by Kane, Paul
There were only a handful twigs lying around, so when these were gone I went into the undergrowth to find more. I hadn’t gone that far in when I found the den. It was covered up with foliage; quite well hidden beneath the trees, a hollowed out bit of green with earth for the floor and the remains of a fire. It was empty. I figured it must have been the older kids that had made it, looking for a private place to hang out.
At that age caution always fell a close second to curiosity, so I dropped the twigs and went inside. There was a strange smell, a toilet smell. I was about to leave when I spotted something towards the back, pages scattered.
And a glimpse of something that, until today, had been forbidden.
I crept further in, certain that the older kids had been here because they’d left behind an Aladdin’s Cave of porn. The magazines were screwed up, the pages creased––yet the pictures of half naked women posing for the camera were a revelation. At that age girls in my class were just pests, there to torment, but this was different. These weren’t girls, they were women, and they were showing me parts of their bodies willingly, opening up as easily as I was opening the pages.
I began to feel stirrings, a pleasant sensation as I ogled the photos. Then something fell out of one of the magazines. A piece of paper with handwritten scribblings all over it. I bent and picked it up, but could barely make out the spider scrawl. All except one phrase, written time and time again: ‘They watch, and they wait.’
I frowned, then checked more of the magazines. I hadn’t gotten very far when I heard the snapping of twigs I’d left in the entranceway. I spun and saw my monster. It was big, hairy, and its skin was almost black. It wore an old trenchcoat that strained tight at the shoulders. When it opened its mouth to speak I saw rotting teeth inside. Drool spilled onto its beard as it gargled, “Did they send you?”
I shook with terror. My erection shrank away and I dropped the magazine, a couple more of the handwritten sheets slipping out onto the floor. His wide, staring eyes followed them down. He covered the distance between us easily, grabbing hold of my arm––so hard I thought it might break. He towered above me. “They did, didn’t they, boy.” It wasn’t a question. His fetid breath almost caused me to pass out.
I shook my head, unable to get any words out.
“Yes. They’ve sent a little spy.”
“P-P-Please don’t hurt me,” I spluttered.
He yanked my arm. “I’m not going back!” he shouted. “You hear me… Never.”
I nodded. He seemed pleased that he’d got through to me. Then he drew me in so close I could see the insects living in his beard. “You go back, you tell them that, boy,” he growled.
He let me go. I gaped, but suddenly my natural survival instinct kicked in and I ran out of there. I plunged through the undergrowth, catching my head on the branch of a low-hanging tree. I fell, hard. Shaking my head, then casting a glance over my shoulder, I got up and began running again.
I felt the wetness at my temple, but didn’t stop. I ran up that path, never looking back in case the ‘monster’ had decided to give chase.
I’m not going back… Never…
When I got home my mother said, “For God’s sake, Chris, whatever have you been doing?” She took me into the kitchen, washed the cut on my head, then put some antiseptic on it. When she asked me again what I’d done, whether it had happened playing, all I could do was stare, opening and closing my mouth.
“Christopher Edward Warwick,” she said a final time, “you tell me what happened, right now.”
“M-Monster… c-canal…” was all I could say.
“You and that blasted imagination of yours,” she said. “Go to your room!”
When the truth emerged a day or so later, she felt pretty bad. I heard that some of the older boys had stumbled upon my monster and gave him a good kicking before telling their parents, who then called the police. He’d gone by the time they got there, but it was all around the estate about what had happened: that some pervo nutter had been living rough down by the bridge.
Mum hugged me when she when found out. She never said anything, but she knew. Knew the monster had been real.
I know better now––he wasn’t really a monster at all. Just someone who knew the truth, and it had sent him insane.
‘They watch and wait’ he had written.
They watch and wait.
Two
When I wake again, the blindfold is gone.
I open my eyes and look around. The bars are still there in front of me, I’m still shackled by the hands and feet, but the bonds are looser, my hands apart. I can move a little, maneuver myself up into a sitting position. I don’t ache as much now, either. I wonder how much time has passed since––
Then I remember. The person burnt alive. It’s gone now, the cage empty, the body taken away while I was unconscious.
“Welcome back,” says the man who’d told me to be quiet, hanging in his own cage like a canary. He’s wearing what look like sweatpants and a top, the kind of thing you’d find people dressed in at a country health spa.
“We thought you were out for the count,” adds the woman who’d also spoken to me before. She’s perhaps in her late twenties, with a slender frame––or what I can see of it beneath the smock she’s wearing. Her dirty-blonde hair is matted with sweat; looks like it hasn’t been washed in a couple of weeks. “How do you feel?”
“How… how do I feel?” I snap, a mixture of confusion and anger.
The man throws me a vicious look. “Christ, can’t you keep it down? I told you before.”
“I’ll keep it down when somebody tells me what the fuck’s going on,” I yell at him, returning his glare with one of my own. I pull at the chains, testing their length.
“If you do that, they’ll just make them tighter,” the woman warns.
