Other Voices, Other Tombs

by Joe Sullivan

  The air conditioning in the car is broken and has been for well over a year. The siblings have been nagging their Dad to get it fixed, but he keeps muttering about the cost of parts and labor being more than the worth of the whole car, and so here they are, immobilized, the windows wound down as far as they will go, zombies sitting in a heat that is as thick as freshly poured tarmac. It pins them to their seats. Lucy feels as if a huge, hot cow is lying on top of her. She can’t think properly. She can’t speak. She can barely breathe.

  ‘How much longer do we have to sit here?’ She moans under her breath, beginning to feel woozy, and faint.

  Her brother snorts.

  ‘Well, if the fucking radio worked in this pile of shit car, we’d be able to get traffic updates, wouldn’t we? But it doesn’t work, does it. Just like the air con. And the windscreen wipers. And the front left indicator. And the satnav. Because Dad doesn’t believe in fixing things, does he? Prick.’

  They sit in silence for a while longer, before Lucy thinks to look at her phone. Her fingers, slick with moisture, slide uselessly across a blank, black screen.

  ‘Phone battery’s dead. Yours?’

  Lucas shakes his head. ‘Died about three hours ago.’

  They sigh for the thousandth time and return to staring listlessly through the front windscreen.

  Time passes.

  A strange, rich smell slowly begins to permeate the air around them, faint at first, and then, as the minutes crawl past, with more intensity. Lucy wrinkles her nose. ‘What’s that?’ she says, irritably, the glands in her mouth working overtime to produce saliva and fight back a sudden nausea. ‘It fucking stinks.’

  Lucas shifts in his chair, wincing. ‘Christ knows. Probably some roadkill nearby, or maybe the tarmac melting. It does fucking stink.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s tarmac.’

  Lucas sighs. ‘Well, I don’t fucking know, Lucy, alright? You’re welcome to get out and explore for me, if it bothers you that much.’ There is something odd in his eyes as he says this, something...knowing. His words sound rehearsed, almost, stagey... disingenuous. Lucy cannot for the life of her figure out why, but she feels somehow as if Lucas knows where the smell is coming from and doesn’t want to tell her.

  They lapse into silence, and the smell intensifies. Lucy dismisses her doubts about Lucas as extreme fatigue on her behalf, and returns to staring out of the window, acutely aware that every moment that passes is a moment of her life that she will never recover, never enjoy. The futility of her situation depresses her almost to the point of coma, and her chin drifts towards her chest as she begins to doze.

  The sun blazes on.

  #

  A sound swells in the distance. Lucy frowns, waking from her half-sleep. It sounds like a motor, but everything around her is now parked, handbrakes on, engines switched off. She twists in her seat, the leather sticking to her skin and tugging at it painfully. She manages to crane her head around and is just about to stick it out of her window for a better look, when a motorbike appears right next to the car, roaring past at a gleeful, breakneck speed, with mere millimeters to spare. Lucy has a split second to react, yanking her head backwards before the bike takes it clean off.

  ‘Hey!’ She shouts, shaking her fist after the bike like an angry old man in a cartoon. The motorbike and its leather-clad rider ignore her, weaving easily between the lanes of parked cars, vans, lorries and trucks, then disappearing from view.

  She catches the eyes of three lads who are in the car immediately to the left of her, on the passenger side, her side. The driver grins at her, leans out of his own window, and shouts after the motorbike:

  ‘Wanker!’

  He makes the appropriate hand gesture to accompany this expletive. Lucy smiles back weakly, her heart thudding in her chest from shock, and then slumps back into her seat.

  ‘There’s always one, isn’t there,’ her brother says bitterly as the bike speeds off into the distance. ‘Always one smug bastard who thinks he is better than us because he has two wheels instead of four.’

  Lucy doesn't answer. She wishes she was on that bike, moving forward, only moving forward, making headway instead of baking in the midday sun in the middle of the fucking M4 like a tray of overdone flapjacks. And that smell, oh, God. That smell is worse now than ever before. She begins to think that Lucas is right about roadkill. It smells foul and yet sweet, like the sugar beet factories used to smell near her house, when she was a child. A headache pokes at her temples.

  Another ten minutes creaks by.

