Agnes grabbed the backrest of her own chair and turned toward the one-way mirror. She stood up straight, a brief moment resembling a shield-maiden of the Viking Age, her breasts naked and covered in blood and sweat, her greasy hair hanging loose. She was less than three paces away from the one-way mirror. She covered the distance running, swinging the chair on the left side of her body like a kid playing baseball. The next second, she smashed the chair through the one-way mirror, sending an explosion of broken glass, sweat, and blood flying into the room behind the mirror.
She counted three people in the room. All standing. One—a man wearing jeans—was scurrying toward a door in the back of the room, while the two others, a woman and an overweight man, were cowering, paralyzed behind a leather couch. The fat man shouting for help into a microphone, yelling that something unexpected had occurred.
Agnes had never seen any of them before. Never. Ever. She used the back of the chair to scrape off most of the glass still sitting in the windowpane. The glass mostly gone, she swung a leg into the room, putting a foot down on the thick and soft carpet inside the room.
The woman started pushing the fat man. “Stop her, goddamn it! You’re the man, aren’t you?”
The microphone slipped from his fat fingers.
“Do something!” the woman shrieked.
Dropping the chair, Agnes brought up the box cutter. She darted over to the man, shoving the knife into his large stomach, twisting it around. Eyes bulging, he said nothing, not a word. She tore the knife out of him and stuck it hard into his floppy neck. Then turned to face the woman. The woman screamed at her, spit flying from her lips, but Agnes was no longer a reasonable person. Not in this moment she wasn’t; she might never be again. Agnes had changed. And deep, deep, down inside the core of her soul, she understood that it wasn’t for the better.
The woman tried to punch her in the face but it was no good. Agnes had already slit her throat open and was on her way to hunting down the last spectator. He had already reached the door and was leaving the room.
“Stop!” Agnes commanded, jumping over the fat man, who had fallen to the floor.
To her utter surprise, the man actually stopped and turned around, shaking all over. His legs caved in and he crashed into the wall. A dark stain forming in the front of his jeans and a small lake of piss growing around his left foot.
Agnes pounced on him.
“I wasn’t even meant to be here. This was my first time. It wasn’t my idea. Sejer invited me. He was the one paying for our tickets. He, that…you…I couldn’t refuse. I would…please…don’t…no…”
The Agnes who checked in at the petrol station not so many hours ago wouldn’t have been able to hurt this man. She would have figured that killing him would have left her no better than him. Maybe she still believed that to be true. However, this Agnes, standing here; staples in her skin, her own name tag pierced through, and gushing blood from, her left breast…this Agnes was a completely different person.
NOW LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENED
Exhausted, Belinda dropped to the floor next to the lifeless clown. She had cast the remains of the chair aside. Her breathing came in slow and laborious gasps. Sweat was pouring down her body, leaving tracks in the dirt on her skin, making her wounds sting. She could hear her pulse echoing inside her skull.
The clown was dead. He had to be. She stared at his chest. It didn’t move. No chest movement, no breathing. There was blood everywhere. The mask was broken but still covered most of his face. The green wig sat askew on his head, his own brown hair clumped from blood and other stuff she was not too keen to name. She had killed him. She had killed a human being. For some reason she could hear her mother’s voice inside her head, blaming her.
Now look what’s happened. You’re going to rot in jail.
She carefully reached out to push the mask from the clown’s face. Blood made it stick to his cheeks and it broke in two as she lifted it, revealing nothing but the lower part of the man’s face and nose. The mouth was wasted, the teeth smashed in. A few of the teeth had even pierced his cheeks.
“Is he dead?”
Belinda turned her head to see Agnes returning through the broken one-way mirror, an extremely bloody box cutter in her hand.
“Guess so,” Belinda nodded. “I killed him.” Her lower lip quivered, but she managed to restrain herself from crying.
“Who is it?”
“Don’t know. The mask broke.”
Agnes came over and stood behind her. “He wasn’t alone. It’s impossible. I think we need to get moving.”
Belinda glanced at the name tag still attached to the flesh of Agnes’s breast. “I’m sorry…I…”
Agnes bowed her head and for a moment she almost seemed surprised to spot the name tag sitting there. “Forget it.” She gently pulled the needle of her name tag out from her wound. “You saved my life. Let’s see who this bastard is.”
Reluctantly, Belinda reached over and removed the rest of the mask. It was a man she’d never seen before.
“Him?” Agnes puzzled. “He was at the petrol station tonight. Before those guys with the love doll. He bought a Wunderbaum.”
