DECOY (Kindle Single)

by Scott Mariani

  She wanted to scream at him in fury, but what good could threats and swearing do? She swallowed her rage and blurted out, ‘I’m sorry for what happened. I didn’t mean to upset you, all right? I was only doing my job. Your wife hired me. You must know that by now.’

  Geoffrey said nothing. He took another step. His face was just a blur in the shadows.

  ‘I’ll give back the money she paid me. I’ll never breathe a word about this to her. I promise. Not to the police, not to anyone. Just let Charlie go, and Hayley too, and I swear you’ll never hear from me again. Please! Say something!’

  ‘I’m afraid things have gone a little too far for that, Kate,’ he said.

  Another two steps. Another pause. He was just ten feet away from her now.

  ‘But you’re right about one thing,’ he said. ‘Nobody will ever hear from you again.’

  He stepped closer. She backed up two paces, three. Her hip caught the edge of a dining table. She twisted away from it and retreated into the gap between a tall dresser and a sideboard. She could hear his breathing. Then— a metallic ringing scrape and a dull flash of metal catching the moonlight, like the mirror. She gave a cry as she realised that he’d drawn a knife. He was insane. He was going to stab her.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ she pleaded as she backed away. ‘Let us go. What have we done to you?’

  He said nothing. Just kept coming towards her. The knife was low, down by his side, a leaf-shaped tongue of steel glittering in the moonlight from the window, its tip angled towards her.

  ‘Please don’t hurt my boy,’ she begged.

  He paused for a second, as if sizing her up. And then suddenly it was happening and Kate screamed as he came lunging at her, closing the distance between them with fast shuffling steps.

  Kate stumbled back out of the reach of the blade, and found herself wedged into a tight space between the freestanding pieces of furniture that seemed to loom and crowd all around her in the shadows. As she frantically retreated from him, she crashed into something solid and heavy that caught her off-balance. She sprawled, fighting to stay upright, and her elbow came down on the keys of an old piano. The dissonant clang of notes jangled loudly through the warehouse. She veered away from it and retreated again. The knife glimmered as he came after her, weaving effortlessly through the gaps between the clustered tables and dressers and chests of drawers.

  ‘Please!’

  He only smiled. Then raised the knife and whipped at her in a horizontal slashing motion that would have cut her across the face if she hadn’t ducked. She avoided the blade, but not his other hand which came up fast as she twisted sideways away from the knife. His fingers locked tight in her hair. She tried to yank her head away and yelled in pain. Gritted her teeth and shook her head wildly from side to side to break his grasp. He wouldn’t let go. The knife was coming towards her face.

  In her desperation she lashed out with her foot, trying to kick him. He moved and the pointy toe of her shoe found only air, but her shin glanced against the side edge of a small round table to her right, rocking it on its pedestal. The blow brought tears to her eyes. She only dimly registered some object falling with a thump against the tabletop and sliding across its tilted surface. It bumped Kate’s hand. Her fingers instinctively closed around it. Something hard and smooth and cool. And heavy. It was a statuette, or a figurine, brass or bronze, eighteen inches long with a solid, heavy base. With a shout and all the strength she could muster at that frantic moment, she hefted it and swung it at him. It was a lucky blow. The circular base caught him just below the cheekbone and she both heard and felt the crunch of its impact. He let out a yowl of pain and dropped the knife. The fingers of his other hand slackened their grip on her hair. Kate let the figurine fall with a clang on the concrete floor. She wrenched herself away from him and ran, zigzagging through the narrow aisles between the furniture, her heart pounding, her breath coming in gasps. In her panic she almost went straight into a wall. It looked as if her escape was blocked; but then she saw the dark rectangle of a door.

  He was chasing. As she fumbled for the door handle, she twisted her head back in terror to see Geoffrey closing fast. He had one hand clasped to his injured cheek, blood running over his fingers. The other hand was wrestling with something that had snagged in his belt as he tried to pull it out.

  It was a gun. Some kind of massive pistol. It looked old and long and heavy. Like something out of a movie. An antique. At the same instant he drew it free from his belt, Kate found the door handle.

