Ventriloquists (42 page)

It was not a netball that passed from hand to hand, however.

It was a human head.

An Absence of Light

1.

Eastlight woke up in a state of high agitation. He did not know where he was; all he was aware of was pain in both his legs, the sense of a retreating hangover… and the dark physical confines of where he’d been placed. When he tried to stretch out his arms, he understood that there was no space for them to stretch
to
. Instead, his fingers touched the walls of his upright coffin – walls cold and damp – and he remembered the attack that Don Bridges had served him, comprehending in an instant that Don must have shoved him into the hole in the kitchen floor. His heart fluttered. He wiped sweat from his unseeing eyes and tried to dry his hand on a trouser leg.

There were no trousers. Don must have stripped him. There were no boxers either; as Eastlight conducted a touch-search of his own body, he concluded a mental tally. He was not wearing socks; he wore nothing on his upper body. Nothing at all.

He’d been left in a hole completely naked. He’d freeze!

Jesus Christ.

His mind mouthed the words slowly, as if to someone who spoke a different language.

I’ll starve to death. He’s trying to kill me…

With this realisation planted, Eastlight reached up with both arms and pushed at the underside of the trapdoor. The wood was chilly and dry; it was strong. The trapdoor did not move (had Don placed something heavy on top of it?) and only when his chest muscles burned did Eastlight give up, exhausted and panicky, the pains in his legs excited by the exertion.

But I’m standing, he thought. I’m not crippled… He didn’t finish my legs.

It was something: a ray of light in Eastlight’s darkness. Or if not a ray, at least a bursting match-head.

Trying to remember what he’d seen while Don had assaulted him with the shovel, Eastlight pushed up against the trapdoor again.

He had seen the trapdoor open, leaning back against its hinges. He had wondered what the hell it was. Then Don had swung his weapon once more…

Locked?

Was the trapdoor locked and bolted; maybe padlocked? How could Eastlight assume he’d ever have enough strength to break a metal lock? But if there was something heavy on the latch, and no locks present, then perhaps with determination… perhaps.

Eastlight pushed one more time, using every grain of power at his disposal. He could not see anything in the darkness, but feel? Oh yes: he could feel plenty. Rivulets of perspiration, for example, rolling down his rotund belly; swimming over the slabs of fat. And something more alarming as well: something trickling between his buttocks. It felt like semen.

He stopped pushing. The discomfort in his anus had been overwhelmed by the agony raging through his shins and thighs. With a deft middle finger he explored the area in question. He’d had sex with his attacker –

No, Charlie. Not ‘sex with’ your attacker.

You’ve been raped, mate. The evidence is clear. He bummed you one, Charlie.

Now how does that feel? He knocked you unconscious and then he stripped you. Then he took out his withered old root and he –

Eastlight snarled as loud as his lungs would let him. He punched at the trapdoor, an action that served only to bruise and graze his knuckles. Having shouted Don’s name four times (and on receiving no answer), he snarled in frustration once more… but the sound decayed into a whimper – something petulant and forlorn – and he understood, when he tried to sit down, how he’d come to be unconscious but upright in the first place: there was simply no room to sit cross-legged, let alone on his arse with his legs stretched out. His body was a big one; it filled and completed the hole that Don had prepared as surely as earth or sand would have done.

He was trapped.

Tears followed. In his blindness, Eastlight moved his hands in front of his eyes, convinced that he could see them.

I’m not blind, I’m not –
and as soon as he could he began pleading with Don from the grave.

‘I’m sorry, Don; I’m sorry I called you Donald Duck,’ he whimpered. And he carried on calling; he remonstrated and he threatened. He pushed at the trapdoor. He cried again – bitterly – and swore vengeance and begged for water. He promised prison for the old man… and then he learned two things simultaneously, there in his private hell.

The first was that Don was not listening. Perhaps he was not even present.

The second was that he had no chance of punching his way free of his box.

He would have to dig.

2.

