by AnonYMous
‘Hello?’ she called out. ‘Hello? Is anyone here?’
She heard, distantly, a voice mutter something. It sounded like a man’s and came from below, as if he was a floor beneath her. It gave her an idea of her bearings, for it implied that she was in an upstairs bedroom somewhere. Then a sudden charge of footsteps bounding up a staircase towards the door in the far corner of the room caused her heart to race. She began to wish she hadn’t called out so hastily. The footsteps were heavy, suggesting that they belonged to a very big man. When they reached the top of the stairs and stopped outside the door in the corner of the room there was a pause, then she saw the handle turn. Slowly the door creaked open.
‘Oh my God, you’re awake!’ exclaimed the rather startled-looking man who had opened the door. He was a big, rugged fellow. Looks a bit like a farmer, Jessica thought. Quite a handsome young farmer, mind you. Nice thick, black, hair, and strong, even features. He was wearing a thick lumberjack shirt hanging out over a pair of brown workman’s trousers tucked into a pair of shiny black boots, which came up just a few inches above his ankles.
Jessica spoke out without actually engaging her brain first.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ she asked.
‘You’re awake. You’re really awake. Oh my God … I mean … shit,’ the man stammered. He seemed to be even more astounded than Jessica, although it was safe to assume he knew more about her situation than she did.
‘Where the fuck am I? And who the fuck are you?’ she asked again.
‘I’m Thomas. Thomas Garcia,’ he said, stepping towards the bed with a great beaming smile starting to spread across his face. ‘I’ve been looking after you. Well, that is, me and my wife, Audrey, we’ve been looking after you … together. She’s at the market at the moment. She’ll be back soon, though.’
Jessica’s instinct was telling her that he seemed nice enough, but she was still confused, and as he approached the bed she suddenly became very aware of the fact that she was naked beneath the covers.
‘Look, Thomas, if that is your real name, I’m stark naked under these sheets, so I’d appreciate if you didn’t come any closer until you’ve found me my clothes.’
Thomas stepped back and raised his hands apologetically.
‘With all due respect, Miss Jessica,’ he said carefully, ‘I’ve been giving you bed baths for the last five years or so, so it’s not like I ain’t seen you naked before.’
‘What?’
‘I said …’
‘I heard what you said. You said you’ve been giving me bed baths. You’d better be fucking kidding, pal.’
‘Sorry, but I …’
Jessica suddenly registered what he had just said. ‘Wait a minute … five years? Did you say FIVE YEARS?’
‘Yes, you were brought to us five years ago. You were barely alive. We’ve been caring for you ever since, hoping that one day you’d wake up.’
‘FIVE YEARS! Are you fucking nuts?’ She was equally astonished and exasperated by what Thomas was saying. She had never seen him before, let alone been bathed by him on a regular basis for the last five years.
‘Sorry, Jessica. It is Jessica, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’ve taken me completely by surprise.’
‘I’ve taken you by surprise? Well fuck me. I am so-o-o-o sorry. Now will you get me some fucking clothes before I lose my fucking temper with you.’
Thomas looked taken aback. Offended, he replied stiffly, ‘Yes, certainly, I’ll get your clothes and then we can talk. I guess there’s a lot we need to tell each other.’
He backpedalled out of the room, turned to close the door and went lumbering down the stairs, leaving Jessica to mull over all that he had just said. How could it be true? Was this some kind of joke or trick? Then it hit her. She had very little memory of anything. She knew her name was Jessica, but she wasn’t sure whether she knew that only because Thomas had just mentioned it. Her confusion reminded her of what it was like to wake up with a hangover and for just a few seconds not be able to remember where she had been the night before or what she had been doing. The difference this time, though, was that while she could remember what a hangover was like, she couldn’t recall any details of her life, and more than a few seconds had passed without anything coming back to her.
Thomas returned a few minutes later. Somewhat apologetically, he tossed some clothes towards her before heading back downstairs with the promise that he was going to make her some breakfast.
