‘I’m cool, brother,’ the other voice said.
‘And next month, once all this has blown over, we can look into getting the parish to buy you that GMC Acadia you’ve been after – for pastoral purposes, naturally.’
‘Yeah, naturally.’
And they both laughed.
Jesus Christ, Coursen had been screwing Brenda. This subplot didn’t exactly astonish me – I’d wondered to myself on several occasions whether there was a romantic link between them. But to hear Coursen speak about it in such a blatantly cynical way to one of his henchmen . . . well, it seriously unsettled me, perhaps because I was stuffed in a corner of the trunk of his car, shivering with the cold. ‘
Make it clear that silence is golden here, that she doesn’t want trouble from me
.’ If he found me stowed away in his vehicle, how would he ensure my silence?
The front car door opened. I held my breath, hoping my teeth – slightly chattering with the cold – wouldn’t be discernible. I heard Coursen slide into the driver’s seat and fumble for his keys. Then there was the sound of an engine turning over and the whoosh of air as the heater was turned on full blast. From the speakers situated around the car came this voice – a super-smooth baritone speaking in a deeply motivational way about Optimizing the Whole You.
‘Now today we’re going to look at “Saying No to the Negative”. Wherever you are right now – right this very instant – I want you to say, out loud, right now: “I AM SAYING NO TO THE NEGATIVE!”’
And Larry Coursen did just that. Saying no to the negative he put the car into gear and drove off.
We didn’t travel far – maybe four, five minutes maximum. En route the motivational CD continued to play, exhorting its listener to: ‘Treat the negative like a cancer – and one which you can stop from metastasizing.’
‘I want you to say that now out loud: “The Negative is a Cancer – and I won’t let that cancer eat me up.”’
Yet again Larry Coursen did as demanded. Having asserted that the Negative is, verily, a Cancer, he braked to a halt. The engine cut out. The heat – which had hardly kicked in as yet – died. A car door slammed. And then he did the unthinkable: with a telltale
beep-beep
he locked the car and also primed the inside burglar alarm.
I knew that
beep-beep
sound because my old VW had the same kind of alarm system. Once primed, any upward movement inside the car itself would trigger it. I was certain that we had pulled up in front of Coursen’s house, given how short a distance we had traveled from the church. The fact that he had electronically set the car alarm could only mean one thing: He was going in for the night, leaving me to freeze while crammed like a balled-up fetus in his trunk.
Idiot, idiot, idiot.
I started to cry – for the stupidity of my actions, for the way I had again shot myself in the foot with a machine-gun, for the fact that my mental state was still calamitous, for the realization that my grief for Emily hadn’t dissipated one bit in the fifteen months since the accident.
I must have cried for a good ten minutes. When this wave of anguish finally burnt off, I decided that I would simply jump up and release the awning, then clamber over the back seat, open a door and hightail it down the street. It would take Coursen a good minute to react to the alarm – and I would be far away at this point.
And then what? Back to my sad little life. Back to the days doing work that I found only marginally interesting. Back to the small apartment – and the empty evenings. Back to everything I did in order to distract myself from the deep-rooted sadness that I simply couldn’t shake. Back to the realization:
You are simply marking time
.
So why abandon ship now? Why run off when you might just find out . . .
You know what you’re going to find out? That Coursen drives his car between his home and his church . . . and that you are going to be stuck here until some point tomorrow when he leaves the car unlocked and you can hopefully hightail it out of here and not get apprehended by the law or by Coursen and his henchman
. . .
This internal debate was overshadowed by a far larger concern: I urgently needed to pee. For around an hour I had tried to ignore the pain in my bladder and the sense that I was about to burst. Now I knew I was courting renal failure if I didn’t do something about it instantly. So I pulled one of the blankets off me, folded it several times over, somehow managed to pull down my jeans and underwear, then shoved the blanket behind me and let go.
It was all ferociously grubby and depressing but the relief was enormous. When I was finished I folded the now-sodden blanket one more time and carefully shoved it to a far corner of the trunk. Then I pulled up my jeans, rezipped my parka and wondered if I would be able to make it through the night without succumbing to frostbite.
