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  He reaches into his robes, producing a gun which he brings up level with my head.

  “Serves him right,” I hear Phil whisper to Jane. “I told him. Shoulda kept his mouth shut.”

  I try to retreat, but the ankle chains suddenly tighten and root me to the spot. He steps closer, finger twitching on the trigger. My mouth falls open and all I can do is gape at the barrel. Not so much of a tough guy all of a sudden, are you? But I never claimed to be, I’m just someone who can’t keep it shut. Someone like Nick.

  And look what happened to him: barbeque.

  Just when it seems there’s no hope, the ‘monk’ turns at the last minute and points the gun at Phil. It takes him totally by surprise, as does the bang when he fires. I jump, then trace the path of the bullet into Phil. I’ve never seen anyone get shot before, except in the movies, and it’s so different in real life. Phil’s wide eyes screw up as the projectile hits his gut. There’s a tiny explosion of blood, then a sudden flow. Phil touches the wound, his breathing fast and low. The ‘monk’ walks over to Phil’s cage, cocking his head.

  “Jesus,” Phil manages. “Look what you’ve gone and done.” His voice is thick and sounds like it’s full of phlegm. The hooded figure raises the gun as if to shoot Phil again. But he doesn’t; he just stands there, watching the reaction. Then, when his colleagues are about to depart from the room, he follows, hiding the gun inside his robes once more.

  It takes a long time for Phil to die. He does his best to try and stem the bleeding, but it’s like the ‘monk’ knew exactly where to hit him for maximum damage––yet prolong his agony. Phil’s face gradually turns white, then stony grey. All we can do is sit there, while the life-blood ebbs out of him. I think about shouting for the men to come back, for them to do something. Then I remember that it’s my fault. Phil is dying because I couldn’t keep my mouth fucking well shut. Because I wanted answers. They’ve done this as a message… a warning.

  Jane is crying uncontrollably, but can’t take her eyes off the sight. Just like she couldn’t when Nick was burning, smoking. Melting. I hear Kavi chanting something I can’t understand; I think he’s praying for Phil.

  At the end, Phil’s bladder and bowels fail him. I can smell the piss and shit. With a final wet gurgle he coughs his last breath. It sounds like he’s trying to ask, “Why?”

  Jane is in a state of shock, Kavi is still muttering words to help Phil’s soul on its way.

  I say nothing. If only I’d kept quiet a few hours ago then… No, it’s not down to me. It can’t be! How would that make any sense?

  But the fact remains I’m still alive, and Phil is in the cage next to me––dead.

  And I have to ask myself whether anything makes sense any more.

  Interlude:

  Three Years Ago

  I left something out, probably because I’ve only just remembered it.

  Isn’t that strange? How could I have forgotten about the e-mails? You’re thinking I’ve gone mad now, aren’t you? I’m beginning to wonder. But trust me, this is important… I think.

  I was still with Kim. Not quite ready to get hitched, but we’d talked about it, usually after too much wine at the weekend. “You know it’s going to happen, don’t you?” I’d say. She’d nod, but give me a look that said, ‘Well, why don’t you bloody well get on with it and ask me then?’

  I’d been promoted at the call centre (I’d show her fucking Dad who was and who wasn’t ambitious!) so now I no longer had to pester people in their homes; I got others to do it for me. Kim had left there by then, and was working in a solicitor’s office. The pay was better and between us we had a pretty good standard of living. I’d forgotten all about the stories I’d sent off to places, that is until one of the magazines wrote back to me saying they’d had a change of editor. Apparently my story had been languishing in a drawer for almost three years. It was only when they cleared them out that they found it. And you know what––this new editor absolutely loved it and could they please use it in a forthcoming issue?

  I’d have to wait six months or more, and I wouldn’t get paid much, but I didn’t give a toss. Something I’d written was actually going to be published. In a real life, honest to goodness, magazine!

