by Tom Marcus
He shut the door and drew across the heavy bolts. There was a hurricane lamp by the altar, and he went and picked it up. As its beam played across the inside of the church, I thought it looked even more ramshackle than before. There were buckets on the floor, presumably to catch the water leaking from the roof, and what looked like sodden hymn books were lying in random piles. There were splashes of white paint across the back of one of the pews – or maybe it was graffiti – and a filthy tarpaulin was draped over the font. It was hard to imagine Martindale actually conducting any services here. The whole place looked as if it was about to be demolished.
‘This way.’
He opened the door into the little room where we’d had our talk and put the lamp on the floor. But instead of sitting down, he moved over to the bookshelf under the crucifix and started moving it to one side.
‘Give us a hand, Stevie, would you?’
I got on the other end and shoved as he pulled. It was surprisingly heavy, even though there weren’t any books on it, and it took a fair bit of grunting and heaving to shift it.
‘That’ll do.’
The bookshelf had been hiding a set of double doors, three or four feet high, set into the wall, the handles padlocked together with a heavy chain. Martindale pulled a bunch of keys from a pocket of his combats and sorted through them until he found the right one. He opened the padlock and freed the chain, then pulled the doors open. The light from the lamp was now shining into a narrow, low-ceilinged room.
‘Watch your head,’ he said, nudging me forward with his hand. I thought maybe he was going to shut the door behind me and leave me there, but instead he hunched forward and followed me through, closing the doors behind us. Bent over with my hands on my knees, I looked around. The room was empty, with bare, whitewashed walls and an old carpet covering most of the floor. Martindale started rolling the carpet up from one end, and without being asked, I knelt down and helped him push it against the far wall. A thick cloud of acrid dust made us both close our eyes. When I opened them, I was looking at a trapdoor set in the floor.
Martindale lifted up one of the doors by its handle, releasing a gust of cold, stale air, and then the other one. I peered down into the hole and saw the top of an old wooden ladder.
‘This is where it can get a bit tricky,’ Martindale said. ‘I’m going to have to let you go first and you’re going to have to feel your way a bit, I’m afraid. Just take it slowly and you’ll be all right.’
He pointed the lamp down into the hole as I got on my knees, then put one leg down, feeling for the rungs. Once I’d got one foot securely in, I started lowering myself down, gripping the sides of the ladder tightly. It wobbled slightly under my weight.
‘Don’t worry, it’s quite safe,’ Martindale said.
I made my way down steadily, and as soon as I got my feet on the floor, Martindale followed, holding the lamp in one hand and feeling his way down the ladder with the other.
‘Interesting history, St Saviour’s,’ he said once he’d reached the bottom, sweeping the beam of the lamp across the low rectangular space we were now standing in. One wall was brick, but the others looked as if they were made out of solid stone. One of them had a dark, worn-looking door set into it.
‘Officially, the first St Saviour’s was built in 1152 by King Stephen, not long before he died. Of course, there’s nothing left of the original structure – at least not above ground. Lots of knocking bits down and rebuilding them over the years. But there had been chapels of some sort on this site for who knows how long even before Stephen. Hence all the chambers and tunnels down here. The last rector was a bit of a history buff – he discovered a couple of tombs nobody knew about – but I think I’ve outdone him. I suppose I should have told the diocese about all this –’ he swept the torch through 360 degrees again – ‘but what would be the point? They’d probably just shut it all up and throw away the key. Health and safety and all that nonsense. Or worse: turn it into a tourist attraction, like the Temple of Mithras.’
I wondered why he was banging on about all of this crap. Did he really think Stevie gave a rat’s arse about King Stephen or the Temple of Doom or whatever it was? Then it hit me. It didn’t really matter what he said: he was just distracting Stevie, keeping him calm, talking any old bollocks to keep him from having second thoughts about what he was getting himself into.
For the first time I started to notice the cold and a shiver went through me.
