The Concrete Grove (25 page)

“Shall we?” Bright’s voice was soft, smooth, as if he were attempting to seduce her.

She set her jaw, tensed her body, and then forced her muscles to relax. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Let’s get it over with.”

Bright nodded once, and then opened the door.

Lana was aware of the big man, Boater, using up all the space behind her, giving her no room to escape, should she even try. She took a step and turned right, into the room.

Inside there was not much to see. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, its paper shade too dirty to make out any kind of design or decoration. The walls were bare stone, with damp stains spread across them like dark, blotchy shadows. There was a double bed pushed up against the side wall, adorned with thin blankets and a solitary shapeless pillow. The floor was stone, like the walls, and there was a crude shower stall in one corner, like something from a book of pictures of a concentration camp she’d once seen. A man stood by the shower. She recognised him from before, when they’d visited her flat to give her Bright’s last warning. He’d been wearing dark clothes, then – threatening clothes. This time he was wearing nothing but black trousers and a vest.

More than the man himself, though, she recognised the single black leather glove he wore.

Terry
, she thought.
His name’s Terry
. It was such a common name for a devil.

He’d been wearing two gloves the last time she’d seen him. This time he only wore the one; his other hand was bare… his
prosthetic
hand. It looked like some kind of out-dated contraption, with thin metal levers visible at the wrist and wide leather straps holding it in place on his forearm. He raised his arm as she stood there, standing just a foot over the threshold, and clenched his plastic fingers. Then, as she began to lose all sense of reality, he undid the leather straps and removed the false hand to reveal a shiny pink nub of flesh.

“Just wait ’till you see what he can do with that stump,” said Bright, standing right beside her. She turned and looked into his shiny face. His eyes seemed to have doubled in size and there was white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Terry, waving his stump around in the air, began to laugh. It was a quiet sound, almost polite: a gentle chuckle that was completely out of place given the situation.

She looked down, at his bare feet. He was wriggling his toes on the stone floor. For some reason the sight was more sickening than that of the naked stump, and Lana felt a wave of bile rising at the back of her throat.

She took another couple of steps, trying to impose herself in the weird isolated space that was the room, to exert some measure of control. She heard the door shut behind her. Then there was the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then a series of blunt clicks as the only way in or out of that room was sealed, perhaps locking a part of Lana inside there forever.

“So, Lana Fraser,” said Bright, slipping off his jacket. “At last you deign to come and visit us, to offer us some kind of payment on your debt.” His body, beneath the jacket, was clad in a tight grey shirt. His arms were huge, the biceps oversized. He could barely even bend his arms to remove the outer garment without having to angle his body to aid its movement. He was deformed; a man made monstrous by the abuse of muscle-building chemicals and heavy weights. Like most small-time criminals, he had an obsession with physical strength, but his had become so acute, so outlandish, that it had altered his exterior to reflect, more or less, how he saw himself in his mind’s eye.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here to pay it off. I want to bring this to an end, finalise the deal. Just like you said on the phone.”

Terry, still standing by the primitive shower stall, laughed again. He flexed his gloved hand; the leather creaked loudly in the silence that followed his abrupt laughter. He stared at her face, her eyes, and never broke eye contact even as he stripped off his vest. His torso was well-muscled, but not as barrel-like as his boss’s broad trunk. Blue-black prison tattoos – at least that’s what Lana assumed the crude, thick-lined renderings to be – decorated his upper arms. An odd-looking dragon draped its badly-drawn tail around his shoulder.

“Is that what I said?” Bright walked around and stood directly in front of her, cutting off her view of Terry as he began to loosen his trousers. Bright was pulling his shirttails out of his waistband. Then he began to undo the shirt buttons from the bottom up. “Yes, I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I know the score,” said Lana, trying to find strength from somewhere, anywhere. “I know what’s expected of me, and I’ll do it all. I’ll do
you
all, if it keeps you away from me in future, and away from my daughter.” She clenched her fists and refused to look away as he slipped off his shirt and folded it neatly before placing it on the floor, near the end of the stark double bed.

Beneath the shirt he was wearing what looked like a wetsuit. It clung to his oddly-shaped form like a second skin, accentuating the ugly, disproportionate muscle build-up around his upper body. Lana was so surprised by Bright’s ridiculous get-up that for a moment she forgot to be afraid, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips. She cut the smile short before it got out of control, wishing that she could have prevented it altogether. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonise these men: there was too much aggression in the room already; unless she was careful, there was the risk that they would lose all control and cause her some real physical damage.

They could fuck her, by all means – she was just about prepared for that – but please God, don’t let them break her.

“Monty, I have some things to do… I’ll just go back upstairs while you sort things out down here.”

Sort things out
, was that how they thought of it? What they called gang-rape? Lana felt her back stiffen as Boater brushed up lightly against her.

“Don’t be silly, Francis. We’re all taking part. We’re going to have some fun.” Bright smiled at her. “Aren’t we, Lana?”

She didn’t have it in her to reply, but she somehow managed to keep staring at him, pressing her gaze into his soft face. There was something going on here – something below the surface, a situation that was nothing to do with her but in which she seemed to have a pivotal role.

“But, Monty–”

“But
nothing
, Francis!” Bright’s eyes swivelled away from her and glared over her shoulder, at his mammoth henchman. “But nothing. We all stay here, and each of us takes our fill. We owe it to this kind lady, who has put herself to a lot of trouble to be here. Never, Francis,
ever
look a gift horse in the mouth.” He smiled but it looked all wrong, as if his face were splitting in two. “And don’t ever let a free fuck go to waste.”

