The new light isn’t natural – it’s too sickly and cold for that – and the table keeps levitating. My eyes won’t adjust to the first brightness I’ve seen in three days and dizziness takes over. I try to steady myself against the back wall. When I’m on my feet, my hazy vision picks out something new about the light – it isn’t a rectangle, but two squares. They are divided by a thick black line in the gap of the trapdoor, and when the line wriggles a little under the weight of the hatch and the attached table, I comprehend that it is an arm. Before disappearing, the line goes straight again in a last violent extension and the hatch overturns, crashing the table against the wall. My once black room is turned into dark green and orange splodges by the invading light from below. The next thing to emerge from the gap in the floor is a human head. The real hell has opened.
41
The head stares at me for a second from its hole then morphs into a man.
Clad in black, he climbs through the trapdoor and blocks off the light he’d just let in. I cannot see his face. I slink into the far corner of the room, from where I will mount my attack. I grind my teeth as he takes a step forward, but it’s not a smooth movement, not how I used to imagine him ghosting around me in the dark. With the light from the hatch, there is no need to be agile. He can see exactly where I am. And yet he arches his body over and lowers his head into the corner, as if he’s checking it’s really me. He is toying with me, even now, when he’s about to kill me.
He takes another lumbering step forward, as unsteady as the first, and the light lands on something shiny tucked in his waist; the knife. He still has it. I remember how it bristled my throat. My breathing quickens and I close my eyes one last time, picture in my head what I’m going to do, and then I do it.
The bucket hits him on the chest – I aimed for his head – but it has the desired effect. It stops him in his tracks; the bang of the third-full container, the subsequent splash, the taste of stale urine that invades his lungs. Angry and disgusted, he kicks the bucket back into my corner, but I am on him before the plastic hits the wall. I spring at him and whip my wrist, like I was skimming a stone into the sea from a beautiful cobbled beach. I was always good at skimming stones; my dad taught me. The empty end of the handcuffs clips him in the neck and he chokes, coughs something on to the floor.
My fists aren’t my only weapons. After the last time he came into the room and attacked me, teased me with the knife, I realised my flailing limbs were not enough to defend myself in the dark. I have been wearing the handcuffs around my right wrist ever since. I didn’t write about it because if he did return, I didn’t want him to expect the snap and recoil of metal from his victim.
My second flick of the wrist sends the spare handcuff into his mouth – I hear the sound of what I hope is breaking teeth. His lips muffle an obscenity and I fire again, cracking him with the handcuff on the top of the head. The smell of piss fills the room. I go for another hit, but he leans back towards the light and the cuff doesn’t reach its intended target. And this time I don’t get the other end of the handcuffs back. He catches the cuff in his hand and wraps the chain around his wrist, pulling me towards him. Instead of resisting, I let his superior strength suck me in, but not to surrender; the short two-step run-up helps me generate the necessary force to bring my free fist into his eye. He yells in pain and some spit escapes his mouth and splatters my cheek. I can’t punch him again, because he wraps both arms around my back and squeezes. My nose flies into his neck. He reeks of piss, my piss, but underneath the urine there is another scent, subtle, sweet and inviting; aftershave. When he was torturing me a few days ago, that smell was all-pervading, and now it has been reduced to almost nothing. Now there is just sweat, piss and fear.
