The barn with its peaked roof was as long as a football field and so tall that a double-decker bus could fit inside.
It stank of excrement, old hay and damp ashes. And although the corrugated iron roof and the thin, prefabricated walls provided poor isolation for the building, it was already unpleasantly muggy inside at this early hour. But that was mainly due to the cold sweat running down the back of Nele’s neck.
‘Where are we?’ she asked the taxi driver, who’d bound her arms and legs with cable ties.
To a hospital stretcher!
The man with the slightly long hair and round nickel glasses didn’t answer.
He hadn’t said a word since he’d taken advantage of the first wave of contractions and dragged her defenceless out of the taxi. Now he was pushing her, strapped to a rickety mattress frame, through this blood-curdling, empty torture chamber.
Nele had experienced Braxton Hicks contractions, but whatever her body was trying to test in her thirtieth week of pregnancy, it hadn’t remotely begun to prepare her for the unbearable pains that suddenly overwhelmed her in the back seat of the taxi. It was as if a fist dipped in acid had tried to yank her womb from her body but was undecided about which way to pull, since she felt the spasms in her vagina as well as her back.
‘WHERE ARE WE?’
Her voice echoed in the bare, windowless barn. The light came from several construction lamps that hung at irregular gaps from wooden rafters in the ceiling.
‘They used to keep cattle here.’
Nele, who hadn’t expected an answer, raised her head as the taxi driver pulled her across the bumpy slatted floor, past bent poles and rusty tubing that formed a sort of metal fence on either side of the gangway.
Nele remembered the sign to the milking parlour she’d seen at the entrance, and a smell of livestock hung in the air, although the dirt and state of the barn suggested no livestock farming had taken place here for some years.
She saw animal stalls. Unlike in stables, these weren’t made from wood or stone but resembled cages enclosed by metal tubing, partitions that let in air and light, each smaller than a parking space.
‘I’m in prison!’ was Nele’s first thought.
She felt as if she were being dragged down a prison corridor, past the cells where chained-up animals must have led a miserable existence.
And now one of these cells is for me.
‘Almost there,’ said her abductor, who was probably neither a taxi driver nor a student, but just a madman.
Where were they heading in this gruesome hall?
Things took an even more sinister turn when the madman started talking to himself, in a whisper, as if trying to give himself courage.
‘It’s a good thing I didn’t have to use the needle. I’m sure I would’ve been able to, I mean I practised, but it’s better this way. Yes, much better.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Nele said.
‘I imagine you view it differently at the moment, but it’s a good thing your contractions have already started. I would’ve had to inject you with oxytocin otherwise, to bring them on artificially.’ All of a sudden it got brighter and Nele raised her head again. Her brain was struggling desperately to comprehend the full extent of this horror.
The pen to her side differed from all the others in a terrifying way: next to the caged partition stood a professional video camera mounted on a tripod. And on the hastily swept concrete floor full of cracks lay a heavy metal chain, attached to a waist-high, empty plastic crate. The crate had a hinged viewing grate and reminded her of the boxes used to transport animals on planes.
‘No!’ Nele screamed, tearing at her shackles.
NOOOOOOOOO!
The worst thing about this scene wasn’t that the fencing was bent in a way that meant the madman could force Nele to stick her head through it from behind – like a cow ripe for slaughter! Nor that the purpose of the chain was to shackle her to the frame like a helpless beast and keep her immobilised.
Nele screamed because of what was written there.
On the strip of wood immediately above the stall.
‘NELE’, it said above the area obviously reserved for her and the stretcher. And above the plastic crate it said, ‘NELE’S BABY’.
‘What are you going to do with us?’
Fear had stripped all expression from her voice. She heard herself speak like a robot.
To her surprise, her abductor offered an apology.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, pulling the bent metal bars to one side and stepping behind the stretcher.
‘I’m sorry, but there’s no other way.’
He pushed her stretcher into the stall that reeked of cow dung.
And if Nele hadn’t seen the tears with her own eyes she would’ve doubted her own sanity. For she could hear it quite clearly in his brittle, faltering voice. Despite her fear. Despite the hopelessness that for some reason her abductor appeared to share with her.
He was crying.
Bitterly.