The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  ‘And what was her name?’ asks the first woman.

  ‘Poor lamb, I have no idea,’ says the second, staring at the bread and ham she now holds in her hands.

  Allen

  Entering the underground that morning, Allen had felt the familiar pang of desire as he descended deep into the station. He felt the heat rise as the endless escalator took him deeper and deeper. He always wondered why it got so hot below ground. It wasn’t as if they were getting anywhere near the core of the earth, he knew that. But there was heat from somewhere. He reasoned to himself that it should get cooler as he went deeper. But it always got hotter, even in the middle of winter.

  He took hold of Emily’s hand and they walked down the platform and waited for a train heading south. Eventually it arrived and they boarded and took seats facing each other. Emily fussed with magazines and newspapers in her bag, eventually upending them over the carriage floor. He snapped at her, then, noting the look on her face, took it back. She was upset, which always made her clumsy.

  He amused himself by taking pictures of doorways he passed along the platform and between levels, locked doorways. Sealed entrances. No explanation. The occasional small sterile sign signifying nothing. There must be a network of tunnels and corridors and rooms, extending around and below the stations themselves. He liked his mobile phone for this purpose: it took good photos in the gloomy depths. He had a huge collection stored online that he shared with other enthusiasts.

  A fragment from a film he’d seen years back popped into his mind. He couldn’t remember the name of it, but he recalled a man, chased into the subway and pursued onto the platform. Trapped by an enemy at each end, he suddenly dropped to the rails and found his way into a subterranean space under the station where he met a crew of crazies. What was that film, he wondered?

  He had read of people living in the tunnels and in the shafts and in the sewers. It seemed that this happened in other countries, not here in London. More like a New York thing. We were a little too uptight here, and there really didn’t seem to be many spare tunnels. Not that he’d really ever looked. Well, not in the railway tunnels. He made a mental note to pay more attention to the tunnels.

  ‘Dreaming?’ asked Emily.

  He snapped back to the present. ‘Nothing, really.’ But she could feel the tension inside him.

  Now the train arrived at their station and, as the doors opened, they climbed out of the train and found their way through the maze of tunnels and staircases to the exit. They emerged and navigated through the huge Victorian station, exiting and turning towards the bus station.

  Halfway along the road, Emily suddenly stopped and, pulling him back to her, said, ‘I don’t want you to go. This doesn’t feel good.’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘You know that. I have to go. I’m on my mobile, it won’t stop working. Ring me anytime.’

  She was crying.

  ‘I thought you understood,’ he said. ‘This is my work. This could be big. I’ll be back in a week.’

  ‘I understand, but I don’t understand,’ she retorted. ‘I do. I did. I thought I did. Now I’m scared.’

  I’m scared too, he thought. ‘There’s no problem. I’ll be back in a week. You can call me anytime. I’ve waited a long time for this, you know that.’

  She looked into his eyes and held tightly on to him.

  ‘Be careful out there. They’re all sickos,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be daft. They’re just people. Normal people, most of them.’

  ‘Not who you’re going to see,’ she said. ‘I read it in The Express. Gangsters. Criminal capital of Europe. It’s a hangover from the communists – they all became criminals. They’re wicked.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re aliens in disguise,’ he said to shut her up, but it didn’t, and he had quickly felt guilty at his glib sarcasm. She’s scared for me, he thought.

  ‘Come back soon,’ she said. ‘I’m not happy on my own.’

  He had touched her hair softly.

  ‘I just wish you weren’t going,’ she said. ‘I hate it when you go off and leave me alone.’ She kissed his lips and turned quickly away.

  He watched her walk back up the street, then he turned back to his own thoughts and immediately forgot her. He walked down to the bus station, pulling his ticket out as he strode.

