Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

‘Don’t stop,’ he hisses. ‘You have to get home to Maddy.’

The door above them opens, closes, and clicks, but there’s no sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Jackie has reached the opening now, and Erik watches her carry on into the passage, holding one hand against the wall and sweeping the ground ahead of her with the stick.

Erik points the torch at the floor and sees Nelly come down the stairs and step out into the middle of the cellar. Her yellow oilskin is smeared with blood and she’s clutching a smaller kitchen knife in her hand.

Her eyes are staring straight at him.

He doesn’t know how much she has time to see before he switches the torch off. Everything goes completely dark, as if someone had swept the whole world away from them.

‘Nelly, they’ll send more police officers,’ he says, holding his injured arm with his hand. ‘Do you understand? It’s over now...’

‘It’s never over,’ she replies, and stands quite still a metre or so away from him, just breathing.

There’s a clattering sound from the tunnel. Nelly giggles and walks across the floor. Erik hears her hit the stack of tiles, go round them and carry on through the darkness towards the tunnel.

Jackie is heading along a narrow passageway as fast as she can. Her right hand is feeling its way along the wall, and she’s moving the stick to and fro in front of her.

She needs to get as far away as she can, try to find a way out and then keep going until she finds help.

Fear is washing over her, it’s almost like being burned, and she manages to kick a bottle lying on the floor that she missed with her stick. It tinkles as it rolls away across the rough floor.

Her fingertips slip across the bricks and crumbling mortar, she notes that she’s passing a seventh vertical indentation in the wall. She keeps count automatically because it makes things easier if she has to find her way back.

Jackie is having difficulty breathing, the pain in her back flares up like a beacon with every step she takes. Warm blood is still trickling from the wound, down between her buttocks and along her legs.

She isn’t sure if Erik was telling the truth when he said she wasn’t seriously hurt, or if he was only trying to calm her down so that she would dare to escape.

She coughs and feels a cramping pain from her injured lung, just below her shoulder-blade.

Her stick isn’t quite quick enough.

Her shin hits some sort of apparatus with sharp tin corners and dangling cables. She has to clamber over the machine and her legs are trembling with effort and fear. She has no way of knowing how long the passageway is, but she has a feeling that she’s inside a system of tunnels and cellars.

She’s walking a little too fast the whole time, and knows there’s a serious risk that she’s going to trip over.

She passes a room on her left, it’s there as a gap in the acoustics.

Jackie decided to stop counting the indentations, she needs to concentrate on finding a way out.

‘Nelly’s coming!’ Erik calls from the basement room behind her. ‘She’s on her way now!’

His voice sounds frightened, weakened by the long tunnel, but she hears him and understands his warning.

Nelly’s coming after her.

Jackie tries to move faster, makes her way round an armchair and carries on along the wall, her fingers brushing a number of shelves. Something rattles behind her and she almost cries out in fear.

It’s getting harder and harder to breathe. Jackie holds her hand over her mouth and tries to cough quietly as she presses ahead. Mid-stride, her face hits something. An open cupboard door. It slams shut, and there’s a tinkling sound of glass objects rattling on shelves.

Memories of the violence she has been subjected to flash past: the feeling of a sharp knife-blade being yanked out with a sigh, and the constricting pain in her back.

Her breathlessness feels like a weight, she knows she’s breathing too hard, but it still doesn’t feel like she’s getting enough oxygen.

She moves the stick quickly and lets the other hand brush over bricks and joints, past a thick cable, along bare brick again, then some old window frames that are stacked against the wall.

She’s trying to read the space the whole time.

Whenever she hears an opening, she stops for a few seconds and listens, to check if it’s another passageway or just an enclosed room.

She keeps moving along the main passageway, seeing as the weak draught across the floor seems to be coming from up ahead.

A protruding bolts tears the skin of her knuckles, and now she can hear her pursuer behind her.

Nelly shouts something to her, but Jackie can’t make out the words.

The voice makes panic bubble up inside her and the hand holding the stick is sweating.

She trips over a brick, loses her balance and starts to fall. She throws her arm out, puts her hand through some thick spiders’ webs and hits the wall hard. Her back shrieks with pain, cutting through her like a javelin with the sudden contortion, and she can taste blood in her mouth.

A crash from the tunnel behind her makes her ears ring. It sounded like the cupboard full of glass objects falling over. She hears a load of glass break, shattering and scattering across the floor.

Jackie wipes her sweaty hand on her legs, takes a firm grip of the stick and carries on as fast as she can. The fingertips of her right hand have gone numb from the rough brick wall.

She can hear footsteps behind her — much faster than her own.

Jackie turns into a side-passage in panic.

Her heart is pounding.

This isn’t going to work, she thinks. Nelly knows her way round these tunnels, this is her territory.

Jackie forces herself to go on. The passageway is narrower than the last one. She stumbles over some old fabric and feels something catch round her foot and drag along behind her.

‘Jackie?’ Nelly shouts. ‘Jackie!’

She tries not to cough, feels herself pass a hole in the wall fairly close to the roof, and hears air streaming through it as something grabs at her clothes. It’s holding on to her blouse, pulling her backwards. She flails her arms in panic, and hears the fabric tear. She’s stuck, and is trying to pull free when she hears Nelly once more.

She must have followed her into the side-passage.

Jackie pulls at her blouse and turns round, puts her hand under her left arm and feels a thick pipe. She walked into a pipe that’s somehow hanging from the roof, it’s got caught in her clothes and she has to back up several metres to free herself.

Nelly is close now, mortar is crunching under her boots and her clothes rustle as she moves.

Breathing through her nose, Jackie carries on along the passageway, then she hears Nelly let out a whimper — she too has walked into the dangling pipe.

A metallic clang echoes off the walls.

Jackie hurries on and emerges into a large room with a slower echo.

There’s a smell of stagnant water in the air, like an old aquarium. Jackie keeps moving, and almost immediately bumps into something and drops her stick.

She’s breathing far too quickly, she bends over and feels a large trough filled with dusty soil, twigs and pieces of bark. The pain in her back almost makes her topple forwards, but she goes on searching beside the trough, feeling tentatively across old bottles, spiders’ webs and twigs.

She hears Nelly call out to her, she’s nearer again.

Jackie gives up looking for the stick, she’ll have to go on without it. With her arms outstretched she feels her way past a series of alcoves with brick walls dividing them.

She stops in front of a large object that’s blocking the whole room. It’s a long, steel washbasin. She feels along it to one end, and has just made her way round it when she hears Nelly’s footsteps behind her.