  The sun shines down. The temperature on the dashboard indicator ticks up another degree.

  Lucy loses her battle with frustration. ‘What the fuck is going on up there?!’ she erupts eventually, gesturing vaguely at the long queue of stationary traffic in front of them. She is beginning to feel desperate. There is a new problem to add to her load: a burgeoning need to urinate has made itself known, despite, or perhaps because of, her dehydrated state.

  Her brother shrugs. ‘Probably a smash up ahead. I could see blue lights flashing earlier.’

  ‘There are too many bloody people on this earth,’ Lucy says, shifting in her seat to try and ease the pressure on her bladder.

  Lucas sighs. ‘You've said that quite a lot on this trip. You sound just like Dad, have I told you that?’

  ‘Shut up, Lucas,’ she replies, a silent, impotent fury building up inside her. Her bladder cramps, and she winces, and bites her lip.

  Time crawls on, and nothing changes, except the smell, which gets worse, and worse, and worse, until she is convinced it is a living, writhing, tangible thing, invading her orifices, crawling down her throat, choking her. The smell, the cars, the heat, and the building pressure on her bladder: that’s all her life has become, now. A collection of uncomfortable things to be borne. I am going to live out the rest of my days in this traffic jam, she laments to herself. I will become a melted lump of a person, like the stub of an old candle left on a windowsill.

  The sun shines on.

  The temperature readout on the dash clicks up to 33 degrees.

  #

  As the second hour of their predicament approaches, people begin to get out of their cars. They stretch luxuriously, and congregate in the gaps between lanes, standing around, smoking, crouching down; doing anything to avoid sitting and roasting in their tin boxes on wheels. It makes Lucy feel slightly better that there are obviously other motorists who haven’t fixed their air-con, either. Doors open and shut all along the motorway, voices began to rise, and mingle, and gradually the feel of something almost festive spreads, as people united in their suffering do what they can to ‘make the best of it’.

  The lads in the car to the left of them get out, pop open the boot, pull out a cooler box of cold coke cans, and began passing them around. The driver of the car presses one into Lucy’s hand through her open window.

  ‘Here you go, sweetheart,’ he says, smiling at her.

  Can’t he smell that? she thinks, swallowing back bile, but apparently, he can’t. She smiles tremulously, grateful, now almost incapable of speech. The burning desire to go the toilet has grown all-consuming.

  She looks at Lucas. ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ she says, her voice small, and desperate. The smell is now so foul she fears she might faint. She can see it is affecting him too. The muscles in his jaw work overtime as he fights to control his stomach. A reluctant sympathy spreads across his face, nonetheless. ‘Come on,’ he says, opening the car door. ‘I passed a woman in a camper van a ways back, before we got gridlocked. I bet she’s stuck too, and I bet she’ll have a toilet you can use, if we ask nicely.’

  Lucy nods, on the verge of tears, and unpeels herself slowly from the sticky, hot leather of the car seat. Anything to get away from the cloying, all-pervasive stench of...whatever it was.

  If she thought it was hot in the car, she is in for a treat as she steps out onto the burning tarmac. It hits her like a bat to the face: solid, searing heat. She
can feel it rising through the soles of her sandals. Hell, is all she can think, her bladder threatening to explode. I’m in hell.

  The boys from the neighboring car are putting up a parasol they have somehow stashed in the boot of their car.

  ‘Come and join us under here!’ the driver says cheerfully as Lucy scans the motorway desperately, looking for the camper van Lucas mentioned.

  ‘I’ve just got to...stretch my legs first,’ she says, wild-eyed, searching for that blessed relief.

  Her brother smirks, gives the lad a knowing look. ‘Call of nature,’ he explains in a conspiratorial tone, much to Lucy’s mortification, and the boys chuckle as she turns beetroot red.

  ‘Good luck with that!’ laughs the driver, not unkindly, looking at the mass of cars and people all around. ‘Not much privacy out here!’ Lucy is silent, miserable, shifting from one foot to the other constantly.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Lucas says, and as an afterthought to the lads: ‘Save us a spot under that brolly!’

  ‘Will do!’ says their new friend cheerfully, and the siblings turn and walk towards the camper van, which Lucy eventually spots parked about six cars back, in the slow lane. It seems to glow in the sunshine, the promise of relief a holy grail to her right now.