A small blessing arrived: sleep. I nodded off for what seemed like minutes. But when I awoke and checked my watch it was 2:43 a.m. We were on the move again. That’s what had jolted me awake: the
beep-beep
sound of the car alarm being disengaged, the driver’s door opening and closing, the engine turning over, the heat coming on full blast and the God-awful motivational CD blaring as Coursen drove us off.
We were on the road for over an hour and a half, a long drive during which Coursen repeated platitudinous catchphrases about ‘The Need to Assert Me’, ‘The Way Forward Without Fear’ and ‘I Can Master Anything and Any Situation’. The motivational speaker unnerved me as he tried to convince his audience that ‘Everything Can be Overcome if you Want to Overcome It’. His smoothie-smoothie voice was cloying and infuriating. I switched him off. I listened to the road.
For around forty minutes, the road seemed well-paved, with few bumps or changes of gradient. From what I could also discern we were the only car out here tonight, one or two roaring trucks (or, at least, I presumed they were trucks) breaking the aural loneliness.
But then we took a sharp right turn and the road changed. Suddenly we were driving along something half-paved and jolting. Every forward movement of the car seemed to throw me up against the back wall of the trunk – and I could only hope that Coursen didn’t wonder what load was in the back causing all this commotion. But the CD was still blaring its motivational bromides and the heat was on full blast and the grind of the tires on the rocky road so constant that it must have blotted out the shake, rattle and roll of my body in the trunk.
On and on we drove. I glanced repeatedly at my watch as ten minutes went by, then fifteen, then . . .
We slowed down and came to a complete halt. The engine died. The door opened, but there was a pause as Coursen seemed to be getting something out of the glove compartment of the car. Then the door slammed shut and I could hear his footsteps walking away from the vehicle. This time he did not, thankfully, trigger the car alarm.
Once the sound of the footsteps had died away I waited a good five minutes before daring to reach up and hit the system that spun away the canvas roof of the trunk. Getting up took some work. I had been cramped in this space for over eight hours and every joint in my body felt as if it had been glued tight. But the relief of actually being able to move again was counterbalanced by sheer unadulterated fear. Fear of where we were. Fear of what I might find. Fear of what Coursen might do to me if he found me . . .
I inched my way up from the trunk and looked out through the car windows. A landscape pitch black, bar one low light in the immediate distance. I pulled myself head first over the back seat – there was no other way to negotiate it – breaking my fall with my hands. Then I straightened myself up and – as slowly and quietly as possible – I opened one of the back passenger doors. I got out, but didn’t close it behind me. A boreal wind immediately hit me. Movement was difficult – my body felt rigid – and the darkness was all enveloping. But I forced myself to walk slowly towards the light in the distance. I couldn’t see the ground beneath my feet. I had no idea what I was heading for; if I was traversing the edge of a cliff, a body of water, a path that would suddenly give way, sending me into free fall.
All there was up ahead was the light. Step by step, I inched my way towards it.
As I drew nearer, I could vaguely discern the outline of a structure. With every footstep the structure came into sharper silhouette. It was a shack. The light was inside the shack. And from within the shack was the sound of a male voice – Coursen’s voice – panting and heaving and simultaneously shouting stuff.
I was now maybe ten yards from the shack. There was a door directly in front of me and a small window to the left of it. I crouched down and headed for the window. Reaching it I sat below it, listening now to Coursen’s rhythmic breathing and the moans of a female voice.
I dared to raise my head and glance through the window. What I saw was . . . unspeakable. A girl – maybe twelve, thirteen years old – was positioned on a filthy mattress, naked from the waist down. A shackle, attached to a chain, was around her left ankle. Coursen, his trousers pulled down, was on top of her, thrusting in and out of her while berating her at the top of his voice. I sat down again, not knowing what to do next. That’s when I put my hand out and discovered a shovel that had been left against this side of the house. My hands were drenched with sweat as I touched it, my heart going insane in my chest. I felt for the handle of the shovel. It was long, substantial. I carefully got myself into a crouching position. I grabbed the shovel with two hands. From inside the shack Coursen’s rant was getting louder, the girl’s cries even more frightened, extreme. Still hunched down I inched my way nearer to the door. It was closed, but looked flimsy. One, two, three, and . . .
