38
Janey opened her eyes; the left one was painful and swollen. She tried to reach for it, and instantly felt a flash of pain rip across her shoulder. It was then, in those first moments awake, that she realised the absolute horror of her situation. She was naked and fastened, with steel handcuffs, to a rusting metal bedstead. Beneath her body, the stained mattress was wrapped in clear plastic. The room was old with a scarred wooden floor and peeling floral wall paper. To her left, was the only source of watery light - a grimy window. But, perhaps worse than all of these discoveries, was the fact a piece of duct tape had been wrapped around her head, covering her mouth. She barely had time to recall the horror of her abduction, before she heard footsteps outside the door.
Janey genuinely flinched as the door opened, and the tall man, who had dragged her to the bus, walked in. His right hand was clamped around what she initially thought was a rifle, but as he approached, she saw it was some type of plastic tripod.
‘Well, hi there, miss.’ He grinned at her. ‘I hope you had a nice rest. Soon, you’re going to need your energy.’
For a painfully long time, the man simply stood staring at Janey, drinking in her naked vulnerability. He loved this part of his ritual, almost more than the later, messier stuff. At this point, he was fully in control - he was the one with the power over the bitch that had attracted him.
He then began to whistle to himself, as he assembled the black metal tripod, and placed it on the ground at the foot of the bed.
‘You might be saying nothing just now, but you’ll be so noisy later on. That’s why I have these.’ He began to rummage around in his trouser pockets, producing two grubby foam earplugs, which he held out triumphantly. Janey could not think beyond the horrifying fact that the sadistic man, who was arranging to rape and murder her, looked so ordinary. There was no scarred deformity, no villainous laugh - just a bland man, like millions of others.
‘Now,’ he said, no longer looking at her, ‘I’m just going to fetch the old video camera from the barn, so don’t you go rushing off anywhere.’
He left the door open intentionally, as if to mock his chained-up victim with the illusion of escape.
In response to this, Janey fought an insistent urge to whimper herself into despair. Part of her mind was almost defeated by the absolute horror of her predicament, and yet, something inside her refused to let this pathetic man have any dominion over her. Instead, she focussed on the one moment of good fortune in the entire nightmare.
As a child, Janey had saved scavenged pennies in an old jam jar, which she secretly kept in the musty shadows beneath her bed. One rainy February afternoon, she had tipped them out on to her Snow White bedspread to count them. They had all clattered into a metallic puddle on the bed, except for one of the stubborn coins that remained stuck to the bottom of the glass jar, adhered by the remnants of the original jam.
Janey had pushed one of her hands into the jar to release the coin, with the ragged nail of one small fingertip, only once her knuckles and thumb joint were in past the rim, her hand got stuck. Reluctant to break the jar, for fear of being cut, Jane had twisted her hand with the strange glass glove. Finally, in a moment of inspiration, she moved her thumb across the palm of her hand, and felt a weird inaudible click as it dislocated. Her hand had moved instantly free of the glass prison. In the ensuing years, she had practised this move many times. She would often help her mother around the home, by recovering items dropped into small places.
Now, in the abyss of her situation, Jane knew she had one small chance of escape. However, this was dependent on her ability to stay entirely in the moment.
Janey twisted her head around to look at the headboard and spat on her hands. Moving them slowly forward and backwards a couple of times, she performed the simple act of dislocation and pulled first one hand and then the other through the handcuffs. Her main concern was to stop the handcuffs from clattering noisily on to the floor. She managed to prevent this from happening by pressing the metal hoops firmly against the back of her head.
Her eyes scanned the desolate room for any type of potential weapon. Finally, they fell hopelessly the bedside drawer. Reaching over cautiously, she opened the drawer, carefully trying to suppress the dull scrape of wood on wood. Inside was a blood-smeared roll of duct tape, a small Kodak camera, and a long boning knife.
Jane felt a flicker of hope ignite inside her. She held her breath, removed the knife, and placed it behind her head on the pillow. Aware that keeping the handcuffs in place would simply be too difficult, Jane let them slip down beneath the knife. She then shifted her body painfully up the bed, and placed her hands above her head, in the position they had originally been fastened. She adjusted her sweating hands so they gripped the knife handle, and tried to avoid thinking about its dry, crusty texture.
When the man returned with the camera, he clipped it onto the tripod and switched it on, and Janey heard the motor groaning to life. A small, red LED light blinked steadily beneath the eye of the lenses. The man looked at Janey, and ran his tongue over his bottom lip. What he did next was even more unsettling, he turned to the camera, held up two thumbs in a gesture of success and turned back to her.
‘Now, we are going to have some fun, bitch, and, if you’re a good girl, I’ve got a nice surprise in the drawer for you.’
He pulled off his t shirt and pants to reveal his skinny, pasty body before he climbed up on to the bed. He grabbed Janey’s legs, forcing them apart and knelt between them. She noticed, in the vague horror of trauma, his small erection was stabbing at the material of his underwear.
‘It’s time to play.’ The man grinned.
As her attacker hooked his two thumbs into the waistband of his underpants, Janey seized her moment. Springing forward, she drew the knife in both hands from behind her head, and thrust it directly into the man’s throat. He let out a strange meowing noise, and tried to clamber away. His blood felt unnaturally hot as it sprayed on her exposed feet. Janey rolled off the bed on to the floor, where she began to crawl clumsily towards the door. Behind her, Dyer was lying face down the bed, rasping and gurgling, as his lifeblood seeped steadily onto the slick plastic sheeting. To Janey, the journey to that doorway had the treacly slowness of nightmares. She fully expected to reach the doorway, only to be confronted by the large man with the Hawaiian shirt, who had promised to skin them both.
She reached the door and used the frame to pull herself up to her feet. Things had faded to silence on the bed behind her, but she did not dare turn around, just in case she found herself face-to-face with something unspeakable. Instead, she began to make her way out of the room and onto a large dusty upper landing.
Faced with two closed doors and a staircase, she chose the latter and hurried down the stairs to the ground floor.
One of her first priorities was to find her clothes, but as she stepped off the stairs, Janey found herself in a grubby farmhouse kitchen, where a small fire was smouldering in the stone hearth. Glancing nervously around, she approached it. On the grey ashen corners of the fire, she could see the scorched fragments of her clothes. Beyond the fire was a door, which lead out into the open courtyard. If she was going to escape into the countryside, Janey knew she needed some type of clothing.
Like a grim Goldilocks, she crept back upstairs.