  Ten feet away, Geoffrey shouted garbled words of rage and levelled the gun. Kate’s hand scraped against the big iron key sticking out of the door lock. She plucked it out, and yanked the door open, and plunged through the doorway into near-total darkness. With trembling fingers she managed to stab the key into the lock and twist it.

  The click of the lock was drowned out by the explosion that boomed out from the other side. The door juddered violently as a fist-sized ragged hole appeared in the wood and splinters flew in the fiery flash of the shot. Kate reeled back, stunned and deafened. One step, two; and the floor suddenly seemed to vanish from under her feet. She flailed her arms for balance as she felt herself topple backwards, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself falling down what she now realised too late was a flight of stone steps. She rolled and tumbled all the way down to the bottom and hit the floor winded and bruised. As she scrambled to her feet, a piercing jolt of pain through her ankle made her cry out. She’d twisted it in her fall and it would barely take her weight.

  At the head of the stairs, the door was juddering and shaking from the blows Geoffrey was smashing into it. She hobbled upright, gasping at the pain. The basement was cold and dank, filled with a bad smell. A really bad smell. It made her think of rats. Just a narrow rectangle of moonlight streamed in from a grimy window high up on the far wall. To hell with her twisted ankle. If she could find something to clamber up on, she might get to that window and manage to climb out. Then, somehow, she had to find Charlie and Hayley.

  She blinked. Her eyes were slowly getting used to the dark, forms emerging, the shadows taking shape beyond the patch of dim moonlight that shone across the floor. She glanced up the steps towards the door. He was still banging and thumping against it. Like a lunatic. It wouldn’t hold for long. He had a gun. What if he shot the lock out?

  She looked wildly around her. A basement. People kept things in basements, like tools, and ladders. She didn’t have long.

  She limped towards the wall, stretching a hand out in front of her to grope her way, breathing through her mouth to avoid smelling the overpowering stink of vermin. They must be everywhere. Her fingers touched against something metallic. A horizontal bar, it felt like, attached to the masonry. Or a rung? For a moment she couldn’t believe her luck, thinking she’d found a ladder propped against the wall. She tugged. It didn’t move. She blinked.

  Thud – thud – thud. The door handle twisted and rattled above.

  Kate tugged again, but it was dawning on her with horror what she’d found. Not a ladder at all. The cage for the lift, whose shaft she now realised came down through the floor above and right down into the basement. Groping about in the murk, she could feel that the door was closed. She grasped its bars and pulled, and the door swung open with a creak. She quickly clanged it shut again. Felt around for a bolt, or a lock. Nothing. Just a crude pair of welded-on lugs with holes in them, one on the door, the other on the frame of the cage, that aligned when it was shut so that a padlock could be slipped through.

  Except that Kate didn’t have a padlock.

  The thumping on the door suddenly stopped.

  Her heart gave a flutter. She stood still and slowly raised her eyes to the ceiling, and could imagine him standing there above her, head cocked, intent, listening hard. His violent rage at being locked out of the basement cooling, a smile coming over his face as he remembered that he didn’t need to get through the door to reach her.

  He could use
the lift.

  He could be coming down here any second.

  She hobbled quickly away from the cage and moved deeper into the shadows, away from the patch of moonlight in search of somewhere to hide, both arms groping out straight in front of her at chest height as she felt her way.

  Two limping steps forward. Three. Her right hand came into contact with something. Not metal. Something soft, and silky. Strands of long hair that tangled in her fingers as she darted back her hand with a frightened gasp.

  And the cold, soft contours of a human face.

  Kate screamed and recoiled. Her back thumped into a pillar.

  That was when she found the light switch, and realised that she wasn’t alone down here.

  Eleven

  The heavy, old-fashioned switch flipped with a clunk and the basement was lit up by the cobwebbed glow of a single naked bulb overhead.

  Kate screamed again.

