Dead Scared

WHAT I REMEMBER next is being in my room at St John’s. I was in bed, my arms wrapped tight around Joesbury’s teddy, wearing my usual night-time jogging pants and vest. For a second, everything felt so normal it seemed the only crazy thing in the whole world was me. I felt tired, seriously hungover, and as though my limbs would shake if I tried to move, but otherwise OK.

Without thinking, my eyes went up to where I knew the camera that had been filming me had to be and that’s when I knew everything had changed. The camera wasn’t there. It couldn’t be. The pipework that must have hidden it wasn’t there. The cosmetics around the washbasin were mine but the mirror was different. The one screwed to the wall of my room had a tiny chip in it at the top right-hand corner. This one was whole and perfect.

I pushed back the duvet and sat up. The floor wasn’t right, either. It looked cleaner and newer and the wall behind the bedhead wasn’t plaster but a much softer, warmer substance. Plywood.

I was not going to panic. I was going to think. Difficult, with such a thick, fuzzy head, but not impossible. Just take it slow.

Nick! What the hell had they done to Nick?

I couldn’t help Nick if I panicked. Take stock. I was in Unit 33 and they’d recreated my room out of plywood, just as they’d done for Jessica. What had she said? My room but not my room?

I was going to hold it together.

This was about scaring me, about getting more gruesome footage for their sick films. They didn’t want me dead yet. I had a massive advantage over the other girls who’d been here. I knew where I was and how to get out. And these bastards did not know me. They could not know what scared me. They’d have something in store that would be unpleasant, but I could deal with it. I’d squeal a bit, pretend to be more freaked than I was. Let them get their footage. And all the while I’d be looking for my chance.

First things first. What had they given me? I remembered being held from behind by Castell and Thornton pushing the needle hard into my neck, then a vague recollection of being carried down the stairs. Nothing after that. A powerful sedative would be my best guess, and it had to be starting to wear off now that I’d woken up. I’d be slow and sluggish, far from my best, but still basically OK.

I got to my feet and felt the room tilt. When I felt I could handle it, I reached over the bed towards the window. The curtains were drawn and I just knew there was something behind them I wouldn’t want to see. Telling myself I could deal with it, I took hold of one curtain and pulled it gently back.

Oh, Jesus!

I’d fallen back against the wardrobe door. There was a dark space in my head that was swelling like a balloon. I was not going to lose it. I was not. It was going to take more than a horrific photograph to make me do that. When I could face it, I made myself look again at the dreadful image they’d fastened on the wall of this fake room, exactly where the window should have been.

It was easier the second time, when I knew what was coming. In fact it was nothing I hadn’t seen many times before. They’d found and blown up a post-mortem photograph, taken over a hundred years ago, of a murdered woman. The poor creature lay on the bed of her rented room in London, hacked beyond recognition.

Three months earlier, I’d worked a big case in London in which women were killed as coldly and as brutally as the one in this photograph had been, and now these bozos thought this was what would scare me the most.

They weren’t even close.

I walked back to the bed and sat down for a while to get my breath back and clear my head. I was going to have to leave the room. See what they had waiting for me outside. I would do it in a second. Just another second.

There was blood, trickling down the wall.

I’d closed my eyes. It’s not real blood, it’s not real blood, they did this to Evi, freaked her out with fake blood. It will be paint, theatrical blood, whatever. I was going to walk over there, run my finger through it, write FUCK YOU in very large letters on the wall and when I got my hands on that bitch Talaith Robinson I was going to show her exactly what a great quantity of blood looked like and it would be her own.

I opened my eyes again to find the blood had gone. I got up anyway and walked over to check. The wall was white and clean.

OK, this was more serious than I’d thought. They’d given me some sort of hallucinogen. I pulled the curtain back again. The photograph of the murdered woman was still there. I reached out, touched it. It was real. The real image had sparked a connected hallucination. Well, at least I knew how it was going to work.

Jesus, to have been through this without the knowledge I had.

No time now to worry about what the others had gone through. I was prepared. I was going to cope. On legs that felt weak and shaky, but did what I told them, I crossed the room, pulled open the door and looked outside.

I saw a dimly lit space, narrow and disappearing into blackness. The walls were of old brickwork, the ceiling low. The painted plywood boards I’d seen in a storage room earlier had been for me.

Bring it on, I muttered as I stepped out, knowing the bravado was to make myself feel better and that it wasn’t really working. It’s one thing to tell yourself all they can do is scare you, but being scared can feel pretty bad when you’re alone in a dark space, at the mercy of people you know to be psychopathic, and without the first clue about what’s going to leap out at you next.

