The Woman in Cabin 10 (22 page)

- CHAPTER 23 -

I
was not sure when I fell asleep, but I must have, exhausted by the ache in my head and the roar of the ship’s motor, because I awoke, to the sound of a click.

I sat up sharply, cracking my scalp against the bunk above, and then fell back, groaning and clutching my head as the blood pounded in my ears, a shrill ringing in the back of my skull.

I lay there, my eyes squeezed tightly shut against the pain, but at last it receded enough for me to roll onto my side and open my eyes again, squinting against the dim fluorescent light.

There was a plate on the floor, and a glass of something—juice, I thought. I picked it up and sniffed it. It looked and smelled like orange juice, but I couldn’t bring myself to drink it. Instead, I got painfully to my feet and opened the door to the little en suite, where I emptied the juice down the sink and refilled the glass with water from the tap. The water was warm and stale, but I was so thirsty now that I would have drunk worse. I gulped down the glass, refilled, and began to sip the next more slowly as I made my way back from the sink and onto the bunk.

My head ached powerfully, and I wished I had some painkillers, but more than that I felt awful—shivery and weak, as if I were coming down with the flu. It was probably hunger—it was hours since I’d eaten and my blood sugar must be at rock bottom.

Part of me wanted to lie down and rest my throbbing head, but my stomach growled, and I made myself examine the plate of food that was on the floor. It looked completely normal—meatballs in some kind of sauce, mashed potato and peas, and a bread roll on the side. I knew I should eat—but the same gut revulsion that had made me pour away the juice was kicking in. It just felt so wrong—eating food provided by someone who’d locked me into an underwater dungeon. There could be anything in there. Rat poison. Sleeping pills.
Worse
. And I’d have no choice but to eat it.

Suddenly, the thought of putting even a spoonful of that sauce in my mouth made me feel panicked and ill, and I felt like flushing the whole lot down the loo along with the juice, but even as I half stood, ready to pick up the plate, I realized something, and I sat back down again on slow, shaky legs.

They didn’t need to poison me. Why would they? If they wanted to kill me they could just starve me.

I tried to think clearly.

If whoever had brought me here had wanted to kill me, they’d have done it. Right?

Right. They could have hit me again, harder, or put a pillow over my face when I was passed out, or a plastic bag around my neck. And they hadn’t. They’d dragged me here at some inconvenience to themselves.

So they didn’t want me dead. Not right now, at any rate.

One pea. You couldn’t die from one poisoned pea, surely?

I picked it up on the end of a fork, looking at it. It looked completely normal. No trace of any powder. No odd color.

I put it in my mouth and rolled it slowly round, trying to detect any strange taste. There was none.

I swallowed.

Nothing much happened. Not that I’d expected it to—I didn’t know much about poison, but I imagined that the ones that killed you within seconds were few and far between, and not easy to obtain.

But something did happen. And that was that I started to feel hungry.

I scooped up a few more peas and ate them, cautiously at first, and then picking up speed as the food made me feel better. I skewered a meatball with my fork. It smelled and tasted completely normal—with that slightly institutional air of food prepared for a large number of people.

At last the plate was empty and I sat and waited for someone to come and collect it.

And waited.

And waited.

T
ime is very elastic—that’s the first thing you realize in a situation without light, without a clock, without any way of measuring the length of one second over the length of another. I tried counting—counting seconds, counting my pulse—but I got to two thousand and something and lost count.

My head ached, but it was the weak shiveriness in my limbs that worried me more. At first I thought it was low blood sugar, and then, after I’d eaten, I started to worry that perhaps there
had
been something in the food, but now I began to count back, to try to work out when the last time was that I’d taken my pills.

I remembered popping one out of the packet right after seeing Nilsson on Monday morning. But I hadn’t actually taken it. Something—some stupid need to prove that I
wasn’t
chemically dependent on these innocent little white dots—had stopped me. Instead, I’d left it on the countertop, not quite able to bring myself to down it, not quite wanting to throw it away.

I hadn’t been intending to stop. Just to show . . . I don’t know what. That I was in charge I guess. A little, pointless “fuck you” to Nilsson.

But then the argument with Ben had driven it from my mind. I’d gone off to the spa without taking it, and then the episode with the shower . . .

That made it . . . I couldn’t quite work it out. At least forty-eight hours since I’d had a dose. Maybe more like sixty hours. The thought was uncomfortable. Actually, more than uncomfortable. It was terrifying.

I
had my first panic attack when I was . . . I don’t know. Thirteen maybe? Fourteen? I was a teenager. It came . . . and went, leaving me frightened and freaked-out, but I never told anyone. It seemed like something only a weirdo would get. Everyone else walked through life without shaking and finding themselves unable to breathe, right?

For a while it was okay. I did my GCSEs. Started my A levels. It was around then that things started to get really shaky. The panic attacks came back. First, one. Then a couple. After a while, it seemed like coping with anxiety had become a full-time business, and the walls began to close around me.

I saw a therapist, several in fact. There was the “talking cure” person my mum picked out of the phone book, a serious-faced woman with glasses and long hair who wanted me to reveal some dark secret that would be the key to unlocking all this, except I didn’t have one. For a while I thought about making one up—just to see if it would make me feel better. But my mum got annoyed with her (and with her bills) before I could come up with a really good story.

There was the hip young community support leader, with his group of young girls who ran the gamut of problems, from anorexia to self-harm. And finally there was Barry, the cognitive behavioral therapist that my GP provided, who taught me to breathe, and count, and left me with a lifelong allergy to balding men with soft, supportive tenor voices.

