by Ruth Ware
My head ached powerfully, and I wished I had some painkillers, but more than that I felt awful—shivery and weak, as if I were coming down with the flu. It was probably hunger—it was hours since I’d eaten and my blood sugar must be at rock bottom.
Part of me wanted to lie down and rest my throbbing head, but my stomach growled, and I made myself examine the plate of food that was on the floor. It looked completely normal—meatballs in some kind of sauce, mashed potato and peas, and a bread roll on the side. I knew I should eat—but the same gut revulsion that had made me pour away the juice was kicking in. It just felt so wrong—eating food provided by someone who’d locked me into an underwater dungeon. There could be anything in there. Rat poison. Sleeping pills. Worse. And I’d have no choice but to eat it.
Suddenly, the thought of putting even a spoonful of that sauce in my mouth made me feel panicked and ill, and I felt like flushing the whole lot down the loo along with the juice, but even as I half stood, ready to pick up the plate, I realized something, and I sat back down again on slow, shaky legs.
They didn’t need to poison me. Why would they? If they wanted to kill me they could just starve me.
I tried to think clearly.
If whoever had brought me here had wanted to kill me, they’d have done it. Right?
Right. They could have hit me again, harder, or put a pillow over my face when I was passed out, or a plastic bag around my neck. And they hadn’t. They’d dragged me here at some inconvenience to themselves.
So they didn’t want me dead. Not right now, at any rate.
One pea. You couldn’t die from one poisoned pea, surely?
I picked it up on the end of a fork, looking at it. It looked completely normal. No trace of any powder. No odd color.
I put it in my mouth and rolled it slowly round, trying to detect any strange taste. There was none.
I swallowed.
Nothing much happened. Not that I’d expected it to—I didn’t know much about poison, but I imagined that the ones that killed you within seconds were few and far between, and not easy to obtain.
But something did happen. And that was that I started to feel hungry.
I scooped up a few more peas and ate them, cautiously at first, and then picking up speed as the food made me feel better. I skewered a meatball with my fork. It smelled and tasted completely normal—with that slightly institutional air of food prepared for a large number of people.
At last the plate was empty and I sat and waited for someone to come and collect it.
And waited.
And waited.
Time is very elastic—that’s the first thing you realize in a situation without light, without a clock, without any way of measuring the length of one second over the length of another. I tried counting—counting seconds, counting my pulse—but I got to two thousand and something and lost count.
My head ached, but it was the weak shiveriness in my limbs that worried me more. At first I thought it was low blood sugar, and then, after I’d eaten, I started to worry that perhaps there had been something in the food, but now I began to count back, to try to work out when the last time was that I’d taken my pills.
I remembered popping one out of the packet right after seeing Nilsson on Monday morning. But I hadn’t actually taken it. Something—some stupid need to prove that I wasn’t chemically dependent on these innocent little white dots—had stopped me. Instead, I’d left it on the countertop, not quite able to bring myself to down it, not quite wanting to throw it away.
I hadn’t been intending to stop. Just to show . . . I don’t know what. That I was in charge I guess. A little, pointless “fuck you” to Nilsson.
But then the argument with Ben had driven it from my mind. I’d gone off to the spa without taking it, and then the episode with the shower . . .
That made it . . . I couldn’t quite work it out. At least forty-eight hours since I’d had a dose. Maybe more like sixty hours. The thought was uncomfortable. Actually, more than uncomfortable. It was terrifying.
I had my first panic attack when I was . . . I don’t know. Thirteen maybe? Fourteen? I was a teenager. It came . . . and went, leaving me frightened and freaked-out, but I never told anyone. It seemed like something only a weirdo would get. Everyone else walked through life without shaking and finding themselves unable to breathe, right?
For a while it was okay. I did my GCSEs. Started my A levels. It was around then that things started to get really shaky. The panic attacks came back. First, one. Then a couple. After a while, it seemed like coping with anxiety had become a full-time business, and the walls began to close around me.
I saw a therapist, several in fact. There was the “talking cure” person my mum picked out of the phone book, a serious-faced woman with glasses and long hair who wanted me to reveal some dark secret that would be the key to unlocking all this, except I didn’t have one. For a while I thought about making one up—just to see if it would make me feel better. But my mum got annoyed with her (and with her bills) before I could come up with a really good story.
There was the hip young community support leader, with his group of young girls who ran the gamut of problems, from anorexia to self-harm. And finally there was Barry, the cognitive behavioral therapist that my GP provided, who taught me to breathe, and count, and left me with a lifelong allergy to balding men with soft, supportive tenor voices.
None of them worked for me, though. Or none of them worked completely. But I kept it together enough to get through my exams, and then I went away to university and I felt a bit better, and it seemed like maybe all that—that stuff—was something I’d grow out of, like *NSYNC, and cherry lip gloss. That I’d leave behind, in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, along with all my other childhood baggage. Uni was pretty great. When I left, with my shiny new degree, I felt ready to take on the world. I met Ben, and I got a job at Velocity and my own place in London, and everything seemed to be falling into place.
