by Dan Malakin
Now, or never.
‘I can’t let you out,’ he said.
‘I won’t try anything. You warned me what you’d do to Lily.’
He started on the buttons of his shirt, opening them from the collar, slowly, his mouth pushed into an appreciative pout, like she was waiting willingly for him on the bed. Was he even listening to her?
‘Spence? Please. You said we could enjoy it. I just want to be comfortable – my stomach hurts so much.’
‘We’ve talked enough,’ he said, slipping his shirt off one shoulder, then the other, tensing his chest with every movement. She’d never seen him with his top off, and although his muscles didn’t bulge from his body like Konrad’s, they had a steel-rope tautness that wilted her confidence.
Her eyes roamed the room. Even if he did let her use the loo, was there anything she could grab as a weapon. The water jug by her bed? The needle of potassium chloride on the floor? She felt slow and frail, her muscles so weak he’d probably be able to pluck whatever she grabbed from her hand before she could strike. What if she gave up on him letting her out, and waited until they were in the middle of it to catch him unawares? Jamming her thumbs into his eyes at the moment of orgasm, pushing until her nails dug into his brain. Then what? She’d still be locked to the bed, starving to death, but this time with Spence’s corpse for company. Scratch that.
Get free first, then worry about what to do.
She needed to change tack. ‘Here,’ she said, shuffling to the end of the bed. She reached for him. ‘Let me.’
Spence looked from her hand to her face, and smiled. He stepped forward, close enough for her to slip her fingers into his waistband, pull him towards her, and slide the slick leather tongue of his belt free from the loops. She kissed his taut tanned stomach.
‘I can make it amazing,’ she said, tracing the groove in the centre of his abs with her tongue.
She felt the slow rhythm of his heart. He looked down at her, his expression impassive, and placed a hand on the top of her head. Oh god, here it comes. But instead of pushing down, he stroked her hair, tentatively, like she was a cute dog he thought might have a touch of mange.
She kissed around his belly button, hard as a coin in his six-pack. Breathing hard, like she was getting into it, she whispered, ‘I can make it so good for you.’
He tipped her chin up with his finger. ‘You’ll make it good?’
‘I’ll make it so good.’
‘If I let you go to the toilet, you’ll make it real?’
‘You can do anything to me, and I’ll love it. I’ll love you.’
‘Anything? Well, that is in an interesting proposition,’ he said, his smile going sharp. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in an experimental relationship.’ He rocked his head from side to side. ‘Okay.’
When he returned, he stayed by the door and showed her the key. ‘Here’s how it’s going to work,’ he said. ‘I’ll unlock you, but you’re not going to move, not until I say. So much as twitch, I’ll be out the door, and you can sit here for as long as it takes to die wondering what I’m doing to your daughter. Understand?’
Rachel nodded. She felt strung out on adrenaline, her thoughts escalating like a panic attack. How was she going to get close to him, let alone overpower him? What if this was her only chance to get free and she blew it?
What was she going to do?
Spence moved towards her, watching her face. At the foot of the bed, still holding her gaze, he lifted the padlock where the chains connected. ‘You won’t get a second warning,’ he said, and slid in the key, turning it and stepping away with the lock in his hand. Holding a finger up, he moved backwards until he was by the bedroom door again.
‘Please,’ he said, extending his arm towards the en suite. ‘Take your time.’
This was it. She was free. But to do what? Rush him? Even turning sideways off the bed and bending her knees to put her feet on the floor sent debilitating ripples of pain though her bones. Her muscles felt like wrung-out dishrags, stapled badly to joints that seemed entirely made of rheumatism. Meanwhile, he had the ripped torso of a martial arts champion. She shuffled across the carpet, the chain attaching her ankles clumping with every step, her legs moving like engine parts that hadn’t been oiled for years, wishing she was exaggerating how much everything hurt, but every operation of her lower limbs really was agony. His eyes followed her all the way; even when she couldn’t see his face anymore, she knew they were on her.
