The Keeper

by Luke Delaney

  Sean groaned inside as he realized his plan had failed and now he was on the floor and at least eight feet from Keller. He swallowed the searing pain in his shoulder and managed to hold his useless arm across his chest while crouching into the starting position of a sprinter, bursting into a full charge, keeping low as he saw the shotgun sweeping in his direction, Keller’s watering eyes growing wide as they tried to focus on the dark shape covering the short distance between them. Sean powered his right shoulder hard into Keller’s midriff, carrying him backwards with him until they smashed into the tall cupboard. The shotgun blast exploded above Sean’s head as they fell to the floor, the cupboard falling on top of them and catching Sean a glancing blow on his temple, knocking him temporarily senseless. It was all he could do to hold on to Keller as they wrestled on the filthy floor, but the blow to the head, the blood loss and the shock of being shot were beginning to tell, beginning to overwhelm his instinct to survive.

  Suddenly Keller was on top of him, overpowering him, his face fading away to be replaced by the face of his father, sneering and lascivious, before it faded back to Keller’s. A hand grabbed him around the throat and began to squeeze, the thumb pressing hard on his trachea and making him cough and gag for air, the fingers of his good arm desperately trying to pull the hand away from his neck, loosening it just enough so he could breathe as the madman stared down at him, eyes wild with hatred, his teeth stained with blood from a cut somewhere inside his mouth, making him appear demonic. Sean was powerless to act as he watched Keller pull his right fist back and then ram it into his injured, bleeding shoulder.

  Sean screamed out in pain and anger. Keller drew back for a moment then once more smashed his fist into Sean’s wounded shoulder, then repeated the action again and again. As the blows raining down on him added to his blood loss and accelerated the effects of shock, Sean’s vision began to fail, the man above him little more than a silhouette. Finally the blows stopped and Keller leaned close and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Time to die.’

  He felt the same long, bony, strong fingers that had strangled Karen Green and Louise Russell closing around his throat – two hands now, squeezing the life from him. But just as he felt he was on the verge of blacking out, the hands released him and the silhouette seemed to rear backwards, a pathetic scream of pain leaking from his mouth, closely followed by a whimper as the madman toppled off him and lay next to him on the floor, clutching at the back of his head.

  Sean coughed and gulped for air, the oxygen partially restoring his vision as he blinked his eyes clear enough to see Sally pulling her handcuffs out and bending over the stricken Keller. She set her ASP baton on the floor next to Sean while she rolled Keller on to his front and pulled his hands behind his back, inflicting as much pain as she could in the process. She clicked one of the cuffs around his wrist then dragged him a few feet to a thick metal radiator pipe running along the length of the wall just above floor height. She fed the cuffs around the back of the pipe and secured his other wrist, then recovered her ASP from the floor and knelt beside Sean.

  Through his shock and confusion Sean was able to piece together what had happened, the dark hairs, sticky with fresh blood stuck to Sally’s ASP told their own story. He felt his head being lifted as Sally placed her rolled-up coat under it.

  ‘Don’t try and talk,’ she told him. ‘You’ve been shot.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ he answered, laughing in spite of the pain at the absurdity of her observation. Sally smiled and shook her head. ‘Get me up,’ he ordered.

  ‘You shouldn’t try to move,’ she argued.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘Prop me up against the wall – where I can watch him from.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about him,’ she said. ‘I’ll watch him till back-up arrives. I’ll call you an ambulance.’

  ‘No,’ Sean insisted. ‘You’re going to get Deborah Thomson out of that fucking dungeon.’ He fumbled for his jacket pocket with his one good hand and retrieved his phone. ‘I’ll call my own ambulance. You get her.’

  ‘Christ,’ she complained as she helped him crawl to the wall, propping him up limply where he could see the sobbing Keller slumped against the adjacent wall.

  ‘The door to the cellar’s locked,’ he reminded her. ‘You need to search him for the key. I think he still has it on him.’

  ‘OK,’ she nodded, cautiously approaching Keller, her ASP in hand. ‘Try anything and I’ll cave your fucking head in,’ she warned him – and meant it. She patted the outsides of his trouser pockets until she felt what she was searching for, carefully slipping her hand inside his tracksuit and recovering two keys. She turned and showed them to Sean. ‘I’ve got them,’ she announced gleefully.

  ‘Good,’ he answered. ‘You know what to do.’

  She recovered her coat from the floor and placed it over his wounded shoulder. ‘Try and keep this pressed against the wound. It’ll help stem the bleeding. The coat’s ruined anyway,’ she added, making him smile through the increasing nausea and drowsiness.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Take the keys and go.’

  ‘OK,’ she said and was halfway out the door when Sean stopped her.

  ‘Hey,’ he called as loudly as he could. ‘I thought I told you to wait outside until back-up arrived.’

  ‘You did,’ she agreed, ‘but I got bored.’

  He managed one last faint smile and waved her away. As soon as she left the building his eyes flickered and his head fell forward. A few seconds later – the darkness came.

