by Ben Oakley
The Ribnik was too big a draw to leave entirely and I found myself traipsing back over the pavement towards it. Besides, I'd left my drink in there and I wasn't quite finished with Jess yet. There was always the feeling that she was my responsibility, as absurd as it sounded.
The phone started to ring again.
I felt a little rising panic and I wasn't sure why. Was it the damn persistence of this girl or something else hiding beneath it?
“Blocked again,” I muttered to myself.
One last time and then I was going to turn the bloody thing off for the day.
I answered the call, “look, I really can't help you.”
The girl shouted at me, “please don't hang up!”
“It's not gonna work darling, I'm turning my phone off now.”
She screamed at me in desperation with words I couldn't make out, before she took a deep breath and stilled her shaking voice.
“Please don't go! I've been attacked and I'm hurt.” Her voice had become more panicky and less shouty, as if she had conceded to her fate. “He is coming back to kill me.”
I sharply pulled the phone away from my ear and took a deep breath. I had interviewed so many people for the Oculus over the years that I mostly knew the difference between truth and lies. This girl was pretty insistent and I didn't like to admit it but she did sound genuinely scared.
“I'm sorry, I can't help you. Why don't you just call the police?”
“I can't do that?”
“You can, they can help you far more than I can.”
“I can't call the police.”
“Why not?”
“I don't know, the phone only lets me dial this number. I've gone through the memory, contacts, everything, it’s just your number. When I try and dial anything else, it doesn't let me. I can't even open an emergency connection,” she sniffed back the tears.
“That would be difficult to pull off,” I said.
“I know, I don't understand it.”
She had me hooked and I was being reeled into whatever game this was.
“Do you know where you are?”
She fell silent for a moment then I heard her crying harder on the other end. The more she cried and broke down in my ear, the more I believed she was telling the truth. After a few moments more, she managed to compose herself.
“I don't know... but it hurts.”
“What hurts?”
“The cuts all over my body.”
“Where did the cuts come from?”
“He did it to me. He was wearing a mask and when I was chained to the wall, he sliced me all over with a sharp knife.”
“Where did you get the phone to call me?”
“It was on the ground in front of me when I woke up.”
“I thought you were chained to the wall?”
“No. Yes, I was. But I passed out and then woke up on the floor in a locked room. It's like a cellar or something.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Forest Hill.”
“Forest Hill, Oxford?”
“Yes, it's where I live.”
I didn't quite know how to proceed from there. Either way it was going to be hard for her but I had to say it.
“Listen, I'm in Camden, in London. I've lived in and around the area for most of my life. We're quite a distance apart. I’m not sure how much I can actually help you here?”
Then I heard her burst into tears more heavily than before. It sounded like the end of the road. Had I delivered a hammer blow to someone who really needed help? They were tears of immense grief and suffering the likes of which I hadn't heard in a very long time.
More importantly, there was no faking it.
I took a deep breath to calm my own rising heartbeat.
“This is real isn't it?”
Three
Questions were racing through my mind so fast I couldn't focus on what I had to say next. I needed more information from her to try and solve this thing. But she interrupted my train of thought and focused my mind for me.
“Please, I'm not making this up.”
“Okay. I believe you.” What was next? “Do you know the number of the phone you're calling from?”
“No, I told you, everything else is blocked. I can't do anything except call your number. Literally nothing at all.”
“Alright, what's your name?”
“Stansey King,” she said shyly.
“Stansey, I'm Harrison.”
“I heard your name before when you answered. Thank you, thank you!”
“Stansey, I'm going to hang up the phone so I can call the police.”
She began to panic and I heard her whimpering, “please don't go.”
“I have to call the police. You're going to call me back in five minutes. If I'm still on the phone then keep trying, I will answer. Okay?”
“You promise, please promise.”
“I will answer, but Stansey, you have to listen to me now.”
I walked back into The Ribnik, exactly the same way I'd left it. The new girl with the dreadlocks was still sitting opposite the guy with the cap. A few more pages of the broadsheet had been turned from the older man at the end of the bar.
“I'm listening.”
“You have to quickly tell me your address, phone numbers, what you look like, tattoos, etcetera. Any important information about you and I'll pass it over to the police immediately.”
“Okay.”
“Right, just hold on one moment.”
I knocked on the rustic wooden bar to get Jess's attention. She slowly walked out the side door and looked at me with her eyebrows raised in a kind of contempt. She never took someone knocking on the bar lightly. Then she saw the look on my face and walked faster.
“What is it?” she said, unaware of the urgency at hand.
“Get me a pen and something to write on, now.”
“A little please wouldn't go amiss.”
“Jess, look at me,” I leaned in closer. “Right now.”
She grabbed a pen beside the cash register and gave me the back of an invoice to write on. I put the phone back to my ear to hear the girl crying.