His arms are wrapped around me, yet he is no longer in control. This wasn’t supposed to go like this. His heavy breathing matches mine – he is just as scared as I am now. His grip isn’t iron-clad and loosens under my consistent wriggling. He pins me to the floor to stop the rot, but the bump only serves to free my right arm, and before he can react, I hook the handcuff chain over his head and round his neck. He splutters and my left arm breaks free. I use both limbs to pull the chain tight into his throat. His palms pat down my face in protest but I keep tugging. His spluttering graduates into a fully-fledged choke. I can end it right now. All I have to do is keep doing what I’m doing and he will be gone forever and he won’t be able to do this to me again. Three days of suffering and now I’m not the one on the receiving end. And I don’t like it. It’s still not bright enough, and my eyes haven’t regained their full focus, but I picture his face below me turning blue. I want to hurt him, I’m enjoying it, but I realise I don’t want to kill him. I want to see the look in his eyes when I tell him I’ve won. I uncross my hands and the chain slackens round his neck. As soon as it does he punches me, high in the chest, spinning me off him and back towards the bed. The side of my head cracks off the frame but I don’t have time to check for blood. He is up on his feet again, still blocking the light from the hatch. I just want to get into the light, then I will be safe. But I have to get past him first. He stands above me, but he is not the imposing shape he was when little more than an elusive shadow. He is swaying. I am not afraid of him anymore.
Between breaths that sound like someone’s last, he says: ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
It is the last straw. My anger raises me to my feet and I run for him, screeching. But he has lost the stomach for the fight. Before I can attack, he takes two timid steps backwards. The first one slides in urine and the second doesn’t slide in anything at all; his foot goes into the hatch, dragging the rest of him behind it. His disappearance is followed by a crash and a scream so loud and chilling I pull my hands up to my ears, cracking my forehead with the flailing end of the handcuffs.
42
I crawl over to the hole in the floor, the stench of my own pee swirling inside my nostrils, and peer down on the world for the first time in three long days. The world is small, bright like a headache, and noisy. He is down there, screaming in agony.
If my eyes were slow to adjust to the magical light created by the opening of the hatch, then this is a new and tougher test. The hatch opens on to a dirty yellow rectangle that I cannot fathom. In the middle of it all is a black blob, rolling from side to side. I put my hand through the hole to gain some kind of perspective and come up against something cold and wooden. I refocus and my short sight kicks in – it is the top step of a set of stairs. I squint several times in succession until the picture below me turns less blurry. Not all of the black blob is writhing, just its top half. His squeals are blood-curdling, but I don’t care. Let him suffer. He may be in agony, but I still have to navigate my way around him. He still has the knife.
I swing my legs round and dangle them out the hatch. My feet land on the top step, but the stairs must be on wheels because they wobble under my applied pressure. The steps fall into another room which cannot be much bigger than the one above. In the light, I get a proper look at myself for the first time in three days. My jeans are filthy, my hands and wrists are black and blue and red, my fingers are shredded. But at least I can see them. Like a newborn waking in a bright hospital ward after a difficult birth, I drink in my bearings. A lead hangs down the side of the stairs and goes all the way to a plug socket on the floor – that’s how he kept charging the laptop for me. The drop to the floor from the hatch is about three metres. I say goodbye to my prison cell and lower myself on to the steps, which rock from side to side as I slide down into the bright light. I am out.
Once off the unsteady steps, I take my first good look at my captor. His face is buried in the linoleum floor, as are his fists. He is injured – or pretending to be. I grant him no pity. I am a different person to the one that woke up in the room above. I’m not going back there. He has changed too. All his control and poise is gone. I have no sympathy in me. I am too far past that. It was him or me. He can sense me hovering.
‘Get awa
y from me!’ he shouts. ‘Why have you done this to me?’
That question again, uttered with so much spite, sends me crazy once more. I sit down on him, putting all my weight on his back – just like he once did to me, when I thought he was going to rape me – and grab him by the hair. I want to look him in the eye. I want him to see what he has done to me in this new cold light. I turn his head and he twists his shoulders enough to lie on his side and gaze up at me.
The battered face belongs to someone I thought I loved. Aaron looks up at me and sucks me in with those big blue eyes. I close my own and squeeze out a tear. He’s not my Aaron any more. He’s Miles Phillips. He killed me in print and then he tried to do it for real. I know he’s Miles not Aaron because there is something in his eyes I haven’t seen before; fear. He is scared of me and scared of what I am going to do to him. Good.
