Matt Evans languished in a place beyond terror, his thoughts shattered into a thousand jagged shards, each one slashing at his sanity as it formed then dissolved.
He was dead. He’d known that much from the moment his captor had loomed over him, those dead eyes boring into him as he held an iPad up to eye level and scrolled through the coverage of the Cowane’s Hospital murder. He said nothing, the only sound his breathing, the silence of the room stretched taut by his presence. It had taken only moments for Evans to break the silence, his desperate, incoherent pleas echoing off the walls of his prison, accompanied by the clang of the chain around his foot as he bucked and thrashed, begging to be freed. He’d felt no shame as he babbled hysterically, his nostrils filling with the hot, rancid smell of his own piss. Shame was infinitely preferable to the agonies that could be visited on him at any moment.
Dead, empty eyes that seemed somehow to draw in the darkness of the room watched him. Then, with a smile that was little more than a baring of teeth, the monster knelt before him, drawing an object from a pocket.
When Evans saw what it was, understanding flooded his mind in a caustic torrent. It was as though he had been possessed by terror and the object had triggered an exorcism. He writhed and bucked and screamed, oblivious to the shackle around his ankle biting into his flesh and becoming slick with his own blood.
When the hand touched his forehead, he froze. His eyes bulged, his mouth worked soundlessly, trying to articulate a scream too big to be released. Warm fingers traced a path across his forehead in an obscenely intimate caress. He almost didn’t hear the gentle ‘Ssh,’ his ears ringing from his own scream. But he heard what was said next, a question he had known was coming.
‘You know what I want?’
He had nodded, eager to please, the thought of the object he had been shown flashing in his mind. He could imagine it biting into him, tearing, gouging, rending. He would do anything, tell everything, to avoid that.
He had been left then, alone with his thoughts and the memory of those headlines. ‘Murder in Stirling’. ‘Victims suffered prolonged, savage attack’. He pleaded to a God he didn’t believe in, wept for his own wasted life and the days the headlines had told him would now never be.
Time lost all meaning to him. How long had he been left alone in the dark, with only his nightmares for company? Hours? Minutes? Days? A sudden thought seized him, hope swelling in his chest. Perhaps the police had caught him. Perhaps he wasn’t coming back. A giddying wave of claustrophobia crashed through him, the thought of dying in the dark from hunger or dehydration seizing him. But even in this, there was relief. It would be a better end than the one he had been promised.
The fragile hope he nurtured was crushed by the sound of footsteps. Evans listened to them, the floorboards above creaking with his captor’s weight. Then they stopped, and the silence rushed in on him again.
And in that silence, he heard one word. It tormented and terrified him, filled him with ever-escalating nightmares.
‘Soon.’