by Adam Nevill
She was now lying on the other side of the bed and holding her breath, hoping the new position merely suggested that she’d moved in her sleep, perhaps switching sides to find cooler, less wrinkled sheets.
Beard resumed his seat.
Kat wondered if her heartbeat was audible. She didn’t know whether to be disappointed that she hadn’t opened the box or relieved that she hadn’t been caught with her head over the foot of the bed. They’d surely search under the bed if she showed any interest in what was down there.
Thirty minutes later Beard’s buttocks slid off the stool again, heavily. Deciding to sit on the floor, he leaned back against the short railing at the top of the stairs. He closed his eyes.
Unsure if he was sleeping on the job or merely resting, Kat took stock: the box needed retrieving from beneath the bed to enable a search and the spray had to be tested. That process was asking for a lot of time. The bed would squeak. Steady hands would be required for the latter part of the procedure or she might blind herself.
Although Beard was the more formidable adversary physically, she’d have to make her move on his watch. He was less attentive, went downstairs more often and took longer to finish his business in the bathroom. Prostate trouble was a possibility: a long silence always preceded tinkling.
Time withdrew like a tide. Her stomach burned with frustration, so the next time the Beard went downstairs she swore to herself that she would open the box and then . . .
Whatever might happen then made her feel sick.
29
Helene must have been swimming steadily for fifteen minutes when she felt the first glimmer of relief: a satisfaction that she hadn’t yet drowned by succumbing to the cold.
She couldn’t fully feel her fingers and toes, her shoulders and neck had stiffened, but by forcing awareness of her fatigue from her thoughts she’d continued to chop at the water and to breathe steadily on the surface of the heaving black.
Twenty more strokes, she repeated to herself and counted them. Resetting her clock she then counted twenty more. With what capacity still remained for imagination inside a skull filled with the noise of her exertions, she pictured herself from above, cutting through the black water with the purpose and speed of a ship’s prow.
For as long as she was able she refused to look up and ahead. The vast distance between herself and the lights on shore remained too demoralising to judge. She told herself that when she next checked she would be closer, she would be encouraged.
When she did finally look up, the lights seemed no closer at all. In fact, with nothing else to measure her progress, her mind tried to trick her into believing that her body was, more or less, still in the same place she’d entered the water. She suspected that a conspiracy of currents was pushing her backwards and that she was merely rising and falling on the swell.
But the natural world and water were full of illusions and little beyond the cold sea could make you feel so small, so futile and weak. She assured herself of this. Maybe only an astronaut adrift in space would know her dread.
When she’d been swimming for what she estimated to be half an hour, she became aware that she wasn’t feeling as cold and was breathing more easily. She was no longer tugging at the air and gulping it and spluttering it out again. She’d reached a plateau, her optimum swimming time. She recognised this stage from swimming in a pool. For a dozen lengths she would feel ungainly, her strokes poorly coordinated and she’d swallow water. But a rhythm and regular breathing would always evolve, hinting that she could swim for ever. Only now would she truly discover how far and for how long.
Small waves nudged her from every direction but she adjusted her strokes and now inhaled on every third stroke rather than every other stroke. This made her believe that she was going faster, with better technique.
When she judged she had been swimming for about as long as she’d need in the pool of the leisure centre to cover one mile, she rested and trod water. That meant she wasn’t doing anything but rising and falling with the swell. And once again she thought of her daughter. But it no longer helped to motivate her, because the lights onshore were still too far away and a paralysing feeling of futility made her sob. Another waste of energy.
She thought of the pig captain’s ruddy face instead, grinning aboard his little boat, and of his stooges, Phil and Richey. It was not right that creatures like that could make her daughter an orphan. She wanted to believe that they would be caught and punished. Surely they would be. Her mother knew where she’d been staying . . . Carol would be questioned by the police . . .
Helene then considered the statuette that had been sent to her daughter in Walsall from down here. Kat had been the only person with her address but who had she shared it with to put Valda and her mum in danger? Lincoln’s recordings were only on disc but her tormentors didn’t know that. For all they knew she had the cave noises on the hard drive of a machine at home in Walsall. If they were prepared to go to these lengths for a handful of CDs, then what might they do to retrieve a home computer?
Her daughter and mother were at risk. They were known to the people who’d orchestrated her tortuous execution by drowning with added hyperthermia. This, and a fear that she couldn’t feel her legs properly below the knee, made Helene resume swimming. Only now she wanted to kill Kat even more than the three men aboard the boat.
After each turn of her head to draw breath, Helene returned her face to the eternal cold darkness beneath the surface, trickle-breathing from her nose to expel air. Sometimes she grunted at the cold and she heaved at the water out of fury, but she also understood that it was now getting harder to think clearly, or to hold any thought in her mind for more than a moment. This was exhaustion: from moving one arm after another, again and again, from rotating her body from side to side, from remembering to kick both legs hard. All of this was consuming her energy while the cold sapped it.
But up and down the small waves she went, kicking her long pale legs, digging at the water with her hands. On and on. On and on.
Valda, Valda, Valda and the lights.
Valda, Valda, Valda and the lights.