“Stansey, give me the details as quick as you can.”
She relayed the information needed and I wrote it down as fast as I was hearing it.
Stansey King. 19-years-old.
Long black hair, usually tied back. Slim build, size 8.
Lives at 5532 Summertown Estate, Oxford.
Mum's name is Rachel King, father is deceased.
Works at the Origin Nightclub in central Oxford.
She can't remember her phone number.
Is genuinely frightened.
I stared at Jess and she touched my shoulder out of compassion or curiosity, I wasn't sure.
“Harry?”
“One moment.” I turned my attention back to the phone, “five minutes Stansey, five minutes you call me back. You got that?”
“Yes, yes, thank you.”
I hung up and opened the camera on the phone. I snapped a photo of what I had written in case I needed it later.
“What's going on?” Jess said more urgently.
“A girl's being held captive somewhere in Oxford and all she had was my phone number.”
“If that's true then why didn't she call the police?”
“That's what I said but she said that everything is blocked apart from my number.” I slipped her the handwritten information, “please call the police and give them this. She'll be listed as missing, or if she hasn't then she will be soon. I'm going to call them as well and give them my details.”
She looked at me with light bemusement on her face and for a moment I didn't think she would help. She had rarely seen me this pent-up and on edge. It was one of those moments she would probably talk about for a long while after.
Finally she said; “sure, I'll do it now.”
She moved to the landline at the same time I called the police from my phone. She looked back
and shrugged.
“What is it?” I said.
“Why does she have your phone number?”
I shrugged back, “I have no idea.”
“You think this is a prank?”
“She would have stopped us getting the police involved if it was a prank.”
“You sure about that?”
“No, I'm not sure about that at all.”
“What have you got yourself involved in now?” she said, with a hint of concern.
“It's not me,” I replied. “I don't know what this is.”
Then I heard the faint words of the operator on the other end of the line.
“Emergency services. Do you need fire, police or ambulance?”
Four
At first, the operator wasn't too sure how to handle it regardless of me telling him how urgent it was. It was a most unusual crime. The only proof of any crime I had was a girl who was telling me what had happened. Beyond that there was actually no evidence at all. I just hoped the information might assist them where needed.
I explained my home was only fifteen minutes walk away and I could charge my phone at the same time if the girl was going to stay on the line with me. They agreed and told me to go home and wait for two officers to arrive.
If they deemed it to be an emergency at that point then they would take over. If they deemed it? I'd used some police services before in my research and they had definitely got less helpful as the years had gone by. But maybe it was just me.
At least Jess believed me.
She was already speaking to them on the other line when I left and seemed to be having more success than I did. I nodded at her goodbye and briskly started to walk the streets back home towards Hampstead Heath. I lived alone just off the high street in an old townhouse with enough space for ten people.
It had been my parents home and their parents home before that. Fifteen years ago when I was 26-years-old, my parents were involved in a boating accident off the coast of Portugal. They were dead-on-arrival at the local hospital and I didn't find out until a week after. Everything was left to me; their only child. I thought about selling it but I never got that far. I guess I just liked the space and to be fair I needed it for the huge amount of research I had amassed.
True to Stansey's word, she phoned back just five minutes after I'd hung up. I had another ten minutes to go before I got back home but it gave me time to keep her talking to try and lift her spirits in any way.
“Stansey?”
“Harrison, oh god, thank you!”
“Listen, I spoke to the police. It's gonna be okay, they're gonna meet me at my house and they'll be better placed to talk to you over the phone.”
“There's no time for the police, he's going to come back and he... he's going to...” she trailed off, sounding even more scared than before.
“Don't you do that, you're gonna have the best people in the business looking for you soon so don't worry. Alright?”
I started to pick up my pace, walking as fast but as comfortably as possible. My attempts at dodging other members of the public wasn't going as well as I hoped. I had no idea how the Japanese did it when they crossed roads and seemed to slot in between each other. It was a skill the British had never developed.
“I think he might be coming,” she said.
“Stansey?”
Shit, I was going to lose her, I could feel it. I suddenly realised I wanted to be in Oxford, at least I'd be able to use some investigatory skills. I'd find out who saw her last, when she left work, her house, her schedules, anything to get a lead.
“It's okay, I think it was something else. I'm not sure though.”
I decided to keep her focus elsewhere. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I've been held captive for weeks somewhere else. He's been drugging me, waking me up, putting me to sleep, doing things to me and then repeating it. Something must have happened because the next thing I knew, I'd woken up in pain here, in a different place. My head hurt. I had a mask over my head so I couldn't see anything and it was difficult to hear. I was face down, tied to a table and he was... he was...”
I took a deep breath and blew it out between pursed lips.
