63 :

I was starting to see a pattern here. The way they did things. They waited until it was dark, they waited until they were alone, they waited until the odds of two-to-one, three-to-one, four-to-one seemed fair.

Chickenshits.

Seems like we’ve been here before. Last time I had been where my love, my Helen was. Alone in the dark, blind, barely conscious. Aware only of what one couldn’t see. In a situation like that, the four remaining senses become acute : paranoid, searching for signs of something, anything : the slightest taste in the mouth, the dry aluminium of fear, the smell of petrol, the vibrations of engines, the noise of motors as the idled, died and then spark to life, something, anything. Unable to scratch, unable to speak, unable to do anything.

Except there she was, limp, dead, oblivious, in some kind of sleep, in the oblivion of an unknowing nightmare. Cliff looked at her, in his eyes an undisguised, animal lust.

She was trying, through the fug of slowly returning consciousness, desperately, to try and understand what was going on, where she was, who was that voice? There is no training for this. How can you reason with this, how can you talk your way out of this, how can you reason with the unreasonable? There are no guidebooks for this. No Worst Case Scenario Book called “How To Survive A Kidnapping”. She played dead, at least for a while, recognising that in this state, her arms bound, blind, she was not powerless, but impotent. So she knew how too many men felt at middle-age, owning stubborn bodies that no longer responded. Wait. Think. Assess. Work out what the hell is going on.

What do you do? Talk to them? Try to use your feminity to appeal to them? And not in the way you already appealed to them? Talk to them? Try to see you the way they would see their sister or their mother? And what if they wanted to fuck and kill their mother? Not good. By no measure could this be seen as a good situation. There was no way that you could spin this into an opportunity. A challenge. Helen was fucked.

She wished she’s had Samaritan training. She wish she knew how to talk to people like this, how to think like scum, how to step inside their minds and find out how they worked, how they thought, what they did, how she could somehow get them to release her. But how? Sometimes she was glad she could not think like a murderer, understand a kidnapper, could not relate to someone like that. But not now.

Her skin itched. Her wrists were raw where black tape bound them together, hairs pulled out of follicles, skin raw with adhesive. She felt eyes upon her. But she still couldn’t see a fucking thing except a tiny strip of light to the bottom of her vision.

His eyes, dark and cold as the night, were no longer looking at this girl as if she were some kind of person, a woman, like his mother, or a girl, like the daughter he never saw, but instead, she had become an object in his eyes. A piece of flesh, reduced the way that a cow is reduced to merely meat, to leg, bone, thigh, calf, breast, the girls of pornography to mere genitals and limbs. She had become merely something, not someone.

I slapped him. My hand passed right through him, that strange feeling akin to running your hand through water, as if he somehow bent around me, parted like reeds as the wind moved through it. And I felt something. I felt something dark and something ugly. As if the ugliness within had touched me, I felt for a second how he might think, saw through dark eyes and a blind, cruel soul. In the way that when you run hand through water you feel the temperature, I felt his soul, if you could call it that.

I felt his soul. He scratched his cheek. He felt me.

Around me I heard voices. Other voices. Some distant, some near. I felt dark shapes. I felt other spirits. Strangers in the night as we rotated through the darkness, wheels idling slowly on tarmac, waiting at lights, all calm, all bright, all unknowing the terror that moved mundanely through their lives. Evil is just the same us, more mundane than us, unable to see the world we do, unable to feel the way we do, dull, unimaginative, an evil life is still one of grocery shopping, evening meals, and bad Saturday Night television. And ill-fitting shoes. But still, I could not understand Evil. Nor did I want to. I did not want to walk a mile in those shoes.

What was He doing? Why was he leaving her alone with him? Why, when all he’s wanted all this time was this one thing, why, when it was in his grasp, would he let it go?

Time passed. Pass slowly, so slowly that each second felt like an hour, each hour a second, and it was impossible to tell how long we’d been here. The vehicle shook. The engine ticked over, then roared, wheels rotated hundreds of times a minute, people walked past obliviously just yards from us, seeing only the dull, silent exterior of a white van, and not the scene of a crime.

But most of us, believing so fundamentally that all things and all people are thoroughly decent, the concept of evil, of an event like this, is so far removed, so alien from us that we cannot even comprehend it.

But here we were. Stopping and waiting. And then slowly, on a deserted road, in the darkness, he climbed in, and Cliff took over to drive.

And the look in his eyes, like a zealot who finally saw the face of God for the first time, like the look a child who was staring at his mother, and somehow knowing who it was for the first time. He was home.

A hand reached out, trembled slightly, hardly daring to touch her skin. The index and ring fingers were the first that made contact, receiving the warmth of her scared body, the middle finger landing a fraction of a second later, so slow was his hand as he reached to his love. He closed his eyes, as if somehow the sense of touch would be amplified by the absence of vision.

How could someone so tender be so cruel? He loved her, he still did, in his blindness, his perverted way, that much was obvious. He loved, but knew not how to love. He knew only that he did : knew in the way that a child knew it loved, knew that it needed, but not why, or how.

God, it hurt. To see the woman you love like that. Hadn’t she been through enough? Wasn’t it bad enough that already he’d hit her, broken her nose, raped her, years before… and now… he still believed that she loved him, that if only she had the chance she would fall for him, whatever it was he had done or not done, it could all be repaired.

True love never dies.

Until death us do part. But whose death? Not mine. I was not dead anyway – I had merely evolved into another form of life, a different frequency of energy, something more than that. I had just gone through a door to a different room. But somehow, I was still stuck here. With her.

Her head lank, her chin poked down, the small folds of skin bunched up where her neck met her head, her hair hanging limply down, drawn by gravity. Christ, she’s going to wake up with one hell of a sore neck. If she woke up at all. In the backroom, unfurnished bar a heater and this dull, ordinary office chair, her legs tied together round the back of the chair, her jeans replaced by a skirt, bruises eating into her ankles, her feet cold and pale.

The fucking cunts. Someone was going to pay. In the darkness her breathing became a rhythm, the moving of the tides. If it wasn’t for that that she was gagged, bound, kidnapped by a murderer it may have even been peaceful.

In this state, the natural human reaction is that of denial. Escape by any means necessary. If the body cannot escape, the mind can. Endless hours in dentists chairs, the sound of drills, the high-pitched squeal of metal eating through bone, these things teach one how to escape. To retreat into the small black corner of the self where nothing bad can reach, even the bony finger of pain wasn’t that long.

That is where she was. Retreated, Somewhere deep inside her. Somewhere nobody, nothing can hurt her, And in that place, dark, yet light, something with her face was playing, something was smiling, someone young and perfect and beautiful.

She was dancing, she was blond, and she was beating her hands to the rhythm of an unseen drum. Consciousness was punishment. And the chloroform had yet to lift from the lids of her consciousness. Wherever this was, it was as real – or not – as any other sensory input.

To bear the unbearable you retreat inside yourself, to a place that nothing can reach. Nothing can touch me. Where isolation is perfect and safe. Inside a sterile, safe haven.