous around the edges.
The last sensations to register in Derek's mind as he lost consciousness were the herky jerky feeling of the boy dragging him into the van, and then the whispered words, "I'm Aaron. And I'm so, so sorry."
She was ten and fatherless when she found her sister's limp body half-submerged in the crimson bathwater. At the forefront of her memory about that day was the smell; like old metal and Rosalyn's lavender shampoo. And, of course, she remembered how she'd screamed. Screamed like her throat didn't belong to her. Like she was a feral, untamed beast.
JJ didn't know it then, but she would, that day, become a veritable orphan.
Her mother, who'd once been left in the dust by a wayward husband and had now been scorned by the one daughter she truly cared for, took to whiskey and Vicodin to numb the pain. JJ took to walking.
There was no one who cared enough about her anymore to make her go to school, and she hated being in her house, the one that reeked of alcohol and her dead sister, so instead, JJ walked. In fact, when CPS came by to investigate all of her third grade absences, she was out walking. They dropped the matter, and so Jennifer Jareau, like so many others, slipped through the system's cracks.
She never walked with any direction in mind. Aimlessness, JJ thought, was rather important to the ritual of it all. There was something quite lovely about not meaning to go anywhere at all. Small and skinny and blonde in the crime-ridden part of Virgina with an unrivaled knack for wandering side streets; it was almost too textbook. She was, perhaps, the easiest target of them all.
Which was not to say that her apprehension was easy—being so small and so blonde, JJ had been forced to learn how to fight like a hellion.
When the boy with the olive skin who was not much older than she, but far stronger and angrier, approached her in Kirigan's Alley, she simply turned and began to walk in the other direction.
"Yo!" the boy, who'd only been a Roycewood for four months at that point, called. He gestured towards the grubby white van parked behind him. "You sure you don't wanna see my puppies?"
She could feel his silhouette on her back when he began to follow her. JJ quickened her stride. Just as she broke into a run, though, there was an arm around her neck. A pale, thin arm—surely not belonging to the boy who'd been trailing her. When she began to scream, the hand attached to the arm fastened itself across her mouth.
"If she'd run away, you'd have gotten both of us killed!"
Even whilst still writhing in the stranger's grasp like a frenzied snake, she noted that this wasn't the voice of the first boy.
"Back to the damn car, you little shits!"
Another new voice; an adult woman's this time. It was shrill and creaky, like a broken violin. JJ flailed harder.
"I'll get her legs, Aaron," she heard the first kid say. After a long, painstaking struggle, the two boys managed to maneuver a still-thrashing JJ into the van, and a vile-looking woman in the backseat pressed a chloroform rag over her mouth.
As the car leapt to a start and JJ's world took on a vaporous film, as though encased in the type of dense fog found obscuring the far edge of a lake, the boy with dark skin and woeful eyes brought his head up to her ear.
"I'm Derek," he whispered. "And I'm so, so sorry."
The girl was endearing, but in a dark sort of way. Maybe it was the bruises that littered her bony arms, or maybe the glazed-over quality to those big blue eyes, or maybe just the stubborn set of her jaw. For whatever reason, twelve year old Emily discarded all of the ambassador's daughter safety protocols that'd been drilled into her head since she was old enough to delineate maids from butlers and followed the tiny blonde.
She'd later come to think that maybe her impulsivity was just a final 'fuck you' to her mother. Her mother, who refused to give a single shit about Emily beyond parading her in front of politicians in poofy dresses, like a perfectly prim and perfectly silent little figurehead. Her mother, who'd once told Emily—to her face, mind you—that she'd only had a child to bolster her public image; apparently, it was good press to be seen as a family woman. (She'd said it made her appear more, "doting and warm." Doting and warm. Emily could've vomited. Elizabeth Prentiss was about as doting as a sociopathic dragon and about as warm as an Antarctic ice bath.) Her mother, who'd missed three birthdays in a row, and who'd never bothered to use the word 'love,' and who'd treated Emily more like a bothersome PR necessity than a daughter.
Her mother, who was dying of breast cancer.
"Please, miss. I really need help finding my mom," the blonde girl in the mall parking lot said. Her posture appeared meek, but her voice was strangely affectless; a flat monotone.
Emily shivered away all thoughts of her mother, who was, at that moment, sedated in an ICU bed, and took hold of the girl's hand. She didn't appear much younger than Emily at all, but good Lord, the kid was small.
"This way," the girl said, pulling Emily towards the shadowy far side of the mini-mart.
Emily was still puzzled by her faraway voice, but she didn't think too much of it. The sun had begun to dip over the horizon, painting the sky a dusty rose. The interstate hummed wearily in the distance. The only other presence in their midst was a tall woman with grey-brown hair and hollow cheekbones who was strolling along the pathway behind them. She seemed innocuous enough. The blonde girl, though, kept shooting furtive glances at the woman over her shoulder. Emily shrugged it off as nerves.
"How old are you, anyways?" she asked. The girl just kept tugging her into the back parking lot, saying nothing. The area was dead empty save for one filthy white van.
"That's my mom's car," the girl said quietly.
Emily's eyebrows shot up. "That's your mom's car?"
"That's my mom's car. Will you come over with me? Make sure she's there?"
"Of course."
The blonde stared at her beat-up sneakers as she walked across the asphalt. Emily couldn't help but detect an acute sense of guilt emanating from the girl's slouched shoulders.
But before she could even begin to act on her firing instincts, someone tall and gangly had caught her from behind and begun to drag her towards the van. As she was hauled into the void, Emily saw the blonde girl staring back at her, the tears in her eyes glistening under the pale orange light of early dusk.
"I'm JJ," the girl murmured as she climbed into the van after Emily's assailant, who she'd since identified as the tall woman from earlier. "And I'm so, so sorry."