None of them worked for me, though. Or none of them worked completely. But I kept it together enough to get through my exams, and then I went away to university and I felt a bit better, and it seemed like maybe all that—that
stuff—
was something I’d grow out of, like *NSYNC, and cherry lip gloss. That I’d leave behind, in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, along with all my other childhood baggage. Uni was pretty great. When I left, with my shiny new degree, I felt ready to take on the world. I met Ben, and I got a job at
Velocity
and my own place in London, and everything seemed to be falling into place.

And that was when I fell apart.

I
tried to come off the pills once. I was at a good place in my life, I was over Ben (oh my God, I was
so
over Ben). My GP lowered the dose to twenty milligrams a day, then ten, and then, since I was coping pretty well, to ten milligrams every other day, and finally I stopped.

I lasted two months before I cracked, and by that time I had lost thirty pounds and was in danger of losing my job at
Velocity
, although they didn’t know why I’d stopped coming into the office. At last, Lissie called my mum, and she marched me back to the GP, who shrugged and said that maybe it was withdrawal, and maybe it just wasn’t the right time for me to come off. He put me back on forty milligrams a day—my original dose—and I felt better almost within days. We agreed to try again another time—and somehow that time never came.

Now was not the right time. Not here. Not shut in a steel box six feet below sea level.

I tried to remember how long it had taken last time—how long it had been before I started to feel really,
really
shitty. It hadn’t been that long, from what I could recall. Four days? Maybe less.

In fact I could feel the panic begin to prickle over my skin in little cold electric shocks.

You’ll die here
.

No one will know.

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh—

There was a sound at the door and I stopped. Stopped everything—stopped breathing, thinking, panicking—I sat, frozen, my back against the bunk. Should I pounce? Attack?

The door handle began to turn.

My heart was pounding in my throat. I stood up and backed away against the far wall. I knew I should fight—but I couldn’t, not without knowing who was coming through that door.

Pictures flashed through my head. Nilsson. The chef in his latex gloves. The girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt, a knife in her hand.

I swallowed.

And then a hand snaked through the gap and grabbed the plate, quick as blinking, and the door slammed shut. The light went out, plunging the cabin into inky blackness so thick I could taste it.

Fuck.

T
here was nothing I could do. I lay there in the impenetrable darkness for what felt like hours but might have been days, or minutes, drifting in and out of consciousness, hoping each time I opened my eyes to see
something,
even just a thin line of light in the corridor, something that would prove I was really here, that I really existed and wasn’t just lost in some hell of my own imagining.

At last I must have fallen properly asleep, for I awoke with a jump, and my heart thumping and fluttering erratically in my chest. The cabin was still in complete darkness, and I lay there, shaking and sweating, holding on to the bunk like a life raft as I clawed my way back from the most horrible dream I could remember in a long time.

In the dream, the girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt was in my cabin. It was dark, but somehow in the darkness I could . . . not exactly see her, but sense her. I just knew that she was there, standing in the middle of the cabin, and I couldn’t move, the darkness pressing me down, like a living thing, squatting on my chest. She came closer, and closer, until she was standing just inches away, the T-shirt skimming the tops of her long, slim thighs.

She smiled, and then with one sinuous movement she pulled off the shirt. Beneath it she was skinny as a whippet, all ribs and collarbone and jutting pelvis, her elbow joints wider than her forearms, her wrists knobbly as a child’s. She looked down at herself, and then she pulled off her bra, slow as a striptease, except there was nothing erotic about it, nothing sexy about her small, shallow breasts and the hollow of her stomach.

But as I lay on the bunk, panting, paralyzed with fear, she didn’t stop there. She kept stripping. Her knickers slipped from her narrow hips to form a puddle at her feet. And then her hair, yanking it out by the roots. Then she pulled off her eyebrows, first one, and then the other, and her lips. She let her nose drop to her feet. She drew out her fingernails, one by one, slowly, like a woman loosening her evening gloves, and let them fall with a slight clatter to the floor, followed by her teeth,
click
. . .
click
. . .
click
, one after another. And finally—and most horribly—she began to peel away her skin, as if she were stepping out of a tight-fitting evening dress, until she was just a bloody streak, muscle and bone and sinew, like a skinned rabbit.

She went down on all fours and began to crawl towards me, her lipless mouth spread wide in a horrible parody of a smile.

Closer and closer she crawled, until at last, though I backed away, I came up against the rear wall of the bunk and could retreat no farther.

I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.

She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak—but then she reached inside, and pulled out her own tongue.

I awoke, gasping and crawling with the horror of it, the blackness like a clenched fist around me.

I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium—if I scream, what’s the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear. Let them hear, and maybe they’ll come and get me.

So I let it out, the scream that had been rising up inside me, growing and swelling and pressing to get out.

And I screamed and I screamed and I screamed.

I
don’t know how long I screamed for, how long I lay there, shaking, my fists curled around the thin, limp pillow, my nails digging into the bare mattress beneath.

I only know that at last it was quiet in the little cabin, except for the low roar of the engine, and my own breath, rasping in a throat scoured raw and hoarse.

No one had come.

No one had banged on the door to ask what was going on, or threatened to kill me unless I shut up. No one had done anything. I might as well have been in outer space, screaming into a soundless vacuum.

My hands were trembling, and I could not get the girl from my dream out of my head, the idea of her raw, moist form crawling towards me, clutching,
needing
.

What had I done? Oh God, why had I done this, kept pushing, kept refusing to shut up. I had
made
myself a target, by my refusal to be silenced about what happened in that cabin. And yet . . . and yet what
had
happened?

I lay there, my hands pressed to my eyes in the suffocating darkness, trying to make sense of it. The girl was alive—whatever I had heard, whatever I
thought
I had seen, it wasn’t murder. Had she been on the ship all along?