Jessica hurriedly dressed herself in the clothes he had provided. They were a perfect fit, which meant that possibly they were her own. There wasn’t a mirror around in which to check herself out, but she had a feeling she looked all right, although whether she looked five years behind in the fashion stakes remained to be seen. She was now wearing an outfit that was devoid of any colour other than black: ankle-high black boots, baggy black pyjama-type shiny pants with an elastic waistline and elasticated bottoms, and a really cool black foldaround karate-type top that was unbelievably comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that it even seemed to warm her body to a perfect temperature.
By the time she felt ready to head downstairs for a full-on getting-to-know-you session with Thomas, she was aware that someone else had arrived in the house. She heard voices downstairs. They would be raised for a few seconds, and then followed by quiet mumblings. Yet it made no difference what volume they spoke at because Jessica was unable to make out a single word of the conversation from behind the closed door of her room upstairs.
Eventually, after a few deep breaths to calm her nerves, she opened the door and looked out. There was a brick wall directly opposite the doorway and a brick wall directly to the right. No effort had been made to cover the brickwork with plaster or wallpaper or any other covering. To the left was the darkened staircase that led downwards. The steps could barely be seen in the bad light. There were a couple of candles in brackets on the wall leading down to the foot of the staircase, but the flames were low and looked as though they would flicker out at any moment. Jessica hesitated, but she had come this far, so there was no point in running back to the comfort of her room. She ventured a sceptical step and her wary foot found solace on the first step down. The journey to find out where the hell she was, and how she came to be there, was about to begin.
The voices below had quietened again. They had been easier to hear in her room, but now that she was in the confined space of the damp, dark, cold, unwelcoming staircase they were so soft she wasn’t sure if they were there at all. Maybe what she was hearing was just the wind.
She stepped carefully down each step so as not to make any noise. For some instinctive reason she felt it would be a mistake to announce her arrival before she reached the foot of the stairs. There were about fifteen steps to the bottom, all of which looked and felt as if they would creak at the slightest pressure. Jessica was light on her feet, however, and made her way downwards without making a sound. When, after what seemed like an age of careful stepping, she finally got there, she was greeted by more plain brickwork directly in front of her and to her left. On her right was a long black curtain. Behind this, no doubt, she would find Thomas and whoever he had been in deep conversation with for the last God-knows-how-long.
The reality, of course, was different. She pulled back the curtain to reveal yet more brickwork. The staircase had led down to a dead end. But how had Thomas come up and down the staircase? And what was the point of the curtain? It was hiding nothing, for there was only a plain brick wall behind it. Jessica had a horrible feeling that she was trapped, and that Thomas might not be quite the gentleman he had seemed when she had first seen him.
The situation was unnerving. Worse, not only was it extremely frustrating, but it was also making Jessica angry. Here she was, trapped not knowing who she was or where she was, and worst of all she was beginning to feel claustrophobic. Take deep breaths, she thought. She found this easier with her eyes shut, but when she closed
them she found herself back once more in the thick, tangled woodland with the beast right behind her. She opened her eyes again instantly. And the beast was gone.
The voice of Thomas suddenly came clearly on the other side of the brick wall in front of her. He sounded agitated.
‘What the hell do we want with a yellow Cadillac?’ he was asking someone.
Trapped in the stairwell, Jessica began to feel lightheaded. She reached out a hand to steady herself against one of the walls. In doing so she inadvertently closed her eyes. She was starting to feel dizzy and could sense herself slipping from consciousness. After five years of lying in bed, even the small amount of walking she had done had tired her out more than she would ever have believed possible. As her legs gave way and she began to slump forward she heard two things. The first was a woman’s voice, pleading for something. Jessica couldn’t make out the words, but the tone of the woman’s voice made it sound as though she might be begging for something as precious as her life.
The second noise to assault Jessica’s ears was a loud roar. The roar of the beast.
Seven
Sanchez didn’t visit his brother Thomas and his sister-in-law Audrey all that often, but after the events of the previous day he knew it was imperative that he warn them of the potential dangers that lay ahead.
