Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘Don’t try and talk,’ she told him. ‘You’ve been shot.’

‘You don’t say,’ he answered, laughing in spite of the pain at the absurdity of her observation. Sally smiled and shook her head. ‘Get me up,’ he ordered.

‘You shouldn’t try to move,’ she argued.

‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘Prop me up against the wall — where I can watch him from.’

‘You don’t have to worry about him,’ she said. ‘I’ll watch him till back-up arrives. I’ll call you an ambulance.’

‘No,’ Sean insisted. ‘You’re going to get Deborah Thomson out of that fucking dungeon.’ He fumbled for his jacket pocket with his one good hand and retrieved his phone. ‘I’ll call my own ambulance. You get her.’

‘Christ,’ she complained as she helped him crawl to the wall, propping him up limply where he could see the sobbing Keller slumped against the adjacent wall.

‘The door to the cellar’s locked,’ he reminded her. ‘You need to search him for the key. I think he still has it on him.’

‘OK,’ she nodded, cautiously approaching Keller, her ASP in hand. ‘Try anything and I’ll cave your fucking head in,’ she warned him — and meant it. She patted the outsides of his trouser pockets until she felt what she was searching for, carefully slipping her hand inside his tracksuit and recovering two keys. She turned and showed them to Sean. ‘I’ve got them,’ she announced gleefully.

‘Good,’ he answered. ‘You know what to do.’

She recovered her coat from the floor and placed it over his wounded shoulder. ‘Try and keep this pressed against the wound. It’ll help stem the bleeding. The coat’s ruined anyway,’ she added, making him smile through the increasing nausea and drowsiness.

‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Take the keys and go.’

‘OK,’ she said and was halfway out the door when Sean stopped her.

‘Hey,’ he called as loudly as he could. ‘I thought I told you to wait outside until back-up arrived.’

‘You did,’ she agreed, ‘but I got bored.’

He managed one last faint smile and waved her away. As soon as she left the building his eyes flickered and his head fell forward. A few seconds later — the darkness came.

Sally picked her way across the forecourt of Keller’s dilapidated collection of old brick buildings with their rusty corrugated-iron roofs, the smell of CS gas from the kitchen still clinging to her clothes and making her eyes sting and water. She held them as wide open as she could to let the mixture of sunlight and spring breeze clear the gas in the safest and quickest way. Several times she almost tripped on the debris that littered her route towards the small building Sean was convinced was the entrance to Keller’s private dungeon and torture house. Coughing CS gas from her lungs, its taste acrid and caustic on her tongue, she paused to peer into an old oil drum with burn marks around its rim. The smell of lighter fuel and petrol rose from inside the drum, causing her to examine it closer. She could make out the remnants of burnt clothes at the bottom, the occasional fragment of colour. ‘This is not good,’ she muttered.

Reminding herself that Keller was cuffed and secured under Sean’s watchful gaze, she forced herself to approach the door of the brick outbuilding. Taking a deep breath, she studied the keys in the palm of her hand and then the padlock. The first key she tried didn’t fit. A strange sense of relief washed over her, brought on by the possibility that she wouldn’t have to descend into the monster’s subterranean labyrinth — into the darkness that held nothing but fear for her. She sighed as she tucked the failed key into her jacket pocket, looking at the next one, willing it not to fit. But it slid into the slot smoothly, turning easily and popping the padlock open.

Sally’s throat suddenly constricted. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. The time had arrived when she would have to either walk through that wall of paralysing fear or risk never again being the person she once was. She wriggled the lock free and placed it carefully on the ground, aware that it would eventually play its part in forming the chain of evidence that would convict Keller of the murders and abductions.

The metal door felt as heavy as it looked once she started to pull it open, the terrible metallic scraping noise catching her by surprise and making her release the door and jump back, clutching her chest. ‘Fuck,’ she cursed loudly, feeling better for it. ‘This is not good,’ she said again and took hold of the door, vowing not to let go, no matter what happened. She pulled hard and kept pulling until the door was fully open, revealing the darkness inside and the stone steps that led down deeper into the well of her fears and nightmares. Her immediate reaction was to recoil from the darkness, retreating a few steps, but she managed to stop herself. ‘Shit,’ she cursed again. ‘This is fucking great.’

She paused, listening for the sound of approaching sirens, but there were none. ‘Bloody sticks,’ she complained. ‘I hate it out in the sticks.’ Most cops did. The inner cities might be dangerous, but assistance was never more than a couple of minutes away. Out here, you could be on your own fighting for your life for ten to fifteen minutes before anyone got to you. ‘Come on, girl, get a grip,’ she told herself, drawing her ASP — more for comfort than in the belief she would need to use it. It was stained with Keller’s blood — a fact that somehow made her feel better, bolder.

After several deep breaths to control her breathing and heart rate, she moved into the doorway and began her descent, squinting in the gloom, moving as silently as she could, cursing every scratch and scrape her shoes made on the hard stairs, her hand stretched out in front of her, feeling her way, ready to push aside any dangers, until at last her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Only another dozen or so steps and she would be at the end of her descent. But the further she went, the more she left the fresh air behind her. Now she was breathing in the sickening stench of unwashed humanity — urine, sweat, excrement and semen mixed into a foul, ungodly brew. She covered her mouth to stop herself gagging, desperately fighting the urge to flee back to the clean air above and abandon whatever creatures lay below to their fate. Halfway down she had to stop and lean against the wall to chase away the rising panic in her chest, her head turning towards the light. But it was in the darkness below her that salvation lay, and she knew it.

‘Come on. Come on,’ she urged, cursing herself for not having thought to bring a torch, afraid she would never be able to force herself down these stairs again if she returned to the house to find one. ‘Steady as she goes,’ she muttered, relieved to feel the panic fading somewhat, seizing the moment to push away from the wall and continue her descent, keeping the wall at her back. There was always the possibility that Keller had an accomplice or accomplices, or that he kept vicious, half-starved animals in the cellar.

It seemed to take a lifetime, but eventually she reached the bottom stair and stepped on to the floor of the underground prison. Inching her way around the room, back pressed to the wall, she moved away from the stairs. The sound of trickling water disorientated her; it felt as if she was in a natural cavern rather than a man-made shelter. As her eyes continued to adjust she made out a hazy, square object, maybe ten feet in front of her, but she needed to get closer to see it properly. Counting down from ten, she pushed herself off the wall and into the free space of the cellar, feeling instantly giddy, as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff. After a few seconds the dizziness wore off and she was able to shuffle onward, her feet not trusting the ground underneath them, convinced she would at any second feel her stomach leap into her mouth as she fell into some unseen bottomless pit, but the feeling of falling never came.