Martindale nudged me towards the door, then felt in his pocket and came up with a big brass key. The door was low and narrow and the dark wood was chipped and scarred. He turned the key in the lock and the door scraped against the floor as he pulled it open.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said, holding the lamp out in front of him. We entered a narrow passage. I put my hand out and felt cold, damp stone. ‘I’m pretty certain there’s an underground river pretty close. When there’s a lot of rain it can get a bit wet down here.’
He turned a corner and the light disappeared. I felt my way along until I saw him again, unlocking another door just like the first. He waited until I’d caught him up and pushed me through. ‘Watch your head.’
The room was small, maybe ten foot by ten. The walls were dark brick and the floor looked like hard-packed earth. Heavy wooden beams made up the ceiling. In one corner was a three-legged stool. In the other were two metal buckets. One of them was full of water.
‘This used to be an ossuary. When I discovered it, it was full of bones. Impossible to tell how old, but judging from the state of them, I’d say they went back to well before King Stephen’s time.’ Martindale shrugged off his backpack and unzipped it, pulling out a black bin bag and a grey blanket. ‘Right. The first thing, Stevie, is to get rid of your old clothes. They’re a symbol of your old life, the old Stevie, so that’s where we’ll begin. Then, one by one, we’re going to strip away the other layers, the layers of the self, until you’re spiritually naked as well as physically. Then you can be reborn.’ He looked at me. ‘It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Like peeling an onion. But I’m afraid, like an onion, there will be a few tears. The old self, old habits, old memories; they won’t give up without a fight. Have you ever gone cold turkey, Stevie?’
‘Once,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘This will be worse.’
I thought maybe he was going to give me one last chance to pull out, but he just looked at me with a mixture of sadness and anticipation, the way you’d look at something you were never going to see again.
I started to peel off my clothes and Martindale scooped them into the bin bag. When I was finished he handed me the blanket. ‘It can get a bit chilly down here. OK, I’m going to leave you for a while, so you can get used to your new surroundings. When I come back –’ he smiled, and the lamplight glinted on his glasses – ‘we’ll begin.’
I watched him turn and walk through the door. When he closed it behind him, the darkness was total. I listened to the key scraping in the lock, then his footsteps along the passage, gradually fainter and fainter. I heard the creak of the other door, the sound of another key being turned, and then silence.
Darkness and silence. My new home. I wrapped the blanket round myself, then slowly felt my way around, touching the walls, the floor, the stool, the buckets – round and round until I had a mental picture in my head of where everything was. It wasn’t much, but it might end up being the only thing I had to hold on to.
Reaching a corner, I sat down, wedging myself between the walls, feeling the icy touch of the old bricks on my shoulders through the thin blanket. I closed my eyes, then opened them. No difference. The same impenetrable dark. That would be the first stage of the disorientation process, blurring the distinction between inner and outer, between what you could see and what was just in your head, between what was imagined and what was real. I knew it would start to unsettle me before too long – opening my eyes and the world refusing to appear – but for the moment I was happy to give myself up to it. Real dar
kness is something we never really experience any more. It was like we were more afraid of it than even our caveman ancestors must have been. But at this moment, it felt like something I desperately needed.
It was when I started to see things that the problems would start.
37
The sound of Martindale opening the door came sooner than I had expected. Not that I had any real idea how much time had passed. But I’d thought he would let Stevie stew for a bit longer, let the darkness and the silence soften him up before he got to work on him. Maybe he thought Stevie was so weak-minded to begin with that it wouldn’t take much to turn him to jelly. Or maybe he was just eager to get on with the job: there must be a clock ticking for him, too, after all.
Martindale put the lamp down on the floor, angling it so it shone behind him, making a dim halo on the wall. He sat down on the stool and shifted round to face me.
‘I want you to recall a memory for me.’
