by S. E. Amadis
He groaned underneath me.
“Come on already, Mimi,” he protested faintly, his voice muffled by my loving arms. “Let me go. I can’t breathe.”
I let up a bit, but didn’t let go of him. I seized him by the hair and planted a hundred kisses around his face.
“No, I will never let you go, honey buns. Not as long as I live!”
I hugged him some more, and stroked his baby-soft, silken hair. After a while, it occurred to me to look up and glance about. The door at the top of the stairs was closed and probably locked. I hadn’t noticed when she’d closed it. Calvin was running his fingers meticulously around the walls and corners of the room.
“This looks like just some sort of underground cavern,” he said. “Did you find anything of interest, kiddo?” He turned to Romeo.
Romeo shook his head.
“It’s just like every basement I’ve ever seen. It’s got a few tools. Lots of mice and ants and spiders and stuff.”
He kicked at the floor with his scruffy shoes.
“I couldn’t find any other way out. And I’ve been here for hours. No secret chambers or hideaways or anything like that. It’s not like you see on TV.”
Calvin chuckled.
“Do you even know how to check for secret chambers?” he asked with a grin.
“Of course. I’m not dumb, you know. You have to bang on the walls and see if they sound hollow.”
He stamped on the floor.
“The same with the floor. I’ve jumped all over the floor. It’s just concrete.”
“All the same...” Calvin continued inspecting the minuscule space.
I turned and grabbed Romeo by the shoulders.
“How did you get here?” I said.
Romeo wiggled out of my hold.
“In a car, of course. You didn’t expect I’d walk here, did you?”
I swiped at Romeo but he avoided me deftly.
“Don’t be such a leech, Mimi,” he complained peevishly. “It’s not like I’ve been gone for days and days.”
“Well, almost!” I nearly screamed. “I meant, how did you end up here? Weren’t you supposed to wait for me or Calvin to pick you up at school?”
Romeo kicked at the dirt on the floor.
“Yeah, I s’pose. But you’re always late. And that guy said he was my dad. And I’ve always wanted to know about my dad, and what he’s like.”
“And you believed him?”
I reached for Romeo’s neck. At that moment I could have easily strangled him but once again he slipped out of reach. He shrugged.
“You never tell me much about him.”
“But you know he’s dead.”
He shrugged again.
“Yeah, but maybe you were mistaken. Maybe you just thought he was dead, but he really wasn’t. You never told me how he died,” he added defensively. “Are you gonna tell me one day?”
I nodded.
“For sure I will, one day. But not right now. Now’s not the time.”
“Anyways,” Romeo continued, kicking at the floor again. “After I got into the car with him he told me he’d lied and he really wasn’t my dad. So then I wanted to jump out of the car, but it was going too fast. I was a bit let down, you know. I kinda hoped my dad’d be that tall, and maybe one day I could be tall like him.” He thought for a minute. “Was my daddy tall, Mimi?”
“Tall and beautiful,” I said gravely, and chucked him under the chin.
Romeo studied me.
“You’re just saying that,” he concluded.
I shook my head.
“No I’m not. He really was beautiful. He was my first love, and you never forget that. I’ll always love him. There will always be a place in my heart for him. No matter how many more men I love in the future.”
Calvin arched an eyebrow at me.
“And I was hoping I’d be the last man you’d ever love,” he quipped, sounding nonetheless a bit hurt.
“I hope so too,” I replied softly. “Really, Calv, you’re the first person I’ve ever cared this much about since Eli, Romeo’s father.” I meant it.
Calvin cleared his throat.
“Oh. Well. But all this small talk isn’t helping us to get out of here.”
He continued with his inspection. I turned back to Romeo.
“So, what happened next?”
“Nothing.” Romeo shrugged yet again. “We came here, and the guy shoved me down into this hole.”
He pointed at a few plastic bottles of mineral water ranged on one of the wooden counters.
