by Jackson Lear
He found a shoe at the base of a pair of blue jeans. Then his knees relaxed when he least expected it, causing him to fall against the side of the tunnel. Summoning every last ounce of strength he ran back to the entrance, leapt out the other side, and carried on running.
Ian didn’t bother waiting around. He sprinted after Daniel and only caught up to him twenty metres away, hiding behind a tree and wildly out of breath. Every last fear he had came crashing on top of him in one foul swoop.
“Did they see you?” Ian asked, realising how stupid that now sounded, given that Daniel had one of the most powerful torches ever made in his hand. He checked over his shoulder. No one was standing in the mouth of the tunnel.
Daniel dropped to his knees and gasped in short quick breaths. “It was the woman. The one we fucked.”
Ian’s pulse flickered.
“The woman. She’s dead.”
Ian pulled back and stared at his friend’s ashen face. “Bullshit.”
“It was her. She was wearing her jeans and her red jumper. It was her brown hair. She was dead. But ... she was standing up.” The cogs were slowly coming back to life as he tried to figure out how someone could be dead while still standing up.
“Bullshit.”
“It was her.”
“I’m not going in there,” said Ian.
Daniel gasped and shook his head.
Ian looked back to the entrance of the tunnel and saw their backpacks lying on the ground. “What if it’s not her?”
“I know what she looks like.”
They needed a plan. Daniel held one hand on the tree to steady himself. He closed his eyes to focus on his breathing. Ian looked on, incredulously. Daniel had his eyes shut while that close to the Beast’s active kill chamber.
The torch fell from Daniel’s hand. “She was an angel,” he murmured. Then he fell to the side. Ian moved to catch him but it was too late. Daniel flopped to the ground.
Ian fell with him and landed heavily on his knees. Daniel was unmoving. “Oh no. No, no, no, no, no, no!”
Ian pushed Daniel onto his back and stared at his unfocussed eyes looking at the sky.
The only word that popped into Ian’s head was ‘CPR’, but he had never done that before. Nor did he even know what the letters meant. It was something people did in movies. Put your mouth on someone else’s and breathe into them, but only if they’ve just drowned.
Ian felt his bladder squeeze, desperate to give way.
Daniel rolled his head. His breathing steadied. He was still too out of it to try and sit up.
Ian sighed in relief. Then he looked back to the tunnel. Someone was still in there, either alive or dead. The Beast might be in there as well. There was no way Ian could drag Daniel to safety. He didn’t know where they were or how to get to the nearest adult for help.
Daniel stared at the tree tops as he wondered what had just happened. Then it came to him. “The thing on the tree was an angel,” he said. “A barbed wire angel.”
“We should go.” Even as he said it he knew Daniel had no strength left in his body. They would have to wait. But for how long? Would he need an hour to recover? Longer? What if he needed to go to hospital and waiting where they were was the worst thing to do?
“She had wings.” Daniel looked Ian in the eye and tried to sit up. “She was standing up and she had wings.”
Ian shook his head. The confusion that Daniel was spitting out at him was too much to grasp.
“I saw her. Her hands were together in prayer and she had wings.” A tear streamed down his face, one that he wasn’t aware of releasing.
“Can you walk?”
Daniel tried to hoist himself up but his legs and arms were shaking too much to carry his weight. He fell down again and laid back on the ground. A surge of fear rushed through his chest, sapping what energy he had remaining as he realised he was a sitting duck for when the Beast returned, and return he most certainly would. It was his kill chamber, after all.
He had barged in and flashed an unloaded gun about. He swore at the Beast and dared him to come out. He was going to get his wish. The Beast would run in the moment Daniel tried to escape. He would rip off his face and cut his stomach open. Daniel felt it too. The slice of sharp nails across his belly, splitting him open. His warm insides would spill out into the cold air. All of this was with the sound of a shrieking monster and a howls of a young boy.
Ian took the torch and gun from next to Daniel. He doubled checked the gun. It wasn’t loaded. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with either item once he got to the two bags, but no doubt he would figure out a solution once he got there.
He crept forward. If someone was in the tunnel, standing just out of sight, hopefully the gun would keep them at bay. Then again, if there was actually a dead girl in there and a murderer nearby then murderers usually had nothing to lose.
Ian reached their backpacks. He shone the light inside the tunnel, but if someone was hiding in there they were just out of sight. He looked back to Daniel and felt a gut wrenching moment of indecision. James’ woman was in there. The woman they had all become men to. If she had been some unknown that Ian had never met before he would have simply run back home. But he had been with her.
Now she was dead.
Maybe. It may have been someone else and Daniel just made a mistake.
That had to be it. A mistake. Someone else was dead in there and James’ woman was still alive.
Ian stared into the entrance of the black tunnel, doing his best to steady his nerves. He glanced back at Daniel. His friend was on his knees, trying to breathe.