His voice had changed. This wasn’t the chatty priest any more, burbling on about ancient artefacts. He sounded cold, impersonal, all business. Was this the first glimpse of the real Paul Martindale? The other thing I noticed was that he hadn’t called me Stevie. It was a small thing, but chilling in its way. Stevie Nichols was already history. I was sure he would never use his name again, confident that the man who walked out of this miserable cell would be a different person entirely. But why, if he wanted Stevie to forget who he was, was he asking him to remember?
‘OK,’ I said. ‘What?’
‘Let’s go back to your childhood. What’s the first thing you can remember?’
I closed my eyes. Come on, Stevie. He seemed reluctant, like he’d gone into his shell since arriving at the church. Self-defence mechanism maybe? When it came to the crunch, had he decided he really wanted to hang on to who he was and his miserable bloody life?
Slowly an image formed in my mind. A bright, sunny day. I had to squint when I looked up. I was, what, four? Five? I was wearing a pale-blue T-shirt with a brown stain on it that wouldn’t come out, however many times it was washed. And the grey shorts I hated because they were always slipping down. They belonged to someone else, someone bigger, but they were all I had. The other kids were always taking the piss, trying to pull them down.
‘Well? What do you remember?’
‘I was little. Must have been at the orphanage. But we was outside, somewhere. There was grass. It was sunny.’
‘That’s clear in your head?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘There was a girl. There weren’t usually girls. We wasn’t supposed to mix with them, you know? Stupid – we was only little kids. Fucking nuns, what did they think we was going to do?’ I lost my train of thought for a moment, thinking about the nuns and all the things they tried to stop you doing, which was pretty much anything that wasn’t scrubbing floors or praying or going to sleep.
‘Go on.’
‘This girl. She had blonde frizzy hair. I’d never seen that before. I thought it was . . . I dunno. Anyway, she came over and smiled at me, so I looked round, thinking someone was behind me and was going to whack me – you know, she was just distracting me – but there wasn’t anyone there. Then she pulled her hand out from behind her back and she had a paper bag in it. She held it out, like. “D’you wanna sweet?” she said. “My name’s Rosie.” I still didn’t trust her, you know, so I just looked at her, all that corkscrewy hair waving about in the wind. She was smiling, but with her teeth together, which I thought was funny. “Go on, put your hand in,” she said. So I did, like. I still thought there’d be a trick, like the bag was full of dog shit or something.’
‘And was it?’
‘No. There was sweets. They were round. Big. I pulled one out. “They’re gobstoppers,” she said. “You can have one.” I remember I put it in my pocket and she laughed. I kept it in my pocket for days. Every now and then I’d put my hand in and feel it. It was sticky. I thought it must be getting smaller. Then one morning it was gone.’
For a moment I felt everything Stevie was feeling. No one had ever given me anything before. Only taken things away. I was sorry I’d never told her my name. I thought if I’d told her my name, one day I’d see her again and she’d remember, but because I hadn’t she’d forget about me.
‘And you remember all that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I just talked to her.’
‘Who?’
‘Rosie.’ He jerked his head towards the ceiling. ‘She’s upstairs. We were just having a cup of tea.’ He smiled. ‘I do see what you mean about the hair. But the rest of her’s changed quite a lot, I’m afraid.’
I sat up straighter, confused. ‘What . . . I dunno what you—’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘Not a pretty sight. Never mind. Anyway, she told me all about it.’
‘What d’you mean? About what?’ I could feel my heart rate rising fast.
‘The gobstopper. You know it was poisoned? Rat poison, she said. She wanted you to eat it so she could watch you die. It would have been very painful.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Nasty little bitch.’
I closed my eyes. I watched Rosie smile again. Now, with her teeth clenched, her expression somehow didn’t look so friendly.
‘You’re lying!’ I shouted as loud as I could, but my voice came out a feeble, strangled bark.
Martindale didn’t move. ‘You think about her, don’t you? Not all the time. Months might go by – years, even. And then when you’re feeling down, one of your especially black moods, you think back to when she offered you a sweet. And you imagine bumping into her again – the grown-up Rosie – you imagine she’s beautiful now, and she remembers you; she’s never forgotten, and just like you, she’s been thinking of you for all these years.’