  Hayley was sitting upright on a high-backed wooden chair, looking at her with a detached, blank expression. Her hands were clasped limply in her lap. Her wrists had been bound with thin cord. Her ankles were fastened to the legs of the chair. A broad leather strap, like the strap from an old steamer trunk, was wrapped around her middle binding her to the backrest of the chair, and another was looped across her forehead. Her body was covered in open gashes and puncture wounds from the knife that had hacked and chopped and sliced into her flesh, ten times, twenty times, fifty stab wounds. Her face, her neck, her arms, her chest, her stomach, her legs. Spatters and rivulets and smudges of blood all over her skin. Every fibre of her tattered clothes saturated. Red dribbles snaking down the legs of the chair to pool at her feet, where it ran down a channel in the concrete floor to an iron drain cover.

  Behind Hayley’s chair were four others. They weren’t empty. The four women tied to them had been dead for longer than she had. One was naked, her body shrivelled and pitiful, grimy brown hair hanging down over her face. Another was grotesquely swollen and livid with decay. It hadn’t been just the rats that Kate could smell down here. The remnants of clothing that hung from the woman’s corpse, encrusted with black blood, had once been lacy underwear. She was still wearing the stiletto shoes she’d had on when he’d brought her back here.

  To one side of the chairs was a long, scarred wooden table. On its surface lay a coil of the same thin cord that had been used to bind Hayley’s wrists, and a long-bladed pair of scissors. A hammer with wisps of brown hair entangled in its claw. A crooked cast-iron fire poker. A butane-powered blowtorch and a box of matches. A butcher’s knife, smeared with blood. A rusty carpenter’s saw with a plastic handle. It was a set of torture implements. To the rear of the table, a grimy old chest freezer stood against the wall. Whatever might be inside was too terrible to imagine.

  Kate dropped to her knees and felt her stomach heave and the hot, salty tears well up in her eyes. She ground them shut and the tears flooded down her cheeks. ‘Hayley,’ she whimpered.

  And then the grinding, rumbling, squealing clatter resonated through the basement ceiling as the lift started coming down.

  Kate snapped her eyes open. She raised herself up from the floor and saw the bottom of the lift emerging from the shaft. He was coming.

  She glanced up the stairwell towards the basement door with a knot in her throat, knowing she couldn’t make a run for it. Not with her ankle so badly twisted. He’d be on top of her before she made it halfway up the steps. There was no time to hide, barely time even to think as the noise of the lift’s relentless descent filled the basement. Down it came, inch by creaking, juddering inch. She could see his shoes. Then the bottoms of his trouser legs. Now she could see his knees.

  Kate limped past the chairs, refusing to look at what was in them. Snatched the cast-iron poker from the table. She refused to think about what it had been used for, too. All she could think about was the lift coming down and the distance between her and the cage door. Could she make it?

  She grabbed the hammer as well, then turned from the table and ran. The pain was too much. She cried out and stumbled, fell to her knees and crawled desperately towards the cage door, the hammer in her right hand, the poker in her left, dragging and scraping them along the floor as she went.

  The lift kept coming. He was visible up to his chest. Then to his neck; and then she saw his face, one side smeared with blood below the gash on his cheekbone where she’d hit him.

  The lift reached the bottom with a final judder. Geoffrey smiled.

  And Kate threw herself the last couple of feet to the cage door, slammed it tight shut with her shoulder and with her left hand rammed the poker through the holes in the two welded lugs. It slid through easily, blocking the door shut like a long iron bolt. But it could still be pulled back out from inside the cage. It had to be bent into a twisted loop to stop him from simply withdrawing it and opening the door. She lashed at it with the hammer, and missed. Geoffrey had realised what she was trying to do. He stepped quickly off the lift platform and thrust a hand through the bars, grabbing at one end of the poker to slide it out of the hole. She lashed out once more with the hammer, and felt it crush one of his fingers. He let out a shriek and pulled away, bending double, clasping his injured hand between his legs. ‘Oh, you bitch! I’ll rip your guts out!’

  Kate swung the hammer again, and this time she caught the end of the poker dead on, bending it into a slight U. She hit it again, again, again. Sparks flew from the impacts. The sound pierced her ears. She didn’t stop beating the poker until it was bent almost into a hoop. Now, it was impossible to draw out of the padlock hole. No way he could open that door.