She opened the bathroom door and stepped inside. She glanced around, feet cold on the tiles, taking stock, but everything had been removed – soap, toothpaste, shower gel. The shelves above the sink were bare, even the cistern cover was gone from the toilet. She pressed the handle to close the door.
‘Leave it open,’ Spence said. ‘Please.’
Rachel eased herself onto the toilet seat. This was hopeless. She wasn’t quick enough, or strong enough, to attack him. She had to convince him to let her stay unchained. Maybe over time she could get him to trust her. What time? You think he’s going to sit here while the police are hunting for him? He probably had fake papers and a prosthetic face waiting in the front room. Bang, bang, thank you, ma’am, and then off to the Caribbean to celebrate another successful destruction of someone’s life.
‘You said two minutes,’ Spence called, cheerfully. ‘You know what they say. Shit, or get off the pot.’
‘Jus-just one more…’ She bit her lips and squeezed her eyes, trying to keep back her tears. Hold it together! ‘One more minute.’
One more minute for what? What could she do?
Nothing.
She dragged herself off the toilet.
When she came out of the bathroom, the sight of it all – Spence, shirtless, his belt undone, watching her from the door, the mattress with the chain at the bottom, thick as a snake, waiting for her to be restrained again – sent a tremble of something close to grief through her.
‘All good?’ he asked.
Every step to the bed felt like struggling in a headwind. There was no way out. She couldn’t come up with how to beat him. He was going to rape her and leave her here to die.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘You said you’d make it nice. You don’t want to know what I do to liars.’
Rachel stumbled, her feet getting tangled in her chain, and fell against the mattress. The tray was in reach. But even if she grabbed the needle, he’d be out of the door before she got close. She didn’t want to cry in front of him, knew it wasn’t what he wanted to see, but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘Don’t make me go back. Please, don’t make me. We can make this real. We can be a proper couple. I’ll love you, I really will. Just don’t make me go back.’
‘Real girlfriends don’t make this kind of scene before… making love.’ He shook out his shoulders. ‘Look, you’re ruining this for me now. I’ve put a lot of effort into this and you’re ruining it, and you don’t want to see what will happen if you ruin it for me. Do you understand?’
Something about the dispassionate way he was speaking to her, like she was an extra requiring minor direction in the film of his life, was more chilling than if he were standing over her with a knife. She nodded quickly, and scrambled onto the bed.
‘Good,’ he said, tossing the open padlock so it landed next to the chain. ‘Now if you don’t mind…’
Oh, great. As good as digging her own grave. She looked for a weak link in the chains, but they were both heavy duty. She clicked the lock shut.
And that, was that.
He started towards her, unbuttoning the top of his trousers. ‘How about we lose the jumpers. Finally.’
By the time she’d lifted them off, he was down to his boxer shorts, the kind of tight black trunks Konrad used to wear. They weren’t so flattering on Spence’s spindly legs.
‘T-shirt too,’ he said, motioning for her to lift it off. ‘I want to feel your skin.’
He mounted the bed like a stalking tiger, moving with his shoulders,
intent on her. She needed to do this, she needed to make it good, whatever he wanted to do to her, the weirder and the freakier the better, as long as she stayed interesting to him, so that he didn’t leave her here to die.
She reached for his shoulder, slowly, like she was worried he’d turn his head and snap at her hand, and guided him towards her. Then they were kissing, Spence on his elbow and leaning over her, his body pressing her down, one hand fisted in her hair so she couldn’t move her head much if she wanted. His other hand roamed her front, stopping to roughly squeeze her breast, to grab what flesh remained on her flank. She didn’t know what she expected, some tenderness maybe, after what he’d said about love, but there was none.
His mouth worked at hers as if it were opening a puzzle, his tongue darted between her lips like a predatory fish examining a dark cavern for prey, his saliva carried the salt-fish taste of smoked salmon. When her fingers stroked his back, he tensed to her touch wherever they went, as if to prove his physique to her.