“Okay, okay,” I said, not knowing what direction to take it.
She wept but gained her composure again pretty quickly. “He used me for hours and then he hurt me badly.”
“Christ, I'm so sorry.”
“I have cuts all over my body, little cuts,” she sniffed back tears again, “like he was trying to carve words into me. It's not deep but it's painful enough to know about it.”
I looked away from the phone in disgust. I had a real sick bastard on my hands and it didn't sound like his first time. I'd dealt with serial killers before, my line of work took me to all manner of dark places.
Although not exactly paranormal in the traditional sense, they invoked a certain inhumanity that I had always associated with the monstrous. I was sure I was speaking to a victim of an unknown serial killer.
“There's not long left.”
“What do you mean?” I said, walking faster by the minute.
“He's going to come back and when he finds me talking to someone, he's going to kill me.”
“We're going to get to you, make no mistake about it.” I turned the corner onto a quieter street, only a few blocks from home.
“Stansey, why did this man leave you a phone?
“I've been trying to work it out and I don't know.”
“Why me?”
“I don't understand?”
“Why is my phone number the only one on the phone?”
“I wasn't tied to a table or the wall when I woke up again. I was terrified but I found the phone in the darkness. I can't do anything else with it, I can't call any other number except this one.”
A sudden realisation dropped over me, I slowed my pace, much to Stansey's detriment. It couldn't be. Could it?
“Then I must know the person who took you.”
“What!”
“Stansey, if it's only my number on the phone, then someone has put it there deliberately.”
“But I don't know you.”
“And I've never heard your name before, I have no idea if there is a connection we might be missing. My number is in that phone for a reason and I have no idea why right now.”
“Why would anyone do this?” she cried.
“Whatever this is, I'm a part of it too.”
“So... does anyone have your number?”
“Of course, a few people do but I changed my number last year and the only person who calls now is my boss.”
“What do you do, Harrison?”
I almost didn't tell her for fear of making her feel worse. It wasn't as if I was a doctor or scientist; someone who humanity relied on to further its evolution.
“I'm an Investigative Researcher for the Oculus Database.”
“Does this have anything to do with that?”
“I'm not sure, I wouldn't think so.”
“So who has your number who would do this?”
I had tried to tell her it wasn't me but the more I thought about it, the more I realised the connection might have been bigger.
There was one possibility.
Five
“Harrison?” she said in fear.
“I went to Oxford last year to report on a haunting of an old lady. There was a shadow of a man who appeared at her window at two in the morning on a Wednesday and every week he would move one step closer to her bedside. Anyway, I nailed the story and went for a drink at a local bar and I remember drinking with a group out on a reunion. Maybe, just maybe, I was drunk enough that someone got hold of my phone number then.”
There was silence for a few moments. Dammit, she didn't want to hear about my life. I was meant to be helping her.
Her breathing quickened, “They?”
“There won't be more than one, Stansey.”
“What do you mean?”
&nbs
p; In no way should I tell her she might be a victim of a serial killer.
“Listen, I took photographs of my Oxford visit and some of the people I met, maybe there is a picture of someone who might have got hold of my phone. I don't know, I'm spit-balling here.”
She took a deep breath on the other end and I heard her sniff into the phone, “I'm so scared.”
“Do you have any idea where you are? What kind of room you're in? Can you see anything that might help the police identify where you are?”
“I've had a look but there's no way out, I've taken the light from the phone to every corner. There's a door but it doesn't open from the inside. It smells like mould and it's quite cold here, I'm shaking.”
“Does it look like a basement or outbuilding?”
“Why would I know what a basement looks like?”
“Is there anything else in the room, anything at all?”
“There's a wooden table in the middle and a chair in the corner. There are some chains on the wall, and a bucket of water underneath the chains.”
“No windows?”
“Only a door which I can't get through.”
“Walls made from concrete or wood?”
“I think the walls are made from bricks, it's not stone.” She sniffed louder, “it's so horrible in here, I don't wanna be here anymore. No one's coming to help me are they?”
Suddenly my phone vibrated. I immediately thought that Jess must have just messaged but that would have been the best-case scenario.
The battery had just dropped to five percent. I started jogging. I wasn't the fittest guy on the block but I did a little bit of exercise here and there. A couple of minute's jog wasn't going to kill me.
“Crap,” I said out loud, not meaning to.
“What, what is it?”
“It's my phone, the damn battery's dying.”
“Oh no!”
I panted into the phone, “it's alright Stansey, I'm almost home. Just stay on the line, okay?”
“Please don't leave me.”
The phone vibrated again; four percent.
I held the phone to my side as my jog turned into a bit of a run. I hadn't run in years and it was tiring me more than I remembered. I was going so fast around the second corner from home that I almost took out an old lady who had appeared from nowhere.