Authors: C. L. Taylor
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Contemporary Women
“But this person knows where I work! They know my mobile number. What if they know where I live, too?”
“So leave. Move.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I want to tell her that I don’t want to leave because I like my life here. I like being Jane Hughes. I like working at Green Fields, and I … the sudden realisation twists my heart: I love the life I’m building with Will. If I leave, I’ll have nothing. I’ll be nothing. I’ll have to reinvent myself and start all over again.
“I want to help you,” Al says, and there’s steel in her voice, “but you need to calm down. Everyone who might possibly want to hurt you is dead.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
“Yes.”
She’s so convincing, so sure, and I want to believe her. I so desperately want to believe her.
“Give me a ring on this number if anything else happens,” she says. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
There’s a long pause, and then: “Ever wish you could rewind time, Emma?”
“Every day.”
The phone goes dead in my hand and I sit still for the longest time, gazing at the floor, then twist round in my chair and move the computer mouse with my hand. The screen flickers to life and, almost as though on autopilot, I move the cursor to the start button and then to the list of recent documents. I scroll down the list looking for the last document I was working on, before realising with a start that it’s not at the top of the list – it’s mid-way down. Above it are at least half a dozen documents that I didn’t open, including “JaneHughes CV.doc”, “JaneHughesAppraisal.doc”, and “StaffContactList.doc”. Angharad wasn’t just checking her email: she was checking up on me.
“Al, Al, wake up!” I shake her shoulder gently. My lips are millimetres from her ear. Her hair smells of bonfire, cigarettes and beer. Less than half a metre away, Daisy is lying on her back, snoring softly. The girls’ dormitory is littered with comatose bodies, some of them still in their clothes, their sleeping bags bundled up as makeshift pillows under their heads.
“Al.” I nudge her again. She moans softly and swipes at my hand then rolls over.
There’s a bang, somewhere in the depths of the house.
“Al!” I put my hand over her mouth and pinch the fleshy skin on the back of her arm. “Al, you need to wake up.”
She wakes with a start and grabs at my hands.
“It’s just me. It’s Emma.” I take my hand away from her mouth. “I need to talk to you.”
“Emma?” Her voice is groggy with sleep.
“Sssh!” I press a finger to my lips as she sits up, and then I point towards the door to the shower block.
She understands and rises slowly, climbing out of her sleeping bag and grabbing a hoody from the pile of clothes draped over her backpack, and then she makes her way towards the door. I follow, picking my way through slumbering women. When we reach the entrance to the shower block, Al pauses. I point towards the cubicle at the far end of the block and she nods.
“What the fuck’s going on?” she whispers as I shut the cubicle door behind us. “I thought you were trying to suffocate me.” She pulls her hoody over her head.
“We need to get out of here.”
“Why?” She glances towards a gap in the corrugated roof. There’s a smudge of scarlet light beyond it. The sun is coming up. In less than half an hour it will be daylight and we’ll stand no chance.
“They killed Frank.”
“What the fu—”
I press a hand over her mouth for the second time. “Ssh. Sssh. Promise me you won’t shout again.”
She nods and I let go.
“They …” I fight to keep my breathing steady. “They had Frank on his knees, tied up. He was mouthing off about how he was going to go back to the UK and report them to the authorities. Isaac kept kicking him and kicking him. Johan tried to stop him but then Frank made a comment about Leanne, and Isaac hit him. They decapitated him with the wood axe, Al. He’s out there now, on the banks of the river. There’s blood everywhere.”
“Jesus.” Her eyes are wide with fright.
“Listen.” I grab her shoulder. “We need to go. Isaac said something to Johan about telling him when it was his turn to ‘have a go’ on me, and they said something about you, too. I don’t know what Isaac’s planning, but we have to leave. Fuck the mud and rain. We have to get out.”
“How do I know I can trust you, Emma?”
“What?”
She inches away, towards the cubicle door, keeping her back against the planks. “You slept with Isaac.”
“I know, and I regret it.”
“You regret it? That’s it? A little shrug of the shoulders and, ‘Oh well’? Emma, have you seen Paula’s back?”
I shake my head.
“Isaac whipped her. He tied her up in a shed, whipped her and called it a detox. How can you not know this? Have you been walking around with your eyes shut the last two weeks?”
“I knew she was in a hut, I saw the marks on her wrists, but—”
“You slept with him anyway?”
“Yes! No! I didn’t know—”
“Stop.” She presses her hands to her head and closes her eyes. “This place is doing my fucking head in. Leanne’s telling me one thing, you’re telling me another, and Daisy’s just fucking hysterical.”