  Emily

  After Allen left, Emily found she was relieved to get a day without either him or her class of children. She needed to escape from London for a while and, as it was half term, she had a week to hide away. Her mother still occupied the family house she’d grown up in, nestled in the London suburbs. The houses there were solid and well built and the gardens long and languid. Her room was always waiting for her and, although she found it contained reminders of her somewhat mimsy teens, she could hide there, sleep all she wanted, drink tea, gossip with her mother and catch up with a friend or two. That usually reminded her of just how far she’d come, how her escape, while not complete, was reasonable. She had momentum, even if her trajectory wasn’t perfect.

  She drove south, straight through the centre of town, and reached Croydon in about an hour. A cluster of office blocks surrounded by endless roads; it was not her idea of London. She surprised her mother as she got back from yoga.

  ‘What about Allen?’ she was asked quickly. Her mother, as always, was both nervous that it might be over and secretly hoping it was.

  ‘He’s away, working.’

  ‘Work?’ said her mother. ‘That’s what he calls it?’

  To Emily, things happened within a structure provided by bureaucracy. If you kept within the spirit and letter of their rules, you were allowed to continue to operate. If you upset them, in any way, they came down on you fast but politely. You knew where you were with her job, unlike the freelance stuff that Allen did. He never knew from one week to the next if he would be working or where he’d be working.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s his work, and he’s good at it.’

  Allen, she thought, was the muscular Christian type, without the Christ bit. He was ex-army with a numinous desire to fix everything through the correct application of the correct kit. Or, if not the correct kit, then the appropriate firepower.

  Teaching in a large primary school on the borders of Islington and Camden was grinding her down. It wasn’t the worst school, even in the borough, but it had its share of hard characters. Although they were young, some children had experienced terrible things and would taunt their teachers with their knowledge, especially the younger and female staff. She was adept at brushing off the revelations and indeed felt some pity for the twisted and broken children among them, but every now and again she needed to escape. Allen’s line of work didn’t help. No matter how much she tried to avoid knowing anything of his research, he also needed to unburden himself sometimes. They had similarities, crossovers, she acknowledged, although he chased his demons while she was victim to hers.

  She wasn’t even sure how she had ended up as a teacher, and it bugged her. She’d never wanted to be one. It had, maybe, started with a stupid affair at the end of her school days, something she would not have allowed when a few years older, but it tainted the end of her education. Escape was what it had been about, and then, when it finished messily, the chance to move anywhere appealed. In the long summer after graduating, still adrift, she signed up for almost the first thing she thought of, which was teacher training. At the time she didn’t even know quite what that meant, but now she did – endless days stuck in a smelly room with thirty incontinent children.

  ‘He’s a good guy,’ she assured her mother. ‘He writes what he has to. You know that. Crime and stuff. If he has to go, he has to go. I don’t mind.’

  She realised her mother put all her lovers in the same club. ‘It’s mysterious, that he has to keep gallivanting around the world without you. He’ll not come back one time, you mark my words,’ she said.

  Emily smiled to herself. How ludicrous that was.

  The arriva
l of the video had scared her more than she thought. She couldn’t explain that. There was no way it was any of her business, of either of their business, really.

  ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

  She was slipping over a line, into a place where her mother would have the upper hand. She bit down on her lip and turned away.

  After a few days in the small room that contained all the evidence of her teenage years Emily wanted to flee. She would have got rid of the lot, but her mother never threw anything out. It did provide some sort of comfort when she visited, at first at least.

  She tried to phone Allen on his mobile but, despite what he had said, he had blocked calls while he was out of the country. Can’t even talk to my bloody boyfriend, she thought. What sort of a fuck-up is that? Lying back in bed, thinking of him, remembering his body and his strong touch. He pisses me off, she thought, but he’s quality.

  She’d never met a man quite like him before. None of her previous boyfriends had had such a mystery about them. They’d been flyboys, office workers, one a policeman who talked endlessly about his job but never seemed to have any interest in what she did. Allen internalised the world he worked in. She knew about his past but ignored it. She’d never told her mother, or anyone for that matter, about his bad times. None of their business, she thought.

