by Rob Parker
‘But why have they brought us here?’ asked Pam. ‘Why are they keeping us?’
‘Why is it only the women too?’ asked Joyce.
The youngest of the group spoke, words that should never come from a fifteen-year-old girl. ‘They’ve been coming to look at me.’
Pam’s parental hackles raised immediately. ‘What do you mean, love?’
Alice couldn’t look at her mother. They’d had the talk about body changes, and the whole puberty chestnut. Mother daughter stuff, essential wisdom passed from generation to generation as it always had done, while the actual nuts and bolts of sex had been well dodged by them both—but there was no time for such prudishness now.
‘They’ve been coming and looking one at a time. One of them touched himself while looking at me. The others came and I think they told him off, and…’
Pam knew there was something else. ‘Did they touch you, Alice?’ She felt flushed with the spirit of a lioness whose cubs had been fucked with.
‘No, no. It just… it was really horrible.’
‘I’m sorry baby,’ Pam said, and pulled her daughter close. Tears fell from Pam’s eyes, and coursed channels through the grime on her cheeks.
‘At the risk of stating the obvious, we need to get out of here,’ said Joyce, walking to the corner at the tangle of wiring that had been used to bind the cell shut. ‘The twins are in the house by themselves. And God knows where Fletcher is. Did you see him, Pam?’
Pam was unsure what to say, so opted for: ‘I lost sight of him before I got knocked out.’ Every word of that was true, but shamefully omitted some very key details. Again, something for later, she reasoned.
‘Has anyone tried talking to them?’ Joyce said. ‘Like, reasoning with them?’
‘They seem to talk in a load of grunts and clicks,’ said Alice. ‘I haven’t heard any words.’
Pam then remembered she had. Loud and clear. When one of them pointed at her in the kitchen. ‘Woman.’
‘What?’ asked Joyce, turning from the binds.
‘One of them pointed at me and said woman. And he also said man.’ The difference between the two words, not just in language but in meaning, caught in Pam’s throat like a mousetrap snap, her breath suddenly stilling.
The man that thing pointed at was then immediately castrated and killed.
The woman was hit on the head and saved for later. Along with two others.
‘I think I know what’s going on,’ she whispered to herself.
‘What is it?’ asked Alice.
But then she remembered what Grace said. That Quint and Wendy Fenchurch had both been murdered, man and woman, killed together. Her theories stopped dead in their tracks. ‘No, never mind.’
‘How do we get out of here?’ asked Alice. ‘I really want to go home, mum.’
Her bottom lip started to wobble, and the young girl was peeking through the steely reserve she had worked so hard to maintain. She grasped for her mother again, and Pam pulled her head onto her shoulder, and let her cry.
‘We’ll think of something, don’t worry,’ she whispered.
‘Pam,’ Joyce asked, stepping close to the pair. ‘What are they?’
‘I really don’t know,’ said Pam. ‘But it looks like they’ve been down here a while.’
The light jangled in the distance, and there was a screech of metal on metal.
The women looked up like rabbits. Between the two older women’s concerned faces, Alice peered through, and said, in a quivering voice and rapid breaths: ‘That’s them. They’re coming.’
53
‘Light! Up ahead,’ said Peter, pointing. ‘Do you see it?’
‘I see it,’ replied Christian.
Grace shushed Dewey, stroking his face.
All three picked up pace, while Peter felt his hands pulsing with nervous energy, as if they were readying themselves to be used in the near future. ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Let’s stay quiet, and kill our lights. We don’t want to let anyone know we’re here.’
The three beams clicked off one by one, and the tunnel was suddenly plunged in darkness, except for the tiny light far in the distance, a bit like looking into a telescope the wrong way round. Peter gripped the cricket bat in his hand, and it made him feel a little bolder. A shade more confident. He didn’t want to have to use it at all, but if it meant getting Alice back, he was pretty sure it would hurt whoever he needed to hit with it.
