She squatted in the corner, brooding and monstrous in her bloodied wedding dress, as she waited for him to awake.
The room was in darkness, but she had lived her whole life closeted behind shutters and black-out curtains, and her eyes made full and efficient use of the traces of street light that filtered through from Outside. She could watch over him, safe in the knowledge that she would remain shrouded in anonymous shadow if his sleep ever ended. Reassured by this, she felt herself gradually relax, until subconsciously her bloated chest rose and fell to the same rhythm as his.
They had left him there, bruised and naked, chained to the floor by wrist and ankle. Blood clotted his forehead. She knew about blood. She touched the dark stain on her dress, feeling it congealed and sticky on her fingers. Out of habit, she licked them clean. Waste not want not, Mummy always said, as had Nanny before her, and she was a good girl who did as she was told.
She willed him to live. They usually stayed alive for a few hours at least. She would hide in the shadows until then. And wait.
#
Philip was just having a nightmare. A particularly weird and unpleasant one, granted, but a nightmare all the same. He was almost sure of it.
He had been round Mandy’s for 3 beers and the X-Factor finals, but she had kicked him out before bedtime. She had to catch a train to attend some weekend bonding session at work, where everyone had to “think outside the box” and hug the elderly middle-manager on their right. She needed her beauty sleep. So it was out the door by ten thirty, without so much as a goodnight “cuddle”.
Halfway back to his Ford Focus, he heard a muted sound in the alleyway which flanked her house. Whispering, it sounded like. He wasn’t the sort to go exploring passageways after dark (Mandy’s excepted), so after a moment’s reflection he put the key in the ignition, ready to drive off. But then the unfamiliar Snake of Conscience writhed deep within the furthermost recesses of his mind. Mandy was alone in there. Maybe she had the window open in her bedroom. She was a good-looking girl. If someone was skulking around in the alleyway and he just drove away and left them to it, he would never forgive himself. More to the point, she would never forgive him either. Besides, if she got molested, she’d most probably go off sex for months, and he’d be packed off home every night for a lonely session with his trusty right hand and a few well-thumbed editions of his “Muff-Diving Dwarfs” magazines. (That wasn’t his first choice of porn, by the way. It was just that the models were much smaller, so the magazines were more compact and easier to hide when Mandy was around).
He would need a torch. Maybe, just maybe, if he knocked on the door and asked for one, Mandy would freak out when he mentioned the prowlers and insist on him staying the night to protect her. She would be so grateful, she might even agree to do that thing he liked with the funnel, the lube and a dozen or so Maltesers.
He was back at the door within seconds, ringing the bell. An upstairs light came on, but the love of his life remained stubbornly indoors. He grew impatient. If there were perverts in the alleyway, he wanted her torch before they decided to venture out into her front garden and practise their moves on him. He knocked again, hoping the noise might scare them off.
Mandy appeared at her front bedroom window. She had her dressing gown on already. She did not look happy.
“What? I’ve gotta be in Bromley by eight thirty.”
“There’s someone in the alleyway.”
“You what?”
“In the alley. Round there. Perverts.”
He gestured round the side of the building, indicating helpfully precisely where the perverts were likely to be situated. She did not seem interested, though.
“There’s only one pervert round here, and I’m talking to him. Now fuck off home.”
She slammed the window shut, and the lights went back out. He felt aggrieved. There was he, trying to save her from being molested by total strangers, and she was telling him to fuck off! If she kept this up, they’d all be gone by the time he got the torch off her. Then she’d be sorry.
He knocked again, louder still. No reply. How rude!
“Mandy!” he called through the letter-box. “Throw me down a torch.”
Still no response.
“Fuck you, then,” he said, and made his way back to the car, slamming the door shut so she would know that he was cross. He jammed the key in the ignition, and was just about to twist it when he heard the whispering again. Whatever it was, it was still there.
He toyed with the idea of driving off regardless, but ruled this out, even before the Snake of Conscience started twitching again. He had made the mistake of telling her about the prowlers. “How could you leave me alone?” she would say if he drove away now. “You knew there was someone there! You just fucked off and left them to it, without so much as a backward fucking glance?” She would crucify him. Maybe he should have just driven away the first time, and denied all knowledge if anything happened. He would have been in the clear then.
He got back out the car, and looked up at the window, in the forlorn hope that Mandy might be up there, beckoning him in. No sign of life there at all. She was probably flossing her teeth by now. He dragged himself towards the passageway to investigate further.
“Hello?” he ventured. “Anyone there?”
No response. Not totally surprising, he told himself. They’re bound to be too busy dropping their trousers, ready to roger me senseless the moment I go in after them. What was that film where they wanted to ride that fat bloke like a little piggy? Well no-one was going to be porking him tonight, that was for sure.
