by Rick Wood
Like a child’s vitamins.
As adults, vitamins were just a solid tablet, had little to excite you. But, when he was a child, his mother would give him squishy vitamins, strawberry or orange or lemon ones, with the texture of jelly babies.
He would squish the vitamin between his teeth and let the juices burst out.
Oh, Amber.
I can’t wait.
He turned the corridor, smiling at the sight of the open door to his trophy room.
They better not have touched anything.
33
The sight didn’t quite register in Amber’s mind.
It was as if it was too much. As if the obscure violence and abstract images were just too extreme to be conceived. As if her mind was already full enough, like an overflowing bucket of water, and adding another horrific sight just meant that it hit the water and felt down the sides.
Luke’s grip on Amber’s hand, his open-mouthed stare that circled around the wall, and his weak muttering of, “Oh, dear God,” prompted Amber to perhaps realise that something was immensely off.
Slowly, it began to seep in.
A hand here. A heart there. A finger, a rake of skin, a deformed slice of tongue.
Some of it she couldn’t even make out. Couldn’t even deduce what body part it was. It was so disgustingly original, so vividly unique, that, by itself, it was barely recognisable from what it had been attached to.
The thoughts slowly crept into her consciousness.
These are body parts.
These came from people.
There are a lot of them.
There are a lot of body parts.
There are a lot of body parts that came from people.
Without still fully understanding how or why or when or who or what, Amber’s produced a high-pitched piercing scream.
Luke’s hand clasped over her mouth, halting the sound, but she didn’t feel it, nor could she tell that he was behind her or whispering to listen very, very carefully to a set of steps that were coming closer.
Amber finally looked away from the items to see Luke peering out of the doorway.
Steps.
Steps of someone.
Steps of the man who…
Luke slammed the door shut and twisted the lock. He took a few paces back and listened to the steps as they ended, stopping firmly and precisely outside that door.
The door handle slowly rotated, but the door wouldn’t open, and the handle returned to its original position.
Luke stared at the door handle, watching its movement cease, watching as it remained still, watching as it did not rotate again.
Amber was still only partly aware of this, still digesting the mass of items.
She wondered which item of hers was going to end up here.
And, just as she realised she was wondering it, she realised that she had almost resigned herself to death.
And she shouldn’t.
That’s when she came around. When she turned to Luke, then turned to look at the door he was staring at.
“What is it?” she asked.
Luke said nothing. Just kept his eyes peeled wide and pointed absently at the door.
“Who is there?” Amber shouted.
“Shut up!” Luke snapped.
Amber, for some reason, didn’t shut up. She didn’t know why she was trying to speak to the man, didn’t know why she was engaging him, but she somehow felt safe to do so. As if she could remember Luke turning the lock at some point, and so knew that he wasn’t coming in any time soon.
“What do you want?” she shouted again.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Luke said in a hushed shout.
Amber ignored him.
“Just let us go.”
No movement. No turn of the door handle. The man didn’t speak.
That is, until he did.
“Let me in, Amber,” the man’s voice, confident and smooth, spoke.
She looked to Luke, both of them sharing the same thought.
How does he know my name?
“Tell Luke to open the door.”
They looked to each other again, wide eyes, terrified wonder.
Then Luke bowed his head as he realised.
“Gray,” Luke said. “He sold us out. He told him.”
Gray is dead.
The thought hit Amber unexpectedly. As if it was the only thing she could associate with Gray.
Dead.
Ceased to exist.
Murdered.
Not the memories of growing up, of the kind face, of the arguments – just that he was dead.
Like when you go through a break-up and hear a song, then all you can ever think of when you hear that song is that break-up.
All that his name conjured was death.
“I’m not going away,” the man said.
“Well we ain’t letting you in!” Luke shouted.
“You think I don’t have a key?” the man said, followed by laughter. “This is my house. You think I don’t have a key to every room?”
Luke went to shout back but his syllables didn’t form.
He looked around. They both did. Trying to ignore the trophies, trying to find another way.
But the room was like a box. There was one way in and out. The rest of the walls were adorned with…
He did this.
As if she hadn’t thought it already, she thought it now.
He made these.
How many people did it take to create this quantity of trophies?
The man’s steps began and grew fainter.
Luke let go of a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“What do we do?” he asked Amber.
Amber looked back at him peculiarly.
What do they do?
So far she had been completely reliant on Luke, reliant on his snapping her out of her trances, taking her away from danger, finding her when she was screaming.
Now he was asking her?
How the hell was she supposed to know?
The footsteps returned, growing louder and stopping outside the door.
The sound of a key entering a keyhole and turning was the only thing louder than their thudding heartbeats.
The locks twisted and turned and the room was unlocked.