I kicked the door in and came rushing towards Coursen, screaming. He jumped up, startled. That’s when I caught him in the stomach with the shovel. He doubled over and I brought the shovel down on the top of his head. He reeled away from the blow, stumbled a few paces, then fell to his knees, not moving, blood cascading down his face.
On the mattress the girl was howling like a wounded animal. I dropped the shovel and went over to comfort her, but she shrieked when I tried to put my arms around her.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ I said, even though I knew that all this was the antithesis of OK. The girl was filthy, the lower half of her body covered in bruises and cuts. There were open sores around her lips, embedded dirt in her fingernails. The shackle on her leg had cut deep into her skin and looked septic, as if gangrene had set in. To the left of the mattress was a bucket from which came a distinct fecal smell. Her hair was matted, her scalp scabby. But it was her eyes that really frightened me. They were hollow, sunken, devoid of any emotion except horror.
‘Ivy MacIntyre?’ I whispered.
She gave a tentative nod. I nodded back, then looked over at Coursen. He had slumped to the floor. I grabbed the shovel again. I approached him, raising it above me, ready to strike again if he dared move. But he was half-conscious – and judging from the bemused look on his face, seriously concussed. When I prodded him with the shovel there was only a groan as a response. His trousers were still down around his ankles. I reached into one pocket and found his car keys and a big chain with around ten keys attached to it. I pulled them both out, prodded him again with the shovel and saw that, stuck into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, was a gun. I reached for it, pulled it out, my hand shaking as I held its flat cold handle. I put it inside my own pocket, then returned to Ivy. She was curled up on the mattress, shaking. I went to work with the keys, trying each one in the lock attached to the shackle. The eighth one opened it. As I carefully lifted the shackle off her the extent of the damage done to her ankle became apparent. The iron mangle had eaten into her flesh. There was exposed bone beneath the septic wound.
Before turning my attention again to Ivy I moved towards Coursen, the shackle in my hand. En route, I pulled hard, testing the strength of the chain. It was attached by another shackle to an iron beam located across a corner of the barn. It seemed to be able to withstand a considerable amount of weight – and I tried not to think about how often she had struggled against its medieval restraint. Now Coursen was about to get a taste of his own monstrousness, as I attached the shackle to one of his ankles, locked it, then slapped him hard across the face to rouse him. His eyes opened momentarily. He seemed to be semi-cognizant of where he was. I leaned down and whispered in his ear three words: ‘Praise the Lord.’
Then I stood up and kicked him hard in the crotch.
This time he let out an agonized groan. I scoured around the floor and found a filthy pair of track pants that had been left near the mattress. Ivy resisted at first when I tried to help her into them, but I kept whispering to her that she was going to be all right, that it was all over now. I managed to get the track pants on her, then tried to raise her to her feet. But the septic ankle gave way and she howled with pain. So I heaved her over my shoulder, expecting to buckle with the strain, but she was so thin, so emaciated, that she seemed to weigh nothing at all. Without stopping to look back at Coursen I moved towards the door. The absolute darkness of the countryside meant that I had to walk with immense care towards a car whose outline was barely visible. It took over five minutes to find it. By the time we reached it I could hear Coursen in the distance, now screaming.
He was back in the land of the fully conscious. And he was going nowhere now.
When we reached the car there was a tricky moment when I had to lean Ivy up against the side as I opened the passenger door. Some weight was put on her ankle and she almost pitched forward from the pain.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said as I kept her upright with one hand and opened the door with another. Then I carefully maneuvered her into the passenger seat and lowered it, so it resembled a makeshift bed. Instinctually she curled back up into a ball and started to shudder.