Read Online 3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Natascha Kampusch
Ads: Link
once did he turn his back on me, and I always had to keep a distance of about one metre between him and me.
I tried to threaten him. ‘If you don’t let me go immediately, you’re going to be in big trouble! The police have been out looking for me. They are going to find me and be here very soon! And then you’ll have to go to jail! You don’t want that, do you? Let me go and everything will be all right. Please, you’ll let me go?’
He promised to let me go soon. As if with that he had answered all my questions, he turned round, pulled the knob out of the door and bolted it from the outside.
I listened in desperation in the hope that he would come back to me. Nothing. I was completely cut off from the outside world. No sounds penetrated, not one flicker of light peeped through the cracks in the wall panelling. The air was musty and covered my skin like a damp film that I could not brush off. The only sound to keep me company was the rattling of the fan that blew air from the attic via the garage into my dungeon through a pipe in the ceiling. The noise was pure torture: day and night it continued to whir throughout the tiny room until it became unreal and shrill, forcing me to press my hands to my ears in despair to block out the noise. When the fan overheated, it began to smell and the blades warped. The scraping noise got slower and a new sound was added: tock, tock, tock. Interrupted only by the scraping. There were days when that torturous noise filled not only every corner of the room, but also every corner of my mind.
During my first few days in the dungeon the kidnapper left the light on round the clock. I had asked him to because I was afraid to be alone in the total darkness the dungeon was plunged into as soon as he unscrewed the light bulb. But the constant, glaring lightwas nearly as bad. It hurt my eyes and forced me into an artificial state of wakefulness that I couldn’t shake. Even when I pulled the blanket over my head to soften the brightness of the light, my sleep was superficial and disturbed. My fear and the harsh light never allowed me to do more than doze lightly, and I always started awake with the feeling that it was bright daylight outside. But in the artificial light of the hermetically sealed basement there was no difference between day and night.
Today I know that it was, and in some countries still is, a widespread means of torture to constantly subject prisoners to artificial light. Plants shrivel up when exposed to the extreme and constant effects of light, and animals die. For people it is perfidious torture, more effective than physical violence. It destroys biorhythms and sleep patterns to such an extent that the body reacts as if paralysed by deep exhaustion, and the brain can no longer function correctly even after only a few days. Just as cruel and effective is the torture of bombarding someone continuously with inescapable noise. Like a scraping, whirring fan.
I felt as if I had been preserved alive in an underground safe. My prison was not entirely square, measuring about 2.70 metres long and 1.80 wide and just under 2.40 high. Eleven and a half cubic metres of stuffy air. Not quite five square metres of floor, across which I paced like a tiger in a cage, from one wall to the other. Six small steps one way, six steps back, was the length. Four steps one way and four back was the width. I could walk around the perimeter in twenty paces.
Pacing dampened my panic only slightly. As soon as I remained standing, as soon as the sound of my feet hitting the floor faded, my panic rose again. I was nauseated and I was afraid of losing my mind. What was going to happen anyway?
Twenty-one, twenty-two … sixty
. Six forward, four to the left. Four to the right, six back.
The feeling that there was no way out gripped me again andagain. At the same time I knew that I couldn’t allow myself to be smothered by my fear, that I had to do something. I took one of the mineral water bottles,
I tried to threaten him. ‘If you don’t let me go immediately, you’re going to be in big trouble! The police have been out looking for me. They are going to find me and be here very soon! And then you’ll have to go to jail! You don’t want that, do you? Let me go and everything will be all right. Please, you’ll let me go?’
He promised to let me go soon. As if with that he had answered all my questions, he turned round, pulled the knob out of the door and bolted it from the outside.
I listened in desperation in the hope that he would come back to me. Nothing. I was completely cut off from the outside world. No sounds penetrated, not one flicker of light peeped through the cracks in the wall panelling. The air was musty and covered my skin like a damp film that I could not brush off. The only sound to keep me company was the rattling of the fan that blew air from the attic via the garage into my dungeon through a pipe in the ceiling. The noise was pure torture: day and night it continued to whir throughout the tiny room until it became unreal and shrill, forcing me to press my hands to my ears in despair to block out the noise. When the fan overheated, it began to smell and the blades warped. The scraping noise got slower and a new sound was added: tock, tock, tock. Interrupted only by the scraping. There were days when that torturous noise filled not only every corner of the room, but also every corner of my mind.
During my first few days in the dungeon the kidnapper left the light on round the clock. I had asked him to because I was afraid to be alone in the total darkness the dungeon was plunged into as soon as he unscrewed the light bulb. But the constant, glaring lightwas nearly as bad. It hurt my eyes and forced me into an artificial state of wakefulness that I couldn’t shake. Even when I pulled the blanket over my head to soften the brightness of the light, my sleep was superficial and disturbed. My fear and the harsh light never allowed me to do more than doze lightly, and I always started awake with the feeling that it was bright daylight outside. But in the artificial light of the hermetically sealed basement there was no difference between day and night.
Today I know that it was, and in some countries still is, a widespread means of torture to constantly subject prisoners to artificial light. Plants shrivel up when exposed to the extreme and constant effects of light, and animals die. For people it is perfidious torture, more effective than physical violence. It destroys biorhythms and sleep patterns to such an extent that the body reacts as if paralysed by deep exhaustion, and the brain can no longer function correctly even after only a few days. Just as cruel and effective is the torture of bombarding someone continuously with inescapable noise. Like a scraping, whirring fan.
I felt as if I had been preserved alive in an underground safe. My prison was not entirely square, measuring about 2.70 metres long and 1.80 wide and just under 2.40 high. Eleven and a half cubic metres of stuffy air. Not quite five square metres of floor, across which I paced like a tiger in a cage, from one wall to the other. Six small steps one way, six steps back, was the length. Four steps one way and four back was the width. I could walk around the perimeter in twenty paces.
Pacing dampened my panic only slightly. As soon as I remained standing, as soon as the sound of my feet hitting the floor faded, my panic rose again. I was nauseated and I was afraid of losing my mind. What was going to happen anyway?
Twenty-one, twenty-two … sixty
. Six forward, four to the left. Four to the right, six back.
The feeling that there was no way out gripped me again andagain. At the same time I knew that I couldn’t allow myself to be smothered by my fear, that I had to do something. I took one of the mineral water bottles,
Similar Books