It had been almost five years since the day when he had stumbled across the angel in the street. He remembered it well because it had been the night of the Bourbon Kid, the night he had seen more bloodshed and dead bodies than the average undertaker sees in a year. Unless, of course, you had been an undertaker in Santa Mondega five years ago, when the massacre happened. The angel in question was a beautiful young woman named Jessica. Their paths had crossed briefly before when she had come into the Tapioca, a rare occasion when a stranger had seemed welcome in the bar. But the next time he had seen her she was lying bleeding and unconscious in the street, riddled with bullet holes. A victim of the scumbag who called himself the Bourbon Kid.
Unlike all of the Kid’s other victims, Jessica had somehow managed to cling to life. There had been so many dead bodies lying around in the city that day that Sanchez had reckoned there was no way he stood a chance of getting a doctor to see to Jessica. The local hospital was already overflowing with casualties from what had been a crazy week since the Kid had announced his arrival in town. No, this girl’s slim chance of survival rested with Audrey, Thomas’s wife. Formerly a nurse, she had a knack for conjuring up wonderful medicines, so Sanchez had figured she was Jessica’s best hope. Probably her only hope. Audrey had cared for victims of shootings before, and she had a survival rate of nearly fifty per cent, odds that had suggested Jessica would at least stand a chance of survival, and perhaps even recovery.
When, after a few weeks in Audrey’s care, it had become clear that Jessica was not going to die, despite having taken no fewer than thirty-six bullets, Sanchez had made Thomas and Audrey swear not to let anyone know she was there. Jessica was special. This was no ordinary lady. Sanchez had seen some strange things in his time behind the bar in the Tapioca, but he had never seen someone survive thirty-six bullet wounds, except for maybe Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 2.
In the back of his mind, he had always secretly feared that the day would come when the Bourbon Kid would return and try to kill her again. That day was starting to look increasingly likely to arrive sooner rather than later.
The occasion five years earlier when Jessica had appeared in town had come shortly after a couple of monks had shown their faces in the Tapioca. He remembered that they had been looking for something – something to do with a valuable blue stone that a bounty hunter named Ringo had stolen from them. For sure, that stone had brought nothing but trouble with it. Ringo had stolen it for El Santino, but he’d been having trouble handing it over to his boss because he had taken quite a shine to it himself.
Then the strange monks had come. They wanted the stone back, and, even as mild as they seemed, they would stop at nothing to get it. Their arrival in Santa Mondega had been closely followed by the appearance of the delightful yet mysterious Jessica. She had shown up and won the hearts of all the locals in the Tapioca over the few days she had been around. Of course, before anyone had really had a chance to get to know her, the Bourbon Kid had made his appearance. After slaughtering all the customers in the Nightjar, one of the Tapioca’s competitors, the Kid had showed up in Sanchez’s bar looking for Ringo. He had proceeded to shoot the piss out of everyone in the bar except for Sanchez himself. Ringo had suffered more than most. He had been shot nearly a hundred times, although Sanchez distinctly remembered that it wasn’t until the Kid tore the blue stone from around Ringo’s neck that the poor soul actually died. (Well, he was a criminal lowlife scumbag, in truth, but a hundred slugs or thereabouts is a hundred slugs.) There was something about that stone – whoever held it acquired a kind of invincibility. Sanchez didn’t understand it, but he knew that the stone had been the root of all the trouble. Poor Jessica had merely been passing by in the street, but the Bourbon Kid had gunned her down as he left the Tapioca.
Word on the street was that the Hubal monks had caught up with the Bourbon Kid further on down the line and killed him, taking back the blue stone that was rightfully theirs. So when, five years on, Sanchez had seen two more monks arrive, as well as a vicious bounty hunter named Jefe, he feared the worst. And when he reached Thomas and Audrey’s farmhouse just outside of town, he knew he had been right to fear the worst. It had happened.