I clenched my fists and shook my head violently from side to side like a dog trying to escape its leash.
Why is he saying this? Why can’t he just shut up?
‘Well, it’s true: she has been thinking about you. Ever since you put the gobstopper in your pocket and walked away, she’s been wondering if you ate it. She’s been imagining the look on your face when the pain hit you, she’s been imagining you frothing at the mouth, your eyes bulging, your black, swollen tongue sticking out. When she’s feeling a bit down, she thinks about it and it cheers her up, imagining you in unbearable pain, squirming like a worm on a hook, choking your life out.’
I suddenly felt a stab of pain in my guts. A wave of nausea swept through me and I toppled over, retching. In two violent spams, I emptied the contents of my stomach before my cheek hit the floor, then lay there, my face inches from the spreading pool, panting, overwhelmed with the sour stench of vomit now filling the room.
I opened my eyes. If Martindale was sickened by the smell, he didn’t show it. If anything, his expression was one of satisfaction.
‘I think that’s enough for now. Funny how things aren’t always quite the way we remember them, isn’t it? I’ll let you have a rest and a think, and then I’ll be back.’
38
It was the cold that eventually woke me up. I tried to lift my face off the floor, but it seemed to be stuck to the slowly drying vomit. I pulled harder and managed to sit up. The blanket had fallen away and I pulled it round myself and just sat there, trying to hug some warmth into my bones. After a while, I tried standing, but my hamstrings instantly cramped up and I toppled back down, so I crawled instead, trying to access my mental map of the room to locate the buckets. My outstretched hand first found the stool and I instinctively pulled it back, as if Martindale might somehow still be there. I took a deep breath, the stinking air almost making me gag, and inched my way round to where I guessed the buckets would be. The water in the first bucket was ice-cold, but I didn’t care. I scooped out a handful and splashed it over my face, wiping away the filth. I kept going until the smell was out of my nostrils and I c
ould breathe normally, then lowered my face to the bucket and drank. I slowly levered myself up until I could stand, then started slowly pacing round my cell, trying to get my circulation going again. Once I was loose, I felt my way round to the opposite corner and sat down, wrapping the blanket around me as tightly as I could.
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t feel Stevie anywhere. He just seemed to have disappeared. I let my mind wander and eventually I found him, curled up tightly into a ball, trying to make himself as small as he could, a tiny, tiny invisible speck floating in the vast, empty dark. I shook my head sadly. If he thought he could hide from Martindale as easily as that, he had another think coming. But he’d find that out soon enough. I let him drift on while I focused on what I needed to do.
The first thing was to give myself some basic mental tasks. How big is the cell? How many feet from side to side? What’s the distance from floor to ceiling? Then, when I’d exhausted all the possibilities of mental calculation, I’d try some simple memory tests. First off, FA Cup winners, going back as far as I could. Then scores. Then scorers. Then back to the beginning and do the teams, starting with the keeper, then right back, left back . . .
I wasn’t in school much when I was a kid, and didn’t pay any attention when I was, so you could ask me kings and queens of England and I’d be stuck after Elizabeth II. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t any good at absorbing information; it just meant I could never be arsed if there didn’t seem to be any point to it. Football would definitely keep me going for a good while, and then there was all the stuff I learned in the army, starting with every kind of weapon I’d ever handled, imagining field-stripping them in the dark . . . Anything would do, so long as it was just information, numbers, data.
No emotional content. That was the thing to avoid. The trick was going to be to let Martindale fuck with Stevie’s memories until he went mad without letting the same thing happen to me. Focusing on the physical stuff would be a useful distraction: pain, cold, hunger – whatever. And then routine mental tasks: calculations, memory games. Anything neutral. Anything to keep Martindale away from the important stuff.
