‘Like crapping a bowling ball.’
Such a stupid comparison could only come from a man. It was far too mild.
To Nele it felt more like trying to press a car battery spiked with nails out her vagina.
And yet she didn’t scream. At least not as loud as she wanted. Not any louder than an aeroplane taking off.
Still, her panting wail sufficed to transform the basement corridor where she lay into a droning cathedral. Her reverberating anguish drifted dully down the corridor, swallowed up by the half-light surrounding her. She’d only made it a few metres away, though it was down metal-grate steps descending from one end of the stalls and into darkness. Then she literally collapsed. Another contraction had seized her, ripping her legs out from under her, sending her to the floor.
Once the contraction ended, she thought she’d been blinded for a moment. But then the shadows returned, of a metal drum in the middle of the corridor, and of wooden doors askew, lining the hallway like so many livestock blinders.
A dungeon, she thought. I’ve fled into a dilapidated dungeon.
Down here she could hardly see more than silhouettes. On the other hand, she could hear and smell that much better.
She smelled faeces, urine, her sweat, and the effluvia of her fear. Heard the wall mortar crumble when she tried pulling herself up using a protruding copper rod (maybe once a water pipe?). To keep running, despite all her pain, down the dark and seemingly tiled corridor, on into the darkness stinking of mud and mould. Away from the footsteps behind her. On the stairs.
The footsteps were getting closer, along with that voice turning her despair into naked panic.
‘Nele?’ she heard her kidnapper yell. This lunatic whose real name was apparently Franz, who’d revealed his actual name to her. Because he never dreamed of ever letting her free again.
‘Nele, come back. Please. I can explain it all to you.’
Another contraction kicked in. The third in only a few minutes.
Please, dear God, don’t let it last another hour, Nele prayed. It was clear to her, of course, that her sense of time was turning as hopelessly dire as this situation she found herself in.
Alone, naked, at his mercy.
‘It’s my fault. I’m not mad at you for running away. I should’ve explained things better.’
His voice had a sad tone to it, completely different than in those movies where the serial killer either sounded quite refined or talked in some sing-song crazy voice. Franz on the other hand sounded so… honest. As if he really were sorry about what he was doing. That didn’t mean he wasn’t crazy.
His next question only confirmed it: ‘Do you know what makes humans radically different from the other mammals?’
Killing others for no good reason? Nele wanted to scream at him but was far too busy trying to breathe from her diaphragm.
She’d discovered it was the best way to manage the impact of these bodily tremors that kept erupting inside her every second.
‘We’re the only mammal in the world that still drinks milk as adults,’ she heard Franz in response to his own question. His voice still sounded like it was coming from the foot of the basement stairs. He’d stopped moving.
‘And no one, truly no one, ever bothers to imagine what that means. What the consequences are of our misguided consumption of milk!’
Nele meanwhile managed the impossible and pulled herself up by the copper rod. Inch by inch, until she was back on her feet, even if squatting.
She felt something damp running down her bare thighs and leaned forward.
And went onto all fours, with her most sensitive parts pointing in her kidnapper’s direction, and she was hoping he couldn’t see any more than she could.
‘I’m not talking about diarrhoea, from lactose intolerance. Or prostate cancer, even though milk causes that as much as it does osteoporosis and diabetes.’
Nele shuddered at the thought that Franz might have some kind of night-vision device. Or that his voice was taped and he’d already crept right up to her.
Only a second more before she felt his fingers on her. Breathing down her neck.
‘I’m talking about an unbearable suffering of a far greater magnitude!’
Nele staggered, couldn’t help toppling forward. And rolling on her side, not meaning to, but she couldn’t avoid it. She simply didn’t have the strength.
‘Please, Nele. Come back. Let me explain it to you. You’re a smart woman, you’ll understand.’
She propped herself up off the floor, which had changed in texture. What up until now had felt like cold and crumbling tiles and rough concrete now gave her a splinter, from her hand running over wood.
Wood? On the floor?
She kept feeling the ground until she found a narrow gap. Traced the wooden groove with her fingers.
Hope surged through her with the same intensity as the labour pains gathering force inside her.
‘You’ll see why this is necessary. That we all need to make sacrifices if anything’s going to change. Nele, you hear me?’
Yes, I hear you, you sick psycho!
Nele heard him along with the footsteps that were getting closer again. But she heard the clanking most of all. Metal on metal. She clawed at a chain ring mounted to the wood. Pulled on it with all her might.
‘Nele? What are you doing there?’
She couldn’t have told Franz even if she wanted to. She had no idea what she was opening. Didn’t know why there was a wooden door here in the basement floor below the old livestock hall or if it was letting her flee to freedom or descend into more doom.
‘Let’s be reasonable about this,’ she heard Franz call out right when she was finally able to move the wooden slab.
She plunged her hands into the dark void, now crouching at its edge. Had no idea how deep it dropped below her. If this stench of carrion rising out of the hole like the breath of some dying animal descended several metres or just a foot.
‘There’s no way out of here. I checked it all. I really don’t want to resort to force. At least not any more than is necessary to finally open everyone’s eyes.’
And I don’t want to die, Nele thought and, against all reason and yet barring any alternative, lumbered down into the hole. And as she fell she screamed so loudly that her voice broke, leaving her shriek far weaker than the contraction that hit her while freefalling deserved.