I pull his hair tighter and shout into his face, but his eyes start to glaze over. I don’t want him to pass out – I want answers – but the only way I can express myself in this moment is through pain, so I give him some of mine. I keep slapping him in the face in the hope that one of the blows will turn it into someone else’s: Rob’s maybe, or Jessica’s, anyone but Aaron’s. He puts up zero resistance.
I cease hitting him when his head goes heavy in my hand.
‘I’m sorry for what I did to you, Suzanne,’ he whispers.
He accepts his punishment and his red eyes close. He is beaten. I have won, just like I promised him. I am alone again.
43
I drag myself off the cold linoleum floor. My left knee doesn’t feel entirely secure under me, and my head is tottering from the bang on the bed frame, but I have freed myself of my captor.
Aaron. Miles. How could you? How could you do this?
The rest is up to me. The white room has a door. I stumble up to it and my eagerness gets the better of me; I pull so hard and fast that I forget to maintain the appropriate distance. Maybe I don’t expect the door to open. But its peeled white frame comes free in my grip and thumps me in the forehead. I ignore it and plough on. There is no pain in me anymore, just desperation. I don’t look behind me. My shirt and jeans feel grafted on to me at this stage, almost like they are an extra layer of my skin.
The door opens into a narrow corridor, one that throws me back into darkness. I let out a pitiful yelp at going back into black, fearing for a second that I am stuck in some sadistic puzzle that has returned me to my shadowless prison cell, but the hallway has light at the end of its tunnel. I head for it, scraping my arm along a cold wall for support – my leg is worse than I thought. I must have twisted my knee when he landed on top of me in the room. I will crawl out of here if I must.
Before I get to the top light, another claws at me from the left hand side. I lean against the opposite wall and use its shimmer to glance back down the hall – he isn’t coming for me, not yet at least. How could he? He passed out. Perhaps he’s gone completely. But what if he has help? The light from my left is cold and sinister. It comes from a small room, once guarded by a heavy wooden door that has been swung open. Inside, a single naked light bulb hangs above a tiny plastic chair – probably about the same size as the one in my room – and a plastic bucket. A black piece of clothing lies on the granite floor, just in front of a bundle of ropes, ripped black masking tape and a pair of discarded handcuffs. The putrid smell of urine sneaks through the open door. I know that smell because I have lived with it for three days. The room is no bigger than a wardrobe. Someone else is in here. I have to get out of the corridor.
The light at the end of the tunnel is shining through a square window frame in a set of exit doors. I bash into the push bar with my hip and fall through, landing on carpet. I am in another corridor, but this one is wider and smells of air freshener. There are tiny bulbs encased in plastic on either side of the walls. Another set of doors awaits me at the end of this corridor and I barge through with even more ferocity than the last. I could go through a brick wall right now. It’s just as well, because when I push through these next doors I am greeted by cold concrete rather than warm carpet. And I face an uphill battle; before me is a flurry of steps. I clamber up them, dragging my knee as I go, and then through another set of exit doors until my world is changed again. The carpet is back beneath my feet, but it barely registers. There is far too much else going on to notice.
The room is enormous, and I feel like cave divers must after they wriggle through a series of squalid passages to emerge into a vast underground lair that stretches into infinity. Although the lights are low, colours I had forgotten attack me from all angles. I have come up for air in a sea of blue. Two towering pillars of sky blue stare down at me from maybe fifty feet away. We are separated by a wide expanse of darker blue created by rows upon rows of chairs. They match the carpet below them, itself speckled with star-shaped red and yellow patterning. A thick line of light blue runs all along the far wall atop the pillars, skipping over mountainous pipe-filled window frames that decrease in size as the eye follows them on to a white-painted balcony. A winding sky blue staircase slithers from one floor to the other. Away to my left, five or six stretched steps spill out of an impressive stage. Further left, something smaller yet more substantial catches the eye, gleaming white and gold with at least half a dozen levels of keyboards. At the top of its wooden husk is a sign in gold writing that reads, ‘WURLITZER’.