Belinda rose up. “The last thing I recall from the petrol station is…” She lowered her eyes, “There wasn’t any blood on the floor beneath Christoffer, even though he had been lying there for some time. His shirt was all bloody. I found this a bit odd, so I started to wonder…maybe, Christoffer…Shouldn’t there have been a puddle of blood on the floor?”
Agnes grimaced. “I am not in the mood to wonder about blood right now. We need to get out, and we need to get out now. Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Grab a weapon. The remains of the chair or something.”
Belinda glanced at the box cutter in Agnes’s hand. Blood dripping from the blade.
Agnes smiled, and something in her eyes made Belinda turn cold inside. “There were three spectators, Belinda. A woman and two men. They won’t be going to anymore live-snuff-shows.”
Belinda peered through the broken one-way mirror.
“Come on,” Agnes said, “we can exit through the backdoor of the spectator’s room.”
MR WUNDERBAUM DIDN’T DO THIS ON HIS OWN
Shortly after, they were passing through the backdoor of the spectator’s room and the stench of blood and feces was revolting. They had to step over the body of the third spectator to exit the room.
The hallway floor was raw concrete, like the floor inside the torture chamber. White paint peeling off the walls. Frayed plasterboards forming the ceiling, from which light bulbs hung by their cords. There was dirt and dust along the walls, and trails of blood on the floor. The hallway seemed to go on forever. On their right side, another, shorter hallway that lead to a closed iron door, behind which they suspected the torture chamber to be. There were spider webs hanging from the ceiling and dead spiders littered around the floor. Walking on that concrete floor, each footstep making loud crunching noises, impossible not to be heard, should anybody be in their vicinity.
There were four closed doors on the left side of the hallway. Agnes opened the first door to a small cell with a dirty mattress on the floor.
“That’s where I was locked up…” Belinda said.
Agnes shut the door. The next door opened to a larger room where work on a new concrete floor seemed to be in progress. A cement mixer, mortar, and sand in large sacks lying around. Parts of the floor seemed to be done already, although it appeared to have been done with poor workmanship by someone lacking the basic skills. The new floor was uneven, clearly made in phases, bit by bit. And then, as her blood ran ice-cold, she understood what she was looking at.
It was graves.
Starting at the opposite side of the room, she figured there to be five or six graves, each covered by a layer of concrete. At the end of the row of covered graves, a new one had been dug. And even though she knew this was a bad idea, even as every cell in her entire body resisted, she had to g
o and peer into the hole. It was deep, intended for several corpses. Looking down into the hole, she saw Benjamin. Almost unrecognizable. The clown had done a thorough job with those shears. Discarded into the grave, Benjamin’s body lay haphazardly at the bottom of the pit: one arm akimbo at a seemingly impossible angle above his head, the other nowhere to be seen. His legs were bent and his back twisted. She and Belinda were also intended to go in that same grave.
Recoiling from the grave, she was shaking her head avoiding Belinda’s glance. “Move on,” she said, not wanting to start calculating how many corpses were buried under those concrete squares next to his grave. “We need to get out of here. Somebody must have been operating the cameras. Mr. Wunderbaum didn’t do this all on his own.”
IF SHE WAS A CELL PHONE SHE’D START BEEPING BY NOW
Behind the next door, they found another cell. Also empty. Agnes spotted a large earring lying amongst the dust on the floor. It had been bent out of shape and was darkly colored. She quickly closed the door and continued to the last one.
Belinda stayed close behind, clutching a broken chair leg with both hands, ready to put up a fight. Agnes, unable to control herself, clenched the box cutter so hard it hurt her fingers. She placed her other hand on the handle of the last door, a part of her expecting it to be locked. But, it swung open easily and soundless.
A dimly lit staircase led to a new door, this one open. A blue glow filling the doorway. She took the stairs, one step at a time, as quietly as she possibly could.
Behind the open door at the top of the stairs, she found a room that smelled of coffee and tobacco. A few chairs around a dining table in the center of the room. On the table, an overflowing ashtray, some coffee mugs, and a folded newspaper. Along one wall was another table with several computer screens showing pictures of the torture chamber, the broken one-way mirror and the dead clown on the floor.
“Why’s there nobody here?” Belinda breathed through her nose in rapid hisses. “They were zooming in like crazy when he twisted your name tag around. They must have watched as I killed him.”
“And as I killed the audience,” Agnes whispers.
“Maybe they got chicken and ran off?”
“We would be so lucky.”
“Maybe, there was only one guy up here…”
Agnes looked at the dining table. There were five coffee mugs. Three spectators and two executioners. It wasn’t impossible. She circled the table to a narrow sliding door. It made sense, if the last accomplice was sitting here, controlling the cameras and watching as she and Belinda killed Mr. Wunderbaum and the three spectators, watching as their nasty little business fell apart. He might well have panicked and run away.