When Aaron had been a Roycewood for exactly a year, Derek for nine months, JJ for five, and Emily for two, Anita Roycewood dragged home a solo capture in the form of cussing, spitting, and hell-raising Elle Greenaway. Seventeen year old Jason, the original kidnapee, had tried his absolute damndest to coach her into obedience, but on her first family outing, a mere month after her abduction, Elle bolted.
She and Aaron had been tasked with bringing in a new little girl from a Maryland playground. The very instant that Anita and Roger were out of her sightline, though, Elle tore across the road, screaming like a banshee. Anita had hastily yanked Aaron back into the van. He'd tried to swallow the hope that was fluttering in his chest, but it eclipsed him, and his broad smile earned him a fist to the cheek.
His heart sank into the depths of his stomach when Roger returned to the van less than a minute later, dragging a semi-conscious Elle by the collar.
"Did anyone see?" Anita hissed as the van pulled away.
Roger merged onto the highway. "I managed to give her a shot of lorazepam before anyone got too close. A few pedestrians asked if everything was alright. I told 'em she wasn't right in the head, and by that point, she was drooling and groaning like an idiot anyhow. They ate it up."
Fourteen year old Elle didn't return to their basement dwelling that night. She was the first to die. Subsequently, through some twisted Roycewood frame of logic, Elle became a cautionary tale. The children's tangible reason not to disobey.
"You remember what happened to Elle, don't you?" Anita and Roger would tease. "She screamed and screamed, until the fire ate her all up."
A month after the Elle debacle, somewhere on a park bench in the blanket of suburbia outskirtting DC, Penelope Garcia smoked her first cigarette. She was thirteen, and recently orphaned by way of a drunk driver, so she figured carcinogenic fumes were excusable at the present moment. And besides, her senile grandmother (who'd she'd been sentenced to live with three months prior, following her parents' untimely death) smoked two packs a day, so Penelope surmised that a few cigs couldn't do that much damage.
It was late by the time she hopped back on her bike. The sky was a glittering navy, freckled with silvery stars. It was the type of night that spurred an uncanny feeling of wholeness, of connection to every molecule of air. The type of night that her mother had loved.
A familiar emptiness bloomed in Penelope's stomach. That gnawing feeling of something being irredeemably missing. She began her bike ride fighting with the tears in her eyes.
In fact, her vision was almost too blurred to see the lean brunette girl frantically waving her hands in the middle of the road. It was late, and this was a neighborhood mostly populated by the elderly, so her surroundings were rather dormant besides the white van that was idling a little up the street. Penelope curbed her neon pink bike and cupped her hands over her mouth.
"What the hell's up with you?"
The girl jogged over. In the low light, the shame and fear spotting the brunette's eyes was well veiled. Before Penelope could even ask another question, she felt something sharp pierce the side of her arm. The girl caught her as she dazedly stumbled to the ground. Before the world went black, she said something so soft that Penelope thought she might've imagined it.
"I'm Emily. And I'm so, so sorry."
The woman at the pharmacy knew him on a first name basis. It was a quiet, consistent affair; he'd get up on his tiptoes to hand her the prescription; she'd give him the little orange bottle without asking any questions; he'd scurry away like a spooked mouse.
Nine years old, and Spencer could tell you about the efficacy of every schizophrenia medication on the market. Diana Reid had been through them all.
Of course, Spencer could tell you most anything about anything anyways. Really, he should've been attending his freshman year of high school, but his mother had had a bad month, so he'd been staying home. Not that it really mattered—Spencer was far and away more knowledgeable than any teacher the local high school could produce. Besides; he learned better at home. He relished in it being just him and his books, and especially in the significant and wonderful absence of oafish older boys who found it wildly entertaining to tie him to goalposts.
His mother's pills rattling in the pocket of his blue jeans, he began to run home along the usual shortcut; a route behind the old delicatessen, then through some alleyways and backstreets.
Of course, there was a white van waiting for him there. But this time, there were no children coerced into conjuring up a ruse. No puppies or balloons or smiling little girls.
Anita Roycewood had deemed Penelope still too emotional, even after three months of captivity, to help with abductions. And besides; it'd been too long since she went out hunting alone. She'd missed the thrill of it all, the unadulterated adrenaline that seemed to soak through her very soul.
When she saw the small brunette with chestnut curls bouncing as he ran, she sank back against the brick wall of the alley, grinning. Sure as shit—he scampered right by, and without much effort at all, she snatched the boy off of his feet and slammed a gaunt hand over his mouth.
There was no one there to tell Spencer how sorry they were.
That night, Anita unceremoniously tossed him into the boys' room, and without a second glance, retreated back upstairs. Once they were sure she was gone, the other children huddled around him. JJ, the sanctioned greeter, carefully sat down beside the young boy on the concrete. She was glad he wasn't crying; the criers were always tough to console. Still, she'd never get used to the deer-in-the-headlights shock that came with a new presence in the cellar. It shook her to her core anew each time.
"What's your name?" she asked. "Only first. We don't do last names down here."
His eyes were wide as saucers. "S-spencer."
Aaron handed JJ the list of rules they'd made for that year. All six of them had vowed to create a new one at the start of every January, for currentness' sake. It was their constitution, of sorts. Jason motioned for the other children to sit, and so they did. Seven small bodies perched themselves about that dank cellar room, just enough space and silence between each one to give off a certain air of hardness. Of grit. Some of their psyches were raw; some calloused; some thoroughly scarred. Each held their own story of arrival, and subsequently, survival. Each remembered their own firsts in the basement just as well as their own lasts in the outside world. They were a unit. A brigade. A cosmos of seven.
"This is the Funhouse," JJ read, gentle but firm, staring at Spencer with eyes like blue glass, "and these are the rules."