Trapped Within

by Bradshaw, Duncan P.

  “What the fuc…?!”

  Argh, shit!

  It hadn’t worked how I intended, but he was shocked enough that I still had use of my arm and my hand was firmly gripping the cold plastic. Staggering around, dizzy from the first impact, I swung again, bending my elbow and circling my arm in a cack-handed bowling move, striking my temple. It went black; I couldn’t move, talk or see. All I could do was think.

  Shit.

  How I wish I could have heard those words. Words are all I am left with now. Even now, her last words echo in my mind. Her eyes as they turned from colourful annoyance to blackest horror. Sometimes I think I can hear her speaking, softly asking me how I am and a million other questions, all asked with one motivation in mind; to make sure I am okay. I tell her I am okay, nothing of me to worry about. He shuts me up, again.

  Now I sit here, existing. Day-to-day, hour-by-hour, seeing and hearing everything, but not being able to experience it. A prison within a prison. Living, but not living. Existing, but only in the recesses of my own mind.

  Since that day when I found my last physical strength, I have had no control, no place in this world or my own world. I have plenty of time to think. I can do this much at least. I think about the life I will never have with Chess. I think about revenge.

  I get stronger every day, but so does he; you find yourself with a lot of time in prison. And now I sit and talk to myself, but now I am the voice. He no longer talks to me; he no longer responds but I talk to him. I tease him, curse him, chip away at him, no, at me. Me? I know he hears me, I feel it. The depth of despair being reached and then the floor bottoming out on him as he realises, all over again, that I will never go away. One day he will kill me—us. If he doesn’t, I will. I am now my own worst enemy.

  Louise de Clifford currently lives somewhere in the vast plains of south Wiltshire and often talks about living everywhere else one day, when she wins the lottery of course. When asked she will tell you that the most interesting thing about herself is her three cats, Jambi, Fraggle and Nermal, which may actually be true as they have their own Instagram page and have more followers than she does.

  As well as writing, Louise loves anything creative and arty, especially singing and has been in a band with her wannabe rock god husband who plays drums. She recently decided that, as she hasn’t played her violin for a decade, that she is going to stop telling people that she can play violin...so maybe you should just forget anything about the violin…unless you want to buy a violin?

  Not that she has any spare time with all the amazing ideas she is always coming up with, but in her spare time she likes to read, draw, go camping, swim, walk and other things that you generally put into the ‘hobbies’ section of a CV and regret during each interview. Oh, and procrastinate – she’s really good at that.

  There’s blood on the chair. A dot, drawn down, like a fat exclamation, one a girl might draw. A teenager with new stationary; a gold pen, one with sparkles, and one lurid and red. It’s not dry, that ungainly spot, so it gets longer all the while I look at it. Maybe it’s just that I can’t not look at it, and imagination and time make it more than it is. The policeman in that chair doesn’t notice. He’s laconic. He’s got this slow way of doing everything, from talking and moving, to the way his eyes occasionally slide down to look at the few notes he takes. He looks down for a while, I look at the blood. He writes, that exclamation gets longer. Or, it’s just imagination. He moves and thinks and speaks slow and leaves plenty of room for fancy.

  “My wife…”

  He watches me with heavy, lazy eyes. I mean languid, perhaps. Deep, blue, watchful. Water in an old quarry. He nods but says nothing. What does he have to say? Why does he have to say anything at all? He doesn’t. Not a thing.

  “… I don’t know. The phone. I thought… her mother. I called. She’s not there.”

  “She’s somewhere.”

  That worries me. Such a simple sentence, but the open kind. Room to fall in that sentence. An open elevation. He watches, blinks—everything—slow.

  I nod, hang my head. Worried. Not guilty. Not tears, or drama, because I’m a guy and he’s a guy. If he’d been a woman, maybe I’d have welled up. Not over the top. Just wet eyes. Watery.

  His eyes shift downward and he writes something. I don’t say anything. I worry what it is he’s writing. I don’t think I said anything at all. I didn’t leave anything behind, and now it’s time to make sure my words are tidy, too. The wood’s dry now.

