by Stuart Keane
Rupert sat down and rubbed his aching cold feet. His tears had started to subside now. Resigning himself to death, alone, hungry and in total darkness apart from the mystery diamond shape in the impossible distance, he started to think of what he enjoyed most in life.
Ah, what was the point, he would never again get to enjoy those things anyway, and thinking of such luxuries now would merely torture him. And his last memory would be of torturing himself because he was too dumb and too shy and too cowardly to do anything about his situation.
There isn’t anything I can do! He thought. I’m trapped!
Rupert rubbed his feet one more time before standing up and moving about, keeping himself active. He needed to keep warm. Making sure he kept on the grass - where there is grass, he reasoned, there is soil, and where there is soil, there is solid ground - he walked in small concise circular motions. He folded his arms, and he suddenly realised how chilly he was. Goosebumps pricked the flesh on his arms and he found himself thinking, why do they call them goosebumps? Surely geese had feathers, which was why you couldn’t see their skin, and surely they didn’t get cold because of the feathers’ qualities of insulation.
He made a note to find out if he ever got out of this mess.
Rupert was jumping and jogging about now to keep himself warm. If he was going to die in here, fine, he was okay with that, but he wouldn’t die cold and freezing. He refused to. Being a coward was one thing, but being an idiot was completely different.
His toe erupted in a blinding flash of searing agony.
OUCH!
GODDAMMIT!!!
Rupert collapsed, holding his left foot in both hands. He rubbed feverishly before the pain filled his brain. It was too late.
Rupert screamed.
The noise shattered the ominous silence in the tunnel, and echoed beyond the chasm and off the high ceilings. The shadows only gave the noise a weird kind of chill, lent a threatening tone to it. Rupert felt as if he was in a horror film.
The captive felt around his foot with his hands. His big toe and the second and third were split, and small cuts on the skin oozed blood. The big nail was cracked too. He felt the warmth of the crimson liquid against his fingertips. A wooden splinter stuck out of the second toe. Around the wound, small pockmarks started to bleed. Whatever he had stubbed his foot on was wooden, that was for sure. The damage was done.
Rupert leaned forward and moved his hand blindly in the darkness. He felt nothing. Moving closer, he groped at unseen darkness for what seemed like an eternity. The wait was painstaking. Finally he gave up, his hand not finding anything at all. Frustration built up inside him before he spat in anger. For a second, Rupert did nothing. Then he lowered himself, kneeling lower and stuck his hand out again. Once again, he found nothing. Just black emptiness in front of him. His hand waved about meaninglessly in the shadows.
His knuckles tapped wood. Only slightly, a glance at most, but he felt something like timber. The panel was there for half a second and then it was gone. Rupert moved closer, still aware of the chasm and its danger and, as he tapped, he felt wood again.
Joy overcame him in a wave of euphoria.
He held his hand against it. Still wary of the death-trap in front of him, Rupert edged closer to the wooden pole ahead. As he ran his hands up and down it, he discovered that the pole couldn’t be more than three feet in height and three feet in diameter.
What interested him, however, was the fact that rope was bound around the bottom of the pole. It was a thick, dusty, coiled rope. In fact, he could have sworn it was thicker than the pole itself. And dusty with age. The dust of years maybe, probably decades.
Smiling, Rupert slid to the right and found another wooden stub, identical to the first - well, maybe not in looks - but darkness did not permit such a comparison. Seconds later, he realised what it was. With bated breath he inched forward and placed his hand down.
He didn’t feel sharpened bamboo poles.
He was touching wooden slats, thick dusty splintered wooden slats.
Rupert laughed, loudly at first.
A bridge!
Praise the Lord!
Pushing his hand further forward, he found two slats, then three, four, and five, all placed next to each other. His fingers found the small gaps between them, below which there was nothing but thin air.
The bridge held when Rupert leaned all his weight on it. Dusty creaks emerged from several sinister areas in the darkness in front of him. Then silence enveloped him once more.
Rupert held his breath, stood up. Smiled.
He took another step. Same groans, same creaks. The bridge was flexible, Rupert could feel it swaying beneath his bare feet. The bridge held.
Rupert smiled again.
Then he ran, as fast as his legs would take him. Groans and creaks and moans emitted from the bridge’s structure as the soles of Rupert’s feet pounded the wood. His feet met solidity for a few moments before he realised he had passed beyond the wooden slats and was once again on cold concrete and grass.
YES!
I’m across!
Rupert dropped to his knees once again in triumph. He cried with joy and stood up, brushing off his knees. Sitting on his rump, Rupert relaxed a little, realising that the worst was over.
For now.
Warning bells rang in his head. If there were bamboo spikes, there had to be a human presence. If there was a bridge, that also suggested the presence of people. But why would anyone put a bridge over a chasm that was designed to kill him?
Sighing, he turned and looked for the familiar sight of the diamond-shaped light.
Focusing ahead, his eyes picked up the talisman that had eluded him for so long. He trod towards the light slowly, his feet aching from the running. The back of his hand wiped his sweaty brow.