  She stood up, breathless and sweating, her hair plastered over her face. Still clutching the hammer, she began to turn towards the stairs. She had to find Charlie and get away from this place, and call the police …

  ‘Think you can escape from me, do you?’ Geoffrey screamed. He thrust his uninjured hand through the bars. It was clutching the gun, pointing it right at her. Now Kate could see it clearly, a massive double-barrelled thing like a sawn-off shotgun. The twin muzzles were wobbling in a circle as he tried to hold the weapon steady. His teeth were bared in hatred.

  She flung the hammer. It was a lucky throw, propelled with all the rage and fury of a desperate mother driven to protect her child. It whirled through the air and hit the gun with a metallic clang, knocking it out of his grip. The heavy double-barrelled pistol fell to the floor on her side of the cage. Geoffrey dropped to his knees in sudden panic, pushed his arm through the bars and tried to reach it. Seeing that the gun was almost within his grasp, Kate stumbled forwards and sent it scraping across the floor with a kick. He tried to make a grab for her through the bars, and she caught hold of his wrist in both hands and gripped it with all her strength and threw her weight backwards, trapping his elbow between the metal bars and levering it back the wrong way. There was a crackling and a popping of cartilage. He screamed. She pulled harder, felt the sickening snap of the bone and the joint going suddenly loose. His scream became shrill.

  Kate let go of him. She turned and started hobbling for the stairs, leaving him to writhe and squeal in agony. The police would know how to deal with him, later.

  With gritted teeth she hauled herself up the steps. To hell with the pain. Find Charlie.

  She made it to the top of the stairs, unlocked the door and limped and hobbled across the warehouse, using pieces of furniture for support. She found the light switch, and overhead neons flickered once and then flooded the huge room and its contents. A padlock hung open from the lift cage door on the ground floor. She pressed it shut and it locked with a click. Then looked around her, breathing hard, dizzy with pain and horror.

  Where was he? Where was her boy?

  He’s sitting here right beside me, Geoffrey had said.

  Near the phone. So where was the phone?

  I can see anyone approaching from my office window.

  The figure she’d seen at the upstairs window.

  Th
e office. Charlie was in the office on the upper floor.

  Kate soon found the doorway to the stairs. Her ankle was excruciatingly painful, making her cry out at every step. The bare wooden staircase was narrow and steep. She lost a shoe halfway up, and didn’t try to go back for it. At the top, she found herself on a landing with a door either side of her. Directly in front of her was the top of the lift cage. Another padlock dangled from the open door. She stumbled over to it, crashed it shut and pressed the lock home. That was it. Now he was well and truly trapped in the shaft, like a caged animal.

  ‘Charlie!?’ she yelled, her voice hoarse with panic.

  No reply. Where was he?

  Kicking off her second shoe, she limped to the nearest door and flung it open. It was the office. A big old-fashioned desk, leather chairs, an antique wooden filing cabinet. No Charlie.

  She turned with a groan and hobbled to the other door, which was opaque glass from top to bottom. She tried the handle. The door was locked.

  Kate limped back to pick up her fallen shoe. She gripped it by its pointy toe and used the heel to smash the glass, whacking repeatedly until the pane was falling out of the frame. She tossed the shoe away and stepped through the door’s jagged remains.

  The other side of it was a small store-room, with a single window overlooking the front of the building. The phone lay on a padded window seat.

  And sitting in a chair nearby was Charlie. He was alive, unharmed. Barefoot and in his pyjamas, bound and gagged and staring wide-eyed at the doorway. All he could see of her was a blur, she knew that. But he’d heard her voice, and the terror in his face was mixed with relief and joy.

  ‘Charlie!’ Kate blinked away the tears and hurriedly overstepped the mess of broken glass in her bare feet. She undid his gag first, telling him that mummy was here now and that he was safe and that they were leaving this place and that everything was going to be all right. She found a box cutter on a shelf and used it to slice away the cord holding him to the chair, then held him for a moment or two, more tightly than she’d ever held him in his life.