Authors: Anthony Price
“Well, Miss Loftus, we weren’t expecting you back so soon. But, now that you’re here, we can turn that to advantage I think.” The voice paused for an instant. “Indeed, I don’t think—I
know
that you will help
uss
.”
Half of Elizabeth was irrationally terrified by the confidence in the voice, and by its smoothness, in which the sibilants hissed and slithered snake-like. But the other half whispered
robbery
to her, discounting rape and unnecessary violence.
Even, it was easy to imagine what had brought them, for it must be common knowledge now that she was alone, and a lone woman in a large secluded house would be an open invitation to men like this. She should have thought of that before, but now it was too late.
So … better to get it over with. Because even if she could spin out the agony until Dr Mitchell came knocking on the door, she didn’t fancy his chances against the gorilla who had grabbed her.
“There’s … there’s money in a box upstairs—a wooden box under my bed.” There was no point in directing them to the silver in the dining room and the sitting room, they would have seen that at once and would have got it already.
“Under the bed? Tut-tut! How very bourgeois and careless!” The voice hissed the double-s at her contemptuously.
“A lot of money—more than two thousand pounds.” The contempt stung her. “Just take it and go, can’t you? There’s nothing else worth taking—except the silver.”
“Nothing else?” No sound penetrated the hood except the voice. “You’re sure of that?”
Fear returned, instantly dissolving the contempt. “I—I promise you that there isn’t—you can see for yourself… I haven’t got any jewellery.” It was hot inside the hood, she could feel her cheeks burning.
“Nothing else?” That hateful hiss again.
She shook the hood. “I swear it. Honestly—
please
!”
For a moment she thought he had accepted the plain truth. Then, without warning, her hands were seized from her lap and held on the arms of the chair. Something sharp bit into each wrist in turn, and then into each ankle.
Nightmare
! She couldn’t see and she couldn’t move! She couldn’t even rock the chair—something, or someone, was holding it steady, and the very effort of trying to rock it stung her wrists.
“Don’t struggle, Miss Loftus. You’ll only hurt yourself.”
Elizabeth sat rigid. “Please—I’ve told you—“
“Shut up—and listen! I don’t intend to waste a lot of time, Miss Loftus, so just listen … We don’t want your silver, and we don’t want your money—we’ll take it, but we don’t want it—do you understand? You know what we want. So just tell us what we want to know, and then we’ll go.”
Elizabeth heard herself sob.
“Don’t be silly, Miss Loftus. Crying won’t help you—and saying ‘please’ won’t help you either. Because there’s only you and me, and I’m not a kind-hearted man—quite the opposite, in fact. Do you understand?”
With an enormous effort Elizabeth brought herself under control. “W-what do you w-want to know?”
“That’s better.” He sounded curiously disappointed. “But just remember now … two things: I
never give
anyone a second chance … and I’m
very
good at hurting people. Do you understand?”
Elizabeth nodded dumbly. Whatever it was that he wanted to know, she would tell him.
“Good. Then tell me all about the
Vengeful
, and those trips your father made to France.”
The
Vengeful
? Those trips—? The questions simultaneously took her by surprise and also horrified her.
“Come on, Miss Loftus. I have his notes, and there’s nothing in them. What I want is inside your head.”
It wasn’t the safe deposits at all—
it wasn
’
t the safe deposits at all
! And there was nothing inside her head except blind panic now.
“But I don’t know what you mean—“
“Ah! Now there—I told you, didn’t I?” Suddenly he sounded brisker, almost happier. “You can’t
sssay
I didn’t tell you!”
“But I don’t!” wailed Elizabeth. “He did research—he did research—I didn’t go with him—I don’t understand—“
“Of course you don’t! You don’t remember anything—of course you don’t!” The snake-voice paused. “Your memory has suddenly deserted you entirely.
Hold her
!”
Hands clamped down on Elizabeth’s shoulders from behind, pressing her back against the chair.
“W-what are you doing?” She began to struggle instinctively, but the pressure on her shoulders merely increased. “Please!”
