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With a lurch, Elissa wonders whether she’s being observed. The darkness is absolute, so if anyoneiswatching, they must be using special equipment. She slows her breathing, straining to listen. The silence is that of a vault; she cannot even detect the earlier drip of water.
The discomfort in her bladder grows. Soon, it’s all she can think about. Calling up her mental chessboard, she crawls to the waste bucket in B3 and rises to a crouch. Warily, she straightens. It’s the first time she’s tried to stand. She’s relieved to find there’s enough space.
With her unshackled hand, Elissa reaches under her dress and tugs down her underwear. She scowls into the darkness. If someoneiswatching, let them get an eyeful if they want: she can think of few things more pathetic than a man who gets his kicks from spying on girls peeing into buckets.
For a moment her anger burns white hot. ‘You’re a dick bag,’ she hisses. ‘A stupid, worthlessdickbag.’ It’s not the worst insult she knows, but she won’t demean herself with something fouler.
The bucket might slip if she puts all her weight on it, so after removing the toilet roll, she rolls up her dress and gathers it together. Then, squatting, she holds her breath.
Initially, despite her aching bladder, Elissa is unable to go. Just as she’s about to give up, her muscles relax and she hears the urgent rattle of urine against hard plastic. It sounds like she’s spraying seeds or pellets, but the smell is eye-watering, unmistakable. Left alone, the air will grow thick with it, so after pulling up her knickers she goes to the second bucket and pours some of the cleaning solution into the first. All this she does blind. The chain tethering her to the floor scrapes and clinks, a constant companion.
Calling up her schematic, she crawls across the floor toG7, avoiding the pool of cold vomit at F5. She’ll have to deal with that soon, before its stench grows any stronger. First, though, a little light.
Elissa pauses at F6, one square from her destination. If the candles and matches have gone, it’ll mean someone visited while she was asleep. Abruptly, a more frightening thought surfaces: What if, when she reaches out, she touches some part of her abductor? A warm foot, perhaps. Or a hand.
Her skin crawls. She’s never had a wild imagination. This is the last place on earth she should cultivate one. Fearing that paralysis will strike if she delays, Elissa lunges forward, arm outstretched. The movement is clumsy, spasmodic. Her knuckles strike the candle holder and it skitters across the floor.
Idiot!
Reining herself in, Elissa reaches out once again. If she’s knocked away the candles or matches, she really will lose it. Fortunately, she finds both boxes right where she left them. Shaking out a candle, she lifts it to her nose. If she hadn’t acted so rashly, she’d have somewhere to set it down. Instead, she grips it between her knees. Then, holding the matchbox with her shackled hand, she removes a match.
Elissa pauses to catch her breath. The moment she strikes this light, the full gravity of her situation will become clear. There’s a good chance she’ll discover something horrifying. Already, some strange inkling of intuition tells her she’s not the first resident of this hole. Perhaps the light will reveal something of her predecessors’ fates. So far, she’s managed to maintain a tiny flame of hope. Ironic if the next one she creates extinguishes it.
Still, she has to know. Knowledge is power, and although her power, here, is almost non-existent, she’s duty-bound to try and increase it. Right now, she’s panting for breath, which means she might snuff out the match before it cantake. To calm herself, she decides to inventory the contents of each box. After half a minute of steady breathing, Elissa’s counted ten candles and thirty-seven wooden matches.
She recalls something she learned at Christmas, from the box of dinner candles her mum bought: each stick, with dimensions almost exactly matching these, had an eight-hour burn time. It means she has the potential, here, for eighty hours of continuous light. The candles offer something else, too, should she wish: a means to measure time.
With a rasp and a hiss, her match flares into life. At first, the light’s so bright that she’s forced to shield her eyes, but she can’t afford to waste it. Quickly, she touches it to the wick.
The flame dips so low she thinks it’ll go out. It bobs, a watchful blue eye, and then it takes. A yellow light swells. The darkness recedes.
Elissa holds up the candle and looks around.
V
The first thing she ascertains is that she’s alone.
No one lurks outside the limits of her chain. Neither does she see any remains of previous residents – earlier, she was so worried by that prospect she could hardly acknowledge it.
Before her stands the stone wall she discovered while lying on her belly. Looking around, she sees the other walls that form her cell. Two are identical to the first. The fourth is constructed from plywood sheeting. A door has been cut into it, but there’s no handle on this side, just a few deep scratches that look deliberate. Above her head, the ceiling’s pine planking appears newer than the stone walls.
Overall, the cell’s dimensions aren’t much larger than the virtual chessboard she created to map it – she needs just three extra columns and four extra rows. She can either resize her board to fit the revealed floor space, or adopt the additional columns and rows into an expanded grid.
Elissa chooses the latter. It’ll cause a few oddities with her naming conventions. The new column to the right of H will be I, but she designates the columns to the left of A as Y and Z. Likewise, the four new rows beneath 1 become 0, –1, –2 and –3. This results in corner points at Y8, I8, Y–3 and I–3. As a reference system, it’s needlessly complicated, but at least it’ll give her brain a workout.
While there’s no way of proving it, she thinks she’s underground. The floor has an excavated look. The walls seem like the foundations of a larger structure above her head.
For the first time, she sees the colours of the objects she found in darkness. The waste bucket at B3 is cherry red. The cleaning bucket is black. The candles are white and the glazed ceramic holder, which rolled into I8, is a dark and musty green.
One thing Elissa would prefernotto see is the gunk in C4 – brownish-red, definitely organic. Nothing about it gives her confidence. Deliberately, she turns away, finding the twin pools of vomit at F5. Beside them is the pillow. It’s damp-looking and tatty. The faded case features yellow flowers on an orange background. They don’t make designs like that these days – the thing must be forty years old.
Elissa’s stomach grips with hunger. Standing, she crosses the floor to her rucksack, awkwardly dragging her chain. A dribble of molten wax rolls on to her knuckles. The pain is intense, but she doesn’t drop the candle. With her free hand, she empties the pack, stacking her belongings and placing Monkey on top. ‘Don’t worry,’ she tells him. ‘I have a plan.’
Casting the empty rucksack like a fishing net, she drags the holder within reach and plugs in her candle. Only then does she pick the hardened wax from her knuckles, tucking the loose flakes into the matchbox. Everything in this room has a currency. She won’t waste a thing.
Now, to the brownie. Elissa opens the wrapper slowly, careful not to destroy it. Easing out the snack like toothpaste from a tube, she takes a small bite – no more than an eighth of what’s there – and puts the rest away, folding down the cellophane to retain as much moisture as possible.
She chews greedily. The urge to take another bite is almost all-consuming, but she resists, repacking the rucksack with the brownie at the bottom and retreating as far as her chain will allow. There she stands, bending her legs and lifting her feet, exercising her muscles as best she can.