And that was when I fell apart.
I tried to come off the pills once. I was at a good place in my life, I was over Ben (oh my God, I was so over Ben). My GP lowered the dose to twenty milligrams a day, then ten, and then, since I was coping pretty well, to ten milligrams every other day, and finally I stopped.
I lasted two months before I cracked, and by that time I had lost thirty pounds and was in danger of losing my job at Velocity, although they didn’t know why I’d stopped coming into the office. At last, Lissie called my mum, and she marched me back to the GP, who shrugged and said that maybe it was withdrawal, and maybe it just wasn’t the right time for me to come off. He put me back on forty milligrams a day—my original dose—and I felt better almost within days. We agreed to try again another time—and somehow that time never came.
Now was not the right time. Not here. Not shut in a steel box six feet below sea level.
I tried to remember how long it had taken last time—how long it had been before I started to feel really, really shitty. It hadn’t been that long, from what I could recall. Four days? Maybe less.
In fact I could feel the panic begin to prickle over my skin in little cold electric shocks.
You’ll die here.
No one will know.
Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh—
There was a sound at the door and I stopped. Stopped everything—stopped breathing, thinking, panicking—I sat, frozen, my back against the bunk. Should I pounce? Attack?
The door handle began to turn.
My heart was pounding in my throat. I stood up and backed away against the far wall. I knew I should fight—but I couldn’t, not without knowing who was coming through that door.
Pictures flashed through my head. Nilsson. The chef in his latex gloves. The girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt, a knife in her hand.
I swallowed.
And then a hand sn
aked through the gap and grabbed the plate, quick as blinking, and the door slammed shut. The light went out, plunging the cabin into inky blackness so thick I could taste it.
Fuck.
There was nothing I could do. I lay there in the impenetrable darkness for what felt like hours but might have been days, or minutes, drifting in and out of consciousness, hoping each time I opened my eyes to see something, even just a thin line of light in the corridor, something that would prove I was really here, that I really existed and wasn’t just lost in some hell of my own imagining.
At last I must have fallen properly asleep, for I awoke with a jump, and my heart thumping and fluttering erratically in my chest. The cabin was still in complete darkness, and I lay there, shaking and sweating, holding on to the bunk like a life raft as I clawed my way back from the most horrible dream I could remember in a long time.
In the dream, the girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt was in my cabin. It was dark, but somehow in the darkness I could . . . not exactly see her, but sense her. I just knew that she was there, standing in the middle of the cabin, and I couldn’t move, the darkness pressing me down, like a living thing, squatting on my chest. She came closer, and closer, until she was standing just inches away, the T-shirt skimming the tops of her long, slim thighs.
She smiled, and then with one sinuous movement she pulled off the shirt. Beneath it she was skinny as a whippet, all ribs and collarbone and jutting pelvis, her elbow joints wider than her forearms, her wrists knobbly as a child’s. She looked down at herself, and then she pulled off her bra, slow as a striptease, except there was nothing erotic about it, nothing sexy about her small, shallow breasts and the hollow of her stomach.
But as I lay on the bunk, panting, paralyzed with fear, she didn’t stop there. She kept stripping. Her knickers slipped from her narrow hips to form a puddle at her feet. And then her hair, yanking it out by the roots. Then she pulled off her eyebrows, first one, and then the other, and her lips. She let her nose drop to her feet. She drew out her fingernails, one by one, slowly, like a woman loosening her evening gloves, and let them fall with a slight clatter to the floor, followed by her teeth, click . . . click . . . click, one after another. And finally—and most horribly—she began to peel away her skin, as if she were stepping out of a tight-fitting evening dress, until she was just a bloody streak, muscle and bone and sinew, like a skinned rabbit.
She went down on all fours and began to crawl towards me, her lipless mouth spread wide in a horrible parody of a smile.
Closer and closer she crawled, until at last, though I backed away, I came up against the rear wall of the bunk and could retreat no farther.
I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.
She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak—but then she reached inside, and pulled out her own tongue.
I awoke, gasping and crawling with the horror of it, the blackness like a clenched fist around me.
I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium—if I scream, what’s the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear. Let them hear, and maybe they’ll come and get me.
So I let it out, the scream that had been rising up inside me, growing and swelling and pressing to get out.
And I screamed and I screamed and I screamed.
I don’t know how long I screamed for, how long I lay there, shaking, my fists curled around the thin, limp pillow, my nails digging into the bare mattress beneath.
I only know that at last it was quiet in the little cabin, except for the low roar of the engine, and my own breath, rasping in a throat scoured raw and hoarse.
No one had come.
No one had banged on the door to ask what was going on, or threatened to kill me unless I shut up. No one had done anything. I might as well have been in outer space, screaming into a soundless vacuum.
