by Ivan Pope
‘Don’t matter,’ said Stefan. ‘You stay here, learn to live with it. The girls live here ok, so you can too.’
A chill ran through him. He didn’t want to spend another minute here. He could feel the effects of drugs wearing off, leaving him nauseous and shivery in the damp gloom of the cellar.
‘What girls have you got here?’ he asked, wanting to keep Stefan talking, to keep him there, close. He knew that if he left, turned out the light, locked the door, it could be a long time before he had another visitor, another chance.
‘You are a spy and a fucking idiot,’ shouted Stefan. ‘A cunt sent to betray us,’ he grunted, demonstrating his education in the English underworld.
‘Come, now. You will stay with us for a while. Roger wants you. You are value. You are property now.’ He spat out the word property to give it its true meaning. He waved the gun, motioning towards the corridor and took hold of Allen with his other hand, dragging him along the floor. Allen levered himself to his feet and skidded along, heel after heel, in an attempt to remain upright. He slid along the rough concrete floor until Stefan pushed him into a dark cell and slammed the door shut.
In the dark Allen could hear the faint whine of a fan spinning, somewhere in the depths, and feel the slight movement of stale air around him. He wondered how deep they were, how many locked doors there may be between him and the surface. Despair started to creep into his bones. So deep, so deep. This must be a military-civilian bunker, he guessed. Yugoslavia had been riddled with them, built for the elite to survive war, whether war came from the West or the East.
Tito had been paranoid, not without reason. He had spent forty years building hideaways deep under his cities, but after his death many of them had fallen into disuse. Since the end of the cold war there had been little interest in these sepulchral chambers that riddled the Serbian earth. While some had been converted for storage or even nightclubs, many others were left to rot, their doors chained shut and abandoned to the earth. They weren’t hard to come by, if you knew where to look and who to ask. Many city buildings had them, as did hospitals, police stations and government buildings. In a broken Serbia, few questions were asked if you took a hammer and a chisel and re-opened a cellar of your own.
After a long wait someone made a sound outside the door. ‘Get me the fuck out of here,’ Allen shouted as it was unlocked. A torch shone on his face. He scrunched his eyes, trying to see who it was. Roger’s stare fixed on him, but gone now was his wide smile. He looked at Allen through half-closed eyes.
‘You’re a clever fuck, you sure are. Poking, probing. I thought we were friends.’
‘For god’s sake, Roger,’ said Allen, ‘I’m a writer. I’m not trying to damage you – we’re friends, or something. I’m not coming after you.’
This is it, he thought. This is how I end up. The mystery is solved. I become one of them, an underground dweller. Suddenly it seemed all too real.
Roger stared down at him. ‘With your nose in my business, I have the right to protect myself as I want. You may not understand this, Allen. You are fucking with fire here.’
Allen tried to jump up but Roger moved quickly and clamped his foot down hard on an ankle. Allen swallowed a scream, then relaxed. He waited to hear what Roger wanted. He realised he had come close to something that really mattered to him, the existence of these subterranean human hostages.
Roger stared at Allen for the longest time. Then he started to speak. ‘I’m having difficulty making sense of you. My friends in London don’t trust you. I heard from my contacts that you are a danger to me. Are you? What is your game, Allen? Are you working with the police, trying to trap me, to turn me in? Why are you so interested in my keepens? Do you think they exist?’
Allen wondered whether the shapeless forms who shared this space could hear the conversation, whether they were listening and waiting for the outcome.
‘If they exist, it’s because of you,’ Roger went on. ‘You want them to exist. You wanted to find your keepens. I’ve got a business to run, I don’t need your help or your fucking input. I’ve got my own family to look after. Keepens, keepens, fucking keepens.’
Roger’s voice climbed the register. ‘Every problem comes from your meddling and everybody we lose is down to you. You have to learn just to stay away from the subject. It’s nothing to do with you. You’re a little pisser playing up big and it has to stop.’