‘Do we have any kind of plan?’ asked Christian.
‘We don’t even know what we’re walking into.’
‘Do you think we could reason with them?’ asked Grace.
‘I think Dewey might come in handy in the persuasion stakes.’
The light was fixed an indeterminate distance away, but was definite. It was no mirage. The silence though, aside from their obvious shuffling, was deeply unnerving. It felt like they were being pulled towards it, helplessly, antibodies drawn into a syringe.
Dewey picked up pace abruptly, and this time, pulled Grace to the right-hand side wall. ‘What is it Dew?’ she urged, matching his speed. The men followed suit, and Peter subconsciously lifted the bat high.
They almost missed it when the dog suddenly darted into a doorway that had opened in the brick, much like the previous one. This one, however, had Dewey’s full attention, and Grace had to strain to keep him back from dragging them in.
Christian, however, had no such restraint and bounded into the room. ‘Olivia? Olivia?’
As Peter motioned to follow him, a wall of stink suddenly assaulted them. It was so thick, so rich, so rotten, he couldn’t take another step, and clamped his hand over his nose—before clicking the torch on.
The room was much like the previous one in terms of size and overall decor, but the contents were wholesale different. There was only one bed in this room, in the centre, and on it was a sight that caused Peter to gag immediately.
‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, while Grace tugged Dewey back out of the door. Christian fell to his knees, alternating wretches with deep lungfuls of rank air.
Once his shock was under control, and the desire to lie down had dissipated slightly, Peter tried to make sense of the sight, and in doing so, fit it into the nightmare in which they had been dragged.
The bed was fouled with viscera. Its legs were rusted. It was folded so that the top half was at an angle, so the patient could sit up. The patient was, however, in a state of decomposition, dead for some time. Peter was no expert and had no idea how long the person had been dead for—but there was still skin there, sallow and ashen of hue, sagging against bone. The eyes were sunken, brown teeth and black gums bared, the hair grey and coiled on the head like a brillo pad grown out.
The cadaver stared at the ceiling, arms out either side of the bed, spindly wrists bound by leather restraints. The ankles were treated similarly, pulled wide and bound at the foot of the bed.
‘What happened to her?’ asked Grace from the door.
Her was correct. The body was nude, sagged and thin, breasts rolling down either side of her mottled chest. The area below her midriff was an unspeakable mess of torn grey flesh, mouldering gore and a sole, dangling rope of tissue, which was severed just before it reached the filthy floor.
‘She… it looks like she… died in childbirth.’
Peter couldn’t wait anymore. He had to leave the room, and within moments he too was gasping for breath against the tunnel wall. Grace gave him Dewey’s lead, and went and had a look for herself.
‘She was old,’ came the shout from within the room after a few moments. ‘Too old to be having kids in a minging tunnel underground at least.’
‘What the hell is she doing here?’ asked Christian.
‘She’s filthy. Not the result of decay, but of living this way,’ said Grace through the doorway. ‘She’s been down here a long time. But not dead for all that long. Weeks not years. A month perhaps.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Peter.
‘I’m working to speciali
se in violent criminal cases. Murder and so on.’
Christian interrupted incredulously. ‘So a month ago, a couple of weeks before we moved in up top, this old woman was dying in childbirth down here?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘So where’s the baby?’ he asked.
They all went quiet. The notion of infants in peril was something that rattled the innate cage of all human beings, barring those with psychopathic tendencies. A species defence mechanism, that inhabited other creatures in the animal kingdom too. The end game of course, with every living creature on the planet, was species preservation. To keep your kind going. So when a human hears that a baby might be hurt, functioning humans fill with fear and dread—hence the silence that had fallen on them. Peter knew also that Christian’s mind would be racing to his own child, Olivia, and what had befallen her.
