the blinking of her eyes beginning to slow until finally they remained frozen wide open with terror. My God, he had taken her, taken her away from her home, her husband, her life. The fear fired through her like electricity, making her want to jump up and run or fight, but the effects of the chloroform weighed her down. She managed to push herself on to her hands and knees before slumping on to her side, using her forearm as a makeshift pillow. Her breathing was too rapid and irregular, her heartbeat the same. She tried to concentrate on conquering her fear, to slow the rise and fall of her chest. After a few minutes of lying still and calm her breathing became more relaxed and her eyes better able to focus on her new surroundings.
There were no windows in the room and she couldn’t see a door, only the foot of a flight of stairs she imagined would lead to a door and a way out. One low-voltage bulb hung from the high ceiling, smeared with dirt, its light just enough for her to see as her eyes began to adjust. As far as she could tell the room was little more than thirty feet wide and long, with cold unpainted walls that looked as if they’d been whitewashed years ago, but now the red and greys of old brick were showing through. The floor appeared to be solid concrete and she could feel the cold emanating from it. The only noise in the room was water running down a wall and dripping on to the floor. She felt as if she must be underground, in a cellar or the old wartime bunker of a large house. The room smelled of urine, human excrement and unwashed bodies and, more than anything else, absolute fear.
Louise pulled the duvet that covered her up to her neck against the coldness of her discoveries only to add to her chill. She looked under the duvet and realized all her clothes had been taken and the duvet left in their place. The duvet smelled clean and comforting against the cold stench of the room, but who would do this, take her from her home, take her clothes, but care enough to leave her a clean duvet to cover herself and keep out the cold? Who and why? She closed her eyes and prayed he hadn’t touched her. Her hand slowly moved down her body and between her legs. Fighting the repulsion she touched herself gently. She felt no pain, no soreness, and she was dry. She was sure he hadn’t raped her. So why was she here?
As her eyes adjusted further to the gloom she discovered she was lying on a thin single mattress, old and stained. He had left a plastic beaker of what looked and smelled like fresh water, but the thing she noticed most, the one thing that brought tears stinging from her eyes, was when she realized she wasn’t just in this terrible room, she was locked in a cage inside the room. All around her was thick wire mesh interwoven through its solid metal frame, no more than six feet long and four feet wide. She was locked inside some sort of animal cage, which meant there were only two possibilities: he’d left her there to die, or he would be coming back, coming back to see the animal he’d caught and caged, coming back to feed his prize, coming back to do whatever he wanted to her.
She wiped her tears on the duvet and once again tried to take in all of her surroundings, looking for any sign of hope. One end of her cage was clearly the way out as it was blocked with a padlocked door. She also noticed what appeared to be a hatch in the side, presumably for the safe passage of food between her and her keeper. Fear swept up from the depths of her despair and overwhelmed her. She virtually leapt at the door, pushing her fingers through the wire mesh and closing her fists around it, shaking the cage wildly, tears pouring down her cheeks as she filled her lungs ready to scream for help. She froze. She’d heard something, something moving. She wasn’t alone.
She looked deep into the room, her eyes almost completely adjusted to the low light levels now, listening for more sounds, praying they wouldn’t come, but they did, something moving. Her eyes focused on where the sounds had come from and she could see it, on the opposite side of the room, another cage, as far as she could tell identical to the one she was locked inside. My God was it an animal in there? Was she being kept with a wild animal? Was that why he’d taken her, to give her to this animal? Driven by panic she started shaking her cage door again, although she knew it was futile. The sound of a voice made her stop. A quiet, weak voice. The voice of another woman.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ the voice whispered. ‘He might hear you. You never know when he’s listening. If he hears you doing that he’ll punish you. He’ll punish us both.’
Louise froze, the terrible realization she was not the first he’d taken paralysing her mind and body. She lay absolutely still, listening, disbelieving, waiting for the voice to speak again, beginning to think she had imagined it. She could wait no longer. ‘Hello,’ she called into the gloom. ‘Who are you? How did you get here?’ She waited for an answer. ‘My name’s Louise Russell. Can you tell me your name?’
A short, sharp ‘Sssssh,’ was the only reply. Louise waited in silence for an eternity.
‘We need to help each other,’ Louise told the voice.
‘I said be quiet,’ the voice answered, sounding afraid rather than angry. ‘Please, he might be listening.’
‘I don’t care,’ Louise insisted. ‘Please, please. I need to know your name.’ Frustration brought more tears into her eyes. She waited, staring at the coiled shape lying on the floor in the other cage, until eventually the shape began to unfold and take on a human form.
Louise looked at the young woman now sitting, legs folded under herself in the cage opposite. She looked around and confirmed to herself there were no more cages in the room, her eyes soon returning to the other woman. Louise could see that she was still pretty, despite her unkempt appearance – her short brown hair tangled and her face pale and dirty, any signs of make-up long since washed away by tears and sweat. She had bruises on her body and face, as well as a badly split lip. She looked to be in her late twenties, slim and as far as Louise could tell from a sitting position, about the same height as she was. In fact almost everything about her was similar to Louise. She couldn’t help but notice the other woman had no mattress or duvet, no covers or bedding of any kind, and all she had to wear were her filthy-looking knickers and bra. She looked cold, despite the fact the room was reasonably warm, although Louise couldn’t see an obvious source of heating. She guessed the room might be next to a boiler room or maybe the fact they were underground, as she suspected, kept it warmer than outside. But why was this other woman apparently being treated so much worse than she was? Was she being punished? Was that why she wouldn’t speak, for fear of further punishment? What would he do to her next – remove her underwear, the final humiliation?
‘My name’s Karen Green.’
The sound of the voice froze Louise. It took her a few seconds to find her own voice.
‘I’m Louise. Louise Russell,’ she answered. ‘How long have you been here for?’
‘I don’t know. He’s got my watch.’
‘Can you remember what day it was when he took you?’
‘Thursday morning,’ Karen told her. ‘What day is it now?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t be sure. I remember it was Tuesday morning when he …’ Louise struggled to find the word. ‘When he attacked me. Do you know how long I’ve been here for?’
‘Quite a while. Maybe even a day. You’ve been out the whole time.’
Louise slumped against the wire mesh of her cage, trying to comprehend the fact she could have been missing for a day and still not been found. And then a more chilling thought swept over her; Karen had been missing for almost a week and yet here she was, rotting in a mesh cage and, up until now, alone – except for him.
‘Do you know what he wants?’ she asked Karen in a sudden panic. ‘Why are we here?’
‘No. I don’t know what he wants, but he always calls me Sam.’
Louise remembered he had called her Sam too. I’ve come to take you home, Sam. Just like I promised I would. She felt the sickness rising in her stomach, the foul, bitter bile pushing up through her throat and into her mouth. They were replacements for someone else – replacements for whoever the hell Sam was.
Another wave of exhausting fear washed over her, a tangible, physical pain. They were being held by someone who was insane, someone impossible to reason or rationalize