The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  Before I was taken, I never thought much about those hostages in Beirut that everyone used to go on about. I’ve thought a lot about them over the years. They spent years in holes in the ground, chained to radiators, and they never knew when they’d be let out. But they knew why they were there. Somehow, they did better than me, I think. The whole world waited for them to come home again. I don’t think anyone has been waiting for me to come home. Sometimes I imagine my funeral, everyone crying. But they wouldn’t have known what happened. They wouldn’t have had any idea that I was still alive under their feet.

  He said he liked me because I was smart and that I knew something about the world. But apart from that he didn’t say that much to me. At least for a few years, must have been about four, he didn’t really talk to me at all. And he didn’t tell me anything about the world. I didn’t ask him either. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him: what can you ask someone who has taken you off the street and locked you in a cellar? You think they are mad and that they probably don’t care much for the world. He used to come down and leave food and then that.

  I spent a lot of time imagining what his life was like up there. I was down there and he was up there. I tried to imagine where I was. I didn’t know, but I invented Edinburgh, as I’d been there for a school trip the year before and we’d been down the underworld of the city on a guided tour, so I had some idea that there was an underground in that city. Because, being a girl like all other girls, apart from being scared by horror videos I hadn’t given much thought to the underground of the city. I sort of knew that London was filled with tunnels lost and hidden and that there must be a lot of underground stuff that was lost. But I didn’t have any reason to think about it.

  But I did think a lot about who he was and what he did when he was upstairs. Whether he lived on his own or with someone else, and whether anyone else knew about me. I guessed that no-one would have any idea, because who would let a young girl waste away underground in such horrible circumstances for so long? But then maybe that was how they got their kicks, he came down for that, then went back up and told his story.

  One morning Emily noticed that the children were cupping their ears to the side of their heads as if listening to some distant sound, something she could not hear. She cupped her own hand to her ear, straining in the dark to make something out. The only sounds she heard were their own footsteps and the distant dripping of water. She could not discern anything new and wondered if they were playing some sort of game.

  Then she heard it. Scrape, scrape, tap. Almost inaudible, distant, remote. She looked at the children and they shook their heads at her, concern in their eyes.

  ‘Is coming.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His. Him. Uncle. Ars father.’

  The hairs instantly stood up on the back of her neck. She concentrated in the dark, trying to make out what they were hearing. There was the whirr of a fan somewhere far off, the air system. It wasn’t always on but now she could taste the fresh air it brought. Then, in the deep far distance, almost imperceptible, she discerned the tiniest clang and then the echoing of feet on something hard. Barely, scraping sounds. She tried so hard to hear that her mind started to confuse vision and sound and, in the darkness, small snippets of light whirled around her head. As she pressed her forehead in concentration, she heard small scrapings while her eyes saw swirling clouds of starlings flocking around her head. The scrapings disengaged themselves from the background noises and suddenly became obvious.

  She found she was sweating and felt her eyes bulging, terror swept over her, her limbs became limp. Now she could hear it clearly. It was the sound of somebody making their way, painfully, slowly, down into the space, maybe crawling, maybe dragging something, she could not be sure. It seemed to go on for hours but was really only a short period which she spent tensed and frozen, immobile, waiting. Waiting.

  Then, across on the other side of the space, the wall cracked and allowed a sliver of golden light to describe a thin line upon the wall. The first light she had seen for days. As she watched in wonder, it widened. A door was pushed open allowing a line of light to fall forward upon the floor.

  A shadow emerged from a hole in the wall and light flooded the cellar, burning Emily’s eyes. The shape unfolded itself and rose up into a large man. It reached behind itself and flicked a switch. Full, harsh, unyielding light flooded the space, blinding her. She shut her eyes tight and tried to blink away the pain.

  Then, although Emily felt terror, it was a strange terror, she knew from the stories of the children, and their hidden mother, that death wasn’t the plan. Her captor wasn’t a murderer, at least not in the ordinary way. She felt a different kind of terror, not a fear of death but an overwhelming helplessness, a horror that entered her body, crept through her muscles and into her bones and settled there, reminding her that she was a prisoner.

  Whatever happens now, she thought, nobody will know. And it is planned, has been planned.

  The man emerged into the space and he walked calmly across to stand in front of her, grinning. He was tall and broad, well dressed in a suit and tie. She noticed his large freckled hands and short hair. He continued to smile at her. She didn’t expect this, didn’t know how to respond. He was not a raving lunatic, not some crippled or dribbling monster, but a broad-faced man dressed in a good suit.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Let me the fuck out of here.’

  Then without warning or decision or control Emily found herself jumping off the bed and flinging herself directly onto him, trying to strike his face with her fists. The big man pushed her easily away and didn’t stop grinning. He balled up a fist and punched her full in the face.

  The unexpectedness and suddenness of the strike sent her spinning across the room, onto the hard concrete floor. She’d never been hit in this way and the pain was huge, but it was the metallic taste of blood and the shock of an uncaring fist that caused the first tears to flow.