“Who will? And who did that…” Words fail me so I simply point across at the empty space where the charred body had once been.
“You ask far too many questions.” This comes from another speaker, his voice richer, deeper. I turn and see yet another of the cages behind. In it an olive-skinned man sits crossed-legged, dressed like the first guy: in loose clothing. A prisoner’s outfit.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Who the fuck are you?”
“That’s two more,” he says.
I make to get up, about to grip the bars of the cage.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” the olive-skinned man tells me.
“Well you’re not m––” Too late I see the wire curled around the bars, and no sooner have I touched the metal than I feel the electric shock. It ripples through my body, not strong enough to put me out again, but enough to blister my hands. “Shit!”
Is that what happened to the person in the cage in front? I wonder. Did someone just leave the current on––running along the bottom as well––long enough to set fire to the poor sod inside?
“I did warn you,” says the man, his dark brown, almost black, eyes fixed on me.
As I rub at my palms I take in the room: rectangular, the walls smooth. There’s a red tinge to the lights, giving the space the look of a photographic dark room. Nothing to give away a location. Just a single door.
“Where am I?”
“Another question,” comes the reply from my neighbor.
“What do you expect, Kavi?” says the woman. “He’s bound to be a little disorientated at first. We all were.”
“And do we know any more now than we did then?” asks the man she named. Nobody rushes to answer.
Instead the woman introduces herself to me. “I’m Jane,” she says, touching her chest, then thumbs over at the other man. “That’s Phil.”
“Philip Hall,” he announces proudly, like it means something.
I shrug. “Chris. Chris Warwick.”
“Welcome to the party,” says Phil snidely.
“So nobody knows anything about this? About why I saw someone just get fried right in front of me.”
I nod. “Managed to drag my blindfold down a bit. I saw enough.”
Phil gives a half laugh. “Resourceful little devil, isn’t he? That’ll get you a one way ticket to hell around here, kid.”
“This is Hell,” says Jane with complete conviction.
“How long have you been here?” I ask, though it’s Phil who butts in.
“Longer than you,” he says.
“Then you must have seen who’s holding us.” I round on him. “Who did that?”
Nobody says a thing.
“Oh, come on! This is ridiculous.” I stand, almost putting my hands on the bars again. “You can’t just kidnap a bunch of people and then––”
“Why not? Happens all the time abroad,” Phil comments. “Places where his lot come from.” He nods over at Kavi.
The dark skinned man smiles. “With one breath you betray your ignorance,” is his only remark.
“We’re all ignorant in this place,” Phil replies.
“But how did you wind up here?” It’s another question, and I expect Kavi to say something about that, but he doesn’t. This time he asks me one of his own.
“How did you?”
It suddenly strikes me I don’t know. I had thought I’d been out on the town or something, and just got completely smashed. But I couldn’t remember a thing about the previous night, the previous day (what time of day is it anyway?), let alone how I ended up in this cage. “I… I think I was drugged.”
“Well, of course you were drugged!” barks Phil. “It’s how they get you here, and put you inside these things.” He points at the cage.
“But why? Are they after money?”
“Looking for a ransom, that what you’re thinking?” Phil grunts. “And why exactly would anyone pay money to get you back, Chrissie-boy? Loaded, are you?”
I hang my head. “No.”
“Me either. How about you, Jane? Fitness instructor’s pay suddenly gone up by a few million in the last month or so?”
“Piss off,” says Jane.
Phil grins wearily. “Wish I could, sweetheart. Really wish I could.”
“So what do you do?” I enquire out of mild curiosity.
“That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”
“He works in an estate agents,” Jane informs me.
“Thanks a bunch,” Phil grumbles.
“What about you?” I ask Kavi.
“Aw, who gives a shit,” Phil breaks in before he can answer. “That was in the outside world. In here you’re just another plaything.”
I look again at the empty cage. “Why did they do that? Burn that person up, I mean.”
“Nick,” Jane says quietly, her eyes glistening. “His name was Nicholas.”
“They don’t need to give a fucking reason,” Phil explains. “They’ll just come in, douse you with petrol and strike a light.”
“Phil, please,” begs Jane.
“Especially if you make a fuss, draw attention to yourself,” he carries on, ignoring her. “Just like Nick did.”
It was Jane’s turn to glare now, at Phil. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He was just––”
“He asked one too many questions,” Kavi points out, looking at me.
Phil nods in agreement. “Every time they came in, he was at it. What the fuck did he expect?”
“Come in? Hold on,” I say, switching the subject, “so you have seen the people holding us then?”
Phil considers how to answer that one. “They don’t exactly let us get a good look at their faces.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will,” Kavi promises.
“Nick didn’t do anything wrong,” Jane continues, as if the conversation hasn’t moved on at all. “It wasn’t because of that––they just enjoy it.” Without thinking, her hand goes to her neck and now I see the scar. It’s a fresh one, still quite raw. “They enjoy hurting us.”
“But why? What could they possibly gain from this? What do they want?”
