‘Didn’t she warn you not to plot against me?’
I coughed harshly, then rolled onto my side and threw up.
‘One thing I’ll thank you for though,’ he said. ‘You actually made Radha hope, just for a second, and that made her subsequent disappointment much sweeter.’
I coughed again, clutching my stomach with one hand and wrapping my other arm over my head.
‘Get up,’ he said. I didn’t move. ‘Get up!’ he shouted, and fired his gun. The noise was deafening, and some of the women shrieked at the sound. I wasn’t hit; it must have been a warning shot into the wall.
I heard the woman nearest me whimper, and I thought about all the fear that must be flowing into Forman. I looked up and saw him smiling, almost leering, his eyes wide. He looked drunk.
It was like a drug.
‘Now get up,’ he said. I got to my knees and he kicked me again, softer this time - just enough to let me know who was in charge. I paused on my knees, gasping for breath, and raised myself to one foot, then the other. I stood for a moment bent over, my hands on my knees, trying to breathe deeply and ignore the pain.
Radha was silent, shrinking back against the wall. In spite of all her anger, apparently she’d still learned not to antagonise him directly.
‘Pick this up,’ said Forman, dropping something on the ground before me. It was my pocket-knife.
‘Pick it up,’ he said again. I stooped and picked it up. ‘Since you and Radha have become such good friends,’ he said, ‘why don’t you get to know each other a little better? Cut her.’
‘No,’ I said.
He kicked me in the back of the knee and I fell over again, dropping the knife.
‘I have already told you that you do not talk back to me,’ he said. ‘Now stand up.’
I retrieved the knife and climbed back to my feet. Radha was staring at me ferociously, her dark eyes narrow and her teeth bared.
‘I’ve read your psychological file,’ said Forman. ‘You’re obsessed with death. I also happen to know, thanks to our conversation last night, that you’ve already killed one person, and I imagine the memory of it has been festering in your gut for months. You’re probably desperate to hurt someone again.’
Radha’s face was hard and set, like a mask of death. Her hands were curled into fists.
‘I’ve spent my life studying people like you, John, and I know exactly how you think.’ Forman was behind me, but his voice filled the room. ‘You dream about hurting people. You torture pets. You pull the wings off of flies. That’s all she is, John. She’s a fly - she’s an insect. She’s a nothing. Cut her.’
She was staring me down, but her eyes were wider now; her gaze was less straight. She’d thought I was on her side, but doubt was creeping in. She was starting to fear me.
Somehow, the blade on the pocket-knife had come unfolded in my hand. I held it up and watched the reflected light shine and run and drip off it like honey.
The knife felt so . . . right. Strip everything away and this is who I was: a man with a knife, feared and respected, free to do and say and be anything I wanted. Months ago I had been in this same situation - this exact pose - holding a knife to my mother, watching her squirm and knowing that I could do anything I wanted. I had been a god, just as Forman had been a god, and I had thrown it all away. Why? So I could force myself into an ill-fitting mould and live the rest of my life as a painful lie? So I could spend my days in isolation and my nights in a losing fight with my own nature? I’d wasted sixteen years trying to be somebody I wasn’t, and all that time I’d been asking the wrong question.
Instead of, ‘How long can I keep this up?’ I should have been asking, ‘Why should I keep this up at all?’
Radha could see it now - some change in my eyes or my hands or my body that let her know I was going to do it. She was becoming scared. She knew how much I wanted to cut her, to open her up, to hear her screaming just for me.
For me? Or for Mr Monster?
I hadn’t thought about Mr Monster for days. He used to fill my mind like an infection, duplicating and growing, but ever since the night I killed the cat in the warehouse, he had disappeared . . . which meant he hadn’t disappeared at all; he’d just melded so fully into my own consciousness that I had become him completely. John had virtually disappeared.
I held up the pocket-knife, staring at it intently. There were so many options, so many blades and tools: a can opener, a saw, a corkscrew. I wanted to try them all. I wanted to feel her muscles tense as I pressed the knife into her back, to hear a whimper of pain, soft and terrified. It’s who I was.
But it wasn’t who I wanted to be.
I put a finger on the back of the blade and steadily pushed it closed - up, over, and down - until it snapped into place.
‘John . . .’ said Forman slowly. What was he feeling from me?
I held out the pocket-knife, clasped tightly in my fist, looking straight into Radha’s eyes. She was hard to see, as if my eyes were blurred. I was crying. I dropped the knife, and as it fell it tore a gash through my soul, cutting Mr Monster away like a massive tumour. I was wounded - I was broken in half - but I was me again.
‘You idiot,’ said Forman, and then he hit me again, a solid blow to the back of the head that felled me like a sack of rocks. Radha caught me, dropping to her knees to slow my fall. Behind me, Forman was swearing darkly, and I heard something loud and metallic.