Lana felt her legs start to shake, but she fought to control the movement. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of witnessing her fear. She was strong; her mind and body were one. This bastard wouldn’t break her, not ever. She vowed to remain intact to the very end, even if she ended up dead. This fucker would not see a single tear roll down her face, or hear a scream pass from her lips. She was stone. She was already dead.

“Are we ready?” Bright rubbed his hands together. His wetsuit absorbed the meagre light, glistening like the flesh of some hideous black lizard. “Are we all ready?”

“Fuck, yeah,” said Terry, moving forward, away from the shower stall. He was standing in his white wife-beater vest and underpants. She could see clearly that he was ready for action.

“Yeah,” said Boater, still standing behind her. There was something about the giant that Lana couldn’t fathom. It was obvious that he was having some kind of crisis of faith; she’d picked up on the fact that he was struggling with his own emotions. He’d almost turned against his boss. She felt it in the air: a sense of suppressed rebellion. Why couldn’t he have gone all the way and brought the fight out into the open, giving her some slight hope that this might not happen – that these men might not use her as a sex doll in this grimy basement room?

Terry’s pink nub of a wrist shone weakly in the dim light. Monty Bright grinned like a lunatic. And behind her, remaining out of sight for now, a silent giant took stock of his situation far too slowly to offer Lana any form of hope.

Bright took something from his trouser pocket: a thin black scarf. “Here.” He said. “Put this on.” He opened his fingers and let the scarf unfurl, holding one end between his thumb and the palm of his hand. It was not a scarf, it was a blindfold: a black silk blindfold.

Lana reached out and took the blindfold from his hand. His skin felt cold and clammy, but that might just have been her imagination, conjuring little tricks to transform a bad man into a demon.

“Put it on,
now
.” The playfulness had gone from his demeanour, leaving behind a blank, empty shell waiting to be filled by whatever he could take from her.

There was a pause. The room seemed to exist out of time for a moment, as if they’d all moved sideways into another state of being.

When Bright slapped her, without warning, it took her a second or two to register the pain. She heard the sound – quick, high and sharp – and had time to wonder what it was before her cheek started to burn. It was too late to even raise her hand and feel the spot where he had hit her. The pause between the violent act and her realisation of it was too great for her to react without feeling stupid. “Oh,” she said instead. It was an ineffectual remark; she wished she’d just kept her mouth shut. “Oh,” she said again, thinking,
Shut the fuck up!

Bright nodded. The walls closed in, squeezing her sense of spatial awareness until it lost all meaning. She realised why Bright had slapped her. The bastard had done it to sharpen her senses, to plunge her into the moment like someone jumping into a cold lake. To make sure she was fully aware when things got under way.

He wanted to ensure that she was trapped firmly in the present and not retreating into some inner chamber where she might distance herself from the outrage. The fucker knew exactly what he was doing. He had done this too many times before to make silly mistakes and allow his victim – his debtor – even a scant emotional reprieve. Maybe his men were just along for the ride, but like most serial rapists, Bright was interested in mental rather than physical penetration.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” said Bright, softly, almost lovingly – as if he were savouring the taste of his catchphrase on his tongue.

Lana covered her eyes and waited for the suffering to start.

A
FTERWARDS, WHEN IT
was all over and done with, she stood in the shower stall and let the cold water chill her battered body. Hot water would have been too much of a kindness, and men like these were not known for their acts of generosity.

Lana ached everywhere, inside and out. The stink of semen clung to her. She had vomited so much in the shower that her belly felt mercifully empty. She had not taken the blindfold off. She didn’t want to see them again until she was clean. She faced the wall and let the sound of the water deafen her, but still she heard the door as it opened and closed, and the footsteps approaching across the hard floor.

“Hurry up. We have things to do.”

It was Terry’s voice. She would never forget that voice, even if she lived to be an old woman. He had whispered such terrible things in her ear as they’d used her body, entering every orifice. Such terrible, terrible things. He’d spoken of Hailey, and how she looked. He’d talked about her daughter’s young body, and what he would like to do with it. The words he’d used had been ones she’d heard before, many times, but in the situation she was in they became something new: another language, and one that expressed only depravity.

These were surely not men; they were animals. Beasts. They had no souls, no morals. They were demonic.

But, no. They were just men: Bad Men.

She fumbled for the taps and turned off the flow of water. Then, wincing as her limbs burned with pain, she took off the blindfold. Then she turned to face the one-handed man who had defiled her. He was fully clothed and his prosthetic was fixed back in place. He was once again wearing both of his black leather gloves.

“Put your fucking clothes on.” The contempt in his voice was almost as hurtful as what they’d done to her. Almost, but not quite. Not at all, if she was honest. That was just another lie to tell herself, a flimsy barrier to wedge between her and the memory of what had been done here in this shabby little basement room she would always think of whenever she heard the word ‘hell’.

The door opened again just as she was putting on her blouse. She watched Bright walk in as she buttoned it to the neck and smoothed out the collars.

“So, are we done?” Her voice was hoarse. Her throat felt like it had been filled with cement. “Are we square?” She shuffled forward. Each tiny step made her thighs blaze, her crotch burn, her torn anus clench, and set off a series of dull explosions deep inside her lower abdomen.

I’ll need to get checked out
, she thought.
For STDs. AIDS.

This grim note of reality, even more than the acts she’d been made to perform and submit to, threatened to tear her apart. The aftermath – the thought of the countless small, intimate and desperately embarrassing tasks she would need to undertake before declaring herself clean and safe – were like daggers in her belly.