  Sally picked her way across the forecourt of Keller’s dilapidated collection of old brick buildings with their rusty corrugated-iron roofs, the smell of CS gas from the kitchen still clinging to her clothes and making her eyes sting and water. She held them as wide open as she could to let the mixture of sunlight and spring breeze clear the gas in the safest and quickest way. Several times she almost tripped on the debris that littered her route towards the small building Sean was convinced was the entrance to Keller’s private dungeon and torture house. Coughing CS gas from her lungs, its taste acrid and caustic on her tongue, she paused to peer into an old oil drum with burn marks around its rim. The smell of lighter fuel and petrol rose from inside the drum, causing her to examine it closer. She could make out the remnants of burnt clothes at the bottom, the occasional fragment of colour. ‘This is not good,’ she muttered.

  Reminding herself that Keller was cuffed and secured under Sean’s watchful gaze, she forced herself to approach the door of the brick outbuilding. Taking a deep breath, she studied the keys in the palm of her hand and then the padlock. The first key she tried didn’t fit. A strange sense of relief washed over her, brought on by the possibility that she wouldn’t have to descend into the monster’s subterranean labyrinth – into the darkness that held nothing but fear for her. She sighed as she tucked the failed key into her jacket pocket, looking at the next one, willing it not to fit. But it slid into the slot smoothly, turning easily and popping the padlock open.

  Sally’s throat suddenly constricted. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. The time had arrived when she would have to either walk through that wall of paralysing fear or risk never again being the person she once was. She wriggled the lock free and placed it carefully on the ground, aware that it would eventually play its part in forming the chain of evidence that would convict Keller of the murders and abductions.

  The metal door felt as heavy as it looked once she started to pull it open, the terrible metallic scraping noise catching her by surprise and making her release the door and jump back, clutching her chest. ‘Fuck,’ she cursed loudly, feeling better for it. ‘This is not good,’ she said again and took hold of the door, vowing not to let go, no matter what happened. She pulled hard and kept pulling until the door was fully open, revealing the darkness inside and the stone steps that led down deeper into the well of her fears and nightmares. Her immediate reaction was to recoil from the darkness, retreating a few steps
, but she managed to stop herself. ‘Shit,’ she cursed again. ‘This is fucking great.’

  She paused, listening for the sound of approaching sirens, but there were none. ‘Bloody sticks,’ she complained. ‘I hate it out in the sticks.’ Most cops did. The inner cities might be dangerous, but assistance was never more than a couple of minutes away. Out here, you could be on your own fighting for your life for ten to fifteen minutes before anyone got to you. ‘Come on, girl, get a grip,’ she told herself, drawing her ASP – more for comfort than in the belief she would need to use it. It was stained with Keller’s blood – a fact that somehow made her feel better, bolder.

  After several deep breaths to control her breathing and heart rate, she moved into the doorway and began her descent, squinting in the gloom, moving as silently as she could, cursing every scratch and scrape her shoes made on the hard stairs, her hand stretched out in front of her, feeling her way, ready to push aside any dangers, until at last her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Only another dozen or so steps and she would be at the end of her descent. But the further she went, the more she left the fresh air behind her. Now she was breathing in the sickening stench of unwashed humanity – urine, sweat, excrement and semen mixed into a foul, ungodly brew. She covered her mouth to stop herself gagging, desperately fighting the urge to flee back to the clean air above and abandon whatever creatures lay below to their fate. Halfway down she had to stop and lean against the wall to chase away the rising panic in her chest, her head turning towards the light. But it was in the darkness below her that salvation lay, and she knew it.

  ‘Come on. Come on,’ she urged, cursing herself for not having thought to bring a torch, afraid she would never be able to force herself down these stairs again if she returned to the house to find one. ‘Steady as she goes,’ she muttered, relieved to feel the panic fading somewhat, seizing the moment to push away from the wall and continue her descent, keeping the wall at her back. There was always the possibility that Keller had an accomplice or accomplices, or that he kept vicious, half-starved animals in the cellar.

  It seemed to take a lifetime, but eventually she reached the bottom stair and stepped on to the floor of the underground prison. Inching her way around the room, back pressed to the wall, she moved away from the stairs. The sound of trickling water disorientated her; it felt as if she was in a natural cavern rather than a man-made shelter. As her eyes continued to adjust she made out a hazy, square object, maybe ten feet in front of her, but she needed to get closer to see it properly. Counting down from ten, she pushed herself off the wall and into the free space of the cellar, feeling instantly giddy, as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff. After a few seconds the dizziness wore off and she was able to shuffle onward, her feet not trusting the ground underneath them, convinced she would at any second feel her stomach leap into her mouth as she fell into some unseen bottomless pit, but the feeling of falling never came.

  As she drew closer and closer to the square object she began to realize what it was – a cage, maybe four foot wide and high, six feet long. Worse, the door to the cage was open. Her breathing became instantly short and laboured like a panting dog, as she convinced herself she was trapped in the cellar with some escaped wild beast that was now circling her in the gloom, clinging to the edges of the room where it couldn’t be seen, preparing to pounce as soon as she ran for the stairs.