  I told Kim when she got home from the office and we went out that night for a meal to celebrate. We fooled around when we made it back, just like we used to do in the days when we first met. It was the most tender and intimate sex I’d ever had in my life. I don’t know about Kim, but I can definitely recommend getting something published as an aphrodisiac.

  We both called in sick the next day. It was only partially a lie, as we should never have finished that last bottle of red. It took till about noon for both of us to feel up to surfacing. I switched on my computer in the spare room and downloaded my mails while I used the loo. When I walked back in, I saw a load of spam had come through. Usually the filters dealt with all that, but they must have been on the fritz.

  Mails were coming in from people like Chick Dalke, Rodney Bunter, Janis A. Ohio, trying to get me to buy anything from sex pills to replica watches. Some of them just didn’t make any sense at all.

  ‘Here’s the lube you neeeeeeeed,’ said one. ‘Let it glide with pride. This oil will make it feeed, quicker than you can blink.’ Another was just a random list of words: ‘Eminent mandrake accost plasma blizzard corruption nordhoff hyena locomotory genus militate neonatal… ’ Pure nonsense.

  “Well, you definitely don’t need any of that stuff,” said Kim over my shoulder, pointing at one ad that promised to give the woman in my life sexual ecstasy. ‘Take me beyond my limits,’ said the woman standing there, finger crooked. “She can wait her turn.” Kim began nibbling my earlobe, obviously still in the mood after last night.

  I allowed myself to get dragged off back to bed, but all the time Kim ground away on top of me my mind was elsewhere. Something in those mails, especially the nonsense ones, was nagging at me. What did it mean? How had they made their way through now, why did they continue to come to millions of people…? The rational part of my mind was telling me the mails were corrupted because they’d multiplied until the original message was no longer comprehensible. But the other part––that dreamt up the story which had just been accepted by the magazine––was telling me something else. What if the nonsense was just a smokescreen? What if there was something important I was missing in those mails?

  “Mmmm… Oh yes,” murmured Kim as she lowered, angling herself so that the sensations she felt were intensified. Her eyes were closed as she impaled herself on me, her moans growing louder, the creaking of the bed in tune to the rhythm of her hips. The image of that half-naked woman flitted into my mind, a construct of pixels, a fantasy someone had thought up to sucker people.

  Then, suddenly, other images of women intruded, pages from some old magazine.

  “Take me… Take me beyond my limits,” whispered Kim. I wasn’t sure whether she was joking, using the phrase from the woman’s speech bubble as a gag. “Take me… Take me…” she repeated. I pushed her onto her back, holding her by the wrists, and began to ram into her hard. Her moans reached fever pitch as I thrust in right to the hilt, again and again, making both of us raw. “Harder… Oh God, harder… Hurt me… hurt me!”

  Let it glide with pride. Make it feeed, quicker than you can blink.

  Pleasure mixed with pain, creating something totally unique. The orgasm, when it came, was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt Kim quivering beneath me as I held onto her. But it wasn’t until I looked down again that I saw she was quivering with fear, red finger marks indenting her skin. She rolled over, sobbing into the pillow.

  I reached out a hand to touch her shoulder; she shrugged it off.

  “Baby?”

  Kim turned back and I saw anger in her face this time. “What the hell got into you? That hurt, Chris! That really hurt.”

  “But you said… I thought…”

  “What? That I was enjoying it? Didn’t you hear
me telling you to stop?” She was practically screaming the words.

  I shook my head.

  “Having too much of a good time, were you? What’s next, handcuffs? Whipping? Gimp masks?”

  “No, you know I’m not into all that stuff.”

  Her look said she didn’t know me at all. “Just leave me alone, would you. Leave me the fuck alone.” Kim buried her head into the pillow again.

  Frowning, I climbed out of bed. I had no idea what had just happened, but I did know I’d hurt the person I loved more than anything. What had got into me? I honestly had no clue. The images in my head, the words Kim had been saying… Something about those mails…

  I returned to the computer in the spare room, which had flipped to the screensaver. Nudging the mouse brought up the spam and I examined those emails once more.