Valda, Valda, Valda and the lights.
30
As the floorboards outside her room depressed beneath Beard’s feet, Kat withdrew her hand from the disordered contents of the wooden chest. Her arm shook so hard that she dropped the spray.
Bending at the waist, she scrabbled for the small bullet, seemingly unable to retrieve it from the weave of the carpet. Angry with herself, at the pitch where self-harm probably wasn’t far away, she lunged in desperation and seized the container. Finally, she cupped the cold lozenge inside her palm.
He’d been downstairs again, Beard. Had he not been so tardy and sluggish on the stairs, he’d have caught her with the lid of her box open. Kat inserted the metal capsule inside the pocket of her jogging bottoms.
With no time to enjoy the elation of retrieving the weapon she looked down at the box that was no longer beneath the bed-frame.
Outside the room, a coffee mug was placed on top of the wooden stool. Without having time to consider her action, Kat tugged the duvet part way from the bed so it slumped over the open box and her bare feet.
A bearded face appeared in the doorway. ‘What you doing?’ His words were thick with lassitude, boredom and sleep deprivation, his eyes red from lack of sleep, too much screen-time and alcohol. They dropped to the duvet on the floor.
‘Toilet,’ she replied, feigning a yawn to conceal the alertness that would be visible in her expression under the landing light.
She shuffled towards the door. Beard stood aside but for several airless moments Kat anticipated the rough leather of his hands on her arms. She could practically hear him shouting, ‘What you got there?’ and reaching for the bulge in her pocket. Was it visible? Kat covered it with a hand.
And then she was inside the bathroom with her back against the door and a towel across her mouth to stifle her panicked panting.
She ha
d the spray now, in her pocket. The spray! Using it on a human face was another thing altogether but she’d got here little by little, inch by inch. She’d bloody done it.
Bastards, she mouthed at the door.
She’d have to spray that hoary bearded face out there on the landing and soon, at close range. The very idea made his body seem too large and dense. There was so much of him. The tiny canister, not much bigger than a lip-gloss tube designed for a woman’s clutch-bag, seemed especially pathetic. What could it possibly do to that brute?
Even after all they’d done to her, what they intended to do, what they’d done to Steve, Matt Hull, the others . . . Helene, they made you walk her into certain death . . . she no longer seemed in possession of her previous resolve: her determination to defend, to avenge.
Where had the fantasies of destroying them gone? Maybe they had been nothing more than the desperation of the condemned.
Now she was frightened, not angry. Her muscles were boiled pasta gone cold. Her heartbeat thumped inside her ears. This is what happened when you’d been captive for too long, when they’d let you live for a bit. Hadn’t she’d also begun to feel stupidly grateful whenever they brought her water or tea and when they let her use her own bathroom?
Calm down. She had to calm down.
Kat sat on the toilet but was too scared to pee.
Beard hadn’t resumed his seat. She’d have heard the creak of his weight on the wooden stool, even through a closed door. She was familiar with these few sounds from her days and nights in captivity: her existence had been reduced to a few feet of space and a meagre selection of noises.
Maybe he knew something was up, that she was behaving differently. A weasel mind adapted that way. The merest alteration in a victim’s eyes and they were alert, their instincts honed. They knew who to attack by the posture of a person’s body. Murderers, kidnappers, fanatics: they thought differently and she was trapped in their medium. She had to do it now.
Oh, God.
Kat stood up and ran a tap so Beard could hear something he might associate with the innocent use of a bathroom.
The duvet was still on the floor of her bedroom. She saw it in her mind, like a betrayer, a feather-filled Judas. If Beard poked beneath the duvet he’d see the open box, a container full of old phones. Their batteries were dead, the services and numbers disconnected. But how would he know that?
Inside her mental parliament, each side of the house rose and jeered at the other’s suggestions. Her head was too busy, nothing seemed clear any more. Get angry. This was her only opportunity. Get angry and be quick. Because if adrenalin didn’t take her over, this plan would not work.
And then Beard forced her to act. Three noisy steps sounded on the landing before he thrust open the bathroom door.
Kat was nearly grateful to him for forcing the inevitable. She’d needed him to, or she would have remained pale, shaky and hopeless.
You’re all head, girl, no gut. Gutless, a little admonishing voice said inside.
He had seen the duvet then. He thought she’d been up to something, her sleepiness unconvincing. His eyes peered all over her, took in her hands. Looked at the bath, the sink, the toilet beside her. He was looking for what she’d just removed from the wooden chest.
Beard stepped into the bathroom, his stare fixed on her pockets. ‘Gimme that phone!’ he roared. He’d seen the old mobile phones. There’d been at least four inside the box.
Kat visualised his rough hand on her wrist before she could bring the spray in play. You never tested it into the sink like you were supposed to!
The crevice in the dirty floor of the barn . . . Cap the bastard . . . that idle hand, lifeless, chopped from a body by a sharp stone and left amongst the spoor of livestock. A grooved human chin wet from feasting.
Kat backed into the sink. The rim indented her buttocks.
She thumped one hand outwards, fingers wide, into Beard’s sternum.
