Gracie wasn’t sure when exactly it was that Chantelle had disappeared from the pit. Night and day no longer had meaning in this place of near-perpetual darkness. Every few hours the bucket was lowered containing water and food, the latter of which never varied much – bread, bacon, cheese – regardless of whether it was supposed to be breakfast, lunch or dinner. So she’d quickly lost all sense of how long she’d actually been down here. If she hazarded a guess, it was maybe a week ago when she’d woken to find herself alone. At the time it had seemed impossible that someone could come down and snatch one of them away without the other being disturbed. Surely Chantelle would have tried to resist them? That should have been sufficient to wake Gracie from her tormented sleep. But she remembered nothing of the sort.
It had occurred to her in the lonely hours following that maybe she’d been drugged. She’d felt nauseous and shivery, her head splitting – though it was difficult to pin the cause of this down with any certainty because incarceration in this dungeon was hardly likely to be good for her health. Despite the water she regularly drank, her throat was sore from her persistent pleading into the darkness above. On those few occasions when the light was lowered so that she could see into the bucket, her eyes stung from lack of use. As there were no seats to recline on, she was constantly on the floor, squatted or crouched against the wall, her joints aching, her limbs cramped. Then there was the smell of her own excrement; there was now a mountain of it on the other side of the pit, and its stench had become overwhelming. Sometimes it caused her to vomit, and, when there was nothing left inside, to dry-heave, which in itself was agony. God alone knew what kind of germs she was breathing down here.
‘Whoever you are … whatever you’ve got planned for me, you’d better get it done soon,’ she croaked up into the blackness. ‘Because I’m pretty sure I’m going to die in this place …’ Her head slumped backwards onto aching shoulders; the mere effort of raising her voice now exhausted her.
There was an echoing clunk of woodwork.
Gracie froze, her eyes snapping open and straining upward.
A light appeared, but it wasn’t the light she’d seen before, the electric bulb attached to the bucket cable. This one had a reddish, wavering tint, and it swayed from side to side. An oil-lamp, she realised. It was maybe ten feet above her, but it was slowly descending. With a thump, something landed in the pit. The expanding glow revealed that it was the foot of a rope-ladder.
Gracie scuttled backwards until she struck the wall. Sweat prickled her face, her heart beating ten to the dozen. Was this it? Was this the moment?
A dark humped shape descended. The lamp she saw was swinging from its belt, the red light reflecting on the encircling brick walls. She could tell from the outline that the incomer was a man. When he alighted on the dungeon floor, he had his back to her, but he was tall, strongly built. He wore boots and waterproofs; the hood was pulled down, revealing a tousled thicket of black spiky hair. Even before he turned to face her, she knew who she was going to see – the young man who, along with the blonde girl, had first lured them into captivity.
On that occasion, though an impressive physical specimen, he’d seemed nervous and shy. He’d worn glasses and had smiled a little boy’s smile, but he’d been handsome too – square jawed, with bright blue eyes, a firm red mouth and sharp, straight nose. He was still handsome now if she was honest, but in a cold, severe sort of way. When he took the lantern from his belt and held it up in his gloved fist, she realised – to her incredulity – how young he actually was. No more than eighteen.
With his other hand, he produced something from under his waterproofs: a flattish metallic device, about the size and shape of a small directory. When he dropped it on the ground, and she saw its rubberised upper plate and the neon numerals darting along its glass frontage, she realised that it was a set of weighing scales. So mundane an item was this that at first, perhaps absurdly, it had the effect of reducing her terror – though very quickly the increasing weirdness of this predicament struck her.
Weird could never be good.
‘What … what do you want with me?’ she stammered.
He didn’t look at her, merely signalled her to stand. At the same time, he fished a roll of something from his pocket and unravelled it. It looked like a tape measure.
Slowly, nauseated, Gracie managed to get to her feet. ‘Look, I … I don’t know what this is about. If you’d just talk to me …’
But he remained silent, concentrating carefully as he extended the tape and dangled it alongside her, evidently taking note of her five feet, five inches. With a snap of his fingers, he indicated the scales.
‘You want to weigh me?’ She almost laughed at the craziness of it.
He snapped his fingers again, irritably, still not meeting her gaze though his eyes, whatever they were focused on, were suddenly bright, as if filled with intense but suppressed rage. Frightened again, though dizzy and awkward in her thigh-boots, Gracie stepped gingerly onto the horizontal scales and stood there, teetering; the whole thing would have been too ridiculous for words if she hadn’t felt so sick with fear and exhaustion. A second later, he nudged her aside with his elbow, picked the implement up and shoved it back under his waterproofs.
‘Look,’ she pleaded. ‘Just stop … stop this madness. I beg you … you’ve surely nothing to gain from it.’ As he turned back to the ladder, her voice rose, becoming shrill. ‘For God’s sake, you’re not leaving me here in the darkness again?’
She lurched forward, hooking her hands into his clothing, trying to cling on to him. He swung back to face her, and slowly and patiently, but with crushingly superior strength, took her wrists in his big, gloved paws and forcibly pulled her loose. Fleetingly, their faces were only inches apart – Gracie’s scrawny and tear-stained, her captor’s flawless, and icily indifferent. With a single shove, he sent her tottering backwards. She fell, landing hard on her bottom, though she barely felt the pain that jolted through her weakened body.
‘Just … just don’t,’ she wept. ‘Don’t leave me down here. Please, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it …’
‘It won’t be for long.’
These were the first words he’d spoken to her – the first that anyone had spoken to her since Chantelle had disappeared – and initially Gracie was so shocked that she clamped her lips together, gazing up at him with mute disbelief.
He smiled at her reaction, but it was the least warm, least enticing smile she’d ever seen. It wasn’t even what she’d have called an evil smile – it was more an utterly blank smile. There was no emotion behind it at all.
‘And … and what then?’ she asked in a quavering voice, only too late realising what a mistake it might be to ask such a question.
He placed one foot on the rope-ladder, but paused as if to think, his head bowed. ‘Do you know May Day?’ He sounded educated; there was no accent there – but suddenly there was feeling. Tension maybe. Indignation.
‘May Day?’
He glanced over his shoulder, eyes gleaming like polished buttons. ‘A rancid political event in our time … espoused by those who’ve replaced our beloved religious and cultural ideology with a soulless humanist doctrine of their own manufacture, a doctrine which in practice has proved to be the most vicious in human history …’
Dear God, she wondered, ever more bewildered. What is he talking about? He has to be insane.
‘I … I know May Day,’ she ventured. ‘I think.’
‘Good.’ He began to climb, the hellish glow rising around him, leaving only blackness below. ‘We … or rather you will restore it to its former glory.’
‘Wait please … tell me what you mean!’
But he said no more, and a few seconds later had vanished. Something heavy and wooden thudded into place overhead, and to Gracie’s hopeless wails, the last vestige of crimson light was extinguished.