Free The Devil's Staircase by Helen Fitzgerald Page B

way back up, and finally – thank God – found the shoe under the metallic blue Honda Jazz that was parked ten feet from the front door. He picked up the shoe and checked the street until he felt confident that he hadn’t forgotten anything else. He was about to return to the task at hand when he noticed someone walking towards the Kensington Gardens end of the street. He panicked, tossing the trainer into the bin beside him, then went back inside.
    He was a little annoyed after the whole shoe incident, so when he got into the basement room he didn’t even sit in his chair. He unzipped again, knelt beside the shoeless foot, the toes wriggling a protest against his left hand’s strokes, and tugged twice, unbelievably, just twice, before it happened. Ah, he said, opening his eyes. Ah, ah, he said, licking his achievement from the sock-clad foot.

 
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    When she’d woken, Celia had assumed it was a dream. Like the one where she’d forgotten to feed Johnny, where he’d become so thin and boggly-eyed that she’d screamed in horror and thrown him against the wall. Or the one where she’d slept with Greg’s best friend and he’d found out and left her. But she didn’t wake up, didn’t roll over to her husband to say: ‘Greg, I had a bad dream, do you still love me?’ Or to her little boys, to say: ‘Good morning, my beautiful little boys! Are you hungry?’ But she couldn’t move her hands to slap or pinch herself, and no matter how hard she looked the boys weren’t there, the bed wasn’t there, Greg wasn’t there, and it came to her that this was real. She was in a dark room. Her trousers and pants had been pulled down to her knees. There was a hole in her chair and a bucket underneath it. She was tied and gagged.
    She’d never imagined coping in such a scenario, so she had nothing to draw on. No inner resources to help with the first few hours, where she’d tried her hardest to get a noise from the inside of her to the out, all the while a masked man three feet from her, watching, just watching. The noise didn’t come. It got stuck somewhere in her throat, dribbles of it dampening the material that dug deep around her mouth. She didn’t give up as such, but after hours of internal screaming, of banging and rubbing against the ties, she rested, just for a moment, to gather her strength. He smiled at her as she drooled, poised like a rabid dog with mouth guard and chain.

    It was a long time before the people moved in above her. During this time, she’d made a rule that she must concentrate on survival and not on him, what he did to her. So each time after he left she pressed her chin to the locket round her neck – a silver heart-shaped locket on a chain, with a picture of her family inside. She touched it with her chin for strength and luck, and then resumed her projects with focus and determination.
    She was tied to a chair in the middle of the small, square, low-ceilinged windowless room. A plastic-coated bicycle chain was looped through one of the slats on the back of the chair and then padlocked tightly to a metal ring that was bolted to the floor. Her hands were bound together behind her back. Each foot was tied to a chair leg. Thick rope was wound around and around her legs and torso. A polyester bandanna tore into her mouth. A lamp, which he always turned off when he was finished, sat on a metal table in the corner. There was a small grate at the top of the right wall. A bucket of her by-products was under her chair. Just outside the room, she’d caught glimpse of a staircase that led to the real world. She didn’t know what world it was. It could have been Bulgaria for all she knew.
    She decided the only way to loosen the rope was to wriggle fingers, toes, feet, to rub and squirm and move as much as she could. She did this for hours each day, first the hands, then the feet, then the whole body. Wriggle and rest. Wriggle and rest.
    She peppered this plan with others, so as to not lose