“That,” says Kavi, “is precisely what Nick wanted to know.”
They fall silent. After a few minutes, Jane turns to me. “Chris, tell us about yourself. Who are you? What do you do?”
I sit back in the cage, picking at the chains. What the hey––I’m not going anywhere right now.
So I tell them. I tell them what I can remember about my life…
Interlude:
Seven Years Ago
I went through the same shit as everyone else in my teens.
Struggled with my lessons, struggled with the opposite sex. I got just high enough grades to take me to art school where I enjoyed a brief and actually quite enjoyable stay––able to reinvent myself for my new circle of friends––until I got thrown out for smoking dope in the toilets with Jill Stanyard. The police let me off with a caution because I told them who had supplied the joint. They informed me they’d be keeping a close eye on me, though.
My parents had split by then, and I didn’t fancy living with either of them. Besides, I think they pretty much wanted to disown me after the whole college incident. So I slept on the living room floor of a friend’s digs and signed on.
In my early twenties I figured I should really make an effort to do something with my life. I worked my way through any number of dead-end jobs just to earn some cash. For a while I was the guy in the street that everyone hates––you know the one, standing there with clipboard in hand. That was when I wasn’t dressed up as a giant chicken, handing out leaflets about tasty battered drumsticks.
In my spare time I kept up with my art, though I’d started writing more by then: something else I’d gotten into at college. I even went to a night-class for a short while.
“Christopher, your characterization is good, it’s just your ideas that need to be worked on,” the tutor told me, a pipe-smoking ex-English teacher in a tweed jacket. “They’re just too… off the wall. For example, these people you keep writing about from this other dimension who manipulate the human race. The ones with the globes. I mean, really.”
“They’re just a metaphor,” I tried to tell him. I thought he’d like that, being into symbolism and everything. “I guess I’m saying none of us are really in control of our own destinies.”
His answer to that was, “Rubbish. We make our own choices in life, Christopher.”
But we don’t, do we? Some of those choices are made for us. Like if I hadn’t been going to the classes I never would have met Kim, and we never would have started going out. She was there for pottery lessons and we bumped into each other in the corridor after class.
“Let me guess, ash tray?” I said, after we got chatting––referring to the object she’d been making that night.
She laughed, her eyes lighting up behind the big round glasses she wore. “Don’t smoke. Actually it’s supposed to be a mug.”
“Ah, I see… Look, do you fancy something to eat?”
And that was that.
I showed Kim some of my stories and sketches; she thought I was talented, though I don’t think she really got them. “You should send these off somewhere,” she told me in bed one night.
“What, you mean to magazines?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think?”
“Sure. What have you got to lose? If you don’t, you’ll never know.”
She was right; if I didn’t I’d always wonder what might have been. But there was no way they were good enough, and the rejections I got back simply confirmed that. So Kim talked her boss, Mr. Malone, into giving me a job at the call centre where she worked.
That’s about the size of it. I ate, slept, watched mindless TV and screwed. Kim and I made plans for the future, even though her parents hated my guts. Her father especially. “He’s got no ambition, no prospects,” I overheard him telling his daughter once. “You can do much better than him, sweetheart.” They say history repeats itself, don’t they?
Stil
l, life was good for a time. Life was normal.
Three
It isn’t long before I see our jailers.
I understand now what Kavi meant, because their features are covered by hoods; cowls so large they obscure their faces. And robes that reach almost to the ground. They look like monks belonging to some kind of religious order. Is that it? A brotherhood dedicated to worshipping pain––inflicted on themselves and others. But their footwear gives them away. Heavy boots; military issue. Plus there’s the merest glimpse of combat trousers as they walk.
They bring with them a replacement for ‘Nick’: a grey-haired old lady dragged along the floor by her flabby arms. She’s blindfolded, like I was, and looks just as drugged up. They begin attaching chains to her wrists and ankles.
I exchange glances with Jane, then Phil and Kavi. The latter are begging me with their eyes not to say or do something that might cause trouble. But as I watch them open up the door of the cage and dump the woman inside, I can’t hold back.
“Hey,” I shout, hearing a sharp intake of breath from Jane. “Hey, I’m talking to you––you murdering bastards.” It’s not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve picked a great time to act the hero, but I just can’t contain my outrage any longer.
The monks pause from their labors and turn in my direction. They say nothing. Then with cold, calculating calmness they finish the job, securing the woman behind those bars.
“You cowards, hiding in those stupid outfits. Just who do you think you are?”
“Christopher,” says Kavi in hushed tones that nevertheless have a hardness to them.
“Hey, I’m waiting for an answer, fuckers!” I shout.
That does the trick. One walks over, the strides long and confident, robes swishing. The same swishing I heard the first time I awakened.
Head still bowed, he approaches my cage.
“You come near me and I’ll…” I start, knowing it’s just a hollow threat. If these people took me in the first place, then I’m no match for them now, shackled. I’m not much of a fighter anyway.
