Beach Bodies, Part 2

by Ross Armstrong

  When Simon pushes it open, they meet the familiar contradiction; at the end of the claustrophobic hallway lies a comfortable room decorated in calm blue, designed to make everyone who enters comfortable, while doubling as a lockable panic room.

  The first thing Simon notices is that the air is stale. The last time he was here he must’ve closed the room’s single high window with a tap of the remote that controls it. He would normally leave it open, but perhaps he was subconsciously still worried about the possibility of an intruder.

  Second, he notices a piece of ill fortune. He has left his blue moleskin on the side, containing handwritten notes from their sessions.

  He picks it up and places it in an open desk drawer as if he’s casually tidying up. If this was a potential piece of bad luck, the last thing he sees is a stroke of the good kind. He managed to turn off the screen that otherwise would’ve displayed the ‘Feed Down’ message. He doesn’t have the feed on during the sessions, so they’ve only ever seen the screen off and therefore won’t know what it’s for.

  Simon has these people’s IQs on record and only two were above his. Unfortunately, one of them is Justine’s, who has become his de facto adversary, since he caught her catching the sight of the words ‘Feed Down’. They’re two words that must be guarded from everyone else with his life.

  All in all, he considers, the room is in a decent state given he didn’t know he’d have other people down here. This wasn’t part of the plan.

  ‘Don’t touch that,’ says Simon, as Dawn reaches to flick on the monitor while he was mentally congratulating himself. ‘The footage is on the computer.’

  He manages to pass this off with the energy of a father who’s not particularly good with technology and has everything set just so, living in fear of anyone touching the wrong thing and ruining his sacred system.

  However, Dawn doesn’t take well to correction and gently seethes as Simon brings up the footage from the previous days, neatly compiled.

  Simon flicks through the files, neatly organised by day and hour. Lance and Dawn knew he was always watching. But this is the first time they’re getting a glimpse into the mechanism. It’s like seeing inside a Swiss watch; the cogs, the wheels, so precise. Lance, for one, finds the level of organisation unnerving.

  ‘Pretty thorough, Si,’ says Lance.

  ‘Well. Yes,’ says Simon, who has never been keen on being called Si. It’s what the bullies called him at school.

  ‘There,’ says Dawn, seeing Tabs and Liv preparing salad in the outside kitchen. ‘This is where Liv goes inside.’

  Simon clicks between camera angles with a certain flair, as naturally as Dawn can touch type and Lance might drag someone from a sticky club floor and throw them onto a rain-spattered street. There’s a pleasure in the élan he uses to switch between camera angles, which the other two note.

  ‘That’s it,’ says Lance, as Liv enters the indoor kitchen. ‘Got ya.’

  And now they are reduced to the condition of viewers, watching others go about their daily business. Dawn puts a hand on her hip and considers how mundane it is to watch, and how pleased she is that up until now she’s always been on the other side of the camera. Lance even stifles a yawn as they watch Liv grab the carrots, just as she said. She gets out that same knife, just as she said. She was cooking for ten, so she chops up a quite a few, and does it inside the villa as she’s there, which makes sense. But then she finishes. And there’s no cut. None of the three viewers see her cut herself at all.

  The carrots are placed in a bowl and Liv hurries back outside.

  Liv leads the way up two flights of stairs. Sly and Summer are behind her, silence taking over due to the weight of the moment, and also because they can’t think of anything to say.

  Liv stops mid-step. ‘Hey. Do you remember when we were on the sun deck smoking? When it happened?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, it was, like, the three of us,’ Sly says, one step down from Liv and not enjoying being towered over. It’s not usually how he sees the world. It causes him some spiritual anguish. ‘We heard the sound first. Before we saw it. We were all outside.’

  ‘Yes, eventually,’ Liv says. ‘But who was the last inside. Do you remember?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’ says Sly.

  ‘It might. See, if it was done with that knife, my theory is maybe it started as a stab…’

  They all picture it. A wild stab to the back of Tommy’s neck. The hand that did it unknown.

  ‘Then he fought back. And they went for the throat.’