Ian looked back to the tunnel, placed his hands on the edge of the concrete, and gambled. With a quick jump he hoisted himself into the entrance and stood in the mouth of the tunnel. The light trembled in front of him. The blanket at the far end could have covered a trapdoor. He expected a roar of anger from both sides. He pictured James chasing after them with a pitchfork and, this time, actually stabbing him with it. Maybe James and the Beast were in this together. James might be feeding him with stray humans who couldn’t keep their mouths shut.
He slid one foot forward. The light flicked off the walls and shook with every thump from Ian’s pulse. The smell was foul. Now that he knew what lay ahead that smell would be forever imprinted in his memory bank as ‘dead woman.’
He pushed himself against the far side of the wall, reached the corner, and flashed the torch inside. He found a metal frame with ripped white sheets hanging down, knotted together, and tied in place. In front of all that was Zofia Bukowski, held up by a thick wire hanging from the ceiling. Her head was slumped forward and her hands were clasped together in silent prayer. She was dressed in her jeans and red jumper, just like Daniel said.
Ian turned the light away from her. Jars lay on the ground, chalk drawings covered the walls, but the only thing of real interest was the dead teenager strung up like an angel. Ian backed away. He tried to look in two places at once, terrified that she was about to jump back to life and that those wings would reach out and grab him. He also was terrified of what was lurking beside the entrance of the tunnel, just out of sight. Ian backed out with the feeling that his heart had migrated to his throat. If he was to pass out now then no one would come to his rescue.
He reached the edge of the tunnel, peered outside, slipped to the ground, then spun around to make sure no one else was watching him. All clear. He grabbed the backpacks while jostling the gun and torch in both hands. Daniel had managed to sit up against a tree.
“I saw her,” Ian said.
“Was it James’ girl?”
“Yeah. The woman. She was like an angel.”
Daniel stared down at his legs. He only realised now that he must have pissed himself while Ian was inside the tunnel. “James said he let her go.”
“Then the Beast got her. We have to go.” Ian stuffed the torch into his backpack. He was about to do the same with the gun when he realised the vast implications of what was about
to happen to them. “We can’t keep the gun.”
Daniel shook his head, not quite following what Ian was talking about. “He gave it to us.”
“To borrow. If the police find us with a gun they’re going to think we killed her.”
Daniel nodded, because he was supposed to. Ian wiped the gun as best he could with his t-shirt, hoping to get every last finger print off. He wanted to throw it as far away as he could, but the police would search the area and find it soon enough.
Good, he thought, allowing it to link to James. Then he realised that anything James had done could be passed onto himself, Daniel, and Warrick. James would tell the police it was the boys who fucked the woman. They would have to lie. He and Daniel were pros at it, but Warrick was never good and sticking to his story. He would buckle.
“We should bury it,” Ian said. “Far away from here.” He helped Daniel to his feet. There was no way either of them had the strength to climb up the cliff face now, and neither of them knew of a different way back home.
Anthony said the sun tracks to the south. It rises in the east, sets in the west. It’s lunch time so south is that way.
That still didn’t help him figure out where his house was. They would have to head back through the trees and hope to find the stream. It was almost a guarantee then that they would cross paths with the Beast. If he saw them in his home, snooping around, he would cut their throats. Daniel was still too disorientated to figure out where he was, leaving Ian to do what he could to keep them alive.
They headed south and veered off to one side. Two hours later they found the field that Daniel had so eagerly led them through. They had somehow bypassed the the stream with no idea how they got there.
Ian buried the gun at the far end of the field, away from where they would have to show the police. He checked the time. It was two thirty. He didn’t have long until he had to go out with his mum.
“We have to tell Warrick,” Ian said.
“He’ll blab!” said Daniel.
“Okay, then. You and I decide. Right now. Do we tell the police we found the girl?”
“Can we do it without telling them it’s us?”
Ian angled his head as though he was trying to manually move the idea from one side of his brain to the other. “We can leave a note. Or a map.”
“Should we tell James?” Daniel asked.
“What if he killed her?”
“Then he’ll go to prison.”
“So will we. He’ll tell everyone what we did. No more James. Never again.”
“He’ll come looking for his gun,” said Daniel.
“Then we’ll tell him where it is,” said Ian. “If he doesn’t like it we’ll tell the police he killed her.”
“But it was the Beast.”
Ian lingered on that idea. They had to find some way of knowing if the Beast found her on his own. With one false step he and Daniel could be strung up right next to her. There had to be a way of finding out.
47
Ian
It took Ian the rest of the day to figure out how to tell the police about Zofia without implicating himself. It was difficult to push the two dominant images out of his mind, one where she was on her back with Ian inside her, the next of her hanging dead in a tunnel.
He found the name of Luxford’s chief of police online. The address was in the phone book. He typed up a quick message and printed off a map of the area he presumed Zofia was located.
‘There is a dead woman in a tunnel. She’s hanging like an angel. You need to find her.’
He read over his first attempt. There was no rush of urgency and no real description in there that would help to identify a missing person. He tried again.
‘There is a dead woman in a tunnel. She’s wearing jeans and a red jumper. She’s hanging like an angel. You need to find her.’