Somehow, I held it together. I walked forward, reached a corner and turned into a narrow, fake-brick-lined alley. It was like something an art student had knocked up in a couple of hours and it was not – not – going to get to me. Neither was the little surprise a few yards ahead, where a spotlight in the ceiling picked out a form on the floor. As I drew closer I could see it was a human figure. Closer still and I knew it wasn’t real. This was a clothes-shop dummy, stripped naked and smeared with fake blood. Joesbury and I had found a very similar one when we’d been investigating the case last year. This was all public knowledge for anyone who looked hard enough and, OK, I was scared, really scared, useless to pretend otherwise any more, but I could deal with being scared. I was getting out of here.

Then the dummy opened its eyes and smiled at me.

When I came to myself again, I was leaning against one of the plywood walls, muttering it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real, into hands that were damp with sweat.

Shit, it had looked very real. Fighting back the fear that the dummy had risen from the floor and was even now peering over my shoulder, I made myself look. Exactly where it had been, eyes closed, lips still, but for the first time I wasn’t sure how much of this I could cope with. What they had to throw at me, possibly. What my own mind was chucking in for good measure was another matter entirely.

At that moment, the dim lights went out and I was staring into darkness so thick and heavy it could have gone on for ever. Then, some way ahead, a beam of light shone down from the roof. In the pool it made on the dusty warehouse floor stood a man in dark clothes holding a long, gleaming knife.

Ridiculous, I said to myself, as something cold trickled down into the small of my back. Ridiculous, ridiculous. The figure before me – I couldn’t take my eyes off it even to blink – would be nothing more than a plywood cut-out, like the clowns I’d seen earlier in the day.

The figure was moving. OK, real or hallucination? Real or not? I couldn’t tell but I really had to make my mind up fast because he was coming for me. I closed my eyes. Still there when I opened them. Real enough. I turned and ran into blackness.

A second later, I stopped dead. Another spotlight had appeared in the ceiling and a second dark-clad figure was standing right in the middle of the tunnel. Everything about him was in shadow, except the steel of the knife blade that shone in his right hand. I turned again, just as darkness fell once more.

I ran on, arms outstretched, knowing I’d lost all thought of finding a way out. I didn’t care. I just had to get away from the men with knives.

Suddenly, I could see my room. To either side of the door were brick walls – that I knew weren’t real. I stepped up to one, pushed it hard and felt its feet slide along the floor until there was a gap large enough for me to squeeze through.

The first thing I saw on the other side was the carousel. Close by and on its side was the fortune teller’s tent. The Test Your Strength machine had been dismantled and lay in pieces on the floor. This was definitely somewhere I wasn’t meant to be.

‘Laura!’ called a voice, masculine but high-pitched and giggly. ‘Lacey-Laura! Where are you?’ Then the dim lights went out again.

Instinct wanted to run, common sense told me to take it slow, get to the wall and follow it. The window I’d broken that morning might not have been repaired. If I could find that, I’d be out of here.

I crept forward. To my right I thought I could make out one of the scary clowns. It was leaning backwards, as though against … yes, I’d reached the wall.

As I made my way along the side of the building, I wondered why they hadn’t turned on the big warehouse lights. Expecting to be flooded with powerful light any second I made it to the corner. Keep going. While the lights were out, I had a chance. A doorframe. The door opened, I slipped through and couldn’t believe my luck.

I was back in the storeroom that I’d broken into earlier. Light was shining in from street lights outside. Against the window I’d smashed was a piece of heavy cardboard and it took less than a second to pull it from the wall.

It was dark outside. I landed on the flagged path just as Scott Thornton appeared at the corner of the building, blocking my escape. He was dressed exactly as he’d been when he’d burst into my room just days before, naked from the waist up, ninja mask covering his eyes, his long dark curls unmistakable. I looked the other way, more in hope than expectation, to find one of the others at the opposite corner, similarly dressed. Impossible to go back inside. No choice but to go over the fence and into the woods.

I wasn’t able to run fast. Or far. The sedative they’d given me still had too hard a grip. And the hallucinogen really kicked in when I hit fresh air. All around me, colours glowed, the stars were great lanterns hanging close enough to touch and fabulous creatures watched me with huge eyes. The trees took on twisted, torturous shapes, branches reaching down for me as I passed. And with every step I took into those woods, it seemed I was going back in time. My years as a detective slipped away; the new life I’d built for myself from the wreck of my past existence vanished.

I wasn’t Lacey Flint any more, I was that terrified sixteen-year-old girl again, in an open space at midnight, and they were coming.

My last thought, as a hand caught hold of my hair, was that somehow, completely impossible although I knew it to be, they knew after all what scared me the most. Somehow they’d managed to unearth the one memory that I could never allow to come to the surface because everything good and normal and safe that I hold on to would shatter.

I screamed once, a shrill cry that went up through the treetops. Somewhere, from way up high, a bird of prey echoed it back to me.