Then he stamped down again on Allen’s ankle. This time Allen screamed loudly. Bastard, he thought.
‘Roger, it’s not like that,’ Allen said. ‘We’re two sides of the same coin. I know nothing about your business, it’s not you I’m interested in.’
‘You’re not interested. So not interested that you crossed Europe and put yourself in a hole to avoid me. I know what you think, our girls are worth shit. But we look after them, feed them, clothe them, get them into the country. That’s what they want. But sometimes they won’t keep their side of the bargain. Sometimes we sell them on. Sometimes we have to use force. But sometimes we lock them up for a while. It’s our police force.’ He laughed. ‘Stefan has learned from me. He’s also my policeman, and very good at it he is too. These girls don’t get missed. They come from all over, who knows where they’ve gone to? They are runaways and whores. We buy and sell them, cheap as chips. It’s been going on forever. It’s not anything new. Even the police can’t keep tabs on it. There are too many, and we move them fast. If one or two go missing, who’s to notice? They’ll never be missed. And even if they are, what’s to be done? By that time, we’ve got them deep in a hole, deep under the ground. It’s always been like that, through history. How many girls do you think have disappeared under the ground and lived out their lives in darkness? And did anyone care? How many have been rescued?’
He paused.
‘Does that turn you on? Would you like to fuck a keepen? A twenty-year keepen? Can you imagine how they become, what their flesh is like, how it is to be in the presence of someone who hasn’t been outside the walls for decades?’
Now Allen felt sick. He knew many cases, he had the notes, of men and women who just disappeared from the face of the earth, always presumed dead. Abducted. Murdered. But not locked up underground. But it was true, it did happen. He had known about it for years, the lost souls of Europe. It happened, but there was something about Roger, something he had long wanted to work out. He played the role of organiser.
‘Tell me about it then, Roger. What do you do? Is that your thing, locking them up underground? Rape? Control? Hate, or love? What’s it about?’
Roger looked thoughtful for a moment.
‘You’d never understand it. You’re not interested in the power; you just want to spoil things. Think about this: if you lock someone up for a week, they are angry. After a month they are unhappy. But after a year, they are yours. They don’t think they’ll ever get out. Ever.’
Allen looked straight into his eyes. ‘Tell me, Roger. How long? How long can this go on for? Even you won’t be around for ever.’
Roger didn’t answer. He turned around abruptly and walked to the end of the corridor, reached up and swiftly climbed a ladder attached to the wall and disappeared through the hatch at the top.
They listened for a while to the sound of Roger climbing up and out of the depths. As the sound receded into the distance Stephan turned to Allen with a wave of the pistol. ‘Get in the cell,’ he said. Realising this was his last chance, Allen summoned his long past army training and, in a rage of fear and loathing, snatched at Stefan’s gun which whipped from his fingers and spun away into the darkness. Stefan roared and lunged at Allen. They fell to the floor and struggled for a what seemed like hours, battering against each other until, with a shriek, Stefan fell back, splayed out on the concrete. Allen rolled away. He held his breath, watching for any movement but Stefan stayed motionless on the cold floor.
Allen looked around, judging the entrance and exit of this hole. He wasn’t in the mood to play horror movies. U
pstairs there was light and the world. He wanted to get back up there and reintegrate himself.
He pulled open the green metal trapdoor that Roger had exited through and swung himself through the gap. He found himself in an antechamber. Pulling open the door of that chamber, he saw the bottom of a concrete staircase. He rapidly climbed the staircase, two stairs at a time, up and up. Repeating this again and again, he counted the levels, five, before he reached a top where a grimy doorway blocked his progress. Around the edges of the door he could feel air – this was an exit, meaning he was at street level.