He was ready to head out that evening, find the chief of police’s house and drop the note into the letterbox. But he had to do so without being caught. He waited for his mum to go to bed. Then he had to make sure the Beast or even James wouldn’t find him.
They’ll be looking for me, Ian told himself. The Beast will know we’ve been through his campsite. He’ll know we went through his car and his tent. He’ll go over to the tunnel and he’ll know we didn’t close the gate. He’ll be out there looking for someone going to the police. He’ll be looking for me and I won’t see him in time.
Then there was James. It’ll be a test. He knows where we live. He knows I’ll be the one to go to the police. If he killed her then he’ll be watching to see if we found her.
Ian’s stomach lurched as a new and terrible idea occurred to him. Daniel found her. It was like he knew where to go. If James told him where she was then James would have set it up as a trap to watch us. He’ll be waiting outside my house, ready to shoot me.
He peeled back his bedroom curtain and looked out to the street below. It was littered with shadows that bulged from the low walls and high pillars marking every house. The trees lining the road blocked most of Ian’s vision. There was no way he could find a single man standing on the street.
If I go left he might catch me. If I go right he might catch me. If he sees me at all he can just shoot me and then go after Daniel and Warrick.
Ian shuddered and felt the overwhelming urge to cry. He fought it, summoning every last breath of strength to stop himself from picturing the worst.
What if we really did fuck her brains out and that’s what killed her? What if the police figure it out and know it was us? We’ll go to jail. Maybe James was just hiding her because he knows we killed her.
Claire tapped on his door, sending Ian into a whirlwind of panic. “Good night, Ian.”
“Good night,” Ian said. He was grateful his mum didn’t open the door or else she would have seen him looking as though he had the flu. He hid the note intended for the police.
Ian waited another half an hour before peering out of his bedroom door. The lights in the hall and downstairs were off. There was no sound of a TV. He closed his door again and paced around for half an hour as he came up with some kind of strategy.
If he was caught then he would be hauled in front of the police with his note slammed in front of him. How then was he going to explain how he found a dead woman near the stream?
No, it was too dangerous to go at night time. He only trusted Luxford in the day when he could see all around him. He would have to wait until the sun came up. He got into his pyjamas and lay in bed, thinking of Zofia on her back then hanging in the tunnel. Soon she would be picked over by the police.
Unless …
Maybe.
What if he never told the police? As long as she was never found then he wouldn’t get in trouble for it.
But leaving her there to be slowly eaten by the Beast was wrong.
It was 3 a.m. There was no sleep for him that night.
48
Claire
Ian picked at his breakfast.
“You okay, sweetie?” Claire asked.
“Uh huh.”
“Were you up all night playing games?”
“No.”
“You want some juice?”
“Okay.”
Claire pursed her lips. “You already have some juice in front of you.”
Ian looked past his bowl of cereal. “Oh yeah.”
Claire focussed on her son, trying to figure out what was troubling him. Perhaps he had finally reached that age where talking to your mother led to disastrous consequences. “You were quiet yesterday as well. Is everything okay?”
“Uh huh.”
“Do you have any plans for the day?”
“Nothing really.”
“I would like you to be here at three o’clock, okay?”
“Why?”
“Anthony and Josh are coming over.”
Ian stared up at the ceiling. That meant he would be babysitting Tom and Sarah again. “Can’t I go over to Daniel’s house?”
�
�You two can be here at three o’clock, along with Warrick. Bring them both over.”
Ian paused at that and stared at his orange juice.
“I can make up some burgers. Curly fries as well. But let’s have the three of you over here at three, okay? No excuses.”
“They might be busy,” said Ian.
“It’s Saturday afternoon in the middle of school holidays. They’re not that busy.” Claire looked over her son and felt the unease creep over her. Ian had drifted away in the last few weeks and she assumed he had finally hit the surly teenage years. Her little Ian was slipping away, being slowly replaced with a fast growing and vacant person who grunted and mumbled at her like she didn’t understand what life was like at thirteen.
A second unease took her over. There was still one way of finding out what Ian had been up to. His computer.
Ian dropped his hands to the edge of the table, ready to push himself back. He was trying to make a quick exit.
“When you’re done, wash your bowl out.”
Ian slumped forward for a moment. Then he climbed up and sauntered off to the kitchen.
Perhaps she couldn’t wait until three o’clock. If that meant scaring her child half to death to reach him then so be it.
“Did Daniel leave his phone here the other night?”
Ian glanced back at his mum. “Huh?” There was no panic in his eyes. Perhaps he just didn’t hear her.
“Daniel’s phone. Did he bring it here the other night when he stayed over?”
There. There was that look of panic. Ian recovered and shrugged, but Claire had twenty three years more experience in recognising lies than Ian had in covering them up. She felt her chest almost heave with disgust at what Daniel might have done. Then her heart nearly broke. Ian knew what his friend had done.
“Are you a good influence?” Claire asked.
Ian pulled back, baffled by the random question, yet he sensed that Claire had unearthed something that was going to come back and haunt him in the near future. “Am I a good influence?”