“I was thirsty, and the guy told me I could drink some.”
I grabbed one of the bottles, unscrewed the cap and sniffed.
“And you drank it? How do you know maybe it wasn’t poisoned or something?”
Romeo opened his arms wide.
“Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?”
I pounced on him and enfolded him in yet another bear hug, until he squirmed his way out.
“Let me go, Mimi.”
I glanced at the bottle in my hand.
“You thirsty, hon? Do you want some?”
Romeo shook his head.
“Well, in that case, I am thirsty.”
I brought the bottle to my lips and began to guzzle at it greedily, then held the bottle out to Calvin.
“You want some?”
Calvin shook his head.
“Not now. But if I get thirsty later on, I see there are more bottles.”
“At least that tall guy won’t make us die of thirst,” Romeo commented.
Calvin marched over to us.
“Thirst, no.” He reached up and squinted at the roof. It was barely visible in the half-light. He felt around in his back pocket automatically for his mobile.
“Where’s my phone?” he asked.
“Yours, I dunno. I left mine charging back in the apartment,” I said as I tried to search my memory.
“I did too,” Calvin said, deflated. “So there’s no way for us to get in touch with anyone?”
I shook my head dejectedly. Calvin sank onto the bottom step and clasped his hands in front of him.
“What did you get to tell Lindsay when you called her?” he asked at last.
“Well, just about everything.”
“Did you tell her about Bruno? And where he lives and all that?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. I even gave her his address. But that won’t do us any good,” I added. “I’m sure we’re not at Bedford Park. We were driving around too long for that.”
“I don’t know.” Calvin stroked his chin thoughtfully. “She could’ve been just driving around the city to disorient us.”
I waved around us.
“Well, this house is clearly not the one we were just outside of a little while ago.”
Calvin turned to Romeo.
“Hey, kiddo. Did that tall guy drive for a long time before you reached here? Did you recognize any of the places you passed?”
Romeo shook his head.
“You know I can’t tell places in the city. But yes, he drove for a long time.”
“How long?”
Romeo hunched himself over.
“I dunno. A long time.”
“Did you notice if you kept passing the same places over and over again?”
“I woulda noticed that. And no, we didn’t.”
I settled on the dusty step next to Calvin, at a loss. Romeo climbed onto my lap the way he used to when he was a baby, and we simply sat there, too crestfallen to make any more moves.
Chapter 25
The voice was thundering in my ears, deafening in my ears.
“Control them with fire, Bruno. Fire!” it roared. Enigmatic. Unfathomable.
“How?” I moaned in the silence of my bedroom. “And I thought you said you would leave me alone as long as I did everything you told me. So how come you’re back?”
“Did you do everything I told you?” the voice hissed, insinuating. “Everything? How about
the one who got away? Did you succeed in bringing your message across to her?”
I stuck my fingers in my mouth unconsciously.
“N-n-no,” I babbled out. “I’m-I’m s-s-sorry. I’ll do better next time.”
“Nooo.” The voice continued to hiss. “You will not do better next time. You will make it up to me, now. You will find her and bring her back. You will make her pay for attempting to essscape her grand dessstiny.” The voice slurred over the s’s, sibilating, like a serpent. Except I knew it wasn’t a serpent.
It was a pillar of fire. Inside my head.
“The destiny you were supposed to inform her about,” it went on. “But you failed miserably, Brunooo. Now you must put it right.”
“How?” I moaned again.
“Fiiire, Bruno. Control them with fiiire.”
And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. And I was left trembling and alone in the pulsating dark, bathed in sweat, my head throbbing.
*
“How do I control them with fire?” My lips quivered, and my top lip was covered with sweat. “You are fire. I’m just... just a frail, imperfect man. I can’t make fire.”
There was no reply, of course. Whoever that being was had left my room long ago, leaving me to pick up all the pieces and figure all those damn things out. I had to figure out how to get a hold of her. How to make her stay.