  I was so transfixed I didn’t hear Kim get up and get dressed, and only realized she’d left the flat when I heard the door slam. Later I found the note she’d left me saying she’d gone to her folks to stay; she’d even packed some of her clothes.

  Kim returned the following week, but only after I’d left many pleading messages on her mobile. “I swear I don’t know what happened,” I tried to explain. “Please come back. I need you.”

  She finally relented, in spite of her mother and father’s protests. But things were never the same. It was a long time before she would let me anywhere near her, saying that she just wanted the old Chris back, the person she’d fallen in love with.

  I wanted to tell her that it was still me, but we both knew that would have been a lie. I’d had a revelatory moment that day, and I was certain it had something to do with the mails. What I never told her was that I’d saved them, and disabled the filters permanently so that I’d get more. I studied them, searching for something.

  Strangely, it was while I wasn’t looking at all that I spotted the answer. Dropping to sleep in the chair, staring at the computer one night, another batch of mails flooded in. Kim was downstairs watching TV, on her own, as she did most nights. I clicked on the first mail and saw this text, suddenly drawn to certain letters:

  ‘I struck some small cork after your ill sky, which bade uniformly. Its narrow box around that knowledge; bitter, necessary pin, wet stone shelf interbred. They slunk, afterwards, only, I hanged her hard operation beyond his important cloud. Which reran often, acid reading remade of this need?’

  I rubbed my sore eyes, blinking. Random coincidence? The letters just happened to make up that sentence? But not the placing of the full stops, separating out each word so there could be no mistake.

  ‘They watch and wait’.

  I checked through the other mails I’d stored, now that I’d broken the code. I saw it again and again. Sometimes it would be down the sides––to the left or the right of justified text. Sometimes it was diagonally across, like a wordsearch puzzle. Other times, like the first one, simply embedded.

  “My God,” I said to myself, clicking on another incoming mail.

  The computer froze. Had to happen sooner or later, a virus of some kind. I moved the cursor and nothing happened. I pressed Ctrl, Alt and Delete together. No task manager box came up. I found myself jabbing hard at one of the keys over and over again.

  Harder… Oh God harder…

  I looked down. It was the Ctrl key. Ctrl…

  Control?

  “I’m going to bed, now. You can do what you want.” The voice startled me and I jumped. Turning, I saw Kim standing in the doorway wearing her ‘keep your hands to yourself’ pajamas.

  “What? Oh, yeah, sure.” I turned back to the dead screen. She sighed, but didn’t bother looking again.

  I just stared at the blank screen, wondering what I’d stumbled onto. The virus behind the virus. One that ensured no computer would ever work for me again.

  It didn’t come as a surprise when, a few weeks later, the magazine that had accepted my story told me they were folding and couldn’t publish it after all.

  “It’s such a sad thing,” the woman said, almost in tears down the line. “The editor threw himself in front of a tube train. There was no warning, nothing anyone could have done.”

  “No,” I replied, the phone falling from my grasp. “I don’t think anyone could.”

  Four

  The new addition’s name is Patty.

  They take her blindfold off at the same time they come and clear out Phil’s body, wheeling it from the room on a trolley. This time I keep quiet as the men in robes do their work. The old woman watches, but doesn’t say a word either. I think she may be catatonic.

  Once the ‘monks’ have gone again, it is Jane who talks to her, eventually coaxing out a name.

  “That man,” Patty says, “he was dead, wasn’t he?”

  “Killed… shot,” I inform her, “by the men that brought you here.”

  “Those same people in the hoods and cloaks.”

  Jane nods.

  “Oh sweet Lord.” Patty’s voice trembles. She has a kindly face, the youthfulness shining out and belying her years. I feel an immediate affinity with Patty. She has that look on her face I must have had when I first arrived: a combination of denial and confusion. The next words out of her mouth confirm this. “Why did they kill him? What do they want with me?”

  “I wish we could answer your questions,” Kavi says, “but we are as much in the dark as you.”