“Please!” The snake-voice mocked her. “Thi
ss
is a little problem I often encounter, you know. But I’m very good at ssolving it … I’m going to help you get your memory back, Misss Loftu
sss
. That’s all!”
Something hooked into the neckline of Elizabeth’s dress, pulling her forward against the pressure from behind. The thin summer dress strained for an instant, then tore apart as the material ripped and the buttons gave way.
Elizabeth tried to struggle again, more wildly but just as uselessly, the wires cutting into her wrists. Then she went rigid as she felt something hook into her brassiere between her breasts: the brassiere stretched for a second, then seemed to fall apart as though it had been cut—
Oh God! Oh God.
’
But then nothing happened. The hands released her shoulders— and she was sobbing again. But nothing happened.
“
Sss
o … very nice, Miss Loftus! So … just listen, then.”
Still nothing—nothing but the pounding of her heart, which hammered the blood in her ears in the darkness, and the sweat on her face.
“Did you hear that? No? Well… I was striking a match to light my cigarette…which is strange, because I don’t smoke, you know.” The voice was animated by pure pleasure. “Smoking is bad for you—and particularly bad
for you
, Miss Loftus.”
Still nothing.
“Evidently you don’t understand—or you’re very brave—brave and foolish.” More pleasure. “Nowadays they have lots of equipment—microchips too, I shouldn’t wonder—but I’m old-fashioned. In fact, although they say the Gestapo got it down to a fine art, I believe it was the Okrana and the Cheka who pioneered it… Apart from which it’s highly cost-effective—even now, with cigarettes the price they are. One packet and a box of matches, and you’re in business.”
Just as the unbelievable dawned on her, and she opened her mouth to scream, something soft pressed through the material of the hood between her lips—something soft which was then pulled tight as the gag was fastened, so that she could only make incoherent sounds of hysteria, doubly muted.
“Ye
sss
… I know you want to tell me
everything
now—of course you do! But you didn’t take me at my word the first time, and I don’t want you to have second thoughts again, so I propose to demonstrate the technique just a little in order to concentrate your mind absolutely on my requirements.”
A hand gently parted the wreckage of her clothing.
“There now!” The voice and the hand both caressed her. “And I see that you don’t much indulge in sun-bathing… which is really just as well, because you won’t feel like wearing your bikini for quite a long time to come, if at all, you know.”
Elizabeth wanted to faint, but her senses refused to leave her. If anything they seemed to have become sharper, even to the gossamer touch on her skin.
“Wait a mo’—‘old on.” The rough voice came suddenly from above, just behind her.
“What is it?” Irritation harshened the snake-voice.
“I thought I ‘eard somethin’.”
“Heard something? Where?”
“Out back. Just ‘old on a mo’, like I said.”
They were listening, and Elizabeth listened with them, yearning for any sound, but above all for Dr Mitchell’s knock on the front door. It didn’t matter to her now what might happen to him if he fell foul of the gorilla-man—nothing mattered but her own deliverance from those other hands, which had crawled over her with such sickening gentleness.
“I can’t hear anything,” hissed the snake-voice.
“No, nor I can’t neither—not now,” the gorilla-man admitted grudgingly. “But I could swear I ‘eard somethin’, an’ that’s a fact.” The pressure on Elizabeth’s shoulders slackened. “Better ‘ave a look-see, I reckon—just to be on the safe side, okay?”
The snake-man sighed. “Very well—if you must. But make it snappy. We don’t have all the time in the world at our disposal.”
Time
, thought Elizabeth desperately. Like them, she had heard nothing. But just as the hood disorientated her sense of place, so the dark tide of fear within her had swamped her sense of time, and what had seemed like only a few minutes of nightmare might in reality have taken much longer.
The pressure lifted altogether, and she could move again within the painful constraints of the bonds which held her wrists and ankles.
Time
was what she had to hold on to—she had to think of ways to spin it out: she had to hold on to it, and get control of herself.