  What she knew was this: he was a brave man but she was the stronger person.

  By the end of the week she was missing him terribly. He rang once, sounding lost and a bit scared but assuring her he was fine, things were going well. She missed North London now, it was so quiet here, so empty. What am I doing here, she thought, and, before her mother was up to dissuade her, she climbed into her small teacher’s car and drove quickly back to Islington. The flat, when she reached it, was familiar and welcoming. Emily placed a few items in the fridge and then phoned around until she’d organised a girls’ night out. Let’s get hammered, she thought, and forget whatever it is that Allen is driving me crazy with. By eight that same evening she was with her three best friends drinking straight vodkas in a dive bar just off Oxford Street in Central London.

  ‘He’s such a dick,’ she said, loudly. ‘I don’t have a clue what he’s doing, he wants to save the world, but I’m not sure he even knows what from.’ She laughed and her friends laughed with her. Anything that Allen was embroiled in was forgotten for the night.

  Belgrade

  Late in the night Allen’s coach pulled onto the ferry as the passengers slept. Arriving in France at daybreak it set off in an easterly direction, towards the German border and beyond. Allen was happy to be out of London, out of England, on the motorways, looking out over clear, open spaces. For a while this was better than the city. Hours later the coach pulled off the motorway. It was early evening and he had an overnight journey still to come. Time to eat something and stretch my legs, he thought. He climbed down out of the coach and was hit by a blast of hot diesel air. He noticed how clean and tidy this German service station was. Puts ours to shame, he thought.

  For a while he lay on his back on the gravel in the thin sun, his coat wrapped around him. Closing his eyes, he felt warmth through his coat, through his sweater and jeans. He sweated and knew that his face was flushed and ruddy in the European heat. He could smell dog shit somewhere near his head in the weedy gravel. He breathed deeply through his nose. The stink was sweet and sour, a thin, ripe odour that came and went with the gentle breeze that whispered around him. It reminded him of the only vacated keepen cell he’d ever visited. The thought made him sit up anxiously. Unsure, he waited for the wind to bring the smell back, unable to conjure it in the intervals. He thought about that dank underground chamber and the normality of disappearance that it had come to represent.

  The long-term missing were listed by various agencies on the assumption that they were corpses and it was only a matter of time before a body turned up.

  Families and friends would wait years, decades, often lifetimes, sometimes going to their own graves knowing nothing. The search for the lost would eventually peter out with the details locked away in archival boxes stored deep within some vast warehouse, the paperwork now as lost as the person themselves, stashed away where nobody would ever find them.

  All that remained was a wedge of paper in a buff file in a green cabinet in a basement warehouse in the suburb of an unknown city.

  Every time Allen read about another missing, he tracked the story and waited for a return or a body. If neither came, he marked the case down and placed a new page on his website. Of course, he had no way of knowing in almost all cases if there was anything, but he was getting the idea. These were not alien abductions. Some of these people were taken by members of our own human race and locked away in confined, dark spaces.

  He learned that in any upheaval where a lot of people disappear, there are some held against their will. His rule of thumb was, after three years they became keepen – the unknown, who whitened and lost their teeth in damp underground containers across the world.

  Online there was something of a conspiracy theory – the subject had garnered its own long tail of obsessives, each with their own theory. The right wing, the left wing, the neocons – they all argued about whether this really occurred, the numbers, the reasoning and, most controversially, about specific cases where suspects and locations were bandied about. In a way, this network of concerned citizens and kooks came to replicate the much darker network of criminal abductors, sex offenders, paedophiles and the likes, the network that Allen closely monitored and tried to infiltrate for his own research. It was this network, he guessed, that had brought him today’s contact. It was like making contact with alien life for the first time. He wasn’t going to lose the connection.

  The press wasn’t interested in the misery of others and tended to the internal explanation: that these missing people were either runaways or had been done to death. It never seemed to occur to them that they might still be alive somewhere.

