Chapter Forty-Six
Forty-Six
Margot’s head whips up, and she runs out of the room, followed by Elsie and, eventually, Beverley, who staggers down the hallway behind them.
Margot finds Duke in the kitchen, scratching at the bottom of a door. The dog whines, sticking his nose to the crack.
“Is it a pantry?” Elsie asks.
Margot pulls the dog away by the collar and tries the handle. “It’s locked,” she says, turning to Elsie and Beverley. Duke immediately returns to the gap and recommences his whining.
“No,” Beverley says, the realization a storm cloud tearing open. “It’s a basement.”
She stumbles to it, beating her fist on the white-painted wood.
“Hello!” she shouts. “Hello?” Louder. “Is there anybody down there? Enid?” Her fists leave bloody curls on the paint. The other women join in, pounding their fists and leaning their weight against the door, trying to force it open.
“What if there are others?” Margot asks breathlessly. “What if there are bodies?”
“Someone needs to break it down.” Elsie pummels. “Not you,” she adds quickly, casting a glance at Beverley, who is now bent double, clutching her abdomen.
“How the hell are we supposed to break down a door?” Margot cries.
“Can’t we pick the lock?” As Beverley cranes her eyes upward, her friends look blurry, shimmering.
Suddenly Elsie raises her foot and kicks.
Beverley grits her teeth against the pain as she watches her quiet, determined friend raise her foot again and again, slamming it against the wood, trying to loosen the lock.
Elsie sweeps the hair back from her face, her eyes darting, the exertion emblazoning her cheeks with crimson.
“I think, if we all tried, we could get it,” she urges.
The three women step back, positioning themselves in line with one another, left shoulders pointed forward, eyes fixed firmly on the door. Briefly, Elsie clasps Beverley’s fingers, and does the same to Margot’s.
“Ready?” Elsie says. “One, two…”
On three, they charge, their bodies smashing against the door in unison.
Pain sears through Beverley’s entire body.
But it works.
The door springs open and reverberates on its hinges, slowly creaking wider to reveal a dark set of stairs leading down to a place of absolute black.
“Holy crap.” Margot peers through the gloom.
“Enid!” Beverley cries as more pain daggers across her stomach. She feels her eyes begin to roll back, her body wracked, as she falls to her knees at the top of the stairs.
“Bev! We need to get her an ambulance,” Elsie urges Margot, but Beverley shakes her head fiercely, gesturing down the stairs. They have to see if there is anyone down there, to see if there is anyone they can save from this.
“I’ll go,” Margot says, shoving Duke aside and placing a foot on the first step.
“Jeez.” She buries her nose in her elbow. There is a stench rising from down below—not like death, or what Beverley imagines death might smell like, but like bodies, like cattle squashed together in their muck.
Margot continues down the steps, with Elsie close behind her.
Slowly, Beverley pulls herself upright, sees their heads disappearing down below and makes a decision.
She will not give up now. She will not be left bleeding on this kitchen floor, so close to the finishing point.
So, with a trembling body, and in a pink dress soaked through with blood, she lurches forward and begins to descend slowly.
The temperature drops as the women move belowground, and the rancid smell intensifies.
Beverley’s senses are on high alert, her nerves strung tight; she is a prey animal moving through the forest at night.
There is a feeling down here, a sense of something inhabiting the space even though they cannot see it.
The air is thick and stale, profoundly dark. There is a ticking sound, like the working of pipes, and then something else, a scrabbling noise, a scratching, like rodents squabbling—or, Beverley realizes, like something trapped trying to get out.
“Did anyone bring a flashlight?”
“Maybe there’s a light pull somewhere…”
“Where do these steps end?”
A strained, bestial sound comes from somewhere in the basement.
The women freeze at the bottom of the steps.
It comes again.
“Shit. Somebody find a light.”
The women frantically search in the darkness, hands scouring clammy walls, finding nothing but infuriating smoothness until Beverley reaches across something hard and metallic. She runs her fingers over it, searching for a switch or a button.
Light suddenly fills the basement space.
It is stark, artificial, yellow. Margot stands with her hand still grasping the bottom of the light pull, but each of the women is staring at the same thing, for a split second when there is only silence and horror and held breath.
At the center of the room, a large pipe runs down into the floor. Attached to that pipe by the wrists is Enid.
She has been tied with her arms above her head. Her mouth is gagged and her head lolls in exhaustion, but her eyes…her eyes are wide and animal and frantic.
Then the silence breaks.
Beverley reaches her first, tugging uselessly at the cable ties around her wrists.
Elsie bends, pulls the gag down from Enid’s mouth, asks her again and again if she’s hurt, if she can breathe. She orders Margot to go and fetch water from upstairs.
With the gag removed, Enid’s wail is vulpine, an inhuman distress call, a sound of sheer terror.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” Elsie coos in the soothing tones of a mother. “We’ve got you. We’re here now. You’re safe.” She turns quickly to Beverley. “Find something to cut these cable ties.”
Beverley drags herself into action, grateful to have someone tell her what to do, order her own delirious thoughts for her.
She stumbles around the cluttered basement.
Among the household storage and the tins and the boxes are signs that Enid has been here for a long time.
There are two buckets, one of them the source of the stench, in which she has clearly been forced to perform her daily functions, and another with water and a sponge, presumably used when she has been allowed to clean herself.
There’s a pile of newspapers and a chair, which has been positioned directly in front of the pipe.
Briefly, she imagines Roger sitting there, chin in his hands.
Would he watch Enid as she suffered? Did he taunt her?
She continues searching for something that might cut the cable ties.
She did have a knife, she thinks helplessly.
She’d brought one but foolishly left it in her bag, on the front seat of the car.
She realizes that there are ropes and wrenches scattered about, and a hammer on top of a cabinet, stained with something sticky and black.
Suddenly she feels light, too light, and her knees crumple beneath her. She is forced to cling to the cabinet to stay upright. A very bright star lodges itself in a corner of her vision. The sounds of the room—Elsie’s muttering, Enid’s ragged breathing—start to seem as if they are very far away.
She moves her hand to her stomach and feels that the blood has started to dry out. Perhaps that means she has stopped bleeding. Or perhaps it means she has no blood left to shed.
She can hear Margot moving about upstairs, running the taps. Then, suddenly, she sees them—a pair of garden shears propped up against a wall. She grabs them and staggers toward Elsie.
“Why did he do this to you?” Elsie is asking.
Enid appears skeletal, a grim contrast to the woman in the photographs upstairs.
She looks up at them. Beverley flinches as her eyes briefly meet Enid’s.
Does she know who Beverley is? Can she tell, just by looking at her, that her husband has had his hands on her?
She is so cold. The shears fall to the floor.
“Bev?”
She wants to find the strength to answer, but she can’t.
“Bev!”
That’s when the sound comes. A car approaching, the crunch of tires on concrete.
Beverley, Elsie and Enid look between one another, hot with panic.
“Shit!” Margot calls down from the top of the steps. “It’s him.”