  As they approach, Lucy hobbling and holding her stomach, she takes comfort in two things: that the smell is subsiding the further she gets from her car, and the fact that the van is more of a full-scale motorhome than a camper, a huge old chrome thing, an American-style Winnebago. It gleams like a great silver bullet in the glare of the sun, and is hard to look at, the closer she gets, so she must shield her eyes.

  And the driver of the van is indeed a woman, as Lucas had said. She sits next to her vehicle in a folding camp chair, a cold glass of something in one hand, a small umbrella that she is using as a parasol held elegantly in the other. She wears huge black sunglasses and a massive sun hat that throws her whole face into shadow. She looks as if she is on holiday in the French riviera, not stuck in a traffic jam on a shitty motorway alongside thousands of other unfortunates.

  Lucy lets her brother do the talking.

  ‘Hi there,’ says Lucas, his easy, friendly manner having returned to him.

  The woman smiles and lifts an eyebrow above the rim of her glasses, an inquisitive and sexy gesture that Lucas appears to appreciate. By this point, Lucy couldn’t care less if she has five pairs of eyes stuck to the ends of each fingertip, she needs to piss so badly. She is so close to losing control of her bladder that her whole body is now cramped with the effort of not letting go, not like this, not in front of rows and rows of people... Just hang on, she keeps thinking, over and over. Just..hang...on!

  ‘Hello,’ the woman says, in a deep, husky voice that makes Lucy think of cigarettes.

  Lucas turns his charm up to ten on the dial.

  ‘I don’t suppose we could ask a huge favor, could we? We’ve been stuck in this traffic jam for almost two hours, now, and my sister here doesn’t feel very well. In fact, to tell the truth,’ and here, Lucas lowers his voice in an attempt at saving Lucy’s dignity, ‘To tell the truth, she desperately needs to use the bathroom, but...well. Out here...there aren’t even any trees she can hide behind. And we were wondering, as you have this big van, whether you might allow her to use your bathroom? If you have one? You’d be helping us out in desperate times.’

  Lucy is beyond desperate now, hopping from foot to foot, tears welling in her eyes. She has seconds before she cannot hold it anymore.

  ‘I’m so sorry to ask,’ she says, her voice wobbling with strain. ‘I mean, I’ll pay you for the inconvenience…’

  The woman holds up a hand to silence her.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says in that cool as a cucumber voice. ‘I’ve been there, I understand. Of course, you can use my bathroom.’

  She stands gracefully, folding the umbrella, and opens the side access door to the van. ‘Just in there,’ she says, pointing to a small wooden cabinet inside. She has an odd, secretive smile on her face, but Lucy doesn’t have time to think about this. She only needs relief, and almost faints with gratitude as the woman holds the door open for her.

  ‘Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou! You are my hero!’ she says, almost sobbing, and dives inside without further hesitation.

  Lucy scrabbles at the cabinet door, and then fumbles to shut it behind her. She sees a fully-flushable toilet mounted to the wall to the left of her. She hastily drags her clothes down past her knees, fingers and hands now ten sizes too big for her. She is sweaty, and hot, and everything is swollen, sticking and catching in the moisture of the day. She wrestles with her knickers and eventually, they do as they are told, and she finally, finally, blissfully, wonderfully is able to relieve herself. Water jets out of her in an urgent, hot stream of relief. Afterwards, she sags against the small toilet cabinet door, panting, overcome. Blessed, blessed relief, she thinks, thanking her lucky stars for the Winnebago and the woman in dark glasses.

  She flushes, and resumes the wrestling match with her sticky, sweaty clothes. Once dressed properly, she looks around for some soap. There is a dispenser on the far cabinet wall, mounted above a tiny chrome sink, and she reaches out to depress the pump.

  Something moves just behind the dispenser.

  A tiny, tiny movement, barely perceptible, but it catches her eye. Lucy freezes, arm outstretched.

  The movement occurs once more. She squeaks in surprise, and then leans in closer, peering at the source.

  And finds a hole, cut into the cabinet wall, very like an empty knothole that you find in wooden floorboards sometimes. It is perfectly round, and about the size of a coin.