  They picture Tommy’s hand getting cut as he tries to protect his neck.

  ‘Then they lost control. Kept hacking away.’

  They picture it. The slashes. The blood.

  ‘Then Tommy slumps against the window, limp. They can’t have thought it’d decapitate him. They hadn’t planned to do that, so, there’s a delay. This person is no mastermind. In a way, they get unlucky. The body could’ve lain there for a while before it was found. But the fact they were with us all when the head went down, that’s their stroke of luck.’

  ‘So salty. But oi, the head can’t have fallen long after the attack,’ says Summer.

  ‘No, it can’t,’ Liv says in the quiet of the stairway as they walk up higher, until they see the green door of the Love Nest, slightly ajar.

  ‘So,’ Liv says. ‘Zack was on camera at the time, the only camera that was working during the blackout hour. We could see Roberto and Justine through that bathroom window.’

  ‘Not even any privacy in the bog,’ says Sly. ‘So, go on, who was the last person, like, out in the garden?’

  He’s going along with this more than he thought he would.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ says Summer. ‘Dawn came out of the villa, alone. I think.’

  ‘Yes, good. I remember that, too,’ says Liv, the green door beckoning, just a few steps away. ‘Then who next? Think back. I’m not going to say it.’

  ‘Lance,’ says Sly. ‘He, like, bounded out of the house, saw Dawn was alone, took a seat right next to her and, like, kissed her on the neck.’

  The noise of raised voices reaches them from downstairs in the living room.

  ‘We were buzzin’ at how smitten he seemed with her,’ says Summer. ‘We had the perfect view of the whole garden. I saw him. I saw Lance come out last too.’

  Liv nods, avoiding a smile of satisfaction as she turns her gaze to the green door.

  Twenty-six steps down and through an open door, a draft takes us back to the living room and shakes the fire, throwing shadows onto the wall as Justine speaks on, her voice raised to counter the doubters.

  ‘I saw the moment the feed went down myself. After the hour they give us for lunch, it was supposed to come back on, but it did not,’ Justine says.

  ‘And, love, he’s not telling us this, why?’ says Roberto.

  ‘Because as long as the killer thinks the feed is on, we’re safe. Relatively speaking,’ says Tabs.

  ‘No, I beg to disagree,’ Justine ripostes. ‘That is just a story. A way to keep us inside this house. I get a very strange vibe from Simon, when we are alone. The way he looks at me. Over these six weeks, I have come to know you all, understand you, I trust you,’ Justine says. ‘When I look into your hearts, I don’t think you are conceited or complicated enough to do this kind of thing.’

  ‘Thanks, love,’ says Roberto.

  ‘It is a compliment,’ she says.

  ‘But you don’t trust him,’ Zack says. ‘You get a rapey feeling from the lad and he’s the only one who…’

  It comes to them later than it should, but they have been under duress, from the feelings they’ve had to process in their love lives and from the horrors of recent hours, but still they each curse themselves for not raising this before…

  ‘He was the only one unaccounted for when Tommy was killed,’ says Tabs.

  The idea settles on them.

  ‘He could see on his cameras that Roberto and I were in the bathroom
. He could see Zack was in the video room. Then he waited until everyone was outside,’ Tabs goes on.

  They picture Simon carrying out these checks, before leaving his lounge.

  ‘It was pre-meditated. Having waited for someone to leave themselves open, he saw Tommy enter the Love Nest.’

  They picture Simon sneak behind Tommy through the open green door and strike at the base of his neck. Then saw away.

  ‘He tossed the head from the window and made his way back to his room.’

  They picture Simon disposing of his bloody clothes neatly but running out of time and cleaning the knife hastily.

  ‘Then when he couldn’t stay absent any longer or it’d look odd, he slipped the knife back into the drawer and stepped out into the garden to speak to us.’

  They picture him taking a single breath in the shade of the villa to appear calm and focused, before emerging to talk to them in the glare of the sunshine.

  ‘I believe that the man that has been evaluating us all this time, he is the disturbed one,’ says Justine. ‘And he means to kill us one by one.’