‘You sick, stupid bastard,’ he went on. ‘You think I can’t do anything to you? Why don’t you ask your new girlfriend there about how much fun the pit is, huh?’
There was a loud screech, and Radha pulled me closer, away from Forman. Something heavy fell on my foot, clipping the edge, and I turned and saw that a thick plank of wood had fallen on it. The three barrels in the corner had been moved, and the boards beneath them shifted. Underneath was a wide hole in the concrete floor, with nothing but blackness beyond.
‘Never give in,’ Radha whispered. ‘No matter how bad it gets, and no matter what he wants you to do - never give in.’
Something grabbed me from behind and yanked me backwards, pulling me away from Radha and wrenching my foot out from under the plank.
‘You’ll love it in here,’ said Forman. ‘It’s a great place for an idiot like you - nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to think about except how much you hate yourself.’
He dragged me across the floor and I saw that the hole was full of brown, oily water. I tried to fight free but Forman’s grip was too strong; he pulled me to the edge and tossed me in.
The water was shallower than I thought, maybe a foot deep, and I hit the bottom awkwardly with a painful, unexpected crash. The water was slick and cold. I sat up, struggling to reorient myself, just in time to feel one of the heavy boards slamming down on my head. I fell face forward into the water and suddenly everything was quiet; sounds were distant and dull, fading away into nothing at all.
I wanted them to fade away for ever.
Chapter 18
‘John!’ It was a harsh whisper, loud and soft at the same time. ‘John, are you okay?’
I was cold, and my head was throbbing like mad. I shifted slightly, and lances of pain shot through me. Dirty water lapped against my face.
‘He moved,’ said the voice. ‘He’s alive.’
‘Can you hear us?’ said another.
The pain in my skull was centralised; I tried to reach my hand back to feel it, but I slipped under the water as soon as I moved. I put my arm back down and sputtered to the top. The water was deep enough that I couldn’t lie down, so I had to prop myself up on my arms, but at the same time the planks above were so low that I couldn’t sit up comfortably. I balanced more carefully and raised my hand to touch my head. It was hard to twist my body into the right shape, but my fingers brushed a big, throbbing bump. It was huge. I was lucky I hadn’t drowned.
‘John?’ said a voice. Then softer, to the side, ‘He did say his name was John, right?’
I
tried to answer, but my throat was raw and my voice was an unintelligible rasp. I coughed and swallowed and tried again.
‘Radha?’ I asked.
‘He took her upstairs,’ said the voice. ‘She won’t be back till tomorrow. I’m Carly.’
I thought of Stephanie, hanging upstairs, and all the things Forman had done to her. He would do them to Radha now. Somewhere inside of me, Mr Monster longed to be there when the women were tortured - longed to be a part of it. That was good; if I was aware of Mr Monster, that meant we were separate again. I was back in control.
‘There’s another woman upstairs,’ I said. ‘Her name is Stephanie. He brought her in the same night he brought me.’
‘He’ll bring her down here eventually, if she survives,’ said Carly. There was a pause, then another voice spoke.
‘Where are we?’
I paused. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I’m from Atlanta,’ the new voice said. ‘We’re nowhere near there any more, are we?’
Atlanta. Is that where Forman had lived before coming here? None of these women had come from Clayton, or we would have heard about the disappearances on the news. ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re nowhere near Atlanta. Are you all from there?’
‘We’re from all over,’ said another woman. That was all three, minus Radha. ‘What day is it?’
I thought back to the previous day, though it seemed so long ago. ‘Today is June twelfth.’
‘Three months,’ said one of the women.
‘Four for me,’ said Carly.
‘Almost five weeks,’ said the third.
Forman had been in Clayton for almost seven months, but he travelled often. Had he collected these women from all over the country?
‘You, from Atlanta,’ I said. ‘He got you there three months ago?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Nebraska.’ After a moment she added, ‘My name’s Jess.’
‘Jess,’ I said. ‘And you’ve been here since then?’ My head was beginning to throb again, and I shifted carefully to ease up pressure on the bump.
‘Not here,’ she said, ‘but a prisoner, yeah.’
‘There was another house,’ said Carly. ‘Most of us came from the old house, but he wasn’t there a lot. Someone came by once a week to feed us - we don’t know who - but Forman still visited often enough to keep us terrified. About one month later he packed us all up in a moving van and came here. He got Jess at a truck stop.’
‘I was travelling,’ said Jess softly.
‘He got me in Minnesota,’ said the third voice. She paused, then added, ‘I’m Melinda.’
