Читать книгу LAST RITES - Neil White - Страница 11

Sarah Goode panted as she looked around the room. Stone walls all the way round, with a door at one end, cell-like, just twenty-foot square with no windows, no view out, a dirt floor scratching her feet.

She looked up to the ceiling and then winced, shielding her eyes. The lights there were like car headlights, bright halogen on full beam, searing into her retinas.

She tried to stretch her legs, but they hurt, all cramped up. She knew she had to keep moving, had to get her muscles working again. She limped to the walls and thumped them, but the sound came back as a dead thud. They were solid, sound-proof, old Pennine stone.

Sarah felt her way round the length of the room, using the wall as support, looking for a weak spot, maybe a loose stone, until she got to the door, wooden and old, the edges uneven and dry. It was bolted on the other side; she had heard it slide back whenever he came into the room. She knew it was a man from his hacking coughs and his deep throaty laugh when he taunted her, when he had kept her in the box.

She looked over to the corner of the room. The box was still there, one end open, from where she had crawled not long before. She turned away from it swiftly and looked up at the lights again, shielding her eyes. Would they stay on all the time? She leapt at them, tried to break one just to reduce the glare, but they were too high. She hurt herself instead when she landed, the dirt cutting into the soles of her feet.

Sarah sat down and put her face in her hands, gripped her hair with her fingers. Why was she there? What had she done? Why her?

She started to pull at her hair, wanting to scream, but then she looked up, startled. She could hear the buzz of speakers. Sarah shielded her eyes to see past the lights, and then she saw them, dark shapes behind the brightness. She sat still, waiting for whatever was going to come out of them. Then the sound came out at high volume, so loud that she had to cover her ears. It was the sound of a heartbeat, fast and anxious, a relentless thump-thump, the noise pulsing around the walls.

Sarah clamped her hands tighter over her ears and screamed, tried to drown it out, but the sound still made it through, making her own heart race to keep up.

She looked back to the box. Maybe it would be quieter in there.

She turned away. She couldn't go back in there, she knew that. Her life had once been normal, but those days in the box meant that it would never be the same again.