Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘Then why?’ Sean pushed, knowing he must be running out of time, knowing Sally would have called for assistance almost as soon as he left her and that any moment half the Metropolitan Police would be crashing through the thin door behind him.

‘They made me do it,’ Keller answered. ‘They’re whores — all of them. They tricked me. They made me … be with them, but they disgusted me. I scrubbed myself in the shower, but still I could smell their stench. They’re whores. They’re nothing and I treated them like nothing.’

‘But what about Samantha? She wasn’t a whore. She wasn’t nothing.’

‘Don’t you talk about her,’ Keller warned him, tears welling in his eyes, spit spraying from his thin, white lips. ‘She’s not like them. They tried to make me believe they were her … the … the way they cut their hair — the clothes they wore, everything, but they were just whores. Meaningless whores.’

‘So you killed them. You drugged them and you took them into the woods and you killed them.’

‘No,’ Keller screamed, taking another step forward, but Sean held his ground, acting as the bait to draw him further away from the tall cupboard.

‘And how did that feel, Thomas? Killing them? When you slipped your hands around their beautiful, delicate necks and sank your thumbs deep into their throats — how did that feel?’

‘You don’t know anything,’ Keller screamed.

‘When the life ebbed from them, when you held them even after they were dead, when you stared into their lifeless eyes — how did that feel, Thomas?’

‘No. No. No!’

Sean’s fist hit the table hard, making the myriad items littering its surface jump and scatter. ‘Damn you — tell me how it felt.’

Hatred poured from Keller’s eyes, his face twisted and deformed, his stained teeth bared and threatening, primeval weapons readied for use, his entire body a coiled spring about to explode all over Sean. ‘Fuck you!’ he screamed so loudly he shattered the very air in the dingy room, spinning quickly and smoothly, reaching the tall cupboard in micro-seconds and throwing the door open.

Sean was already on his feet, his right hand pulling the CS spray from his coat, his left planted on the underside of the table, lifting it upwards and hurtling it out of his way, providing him with the shortest route to the madman, cups and plates, half-full glasses flying through the air. It seemed to happen in slow motion, but it was the shotgun Keller was reaching for that Sean saw above all else — its wooden stock and shortened black double barrels. He moved as fast as he’d ever moved in his life, but as he watched Keller’s right hand wrap around the pistol grip of the stock he knew he hadn’t moved fast enough. Keller spun back towards him, the black holes of the gun barrels bearing down on him. The two men were only three feet from each other, simultaneously firing their weapons. The CS canister soaked Keller’s face in burning liquid, instantly blinding him and arresting his respiratory system, while the outside arc of the shotgun blast pounded into Sean’s left shoulder, knocking him backwards through the air and throwing him to the ground, dozens of red-hot lead pellets feeling first like a punch, then like the feet of a hundred crawling insects before turning to the searing pain of a thousand wasp stings.

He looked up at the madman, thrashing and wailing, clawing at his own eyes with one hand, unwittingly pushing the caustic liquid deeper into them, salivating uncontrollably, sweeping the shotgun back and forth across the room, trying to see Sean through blinded eyes, listening for him, finger wrapped around the trigger. It wouldn’t be long before Keller’s eyes began to clear, leaving him a sitting duck, lying on the floor with only one good arm, the CS he’d been holding long since dropped and lost amongst the wreckage from the table he’d upturned. He grabbed the first thing of size he could reach, a small saucepan, and threw it across the room, sending it crashing into the cupboard next to the sink. Keller spun towards the noise, pointing the shotgun at the place he thought Sean had to be, his finger squeezing the trigger, but then easing off, some animal instinct to survive telling him to save his last shot until he was sure.

Sean groaned inside as he realized his plan had failed and now he was on the floor and at least eight feet from Keller. He swallowed the searing pain in his shoulder and managed to hold his useless arm across his chest while crouching into the starting position of a sprinter, bursting into a full charge, keeping low as he saw the shotgun sweeping in his direction, Keller’s watering eyes growing wide as they tried to focus on the dark shape covering the short distance between them. Sean powered his right shoulder hard into Keller’s midriff, carrying him backwards with him until they smashed into the tall cupboard. The shotgun blast exploded above Sean’s head as they fell to the floor, the cupboard falling on top of them and catching Sean a glancing blow on his temple, knocking him temporarily senseless. It was all he could do to hold on to Keller as they wrestled on the filthy floor, but the blow to the head, the blood loss and the shock of being shot were beginning to tell, beginning to overwhelm his instinct to survive.

Suddenly Keller was on top of him, overpowering him, his face fading away to be replaced by the face of his father, sneering and lascivious, before it faded back to Keller’s. A hand grabbed him around the throat and began to squeeze, the thumb pressing hard on his trachea and making him cough and gag for air, the fingers of his good arm desperately trying to pull the hand away from his neck, loosening it just enough so he could breathe as the madman stared down at him, eyes wild with hatred, his teeth stained with blood from a cut somewhere inside his mouth, making him appear demonic. Sean was powerless to act as he watched Keller pull his right fist back and then ram it into his injured, bleeding shoulder.

Sean screamed out in pain and anger. Keller drew back for a moment then once more smashed his fist into Sean’s wounded shoulder, then repeated the action again and again. As the blows raining down on him added to his blood loss and accelerated the effects of shock, Sean’s vision began to fail, the man above him little more than a silhouette. Finally the blows stopped and Keller leaned close and whispered in his ear.

‘Time to die.’

He felt the same long, bony, strong fingers that had strangled Karen Green and Louise Russell closing around his throat — two hands now, squeezing the life from him. But just as he felt he was on the verge of blacking out, the hands released him and the silhouette seemed to rear backwards, a pathetic scream of pain leaking from his mouth, closely followed by a whimper as the madman toppled off him and lay next to him on the floor, clutching at the back of his head.

Sean coughed and gulped for air, the oxygen partially restoring his vision as he blinked his eyes clear enough to see Sally pulling her handcuffs out and bending over the stricken Keller. She set her ASP baton on the floor next to Sean while she rolled Keller on to his front and pulled his hands behind his back, inflicting as much pain as she could in the process. She clicked one of the cuffs around his wrist then dragged him a few feet to a thick metal radiator pipe running along the length of the wall just above floor height. She fed the cuffs around the back of the pipe and secured his other wrist, then recovered her ASP from the floor and knelt beside Sean.

Through his shock and confusion Sean was able to piece together what had happened, the dark hairs, sticky with fresh blood stuck to Sally’s ASP told their own story. He felt his head being lifted as Sally placed her rolled-up coat under it.