‘So he came here about seven months ago to investigate the Clayton Killer, but he still took time to travel all over and kidnap you - plus the four he’s already killed.’ It was like an addiction. He couldn’t go for long without torturing somebody; he needed the emotional buzz just like a drug. Could I use that against him? There had to be some kind of way out of this. ‘Was the pit already here when you arrived?’
‘Yes,’ said Carly, ‘and the chains, and the ropes through the rafters upstairs.’
‘The walls are reinforced, too,’ I said. ‘It took him a while, but he prepared everything so he’d have a working dungeon by the time you got here. That’s a lot to move.’
‘He’s moved it once before,’ said Jess, ‘at least once. Radha remembers a third house; she’s been here the longest.’
Of course she had. Radha was his favourite, because she was a fighter. Every day she chose between fighting and being his favourite victim, or giving up and being killed.
‘How long has she been here?’ I asked.
‘A year,’ said Melinda.
A year. After enough time, most people would choose to die. Apparently not Radha.
And then her screaming began, drifting down from upstairs like a prophecy of doom. We all fell silent, and I slid down in the water until it covered my ears and drowned out the noise.
The water was rank and oily; it had probably held several prisoners, and had likely never been cleaned. When I started to feel the urge to pee I held it for as long as I could, but eventually there was nothing to do but let it go. The water grew warm, and I finally stopped shivering.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, always aware, even in sleep, of my head and arms and the surface of the water. I tried to twist my body at an angle, to press against the boards above me, but they were too heavy to budge. The barrels on top were probably full of earth, or more water.
I ended up perpendicular to one of the walls, my head wedged up against the side and my arms crossed under my head; with my hands balled into fists, one on top of the other, they were just tall enough to keep my face above water. I held myself still, breathing slowly, barely conscious.
I’d had nothing to eat or drink since my date with Brooke. After hours of lying in the pit, my hunger made me feel sick and weak, and I was so thirsty I could barely swallow. There was nothing to drink but the water I was lying in, so I sipped it gingerly and tried to sleep.
‘Is he still in there?’
‘Yeah. He never talks, but we hear the water every now and then, so we know he’s alive.’
‘Sleeping, then.’ The voice was weak, but familiar. Radha was back.
‘I’m awake,’ I said, pressing my head and arms more firmly against the wall. The water sloshed around me in tiny waves.
‘Who are you?’ Radha asked.
‘My name is John Cleaver,’ I said.
‘I know your name,’ said Radha, ‘but who are you? Why are you here?’
‘Same reason the rest of you are here,’ I said.
‘But he’s never taken a guy before,’ said Carly.
‘And he said you’re a killer,’ said Radha.
‘I . . .’ I stopped. What could I possibly tell them? More importantly, what could I learn from them? They’d lived with Forman far longer than I’d even known him. If he could transform into a demon, they might know about it. ‘Have you ever seen Forman looking . . . different?’
‘You mean in a disguise?’ asked Radha. ‘No, I’ve never seen one.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean, have you ever seen him, I don’t know, grow claws or something? Fangs? Does he ever look like an actual monster?’
Silence. After a moment I heard Radha speak softly.
‘He’s hallucinating.’
‘The pit does that,’ sighed Melinda.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s real. One of his friends was . . .’ I stopped. I didn’t know if Forman was listening in, and this was information I hadn’t given him yet. That’s the whole reason he had me here, supposedly - to find out what had happened to the demon Mkhai.
Regardless, their confusion had already answered my question. If they had seen him change forms, they would have recognised my meaning immediately. There was no point giving away any more info.
‘Never mind,’ I said.
‘So did you really kill someone?’ asked Radha.
‘I did,’ I said. ‘A friend of his. But I didn’t want to hurt anyone.’
Silence again.
‘Can you kill Forman?’ asked Melinda.
I heard a gasp from the others, and a grumble of protest from Radha.
‘Just stop,’ Radha said. ‘Do you have any idea how many women he’s killed for trying to escape?’
‘And what’s the alternative?’ Melinda demanded. ‘You just want to let him torture you until you end up dead, like the others?’
‘I want to wait for the right moment,’ said Radha. ‘I’ve been here a year, Melinda - a whole damn year. I know how he thinks, and I know what I’m doing. He takes me upstairs sometimes to cook; he trusts me. And some day he’s going to trust me enough to leave me an opening, and then I’m going to take it, and I’m going to get us all out of here. But we can’t move before that happens or we’ll lose everything!’
‘And what happens in the meantime?’ Melinda burst out. ‘You let him hook you up to a battery and stab you a few hundre
d times?’
They were getting too angry. He’d feel it, and he’d get suspicious.
‘Quiet,’ I urged. ‘You’re going to bring him down here.’
‘He can’t hear us,’ said Radha.
‘But he can feel you,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘You said that before,’ said Carly. ‘What do you mean?’