Playing Dead: Book One of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 16

"I have a gift for you."

We stood in front of an unvarnished wooden door, with Harper pressed up behind me, arms wrapped around my upper body, preventing me from moving to strike him.

I had struggled and kicked all the way from the room upstairs as Harper had attempted to restrain me when I could handle the thirst no longer and I had thrown myself at him. It had proved to be a futile mission, of course, as I was still unsteady on my feet and with nothing but my rage and hunger driving me forward and weakened by my ordeal, I wasn't at all prepared for how easily he was able to handle my attack. Half-dragging, half-carrying me back along the hallway and down a narrow set of stairs, I soon found myself standing here in front of this door, behind which Harper claimed was a present just for me.

I stared wildly at the door. Ominously closed, I could feel a slight chill emanating from underneath it, creeping around my bare feet and sending goosebumps up my legs.

When Harper reached out and tugged on the door handle, it swung open revealing another set of steps leading downwards into pure darkness and I whimpered, knowing instinctively where he was taking me.

The basement. My own personal torture chamber. The pit of horrors.

Automatically I kicked out with my legs, thrashing about in his arms and making contact with his shin, so petrified I was about the prospect of going back down into that hole. He sucked in a breath and gripped me tighter, his fingers digging cruelly into my flesh.

"No, no," I pleaded, as he practically carried me down the steps and I was immediately hit by some foul stench that made my stomach knot up, even more so when I realised it was probably my scent I could smell. Something fetid hung in the air and I felt the shadows dancing around me with glee.

She has returned! She has returned!

At the bottom of the steps, I was surprised to find more floorboards under my feet and the room was cluttered with random debris. This wasn't my torture chamber at all, yet why did it smell and feel like that same place where I had lived out the last moments of my life?

Dragging me halfway across the room, Harper leaned down and tugged on something on the floor. To my surprise a hatch door opened and immediately I knew why this place reminded me so much of my hell-hole. I dug my heels in and desperately tried to pull away from Harper's grasp but he dragged me back towards the hatch and threw me down into the hole.

Blind with panic, I hit the floor hard, remembering the feel of the dirt beneath my fingertips and scrabbling around in the darkness. Suddenly Harper was beside me and upon me, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck and pulling me towards him yet instead of attacking me like I expected, he brought my face close to his and put his finger on my lips gesturing for me to be quiet. I could hear my own breath wheezy and shallow but as I tried to control the swelling panic, somewhere in the back of my head I could hear another noise, a squealing, squeaking noise and a shuffling, as if something was crawling in the dirt.

Another smell hit me. Something sweet. Something that when I focused upon it, seemed to saturate the air with its scent. Something that fired up my hunger and all of a sudden I had forgotten completely that Harper had thrown me back into the basement. My ears pricked up and I concentrated wholly on that sound which I now realised was not in my head, but coming from somewhere in here, with us. My head spun sharply, my eyes instinctively becoming accustomed to the dark and I gasped when I saw a dark shape lying on the floor; a woman, wriggling and struggling against her binds.

She was bleeding. I didn't know where from, but I knew she was bleeding. I could smell it.

I turned quickly back to face Harper, who still hadn't released me but was watching me with wide eyes, glistening molten black against his pale skin.