“That’s the other thing. I just found some emails between Leanne and Isaac. She’s his half—”
There’s a loud creak from the dorm and I shoot Al a warning look. We stare at the closed cubicle door and listen. Someone in the dorm coughs and there’s another creak, then the almost imperceptible sound of a door squeaking on its hinges.
I barely notice the smell at first, and then it’s everywhere – smoke, sweat, musk and blood. I look at Al. She stares back at me. Her face is pale; the circles under her eyes are purple bruises against her white skin.
“Isaac,” I mouth.
Two things happen at once: the cubicle door slams open, and Al launches herself at me. She kisses me violently, pressing me against the cubicle wall. I try to wriggle away but she pins herself against me as her hands roam over my waist and hips. I feel her tug at the pocket of my trousers and something sharp presses against my right hip. She yanks my hand away as I reach for it.
“Well, well, well.” Isaac’s laugh is dry. “Now there’s something I didn’t expect to see.”
He yanks Al away from me. “Dirty dyke!” he chastises, waggling a finger in her face, a dangerous smile on his lips. “You need to wait your bloody turn. And you” – he slips his hand underneath my hair and grips the back of my neck – “I’ve got something I want to show you.”
I catch a glimpse of Al, peering out of the shower cubicle as Isaac angles me towards the doorway to the girls’ dormitory.
“I trust you,” she mouths.
“That wasn’t what it looked like.” I try to twist away from Isaac as he leads me through the girls’ dormitory and out onto the walkway, but his grip on the back of my neck is vicelike.
“What did it look like?” he asks, steering me through the hallway and out of the back door.
I don’t know what to say so I say nothing as he marches me across the patio, down the garden and through the orchard. I don’t know how to explain what just happened, because I don’t understand it myself – although, from the sharp pain in my right leg, a pain that increases each time I take a step, I’m fairly certain the kiss was a way to mask the fact that Al slipped something into my pocket.
As the waterfall roars in the distance and we approach the river, I’m gripped with a new terror. What are we doing down here? Does Isaac know I saw what happened with Frank? Did he see me run away?
“Are you ready?” he asks as we cross over the bridge.
“Ready?”
“For your detox.”
My leg spasms with pain as he pulls me towards the huts, and I plunge a hand into my pocket, where the pain is worst. Instead of feeling the soft yield of my cotton shorts, my fingers close over something else. Something cold and hard. The knife Al put there.
“Isaac, no.” I lean back, jamming my heels into the ground, the skin around my wrist twisting as I try to wrench it out of his grip. “I don’t want to.”
He turns the key in the lock. “You don’t know what’s going to happen yet.”
I cry out as he throws open the door to the hut and yanks me inside, but the sound only lasts as long as it takes for him to clamp a muffling hand to my mouth. He holds me against him as he turns the key in the lock with his free hand.
“Emma,” he says as I twist and wriggle and pull and push and attempt to unbalance him. “You need to calm down. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.
“That’s it,” he says as I stop fighting. He holds me tightly for several seconds then slowly lets go of me and angles me so he’s standing with his back to the door and I’m in front of him. The door is ajar behind him, a sliver of sunrise lifting the gloom of the hut. “Are you calm now?”
I nod but my hands are clenched at my sides.
“Light the candle.” He hands me a lighter and watches as I turn and light the large white church candle on the table to my right.
As the gloom lifts, he pulls his T-shirt over his head and drops it to the floor.
He looks at me steadily, almost daring me to glance away. His chest, his arms and his stomach are striped with scars – thick, thin, long, short, raised, flat. There isn’t a patch of skin on his upper torso that hasn’t been cut, slashed, hacked or carved. So that’s why he wouldn’t let me take his T-shirt off when we had sex.
“Are you shocked?” His voice is barely louder than a whisper.
“Yes.”
“Would you believe me if I told you it didn’t hurt? Because it didn’t, you know.” He takes a step closer to me and reaches for the string at the waist of my cotton shorts.
“I’ll do it,” I say, untying the string and slipping my shorts down to the floor. I step out of them, picking them up and keeping the ball of material scrunched up in my hand.
“It’s a natural progression,” Isaac says, dropping to his knees and pushing my knickers to my ankles. “Once you’ve lost your attachments to people and things, the next step is to learn how to detach from your own body. It’s incredible” – he kisses my belly – “to be able to mentally overcome pain. Absolutely incredible. You’ll be blown away, Emma, by how much your mind can accomplish.”
His lips travel from my stomach to my hipbone then to the top of my thigh.
I fumble with my balled-up shorts, searching for the knife. They feel too soft, too yielding. Where is it? Did it fall out when I was trying to get away from Isaac outside? I partially unfold the shorts but there’s nothing but soft cotton in my hands.