  There’s blood, though. I thought it would be clean. No mess, no fuss. Just… slipping away.

  I thought about this. This guilt. I knew I could kill but not if I could bear it.

  It’s not as heavy as I thought. More. Crushing. Sinking.

  Sinking under water. Everything’s about water. I hear drips. Splashes. Lapping waves. Trickles. I feel it on my skin when I wake, like evaporation happening right next to me. Like I sleep beside a lake, the quarry, and she’s mouthing something as she goes down. It was dark. The water still dark in the morning. Had it been misty? I can’t honestly remember. The feel of it, I do remember. Damp on my skin and in my hair.

  I stayed that way, by the edge of the water, for hours. She didn’t come up.

  Heavier than the water, this guilt.

  “Can’t think of anywhere?”

  I shake my head. Shake. Nod. I planned this. Rehearsed. Spoke to myself. Placed a chair there, in our kitchen. It’s where we sat, so it’s a natural place, for me. The living room wasn’t. A couch, you sit back or forward, it just looks wrong, or contrived.

  His head goes down. He writes something. The spot, dark and wet on the dry wood backrest of the chair is longer. I hear drips. I glance, quick, so he won’t notice. By the rear legs of the chair, blood drips. Blood, not water. The chair, bleeding. Drip.

  Scratching—the sound of his pencil on the pad. Maybe the point of the pencil’s worn low, and it’s the sound of the wood against the rough notepaper I hear.

  The scratching slows. He looks up, mouths something, but no questions come out. There’s question in his eyes, though. Mine, too. I don’t know what my expression is. It’s not one I’ve seen in the mirror I watched myself in while I sat in this chair, the mirror in the policeman’s chair so I would see what he would see.

  The drips are music. Fast, quick. A lullaby. A verse, a chorus.

  He slumps, like he’s fainting, light-headed. Maybe he is. The blood turns from a spot, to a drip, to a puddle, to a pool, to a lake.

  He closes and opens those deep eyes and I stare. I stare, wide-eyed—I wasn’t expecting surprise—I haven’t practised this. She’s there, next to the blood. The policeman’s eyes open and close and my mouth does the same.

  My wife is wet through, and wan. Pale clothes and hair and skin and eyes milky like dead, drowned women. She seems thin. Not blown and bloated or even eaten, but just like a shade, like things looks with sunglasses on in the dark, looking into the shadow. Just a dim, thin thing. She’s not there, but I’m here, the policeman is in her chair and he slides to one side, sees the blood all around him and sighs, says something that sounds like hugs.

  That’s why, he’s thinking. That’s why I’m dying.

  He doesn’t fall. She can’t push him because surely, she’s no more than a shade. She stands in the blood pooled around the chair. The wood’s dry now. It was wet when I pulled it back from the quarry. Wet when I cut her loose so she could sink again. I can see the marks where tape pulled some of the colour, a stain like ages oak, from the legs.

  Everything seems pale. Her, the dying man. Me, too. I should have let her sink in the chair. I brought it back. People have four chairs. Three’s not right. They’d ask, “Why three chairs?” I’d say one broke. They’d think.

  She walks, her feet wet and the blood wet, so she spreads the mess across the kitchen floor. She still drips and leaks water like she brought the quarry with her and if she stood in the man’s blood long enough she’d wash it all away.

 
I think her feet look normal, but pale. Her veins are almost black. Tendons, bones, skin, all hard and white. There’s a corkscrew in her hand and she puts the corkscrew on my lap before she moves around, and then behind me. She kneels and winds tape round my ankles, my calves. I look up. I’m sitting where the policeman would sit as I watch myself and practise my lies in the mirror. In the mirror, she’s behind me. Below is a pool of blood so deep and dark I can’t see where it ends.

  Craig Saunders is the author of over a hundred novels, novellas and short stories including 'Masters of Blood and Bone', 'RAIN' and 'Deadlift'. He writes in many genres, but horror is his favourite.