It didn’t take me long to put my plan together. It was just a matter of dropping bits and parts of ideas into place, like a jigsaw puzzle. The only thing I hadn’t as yet worked out was how to actually control them and keep them there, once I had them.
Of course, the cellar door had a lock on it. State-of-the-art double bolts which I’d installed in the original steel door. It was an old door and it wasn’t stainless, but I thought the rust stains only conferred an air of antiquity and, almost as if, the feel of a hallowed family estate. Hallowed family estate! I laughed out loud. This shithole of a modest single-family home out in the suburbs had been purchased by the pissed-out drunk of my father barely forty or so years ago, a bit before I arrived in the world.
But no one was using it now, so it served perfectly for my purposes.
*****
I must have fallen asleep, on that filthy, grimy floor. I had a vague memory of leaning my elbow up on the step above me and curling my head in the crook of my elbow. When I awoke, I noticed that Romeo was perched on the step next to me with his sweet face curled in my lap, his lips and fingers sticky, I didn’t know from what. Whether it was from sweat or from something sugary that he might have eaten. I stroked his damp waves plastered against his pallid forehead. He stirred in his sleep and mumbled something.
I wondered what time it was and glanced down automatically at my wrists. Then I remembered that it had been years since I’d used a wristwatch. Ever since my mobile had replaced it, actually.
Calvin sat snoring beside me, his head thrown back awkwardly leaning against the step behind us.
Gently, I transferred Romeo’s head to Calvin’s lap and eased myself to my feet. In the faint light I started groping around the walls and the sealing points between different sections of the wall. I scratched away at cracks and crevices, seized a hold of a metal file that I found on a counter and tried to fit it in between sections of the walls, to see if I could somehow separate them and maybe find an opening, or something.
The door squeaked open above me, and a gigantic patch of glaring sunlight beamed down on us. I stared at it in surprise. The dank gloom in the cellar had misled me into believing it was still the middle of the night.
Romeo and Calvin arched up with a start, glancing about themselves in a daze for a minute until tortuous memory returned to them with agonizing slowness. Then they both leapt up in a fright.
Bruno stuck his mongrel face covered with coarse, black stubble through the doorway, cutting off the bright light. His lips curved into a nasty grin.
“Ah, at last, Annasuya Rose Adler, we get a chance to finish our most enlightening conversation. I was truly distressed when you dashed off without even a word of good-bye.”
I started to tremble from head to toe.
“Why are you doing this to me, Bruno?” My voice was shaking. “Isn’t it enough already, that you raped me? What more do you want from me?”
Bruno smiled a crooked smile.
“I wouldn’t call that rape, my dear. Let’s just say, that’s my manner of getting acquainted with beautiful women.”
He strode confidently down the stairs towards me. Romeo and Calvin backed away from him, Calvin with an expression of undisguised disgust, Romeo with pure fear.
As Bruno passed beside him, Calvin suddenly seemed to come into himself. He cast around himself desperately, seized the first item in sight, which turned out to be a wrench on a nearby counter, and threw himself onto Bruno with a guttural growl. Bruno whirled about in a flash of trained reflexes, lashed out with his fists and a minute later, Calvin lay grovelling in a heap at Bruno’s feet.
“That should show you not to take me on, Mr. Wise Guy.” He wiped his hands together in satisfaction.
I stared at Calvin, the man I most cared about in all the world after Eli, crumpled into a tangled mass on the floor, blood pooling in his kinky curls, and something in me just broke. Something so fierce and primal just overwhelmed me, and before I could stop myself I found myself launching myself against Bruno full on with all the force I could muster, hurling myself against him with both fists flying and kicking at his shins with my heels. Bruno merely turned towards me with a malevolent grin.
“You remind me of Brionna,” he boomed out. “Brionna used to beat me up all the time, you know. But the only thing that did for me was to teach me how to fight, and to grow stronger than her, and to egg my spirit on. Every day she used to get the better of me. But you know what happened, Annasuya Rose Adler? Do you know what I did?”
