The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  ‘Take a look at my teeth, what’s left of them.’

  Message

  By the end of July, the days had heated up and made the city an even more unpleasant place. It was one of those seemingly endless humid London summers. Allen twisted and turned in the London miasma, waiting for a clue, something to start the process.

  The sunshine was unexpected and after the first few welcome days when everyone put on shorts and sandals and took to drinking beer outside pubs, tempers started to loosen. The nights were as hot as the days. Allen left his windows open but the heat and the blackness outside gave rise to nightmares in which he was searching endless tunnels for Emily and finding only side doors that led into small rooms with gridded openings that dropped further down into blackness. Each time he got down on his hands and knees and peered into the void and caught a glimpse of somebody walking out of sight. He thought it was Emily, but when he stood up in the dream he couldn’t work out if it was her or not.

  These dreams frustrated him and he woke again and again, sweating and twisting in the darkness. Each time he dropped back into sleep the dream came again until he was forced to leave his soaking bed and sit drinking tea in his kitchen.

  Then, just when he thought he was close to a total breakdown – in his research or in his life – the first communication came.

  It came in a strangely physical form. He had been expecting something electronic, an email or a video. In the post that morning came a tiny inconsequential envelope, posted in North London. When opened it revealed a scrap of fabric, a long triangular scraping. He 144ecognized the fabric immediately. It was from one of Emily’s dresses, a favourite.

  I have her, the message said.

  Allen waited. There was little he could do. Now he knew the game had commenced, but he had no experience of what to expect.

  Do you want her? Do you want to keep her for yourself?

  He held his breath at that one, fearing to explode. This was Roger, he knew that. There was no method of reply, just more taunts.

  I have her good and deep.

  Shopping list for a keepen

  Instant mashed potato

  Toilet paper

  Wet wipes

  Cartons juice

  Candles

  Tea bags

  Tissues

  Baked beans

  Crackers

  Margarine

  Cheese spread

  She prepared meals for him. She made lots of meals for him but usually he didn’t want to stay to eat; then after a while, maybe after two years or more, he started to stay with her and sit at the table and eat with her. She remembered thinking every time it was mad, there was no food to make anything with and she hated him and when he was there she hated him being there, but when he wasn’t there she wanted him to come down, to talk to her. When she heard him laugh she could imagine her mummy and her friends and maybe that’s why she fell in love with him.

  She wanted to make a feast, she had been remembering recipes and cooking that she did with her family.

  She saved up some tins and waited for him to bring fresh bread. Then she made a feast of bread and mackerels, peaches and custard. She laid it all out on the long table, waiting until the children were sleeping. It was like a wedding feast. She was glad she had married him, because they had two babies and they were doing it like husband and wife all the time. Or all the times he came down to see them. They spent quality time together and sometimes he even stayed overnight. Two times he stayed a whole week, or six days.

  She didn’t know what day it was when he came down and she never knew if he was coming. But one thing she did learn was to know when he was on his way. It took him quite a long time to get from outside down to her level. If she was awake she could hear him start his journey far off. She would run into the dark room and crawl to the back of the space, and from there if she put her ear to the pipes she could hear small sounds echoing in the distance. Sometimes she even thought she could hear people talking and, strangely, children crying and shouting. So that’s what’s upstairs, she thought. She had a dream about what went on upstairs – maybe his sister lived there with her children and maybe he’d say, ‘I have to go and visit my girlfriend,’ and his sister would say, ‘why don’t you bring her back here sometime and introduce her,’ and he’d say, ‘no, she’s shy, I have to go visit her at her house.’ And then he’d leave the house and come to his cellar that they didn’t know about and climb slowly down into the darkness.

  Sometimes she wanted this all to be true and sometimes she hated herself for making up stories about him and what he did up there, because to tell you the truth, it made her even more unhappy. If that was possible.

  Only her children were keeping her alive after that.

  She said she loved her children a lot and in the end she almost loved the man who kept her here.

  She said he brought a woman called Ruth in the seventh year of being down there, company for her. She came to love Ruth, but he took her away again in the ninth year. Ruth helped her look after the children and for a time they had been like sisters, looking out for each other and holding tight through the long, cold nights. But he’d come for her with no warning, soon after the longest, darkest absence. In the eighth year of being down there he had disappeared for six months, or a long time, she wasn’t really sure. When he came back, with a scowl and a battering of fists, he pulled Ruth by the wrist and dragged her out of the cellar, never looking back. The children had cried for a long time after that, and a year later they were still unsettled. They were growing fast and coming to an understanding of the environment. It was all they had ever known. She was scared they were becoming golem children who could see in the dark and knew nothing of light.

  There were others, but none stayed more than a few weeks, a month at the outside. They came and went, sometimes she didn’t even know their names. She stopped getting friendly, understanding that her survival for her children’s survival had priority. But priority for what, she began to wonder. She tried not to think that, that thought which had wormed its way into her head in the fifth year had always been kept at bay. How long, how long would she live here? What would happen when she was old? Would her children also grow old down here? Maybe he would make children with her children and the line would continue forever. But of course, he also would, and was, growing old. He was older than her, much older than her. She had started to notice how he had become grey and puffy. His movements were now slower and he had less appetite for that, unlike the early days.