Her free hand scrabbled at her hip until her fingertips found the pocket of her jogging bottoms.
Beard snatched her outstretched arm at the wrist. She pulled back with all of her might and sat in the sink. A sudden sharp pain from the taps pressing into her lower back stabbed some purpose into her mind. Kat dipped her hand inside her pocket and the canister slipped into her palm.
Beard grasped her weapon arm below the shoulder. He didn’t prevent its range of movement because he wanted to see what she held in her hand. He suspected a phone, not a weapon.
‘See,’ Kat said. ‘Lip balm.’
Beard moved his face closer, eyes wide to identify what lay inside her palm.
Kat’s index finger slipped into the groove intended for a woman’s frightened finger. The top of the can was black and made from rubber. She thought of how the pepper had burned her whole life away for twenty minutes at school camp.
Watch for blowback.
‘’Tis that? What you got?’ Beard demanded.
And then his ruddy, veiny face and bulging eyes were engulfed by the discharge of an aerosol. Small droplets cavorted in their thousands.
31
Mouth open to inhale, Helene caught another small wave in the face. Engulfed by the shock of choking on seawater, she flailed.
Panic brought immediate clarity to her vision, electrifying her awareness but failing to fully extend into her muscles. She was too weary, losing rhythm: practised movements were heavier, clumsy, slowing. Her half-closed eyes stung. The inside of her ears throbbed like thumbs beneath misjudged hammer strokes. Her nose burned and tendrils of pain threaded her sinuses. Her face might have been struck by a shovel carven from solid ice.
Helene floated on her back to regain her breath, to ease the terror of the wave flushing her mouth.
She calmed and discovered that the persistent anxiety about how long she could swim worried her less than it had when she hit the water so long ago.
She turned onto her tummy and began breast-stroking: slowly, her shoulders screaming, but at least her head was more out of the water than under it.
Ten minutes later she was sure she saw an object on the surface. A moment later it appeared to be another head, some distance to her right. She stopped swimming and trod water.
Peering about, she waited for a series of small waves to slope away and reveal the dark blur facing her: a shape different in colour and form from the surrounding air and water.
There. There it was again.
Helene struck out for it, losing sight of the object briefly before her frantic vision rediscovered the dark sphere.
She lost it again in a trough. Then found it.
The fact that she took so long to reach the buoy when it had never been far away was a fresh blow to her confidence about her progress. A fear of swimming against a current or tide from the beginning made her body seem twice as heavy. Maybe her sluggishness and the presence of the marker signified a current. She didn’t know. She couldn’t read the symbols of the sea.
Reaching the buoy, Helene engulfed the slimy sphere with her hands as if it were her own child.
By pressing it down and under the surface she attempted to rest her chest and chin upon it. At the first three clumsy attempts the buoy slipped between her stiff white hands, bobbed up and away.
Beneath the surface a rope disappeared straight down, so she coiled her legs around the mooring to keep the buoy still. Mussel shells encrusting the rope cut rough and sharp against her calf muscles and ankles, but she kept hold of the buoy.
Once clear of the water her shoulders and upper arms told her how much they ached. Oddly, she no longer felt cold. That couldn’t be a good sign. Not after she’d been in the water for so long.
Looking to the land, she could see that the distant hill lights still appeared small. But the separation between the lonely vigil of one light and its neighbour seemed much greater now, wider. If the lights were further apart then she must be closer to land. These lights were not strung along the shoreline. They were shining from buildings in
distant hills. The coastline must be some distance below and before the faraway beacons.
She had made progress. A lot of progress.
There was only a trace of illumination from the distant moon and no light pollution along the coast. By concentrating her gaze straight ahead she just made out the lumpy silhouette of a rocky coastline: an uneven line barely distinguishable in the darkness. The rocks of the shoreline were a lighter colour than the oily sea but still distant.
Helene pressed her face against the slippery buoy and wept for a few seconds. She’d come so far. She’d come so close.
Further ahead of her she saw another buoy: dark and bobbing like the head of another person in the water. Maybe twenty metres ahead.
Looking about herself she noticed another one behind her. Further to her left she thought she could see another two.
Why they were there was a maritime mystery but she’d just swum across two parallel lines of buoys anchored to the ocean floor by rope. And to place her numb and wrinkled hands upon something manmade almost kidded her, for a short time, that she was close to saving herself from the sea.
But how far out in the water these buoys were and how far away the distant, patchy suggestion of rocky land, she couldn’t accurately judge. And what of her frozen body if she even managed to claw herself onto those rocks? She knew she had little strength remaining and would be unable to walk if she even made it ashore. Of that she was certain.
The end of her natural resources approached. The swim had kept her afloat and active but merely reaching the first buoy had sapped what felt like the very last of her strength.
She turned her weary face to the sky and then pushed herself away from the buoy. She swam on her side in the direction of the next one.
Valda . . . Valda and the lights . . .
Valda . . . the lights . . .
Valda . . .
32
Hands with skin as hard as old shoe-leather clapped the outside of Kat’s shoulders. Great paws cupped, crushed and yanked her upwards.