“Just get it over with, please, just kill me now. I don’t want to go through all this anymore. I can’t.” The woman wept, her words stumbling over themselves, half drowned by the tears and ragged, gasping breaths.
“Relax. I’m not going to hurt you,” Marcus said to her, resisting the urge to crouch down to her level. The stranger raised her head and looked at him; her eyes were purple, swollen from tears and fear, while her face was pale and soaked with sweat. Her hair was different, longer, and black, jet black. It was plastered against her head. Despite the swelling around them, it was the clarity to the eyes that proved to be the best part of the disguise. It was she who saw it first.
“You,” she said before passing out, as if the sudden rush of safety she felt and saw was too much for her brain to handle.
V
“You know her?” Helen asked as Marcus carried the unconscious Becky Ponting away from the cupboard. He placed her gently on the bed. Marcus made another observational note to himself, that the bed in this room was made up and turned down, as if it had been expecting an occupant all this time.
“Yeah, she…” Marcus paused, trying to think of the best way to say that this girl looked nothing like the girl she was – or had been, at least. “She doesn’t look anything like she did then,” he started, and when his words faltered Helen finished the sentence for him.
“She’s the woman who got you killed?” For a moment Marcus said nothing. He heard Helen’s words and nodded his response. He stared at Becky as if she were a piece of art, unable to avert his gaze. “Wow, then maybe we should rethink why we are here. Is this like some revenge chamber; a test or something?” Helen got a vision of every horror film she had seen released over the past few years and a chill so thick and heavy ran down her spine that it felt like an avalanche tumbling between her shoulder blades.
Marcus didn’t answer her; he was too busy studying Becky, checking not only to see if she was still alive – if alive is what they were – but also how she had changed. Her clothes and hair were obvious, but the sparkle in her eyes was so bright, it shone through her fear, and he knew what it meant, and another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
“She’s clean,” he said suddenly. “She’s not here to kill us, or for me to take revenge on. Besides, it wasn’t her fault. She died too, trying to protect her child.” Out of the corner of his eye Marcus saw Helen lower her own hands to her stomach. “She’s been in the same place as us, and long enough to be forced through it cold turkey. I think this house led us to her. We were supposed to find her. Feel free to tell me why, because I’m drawing a blank. There must be a reason for the three of us being here.” Marcus rose from the bed and spoke in a lowered voice. Becky’s eyes began to flutter and when they opened they were an intoxicating shade of green.
For what felt like an age, Becky just lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, afraid to even blink. Eventually, she sat up. She stared at Marcus in horrified silence. Her jaw was clenched, and her eyes wide with fright. Then, slowly, a look of distant recognition washed over her.
“You,” Becky repeated as she scrambled to her feet. In her hurry she fell from the bed and scurried backwards across the floor on her hands and knees.
“It’s okay. Stop, please. It’s okay, we’re trapped here too,” Marcus said, trying to find the right words to make her understand. He backed away from the bed, holding his arms out before him, palms facing her. He saw her shoulders drop (relax), and he finally let out the breath he had been holding.
“Wh-what do you mean?” she whispered through clenched teeth, afraid of being overheard if she spoke in louder tones. “Trapped? You got in here; you can get out,” Becky snapped. “If there is something going on then I don’t want any part of it. I’m out. I’m not going back.” Becky rose from her knees and stood hunched over, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Not jonesing for a fix, but ready to run back into her safe house.
Marcus made to walk closer to her; Becky shifted her weight ready to jump. It was Helen who spied the mark on her bare shoulder; the tank top she was wearing showed a clear palm print complete with four fingers and one thumb, although the ends of each digit were lost beneath the fabric. Rather than calling out, Helen nudged Marcus in his side with her elbow and whispered to him.