He parked his worn-out, rusty old white VW Beetle by the front porch. The door to the farmhouse was practically hanging off its hinges. Perhaps that alone wasn’t enough to signify that something bad had happened. The fact that neither Thomas nor Audrey had come out to greet him was the giveaway. The house was never left unattended. One of them would always come out on to the long wooden porch out front if they heard a car approaching. Not today, though.
He found their bodies in the kitchen. It was a large kitchen that doubled as a dining room. There was a large oak dining table in the middle of the chessboard-tiled floor. Normally the room was spotless, because Audrey had no tolerance whatsoever for mess, but today there was blood everywhere. On the floor on either side of the table were the still warm corpses of Thomas and Audrey. Some kind of smoke or steam was rising from their bloodied, disfigured torsos. The stench in the air was truly foul. Sanchez had smelled some pretty bad things in his time, not least the reek of twenty-seven dead men in his bar one night five years ago, all gunned down in front of his very eyes by the Bourbon Kid. Not even that compared to this nauseating stink. This was something different altogether. This smelt of evil. There were no signs of bullet wounds, and yet both Thomas and Audrey were almost unrecognizable. No sign of even so much as a cut from a razor blade on either of them, but they were drenched in blood. It looked almost as though the pair of them had died from sweating blood. Literally sweating blood.
It hadn’t surprised Sanchez too much that his brother and his wife were dead. He had been expecting to walk in and find them like this ever since the day he had brought Jessica to them. And now she had been taken. The secret concealed doorway in the kitchen that had hidden the staircase up to her room had been opened. It had not been smashed, or damaged in any way, which suggested that it had been opened without force. Even though he knew that there was no way the girl was going to be upstairs, Sanchez still felt he had to head up there to see for himself. At the very least, he wanted to take one last look at the bed in which she had spent the last five years.
He took the climb slowly. He had never liked this staircase. Even as a child, when his parents had owned the house, he had been afraid of climbing these stairs. They were cold and hard, and the narrow width between the walls made them quite claustrophobic. And although it had probably always been his mind playing tricks on him, he was convinced to this day that the air became thinner and thinner as he neared the top.
As he stepped cautiously upwards, Sanchez could hear
no movement from within the room above. If he were to hear a noise it might mean that Jessica was in there and still alive, even though still in a coma. Then again, it might also mean that his brother’s killer was there. It wasn’t until he reached the bedroom door that he realized how dark it was at the top of the stairs. There were a couple of candles on the wall of the stairwell, he knew, but they were unlit or had gone out. He could just make out the light from the opened door at the bottom, but he was actually unable to see much further in front of him than his outstretched hand. By now almost sick with anxiety and fear, he used this hand to open the door and then reach into the room to press the light switch on the wall. The light came on, blinding him for a second. He blinked his eyes to accustom them to the brightness, then took a deep breath and stepped into Jessica’s bedroom.
As he expected, it was empty save for an enormous spider rushing along the bare floorboards toward him. Sanchez came close to shitting himself. He hated spiders with a passion, so he was mightily relieved when the creature stopped dead in its tracks a few feet in front of him, then backtracked slowly – as if not to wanting to lose face – and hid itself under the bed in which Jessica had been living for the last five years. It was reassuring to know that there was no killer present (other than the spider), but equally devastating to see there was no Jessica either. The bed was a little unmade, but there were no signs of any struggle, which was hardly surprising. After all, how difficult would it be to kidnap someone who was in a coma?
The sound of an engine starting up outside made him jump slightly. He had not noticed another car outside the house when he arrived, but he had not been paying that much attention at the time. There was definitely a car outside now, though, and it didn’t sound like his decaying old Beetle. This sounded bigger, with a more powerful engine. Within moments there came a loud screeching of tyres – whoever was driving was in a hurry to get away. There being no windows in the bedroom, Sanchez had to rush back down the narrow staircase in the hope that he might catch sight of whoever was driving away from the farmhouse. There was a chance that Jessica was in the car.