It was then that he realised that this must all be just a nightmare. The world swam around him like a flashback scene in a crap made-for-TV film, and all of a sudden he was somewhere else. It was hard to say where, as it was pitch black. He felt something tight around his wrists and ankles, and shivered in the cold. Damp stone numbed his side and his legs, and he knew that he was naked. He had that overwhelming sense of vulnerability you get in your dreams when you are wandering down the dairy aisle in Tescos wearing nothing but a mortified smile, and praying that the CCTV footage doesn’t end up on YouTube. Or Asda; sometimes it was the butchery aisle at Asda. Tesco’s was worse though, as he had always forgotten his Clubcard.
He felt convinced that there was something watching him. He could sense it here with him, skulking in the darkness. He could hear it too. The sound of laboured breathing.
“Hello? Is there anyone there?”
He had just said that earlier, he realised, when he was back in the alleyway. It hadn’t done him much good then, either. He had still ended up here, naked and alone, tethered to the stone floor like a goat at a Satanist’s house-party.
He was overcome with nausea, and the world shifted, even though it was too black to actually see it move around him. Then he was back at Mandy’s again, fully clothed and staring up at her window, howling for a torch as if his life depended on it.
He stopped for a few seconds, trying to make sense of what was happening here. Was he chained to a floor somewhere, being spied upon by God knows what, or was he at his girlfriend’s house, checking for prowlers? Which was worse? The floor, definitely. At least he had his jeans on at Mandy’s. It was harder to be brave without pants.
All of this was just a dream anyway. Neither “reality” could hurt him. Check the passageway, get back in the car, and wait for Radio One to wake him up tucked away safely in his own bed.
He went back into the alleyway. He could hear his own voice calling out to him, imploring him to stay on the street, but he paid no attention. His voice got louder, shriller, more hysterical, but still he stepped into the shadows and went in search of whatever was lurking there. He heard a sound behind him, and turned to find a man confronting him, blocking his path back to safety. Six foot plenty, with a face of pasty, badly-chiselled clay. Smiling, but not in a good way. Not in a good way at all.
Then there was something behind him, and the voice in his head cranked up to a slow-motion scream, disorientating him, leaving him in two minds as to whether to run or fight. Instead, he did neither. As the scream cranked up a notch or two at a time, he felt something slip over his head, and then a blow, and then nothing at all.
He woke up back on the stone floor in the black-hole of his nightmare.
#
Again, he sensed that there was someone out there. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t even hear them now, above the sound of his own laboured breathing. But he knew they were there, lurking malevolently in the darkness like a spider watching the death-throes of a juicy fly pumped full of paralysing toxins.
“Who’s there?” he asked, fighting the urge to soil himself with only partial success.
He paused, dreading a reply.
“I’m Matilda,” came the unexpectedly informative response. “What’s your name?”
A voice from the darkness. Harsh. Gruff. Halfway between male and female, like a drag-queen in need of Strepsils.
“What the fuck does it matter what my name is? What the fuck am I doing here?”
“You’ve got to whisper,” she pleaded. “He’ll come for us if he hears you.”
“Who will?” he whispered as quietly as he could, looking about him instinctively even though it was too dark to see anything.
“Daddy,” she said.
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this response. Daddy was supposed to be a good word. Daddies gave you pocket money, and took you out for pizza and took you to cricket matches at weekends (well, maybe not for ten years or so, but they used to do those things). But the way she said it was just too damn creepy. As if Daddy was the worst thing in the World.
“You’ve got to be fucking joking!”
“Don’t swear. He doesn’t like it when people swear.”
Philip lost it. He had been abducted, stripped naked, and chained up in a cellar with a transsexual voyeur, and now she was trying to give him a lecture on good manners! He would swear if he wanted to. And right now, he really, really wanted to. As long and as loud as he could.
“Are you having a fucking laugh?” he enquired. “This has got to be a wind-up, right? You lock me up in what feels like a fucking freezer, stark bollock naked, and you have a go at me for using the fucking F-word!”
He paused between profanities to give her the chance to apologise before he moved on to the C-word. She was silent for a few seconds. Somehow, he could sense she was listening.
“He’s coming,” she said. “Daddy’s coming!”
That didn’t sound good.
He heard her scrabbling around in the darkness, searching frantically for a place to hide. Everything was silent for a few seconds, and then he made out the sound of footsteps outside, getting louder, getting nearer. He tried to flee, but the manacles cut into his wrists and ankles, pinning him to the spot, making escape impossible. The footsteps stopped, and his bowels noisily imploded in terrified anticipation of what was to come.
The door was thrown open with such force that it almost rebounded shut again. A large man stood in the doorway, candle in hand. The flame writhed, as if it too was trying to flee, in a futile struggle to free itself from its waxen prison. The flickering candle made the man’s face distorted and troll-like. It was Clay-Man, from the alleyway. It was “Daddy”.
Again, Philip tried to back away, but his bonds held him as tight as the tethered goat in his own Satanist metaphor. The troll strode over to him, kicking him hard to the face. He felt his teeth crack, and blood flow down his throat. Shock engulfed him.
“You don’t talk,” the man said. “You don’t shit unless I tell you to. You don’t do nothing, you got me?”
