There was light on the other side. It was startlingly bright: burning through the keyhole, the cracks in the wood, a knot about halfway up that had two pinprick-sized holes in it. I moved up to the door, looked down at the handle and felt myself reach out for it. I couldn’t see my arms, didn’t reach for it with my fingers, but could feel my hands on it. Could feel I was turning the handle.
Then I stopped.
In the space behind me, I felt someone move in close. A presence. And with it came a distant sound. A sound I recognized. I let go of the door handle and realized the sound was waves turning over, crashing on the shore.
The sound I heard the first night I ever met Derryn.
I felt the presence nod at me. Telling me I was right.
Is Derryn waiting for me beyond the door?
No reply.
I want to see my wife.
I felt the presence drift away.
Please, let me see my wi—
‘David?’
I opened my eyes. Below me a man was looking up: scruffy, his skin smeared with filth. He looked homeless: stained, mismatched clothes; the hood up on his jacket; an unkempt beard that consumed his face. I wasn’t sure whether he was real or not. I was drifting in and out of consciousness so fast and so often, I was finding it hard to tell the two apart.
He took a step closer.
Something flickered in me, the smallest fire of recognition. Then it was gone again. But as he took another step closer to the ladder, I clawed at the memory and it came to me. The man who had broken into my car. The man I’d lost outside Angel’s. The man I’d seen outside my house. I knew him. Knew him all along.
‘Alex…’
He looked past me to the doors, and then climbed up the steps to my right hand. Glancing at me, he unzipped his coat and took out some bolt cutters. He opened them up, placed them on the chain between the handcuffs, and cut through.
Snap.
Alex caught my arm as it dropped, but the movement still unbalanced me. I wobbled on the footrest, the cross vibrating as I leaned forward, but he pressed a hand flat to my stomach and steadied me. Slowly, he guided my arm down to my side.
He moved down the stepladder, picked it up and placed it under the left arm of the sleeper. He came back up the steps.
‘I’m going to take the nails out,’ he said. His voice was soft, almost soothing. A complete contrast to the way he looked. ‘It’s going to hurt. But I need you to keep quiet. If you scream, if you make a noise, they will hear — even above the alarm.’
He perched the bolt cutters on top of the sleeper, and slowly wrapped a hand around the end of the nail in my index finger. He glanced at me once.
Then he yanked it out.
The pain was colossal — like having my whole arm pulled from its socket. Every inch of the nail, every groove, every fleck of rust, bit, tore and ripped at my flesh as it came back out. When I looked at him, he held the nail up to me, as if trying to motivate some sort of response. Anger maybe — or revenge.
I looked at him, my vision blurring.
And then I blacked out again.
David.
David.
I came round to find him looking at me, both nails in the palm of his hand. He swapped to the bolt cutters, and placed a hand around my lower arm. He snapped through the handcuffs, his hand still pinning my arm to the cross. He placed a second hand under my wrist and slowly guided it back to my side. I wobbled a second time, the strength fading from my legs, and this time he let me fall forward, on to his shoulder.
At the bottom of the steps, Alex laid me on my stomach and started picking at the locks on the handcuffs. Inside a minute he was done. ‘John Cary taught me how to do that,’ he said quietly, unfastening them. Then, through the corner of my eye, I could see his attention switching to my back, his fingers tracing the scourge marks.
‘I need you to sit up.’
I shook my head. I’m not getting up.
‘I need you to sit up, David. If you don’t want to die here tonight, I need you to sit up so I can cover these marks.’
I shook my head again.
‘Yes,’ he said, forcefully, and rolled me over on to my back.
I cried out.
He pulled me up, so I was in a seated position, and took off his coat. He laid it on the floor next to him, and started to pull out something from the inside pocket. Long. Clear. I dropped my head forward and closed my eyes. Where’s the door? I searched for it, but couldn’t see it. Couldn’t feel anyone behind me any more. Couldn’t feel anything but pain.
‘Right,’ Alex said.
He was on his haunches in front of me, a long stretch of cling film doubled up in his hands. He started wrapping it around my body, so tight it felt like he was crushing my chest cavity. He circled me, securing the cling film in place under my arms, all the way down to my beltline. After circling me a fourth time, he stopped.
‘This’ll hurt when you take it off again,’ he said, ‘but the cling film will kill some of the pain for now.’
He gently took my hand in his, looked at the wounds, then started wrapping cling film around both of the fingers individually. Round and round, until everything was covered from the tips down to the top of the palm.
I looked at him. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why come here?’
He hauled me to my feet.
‘Because someone has to pay.’
And then the alarm stopped.
41
Immediately outside the crucifixion room was a long, thin, partially lit corridor. It looked like a military compound or a bomb shelter. There were no windows, just an arrow on the wall pointing to the left, underneath the words SURFACE. We were underground.
Alex carried me along, my arm slumped around his shoulder, my feet barely working. He’d been right: the pain in my back had been contained by the cling film, at least above the surface of the skin. Beneath, it felt like razor blades were running through my veins.
Naked lightbulbs dangled on cords above us, and every so often we passed other doors. Most were closed, but a couple were open. I glanced in at one of the rooms. It was small, empty apart from a pair of bunk beds facing one another.
The corridor got darker the further along we went. It was damp, with a musty, enclosed smell to it. Rust ran in strips next to the joins in the walls. Alex stopped about halfway down and listened. Above us there were voices — muffled, echoing slightly. It was hard to make out words, hard even to tell whether the voices were male or female. I started to drift away again as we stopped moving, set loose in the darkness. Then Alex pulled me back by forcing me to move forward.
Eventually we reached a set of doors, and pushed through them. On the other side was a triangular-shaped anteroom with two further doors. The one on the left had a glass window in it and was marked MEDICAL. Inside I could make out whitewashed walls, a dentist’s chair, a panel of switches and plugs above the headboard of a bed, an oxygen tank, and a trolley like the one Legion had used, this one full of scalpels, chisels, scissors and clamps. The adjacent door, on the right, wasn’t marked, but also had a glass window — it was mostly dark, except for one strip light, dull and creamy in the blackness beyond.
Alex pushed through the right-hand door. On the other side there was very little lighting — only the strip light I’d glimpsed, and two identical ones further down, spaced about ten metres apart. They gently buzzed above us as we walked. The corridor was shorter, with two doors on either side, and a further one, standing open, at the end. Steps led up from the open door, a block of light at the top.