Eastlight spent a length of time that he couldn’t measure trying to fork his increasingly cold fingers into the compacted earth that was the side of the hole directly ahead of him. During this time the only satisfaction he earned was the feeling of crumbs of mud rolling over his knuckles as his efforts made some minimal difference. It was slow going; but what choice did he have? If he could dig horizontally for a while, perhaps he could generate a kind of cave-in, and if he could make the earth fall in, perhaps he could stretch his arm’s length out towards the surface.

Suddenly he stopped digging. Like a mudfall itself, a set of realisations tumbled through his mind; he swore loudly – at himself this time – because he had been so slow on the uptake. And although he could blame the concussion he had received for his mental sloth, Eastlight was not sure this was the case. For one thing, it was not his head that hurt: if Don had brained him with the shovel, it was a wound that had healed swiftly… or else he had been here a lot longer than he’d first imagined. So what then? Had it been the pain caused by the strikes to his legs that had made him black out? Embarrassing, if so; but it was not of primary importance (although Eastlight continued to explore his scalp for bumps and abrasions while the mudslide moved into his consciousness).

He could breathe.

It was the first time that he’d considered this fact, and it arrived like a spiritual revelation.

He could
breathe
.

Which meant that air was entering the hole, from somewhere. But where else could it be coming from?

Eastlight stood on tiptoes, the better to get a sniff of what he was more sure than ever was the trapdoor above him. Due to the pains in his legs, however, he could not hold the ballerina’s pose for more than a few seconds, and the results were inconclusive. Had he or hadn’t he smelt fresh air from a gap at the trapdoor’s edge? The only thing he knew for certain was that looking straight up in the darkness had provided him with a neck strain and a faint sense of vertigo.

‘Again, then,’ he muttered. This time he eschewed the option of tiptoes; he stared up at his unnatural sky and breathed deep.

Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Trickles of pure air were coming in, to dilute the damp clammy whiff that escaped from the mud. Which meant what? There must be a gap (or two) around the trapdoor’s edges! My God! thought Eastlight, and he knew at once the true definition of hope. The
gaps
were where he had to dig with his fingers, regardless of how uncomfortable the exercise would be. And there was no time like the present, was there? Surely the fact that no light could creep through the gaps suggested that no light was on in the kitchen.

It was time to dig.

So deciding, Eastlight shuffled his bulk slightly in the confines… and his bare left foot touched something solid – something that felt different from earth or mud. It could be metal, it could be plastic; he wasn’t certain.

He froze.

Then the object below his left foot started to ring.

3.

Too stunned to move for a few seconds, Eastlight absorbed the information as if through the riddling filter of a dream. The scant illumination peeking up from beneath his swollen knees; the persistence of the familiar ring tone…
It’s my mobile,
the prisoner concluded; and he set to attempting to answer it before it rang off.

Easier thought than achieved! Eastlight was forced to squat, the hole’s back wall rubbing cold slimy mud along his spine… but there was not enough room to manoeuvre, and the agony in his legs was atrocious. He could not get low enough to reach the phone.

It rang off.

Insisting ‘
No
’ in a gasping voice, Eastlight imagined gravity assuming a fifty-fifty share of the responsibility, but gravity was impotent here in the hole. Not even gravity could suck a tennis ball through a car exhaust pipe; the effort would be Eastlight’s alone. And he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t…

Yes he could.

His bottom slid another few centimetres down the muddy shaft – and his legs, now a quarter bent, complained loudly. Darkness churned in front of his eyes; exaggeratedly he blinked and blinked again, in an effort to ward off unconsciousness. If he blacked out in this position, his legs might seize and he might never stand up again.

Is that right? And how exactly do you plan to stand up again anyway, blackout or no blackout?

One problem at a time, Eastlight told himself, now puffing like a hillside locomotive.

Reach!

His bottom slipped down by another couple of centimetres, and Eastlight felt the pain of some skin being scraped off his tailbone.

Reach, you fat cunt!

Eastlight reached – his legs bent double, pain in shimmering waves – and the mobile phone wriggled away from his touch.