And then he was gone, the door slamming shut behind him.
“Double negative”, Philip muttered, when he was sure he was out of earshot. “If I don’t do nothing, I must do some-”
“Are you all right?” Matilda asked.
“Never fucking better,” he replied, relishing the sound of the swear word on his tongue.
“I’m sorry. He’s a pig. I’m bleeding too.”
Philip started to cry. Not for her: he couldn’t give a toss whether she was bleeding or not, and she probably deserved it anyway. He was crying for himself. Great big sobs of grief and fear and self-pity, stifled so as not to bring Clay-Man crashing back into the room.
He felt a weighty arm around his bare shoulder, but drew away in revulsion, as far as his bonds would permit. He didn’t want her touching him.
“Don’t cry” she implored, her voice heavy with empathy. “It’s going to be all right, I just know it will.”
He hesitated, searching for the right reply, determined that it should contain at least one swear-word to shock and offend her.
“Matilda, my Darling,” he said. “You must be out of your tiny fucking mind.”
#
Mandy was perplexed.
From her front bedroom window, she had seen Philip being bundled into a white transit van by two hulking shadow-men. They must have been fucking builders or something: who else would ride around in a crappy old “no tools are kept in this van overnight” shit-heap like that? But why were builders kidnapping her boyfriend on a weekday? And what could she do to stop them?
No way was she going out there. She was fucking gorgeous (everyone said so), and once they saw how pretty she was they were bound to chuck Philip out their van and bundle her in there instead. It was bad enough having to put up with them wolf-whistling at her when she wore her tartan mini-skirt past the building site (on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and sometimes on Fridays if she could make it), but she was buggered if she was going to let them gang-bang her as well. It was Philip they were after anyway. If he was stupid enough to get in the van with them, then he could take the consequences. Take one for the team, so to speak.
This was a nightmare. She had to be up early for Bromley tomorrow. She felt crap when she was tired. How could she think outside the box, if she was too tired to even find the box in the first fucking place? Why did these things always happen to her? She was a good person, she gave three pounds a month to Oxfam by direct debit to save all the little African children Madonna and her friends had not yet adopted.
The back doors of the van slammed shut, with one of the men in the driving seat and the other in the back with Philip. They would be driving off any minute. Philip needed her. But what could she do, especially in her Wallace and Grommet slippers?
The engine clanked reluctantly into life, and the van pulled uncertainly from the kerb, heading God knew where. Now! She had to act now, or it would be too late.
She threw open the window in one last desperate effort to save the life of the man she loved (well, fancied at any rate).
“Oi, you fuckers!” she screamed after his kidnappers. “You bring that bastard back here now!”
#
Just when he thought things could get no worse, Matilda shared her escape plan with him. It had sounded quite plausible at first, but tailed off pretty rapidly after a sentence or two.
“I’ve stolen the key,” she told him. “To your manacles. I can get them off.”
Ordinarily, the thought of her getting anything off would have held no appeal for him at all. But in the particular circumstances, he was willing to make an exception.
“Oh God, please, yes. You’ve got to get me out of here.”
She shuffled around him, and dropped to her hands and knees in front of him, their faces just inches apart. He could feel her hot breath on his cheek, but it was not this that bothered him. It was more the fact that she looked like a troll.
Involuntarily, he pulled away. She repulsed him. Her nose was lumpy and bulbous, her lips like two fat slugs copulating at both ends. She had a wart on her chin, the size and shape of the kidneys they always insist on putting into steak pies to ruin them. It sprouted thick black hair which almost brushed against his face. And all this set in a large lardy face, resting atop multiple chins which spilled muffin-top-like over the fussy lace collar of her off-white dress.
Her hair appeared to have been cut using a badly chipped pudding basin; spirit-level straight around most of the circumference, but with a small V cut into the centre of the fringe for no apparent reason. It was not an attractive look.
But her eyes disturbed him most of all. They were beautiful! The purest blue, a swirling mass of destructive emotions inside them like a galaxy of pain. Philip was not known for his empathy – he had once cried during a Children in Need appeal, but Vodka always affected him that way – but even he could see the shyness, the fear, the need, the hurt locked within. One emotion dominated all the others, though. Self-loathing. It riddled her.
He shrank away from her, and her eyes died. All that turbulent emotion drained away, leaving behind a soul both desiccated and barren. And as he drew away from her, he realised something else for the first time, something which shocked him even more. She was wearing a blood-encrusted wedding dress. Unless she was marrying “Daddy”, he appeared to be the only remaining candidate for bride-groom. The fact that he was chained to the ground, butt-naked, with his arse provocatively in the air, did nothing to ease his sudden and overwhelming feeling of vulnerability.
Despite all of this, she was his only way out of this, the only person (in the loosest sense of the word) who could set him free. He had to be nice to her. Not too nice, of course…..
“Matilda?”
“Yes?”
“You said you’d help me.”
She shuffled uncomfortably, refusing to make eye-contact like a child with a guilty secret.
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