Grace poked her head out of the room. ‘There’s no baby in here.’ She’d obviously been checking while the men had waited outside, their thoughts quietly turning. To his shame, Peter was impressed with her. She was no nonsense, rational and action-orientated, and proving to be a brilliant accomplice on their journey underground.
‘Then let’s get moving again,’ he said. ‘And hope that’s the last of the horrible surprises.’
He didn’t think for one minute, as they fell into a line again and headed for the distant light, that would be the case.
54
The three women were ordered, via a procession of furious clicks, shout, grunts, and pointing, to stand in a line. There were four of them present, having emerged ominously from the gloom one at a time.
Alice couldn’t stop sobbing while they stared. When they didn’t comply, they’d been spat at. The fury in the black eyes was impossible to ignore. The clicks came at a torrential speed Alice thought impossible to repeat, let alone decipher—but indeed, they used it to communicate. And they used it to argue. They bickered incessantly, barking at each other, the sounds coming so fast and thick their mouths frothed and sprayed angrily, which they made no attempt to control.
And the worst part about it? They seemed to be arguing over them.
The women.
Alice saw the maths—three into four—and killed the thought before it got any further. It didn’t stop the tears coming, and even the obvious fear and sadness of the women in the cell didn’t quell the ire of their audience.
As they bickered and the friction ramped, Alice noticed a hierarchy emerge—and amazingly, the giant one wasn’t the leader. If anything, he was in third place, next to the smallest—the jostler—who you couldn’t call a runt either.
The big one definitely had a place, though. The top two were similar sized, and bickered relentlessly, but the big one had a clear favourite, and this appeared to settle the positions in the food chain. The one that was covered in blood, his sweatshirt down to his joggers drenched in maroon. The big one seemed to favour him, and stood close by, edging nearer to him when the disagreement peaked in animation, as if he was a good back-up.
Maroon had a really nasty bump on the top of his head, which seemed to carry all the way down between his eyes and to his chin, resulting in one side of his face being slightly higher than the other—giving his mouth a lopsided quality that looked ever like a vicious smirk. He was taller than Alice’s dad, but her dad wasn’t really a tall man. Some of the lads in her class were even taller than him now.
This particular one had the clicking thing down to a fine art, maybe because of the uneven composition of his face, and his advanced grasp of their language seemed to give him an edge. And for whatever reason, it was Alice herself that seemed to be the object of his attention. He gesticulated and pointed at her, and twice pawed at the area between his legs—after which Alice could no longer meet his gaze.
The little one, or littlest, the jostler, didn’t enter arguments at all. He merely focused on Joyce, his stringy neck bobbing up and down, the tufts on his head giving him, despite being the only one with hair, the appearance of youth, in that they were downy, like a duckling’s tender plumage. The others appeared to leave him to it, locked in disagreement.
The other one, who Alice thought of as Cueball, because his head was a perfect ghostly sphere, was not backing down, and he too seemed to have a twinkle in his dark eyes for Alice. His jumpsuit was filthy, in a deeply ingrained way, and he had very sharp incisors either side of buck teeth. The Giant kept pushing him back when he got close to Maroon, and pulling him away from the cage when he stepped out of line.
Joyce, on the end, was muttering to herself, but Alice couldn’t work out what she was saying. It gave Alice an idea. ‘What do you want?’ she said.
They went quiet, and Alice was initially of the opinion that they couldn’t understand her, that their secret language was the only method of communicating that they had. Then a word spilled almost dismissively from Maroon’s cruel lips.
‘Baba,’ he said.
‘What do you mean baba?’ spluttered Joyce as she stepped forward, but it only resulted in eliciting laughter from their chief tormentor, as he stuck his belly out, and patted it. Laughter was a generous word for the sound. It was a horrible echoing bark, throaty and deep. Alice thought she’d never ever forget that sound, that it would be the last thing she’d hear before falling asleep every night, regardless of whether she ever managed to leave this place or not.