Luke went to move, as if to force the door shut – but by the time the thought had occurred to him, the door handle had already twisted, the door had opened, and the man was standing there looking directly at them.
34
He hated clichés and dumb expressions – just like he hated the predictability of people’s reactions to immediate death.
But, on this occasion, there was one idiom that just summed up the sight before him too succinctly:
Like a deer caught in the headlights.
And that was precisely what they were.
Two deers, caught in the headlights – and surrounded by everyone else who had ever been scared by him, no less.
“Please,” the girl, Amber, said. “Please don’t hurt us.”
Again, predictability.
Infuriating.
Please don’t hurt us.
Please let me go.
Please don’t kill me.
No one that had ever said that to him had been successful in their request – and people had said it to him many, many times. To him, it was practically the same as saying cheese sandwich, or would you like coleslaw?
Did these people really think he was ever going to acquiesce their request?
Honestly, the best thing that one could say in this moment was something to throw him off.
Once, when one of his subordinates had become irritable in his presence, he had simply looked at the ranting idiot and said: “My walls aren’t four foot high.”
The inferior employee had gone to speak, stopped, twisted his face and said “…eh?”
Because it was unexpected. It threw him.
Honestly, instead of begging, say something original, then at least it b
rings some amusement to their predicament.
“Please,” Amber pleaded again.
He stepped forward.
The boy, Luke, put his arm across Amber and tucked him behind her.
“Don’t fucking touch us,” Luke said.
Now this made him smile.
Don’t fucking touch us.
Genius. So hostile, so angry. And the boy said it with utter venom, like Luke hated him so much that there was nothing Luke could do to contain it.
He admired it.
“Come any closer and I’ll break your fucking fingers,” Luke said.
The man couldn’t help it. His mouth opened and guffawed a giant “Hah!” in Luke’s direction.
He withdrew the knife still dripping with their brother’s blood and held it by his waist, loosely but definitely, just so they could see it.
“What is your fucking problem?” Luke asked, shouting now, getting louder.
The man looked around the room, admiring his work. Smiling broadly at what he’d done. Knowing that this would tell them how much he was looking forward to choosing which part of them would be trophesised.
Trophesised, he thought. I think I’ve just invented a word. And a jolly good word too…
This glance around the room at his art, however, was his first and only mistake. As, in the gleam of his eyes or the raising of his smile, he had given away just how proud he was, just how pleased he was with all the items in this room. How much he treasured them.
Because Luke seemed to notice this too.
Luke leapt to the nearest box, displaying the finger of a mixed-race woman with the nail still painted red, and shoved the box to the floor, its glass screen smashing into broken shards.
“No!” the man cried out.
Luke rushed to another and put his hand behind it.
The man rushed forward and, noticing that Luke hadn’t pushed this box off but was instead holding his hand in readiness to do so, he halted.
Watched Luke. Waited for the next move.
“Yeah, that’s it,” said Luke, a gloating sneer to his voice. “You don’t want me to wreck any more of these, do you?”
The man did not reply. His ever-present grin had morphed to wrath. His fingers were flexing over the knife. His decision-making skills were being tested.
“Let my sister go,” Luke demanded.
“What?” Amber said, quickly turning to Luke. “What about you?”
Luke scoffed. “Look at this guy. This private school rich dick. Think I can’t take him?”
“Luke…”
“Honestly, I’ve taken pieces of piss like this down for nothing. You get out and I’ll follow.”
“But Luke…”
“I’m not asking, Amber.”
Luke pushed the box an inch forward, causing the man to throb.
“Let. Her. Go.”
With a big intake of breath, the man nodded.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
There was nowhere the girl could go anyway.
By the time she would realise that, he’d be done with Luke and be on his way to her.
Amber turned back once more and took hold of Luke’s spare hand.
“Go,” he instructed her.
“But–”
“I promise you. I can take him. Just go.”
“I–”
“Get the police. Get help. Then come back. Honestly, I’ll be fine.”
With a hesitation she wiped a tear, nodded, and turned. As she crossed the man, she pushed herself against the far side of the door frame, keeping him as far away from herself as she could.
She turned the corridor and sprinted out of sight.
Luke locked eyes with the man, who returned the glare.
“Looks like it’s just you and me,” Luke stated.
35
Amber ran.
She had no idea where to, what for, or where her legs were going to direct her. She barged against a corridor and skidded around a corner and somehow found her way to the stairs.
She glanced over her shoulders at the shutters blocking the moonlight from the window, how had he done that, it was covering every window, every window every window every damn window trapped, trapped, trapped inside and Luke’s fighting him and Gray and Gray and oh god oh god oh–
Get a grip.
She had to find a phone.