  A spark kicks up from the fire. Then Roberto blows out his cheeks. ‘How long you been keeping all that to yourself, love?’

  ‘We need to call the police,’ says Zack.

  ‘Couldn’t get hold of them, we tried,’ says Roberto.

  ‘That’s what Simon said. Nobody knows if he really called them or not. And given the current information available, I’d say not,’ says Zack, dropping into a more well-spoken mode. He gets a series of looks that tell him the mask is slipping. ‘What? Have I got a telly on my head or something?’ he shouts, recovering a little.

  ‘I’ll go,’ says Tabs. ‘I’ll go and get help.’

  ‘Nah, I’ll go,’ says Zack.

  ‘I feel like I should say I’ll go,’ says Roberto, sheepishly. ‘But I don’t really want to. Plus, I think I’d be better off sticking with Just.’

  ‘Look, you three stay here, where it’s safe,’ Zack says. If the cameras were still on, they’d be pulling back to frame a hero shot. ‘Don’t worry about me. If I can steer clear of getting blown to shit by the weather, outside might be the safest place to be.’

  ‘You’re going to find the cops on foot, are you Zee?’ Roberto says.

  ‘Yeah, any other suggestions?’ says Zack.

  ‘Er… you could use my phone.’

  And as they all start to laugh, he produces it from the knee pocket of his combat shorts.

  ‘How long have you had that?’ says Tabs.

  ‘Whole time. Wanted to check what people thought of me on the outside world. But I couldn’t get any signal. Except a flicker of Twitter upstairs in week one. What does ham-faced cringe-turd mean?’

  ‘I suppose,’ says Justine, ‘they think you are the colour of gammon. And you do things that make them cringe.’

  ‘And they’ve thrown a turd in there,’ says Zack. ‘Just for kicks.’

  ‘Children can be very cruel. Anyway, you might have better luck with a signal outside,’ Roberto says, throwing the phone to Zack.

  ‘I’m not going to ask where you hid this to get it inside,’ says Zack.

  ‘No. I wouldn’t if I were you,’ Roberto says, laughing, very much alone.

  Everyone else remains silent as Zack nods, breathes a little harder, and approaches the front door.

  A small red light goes off in Simon’s room as they watch the clip for a second time.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ says Dawn.

  ‘Well,’ says Simon. ‘It means the front door has opened.’

  ‘Someone’s left the bloody place,’ says Lance.

  ‘Or…’ says Simon. ‘Someone’s just come in.’

  Then their eyes are drawn back to the screen, as on it, Liv has moved her hand sharply away from the knife, bringing it to her mouth to suck the blood.

  ‘What?’ says Lance. ‘Wind back the clip.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Dawn says as they watch again. It’s the exact same footage, except for the fact that this time Liv accidentally nicks her hand.

  Lance moves away and shakes his head, with a knowing glance to Dawn.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ he says.

  ‘Show it again, Si,’ he says.

  Simon makes to play it again, then just freezes it on the wound on her hand. It’s plain for all to see.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Dawn says, side-eyeing Simon, ‘I really don’t think that happened, the first time we watched it.’

  ‘It didn’t,’ Lance says. ‘I’m fucking sure of it.’

  ‘So surreal,’ whispers Dawn.

  And suddenly both of them are looking at Simon and he is laughing like Roberto is at that exact same moment. Alone.

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ says Simon. ‘I’m just playing the tape.’

  ‘What did you do to the footage?’ says Lance, raising his voice.

  Simon looks to Dawn for help, but she is wide-eyed and helpless. The word surreal drifts into her head like a passing cloud.

  ‘What did you do, Si?’

  ‘Oh shut up. It’s real life. You can’t change that. You just missed it the first time, you bloody idiot!’

  And as easy as Dawn touch types on a keyboard, Lance’s hands are around Simon’s throat.

  ‘I’m gonna figure this out,’ Lance says, squeezing, drawing low guttural sounds from Simon’s windpipe. ‘But first, flick the live feed on and let’s find out who just came inside, or who just left.’

  Simon’s eyes bulge.