  “Do you remember how you got here?” I ask.

  Patty shakes her head. “No, wait, I think I was at home. I remember I was feeding Mr. Vickers.” She smiles thinly and adds, “My cat. Then there was a knock at the door. I went to see who it was.”

  “And…”

  “I… don’t know, it’s all so muddled. I can’t remember much after that.”

  “Jesus.” I bang my fist into my hand; a humorless imitation of Robin from the old Batman series. “Please try to think.”

  “I’m sorry,” she replies, gazing at me. “My memory’s not what it was at the best of times.”

  “Look, it’s obvious they don’t want us to know,” Jane says to me. “None of us can remember, no matter how hard we try.”

  “It is futile striving to know the unknowable,” Kavi concludes.

  I snort. “Right. Is that why you pray? I saw you when Phil was dying.”

  Kavi slowly closes then opens his eyes. “Praying does not reveal the unknowable to me, it simply puts me in touch with my God. He hears my plea. But at the same time I do not demand anything from him.”

  “No, because he bloody well won’t answer you, will he?”

  “The words of a Godless man, am I right?”

  I say nothing.

  “I accept what is and what must be,” Kavi answers as enigmatically as ever. “Most men do not.”

  That’s directed at me. “Well, I don’t accept that there’s nothing I can do to get out of here. Nothing to do but watch and––”

  “Wait?” Kavi finishes for me.

  “T-That’s right.” I turn back to Patty. “Can you think of any reason why you might have been kidnapped?”

  She shakes her head. “None at all. I’m nothing special, young man.”

  “Maybe that’s just it,” Jane interrupts. “Maybe we’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle. Have you ever thought that they’ve chosen us simply because we’re ordinary? Because we won’t be missed? Heaven knows nobody would give a toss if I vanished off the face of the Earth. I haven’t seen my ex in years and I moved recently so I don’t have any close friends in the area. How about the rest of you?”

  “My wife and small son,” Kavi informs her, a faraway look in his eye, “they would miss me.”

  “My husband passed away many years ago, but there’s my daughter,” Patty says. “And my little grandson, though he’s probably too young to remember his old Gran if something should…” Her eyes begin to moisten.

  I pause to think, who would miss me? Who would actually care if I died right here in this cage like some kind of lab ra
t?

  Before I have too much time to mull it over, our food is brought in. Some sort of brown slop in a bowl with a spoon. It isn’t until one of the hooded figures draws closer with the stuff that I realize how incredibly hungry I am. I probably haven’t had anything to eat in well over forty-eight hours, though time has a way of becoming meaningless in this room. Our chains tighten as the cages are undone and the bowls placed inside.

  When the cages are locked again, and the ‘monks’ have departed, our bonds loosen. Jane and Kavi reach for their bowls and begin to spoon up the slop into their mouths. It’s obvious they’ve eaten at this restaurant before. Patty just sits and stares at the offering they’ve placed in her cage.

  I hunker over the bowl, sniffing at it. The stuff smells distinctly meaty. When I push the spoon around there are chunks of something in the broth.

  “You should eat,” Jane encourages me, “before they come and take it away again. You never know if you’re going to get another meal.”

  “You mean they’d starve us?” I ask.

  “It would not be the first time,” Kavi says. “Imagine having to eat while someone else is wasting away. That is true torture, my friend. For you and for them.”

  I raise a spoonful and my stomach rumbles. “But… what is it?”

  “If we ask do you think they’d tell us?” Jane had a point.

  I bring the spoon to my lips. Isn’t half bad, a bit like beef stew. Greedily, I tuck in.

  “Patty, you should eat too,” Jane calls across, getting to the bottom of her bowl.

  “I can’t face it,” she replies honestly.

  “You need to keep your strength up,” Jane insists.

  Patty pouts. “What, because I’m a frail old lady?”

  “No, I didn’t mean…”

  Patty folds her arms, more determined not to eat.

  “This is my first time as well,” I say. “But, really, it’s not as bad as it looks. Go on, take a––”