Watching You(2)

‘Trap,’ she whispered.

‘Too late, again,’ he heard himself say as he made his way inside.

The mechanism was mounted on the wall of the hall. It had fired blades at a specific height, in a specific direction. Deer shone her torch to the left, towards a half-open door. Probably the living room.

The screaming out on the porch had risen to pain now, no longer pure, astonished dread. There was, paradoxically, something hopeful about it. It was the scream of a man who believed he was going to survive after all.

Berger gestured to two officers behind, pointing them up the staircase to the right.

His colleagues set off upstairs, beams of light playing briefly on the ceiling above the stairs, then everything was dark again. Berger and Deer turned slowly back to the half-open door to their left.

Out with mirrors, to check for traps. All clear. Berger slipped into the darkness first, followed by Deer, as they covered each other. The weak torchlight revealed a bare, spartan living room, a clinical little bedroom, an equally scrubbed kitchen. No smell at all.

The kitchen extinguished the last hope. So clean.

And so empty.

They went back out into the hall as the two officers were coming down the stairs. The first merely shook his head.

It was lighter in the hall now. The wounded man was no longer screaming, just whimpering. Two long, thin knife blades without handles lay on the decking. The rain had washed the blood from them, from the whole porch.

So clean.

Berger looked up. In the distance an ambulance was heading towards the gates of the large, overgrown property. There were already two police vans there, their blue lights flashing next to two rival media vehicles. Curious onlookers had started to gather by the cordon. And the rain had eased to a heavy shower.

Berger’s gaze settled on the porch steps – almost two metres high – then he marched back into the hall again.

‘There’s a cellar.’

‘Do we know that?’ Deer said. ‘There’s no cellar door.’

‘No,’ Berger said. ‘Look for a hatch. Gloves on.’

They pulled on plastic gloves, spread out, rolled up the blinds. Light filtered in, refracted through the water. Berger pulled the bed out, dragged the chest of drawers aside. Nothing. He heard noises from the other rooms, then finally Deer’s muffled voice from the kitchen.

‘Come here!’ She was pointing at the wooden floor next to the fridge.

He could make out a slightly paler rectangle. They worked together to push the fridge aside with help from the three uninjured officers.

Between the fridge and the cooker, a rectangle had been cut into the floorboards, but there was no handle.

Berger stared at the rectangle. When it was broken open everything would change. The true descent into darkness would begin.





3




Sunday 25 October, 10.24

They had to prise the hatch open, four men armed with a variety of kitchen utensils. Berger stopped them when it was open just a few centimetres. He shone his torch around the edges of the hatch, and Deer pushed through a mirror that caught the light of the torch. No booby traps. They forced the hatch open. There was a crash. Dust flew up from below. Then silence.

More silence.

Berger switched his torch back on, and could see some steps. He jumped down, his torch and gun raised.

Step by step the darkness grabbed hold of him once again. The torch hid more than it revealed. A fragmented world: no more than claustrophobic cellar walls and low, half-open doors that led to yet more darkness, new, different, yet still essentially the same.

What struck him most was the smell. That it wasn’t what he had been fearing. And that it took him such a long time to identify it.

The entire cellar was bigger than expected. There were doors leading off in all possible directions. Cement walls, considerably newer than the house.

The air was thick. It left no room for anything else. And no windows, not a trace of any light but the five beams of lights that daren’t linger.

The smell grew stronger. The mixture. Excrement. Urine. Blood, perhaps. But not a dead body.

Not a dead body.

Berger scrutinised his colleagues. They looked pretty shaken as they spread out into the claustrophobic small rooms. Berger was in the one furthest to the left, shining his torch around. There was nothing there, absolutely nothing. He tried to picture the layout.

‘Empty,’ Deer said, her pale face appearing from behind one of the doors. ‘But this smell must be coming from somewhere.’

‘This cellar’s asymmetrical,’ Berger said, putting his hand to the wall. ‘There’s another room. Where?’

‘Spread out,’ he said from one of the doorways. ‘Search along the left wall. Differences in colour, texture, anything at all.’

He returned to the far left room. The cement looked uniform, nothing that stood out in any way. Berger hit the wall, a short, sharp uppercut. The plastic glove broke, and with it the skin of his knuckles.

‘I think we’ve got it,’ he heard Deer say from somewhere.

Berger shook his hand and walked out. Deer was crouched in the corner of a room on the right, as one of the police officers lit it with a shaky beam.

‘Something’s different here, isn’t it?’ Deer asked.

Berger inspected the wall. In the far corner there was a square half-metre where there might have been a tiny shift in colour. Footsteps heading down into the cellar. One of the officers appeared with the battering ram in his hand.