  No doubt he could still make new babies with her babies. Not for a few years. And not if she had her way, she would do something to stop it. She started planning in the fifteenth year.

  She realised that they were like concentration camp people, at the mercy of their jailers. He could kill us and nobody would care or even know, she thought. At least in the camps they had other people to talk to, maybe a friend or even family or the guards. She imagined that late at night after work they would talk quietly and low in their bunks, even if they were suffused with hunger and worn close to death, they would talk because to talk is human. Isn’t it? She had nobody except sometimes other girls and children who stayed for a short time, and they were near useless, they couldn’t even talk in English, but she tried, she did try to talk to them. But for many years now, nobody, and the nobody was the worse, the worst.

  ‘He was drugging me,’ she said to Emily when they had become used to each other’s presence. She was eager to tell her story and Emily listened in resigned horror.

  ‘I know, though he said he wasn’t. He called it medicine. “Come for your medicine,” he’d say, “you want to stay healthy.” He’d bring me medicine every other morning. Then I’d sleep a lot, and when I wasn’t sleeping, I’d be stumbling around the space not really having any idea where I was or what was going on. He would still come down for that and we’d fight a bit sometimes. The medicine made me less scared of him and made me forget where I was and what was going on.


  ‘I lost sense of time in those early years, he used to give me medicine a lot of the time and I’d lose any idea of what I was supposed to do. Then he’d come down and tidy up the rooms and sort out the food that I’d dropped or left around and bring me clean clothes. Sometimes he brought me nice clothes.

  ‘The medicine gave me terrible headaches after I woke up.

  ‘I’m not stupid, I grew up down here. I was a child, a baby, when he took me and I forgot a lot about the world and also I didn’t know a lot about the world. I knew this was not a normal life and that I was not a normal person. I wanted to know love and to meet people, to enjoy my life. Do you think I’m mad? I have been locked in this basement for years, do you think that sent me mad? I lie awake sometimes and wonder if this is real any more, any more real than up there. And sometimes I don’t want to get out because, I know what it is all about down here.

  ‘I have built my own world. I have my five rooms. He is allowed into two of them, that is my rule, not his. Not into the back rooms, they are mine. I made memory things in those back rooms. In three rooms I was safe from him and I built my world. But I had to come out from those rooms to allow myself the privacy of the other three.

  ‘After my first baby was born my life changed. Then I understood love and I knew then that I had to live and escape from him and that. But I also knew that he had a hold over me that was new. He could have snapped my baby like a twig and often I thought that was what he was going to do.

  ‘We didn’t do it for two years after my first was born. Then one day he came and he said it is time for this little one to go to the surface and see the sun. And I cried and I fought with him and also it was the only time he came into my back rooms because I hid in there and wouldn’t come out. After two days he came in, he didn’t say anything, he just came in and I fought him; the only time I fought as hard as I could and I won because he never took my babies.

  ‘Do you want to hear how it is giving birth underground, in the deep dark without your mother or your friends to even know you are going to have a baby? I wasn’t happy from the start. I guess I always knew that I could end up with a baby, because of that, it went on for a long time. I asked him for protection, but he wouldn’t help me. I wasn’t allowed to talk to him, but I wrote him notes telling him that we would end up with a baby and why would he want that. Whatever he wanted for me, I couldn’t believe that he wanted more of us in there.

  ‘He did tell me after a while that he wanted more of us. He said that he’d considered catching me a friend, but he’d realised that he could just make more of us. He told me that he’d thought about snatching me a father for my children, for that, you know. So that we’d make babies. But when I asked him what the babies were for, he just went quiet, he couldn’t tell me.

  ‘I looked after my babies better than anyone could have done. They never saw the sun. I used to cry for them when they used to cry to me. When they were tiny it didn’t seem to matter, but as they grew and learned to crawl and then walk, I found it almost impossible to handle. I so wanted to take them to the beach, to the country. I wanted them to see clouds and cows and the sky. But he said no. He wouldn’t even bring them picture books, how wicked is that? The most wicked thing I ever could imagine.

  ‘For ages I thought I could hear a disco pounding away in the night. I never worked out if I could or not, I’d lie in the endless silence trying to focus my ears on the rhythmic, repetitive noise that went on and on and on. It didn’t sound like music, but it was like the afterthought of music—what might remain after all the sound in a piece of music had been leeched away by the ground. As the night wore on, I would start to hallucinate; the music was near, the music was the sound of water, I could hear voices along with the music.