“I think you know you can trust me,” he said, turning around to show Becky his identical tattoo. The smaller window in the room seemed to increase the range of the yellow beam, which had gathered above their heads like a cloud of cigar smoke over a poker table. “You seem like someone who has made her fair share of bad decisions in life. Look at them now, and then look at me. Look at us. Helen here is in the same boat. If you think we are a threat then okay, we’ll leave and give you no more problems,” Marcus said with well-practiced diplomacy, his words soothing even to Helen, who watched the strange reunion from a distance. Having heard Marcus’s tale once before she was surprised to see how her image of the prostitute… the girl had been so accurate.
Convinced, Becky got to her feet. Her hands relaxed from the claw-like shapes that they had been cramped in for the last… God knew how long she had been hiding in the cupboard, sitting in the dark, listening to the whispers that floated through her head, hiding from whatever had been outside waiting for her. The only thing that didn’t change about her was the gaze she held on Marcus. She studied Marcus, looked him up and down, before she fell into his arms and burst into tears. She flung her arms around his shoulders, buried her face into his neck and sobbed.
“I’m sorry,” she wept. “I’m so sorry.” She repeated this over and over until Marcus pulled her away from him, cupping her head in his hands so that he could look her in the eyes before speaking.
“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t kill me. You had nothing to do with it; it was my job, and you are just as innocent as I was,” he said, but after everything that he had been shown in the judgment room the word innocent tasted stale on his lips, like a glass of water left out overnight and drunk the next morning.
“I’m not innocent,” she said with a broken voice; yet her eyes burned fierce and proud. “I saw everything; the people I abused. I abused them, offering them my body. I stole from them, and I abused my child. I deserve to be down there. Being tied to those tables was too good for me. I deserved much worse; they explained it all to me, made me see. I sent my own daughter to her death the moment I gave birth.” Becky broke down once again, and it was Helen who moved forward and put her arm around the woman who, despite everything she had been through, was still only young.
“None of us are innocent,” Helen said, feeling embarrassed when both Marcus and Becky – although at that point Helen still thought of her simply as the woman – looked at her. Her cheeks flushed; she could feel them glowing red with heat.
“That’s right. We’ve all done things we regret, but you have turned it around. You’re clean now, you survived that, and you survived wherever you were sent. So you’re not innocent. Nobody is, not in the real world, in real life. Deep down we all know that. I want you to listen to me now.” Marcus didn’t speak again until Becky turned to face him. “You had nothing to do with my death; my conscious is clear on that, and so should yours be. Now what do you say we find a way out of here?” Marcus stood up straight as he spoke, and both women felt safer.
Becky nodded her head, and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand.
“Marcus, how do we do that? I mean, we checked this place, there is no doorway here,” Helen said. Now that the confrontation was over she was happy (not comfortable) to speak again.
“There has to be something,” Marcus said, turning around, surveying the room, looking at everything closely.
“Marcus?” Becky asked, still somehow unable to break her stare at the man. “And Helen, right?” She pointed at Helen. “I’m Becky; Becky Ponting.” She already seemed more at ease in their presence, and stood up amongst them. She offered her hand out to Marcus, who took it without question, and then did the sa
me to Helen. She was more apprehensive but took it nonetheless.
“It’s nice to meet you, Becky.” Helen flashed a half smile as she spoke in the hope that it would mask the apprehension she felt.
Marcus turned, opening his mouth to speak, when it hit him: an idea of such clarity he felt himself recoil as it came into his mind. The yellow ‘balloon’: it wasn’t a cloud over them, it was showing them the way, as it had been since the start.
“Watch out,” he said as he bent down onto the balls of his feet. He grabbed the legs of the bed, and in one powerful movement pulled it from the floor and threw it out of the way. Dust billowed up from beneath it – no, not dust, but dullness; the same strange chalky mist that had covered their previous room also. The sudden nature of Marcus’s action kicked up a small storm and for just a second, the true colors of the room were revealed to them.
The women both jumped and shrank away from Marcus as he threw the bed. His chest tensed, and his shoulders bulged as he threw the bed. Becky let out a small shriek; she had been around enough violent men in her time to become sufficiently scared of the consequences if you get in their way.