She shot Belinda a warning look before she pulled the sliding door open. The adrenaline was starting to leave her body now, she felt tired and exhausted. The pain was becoming worse. If she was a cell phone she’d start beeping now: Battery almost empty.
The sliding door rattled fiercely as it slid open. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness behind the door, and a few confused seconds more for her to understand what she was seeing.
A wall made of hay.
Stacks of hay bales.
It was about a meter and a half from the sliding door to the hay bales, forming a weird hallway. She stepped out of the door, Belinda right behind her, and into the darkness of the strange hallway. Feeling her way forward, step by step, progress was slow.
At last she reached the end of the hallway. Moving her hands around the edges of the walls, desperation starting to build inside her. “It’s a dead end,” she muttered. “A dead end. There’s no way out of here.”
“I felt an opening between the hay bales a few steps back,” Belinda says.
“Show me.”
Belinda led the way back to the opening, an even narrower corridor through the hay. Belinda moved on ahead.
Five, maybe six paces down, Belinda halted.
“What?”
“Another dead end. Bales of hay everywhere. If I only I could see.”
“Try searching higher or lower…” Agnes stared back into the darkness behind them, only the faintest glow of blue from the computer screens could be seen.
“Hey, hello!” Belinda said. “I feel something. A plank, some wood, I think. Some of the hay bales are attached to the plank.” Agnes could hear her pulling and pushing about.
And then, a section of hay bales gave way and opened to a large barn. The moon shining through a large open gate, giving the insides of the barn a faint bluish glow. Looking in all directions, they exited the haystack. The barn looked like most barns do. A tractor parked in the middle, among its utilities. Plow, harrow, seeder. Whatever.
Through the small, arched barn windows, Agnes spotted the glowing signs of the petrol station, less than a kilometer away. It broke her heart. They were this close. Blue lights flashed around the petrol station. Police? Ambulances? Maybe, someone found Christoffer? Belinda and her must have been reported missing by now. She couldn’t stand the sight. The police officers were so close, looking for clues to what happened in the petrol station, so close, and yet, so far away that they may as well have been on the moon.
Outside the large barn gates, several cars were parked in the courtyard. The moonlight sparkling on the chrome of a Jaguar parked next to the clown’s metallic blue Toyota, with the Wunderbaum Agnes had sold him earlier the same evening, hanging from the rearview mirror.
SO CLOSE TO FREEDOM
“If the accomplice panicked,” Agnes whispered behind Belinda’s back, as they left the barn. “I doubt he’d waste time closing the exit hole between the hay bales.”
Belinda crossed the courtyard, looking around. A regular Danish farm courtyard, like so many others. Whitewashed walls, black roof. Slightly decayed. A little spooky in the blue glow of the moonlight. No lights on in any of the windows facing the courtyard.
The air was chilled, even inside the shelter of the closed courtyard. Naked from the waist and up, her skin contracted against of the chill of the night, erecting her nipples, making the staples still sticking in her flesh hurt even more.
They were so close to freedom.
So close.
The entryway leading out of the farm was dark, but luckily the gate was ajar. Half way through the entrance, on one of the doorsteps of the farmhouse, lay a love doll with duct tape over the mouth. Not speaking a word, they moved on and slipped out of the gate.
A dirt road led away from the farm, up a hill, and through some field boundaries and so on. Probably to the highway or a country road, to freedom. A car was coming down the road. It was still too far away for Belinda to spot the brand of the car, nevertheless she was pretty sure it was a BMW. Only one of the headlights was working.
“Shit,” Agnes gasped next to her. “We can’t let them see us. Let’s run through the fields.”
“I told you so,” Belinda muttered, hurrying after Agnes around the corner of the farmhouse. “I told you they were psychos.”
There was light in the windows on this side of the farmhouse. The garden door was open. Belinda hadn’t seen the lights from the petrol station, nor the blue flashes of the emergency vehicles from the barn windows, as she had focused her attention on the cars in the courtyard. However, she saw it all now, shining like a lighthouse out in the distance, showing them the way to freedom, but unlike Agnes, she didn’t wonder if someone had found Christoffer.
Because he was standing there in the open garden door with a shotgun in his hands.
“Girls,” he said, aiming the shotgun at them. “I’m sorry, but you’re not going anywhere. Arni, come here, I got the girls!”
Belinda stared at him, and in his eyes, she saw all the things she wished she didn’t understand.
>
The Ringmaster Page 9