Then she got it. He didn’t care about her, how she felt, but he did care about what she thought of him.
And something else – the key to the padlock was in his trousers.
Next to the bed.
Spence tightened his grip on her hair, pulling back so she had to tilt her chin up. He slid his lips over her cheek, nibbling her skin, then ran his tongue down the side of her neck. With his other hand, he rubbed between her legs, through the thin material of her knickers. He pulled his head back and, looking at her coldly, put his first two fingers deep into his mouth. When he took them out, they glistened in the light. Tugging her knickers aside, he thrust his fingers deep into her. Rachel bucked, arm around his neck, catching herself in time to make it look like pleasure instead of alarm. She moaned in his ear, ‘That’s it. That’s how I like it.’
He grunted, pushing his fingers into her hard and fast, his face tight and intense as she turned his cheek and licked his neck, dipping her tongue in the hollow beside his trachea, her hands going up and down his back, his carotid artery throbbing against her open lips – now, now, NOW! She wrapped both arms tight to his neck and clamped her teeth.
He pushed against her chest, unsure, for less than half a second, but it was enough time for her to lock her arms, her mind going white and blank as she pressed down her jaws with all that she had, every inch of muscle and sinew working together, and he became everything she’d ever deprived herself, every pain she’d inflicted on herself, every bite of self-loathing she’d taken from her soul.
Her mouth filled with the taste of rusty metal as her incisors broke through his skin, tearing through the thin muscle beneath. Spence beat at her side and chest, but it was as though she possessed superhuman strength, like a mother who rips the door off a burning car to get to her baby, and he couldn’t work his way free of her grip. She forced her jaws harder, biting deeper. The blood became a torrent, firing into her mouth, hitting the back of her throat. She twisted away, coughing up thick red gluts.
Spence rolled off the bed, landing in an ungainly crouch, his expression more confused than anything else. He touched his neck and frowned at his crimson fingers. The wound was deep and ragged, and pumped blood like a burst water pipe onto his bare chest. His tan had gone pale yellow, like sand.
‘You stupid…’ he began, trying to stand, but seeming to go dizzy. He took a fast step to the side to regain his balance. ‘You stupid fucking bitch. How – how are you going…?’
They both looked down at the same time. Spence dropped to his haunches as Rachel lurched from the bed, her arms hitting the floor where the trousers had been, a moment after he’d snatched them.
His leg was close enough to grab. ‘Please. Think of Lily. Don’t do this to her…’
Spence was looking down at Rachel, eyes unfocused, swaying slightly. The blood seemed to be coming out slower. What if he staggered backwards, died out of reach? Taking the key with him.
Grab him – grab him now!
She shot out her hand, her fingertips grazing the hairs on his shin as he stepped smartly to the side.
He went down on one knee. When he looked up with his hopeful promising smile, it almost looked like he was proposing.
‘Have fun,’ he said, and pitched forward.
Chapter Forty-Six
Starve
Rachel stared at Spence’s body. She knew what this meant, the finality of her situation, but the knowledge seemed to sit on top of her mind, and a deeper part of her still expected him to move, to sit up, to laugh like The Joker, and suggest she was a fool for thinking she could get rid of him that easily. She was sorry when this expectation, however absurd, faded away, because what came after was so much worse.
She scrambled forward, the manacles straining against her ankles, fingers outstretched, trying to reach his arm. He was maybe only ten centimetres away in the end, but it might well have been a thousand because, unless she was going to gnaw both legs off, it wasn’t going to make a difference how far he was, any distance was too far. Besides, if she chewed her way out she wouldn’t need the bloody key!