  Afterwards, Emily asked Abby why she had never killed him. It shocked her to hear herself ask. The thought came from nowhere, but as soon as she said it, she knew they could do it.

  ‘At first, when I was little, there was nothing I could do. He is a big man, as you have seen. Then there were children. I did think of it, but I thought he never tried to kill me so why? He told me I would never get out, I believed him.’ She tailed off, uncertainly.

  ‘Didn’t you think, one day, maybe he’d let you go?’

  ‘If I was nice to him? If I looked after his children? I was always nice to him, as much as I could, but he told me about the terrible traps. I don’t think there’s any way out, even if he is dead. If he dies, it just gets worse.’

  She seemed resigned, as if any thoughts of getting out had long died in her. But Emily wanted to get out, knew that there was a world out there still waiting for her. Fuck traps, she suddenly thought, they are probably all a lie in the way that everything in this crazy place is a lie.

  ‘We’re going to die in here anyway, if we don’t do something. Have you thought about it, what happens to him, he won’t live for ever, he’s an old man? Getting older.’

  She steeled herself. This isn’t what I do, she thought. A knife being pushed into human flesh, it held horrors. It is what Allen would do, she thought, and what he would want me to do. How do I get a knife, can I fashion one from the cutlery? Thoughts of prisoner of war films came to her, they were imaginative, they made what they needed to escape.

  Sharpen something on the wall, make a sharpie, a shiv and push it into his ribs, she thought, the ideas suddenly thrilling her.

  ‘I’m not scared of him,’ she said.

  ‘I have something,’ Abby said. ‘I made it, a long time ago, for our food, for cutting. Now you are here, I’m not afraid anymore either. You will do it, for my children.’

  She started crying and Emily reached out and held her close.

  The Collector

  Allen found he was w
riting more. He wrote late into the night, avoiding the dark silence for as long as he could. He was in demand. After his return from Belgrade and the disappearance of Emily he had become the first port of call every time someone went missing, a useful talking head for television and an authority on strange vanishings. His friends in the police continued to regard him with some suspicion, but still came to him occasionally for information or advice. He felt himself elevated above the fray. The temper he’d fallen into started to dissipate.

  Out of a sense of duty he kept in touch with Emily’s mother, making a sort of uneasy peace out of their shared misery. She had long realised that the stories the police had whispered to the papers and which they had gleefully repeated were nonsense. There were no other relationships, she hadn’t been seeing a teacher or a retired detective, she hadn’t been seen with a famous musician and she certainly hadn’t run off with a pupil. They had both learned a lot about the cruelties of the English press during that time and it had changed both of them. From that a sort of accommodation had been reached, an understanding that they were both suffering and neither was to blame.

  ‘Maybe she just had enough of me,’ he said, unwilling to share his true thoughts about her fate. He could only leave her in a sort of mindless void between thinking he had done it and his deepest nightmares about what might be happening to her daughter. They sat in long silences, utterly unsure of how to talk about her.

  ‘They are doing something,’ he said, but he knew the trail had gone completely cold.

  Maybe, maybe in years to come, if things changed, he’d get a message. He could hardly bear to think about it.

  He understood she wasn’t dead; he knew she’d been taken. There was nothing he could say or do. She was with Roger. There was no body, but this didn’t mean she was still alive, or dead. He just knew she was alive. It was the way. He knew how this worked. If she had been killed, he would know.

  Emily was part of Roger’s plan for him, part of the learning curve. Maybe taking and keeping wasn’t enough, maybe in the end it was important for outsiders to understand, to experience the exquisite torture of long-term holding. He tried not to think about it. In the night he’d try any trick to stop his mind building pictures of Emily in a huge black unheated basement. It was hard to stop the images coming.

  He spent long evenings watching trash television, drinking red wine, trying to ward off the thoughts and drifting into a void. Looking for distraction he pulled out a book he’d picked up in Roger’s flat which had been in his bag since his return. He remembered it now, The Collector. It was a story about taking. It seemed strange to him that someone like Roger would be interested in reading such a thing, but he flipped the book open. As usual, as he read, he found himself drifting quickly into sleep. And as he slept, the same dream came again and again, descent, darkness, disorientation. In the dream he was a boy again. He had crossed the road from his parents’ house and entered the house opposite, the house that had scared and tormented him as a child, and he found there was a staircase that ran both up and down, around a square well. He leaned on the banister and looked over, into a dark, deep, space where there should not be a basement, and he knew he must not go down while knowing, even in the dream, that he would go down. Fear overtook him but still he could not leave and still he could not surface.

  When, eventually, he woke up, the book had fallen to the floor beside him and lay splayed open on the carpet. As he picked it up, he saw an address written in spidery elegant handwriting inside the back cover. He stared at it for a moment, wondering why it was there and then it came to him. It must be Roger’s London address. Had to be. I’ve got your fucking address, he thought, and I’m coming to get you. A deep, shuddering fear swept through him.

  Hampstead

  When first light came, not wanting to waste another moment, he pulled on some clothes and ran to the tube. He exited at Hampstead and climbed up and up above London where the houses got bigger and grander.