  ‘Give over, Lance. Stop being extra, for fuck’s sake,’ says Dawn.

  But Lance only squeezes harder. ‘Show us the live feed!’

  A wail comes out of Simon. Pitiful, childish, helpless.

  ‘I can’t,’ he croaks.

  But Lance just holds him there, looking into his eyes.

  Simon is turning purple.

  ‘Show us. The live feed.’

  ‘Stop it, Lance!’ Dawn bellows.

  And another croak. ‘I can’t.’

  Up two floors, in the neon corridor, Liv leads the way to the green door.

  Summer’s feet stop. ‘I’m not sure I want to see it.’

  Liv looks to Sly. ‘Don’t have to, darling.’ He puts his arm around Summer and kisses her on the mouth. Liv watches on. ‘When we open that door, you close your eyes.’

  Liv puts her hand on the handle, then turns back once more. ‘Ready?’

  Summer nods.

  ‘We’re mainly looking for self-defence marks on the hands, to fit my theory.’

  Summer swallows hard.

  ‘All right, Liv,’ Sly says, hand on her side. ‘Let’s crack on.’

  ‘One.’

  Another noise downstairs.

  ‘Two.’

  Summer closes her eyes in preparation.

  ‘Three.’

  Sly and Liv push open the door and step inside, leaving Summer standing on the precipice. But what they see doesn’t quite make sense.

  ‘Shit,’ Sly says. A strangled sound.

  There’s no body there at all. No signs of blood. And as they explore the rest of the room, the bed, the bathroom, and Summer, hand over eyes, screams, ‘What is it? What is it?’ with increasing volume that they’ll soon need to hush, they can’t find a trace of a body whatsoever.

  Summer feels a touch against her skin.

  ‘You can open your eyes now,’ Sly says.

  And when they go from tight to open, she screams. But sees nothing.

  ‘Shit,’ says Sly.

  ‘Stay calm,’ Liv says, panting hard in the blackness, still fumbling for a body. ‘Stay calm!’

  But that’s going to be even harder. Because now the lights are out.

  Meanwhile…

  Meanwhile, another member of the group stares at a white wall. They feel different. They wonder if they’ve just come around from anaesthetic. They’re lighter somehow.

  The room is small and dim, but feels relatively bright to them. And no
t so small. They blink a few times. They’re far away from the others. But not really, so, so far.

  A feeling of doom enters their head. One they can place as like the day before a deadline from school, or the remnants of a bad dream you can’t shake off, or the shame spiral of a hangover day.

  They think about the word ‘they’. It could mean a collective of people or a person you don’t want to give gender to. They’re more used to ‘he’ or ‘she’, but they can’t remember which they are for a moment. It’s liberating. They laugh.

  They hear their voice come back to them. They have the strange sensation they really shouldn’t make a noise, just in case someone comes into this small room. They recall being placed on the naughty step as a kid, being placed outside class and told to be quiet, being left alone for the night by Mum and Dad for the first time and hearing a noise upstairs.

  The room isn’t white anymore. The white seems to be peeling away and revealing something else to them, underneath.

  They can hear voices, not so far away. Familiar ones. But they can’t see their friends anywhere. They want to get to them, but they feel woozy. Then that feeling gives way to a brightness from within: an after-exercise feeling, or like acupuncture, or the breath you take after being told ‘well done’.

  They hear those voices again and know their new friends can’t be far away. But the peeling walls just reveal more white underneath and are telling them nothing. And when they try to get up and walk away, they realise they can’t seem to move a muscle.

  6.57 p.m.

  Simon’s eyes are bloodshot and still. His face rests on the white shag pile carpet. A standard lamp sits above him, its light reflecting in the stagnant gleam of his eyes. His pale neck holds a maroon bruise in the shape of Lance’s hand.

  He gasps, the blood returning to his cheeks, as he splutters, lifting his hand to his throat to assess the damage done.

  Above him, Lance is pressing every button that looks like it can be pressed, but he only gets anywhere when Dawn joins them, turning on the screen to their left, which immediately shows the ‘feed down’ message.