Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

he needed to. If he started giving me any bother, I could chain him up properly then.

I picked up the clothes I’d taken from him and locked the cell. Leaving those on the table, for now, I went over to the one the kid was in. That one didn’t have open bars I could watch through, the wall was solid, but the metal door had a big, hinged panel I could open.

“I warned you to keep quiet, didn’t I?” I told the brat as I glared in at him. “From now on, every time I hear you, I’m going to come in there and make you regret it. And you’ll go without food for the rest of the day. Is that what you want?”

The kid shook his head mutely, his miserable snotty face staring back at me tearfully with wide, frightened eyes. I showed him the cattle prod, and he flinched backwards. That gave me a nice tingling feeling. It would be a few hours before the new creature woke up. I’d come back after lunch and see what he had to say for himself then.

Twenty-Seven

Shay

I woke up slowly, with a sour taste in my mouth. Right. He’d hit me with the taser gun, a couple of jolts, then stuck the needle in. I’d started to drift away pretty quickly after that, a pleasant, relaxed sensation. Midazolam? He must have given me a big enough dose to bring about deep sedation. Crap! That stuff could fuck with your memory for up to a day. No noises nearby, no sensation of being watched.

I opened my eyes and blinked a few times to clear them. My right eye felt a bit sore. Had he been poking at it? Probably. I checked my thigh. He’d removed the darts. Nothing there now but a slight sting from the little burns. I ran the succession of events over in my head and decided I’d been right not to try to rush him. He’d been too cautious, too prepared, to come close enough for that to work, and it would have been entirely out of character too. The moment he decided I was pretending to be something I wasn’t, I’d be in real trouble.

I sat up, shivering slightly. That wouldn’t do. The brain could be easily fooled though. Under hypnotic suggestion, an onion could taste like an apple, hot feel cold and cold feel hot, a metal spike through the flesh of the arm caused no pain. It was all about tricking the brain into believing what it was told to believe, ignoring the real nerve signals and accepting the proposed alternative interpretation. You just needed to alter your state of consciousness. It wasn’t cold in here, it was pleasantly warm, see? I’d have to watch the extremities, keep the little muscles active enough to generate heat, but it was well above freezing in here. No danger of frostbite.

I was locked in a cell about fifteen feet deep and twenty long, the entire front of it was just a set of metal bars with a door in the middle. Those would be sunk deeply into the floor and ceiling. Bare, cement floor, plastered walls. The length of chain running from the manacle on my right wrist was attached to a horizontal bar on the back wall that it could slide along. Not long enough to get me near that door, but I was very pleased to find myself so loosely restrained. If I’d been chained hand and foot, I’d have been totally fucked. There was nothing in here but the mattress I was sitting on and a drain in the back corner. A low power light bulb, hanging from the ceiling in the room beyond the bars, currently provided the only light.

I continued my unmoving survey of my surroundings. A big wooden table and a chair occupied the middle of the floor out in the main room. There was shelving along the far wall, and the rest of my clothes were stacked on one of those in a little heap with the trainers on top. There were other clothes there too. There were also a disturbing number of spare chains, ropes and various tools. What looked to be a massage bed was propped up in the corner, legs folded. Yeah. I could picture Dominic Chuol strapped face downwards on that, puking harmlessly into a bucket below.

Above the shelves was a wall mounted metal box with an array of little lights, all inactive. A subsidiary display for the alarm system upstairs, probably. A glass-fronted cabinet held what looked to be a well-stocked personal pharmaceutical store. Lots of pill bottles, vials and unopened syringe packets. Enough funds and you could buy pretty much anything you wanted these days. There was a little electric heater out there too. Brady probably only turned that on for his own benefit whenever he intended to spend some time down here.

The door leading out of this cellar looked like a real problem. I’d only get to see how thick it was when he opened it again, but I imagined it would be a good couple of inches. Reinforced steel, with long bolts sinking deeply into the wall most likely. If the walls weren’t solid steel under the plaster, they would at least have regularly spaced reinforcing bars running through them.

Was there an equally formidable door above? His front door had been black-painted metal too, and the only window I’d spotted with the curtains open had bars on the inside. With the security setup I’d seen out there, nobody was going to take him by surprise or burst into this house quickly enough to prevent Brady from getting down here.

I stood, slowly and carefully and walked along to the corner a little unsteadily to get some idea of the full length of that room out there. It was bigger than I’d thought and there was another door on the wall opposite the main door. Another room, or cell. Was Jimmy in there?

Alright,