  He soon found Marsham Street – it had a lot of big houses and a lot of trees. Many of the houses converted into flats, not all of them exactly salubrious but not grubby either. Money. Security. Safety, he thought. Some were recent conversions, smart with tidy bricked-over front drives and video cameras on the doors, architect extensions with concrete and glass, stainless steel and bleached wood. The older conversions looked like long-term tenancies, lots of poured concrete, lumpen extensions, overgrown front gardens with somewhat worn-out cars jammed into them.

  And then, the house he was after, the address in the book he’d somehow brought from Roger’s. Though it was only a couple of streets away from some of the smartest streets in the capital, it looked tired and isolated, though it was probably the most valuable plot in the street.

  He stared up at the building, embedded in the side of a hill. A garden behind a high wall dropped away to the south of the building. The people who live on the hill, he thought. This was the sort of house that people would crave, with a location to die for. The trees were huge and heavy, shutting out light to the sloping garden, ignored, unpruned for many years. He wanted to look over the fence, to peer into the space beyond, but something held him back. Not here, not in this street. Not with respectable people watching over his movements. He could feel them watching him though the street seemed silent and deserted.

  Climbing fifteen steps to the front door, Allen wondered what he would say. He didn’t relish meeting Roger on the doorstep. Stepping quickly into the tiled entranceway, he reached up to the large front door and rang the bell. His heart began to beat faster. His mind emptied. He knew he was winging it, his mouth went dry and, as he heard footsteps on a wooden floor behind the huge door, he drew breath. Someone peered through the coloured glass at him, then he could hear them twisting at a heavy door handle.

  A small woman opened the door and he exhaled.

  ‘Hello,’ he said with a forced smile. ‘My name’s Allen Kimbo.’ He held out his hand but she looked right through it. ‘I’m looking for Roger.’

  The woman stared at him for a long moment, pointedly ignoring his hand. She was dressed in a flowery housecoat and slippers,

  ‘Have you come about the flat?’ she said. His mind went blank, then in a flash he grasped what she meant. She was so natural and so straightforward that, in fear of derailing her, he just nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ His breath became faster again, now. He couldn’t believe she was going to invite him in like this. ‘I’ll just get the keys,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to let yourself in. Roger is not here and I’m afraid I never go down there. You understand, don’t you?’

  A note of self-protective sympathy crept into her voice. Confused, Allen reached out to take the keys she had unhooked from behind the door.

  ‘And?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Oh, it’s down there,’ she said, vaguely gesturing to the side of the house. ‘Just follow the path round and you’ll find a green door at the back.’

  He swung the keys gently and stepped back down to find the path. There was a big flat built under the main house. It looked backwards, away from the road. A thin path led round to the front door below the east side. There was a small garden, not even that really, just a yard contained within a wooden fence that separated it from a large, sloping city garden. The ground dropped away steeply from the flat, down to the backs of the houses on the road below. The road that the house sat on curled around the west end of the house and itself dropped down to join the next road. A small gate provided an entrance from the road to what seemed to be the garden of the house, although this space was overgrown and dark.

  He felt the weight of the key in his hand, an old-fashioned mortice lock key with a large tang. When he got to the door, Allen slotted the key neatly into the lock and it turned with a satisfying, oily click. A second lock up above was similarly easily opened and Allen stepped through the front door and into a narrow, dim hallway. He realised that he wasn’t breathing, that he was frigh
tened to be in a space below Roger’s house. Suddenly lightheaded, he walked quickly down the corridor and into the living room. Bracing himself on the windowsill, Allen took deep breaths while looking across at the lower gardens.

  Abigail

  Sometimes he came down and took loads of photos with a little camera, Abigail told Emily. For the early years, although he didn’t talk to me or bring me anything much like clothes or books or anything, he was the only human I knew, and I came to look forward to him visiting. Even though I knew that would happen when he came, even that became part of my life in a way that you won’t understand.

  By your reaction to that I can feel that you will start to hate me. If you know what happened down here and what it meant to me, you’ll start to hate me because you won’t be able to handle it. So, I’m keeping it to myself. I was girl stuck in a hole with a monster. What happened to me was my life for a long time, and I made it my life. You didn’t come to find me, you didn’t dig through the walls and pull me out.

  For a long time I had dreams about being rescued. I thought for sure my dad would work out who was keeping me and would come and dig down in the night and pull me to freedom through a hole in the wall. Sometimes I dreamed this rescue in such detail that I would wake up and wonder how I was still down here.

  At the start of my time here I didn’t know the rules or even if there were any rules, so I used to shout at him or ask him for things. The first time I talked to him, he punched me. I’d never been hit before by anyone. I remember the shock of it, the jarring crunch as his closed fist whacked into my face. It wasn’t really the pain but the unexpected shock of it, like I’d just walked into a lamp-post while looking in the other direction, if you’ve ever done that. The moment it happens, like you are just wondering what this thing is that materialized from nowhere to wallop me in the mouth. After that, I was on my guard when he was down, always thinking that if I looked away a post might appear out of nowhere and whack me one and break another tooth and split my lip and spew red blood all down my front.