“There, look,” Marcus said, panting. His time in the judgment cell and hotel room had left him weakened. He had no idea how long it had been since he had last eaten or drank anything, and it wasn’t until that point that he realized how his throat ached for a sip of water or how his empty stomach flapped around inside his body like a windsock at an airport, desperate for some meager level of sustenance.
The women stood together and simply peered forwards, craning their necks, neither one wanting to move any closer until they knew what it was they were supposed to see. It was Helen that saw it first: a faint outline on the floor.
“A trapdoor,” she said in a voice filled with wonderment. She took a step away from Becky, but found her gaze moved from the floor to Marcus and so she stopped. She didn’t know what it was about him, but he made her nervous.
“Now we just need to figure out how to open it.” Marcus began to plan things out. Stepping closer to the trapdoor, he crouched down onto his haunches. He placed his hands on the floor, in the center of the faint, but now that attention had been drawn to it, clearly visible square.
“What are you talking about? I don’t see anything,” Becky said. Her arms were crossed, but she no longer hugged herself.
“Come here and you’ll see. Don’t worry, I don’t bite.” Marcus looked directly at Becky as he spoke from his squatted position and he saw her face change, relax. “I saw your face change when I moved the bed; it’s a face I’ve seen one or two times before, you know. It’s fine, you don’t have to say anything, but just know that we’re in this together, alright?” he continued, holding her gaze so that she could see his words were genuine.
With memories of rash decisions still lingering in her mind, Becky moved closer, until she stood between Helen and Marcus, leaning over them, not wanting to crouch for fear of not being able to stand up again. Her body was weak with hunger; her legs trembled, and visibly, she guessed, for Marcus rose and steadied her by placing an arm around her shoulder. She looked, squinted at the ground – she even tried crossing her eyes like one of those magic eye puzzles that she had never been able to see as a child, but she just couldn’t see it.
“It’s here.” Helen pointed at the ground, tracing the outer edge of the square with her index finger.
“I see it!” Becky squealed with delight. A childish smile graced her face. She stood with slack jawed amazement as a bold black line appeared before her eyes, travelling along the floor like the lines of an earthquake in a cartoon. The line wasn’t much thicker than a hair’s breadth, but saw it. She could see the shape and that made her happy; she wasn’t the one behind left behind this time.
“It’s hot – ouch, really hot,” Helen exclaimed as she stood up, shaking her right hand as she did. She put the burnt finger in her mouth and felt it throb against her tongue.
The trio stood side by side. Marcus loosened his arm around Becky and when he felt her stand on her own he removed it completely.
“Is it just me, or is anybody else starving?” Becky said at the same time as her stomach gave a loud lengthy growl.
“Oh God, I could eat a horse sideways,” Helen remarked as she continued to suck on her burnt digit. None of them had even thought about food until they got close to the trapdoor, but now the hunger grew inside them like a parasite.
“I think we’re getting close,” Marcus offered. “It’s our bodies catching up with us, what has happened, how long we have been gone,” he reasoned, and while he was aware that it sounded as if he knew what was happening, the reality was that it was all guesswork. If anything came out in some sort of sensible order it was pure coincidence. Nothing that had happened to them had been normal in the terms that they had been raised to believe, and so why should this time around be any different? If they felt hungry it was because they hadn’t eaten in a long time.
“How do we open it then?” Becky asked, looking around the room, struck by a sudden feeling that something was watching them. Not in that creepy mansion sense of the eyes in paintings moving, but rather like being in a police interview room, all of them hidden behind the mirror, watching her every move. She was sure of it, even before the hairs on the back of her head stood on end.
“No idea. I think we just have to wait. The last time it appeared when it was ready to,” Marcus answered. His left arm was crossed over his body, while his right rested with its elbow on his forearm. He stroked the thick layer of stubble that had appeared on the lower half of his face as he thought. He knew they were being watched, but there was nothing he could do about it.