Concentrate on the task.
A phone. A phone. A phone.
Those boxes were full of body parts.
Where would a phone be?
People rarely had landlines anymore. But, surely, there must be something…
She ran down the stairs, leaping a few steps at a time until she had descended to the ground floor.
She’d forgotten that Gray’s empty body was laid at the bottom of the stairs. The expected surprise took her feet from beneath her, and she collapsed down the final few steps to the bottom floor, landing in a pool of red.
She lifted her hands up, looking at her brother’s blood as if she had no idea what it was.
She nudged him, even weakly saying, “Gray? Gray, are you there?”
She didn’t know why.
But she kept trying.
“Gray? Come on, wake up.”
She closed her eyes. Flinched away.
This wasn’t a grumpy older brother refusing to wake up for school in the morning. This was something else. This was…
Don’t say it.
She was going to have to forget. As nasty as it was, she was going to have to forget that he was… that he was… that he was de…
She could grieve later.
She leapt over the body like it was an obstacle on a computer game and ran from room to room. Dodging expensive furniture, side-stepping glass tables, scanning the walls displaying such beautiful works of art.
Ignoring further stains of red in the kitchen, she eventually found it. On the wall. Black with a grey face, and a wire connecting it to the wall. She remembered having a phone like this in the house when she was eight.
She lifted it and placed it next to her ear.
She heard the glorious jarring echo of a dial tone.
Her eyes closed as she breathed out a long breath of relief. Anxiety sunk out of her like water filtered through sand, pouring into an ocean of hope.
She shoved her thumb on 9, hitting a few other buttons at the same time. She reset the dial tone and tried again, this time taking more care in dialling 9 9 9.
She put the phone to her ear and let it ring.
And ring.
And ring.
Why was it ringing so much?
Then came her answer.
“We are sorry, but the outgoing call function has been disabled at this time.”
What?
How?
No…
Did that mean she couldn’t make any calls at all?
She tried to think of her mum’s landline. She wouldn’t answer, it was pointless. She could, however, remember the number of the nurse who used to look after her mum, back when she first became ill and could afford such a thing.
Amber dialled the number and put the phone to her ear, letting it ring.
And ring.
And ring.
“We are sorry, but the outgoing call function has been–”
“No!” she wailed, dropping the phone, her body contorting, a folded piece of cardboard, her mind a presentation of images, each one representing another form of agony.
She tried the back door. The way they had come in.
She swung the door open and her hope lifted again, for the brief second before she saw the shutters.
She grabbed hold of the shutters and she shook and shook, and shook, and shook.
It made a huge clatter, a repeating barricade of noise, but to no avail.
“Help!” she screamed against the shutter. “Help! Please, somebody!”
But she knew it was no use.
They had gone to this house because it was so far away from any other house
. Because there was no way they would be noticed. Because neighbours wouldn’t have any idea what they were doing.
And now they were trapped. Too far away from other life, in the home of a murderer.
She fell to her knees and covered her head with her arms, hoping that if she just pretended this wasn’t happening, then maybe – just maybe – it wasn’t.
36
The stupid boy’s hand was resting firmly against the back of a box containing five toe nails, all taken off the right foot of a ginger woman from Manchester.
This woman had been strikingly beautiful – not in the cliched sense, but in the real sense. He had always had a real distaste of artificial beauty, finding too much make-up and fake implants repulsive. He would much rather a natural face, with blemishes upon the skin and scars that showed a life lived. This woman had freckles over her nose and a long, grey, faded line beneath her chin – something from a struggle long ago. She hadn’t been the kind a woman who had starved herself; he’d enjoyed her size twelve figure, her clothes encasing her body like an unwrapped gift, pressing against the ribbons, waiting to be untied.
Those five nails were the last thing that remained of her beauty. The box had been plugged into the wall, allowing a small compressor to constrict the box’s vapour, raising its pressure, cooling down the gasses of the air, and absorbing any heat it may have come in contact with.
This had made the box good enough to preserve the nails for five years and eight months.
And now this boy, this imbecile named Luke, was going to wreck it.
“Let go of that box,” he instructed. “Let go of it and step away.”
“Why the fuck would I?” Luke retorted, prompting a sneer at the impudence. “You drop the knife, then we’ll talk about me letting these body parts go, you psycho freak.”
An interesting proposition.
Drop the knife and leave himself unarmed – leaving the boy with the only leverage.
Or, lunge at the boy, and hope that he could catch the box before it smashed upon the ground and the toenails were lost forever.
Hmm.
What a conundrum.
It was like he was on a gameshow. Like a presenter was giving him two options, and he had to weigh up the better one.
Option one – risk losing the nails and stab the boy.
