Chapter Eighty-Five
Eighty-Five
The room that Mary was looking at was larger than Quaddra’s office – about one and a half times larger.
Two rows of fluorescent ceiling lights bathed the entire space in a glow that was more comforting than bright.
At the center of the room, there was a rectangular workstation that was almost the same size as their eight-seater dining table upstairs.
There was a computer at the center of the workstation and not much else, but Mary’s attention was solely on the wall directly in front of her… on the other side of the workstation.
‘What the actual fuck?’ Mary whispered, feeling her legs weaken under her.
The wall across the room from her was partially covered by newspaper clippings, printouts and photographs – Polaroid photographs – and there must’ve been well over a hundred photos on that wall.
Mary stepped around the workstation to get a better look, her eyes moving up and down and left and right, jumping from Polaroid to Polaroid… printout to printout. The more she saw, the faster her heart hammered the inside of her ribcage.
The Polaroid photos were all of different women – close-ups of their faces… their hands… their bare feet… and their naked bodies. But these weren’t glamour photos. These women weren’t smiling or posing for the camera.
Mary stepped closer still.
The photos were arranged in columns: from top to bottom – face, hand, body, bare feet and, finally, face again – each column seemed to represent a different woman.
Under the final facial photo, the one at the bottom of the column, came printouts – sometimes a couple, sometimes more, and sometimes just a single page.
A few of the columns also displayed a few newspaper clippings.
Mary’s stare jumped between some of them for a quick moment before she allowed her eyes to take in the entire wall at once.
The women’s hands were always bound together by zip ties – in every hand photo – either above their heads or behind their backs.
Their nails seemed brutally broken, with some ripped from their beds, which were caked in dry blood.
The skin on their palms and fingers was scuffed and torn in places.
Their naked bodies – and once again, there were several different photos per woman – looked savagely beaten, cut and bruised, with various-sized hematomas showing around their breasts, ribs, hips, groin, back, buttocks and upper thighs.
At the top of each column, there were three different facial photos for each woman, and they all followed the same pattern – eyes open… eyes shut… and inconclusive – because their faces were so swollen from battery that Mary couldn’t tell if their eyes were open or not.
In every open-eye photo, there was more than just tears in their eyes…
there was terror – the kind of terror that Mary imagined a person would experience if they knew that they were about to die in a very hideous and painful way – and Mary had a horrible feeling that that had been exactly what had happened to all of these women.
The reason why she thought so was because on the last facial photo – the one at the bottom of every column – their eyes were fully shut, the skin on their faces was lifeless and dull, with a rubbery quality to it, and their lips all showed an odd shade of purple.
Mary had seen that same shade of purple on lips before.
She saw them on internet photos, when she was analyzing physical battery bruises so that she could copy them using makeup.
That shade of purple only showed on the lips of cadavers.
And then there were the marks around their necks – sometimes ligatures, sometimes round hematomas the size of thumbs and fingers, and sometimes lacerations that looked so deep, they had almost been decapitated.
‘What the fuck is this?’ she whispered in a faulty voice, her own eyes glassing over, her heart practically relocating to the back of her throat.
Whatever she was looking at, it was something that Quaddra clearly didn’t want anyone else to know about.
Whatever that wall was, it was disturbing, sickening, grotesque, and so frightening that Mary had started to feel sick.
You need to get the fuck out of here, Mary, the voice inside her head screamed at her. You need to get the fuck out of this fucking room… NOW.
Disoriented from an overwhelming mixture of fear, cold and confusion, Mary took a couple of steps back to butt-lean against the edge of the workstation and re-steady herself, but as she did, her left hand hit the computer keyboard on the station, waking up its monitor.
‘What the fuck?’ Mary whispered, as her eyes moved from the wall to the PC screen.
The image that had materialized on it was that of a naked woman, who had been tied up to a heavy wooden chair, reminiscent of the old-style electric chairs that she had seen in so many movies before.
The woman had clearly been tortured, with her entire body severely battered, bruised and cut.
Blood had trailed down from her nose, lips and ears, creating a crazy labyrinth of red lines across her face before dripping down onto her exposed breasts.
Her right eye was practically swollen shut and it looked like someone had taken a large bite out of her bottom lip.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Mary asked herself.
Nothing good, the voice inside her head replied. Let’s go. We really need to get the fuck out of here.
On the top right-hand corner of the screen, Mary could see a timecode – 02:22 – indicating that that was a video, not a photograph like the ones on the wall just behind her.
Mary, don’t you fucking dare. We need to GO!
But Mary’s curiosity was stronger than her fear, and almost without realizing it, she reached for the spacebar on the keyboard.
The video started playing.