Dangerous Games

Chapter 12 part 2

Come about nine o'clock, I'd had enough. Mentally, I was drained and I couldn't take any more. That helped my problem slightly – I was just too exhausted to feel scared. Fear takes a great deal of mental energy, you know!

"I'm sorry, Claire, we've been going for hours now and I just can't go any further." We were sitting on that bench, and, as Claire had predicted, I did have my head between my knees.

"Look," she said. "Just one more test. I want you to go from the bottom floor to the top and down again on your own. You do that and, as I promised, I will spend the night with you – once you've recovered, of course."

I sat there, my mind numb from all the mental strain of the evening, and tried to assess whether what she was promising was worth a few more minutes of misery. Well, it couldn't be any worse than what I'd already been through and having come this far, I wasn't going to pull out now. "Okay, I suppose so, but we go down to the car-park using the stairs. Deal?"

"Deal!"

My feet felt heavy as we descended the stairs, with them hitting the steps like lumps of lead. It was like being marched to the scaffold. All too soon we were back where we started, sizing up the lift door in the car-park.

"You ready for this?"

"No"

"But you'll do it anyway."

"Yes"

"Go on then." She stepped back. It was all down to me now. I pressed the button, and, as you might have guessed, the lift door obligingly opened straight away. I forced myself into the lift and turned to face the panel of buttons.

Outside the lift I could see Claire smiling encouragingly and giving me the thumbs-up gesture. I forced myself to look at the panel of buttons rather than at her – and freedom. Calm blue ocean! Calm blue ocean!

I pressed the button marked "3" and the door closed. No going back now. I was marginally surprised to find that the sickening press into the floor felt almost reassuring, perhaps because of its predictability. It seemed like minutes, but within what couldn't have been more than seconds, the doors opened again on the third floor.

And then things started to go to pieces. The doors opened to reveal a young, olive-skinned woman with long, jet-black hair waiting to descend. My first thought was 'Great, I've got someone to go down with,' until I realised where I'd seen that woman before. Although I'd never seen the face, I was utterly convinced she was the demon woman from my dreams. She turned to me.

"Where are you going?"

Don't answer her. Don't answer her. I turned away, choking back the urge to be sick. She must have thought me very rude, or ill, or mad, or all three. Anyway, I heard her press a button and the doors close. I covered my eyes.

I lost track of time with my eyes tightly shut, but I heard the doors open again. After a while, during which the doors remained open, I ventured to open one eye. The lift was on the first floor, although the demon woman was nowhere to be seen. I still had one floor to go to be with Claire again.

I leaned forward and lunged at the button marked "G" for ground floor. Still the doors didn't close. The urge to rush out of the lift started to build – stuff Claire, she could keep her sexual favours – but I forced myself to stay put. Instead of rushing out, I satisfied myself by stabbing wildly at G, again and again. Why wouldn't those damn doors close?

At last the urge to leave overcame me and I moved forward – just at the point when the doors closed. I came within an inch's width of getting my head caught between them. An instinct caused me to pull back just in time. Never mind what was going on in my head, that was real danger. I could have been seriously injured. I leaned against the wall of the lift as it started to descend.

And that was how Claire found me when the doors finally opened. I rushed out.

"Get out of the way. Now! I'm going to be sick."

She rummaged in her pocket and pulled out a large carrier bag. "Here, use this."

As promised, I spent the next thirty minutes doing one multicoloured yawn after another. That can of beer, plus whatever I'd had for my lunch ended up half filling that bag. Then I sat down on the tarmac. "Can we go home now?"

Half way home, we found a convenient rubbish bin and jettisoned the bag of vomit. I know that we shouldn't have – rubbish bins aren't a socially responsible place for bodily products – but by that stage we just didn't care any more. I was so whacked that the only thing I cared about was getting to my bed.

Inside my house, I flopped down on the sofa and within seconds I must have been asleep – fast asleep. It was a deep, dreamless sleep – thank God! To be honest, I haven't slept that deeply for weeks.

...

Finally, I woke. It was still dark. As always, there was a slight 'where am I?' moment, when I looked around, trying to get my bearings. Somehow I was in my bed. The last thing I remembered – vaguely, but I definitely remembered it – was that I had crashed out onto the sofa. I felt downwards under the duvet. No clothes. No nightclothes either. No Claire – I was alone in the bed.

The reason I had woken up became obvious. Not all the beer I had drunk for Dutch courage earlier in the evening had been ejected into that bag. Some of it must have made its way to my bladder, which was now bursting. Or it could have been my prostate starting to give out. Either way, a trip to the toilet was in order.

Back in bed afterwards, I didn't really feel tired any more. I just lay there watching the minute hand on my alarm clock slip imperceptibly round from a quarter to three to a quarter past. Eventually, I drifted off back to sleep.

Big mistake! I should have realised. The night after a single trip in a lift and I end up with nightmares, and tonight I'd been going up and down like a flipping yo-yo. Why should tonight be any exception?

I was standing back in the car park of B&Q. Claire was standing next to me, but there was no-one else around. In front of me the lift door stood open, and I could hear her voice saying "Do it. You have to do this."

I walked forward and before I knew it, the lift had engulfed me. I saw my hands reaching out and touching the walls, feeling myself recoil slightly when I came in contact with the cold, hard metal. Slowly I felt myself turning round, to find that Claire had disappeared from outside the lift. In her place, mist swirled around the cars parked in their rows between the pillars.

My attention returned to the button panel in the lift, but before I could choose one, the lift doors slammed closed and the damn thing started moving, not upwards as before but downwards, faster and faster. I could feel the metal work starting to heat up and glanced down to discover that the soles of my police boots were starting to melt and bubble under the intense heat of the floor. Clearly this was a Hell-bound elevator!

Then just as suddenly as it had started, the lift stopped again, with such force that it threw me down to the floor. Looking back on it now, I can't understand why a blow like that didn't wake me up, but it didn't. Instead, I was aware of a searing pain in my hands as they touched the by-now almost red hot metal floor plate. I grasped my hands in my armpits and writhed around in agony, then all of a sudden the pain ceased. The door was opening.

From my prone point of view, I was aware of a small pair of bare feet entering the lift. I can remember thinking, how can this person bear to walk barefoot in all this heat? The woman – for it was a woman, and I knew exactly who – stopped in front of me, and slowly turned.

"Look at me." Her voice seemed to go right through me. I felt my gaze rising to meet hers, though every sinew in my body was fighting against it.

"Look at me." Again. I looked, and found myself staring into the dead, implacable face of Anita Patel. It was quite distinctly her, dressed exactly as I had seen her every day in that photograph on the board, except that she had an expression like thunder and her eyes were completely black, like small oval wells appearing to draw me in. Her gaze transfixed me, and once more she spoke.

"Where are you going?"

Before I could answer "To Hell" I was plunged into sudden darkness again. I screamed, and screamed, until I realised that the darkness wasn't the depths of Hades, it was my bedroom. Outside the window, the first few rays of dawn were stabbing at the sky, and the birds had started their dawn chorus. It was some time after four o'clock, and I had woken up again.