“Before the pain, a little pleasure.” Isaac plunges his fingers inside me and I stumble to my right, smacking the shorts against the table as I try to keep my balance. The fruit knife slips from the bundle of material and clatters onto the surface. It spins round and round in slow motion.
Isaac looks up. His eyes widen as he spots the knife, and he reaches a hand towards the table.
I grab it first and, without pausing to think, bring it down against the side of his head. It slips from my hand as it makes contact with his cheekbone. As he roars with pain and reels to the side I leap for the door.
There are lights on in the house now. People are awake.
“Oh no you don’t.”
The air is squeezed from my lungs as one arm grips me around the stomach and the other around the throat, and I am pulled back into the hut. Isaac lifts me as though I’m weightless, and then spins me around before forcing me against the back wall, facing the rough wood. One by one, he grabs hold of leather bonds and uses them to attach first my left wrist, then my right wrist to the metal hoops in the corners of the ceiling.
“Isaac, stop! Stop!” I pull at the restraints but they are bound too tightly – leather cuffs buckled around my wrists with strong, brass clasps and attached to the metal hoops. My ankles are strapped, too. I am spread-eagled against the back wall of the hut, my face pressed against the cold wood.
“You stupid bitch.” He touches the side of his head. There’s a dark mass in his hairline. He scratches at it, digging in his nails until the blood runs free again and dribbles down the side of his face. He swipes at it with his palm then slowly, deliberately, wipes his hand over my face. My nostrils are flooded with the scent of iron and salt.
“You had to make this difficult, didn’t you?” he says as he steps out of my line of sight, and I hear what sounds like a metal box being dragged across the floor. “Ah, well.” He sighs deeply. “It looks like we’ll have to do this the hard way.”
I hear the crack of the whip before I feel it. At first there is nothing – no discomfort, just the sharp sensation of being slapped on the back – then the burn bites at my skin and I howl with pain.
He cracks the whip again.
I screw my eyes tightly shut, curl my toes and clench my fists. To begin with, I count the strokes – one, two, three, four, five – and then I focus on the candle, flickering violently on the table whenever he raises the whip in the air.
There’s a creak as the hut door opens, followed by the low rumble of a man clearing his throat. I don’t turn my head to see who it is; I don’t even open my eyes. I stay where I am, huddled in a heap on the floor, pressed against the back wall. My wrists have been released from the leather bonds, but they burn as if I’m still tied up.
“Is she good?” the man asks as an icy blast of air hits me.
“Finished about half an hour ago.”
“So can I have a go?”
“On the whip or her?”
Isaac and the other man laugh. I don’t understand why, and I don’t care. They may as well be a million miles away.
“What are you doing here?” Isaac asks.
“Isis said something about another Pokhara run. You didn’t mention it to me.”
“Didn’t I? Must have forgotten.”
“What about her?”
“Emma? You’re lucky if I let you shag anyone ever again after the shit you pulled with Frank.”
“You promised I’d be next, Isaac.”
“That was before you threw a fist in my face.”
“You said there would be no more deaths.”
“Fuck off, Johan, we’ve already talked about this.”
“Yeah, but—”
“You heard what I said. I’ll let you know when she’s ready, you dirty, fucking Swede. Haven’t you got turnips to fertilise, or something?”
There is a click as the door shuts, and then everything goes black.
The next time I open my eyes, Isaac has gone and it’s pitch black inside the hut, apart from a shallow pool of light at the base of the door. I crawl towards it, retching as I pass the bucket Isaac left there. My lungs fill with the stench of vomit, piss and shit.
When I reach the door I tilt my head to one side and press my lips against the half-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the frame. The air smells sweet and fresh. I gulp at it, filling my lungs, inhaling until they feel fit to burst.
“Help!” The word scratches at the back of my throat. I try to swallow but there’s no saliva in my mouth. “Help! Please help! Somebody help me.”
The gap is too small for me to see more than the tiniest patch of grass, so I press my ear to it instead. All I can hear is the whirl of the wind and the roar of the waterfall.
“Help!” I drag myself onto my feet and pound at the door with my fists. The wood is weather worn and cracked. Splinters drive themselves into my skin but I keep on thumping, smacking and hammering at it. The door shakes but remains on its hinges. I kick at it, steadying myself by pressing my hands to the side of the hut. It holds fast so I turn and kick backwards, like an angry mule.
Nothing.
My legs buckle under the weight of the table as I pick it up and hurl it towards the door. It hits the wood with a thump then bounces back. One of the legs catches me in the stomach and I reel backwards. My heel hits the bucket and I trip. Urine, vomit and faeces swirl around me as I fall to the floor.