He banged on the door. Then he tried to find something to pull on. He could not get it opened. Then, finding strength, he pulled with full bodyweight at the cross-member of the door. The door flew open towards him and he flew backwards and down the the stairs, painfully. When he picked himself up, he saw a rectangle of good, honest sunshine and a view of the nearby buildings. He felt in heaven. As he suspected, he’d been deep underground, below a stack of normal flats. He looked up and realised he had emerged from underneath Roger’s building.
He ran through the lobby and into the stairwell. He feared an ambush by Roger or even that Stefan would free himself quickly and emerge from the cellar. He climbed swiftly, now the third, the fifth. Soon he was back up to the seventh floor. He stood gasping in the open corridor outside Roger’s flat. Then he hammered on the door, desperate to find his passport, to leave. I can handle this, he thought. I’ll smash his fucking teeth in. No answer. He hammered again, shouting and banging. The flat was silent.
Pulling off one shoe he smashed it through the window to the right of the door, reached through and opened the window which folded back and down upon itself. He pulled himself up and through the broken frame, then fell, heaving and out of breath, onto the floor of the kitchenette. He was frightened, very frightened. His heart raced.
He turned and looked slowly around the flat, seeing how empty it was, had always been. No pictures on the walls, no books, no possessions. He ran into the bedroom where a huge double bed dominated, covered in a powder blue counterpane with a vast bolster. He pulled open bedside drawers. They were empty.
The flat already felt abandoned. He rifled the space, searching for evidence of occupation, but there was none. He had been fooled – nobody lived here, this was a dead flat. It now looked like a squatted property, used and jettisoned.
He ran through to the back room and into the box room where he had spent the previous nights. His possessions were scattered across the floor. Looking into his bag, he saw his passport and his wallet were gone – shit, that would cause problems. All he wanted now was to get home fast and leave Roger and Stefan and the rest of them far behind. He picked up everything he could reach and pressed it into the bag.
Pulling open the door, he ran out into the corridor, down the stairs three at a time and away into the cool evening air towards the distant motorway.
Capture
Emily floated out from a very bad dream to find she was lying on a hard floor feeling cold and uncomfortable with a dry retching in her throat. It was very dark. When she tried to move her shoulder seared with pain. She lay still and then, after a bit, pushed her legs out into the blackness. Where the fuck am I? she wondered.
Staring into the darkness, she could only make out fuzzy patterns. She strained her eyes although she knew that this whorling motion came from somewhere inside her head. I’ve had this dream before, she told herself, I can wake out of it if I focus. She tried to shake it away and waited for consciousness to arrive. The darkness remained, the hard floor, the cold. She swallowed back the fear that was rising in her chest. She tried not to think about where she was.
Her arm was twisted under her body. As she gently extracted it the blood began to pump back through it and to her shoulder, which now hurt even though she didn’t move. Stinging pain spread from her right shoulder and back, as if she’d been dragged along the ground. She could feel the cold everywhere, right deep down into her bones. Her upper body ached and the muscles in her hips hurt. Her left leg throbbed as if something had grated down it. When she flexed it, she could feel abrasions all over. There was no feeling in her feet, it was as if they had gone.
Where the fuck am I?
No matter how hard she stared into it, the dark would not clear. The space became more oppressive, it started closing in on her. Now she could hear the size of the space. It stretched far away from where she lay. At least I’m not in a coffin she thought, not in a car boot. Not in a wardrobe.
Is this the game – to guess where I’ve ended up?
Maybe I’ve had a stroke, been run down, crushed by a lorry. I’m lying in a hospital bed, locked in with no sight. Soon a doctor will come to my bedside and talk soothingly to me and my recovery will begin.
She moved her hand to her pocket, but her phone was no longer there.
Maybe I’m dead, she thought.
She slipped back into sleep and woke again and again. Things changed slowly. There was no time or space for more than one thought each time she surfaced but she realised that each line of thought represented one waking period. With each period she climbed further out of the mire.
Eventually she flexed her body, trying to move without making a sound. Her mind would not focus, she felt drunk.