My hands were trembling, and I could not get the girl from my dream out of my head, the idea of her raw, moist form crawling towards me, clutching, needing.
What had I done? Oh God, why had I done this, kept pushing, kept refusing to shut up. I had made myself a target, by my refusal to be silenced about what happened in that cabin. And yet . . . and yet what had happened?
I lay there, my hands pressed to my eyes in the suffocating darkness, trying to make sense of it. The girl was alive—whatever I had heard, whatever I thought I had seen, it wasn’t murder. Had she been on the ship all along?
She must have. We hadn’t stopped. We hadn’t even got near enough to land to see it. But who was she, and why was she hiding on the ship?
I tried to ignore my aching head, to think logically. Was she a member of the crew? She had access to the staff door, after all. But then I remembered Nilsson punching in the code, me standing behind him as he did. He’d made no effort to shield the keypad. If I’d wanted to, it would have been child’s play to note down the numbers as he entered them. And after that, once you were below decks, there were not many further locked doors.
She’d had access to the empty cabin, though—and that did require a passkey, either a guest one, programmed to that door specifically, or a staff one that opened all the cabin doors. I thought of the cleaners I’d seen in their little hutches below decks, their scared faces looking out at me before the door swung shut. How much would one of them sell a passkey for? A hundred kroner? A thousand? They wouldn’t even need to sell it—I was certain there were places you could get key cards copied. They would just have had to loan it out for an hour or two, no questions asked. I thought of Karla—she had practically told me that it went on, that someone might have lent the cabin to a friend.
But it didn’t have to be that. The passkey could have been stolen, for all I knew, or bought off the Internet—I had no idea how those electronic locks worked. There might have been no one else involved at all.
Was it possible that all this time I had been looking for an accomplice—a perpetrator among the crew or passengers—and they’d been innocent all along? I thought of the accusations I’d hurled at Ben, the suspicions I’d had of Cole, of Nilsson, of everyone, and I felt sick.
But the fact that this girl existed and was alive, that didn’t automatically rule out someone else’s involvement. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that someone had been helping her above decks—someone had written that message on the spa wall, had tipped Cole’s camera into the hot tub, had stolen my phone. They couldn’t all have been her. Someone would have seen and recognized the girl I had been shouting about for two days if she’d been wandering around the ship.
Ugh, this was making my head hurt. Why? That was the question I couldn’t answer. Why go to such lengths to hide on board the ship, to stop me from asking questions? If the girl had died, the cover-up made sense. But she was alive and well. It must be who she was that was important. Someone’s wife? Someone’s daughter? Lover? Someone trying to get out of the country with no questions asked?
I thought of Cole and his ex-wife, Archer and his mysterious “Jess.” I thought of the way the photograph had disappeared from the camera.
None of it made sense.
I rolled over, feeling the weight of the darkness all around. Wherever we were, it was very deep beneath the ship, I was sure of that now. The engine was loud, much louder than on the passenger deck, louder even than I remembered it being on the staff deck. I was somewhere else, on an engine deck, perhaps, far below the waterline, deep in the hull.
At that thought, I felt again the horror begin to creep over me, the tons and tons of water weighing on my head and shoulders, pressing against the hull, the air in the cabin circulating, circulating, and me here suffocating in my own panic. . . .
My legs shaking, I climbed cautiously off the b
unk and made my way slowly across the floor, my arms stretched out in front of me, cringing from what might be in here with me in the absolute darkness. My imagination conjured up horrors from my childhood nightmares—giant spiderwebs across my face, men with clutching arms, even the girl herself, lidless, lipless, tongueless. But another part of me knew that there was no one here but myself—that I would have been able to hear, smell, sense another human being in such a confined space.
After a few moments of cautious inching, my fingers encountered the door, and I felt my way across it. The first thing I tried was the handle, but it was still locked—I hadn’t expected anything else. I felt for a spy hole, but there was none, or none that I could find on the blank expanse of plastic. I didn’t remember seeing one earlier, anyway. What I did remember, and what I felt for next, was the flat beige light switch to the left of the door. My fingers found it in the darkness, and I pressed it, my heart beating hard in my chest.
Nothing happened.
I flicked it back, but without hope this time, because I knew what they’d done. There must be some kind of override in the passage outside, some sort of master switch or fuse. The door was already shut when the light went out, and in any case, in any cabin I’d been in before there was always some kind of security light—you were never in complete darkness, even when the lights were turned out. This was something else—this was an utter, total darkness that could only come from the electricity being completely cut.
I crawled back to the bunk and beneath the covers, my muscles shaking with a mixture of panic and that sick flu-like feeling I’d had before. My head felt filled with a spreading blankness, as if the dark of the cabin had seeped inside my skull and was filtering through my synapses, deadening and muffling everything apart from the panic that was building in my gut.