  Every few years, somebody would emerge from darkness or a bound situation. Often these people were not known of before the moment of their emergence; thus, they were never listed as missing, even though they had endured years of captivity.

  Given no evidence of continuing life, Allen knew that the police would often abandon a search for an abducted or missing person at an early stage. They would keep up the investigation, of course, but as a missing, presumed dead job. Absence of evidence of activity is given as a guide to death. However, locking anyone in a secured cell has the same effect. No credit cards will be used, no phone calls will be made, no passports applied for. No work records, no use of national insurance numbers. The person has effectively disappeared. And death is, indeed, where they have disappeared to, though these deaths are lingering and long-lasting.

  If you ever spent twenty years inside, in the darkness, in a basement, you might emerge insane.

  He had made the trek across Europe in the past to visit emergers, people who had resurfaced. He wasn’t a policeman and he wasn’t a detective. But he did have a mission.

  He was especially interested in the living dead, abductees who were kept alive deep underground, in chambers and cellars and carved-out cells. Some in luxurious secret apartments and some in dank worm-infested holes in the ground. They seldom emerged, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  If you have never been incarcerated so deep that you never see daylight, you will not be able to imagine the effect this has on the senses.

  Allen knew this, but it didn’t make it any easier.

  In the distance the coach engine revved and the horn sounded. He jumped up, feeling hungry. Emily had made him egg sandwiches and a scotch egg. She was good at scotch eggs. They were in his bag on the coach.

  He stood up, his legs momentarily hobbled by pins and needles. He stretched out his toes in an effort to shake off the ague and looked over to the other side of the car park where a line of huge European coaches sat in the early spring sunshine. He wondered why he hadn
’t found a cheap flight. Coaches seemed romantic, when in reality they were uncomfortable, hot and smelly, though at least he’d have time to think.

  He climbed back into the cold, quiet interior, aware of the fusty aura. The coach was full and Allen looked for the seat he’d been in before, all the way from the 9 am departure. He didn’t want a window seat, what passed on the outside now was of no interest to him. The coach growled into life and made a slow circumnavigation of the car park, pulling out onto the anonymous slip road and then down and out onto the anonymous motorway. The sky was flat and grey and the sun fell swiftly towards a flat German horizon.

  Swapping drivers every four hours, they sped on towards a second night. Allen talked to the passenger next to him. Deep in the night the man had pulled a thermos of hot coffee from deep in his bag and offered Allen a thimbleful. He’d gratefully accepted it and fallen into a slow, low conversation that took them across three countries. They talked about Serbia and England, the old Yugoslavia and how countries were torn apart, families, children, parents, grandparents, wars, jobs and politicians. This man was a migrant worker, who had fought in the Croatian campaign. Allen shivered at that, but it all seemed a long way in the past now. He stared out of the window as they discussed greasy spoons and plum brandy and the relative merits of football teams, leagues and championships. Lunch was grabbed from a service station on the E70. The Europeans paid for this road, said the anonymous man, as an apology for bombing us. Allen laughed.

  On the Sunday morning they entered Serbia. Everybody was woken and tossed off the bus to stand sleepy and shivering in the early morning chill. Stony-faced border guards walked slowly up and down the line, gesturing for passports and holding them open as they compared them to the person standing in front of them. After a while they lost interest and left. The driver found a breakfast stop somewhere outside Zagreb and Allen hurriedly ate a white bread roll and gulped a hot, instant coffee. Then they drove on into the morning, swapping drivers along the way. In the early afternoon, as the sun shone weakly, signs indicated the approach of Belgrade. Clusters of tower blocks dominated the city’s skyline. A succession of flyovers, housing projects and industrial areas spread alongside the motorway, towns and villages, as small outliers of the main city eventually became merged into the outskirts of the capital. Slip roads ran away into unknowable areas, mysterious locales that nobody ever visited.