One more push and I’ll wake myself up, she thought.
A feeling of panicky nausea swept through her.
Blinking repeatedly against the darkness, she tried to hold onto her sanity. I must keep the panic down, she thought, knowing that she would eventually work out what had happened.
She always did.
And then she saw it. A face. A pale, very white girl’s face, close to hers, examining her minutely. A small grey face, wide-open eyes, huge pupils, thin red hair, a flicker of a smile playing across the tiny mouth.
Help, oh fuck, make it go away her mind said while out of her mouth in the darkness came a small wailing sound which, before she knew or controlled what was happening, broadened and grew into a huge caterwauling wail, an encompassing cry of fear and terror in the sooty night.
The girl retreated into the dark and, with the soft click of a door somewhere, was gone.
She subsided into sobbing tears.
When she woke for the third or fourth time she was lying on a low mattress. There was a blanket over her. She shivered slightly but the previous chill had gone. Her head felt empty. She lay rigid under the fleece, trying not to move. Her bladder cried out for relief, but she had no desire to move in case that face reappeared. Earlier she had been lying in the middle of a space and now she was lying next to a brick wall. With a blanket over her.
She pressed her heel against the wall, testing the solidity of her surroundings.
Yes, she thought. It’s a wall, properly built. The sort of wall that holds doors in place, that holds locks and beams and concrete and all the things that a human body can’t break through. She shivered again.
On that first day she pissed in the corner, staggered around in the darkness and tried to supress the darkest fears that beset her. The girl had disappeared, into the darkness. Emily had no desire to go looking for her.
She found that the floor was cool, maybe glazed tiles, and that she was wearing no shoes or socks. It crossed her mind that she might have been raped, she couldn’t be sure, but she’d clearly been beaten and thrown around. Her hips and her knees, her elbows and one side of her head were deeply grazed. She felt the blood coagulated in her hair. She struggled to remember how she might have got here. She had a memory of leaving a pub, of walking unsteadily in a dark street, but nothing more came to her. Her wrists were sore where she’d clearly been bound. She was wearing the same clothes as when she left home.
She tried to work out where the fuck she was but found herself bursting into tears when she thought about it.
There’s another person here, she told herself. She thought she’d been locked in hell but she didn’t believe in hell – something else terrible was happen
ing. She understood it had something to do with Allen, with his stupid obsession. She briefly wondered where he was, whether he was safe, then a terrible thought crossed her mind: maybe he knew what was happening. Maybe this was part of a project, of his game. The thought chilled her, even though she knew it couldn’t be true.
The hours passed slowly in the darkness, her mind raced, chasing after phantoms and awful thoughts. ‘Allen, Allen, Allen,’ she wept to herself. And then, ‘Mummy’.
After a while, she wished the white-faced girl would come back. Anything would be better than this darkness. She sat, arms pulled tight around her knees, back to the wall, falling in and out of sleep.
The first days were terrible, she knew she could fall into madness – she wondered if she already was. She saw faces in the darkness, looking at her, small faces with wild red hair. She couldn’t work out what they were, who they were. There was a woman here, the white-faced woman, and there were children. The faces kept retreating into the dark corners and through dark doors when she moved. It seemed that they were as scared of her as she was of them. They were locked in a cellar with her, she understood that, but she told herself that this could not be real, that it could not be happening to her.
After endless sleeping and waking in the darkness, she realised that it was no dream that she could surface from. The teacher in her came out, she understood that she had to organise the horror so she could understand it, survive it. I have to make contact, she thought. To survive, I have to make friends with them. If they are scared of me, then they are people like me. If they are people like me, I can talk to them. She concentrated on the darkness, watching, studying their movements. When she saw the woman, Emily took a deep breath and summoned reserves of courage, forcing herself not to scream out. She held out her hands in the dark space. ‘Come and talk to me,’ she said gently. ‘Don’t be scared, I want to be your friend.’