  ‘I started to believe that there was a nightclub underground, close to where I was stored, and that if I could pinpoint the source of the noise, I could dig my way through the soil to the club. I used to imagine myself arriving in the club, crashing through the wall onto the dancefloor. Someone would notice a small crack in the wall, a trickle of soil and water, then, as the crack widened, they would look on in horror as fingers grasped through. Suddenly I would push through with one almighty crash, like when the Berlin wall came down. I would fall heroically onto the dance floor. The music would stop, silence as the crowd gathered around this subterranean figure who had fallen into their world. They would press upon me, asking who I was. And I would say, “I’m Abby, I’m Abigail Holden,” releasing my true history with one spoken truth. Then the police and ambulance would come and my parents would come with my friends. In later versions of this I carried my two children with me through the tunnel that I dug, the Great Escape. In the tunnel, the Germans are up above, waiting for us to emerge. The air bellows are pumping, I’m rolling through a tunnel on my back with two children strapped to my chest. I told myself I was going to escape.

  ‘No. I don’t know if there was ever a nightclub. Was there a club? Is it possible? Did I hear music or was it more of the darkness speaking?

  ‘He told me about how he had built my prison. He told me how he had made traps, terrible traps, that if I tried to escape I would be crushed, that my children would shrivel up and die without me. He told me that a vast concrete block would drop into the passageway. He seemed to like talking about the horrors he had created, that the secrete chambers and the hidden doors and the spikes that would impale me gave him more pleasure than my presence. I don’t know if anything he told me is real but it is in my head. It is my life.

  ‘He talked to me with silence. I learned to hear what he was saying in that silence. After a long time, our relationship became so close that we understood each other without words. Not that I came to accept the situation, but I must admit I forgot another life. Partly I did that on purpose, I would not allow the life I had before to exist anymore. I could not allow myself to think about my mother and my father and my sisters and my brother. To do this, to dwell on what they might be doing now, would have finished me off.

  ‘I lost track of how much time had passed, so it was not so hard to deliberately lose track of who I was and who I had been. It is very hard to track time in darkness with no human contact. For many years he never let me have a clock, nor a light that I could control. I didn’t have hot water for more time than that – I had forgotten things that you know every day. How to wash my hair, how to take a bath to clean away the sweat of the day. I forgot the seasons and the weather. I grew older, my body changed, but I knew nothing of the world upside, only of my filthy, dark space.

  ‘I felt I was going insane, losing my mind. For a long while I was sure that was the best thing, that I should forget that I was human and in that way peace would come. But it never quite did, I always woke with perfect knowledge of who I was and how I had got here. And I always went to sleep knowing that I had no way out.

  ‘You see, he built his dungeon and I performed in it. It was an act, an act like an actor would perform. He never asked for performance, but over the years I came to realise the roles we were playing. Then I tried many ways to make it into theatre, to leave my body while in that place. But I never quite found the trick. I was always present. His demands got harder to do over the years and I got weaker in my body and in my mind, I thought. In that place I could see how he would eventually kill me.

  ‘But it never came to pass, he never finished me off. I could not work out what the endgame was, but I had accepted that my life was to stay in this hole and be buried there at the appropriate time. I worried more about my children. I could accept what would happen to me, but not what would happen to them. And would it go further.

  ‘It was a hard time.

  ‘I have to find a way to pass the time. Time changes, it moves faster or slower, depending on things.

  ‘You’d probably think that time in here has passed very slowly, that I spend every day in a state of boredom, waiting for it to end. But it doesn’t work like that – the time here has passed very qu
ickly. I’ve taken to imagining that I’m not producing any memories. If you asked me straight out what happened last week, last month, or for the last year, I couldn’t begin to tell you. I made a memory machine for that, because I wanted to tell people what happened in here.’

  She took Emily by the hand and led her into the darkest of the dark back rooms and showed her the piles of tiny scrap dolls, the markers of the months and years in this place.

  ‘If you asked me to guess how long I’ve been in here, I might answer, just a few months. If I think back to the beginning, it seems like a few months ago. In between is a lot of greyness, for sure. And my babies were born and have grown up, so I know that years have passed. And there is him, he comes regularly.’

  Emily finally understood the hopeless, helpless mass in that room and how the years had passed here and her heart broke again.

  I’m not stupid, I knew from the beginning that I would get babies. Well, at the start I believed that I would get out, that he would let me free and I would run home and cry to my mother about what had happened and there would be lots of police and then a court case and then I would go back to school. And I would have stories to tell.

  Or he would kill me. I used to lie awake at night thinking about how he would murder me and trying to imagine how it might happen. I used to wonder whether he would tell me before he did it, or whether he would grab me suddenly while doing something else (it, probably), and strangle me in quick motion. And what I would feel and think while it happened, and whether I would know I was going. And of course, I wondered what I would find afterwards, would I wake up in heaven or in some black pit? Maybe in hell, as I’d been doing some very bad things.

  That was before I got snatched myself. One minute I was walking home, singing to myself as it was dark and a bit scary. Then this guy asked me something, where was something, I couldn’t quite hear him. He was standing next to a van, but I never thought for a moment. I don’t remember anything about what he did, but I woke up in his van feeling sick. Then I threw up.