Within seconds, the others were barking between bouts of repeating the word ‘baba’, as if it were the punchline to the funniest joke in the world.
‘Why us?’ Alice asked. ‘Why us?’
This made them clam up, and they debated with each other, back to the clicking and rasping. They were on the same page it seemed, it wasn’t a disagreement, but they aimed the occasional point back down the tunnel to the light source. The little one then broke away, and looked directly at Alice. ‘Mama oosh,’ he said, and raised his fists and curled them tight on the second word.
‘Oosh?’ said Alice. ‘Oosh? What is oosh?’
‘Oosh!’ repeated the little one, balling his fists up by his chin. ‘Oosh.’ There was an inflection of malice in the word this time.
‘Dead,’ said Maroon, definitively. It shut the chatter cold.
‘Mama’s dead?’ said Alice.
‘Mama dead,’ said the little one.
The tunnel went quiet as an understanding appeared to have been met between the two groups, however opposed their positions. Alice felt sadness. Had these men lost their mother? But then why had the women been brought here? Was it to bring some feminine cast to their world? Alice’s mind was racing.
‘No mama, then,’ she said. ‘Where’s dada?’
They started the barking again, dismissively howling, throwing their heads back in apparent disbelief that Alice could be so stupid.
‘No dada?’ she asked tentatively.
Cue Ball placed a palm with force on Maroon’s chest. ‘Dada.’
Maroon put a hand on his chest too. ‘Dada.’
The little one walked along the line, patting the other’s chests. ‘Dada, dada, dada,’ he said in turn, before going backwards, repeating the word on each. Their howls were loud and incongruous and terrifying.
Alice felt a penny come close to dropping within her, but some last thread of understanding was stopping it from falling completely.
A loud clunk of metal sounded off in the distance, reverberating down the chamber to the two groups. The men all turned to the source of the sound, stunned and wide eyed. They clicked to each other, Maroon taking the lead, before scampering off down the tunnel to the source of the disturbance.
Only the little one paused to offer some chatter at Joyce, before joining the others—who were all at full sprint now, dwindling shapes in the darkness.
55
Dewey was at full pelt now, the distant light the object of his fixation, while they charged in a silent line towards the growing amber glow. As they got closer, Grace noticed the light was flickering, and that, along with its colo
ur, kickstarted an ancient survival awareness.
Fire.
Buoyed by the idea that they had surely found the missing children, she urged the others to ‘come on’. Orange fingers flickered along the walls beckoning them on, as the tunnel opened out into a room.
The space itself was hexagonal, while some of the sides were other openings to inky darkness, or doors embedded in the walls. One wall had a staircase at the bottom of it, a wide set of steps which led up to a door in the ceiling, a door which was iron and oranged with rust.
This had to be the central point of the tunnel system, Grace thought. The original point of both axis and access.
It was obscure, dim and flickering, but she could make out certain features. It had all the hallmarks of a squalid living space around an open fire, with a number of odd distinguishing features, amid a stench so raw it stung the eyes. The fire was a long-established circle of brick with stacked tree branches glowing in the centre, slick with some kind of accelerant. Old cans were discarded next to the flames. The bricks of the circle were black with years of smoke wash.
Grace watched the smoke rise, wondering where it went to, and then noticed that the roof was blackened too. Even the door that was recessed into it was darkened by what had to be fire damage. There was a story here, untold, leaving dangling threads.
Filthy beds, much like the one the woman had died in, were strewn about in an order that wasn’t obvious. In fact, there was a general lack of order to what she was looking at, except that one thing was blindingly obvious:
‘They live here,’ she said, her voice cannoning about in the space.
‘I think you’re right,’ said Peter, stepping towards the fire to warm his hands. ‘They won’t be gone long, so we best get looking.’
‘Smells like a sewer system,’ said Christian, as he started walking towards the nearest bed, the swaddling on which was almost black with grime. ‘The beds are gross, but surely that’s not the smell?’