  And there is something alive behind it.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Lucy murmurs, all previous distress now forgotten as she stands stock-still in the tiny closet toilet.

  Behind the wall, there is more movement. Another small noise. She frowns, and leans in closer, trying to see what is behind the hole. Is someone else in the van? A partner maybe, or a pet, in the next partition? Lucy had thought the woman was alone, she gave that impression, but she hadn’t exactly paid too much attention, either way- she’d been distracted.

  Another slight shifting, and another noise. A distinctly... human sounding noise.

  Almost...a moan.

  Moaning?

  Lucy’s brain immediately leaps to the worst possible conclusion.

  Peeping Tom.

  Pervert.

  Spyhole.

  Voyeur. Watching me, in the toilet.

  No wonder that woman had been so keen to let her in! It’s obviously something she does, some perverted kink she’s into. Sure, you can use the facilities! But there's a price to pay: your privacy.

  Oh God, Lucy thinks, what if there are cameras rigged up?

  Suddenly angry, she thrusts her right eye close to the hole and peers in, trying to identify the source of the moaning.

  And she sees a man in the half-dark, bound, gagged, and propped upright in a small adjoining storage cabinet.

  #

  A thin light leaks into the cabinet, probably from cracks around a door Lucy can’t see, or more missing knotholes in the wood. The light sits gently upon the man’s prone form like dust, highlighting his face and the bare skin of his shoulders, which move up and down in jerky, panicked twitches.

  Lucy stares in disbelief at him, slowly registering the cable ties about his wrists and ankles, the lack of clothing except for stained and dirty underwear, the blood. He is covered in blood, as if painted with it, and his eyes are wide, nostrils flared with a mad type of terror. He moans again, and makes a gurgling noise, low in his throat. He knows someone is there. He wants Lucy to help him.

  Oh, God. Oh, God, is all she can think. Her hand flutters up to her mouth. She is cold all over, an alien feeling given the heat of the day. Lucy jerks her head back from the hole, heart thumping, her own blood pounding in her ears. She checks behind her to see if the toilet door is still locked. It is.
/>
  Trembling, she slowly puts her eye to the peephole once more.

  The man rolls his head back, the moaning, gurgling sound rattling out into the closed space. Then, Lucy sees the wound on his neck. Fresh, and deep, and wet, like a wide-open mouth. His throat has been cut, probably only moments before she’d walked into this van. He is dying.

  Lucy recalls the odd, secretive smile on the mysterious woman’s face as she’d opened the door for her, knowing what was hidden inside the van, thrilling to her own dirty little secret.

  The man continues fight for his life, blood sheeting down his naked body. Paralyzed, with her face glued to the wall, Lucy watches as he struggles to breathe, his chest fluttering with tiny, futile movements as he tries to draw air in through his severed windpipe. His focus locks onto her one, dis-believing eye, peering in at him through the spyhole, and he pleads silently for help, but she knows, deep down, in some instinctive way, that he is beyond help. And so, Lucy watches, a prisoner in time, a statue, and the man moans again, and then gargles and chokes, drowning in his own blood. Red mist sprays from his mouth and bubbles from his neck and finally, in a slow and graceless defeat, his chin sinks to his chest. He falls sideways, slumped, dead.

  Dead.

  The spell is broken.

  Lucy starts to scream, and then bites down on her wrist, hard, to stop herself.

  Out, she thinks, her body alive with adrenaline and fear. I have to get out. And then, because she loves him:

  My brother is out there.

  I can hear him, talking to...that woman...and I have to get him out, away from this, before she slits our throats, too!

  But as Lucy opens the toilet cabinet door, slowly, softly, she understands that it is too late. She can hear voices, close to her, closer than they would be if they were both still standing outside the van.

  She inches cautiously out of the toilet, trying to assume a neutral, pleasant expression, and failing. She can see the eyes of the dying man in the closet, wide, glaring, begging for her help, then fixing on something far away as the life left him.

  There is the unmistakable sound of a bottlecap being popped off a beer bottle, and then another, staccato, and a chink, glass upon glass. Then, laughter, both male and female. Lucy edges around the corner of the toilet cabinet, and sees her brother, inside the van, with the woman, an ice-cold bottle of Heineken on its way up to his mouth.