VI
The first cracks appeared just as the ground began to rumble beneath their feet. A gentle shake at first, but it escalated to a tremble that rattled the windows in their frames. The loose fitting shelves in the closet fell from their holdings, creating a strange sound, muffled by the unusual atmospherics of the building. It sounded haunting and melancholy. The line traced its way round the outline of the square, not following the faint but crisp shape, but rather tearing the floor open. Wooden splinters shot into the air before they rained down around them like Lilliputian arrows fired at invading giants from another world. Helen flinched, ducking backwards, while Becky remained stationary while Marcus stood tall, watching the scene as it unfolded with a curious intensity.
“Get back,” Marcus said as he stepped before both of the women, spreading out his arms and holding them in front of them, creating a temporary barrier. His block soon turned into a swimming motion as he pulled his arms backwards, sweeping the women with them, just in case. The crack made the first turn and sped towards the second. Its speed along the third straight slowed, even stopping twice. Yet each time it started again. Reaching the third and final turn without any further problems, the line then decided to straighten out, moving crisply and cleanly towards the finish.
All three of them held their breath as the vibrations that shook the room increased, and until it was a tremor. The building seemed to shake in fear of what lay ahead… lay in wait.
“Becky, get back a bit; we don’t know what’s going to happen.” Marcus called. He found himself shouting even though there was no real need for it.
Becky ignored him, or so he thought. In reality she didn’t even hear him. She heard a faint sound, like someone talking through a wall, or underwater. Becky heard her name – or the last syllable of it, at least – but her focus was elsewhere. She watched as the crack in the floor spread, first becoming a thick black line in place of a thin grey draft. She looked on as it widened, and with it came the voices. They hit her like a rush of air escaping a recently discovered tomb, opened for the first time by eager scientists and archaeologists whose only interests deep down are to better their own names.
At first the rush of air sounded like the wailing song of the helpless, a truly lonely sound that Becky was sure would break her heart in two al
l over again. For hidden within the mournful cry, she head her daughter. Crying as she left her womb, ripped into a world that was destined to look down on her. She heard the cry of a baby’s first teeth and first fall when learning to walk. She heard the crashing sound of a bicycle falling, the tears of a child with knees scraped and bloody. The gap spread, opening like the legs of the crack whore she once was, and with it came the howls of disbelief, of refusal, as her daughter was told who her mother was, hearing the truth that her real father was just some bum, who was bored with his own wife and kids and too spineless to leave them, yet couldn’t keep the itch in his pants. So he had offered a girl half his age three times the going rate to go to fuck unprotected. To Becky three times meant three times as much escape and so she had accepted without hesitation. She heard her daughter scoff as she was told her mother didn’t care. They told her that he could have fucked her all night wherever he wanted for just a small rock or a few hundred bucks and a cup of coffee.
She didn’t feel Marcus grabbing at her as the crack spread further, cutting the square from corner to corner like a sandwich. She heard nothing other than the cries of her child before they turned into the wails of a woman, a woman so desperate to avoid her mother’s life that she unknowingly runs harder towards it. The screams turned to moans of pleasure and ecstasy. Then screams of terror and pain as her legs were spread against her will. Men, sometimes in groups – she could hear their taunting laughter – ploughed her young body with their own instruments of torture. Becky heard the weeping shallow breaths of depression as her baby took her first hit from a crack pipe handed to her by some pimp in an alleyway. Becky clasped her hands to her ears. The square disappeared, revealing a black void, and in the center a dot. A dull yellow light fought its way through the darkness. To Becky, it didn’t look like the light at the end of the tunnel, but rather the headlight of the oncoming locomotive ready to meet them halfway. The light cast long eerie shadows on the walls and Becky screamed as her daughter’s weeping turned itself to the guttural screams of terror that brought back the images of the endless rows of bodies being burnt, turned on roasting spits, helpless and at the mercy of the merciless, flames forever licking at their wounds. She could feel the heat of the fire flicking through the floor, tasting the air for her scent. It was then that Becky understood what waited for her in the dark: Adramalech. His burning, fire filled eyes would fill the void, and the festering open wound that was his hand would reach through and pluck her from the group, just as King Kong first abducted Fay Wray’s unforgettable character from the safety of her hotel room.
Highway To Hell Page 19
