Читать книгу The Girl in the Water - - Страница 20

Not every den of torture looks like what we’re given to expect. Like what the storybooks tell us we should see there. It is possible that there are those which fit the stereotype: dark, damp stone walls with old chains hanging from hooks on the ceiling, the devices of abuse crusted with dirt and gore.

It’s possible.

But reality can be more hellish than those props. Strip away the myth, and what’s left behind – what’s left to be real – is something different. Something worse.

It’s a basement, though not because there is any particular power to darkness or to being underground. It’s a basement because basements bar sound better than ground-level living rooms, and though there isn’t usually that much noise involved in the way torture really works, one does want to guard against even the remotest possibilities.

It is furnished nicely, if simply. The carpeting is higher grade than discount, the walls are a muted tan. There are bookshelves with nondescript volumes – the kind that bespeak a degree of education but not an excess of wealth – and a small desk in one corner, with an old tube-style television on a table in another. The chequered fabric sofa with pull-out bed is the centrepiece of the wall to the right, as one enters, and the door itself is wood-panelled with a knockoff brass knob. The prefab sort with a lightly marked up, push-button lock.

The only sign of the room’s real purpose is the sturdy chrome bolt lock that’s been added above the knob. An ordinary basement den, with no windows or external exits, doesn’t have a deadbolt fitted towards the interior hallway. Especially not the kind that is key operated only, from both sides.

The kind that, once locked, keeps you in as well as out.