  Craig lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and children, likes nice people and good coffee. Find out more on Amazon, or visit:

  www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com

  www.facebook.com/craigrsaundersauthor

  Twitter: @Grumblesprout

  The front door slowly creaked open disturbing a stillness that had claimed hold of the house for days. Its inertia was so thick as to be almost palatable, like the bland taste of stale water, and when Darren closed the door behind him as carefully as he had opened it, he swallowed back the strange sensations that tingled on his tongue. Placing his rucksack on the carpet, it kicked up dirt that had lain undisturbed for days, making his throat tickle as he breathed in a lungful of air, thick with dancing dust particles.

  Is this what death tastes like?

  He shivered as he looked down the hallway, berating himself for such careless and unsympathetic thoughts. Now wasn’t the time to spook himself with morbid whimsies.

  Shaking his shoulders in an attempt to dislodge his mind’s macabre meanderings, Darren took cautious steps into his Grandmother’s house. It seemed like nothing had changed since he’d last been there as child. The wallpaper still had the same green, floral rosettes arranged in vertical columns and separated by borders of rose heads and daffodil petals. Even now, at twenty-four, he still found himself seeing the dragon faces his mind made from the botanical patterns.

  Darren smiled at the tooth-filled mouths and the nostrils that billowed smoke. He never understood why others couldn’t see this image. To him it was as plain as day.

  What a delightful imagination you’ve got, Grandma Flo used to say before ruffing his hair and offering him another toffee.

  He sighed as he walked into the kitchen and took a seat by the dining table. On the side lay a pile of unopened letters. He flicked through them, reading the printed name on the front of each.

  Florence Hannam.

  Mrs Florence Hannam.

  He’d always thought it was an old fashioned name, but it and others like it had seen a resurgence in the last few years.

  Grandma Flo had become trendy again.

  Darren smiled at this thought and relaxed back into the chair, placing the letters back on the table and taking in his surroundings. The place wasn’t a mess, but it wasn’t really clean. The sides were thick with dust and insects had taken to calling the windowsill home. It was a little unkempt, but only through recent neglect.

  Of course that made sense; she’d been dead for a good few days before anyone found her. That’s what his mother had told him, anyway. Fell to the floor and cracked her head. Unable to get up, and with no one around, all she could do was patiently wait for death to take her.

  A tear collected around the edge of Darren’s eye as he thought of his Grandma, helpless and vulnerable. The air grew colder and pricked his skin as her final moments played out in his mind.

  The call of a magpie, outside, brought him from his reverie, but the sound of something else made him shiver; footsteps from upstairs.

  Darren held his breath and listened. Had the others already arrived? His parents were driving back from Scotland and had messaged this morning to say they’d be delayed. Their solicitor was due any moment, but what would she be doing skulking around upstairs?

  He called out and waited for a response, but none came.

  He should be alone in the house, and yet the noise above him suggested otherwise. The creaking of the floorboards across the ceiling…

  Rising to his feet, Darren crept towards the stairs and tried to ascend without treading too hard on each step, lest the boards creak beneath him.

  It could be a burglar. Someone in the street that had watched the ambulance take a dead body away. Perhaps they thought they’d seize the opportunity and hunt for any valuables. Old dears like Grandma Flo were notorious for hiding their savings under mattresses.

  Clenching his fists as he prepared for a fight, Darren’s mind raced with possibilities.

  He hoped it was a burglar.

  Anything but…

  Following the sounds, he traced the direction, but he already knew which room they’d be coming from. When his senses confirmed his fears he felt his stomach contract and his jaw clench.

  At the far end of the landing, next to Grandma Flo’s bedroom, stood a door that looked the same as the rest. But the magnolia panels and metallic-black door handle held the resonance of a nightmare, one Darren had spent his life trying to shake.

  Childhood fears had been circling his thoughts since he walked through the front door, and now at last they were ready to infiltrate his conscious mind. Darren felt his scrotum tighten as those fears took hold. His throat dried and his heart pounded in his ears.