I didn’t care what he had done. I flung myself against him, swinging with my fists against his head as if wielding a baseball bat. He eluded my flailing arms with ease, stepping aside and ducking down at just the right moments.
Deftly, Bruno hooked his leg behind my heels while at the same time he pulled out a crowbar from underneath his jacket and launched it against me. I crashed on my back against the floor, striking my head on hard concrete. Stars blazed before my eyes. The last thing I saw was Bruno approaching me with his crowbar.
“I did to her exactly the same thing I’m going to do to you, Annasuya Rose,” he said.
*****
I observed her as she tottered on the brink of unconsciousness on that austere, filthy floor. That hulking braggart of a boyfriend of hers was flat out cold on the floor next to her. I had them in the perfect place. The only loose end was the boy. But as I studied him, cowering in a little ball on the bottom step, his lips trembling and tears pouring from his eyes, I was struck by a sudden brainstorm.
Of course. Now I knew what to do. Now I understood how to control them with fire.
But first I had to get these two specimens under wraps, where they wouldn’t pose a threat to me. I walked over to the mother. I hauled her nimbly into a rickety chair and secured her with ropes, thanking my lucky stars they made them weight-conscious these days, always dieting and going to the gym. Well, I didn’t know if she followed a diet or ever stepped foot inside a gym, but she was certainly light and shapely enough.
Her giant hulk of a boyfriend was a totally different affair, however. Perhaps he wasn’t as tall as me, but what he was lacking in height he more than made up for in girth and muscle. There was no doubt this specimen did spend long hours working out with weights.
I glanced around looking for another chair, but there wasn’t any. In the end, I tied the incredible hulk up to the handrails at the bottom of the stairs, next to the mealy-mouthed boy.
Next, I cast about the dank space for something I could use to control the boy. There was an iron ball, about the size of a tennis ball, on one of the counters. I had no idea
what it was supposed to be or what its original purpose was. But it would serve me just fine.
I picked it up and fingered it gingerly in front of the boy, as if handling a live bomb. I turned my head half towards him, hiding part of my profile from him.
“Do you know what this is, son?” I asked, rubbing the metal ball with exaggerated strokes in front of him.
He shook his head, his eyes wide like saucers. I grinned.
“I’ve been working on this for a while, you know. It’s not easy for an amateur like me. But I think I’ve finally figured out how to put it together.”
I approached the child with the metal ball clutched delicately in my hands, then lowered myself to his side and perched the ball scrupulously on the floor between his legs. My lips curled up in distaste at his scruffed-up running shoes and dusty trouser legs.
Then I stepped back, away from him.
“It’s a bomb,” I whispered.
My words fell into the echoing silence as if they themselves were tiny explosives. The boy blanched and froze on the spot. His hands, which were raised in the air, half covering his face, remained still where they were.
“Yes, it’s a bomb. A homemade one, to be sure. But I think it works just fine.”
A dark stain began spreading out from the boy’s crotch and he was shaking so hard I wondered that he didn’t just keel over and tumble from the step.
“It should stay pretty stable if you don’t touch it and leave it alone,” I remarked, amused. “But if you disturb it in any way, I don’t know but...” I looked up at him. “Have you ever heard of nitroglycerine, son?”
The boy’s eyes grew so round I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if they’d just popped out of his head and started bouncing all over the floor.
“Well, that’s the main ingredient of this artefact. And if you know anything about chemistry, you must know that nitroglycerine is highly unstable.”
The boy gulped. He cast longing glances towards his mother, who was still out cold. I rubbed my hands together in self-satisfaction.
“I imagine, as I’ve said, you’d have no probs if you just leave it alone and don’t move too much. But any brusque or sudden movement close to it, vibrations in the floor around it, for example, and...” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Boom.”