“Hang on?” He startled himself by speaking.
Rupert’s feet came up against a concrete step. He placed the soles of his feet on it. He felt deep satisfaction, knowing that his footing was secure, as he climbed more steps. He peered at the diamond of light, which was now inches from his nose. The sudden strong light hurt his eyes for a few seconds as they became accustomed. He put his fingers against the diamond shape and felt. The darkness ended beyond this…window?
It seemed as if it was a window, embedded in painted wood. Running his fingers down further, his hands came across a shape, not part of the woodwork, something nailed to it after the window frame’s manufacture. His fingers traced it and he made out a cross shape, his suspicions confirmed when he felt the blob of metal attached to its epicentre. It was the shape of a man nailed to a cross. Jesus on the crucifix.
This was a door with a crucifix nailed to it. A religious person’s front door. Was this a sign? And who the hell has a tunnel like this leading towards their front door?
Rupert’s eyes had become accustomed to the light now, and he found that the window - or whatever it was - had a picture in its centre, silhouetted by the light behind it. It was a number. Tracing his fingers around it (using his sense of touch seemed more efficient than ever now, since his eyes remained useless in these conditions), he discovered the outline of the numbers six and four.
Rupert caught his breath.
Shaking his head, he stood back away from the light, which he now saw was certainly a window.
There’s no way.
He had seen enough front doors in his life to know what this was. The problem was that the door was very familiar. So much so, it hurt him to recognise it. The shape and feel of it, the significance of the numbers and of the pane itself. The smell of it, the rhythm as you climbed the steps below it.
There’s no way in hell!
The number 64. His favourite psalm. Psalm 64 spoke of protection from the conspiracy of terror. He knew it off by heart, had memorised it when he was fifteen, when he realised what he had wanted to be when he grew up. Saying the words in his head only made it worse. His personal life had now come back to haunt him.
This w
as his front door.
The Reverend Rupert Shaw was home.
***
Impressive.
The first man clapped his hands together once and returned them to his lap. Staring at his monitor, he was both appalled and proud of what he had just seen. Appalled because of the stakes, impressed and proud because for a man to do what Rupert had done in pitch blackness was both immensely exciting to watch and breath-taking to witness. A hint of comedy sprang to mind as he remembered seeing the man wave his hands blindly for minutes before discovering something as humble as a block of wood and some rope.
The man removed his spectacles and wiped them with the silk handkerchief he kept in his breast pocket. He put them back on his nose. He smiled and lifted his tumbler of red wine to his lips.
It was getting exciting now.
His victim stepped through the door he’d been standing in front of. The interior view of the well-lit room behind it filled the monitor. The camera’s angle changed the screen’s view to show the same man from a different angle, walking into a vast room. No darkness here.
The man rubbed his chin and continued watching.
FIVE
Fifteen minutes.
Fifteen bloody minutes!
Kathryn Cox struck her bunk in anger. The bunk replied with a faint squeak, the age of its bolts and nuts and screws obvious, its lack of maintenance even more apparent. The dark room gave away nothing about the surroundings, but Kathryn knew she was being held captive.
At first she thought that to lock her in a room with no light, food or water was someone’s idea of a lame, but very sick, joke. She even thought she’d been placed in a police cell for disrupting the peace or for committing a drunken assault or something along similar lines. It wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure.
Except that she hadn’t been out drinking the night before.
Or in the last three months to be exact.
Before she had awoken on this stinking bunk she had been sleeping in her bed peacefully. Plenty of overtime had been available at work recently, and as much as she hated her job, she needed the extra money: holidays don’t buy themselves. The only problem was that working long shifts required a lot of sleep to recover from them. Being able to sleep wasn’t an issue, but the extra rest made her feel lazy. And her job motivation went out the window, which meant she didn’t go to the gym as much, and her eating got out of hand. All because of her fucking job.
So going from her peaceful bed and waking up somewhere completely different was a little unsettling. It scared her.
And Kathryn Cox didn’t get scared.
It wasn’t in her nature.
She found that there was little in life that was worth getting scared about. She was sick of people whining about life and its problems: the issues and scenarios and politics that being a human being brought about. How people couldn’t cope with everyday issues such as money, jobs, relating to others, being a celebrity. How people lived within a certain spectrum, and if that spectrum became fragmented or distorted in any way, shape or form, they completely collapsed, and became useless.
Fear ruled all.
Kathryn believed the UK had operated this way for decades. When it’s sunny or raining, the country is fine, the people are used to it (the latter more so), but when it snows, the whole of Britain goes into meltdown. Everyone stops, just as a computer crashes or a heart dies when age has won its final battle. A comedian she admired once said, “If terrorists wanted to shut this country down, you would only have to take out one hundred celebrities and watch the country have a nervous breakdown.”
She had to agree with the sentiment.
Kathryn didn’t plan on sticking around, she wanted to get out of Britain anyway. A little home in France was what she wanted. She just had to get there first.