  Come on now, he told himself. You’re not a little kid anymore.

  The dragon faces on the wallpaper watched his cheeks fade white, showering him with a wave of patronising grins, sinister in their friendliness towards his growing terror.

  He laughed at himself; at the preposterousness of his reaction. But it was a forced laugh, and a smile that quickly disintegrated with disingenuity. Darren’s steps grew smaller, his footsteps lighter, as he approached the innocuous looking door. His eyes scanned the woodwork, picking out the scratches that had been painted over; an attempt to conceal them, but failing to completely fill the ragged grooves that scored across its width. Placing his hand on the door handle, he felt the cold metal throb with evil. He placed his other hand on the key sitting in the lock and felt the resistance as he went to turn it.

  A bang from behind made him jump away from the door, spinning around to confront its source. He saw nothing, but the noise came again. Then a gurgling slurp. A sloshing of liquid.

  His face relaxed as he recognised the sounds and stomped across the hallway with purpose. Entering the bathroom, he opened a cupboard door, only to be blasted with a wave of dry air and the musty smell of an arid atmosphere; the kind that can only be produced by a boiler kept in a confined space.

  Pressing a button on a control panel, Darren turned the central heating off.

  Must have been left on timer, he thought. The pipes had been warming up, causing them and the floorboards to expand.

  On the floor was a growing patch of damp; its influence spreading across the carpet and up the wall. Following the trail of mould, Darren got to his knees and peered underneath the wash basin. A pipe running vertically up to the tap was slowly dripping water onto the floor. He touched the lino below, itself swollen with moisture, and was not surprised to feel the softening effects of rot. This kind of deterioration must have taken weeks, maybe months.

  Downstairs a phone bellowed with the cry of an old fashioned ringer.

  With adult eyes, and the power of reason, he looked back at the door across the hallway. Its air of menace had rescinded but the haunting memory of his Grandma’s words echoed in his mind.

  Stay out of the Darkling room, Darren. It’s dangerous in there.

  It took thirty minutes to reassure his mother that he had everything under control and it didn’t matter that they weren’t due back for another couple of hours. Yes, he was sorry he didn’t check his mobile phone, and yes he’d charge it up as soon as their conversation was over. The solicitor would be here any moment and he was perfectly capable of taking instruction and receiving the will. Everything was going to be fine.
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  Their relationship had been fractious in the past, and the ten minute telephone call was a reminder that he’d made the right decision to move far away at an early age in his adult life.

  Darren marvelled over the plastic receiver as he placed it back on the cradle. A home phone. He hadn’t seen one in a while. Especially one that looked so antiquated. It didn’t take long in this modern world for things to quickly become outdated. Even his Samsung was struggling to keep up with the demands of Instagram, Facebook, and all the other apps that ran automatically in the background. He was lucky if the battery lasted to the end of the day.

  Above him came a clunk and patter as the heating cooled, causing the pipes and floorboards to contract under the lowering temperatures.

  It really did sound like footsteps.

  Heading out to the hallway, Darren retrieved his phone charger and torch from his bag then headed further into the house. He searched around the kitchen, through the cobwebs under the sink, and eventually found the stopcock. Pulling the lever, and satisfied the water was shut off, he stepped back out of the cubby-hole and straightened his back, groaning at the strain his muscles had endured in such an unnatural angle.

  Turning a tap, he allowed the water to run until the flow died down; reducing to a trickle and then eventually fading away.

  Darren smiled to himself, proud he’d picked up some useful knowledge from his father over the years. He made his living as an actor, treading the boards every night in the West End of London, but he was just as capable as the next man. A point he’d been determined to prove ever since he came out as gay, three days before his twentieth birthday.

  It had taken a while for his parents to come to terms with his sexuality. They had outwardly appeared fine with the announcement, but Darren could sense a frosty unease with the situation; especially from his dad. Over the years, though, they had seemingly grown used to the idea, and the initial shock of their son questioning a moral code they didn’t even know they possessed had gradually subsided. Although things had never been quite right since.