Tania Carver: Cage of Bones

Then she heard it. The crack of dry twigs. Footfalls. Heavy. Not caring whether she heard or not. Knowing he was going to find her. She couldn’t stay where she was. She had to keep moving.

Looking round, she quickly decided where the sound was coming from, turned and headed in the opposite direction.

Her feet hammering down hard on the earth, pain starting anew, body racked and burning, feeling worse for stopping, not better.

And on. Running, running, running. Arms pumping, legs pounding. Not stopping. Not looking back. Moving forward, ever forward. Her son in her mind’s eye. Running towards him.

And then… other sounds. In front of her, not behind her.

She slowed, nearly stopping. Listened again, tried to make them out over the top of her laboured, painful breathing.

She knew what the sounds were. She smiled.

Traffic.

She was near to a road.

Smiling, she ran all the harder.

Then: another sound. Behind her this time.

She risked a glance over her shoulder. And there he was.

Faith hadn’t expected him to move so fast, given the size of him. But he was barrelling towards her, knocking branches out of the way as though they weren’t there. Like that Vinnie Jones character in the X-Men film she had watched once with her son.

‘Oh no, oh God… ’

She ran all the harder. Away from him. Towards the traffic.

The forest floor began to slope downwards. There was an incline leading towards the road. Faith ran down it. Brambles and thorns were thick here. They tore at her, attempted to hold her back. She ignored them, refused to feel her arms, legs, as they were ripped open. Some snagged her, refusing to give way. She kept on running, letting them gouge out large lumps of bleeding flesh.

No time for that. Only for escape. Escape…

The road was in sight. The cars speeding past. She could see them. And, in a few seconds, touch them. Her feet ran all the faster.

And then, just as she was about to break free from the thorns, he was on her.

She screamed, tried to pull away. Felt his hot breath on her neck. His strong, meaty, sweaty grip on her shoulders. Fingers like heavy metal bolts digging into her skin.

She screamed again. Knowing she couldn’t match him in strength, she became an eel, twisting and writhing away from his grip. Something she had picked up years ago, used when a customer tried to get a bit too handy. There was another move she knew too.

Squirming and turning in his grasp, she managed to bring her heel up, right into his groin. He might be big and strong, she thought, but there was no way he wouldn’t feel that.

And he did. Grunting, he loosened his grip slightly.

It was all Faith needed. She pushed her body sharply back against him, knocking him off balance, releasing his grip further, then ran.

Towards the road.

She reached the kerb, glanced back. He was following. She allowed herself a small smile of triumph.

She had escaped. Got away. Yes, she-

Didn’t see the VW Passat coming round a blind corner, straight towards her.

Too fast to stop or change direction.

It hit her, sending her body into the windscreen, shattering it, then over the roof of the car, landing in the road behind, her pelvis shattering, twisting the lower part of her body away from the top. The next car, a BMW 4x4, tried to swerve and missed her torso, but wasn’t as lucky with her legs. The thick tyres crushed them as the driver slammed on the brakes.

Faith had no idea what had happened. No time to think. All she saw was daylight, the sky far away, yet near at hand. Then her son’s face once more, smiling at her. Like an image from another world.

And a few seconds later, it was.

Whenever Detective Inspector Phil Brennan thought he had seen every kind of horror that humans could inflict on humans, something would hit him with the force of a right hook to the gut to remind him that he hadn’t. And that he would never fail to be surprised and sickened, no matter how long he lived.

When he looked into that cellar and saw the cage, he felt that blow to the gut once more.

‘Oh my God… ’

As DI with Essex Police’s Major Incident Squad – MIS – he had witnessed on a regular basis the damaged and the deranged destroy themselves and others with tragic inevitability. Seen loving family homes mutate into abattoirs. Comforted victims whose lives had ended even though they still lived. Attended crime scenes so horrific they gave a glimpse of hell.

And this ranked as one of the worst.

Not because of the usual stuff. Gore and dismemberment. Emotion and anger made corporeal. A savage and senseless loss of life. Here, the passion and rage of murder was absent. Although he imagined it would have been there in time. No. This was a different kind of horror. A calculated, deliberate horror. Thoughtful and precise and vicious.

The worst kind.

Phil stood on the hard-packed dark earth and stared at it, shivering from more than just the cellar’s cold.

Arc lights had been hastily erected at either wall, dispelling the Hammer Films gloom, replacing it with deadeningly bright illumination that revealed everything, conversely making it all the more horrific in the process.

The blue-suited CSI team worked in the glare of the lights. They were all around him, attempting to spin samples and specimens into the slenderest of narrative threads, building the biggest story from the smallest particles.

Phil himself was similarly dressed, standing still and staring. Taking in what was before him. Trying to process it. Knowing he would have to hunt down the person responsible for it.

The cellar floor was strewn with flower petals. The arc lights showed up the varying colours: blue, red, white, yellow. All turning brown, curling, dying. All from different kinds of flowers. Around the walls were bunches of wilting blooms, bound together, placed in clusters at regular intervals, like little roadside memorials. The smell, in that small space, was overpowering.

Above them, daubed on the walls, were symbols. Swirling and Cabalistic. Phil had initially thought they were some kind of pentagram, an indication of devil worship. But he had examined them more closely and found that wasn’t the case. They weren’t like any Satanic designs he had come across. He couldn’t say what they were, but they made him feel uncomfortable looking at them. As though he had seen them before and knew what they were. And didn’t like them. He shuddered, kept looking round.

In the centre of the space was what looked like a workbench. Wooden surface, with adjustable metal legs. Old. Well used, but well looked after. Phil leaned forward, examined it. It had been kept clean, but the wood was stained darker in places, the surface scarred and chipped with blade marks and heavy, angry gashes. He suppressed a shudder.

And there, behind the bench, at the far end of the cellar, was the cage. He moved closer, stood before it like an astronaut confronted by an alien artefact, unsure whether to worship it or destroy it. It took up nearly a third of the cellar. Floor to wall to ceiling. The bones embedded, cemented. Bound tightly together with what looked like some kind of hide. Varying in size, but all quite long and substantial. Precisely worked and integrated. A solid construction, criss-crossing to form neat, even-sized squares. It had been there a long time. Some of the bones were worn and smooth, time-leached from white to grey. Some were much newer, almost white. And it had been well maintained over the years. Sections had been repaired, the newer, paler bones standing out, at odds with the rest. Old, splintered ones strengthened and bound. A smaller frame set into the larger one served as a door, hinged on one side by bindings, a chain and padlock securing it on the other side.