The door slammed shut behind me and a key turned in the lock. I ran up to the door and frantically pulled at the handle. The door was made of thick solid oak.
‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ I shouted through it.
I had no idea who I was talking too, but I heard the sound of his footsteps recede into silence.
I looked around again at the desolate room. It was small and stuffy. I sat down at the table. The walls were blank.
SIXTY-ONE
As I write now, I cannot really remember in any great detail my reaction to being locked in. It was as if, because I had visited the house before in my dream, that what was happening to me at the time was also unreal. All I knew was that it was my Destiny to rescue Justine. I was not afraid. As I write now, I realize more clearly that my reaction was really one of feeling that I had been set a test.
I tried the window. It opened easily but the bars behind it were unbreakable. I had expected them to be as old as the house but to my surprise they were shiny new. Someone had designed this prison for me very recently. There was no leverage with which to jolt the door open.
I knew it was important to retain a sense of control over my circumstances. Thinking in long, well-constructed sentences helped me maintain a sense of power over these events. The blank paper and the pen stared suggestively up at me from the table. A message – I was supposed to write a message. But to whom? The room was absent of clues and the situation reminded me of Juliette’s flat after it had been abandoned.
I went to the window again and looked out over the garden. I could see from above clearly the symmetrical pattern of the maze. From up here the design was easy to read. A bench had been placed in the centre of the maze. On the bench, in the early evening, a woman was sitting reading. It was Justine. The abductor must have imprisoned her in the centre of the maze. But a few moments later the woman stood up and calmly began to make her way out of the maze, following its twisting configurations unerringly, as if she had known its secrets since a child. The exit was directly below my window and I could see her more clearly as she approached the end of the maze’s long corridor. I noticed the ill-fitting clothes she was wearing, the way she walked slightly defensively, the way she looked straight up at me, in my direction, but didn’t register what she saw. It wasn’t Justine. It was Juliette. She disappeared into the house.
So Juliette was here. But what was she doing here?
Had she been kidnapped too?
Just then there was a knock on the door. A black joke, I thought, I can hardly say come in.
‘Who is it?’ I asked. My voice sounded odd.
‘It’s Justine.’ She was speaking softly. ‘I’ve managed to get out of my room. He left the key in the lock. But the outer door—’
‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ I interrupted. ‘There’s so much I don’t understand. I’ve just seen Juliette in the garden.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything to you. But you’re going to have to wait. I can hear him coming.’
She fell silent.
‘Justine?’ But I could hear her footsteps disappearing down the corridor. ‘Justine.’ justine.
By the next morning, having spent a night on the hard boards without any food or water, I was becoming desperate. I was not used to any form of deprivation. I started clawing at the door shouting Justine’s name over and over again. I was pounding at the door, shaking it, knowing that there was no way I would be able ever to defeat its intractable strength.
SIXTY-TWO
I sat down at the table and picked up a pen. On a blank piece of paper I wrote,
juliette. i’ve been imprisoned in the room at the far end of the east side of the house on the top floor. the one with bars on its windows. please help me.
I signed my name.
I then moved the chair to the window and sat down and waited for her to come out into the garden again.
Early in the afternoon of the next day she appeared, carrying her book. I watched as she entered the maze confidently and weaved her way through into its centre. After an hour of reading she walked out of the maze in the same way. As she was walking underneath my window, I put my hand to the frame to throw out the message. But the window stuck. No matter how hard I pushed upwards, I couldn’t get it open. I was too far up for her to hear my cries.
During the night I finally managed to open the window. I was then reluctant to close it in case I could not get it open again. The wind at night was freezing and I slept curled up in the corner of the hard floor. The room was also beginning to smell of urine and excrement. Juliette did not appear the next day nor the next.
I was growing fainter and fainter. If I had been offered food now, I would not have been able to eat it. The pain of my hungry stomach had been replaced by an odd feeling of fullness, as if it had been stuffed with empty space.
I began to lose track of the passing time.
I continued my vigil by the window. Early one morning, Juliette finally entered the garden again. Without hesitation I threw the message down to her through the bars of the window.
The paper floated through the air like a butterfly to land by her feet. I watched her bend down and pick it up and read it. I signalled desperately to her between the bars. Her face seemed stony, to give away no response. Suddenly she turned up her face in my direction. The sun came out and I could see the expression on her face more clearly. She was laughing. She was throwing back her head in laughter.
I withdrew into the darkness of my cell and lay curled up on the floor in the foetal position. Now the smells of the room, instead of repulsing me, had begun to offer me comfort. Their acrid warmth had become the proof of my existence.
SIXTY-THREE
I shut the window that night. There was no need to have it open any longer. Was I to remain here until I starved to death? In spite of what I had done for the abductor, for having killed John Baptiste, was I to be rewarded not with Justine but with a slow lingering death? I had been right about Juliette. She was in league with the abductor, unknown to her sister: she had seen me and laughed. Did that make Juliette involved in Jack’s death too? Had her desire for revenge taken her that far? Had I been just a pawn employed by her to murder him? But where in all these torturous convolutions did this leave Justine?
I began to wonder if Justine was a monster of my own creation. Locked up in the room I wondered if my imagination had created her all along, that she was just the projection of my obsession made bodily flesh.
She began to take on paranormal qualities: at night she shook the house so it felt like the wind was blowing through. Her presence permeated the house, the sound of a creaking door was the moan of her complaint, the rattling of the glass window her laughter.
I became increasingly aware that my room was only a component of a giant house, a vulnerable locked-away part, while the house with its own machinations went about its gigantic business, with its sounds and rustles. The paranoia increased, and I felt perpetually monitored, perpetually watched by the house that was permeated by Justine.
I began to long for the detail of the rest of the house, of the outside world, outside my small room. The longer I stayed here, the more absent the details of the room became. I knew each crack in the wall so well that they ceased to seem real.