  Then she heard it, a noise away to her right, something moving, the animal positioning itself to attack, the terror of her situation freezing her rigid. But eventually she forced her head to twist towards the sound, at least enough so she could see out of the corner of her right eye, another large box silhouetted in the gloom, a shape huddled in one corner – an unthreatening shape – something that feared her more than she feared it. She turned fully and headed towards the box until she could see it was an identical cage to the first one, only this one’s door was shut and there was something inside – something alive, cowering.

  Sally shuffled slowly forward, her ASP gripped tightly at her side, moving endlessly towards the cage before suddenly freezing again and looking from the empty cage to the cage with the thing inside. The image of Keller coming from the door above carrying a mattress and clothes flashed in her memory, the fear lifting and allowing her to think, the realization of where she was and what she was seeing flooding over her. The true awfulness of what must have happened down here suddenly dawned on her as she covered her mouth with her free hand to try and disguise her words. ‘Oh my dear God,’ she said, louder than a whisper. ‘Oh my dear God.’

  She almost ran the last few feet to the cage and kneeled by its side, peering through the wire at the wild-eyed creature trapped within as she simultaneously fumbled for the key she knew would fit the lock. ‘I’m a police officer,’ she told the filthy, terrified woman trying to hide in the corner of the cage. She fished her warrant card from her pocket and pressed it against the wire mesh. ‘You’re Deborah Thomson, yes? I’ve come to get you out of here.’

  The woman didn’t reply, her eyes full of mistrust and fear. Sally moved quickly around to the cage door and wrestled to free the lock, struggling to find the slot for the key in the dim light. Finally it popped open and she was able to pull the door free and swing it ajar.

  ‘I think it’s time to get out of here. Don’t you?’ she said.

  The woman remained where she was, cowering virtually naked in a corner of the cage.

  ‘It’s over,’ Sally reassured her. ‘He can’t hurt you any more. It’s over.’

  The woman’s bloodied lips finally cracked open. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice hoarse and barely audible.

  ‘My name’s Sally.’ She stretched out her arm, offering Deborah Thomson her hand. ‘Detective Sergeant Sally Jones.’

  Kate sat tiredly in the staffroom hidden in the corner of Guy’s Hospital Emergency Department, watching some hideous Sunday afternoon cooking programme and drinking instant coffee – her sixth of the day. She’d had to dump the kids on her mum again, thanks to Sean’s unscripted absence. No doubt he wouldn’t be home until well after she’d picked the kids up, taken them home, fed them and put them to bed. She was beginning to feel like she was doing two full-time jobs without a whole lot of support and she was having to try harder and harder not to resent it. It wasn’t as if Sean was being paid a fortune as a detective inspector. Worst thing he ever did was take promotion – at least as a sergeant he got paid overtime, some compensation for never being around. Now he seemed to work more hours for less money.

  Hearing the staffroom door open, she looked up and saw Mary Greer, the A and E manager, enter. Ignoring the other people slumped around the room, she made a beeline in Kate’s direction. Kate smiled, but Mary didn’t smile back. Her own smile faded as she recognized the expression on the other woman’s face. It was an expression that said she was the bearer of bad news – personal bad news.

  Kate’s first thought was that it was one of the girls, the fear almost stopping her heart. But if it was the children, surely Sean would have come? No matter what was going on at work, he would have dropped everything to be here …

  In that second she realized she’d solved the puzzle. Her hand covered her mouth as tears pooled in her eyes and her throat swelled almost shut. Mary crossed the room quickly and held her gently by the shoulders. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told her. ‘It’s Sean. He’s on his way in. He’s been shot.’

  Mostly it was darkness – silent darkness, but the nightmares found their way through – the orange blast of a gun pointing towards him, faces too close to his own – his father’s, sneering and leering – Thomas Keller’s, his red teeth gritted in hatred, eyes blazing with evil intention – Sebastian Gibran, mocking him with laughter – Sally lying in the hospital with tubes snaking down her throat – Kate crying and pleading with him not to leave her – the faces of Louise Russell and Karen Green, their dead eyes staring at him, their lifeless blue lips parting to whisper to him: Why didn’t you save us? Why didn’t you
save us? Why didn’t you save us? – their faces slowly changing, growing younger and younger until they became the faces of his own daughters, their eyes also the eyes of the lifeless, their lips as pale blue as the lips of the dead women who’d spoken to him from beyond the grave as they lay broken in the woods – Why didn’t you save us? Why didn’t you save us? Why didn’t you save us? Then the darkness came and brought him peace – peace like he’d never known before – peace like he’d never had since being forced from his mother’s womb.

  Three Days Later

  He heard sounds though he couldn’t see anything other than light. Sounds in the distance, surreal and difficult to make out. A few seconds later his eyes flickered and opened and he remembered where he was. Kate was sitting by his bedside, dressed in her hospital uniform, loose blue cotton trousers and shapeless blue top, her name tag clipped to her breast pocket. ‘You fell asleep again,’ she told him. The sun shone brightly through the window of his private room. He’d only escaped intensive care the night before.

  ‘Sorry,’ he murmured, his mouth painfully dry.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she assured him. ‘It’s the painkillers. You’ll be dopey for a few days yet.’ She lifted his covered water beaker and eased the straw between his lips. ‘You’re still pretty dehydrated. You need to try and drink.’