Then, out of the darkness, he touched her again, and the control she was striving for slipped from her mind in a wave of sick revulsion and instantly-revived panic. The chair rocked and the bonds cut into her flesh agonisingly. Whatever it was that she had been on the point of thinking vanished from her mind, and all she wanted to scream was
Please don
’
t
—
please don
’
t
!
But she couldn’t scream, and even the incoherent sounds she started to make were stilled as it came to her with a flash of bitter clarity that all pleading was useless, and worse than useless:
please don
’
t
had been the ultimate encouragement he wanted from her, adding spice to what he was going to do, and had always wanted to do … and nothing she could say or do—there
was
nothing she could say or do—would change that. She didn’t even know any of the answers to his insane questions, but resistance or submission was all the same to him now.
So … there was nothing left to her but helplessness and terrible numbing fear in the dark—and the quiet of his silent enjoyment of her terror, which joined him to her.
The crash of noise which broke the bond between them was so unexpected and so shattering that for a fraction of time she thought it was inside her, as though her brain and her heart had exploded simultaneously.
Then the noise was outside her, repeated and so loud that it convulsed her into movement, regardless of the pain which tore at her again and as the chair toppled turning black into screaming red into nothing as her head hit something hard—
THERE WERE COLOURS
, bright as flowers, but crowned with stars—
“Come on, Miss Loftus—Miss Loftus, come on now—wake up, Miss Loftus …” The voice surrounded her, hectoring and encouraging her at the same time.
The colours revolved, and then became flowers in reality: the flowers in the curtains of the study, with the evening sun shining through them and starring the gaps in the folds of the pelmet with light. Elizabeth blinked the tears out of her eyes and fought her way upwards into consciousness.
She could see again!
More, she could see and her hands moved—hands, wrists and arms … all of them moved, freely though painfully, falling where gravity took them.
“Come on, Miss Loftus—damn it!” The voice became peremptory and irritable. “Wake up!”
First, she felt aggrieved—then she became aware of hands holding her, lifting and dragging at her, which roused her into a flurry of fresh resistance against them.
The hands became arms, imprisoning her again. “No! Come on, now—it’s me—
stop it.
’”
The hands weren’t
those
hands—they crushed her, but they didn’t
touch
her … it was as though, even though ungentle, they were unwilling to hold her, never mind to touch her—
Elizabeth relaxed, suddenly boneless.
“That’s better! Now then … I’m putting you down—it’s all right, but I’m putting you down—do you understand? Don’t move—it’s all right… I’ll come back … right?”
There was no way she could answer any of that. But she accepted the soft-hard feel of the carpet against her cheek, and the movement of the bright flowers of the curtains and the stars twisting at impossible angles—and the desk and table legs horizontal when they should have been vertical.
She wrinkled her nose against the smell of burning carpet …
Burning carpet
! The smell registered in her brain, triggering consciousness and a proper focus on her surroundings at the same time.
The desk blocked half her view of the room from ground level, but there at the end of it, a yard from her face and sending up a spiralling blue-grey smoke signal to her, a cigarette smouldered on Father’s best-quality Wilton carpet!
Elizabeth hauled herself on to one elbow and reached out towards the cigarette. But it was too far away after all, and she had to go on hands and knees in order to extend her reach. To her annoyance she saw, as she picked it up, that it had already gouged an ugly brown mark into the thick pile of the Wilton, and—
God! There was someone lying behind the desk!
She froze on two knees and one hand, the cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger of the other hand, hypnotised by the dark suede shoes, and the grey trousers rucked up to reveal socks and an inch of hairy white leg.
“Don’t look,” said a voice from behind her.
Elizabeth hadn’t wanted to look, there was no danger of that: not only the legs themselves, but also their stillness terrified her. But she found it impossible to take her eyes off them.
“Look at me instead,” commanded the voice. “Come on, Miss Loftus—look at me.”
She didn’t want to turn round either, but in the end it was the lesser of two evils.
“There now … it’s all right, Miss Loftus—Elizabeth—can I call you ‘Elizabeth’? And you can call me ‘Paul’—right?”