Janey had pushed one of her hands into the jar to release the coin, with the ragged nail of one small fingertip, only once her knuckles and thumb joint were in past the rim, her hand got stuck. Reluctant to break the jar, for fear of being cut, Jane had twisted her hand with the strange glass glove. Finally, in a moment of inspiration, she moved her thumb across the palm of her hand, and felt a weird inaudible click as it dislocated. Her hand had moved instantly free of the glass prison. In the ensuing years, she had practised this move many times. She would often help her mother around the home, by recovering items dropped into small places.
Now, in the abyss of her situation, Jane knew she had one small chance of escape. However, this was dependent on her ability to stay entirely in the moment.
Janey twisted her head around to look at the headboard and spat on her hands. Moving them slowly forward and backwards a couple of times, she performed the simple act of dislocation and pulled first one hand and then the other through the handcuffs. Her main concern was to stop the handcuffs from clattering noisily on to the floor. She managed to prevent this from happening by pressing the metal hoops firmly against the back of her head.
Her eyes scanned the desolate room for any type of potential weapon. Finally, they fell hopelessly the bedside drawer. Reaching over cautiously, she opened the drawer, carefully trying to suppress the dull scrape of wood on wood. Inside was a blood-smeared roll of duct tape, a small Kodak camera, and a long boning knife.
Jane felt a flicker of hope ignite inside her. She held her breath, removed the knife, and placed it behind her head on the pillow. Aware that keeping the handcuffs in place would simply be too difficult, Jane let them slip down beneath the knife. She then shifted her body painfully up the bed, and placed her hands above her head, in the position they had originally been fastened. She adjusted her sweating hands so they gripped the knife handle, and tried to avoid thinking about its dry, crusty texture.
When the man returned with the camera, he clipped it onto the tripod and switched it on, and Janey heard the motor groaning to life. A small, red LED light blinked steadily beneath the eye of the lenses. The man looked at Janey, and ran his tongue over his bottom lip. What he did next was even more unsettling, he turned to the camera, held up two thumbs in a gesture of success and turned back to her.
‘Now, we are going to have some fun, bitch, and, if you’re a good girl, I’ve got a nice surprise in the drawer for you.’
He pulled off his t shirt and pants to reveal his skinny, pasty body before he climbed up on to the bed. He grabbed Janey’s legs, forcing them apart and knelt between them. She noticed, in the vague horror of trauma, his small erection was stabbing at the material of his underwear.
‘It’s time to play.’ The man grinned.
As her attacker hooked his two thumbs into the waistband of his underpants, Janey seized her moment. Springing forward, she drew the knife in both hands from behind her head, and thrust it directly into the man’s throat. He let out a strange meowing noise, and tried to clamber away. His blood felt unnaturally hot as it sprayed on her exposed feet. Janey rolled off the bed on to the floor, where she began to crawl clumsily towards the door. Behind her, Dyer was lying face down the bed, rasping and gurgling, as his lifeblood seeped steadily onto the slick plastic sheeting. To Janey, the journey to that doorway had the treacly slowness of nightmares. She fully expected to reach the doorway, only to be confronted by the large man with the Hawaiian shirt, who had promised to skin them both.
She reached the door and used the frame to pull herself up to her feet. Things had faded to silence on the bed behind her, but she did not dare turn around, just in case she found herself face-to-face with something unspeakable. Instead, she began to make her way out of the room and onto a large dusty upper landing.
Faced with two closed doors and a staircase, she chose the latter and hurried down the stairs to the ground floor.
One of her first priorities was to find her clothes, but as she stepped off the stairs, Janey found herself in a grubby farmhouse kitchen, where a small fire was smouldering in the stone hearth. Glancing nervously around, she approached it. On the grey ashen corners of the fire, she could see the scorched fragments of her clothes. Beyond the fire was a door, which lead out into the open courtyard. If she was going to escape into the countryside, Janey knew she needed some type of clothing.
Like a grim Goldilocks, she crept back upstairs.
Glancing into the doorway, she saw the man who had attacked her was thankfully motionless on the bed. His discarded jeans remained on the floor. Janey held her breath, as she crept back into the room, like a child approaching a sleeping adult.
She displaced her mind, as she pulled on the jeans. The legs were too long, and she had to roll them up to expose her feet – one of which was peppered with small cuts.
Walking back out into the hallway, she opened the closest door to find a small room and a bed much like the one she had been on. The only difference was, this one had complicated system of ropes suspended from steel hooks in the ceiling. Retreating and closing the door, Janey functioned in a semi hypnotic state – it was the only way she could survive.
She opened the next door, and was immediately confronted by a room without a bed, but instead, the floor was covered with large mason jars. Thankfully, it was too dark to what had been preserved in the glass containers, but the smell of pickled death in that stifling room was overwhelming. Jane felt a rising convulsion in her stomach, and she retched, splattering the floorboards with hot, bitter vomit.
Wiping her mouth, she glanced to the first room. She knew she could not face going back in to recover the grimy t-shirt. She would rather face the vulnerability of her nakedness.
Hurrying back down stairs, she opened the door to the yard, and had to shield her eyes against the fierce sunlight. From outside, she could see that the house stood alone in a dry basin of land, with no other house or feature for miles.
Her only option was to follow the track and hide from any approaching vehicles.
39
At the same time as Janey Bernal was discovering her handcuffs, Leighton was cramped in the back seat of a cruiser, his hands also painfully cuffed behind him. Unfortunately, unlike Janey, he did not possess the ability to squeeze out of his restraints. The heat was stifling in the baking confinement, and Leighton found himself struggling to breathe.
Paul Ross, the senior officer who was driving the car, was confident Gretsch would probably reward him with a week’s holiday for bringing this crazy old bastard in.
‘Please, guys,’ Leighton tried to lean forward to engage the two officers in the front of the car, ‘the girl on that bus is in real danger. Can you just radio in, just ask that a car pulls the damn thing over?’
‘Shut up!’ shouted Harold Dean - the passenger side cop, who was playing a game on his mobile phone - without turning around.
‘It’s true,’ Leighton continued, ‘I’ve been investigating the bus and-’
‘Investigating?’ Ross laughed almost too loudly.
‘She could die!’ Leighton shouted - his mind suddenly filled with the endless horrors that could fall upon Vicki, knowing it was his hubris which had led her into this dark world. He had few, if any options left.