Patience, in two years you will get there, she thought.
Well, if you can get home again first, she reasoned.
All these thoughts had been running around in her head when a loud clicking sound filled the room. It then disappeared as quickly and abruptly as it had rung out. Kathryn hadn’t noticed anything about the room while she was sitting on the bunk. She’d been distracted, deep in thought, keeping herself calm. She didn’t scare easily, but then again, normal situations weren’t scary. Being locked in a mysterious, cloying dark room? Kathryn imagined it to be every human’s personal nightmare, and if not, pretty close to it.
Helplessness had almost taken over her thoughts now, but she realised she couldn’t let that happen.
The click had come from somewhere. She thought about the door – there had to be one. After all, that had to be the route through which she’d arrived here in the first place. She stood up, intending to investigate the sound.
And she suddenly fell to the ground in a heap, the breath knocked out of her. Her legs simply refused to support her weight. She lay on the cold hard floor and cursed the fact that she hadn’t been more careful. At first the thought of being a cripple for life panicked her. When rationality had set in, she realised that in order to get here, she must have been drugged, and her legs giving way was probably a side effect of the medication.
Using all her strength, Kathryn pulled herself up off of the floor onto the bunk once more.
Fifteen minutes later, when her legs were feeling better and she was angry for wasting precious time, she punched her bunk. The second time she tried to stand up, her legs had supported her. Breathing out, she slid her hands down them to make sure they were okay, that she was standing and could remain upright.
Now to see what that noise was.
Gingerly she walked across the room, aware that she could see nothing and that she might collide with something sooner rather than later. Her hands moved out in front of her, instinctively feeling the way. They didn’t take long to find a wooden surface, her fingertips detecting splinters and a doorknob. It took even less time to find out the door was ajar and a good few feet of gap was between the door and its frame. However, it took Kathryn even longer to think about going through the opening.
Hesitation had set in early. Kathryn wasn’t a stupid person. She was methodical, cautious, liked to think things through and act only when appropriate. Who knew what stood beyond that doorway? She had been put in this room for a reason, and whoever put her there didn’t want her escaping.
Or did they?
If she was a prisoner, why did the door open?
This made her even more suspicious.
The open door was like bait, a trick, a human sized Venus fly trap. Someone did want her to escape. Whoever it was wanted her to go through that door and walk straight into a trap.
Maybe she was paranoid, maybe she wasn’t.
But she wasn’t stupid.
Kathryn Cox was staying put.
***
The second man cursed his monitor on the desk in front of him. He stood up and circled his luxurious office, only parts of the interior visible from the solitary light on the desk. Shadows bounced across the room and the desk and the floor. The man took a seat and tapped his keyboard. The camera zoomed in to show the woman sitting on her bunk. Minutes before she had been at the door, about to leave the room. Now she had come back to sit down again. Not moving, staying put.
Bitch!
Get out of there! I’m already three minutes behind everyone else!
His cool attitude had gone now, his face a mask of anger. Sweat beaded his brow and his hair was dishevelled, as his fingers ran through it.
That little bitch had no idea what was at stake. Only he knew what was riding on this. And as it stood, the odds were severely stacked against him.
He rubbed his face, wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.
Then he smiled.
He tapped a button on the keyboard, which brought up a red bar on the screen. It read thirty five out of one hundred. He tapped another key and the number rose to forty five, then fifty.
Feel the heat, bitch!
SIX
Heather Mason was concerned.
Concerned and confused. And a little sick.
It’d been three minutes since she’d stepped through the door that rendered her a prisoner. Thirty seconds of that had been taken up with her finding the end of the dark tunnel that led to her previous temporary home. Another door had greeted her, which meant the tunnel had been a little less than double the size of her cell. The second door had been shut, but not locked.
Opening it had brought her to her current situation.
It took a full minute for her eyes to adjust to the light that welcomed her. In fact, she had to shut her eyes and use her hands as a shield while her eyes focused on the light. It was like staring at the sun, it burned at first. At one point she even turned away. Once she had prepared herself, she turned back to the room in front of her.
And looked down.
Her clothes!
When she went to work (today, yesterday, last week?), she had been dressed in a two-piece pinstripe grey trouser suit. The trousers were snug around her butt and thighs, and finished neatly just above her ankle. Her ankles had been hidden that day by black leather boots, newly polished and immaculate. She liked to polish her shoes regularly, appearances meant everything in her job. Looking good got you places, it meant you were paid more and sometimes it meant the boss might want to fuck you, and smooth the way towards rapid promotion - not that Heather was interested in such perks. Heather just liked to look good, because it made her feel good, and it helped her forget the bad memories of her mother. The suit she’d been wearing had been finished off with a matching jacket, and underneath she had worn a thin white tee shirt with a white supporting bra. Minimal make-up and a brush through her hair had given her the elegance that she had always radiated since the age of fourteen. Twenty years on, she could still knock them dead.