I have stepped into a massive theatre, brightened by emergency lighting. The exit doors I came through are painted sky blue on this side to match the pillars studded around the sphere. I look through the small windows in the door, back into the last corridor. No one is coming. Not yet. But it is time to go.
If the stage is on my left, the logical exit must lie to the right. The carpet is kinder on my knee than the concrete and holds me up through a steady sprint into the middle of the theatre, until I clatter into a row of chairs just before the steps under the white and blue hanging balcony. The noise echoes around the theatre and will surely bring down more foes. I don’t glance back to see how many chairs I’ve scattered; I keep pushing forward to the rear of the auditorium, where I am met by another set of bright blue exit doors. The relief that spreads through me when I open them is overwhelming and judders my heart into overdrive.
I am almost there. I can do this. Up another carpeted corridor I go, but not for long, until I arrive at the bottom of two sides of a marble coated staircase in a foyer guarded on high by a chandelier of a thousand crystal pieces. Between the first steps of each side of the staircase is a large pin board filled with framed posters. Each poster has a famous name in scrawl alongside a date in history. The ones I recognise jump out at me as I run past the board.
‘BILL HALEY AND HIS COMETS – FEBRUARY 1957’
‘BUDDY HOLLY – MARCH 1958’
‘THE BEATLES – APRIL 1963’
‘THE ROLLING STONES – NOVEMBER 1963’
‘DAVID BOWIE – JUNE 1973’
‘THE WHO – DECEMBER 1977’
At the top of the pin board, decorated in thick black writing, is a large piece of card in a frame of its own. It reads:
‘WELCOME TO THE GAUMONT STATE THEATRE IN KILBURN; WHERE SOME OF THE BIGGEST STARS IN SHOWBIZ HAVE SHONE. HOME TO A WORKING WURLITZER ORGAN’.
I limp past the board and my knee buckles as it’s forced to withstand a new surface; hardwood flooring. But the discomfort is nothing compared to the anticipation, for the panelling under my feet signals that I have come to the end of the road; up ahead, where the floor runs out, is a row of glass doors with wooden frames, mirrored by a similar set a further ten yards back. I wrap my rough hands around the handle in the middle of the first row of doors. It is locked. The second handle on the other side will be too. Looking through one row of glass and the next, I see people surging back and forth, like extras in the background of a film. The main road. Kilburn High Road. I must join them out there in the dark of the night.
I bang my bloody fists on a panel of the first se
t of glass doors and squeal in my highest pitch, but my screeches go unanswered. The handcuffs, still tethered round one wrist, bang at the glass of their own accord. No one can hear me. I whip around and scan the foyer. There is a tall reception desk, caked in marble to match the staircase, and something gleams at me from the top surface. I drag my failing body over and paw at the object, which turns out to be a smaller version of the Wurlitzer organ. Delight penetrates me when I go to lift it – the mini-organ is heavy, almost too heavy to hold in two hands. Bronze or marble – I don’t care – it weighs a tonne; exactly what I need. I shove it off the top of the reception desk and it takes a bite out of the wooden flooring. Perfect. I drop to my knees and begin pushing the Wurlitzer statue across the floor, inch by excruciating inch. It is as big as my head. I can do this.
I keep telling myself this until I have shoved the statue into the bottom of one of the doors in the first row. The glass is framed by a thick outer layer of wood, so I still need to lift the Wurlitzer. I sink one knee to the floor and bend the other as far as the pain will allow and I heave. The statue comes up with me and I steady it on my thigh, then jerk it along my belly and up to my chest. I take a step back from the door then spin my torso and arms together in one swift movement. I close my eyes. I hear the rattle of the handcuff against the glass first, and for a horrible split-second I fear that is the only impact, but the glorious crash that follows and the hot spark of cut glass on my hands and face tell me I am halfway there. One door down, one to go.
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