Once she’d finished screaming, cursing and banging the floor, she got back on the bed and took stock. She had maybe a litre of water in the jug, plus whatever was in her bladder. Over half a bottle of white wine, and what was left in her glass. Some chocolates, but not as many as she could have had – why had she eaten so many last night? Oh, and her death tray. She couldn’t forget that. She took a swig from the wine bottle and smiled grimly.
Cheers to me!
Then she broke two fingernails trying to force open the restraints.
Spence was right about one thing though, that crazy psycho fuck. Regret, it was the worst. Questions tormented her, day and night, tearing at her sanity. Why hadn’t she held on to him tighter? A few more seconds, that was all, and he would have been too weak to get free. Why had she allowed him so easily into her life anyway? Had she been so starved for attention that she’d had to offer her friendship so completely to someone she barely knew? She lost count of the times she beat the heel of her hand against her forehead, before realising she was wasting precious energy doing that when she could quite as easily berate herself using her inside voice.
More than anything, she wished he’d left the television switched on, so she could check the news, see if they were still looking for her.
As the days passed and the chocolates disappeared, along with most of the clean water, so did the last of her hope. She tried to keep it alive by fanning the flames of interest in her mind – What had made Spence so flustered? Could he have left a clue to where they were? In her dreams, she watched the case being cracked, seeing the scenes play out like she were a ghost in the room, convoluted discussions about who she was last seen with, wild madcap chases that ended in bizarre anxious loops where things weren’t being slotted in the right places.
On day six, she ran out of water. Not that she was too bothered by that point. She was already drinking the piss of her piss, and it didn’t taste any nicer after the second run through her bladder. The full doom of her situation sank deep into her, but, perhaps surprisingly, as it was absorbed, it seemed to lose its potency; it no longer carried the same sucker punch to her spirit as before. All the questions, all the recriminations, all the fears fell away. What was the point? No-one was coming for her. No-one would ever find her here.
She started seeing the positives. If she had to choose a way to die, to pick just one, then starvation would probably be high on her list. She didn’t mind the Chinese water torture accumulation of ache in her stomach, or the primal sensation of raw hunger surging from her chest to her groin that she had to grit her teeth to bear. For others, it would drive them crazy, they wouldn’t be able to think of anything worse, but this was one marathon she’d run before, and the physical sensations, even at their worse, were bearable.
Despite the pain in her body, an almost philosophical serenity overcame her mind, a fasting high like the first time she was in hospital
, and she remembered her past in a different light. She wasn’t cursed, she didn’t deserve all that had happened to her, she’d just had bad luck growing up, shit parents, whatever. But from that beginning, she’d made a life. She’d felt love from Lily that as a teenager she thought no-one would ever feel for her. Be gentle with yourself, she repeated, to pass the time. Be grateful for what you had. Be proud that at the end you wanted to live.
When that mantra failed to calm her, she stared at Spence, rotting on the floor six feet away. That was another positive, right? Him being dead. He could easily have had his way, emotionlessly going at her like a robot on Viagra, then strolled off to track the next target on his dating hit list, maybe even Lily, leaving Rachel to die here anyway. Plus the stink of his decomposing remains made it easier to not think about all the delicious food she’d love to eat, so there was that as well. In fact, when she really thought about it, her well of good fortune was fucking overflowing.
Looking at him there, so close, so, so close, something sparked in her chest. Trying to conserve energy, she hadn’t moved in days, but now she tentatively lifted her leg. As expected, it came to a stop when the chain extended. She tipped her toes forward, and her heart beat suddenly faster.
She’d lost so much weight that there was more give in the manacle.
She shuffled down the bed and bent to get a closer look, her limbs in agony as she forced them into position. It wasn’t much, but still, the skin of her ankle slid against the padding where before it had been tight.
Oh my god. The padding.
Why didn’t she think!
Rachel grabbed at the faux fur – it was stitched into leather – but it wouldn’t come away from the metal core.
The wine glass. She smashed it to the floor. She picked one of the shards and cut away the leather, revealing the dull iron core beneath.