‘No…’ he breathed. ‘Come here, darling – come to me…’

And with a final stretch, he was able to fidget the handset into his left palm. He squeezed it tight; he loved it. Right at this very moment – almost deaf to the din of pain – the supermarket-bought mobile, nothing flash in the outside world, was probably the most precious thing that Eastlight had ever owned.

Then it rang again.

4.

‘When are you gonna let me out?’ Eastlight asked as calmly as he could.

‘I’m not,’ Don answered.

‘You can’t leave me in here, Donald. I’ll freeze to death. I’ll starve.’

‘That you will, Mr Eastlight. I’ll be with you every step of the way – if step is the right word.’

‘…What do you mean?’

‘We’ll be in regular telephone contact,’ Don told him. ‘The first favour technology’s ever done me, Mr Eastlight. I’m going to listen to you die. You can call me anytime.’

And he ended the call.

5.

Having listened to the disconnect tone and the silence that followed for nearly a minute, Eastlight spent another minute in a successful effort to stand upright. Then he stirred himself into action. He had his phone: that was more than he’d thought he had a few minutes earlier. It was a start… He called Massimo but got no answer. Then he called Vig. It rang and rang… and then Dorota’s voice slurred sleepily into his ear.

‘It’s Charlie, Dorota,’ Eastlight said loudly but not quickly – he did not want to fluff his chance by acting panicked. ‘I think I’m in Don’s hut.’

‘You think you’re
what?
’

‘I’ve been imprisoned. He intends to starve me to death.’

‘Charlie. Are you drunk?’

‘I think I am; but this is serious, Dorota. I’m naked and I’m in a hole – an actual hole. I think it’s the one in his kitchen.’

‘You’re naked?’

‘Yes… I need you to –‘

‘He says he’s naked,’ Dorota told Vig. ‘In Don’s trap.’

Vig said something that Eastlight couldn’t hear.

‘What was that?’ Eastlight asked, a little sharply. What did they need to take him seriously?

‘Vig wants to know where Don is,’ said Dorota.

‘Well, how the fuck should
I
know? I’m in a fucking
hole.
I’m shivering. And so I’m asking you if you’d kindly get out of bed and come and let me out!’

‘Okay okay, Charlie, Vig’s pulling on his trousers. We’ll be there in ten minutes.’

‘
Hurry
.’

Eastlight breathed with a sudden and unexpected difficulty. It took him a moment to realise that this was excitement. It made him shake. No longer did it matter that his phone’s display showed a measly two bars of existing battery - his rescuers would be here in a trice.

6.

‘This is madness,’ said Dorota; ‘absolute bloody madness.’

Although Vig wanted to tell her to shut up, he kept his lips sealed as they strode across the gravel driveway and onto the path that led into the woods.

‘I want him out, Vig. Tonight. I’m serious.’

‘Let’s see what’s going on,’ Vig replied, ‘before we make any rash decisions.’

‘You think he’d
lie?
’

‘I don’t know, Dorota. All I know is, I wish I’d never won that bloody prize. It’s been nothing but a hindrance.’

‘Oh yeah. Because you loved teaching brats to speak German, didn’t you? It wasn’t
you
cursing about all the books you have to mark.’

‘There are other jobs in the world, Dorota.’ Vig was trying to keep his cool.

They had entered the woods and the temperature had plummeted.

By the time they arrived at Don’s cabin, the angry silence that they’d created hung around their throats like a noose. And it throbbed like a headache.

Wasting no time whatsoever, Dorota rapped on the door. She tapped her foot impatiently; a clutch of desiccated leaves crackled under her heel as it was crushed.

She knocked again.

‘Open up, Don!’ she shouted.

‘He’s probably asleep,’ Vig mentioned.

‘Only the guilty could sleep tonight.’

She had a point, Vig acknowledged: if Don was sleeping, after the grilling he’d been given… then why? Then how?

A murmur of movement from within. A shuffle. A voice.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

Voice corroded by drink – and possibly slumber. Say they’d raised the old guy from his pit of dreams… Vig felt a buzz of guilt. If only he could hear a baby’s cries, something to verify the claims…