Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

have insisted, Carmen. We’ll talk about this after. Right now, get to her apartment, bring her in for interrogation and find John. And as soon as you get back, I want you both in my office, before you interrogate her. I want to know what the hells is going on, I want to know what is in John’s mind and I want to know why we have three decapitated bodies. I mean, what the hell! Have we got a serial killer, or what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why are you still here? Go!”

THIRTEEN

I opened my eyes and realized I had been asleep. I still felt groggy and the light was hurting my eyes. I tried to shield them with my hand, but couldn’t move it and remembered my hands were tied. Then the memories started to seep back. My belly burned and I felt sick. It had been dark. Now it was light. Somebody had switched the lights on.

I opened my eyes by slow degrees and peered. A wave of intense nausea washed over me and for a moment I thought I was going to vomit, but it passed and I tried to take in what I was seeing. My vision was foggy and at first it didn’t make a lot of sense. I had a strange sense of dissociation, as though I were watching myself, understanding myself and my relationship to the universe for the first time.

On my left there was a bare brick wall. It felt cold on the back of my hand. I muttered to myself, “There is cold, but I am not cold.” I raised my head and looked down the length of a body that was mine, but not me. Thin nylon rope bit into my throat, but I could see my shoes, and beyond them a jumble of boxes, old chairs, a standard lamp—junk. No windows.

I smiled, aware that what I was seeing was a symbol of my past, which was holding me prisoner.

Then I turned to my right. More cartons full of junk, photographs in frames, an old computer, wires, keyboards. Some concrete steps; I counted them: six, leading to a door. The door that had opened and then closed, where the shadow had stood. I wondered if the shadow had been me, observing myself. There was no source of natural light in the room. No way of measuring time. Everything was now. I stared up at the ceiling, the dirty, white wire protruding from the bare concrete, the ancient green glass shade, the forty watt bulb.

I craned my neck against the thin, nylon rope across my throat and tried to see the floor. It too was concrete, dusty, littered with bits of card, scraps of paper and amorphous trash that was impossible to identify.

I flopped back and looked to my right again. That was when I slowly became aware of the bench that was just a foot or two from my head and just above the height of my shoulder. It looked like a workbench of the sort you might have in your garage, for sawing wood or doing odd DIY jobs. But it was slightly different, as though it had been modified in some way. It had a system of rollers and pulleys I could not quite make out, but as I narrowed my eyes and tried to focus I realized that, fed through the rollers and pulleys, there was a thin steel wire, like a piano wire.

Or a cheese cutter.

And it was threaded up and over my throat. What was holding my head down was not just a nylon rope, there was a thin steel wire too.

With that realization came the realization also that I was on the clock, and a confusing feeling that I was already dead. Time was running out. While I had been sleeping under the effects of whatever drug I was being given, my captor had been in there with me, preparing me for decapitation. I was running out of time, and I was running out fast. I tested my ligatures again and realized that if I tried to force the wire around my neck, it would slice into my flesh. I had to release my hands first, but I had no idea how. I looked down at my right wrist and saw where my attempts to fray the rope earlier had bitten into the table, but had done nothing to the rope. My head was reeling. My stomach was panicking and my dissociated mind was embracing death.

The sound of the key in the lock made me look over at the steps. The tumblers clunked and the door swung open, but where earlier the light had been on outside, now it was off, and all I could see was the darkness of a corridor in shadows, and within it, the slightly darker shadow of a person’s silhouette, standing motionless, watching me.

I watched it back for a while, wondering again whether I was lying on the table or standing in the shadows, watching myself. A long time seemed to pass, but it may have been just twenty or thirty seconds. Finally I said, “Is that all we’re going to do, stand there and stare?”

Nothing happened. There was no response. The figure remained motionless, watching me. The words spilled from my mouth as though of their own accord.

“What do you think you are going to achieve by killing me? I am you and you are me. We are one. Life is death and death is life. It’s all the same. Besides, this place is going to be swarming with cops within the hour, like an ant hill. Nothing changes because I die.”

Then I heard something. It was like a sniff, or a slight hiss. It dawned on me that it was a snigger. A feeling of sinking dread seemed to drain me from inside. “You’re out of your mind,” I said, but