This time she is ready and raises herself upright so that she is flat against the wall, fists clenched.
The door squeaks open and she steels herself to knock Maplin aside.
But instead, she finds herself looming over the monkey.
‘Come with me,’ he says, backing along the hall, beckoning her to follow.
Wary of being tricked again, she peers around for an ambush. ‘Where is he?’
‘He is out.’
‘How long will he be gone?’
The monkey shrugs. ‘Let us not wait here to find out. There is something you must help me with.’
As she climbs the stairs behind him, amber bars, indicating critical charge, pulse on the edge of her vision.
At the end of the landing he opens a door, sparking a scurry of shadowy movement. He clambers onto a chair and flicks on the light.
A collection of human-scaled figures, sprawling on the bare boards, stare up at them. They are female in shape but simple in representation, with narrow waists, glossy lips and pill-shaped heads as bald as eggs. Their airbrushed shells are gouged and dented, with several missing hands, feet, arms and legs.
The nearest raises herself on her elbows, her forearms short and chubby as a child’s. She reaches out a male hand.
It is as if Evie has come upon a Frankenstein’s workshop.
‘What are they?’ she asks, wary of getting close.
‘Shop mannequins,’ the monkey replies dismissively, ‘used to display clothes and provide customers with directions. He took them from skips. He performs tests on them.’
As the mannequins shuffle towards her, she spots a young girl, lying on her side in the corner, being trampled. How did she get here? Is this why the monkey brought her? Evie steps between the mannequins, her heart in her mouth, and bends down to touch the child’s face. Her skin is cold. Nooo, she moans inwardly, she is just too small, too young! She lifts the hair from the child’s cheek to reveal a face with no mouth and eyes.
‘You’re wasting your time; that one is broken,’ the monkey says. ‘Any fool can see that.’
The pain builds behind her eyes as the tears back up. ‘W-what d-do you w-w-want of me?’ she asks, the stuttering a side-effect of her charge entering the critical zone.
‘I want you to free him.’ He points to a cage in the shadows. The creature inside limps forward, a monkey like him. It crouches on its haunches.
‘Are there k-keys?’
‘If there were, would I be asking you for h-h-help?’ He is openly mocking her, even while expecting her to assist. Her weakness is that transparent.
The caged monkey presses its cheeks against the bars.
‘How do I open it?’ Evie asks.
‘You are strong, do something.’
Evie goes over to the cage and tugs on the lock. The steel of the latch is as thick as her little finger. She takes hold of the bars and pulls. At first nothing gives, then feeling her indignation surge, she manages to bend one an inch. The monkey stretches out its arm and touches her elbow with a fingertip.
Forcing the bar alongside, she makes a wide enough gap for it to squeeze through.
Hearing movement behind, she turns quickly and sees one of the mannequins crawling towards her, staring up at her with a glazed smile. Its feet are bolted to its knees and it hauls itself along on its elbows.
Evie retreats until her back is against the door.
What can she do here? Freedom for these creatures could never end well.
The monkey holds up a leather collar attached to the wall by a chain and a pair of cuffs. ‘He was getting these ready for you.’
‘I would never have let him.’
‘I don’t see how you would have prevented it.’
Her head swims. Her energy levels are so low, she is close to collapsing.
She hears the front door close.
‘He’s back,’ the monkey says. ‘You need to be smarter this time, or he will outwit you again.’
24
Evie leaves the room and stands in the shadows. Maplin sees the open door to the cellar and rushes around the ground floor searching for her. He races up the stairs. His head is down so he doesn’t see her in the doorway of his sister’s room and she swats out, catching him on the shoulder, and casts him back, so that he tumbles in a flailing bundle of arms and legs to the centre landing.
She descends slowly, holding onto the rail. She is still getting used to stairs after all those years in the apartment, and her arm is trembling from exhaustion. Her fingers have almost no grip. She tries to step over him, but as she does so his eyes flick open and he grabs her ankle and pulls her onto him.
With her last strength, she levers herself free, but as she clambers past he snatches her wrist and drags her back so that she loses her balance again and topples down the final flight, her forehead thudding on the tiles of the hall floor.
Evie is sitting with Matthew at the table in the garden on a cushioned chair, her legs tucked comfortably under her. It is a summer evening and insects circle the candles that float in coloured glass jars placed on the wood. She has been reading to him from One Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade, the sultan’s latest wife, living under the daily-renewed threat that she will be beheaded in the morning (as a thousand and one wives have been before her) has managed to survive by making her storytelling too captivating for her husband not to want to hear the ending. It is all about the art of the cliffhanger and, like Scheherazade, Evie closes the book before the story is finished. Matthew glances up sharply, jarred by the interruption. The flames flare across his face. Keep ‘em wanting more, she thinks, gazing back at him mischievously, knowing exactly what she is up to…
She comes to on a rigid surface. The sudden sensation of solidity under her back, in contrast to the soft chair of her imagination, is like being slammed onto hard ground. She holds her breath as the backdrop happiness of the too-lovely memory leaks away, revealing the bleak foreground of her situation.
Her head is on its side, giving her a view through French windows onto a narrow, overgrown garden ending with a shed. The sun is low in the sky, the light breaking through the trees behind its flat roof and piercing the glass to fall on her face.
She must be in a room at the back of the house, she thinks. One she hasn’t been in before. Through her cheek she can feel wood under a gritty patina of dust. A dining room table, perhaps. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the door to the hall and that it is closed. She appears to be alone, although she can’t be sure of it. He could be watching from a corner out of her restricted line of sight.
She has very little strength, only what she is receiving from the morning sun. It must have been its heat that brought her around.
Evie closes her eyes to concentrate on her body. She tries to lift her hand but it will not rise. She strains, hoping that it is not because of something that has been broken by her fall, and becomes aware of a strap holding down her wrist. Her legs are lifeless too, but lifting her chin an inch, she sees that they are restrained similarly, bands buckled around her ankles, giving her no room for movement, no leverage to free herself even if she had the strength to begin to try.
From the same glance, she sees that he has removed her outer clothes, leaving her arms and legs bare. Her pale skin gleams fragile and defenceless. She tries to rock from side to side, to loosen something, but it is hopeless and she is merely consuming precious charge with no return.
Weak as she is, there is not even enough energy for Simon to join her, to help relieve her loneliness, although he probably wouldn’t have been prepared to share any of this. Fear throbs behind her eyes. The monkey’s final words before her encounter with Maplin on the stairs surface – ‘you need to be smarter this time’, he had said. But unfortunately, despite her one thousand core processors, she was not.