They were busy elsewhere.
‘This is nothing more than a message,’ he said. And to himself he added: and a warning. ‘We’ve got to get back to the mansion. Right now.’
He dropped the relics of the skirmish and began to run.
He hoped Collins and his people couldn’t run like Richard Shanti.
The girls lay in total darkness, their small thin bodies pressed tight together. They dared not speak but instead whispered, little more than a silent breath, into each other’s ears from time to time. As terrified as they were of the moment when they were discovered and the light blasted in to reveal them, they felt a sense of security in the cramped darkness.
In the old days there had only ever been one of them enclosed like this and it had always been a competition. Now, they were together, tighter than they’d ever been squeezed and staying brave for longer than ever before. If they wanted to win this game, they’d have to work together.
It was impossible in the darkness to tell how much time had passed. It seemed like hours but they knew it might only have been minutes since the shouting and wrenching of doors and the stomping, running footsteps of people searching for them. That had been the worst time, knowing that they might be exposed at any moment and listening, listening, listening for the faintest sign that their captors might be coming closer rather than getting further away.
And then there’d been a growling sound. At first they thought it was the hairy man coming back to get them but the growling sound went on and on and never moved. They could still hear it now. Someone was in there with them and there was no way they could creep out of their hiding place without being seen or caught. They had to wait. They knew that when they heard the growling noise stop and footsteps walking away; that would be their moment.
They had agreed what would happen next. It was very simple. They would run out of the house and into the grounds where the trees and bushes would hide them. And every time they hid and people didn’t find them, they would run to another bush and then another until they reached home. Home would be safe. And mama and papa would come home and love them again.
In utter blackness, they squeezed each other tight.
‘Soon,’ breathed Hema to Harsha.
‘Soon,’ replied her sister.
The cell in the mansion was far worse than the one the Welfare had provided.
He awoke to pain in many parts of his body and the smell of shit and urine. He tried to sit up and smacked his forehead against hard wood. Stars spread across his darkened vision. His head was exploding. He lay back and felt with his hands. The cell was more like a coffin than a room. It was about two feet deep, seven feet long – so he was able to stretch to his full body length – and about three feet wide. Whatever he did, there would be no way to stand.
He imagined the pressure sores that would erupt on the bony areas of his body while he waited for Magnus to do him in. Perhaps Magnus was so incensed at all that he’d done that his end – removal from the box, at least – might come swiftly. In the next moment he was ashamed that his first thoughts were of himself and not of Hema and Harsha for whom he knew it was already too late.
He’d done all he could do for them. Perhaps with more time, with the chance to liaise with others, it might have been different but there was no point hoping to change the past. In the box, little more than an oubliette – and perhaps that was how Magnus had decided to dispose of him – he was alone with his memories and his fears. Desperation grew despite the impossibility of escape. If only he could get out, he might have the opportunity to prevent the damage to his girls from being too scarring. With fewer guards around the house and grounds perhaps he’d have one more opportunity to finish Magnus himself.
The thoughts would drive him crazy.
He wasn’t prepared to give in to his mind yet. He was still alive, that meant there was still some kind of chance. At the very least perhaps he might see them again. Have the opportunity to say he loved them, to apologise and say goodbye. Such pitiful aspirations. How the town and everything in it had reduced him. How evil his life had been. No matter how he’d tried to absolve himself, no matter how he’d tried to stay pure, he had committed endless crimes and brought the very worst upon his family.
Again, he realised, such thoughts were deadly.
There was one good thing in the town. One good person that had wrought at least a little change – John Collins. Prophet John. The man who had shown him miracles were possible, that there were other ways to live for those compassionate and loving enough to try. It was crazy, what John Collins had been teaching, but Shanti believed it. In fact, belief didn’t fully define it; he knew in his body that it was true and possible. He knew it because he’d begun the same journey himself and it had not killed him. He had not eaten anything but light and air for many days and he was stronger and healthier than he’d ever been. He’d noticed in the mirror that, far from emaciating himself since he had stopped taking vegetables and rice, he had filled out. Not much, but enough to notice. His muscles were larger, his chest more expanded and able to hold more air. John Collins said that one day, when enough wisdom and love had been acquired, even the need to breathe would become a thing of the past. People would understand they were immortal, that they had always possessed the potential without realising it.
Of course, if Magnus knew that Shanti no longer needed to eat to stay alive, he might keep him in this stinking hole until he drove himself insane.
No.
He had to survive and to do that, he had to think right. He had to prepare.
First he checked out the painful places on his body. His nose was broken – he was fairly sure it shouldn’t be as mobile as it was. A couple of his front teeth were loose. His ribs were sore on both sides and he remembered being kicked a lot when he regained consciousness only to black out again. His legs were fine but his hands and elbows were cut and bleeding where he’d made contact with the teeth of some of Magnus’s men. There was a lump on the back of his head and that, more than any other injury, gave him cause for serious concern. It made his whole head hurt inside and out when he touched it. There was a swelling there and he didn’t know what it was filled with. His fear was that Magnus’s blow had cracked his skull and that his brain was exposed below the skin. If that was the case, he knew he could die at any moment. And if he didn’t, and if he made it out of this box, he might not live beyond standing up.
Instinct told him that he should try to heal himself. Was it instinct or was it something else? He felt a small pressure in his gut, right in the very centre of himself. He knew what it meant. He would try to be ready.
Lying on his back in the stinking filth of Magnus’s primitive cell, Shanti drew the light stored in his abdomen and sent it up to his skull. He prayed that it would fuse his broken cranium.
Bruno led his unfit brigade of guards up the long driveway praying, yes praying, that they were in time.
They rounded the final bend in the approach and he saw what he’d hoped not to. Ranged around the mansion in twos and threes were Collins’s raggle-taggle followers. They were dressed in clothes that might have been worn for decades at a stretch. Torn, faded, in some cases patched, in others not. They were no better than vagabonds. Scruffy urchins that had escaped the town’s attention for far too long. He would have laughed at them but for three things.