Free DECOY (Kindle Single) by Scott Mariani

For a moment she couldn’t believe her luck, thinking she’d found a ladder propped against the wall. She tugged. It didn’t move. She blinked.
    Thud – thud – thud. The door handle twisted and rattled above.
    Kate tugged again, but it was dawning on her with horror what she’d found. Not a ladder at all. The cage for the lift, whose shaft she now realised came down through the floor above and right down into the basement. Groping about in the murk, she could feel that the door was closed. She grasped its bars and pulled, and the door swung open with a creak. She quickly clanged it shut again. Felt around for a bolt, or a lock. Nothing. Just a crude pair of welded-on lugs with holes in them, one on the door, the other on the frame of the cage, that aligned when it was shut so that a padlock could be slipped through.
    Except that Kate didn’t have a padlock.
    The thumping on the door suddenly stopped.
    Her heart gave a flutter. She stood still and slowly raised her eyes to the ceiling, and could imagine him standing there above her, head cocked, intent, listening hard. His violent rage at being locked out of the basement cooling, a smile coming over his face as he remembered that he didn’t need to get through the door to reach her.
    He could use the lift.
    He could be coming down here any second.
    She hobbled quickly away from the cage and moved deeper into the shadows, away from the patch of moonlight in search of somewhere to hide, both arms groping out straight in front of her at chest height as she felt her way.
    Two limping steps forward. Three. Her right hand came into contact with something. Not metal. Something soft, and silky. Strands of long hair that tangled in her fingers as she darted back her hand with a frightened gasp.
    And the cold, soft contours of a human face.
    Kate screamed and recoiled. Her back thumped into a pillar.
    That was when she found the light switch, and realised that she wasn’t alone down here.

Eleven
    The heavy, old-fashioned switch flipped with a clunk and the basement was lit up by the cobwebbed glow of a single naked bulb overhead.
    Kate screamed again.
    Hayley was sitting upright on a high-backed wooden chair, looking at her with a detached, blank expression. Her hands were clasped limply in her lap. Her wrists had been bound with thin cord. Her ankles were fastened to the legs of the chair. A broad leather strap, like the strap from an old steamer trunk, was wrapped around her middle binding her to the backrest of the chair, and another was looped across her forehead. Her body was covered in open gashes and puncture wounds from the knife that had hacked and chopped and sliced into her flesh, ten times, twenty times, fifty stab wounds. Her face, her neck, her arms, her chest, her stomach, her legs. Spatters and rivulets and smudges of blood all over her skin. Every fibre of her tattered clothes saturated. Red dribbles snaking down the legs of the chair to pool at her feet, where it ran down a channel in the concrete floor to an iron drain cover.
    Behind Hayley’s chair were four others. They weren’t empty. The four women tied to them had been dead for longer than she had. One was naked, her body shrivelled and pitiful, grimy brown hair hanging down over her face. Another was grotesquely swollen and livid with decay. It hadn’t been just the rats that Kate could smell down here. The remnants of clothing that hung from the woman’s corpse, encrusted with black blood, had once been lacy underwear. She was still wearing the stiletto shoes she’d had on when he’d brought her back here.
    To one side of the chairs was a long, scarred wooden table. On its surface lay a coil of the same thin cord that had been used to bind Hayley’s wrists, and a long-bladed pair of scissors. A hammer with wisps of brown hair entangled in its claw. A crooked cast-iron fire poker. A butane-powered blowtorch and a box of matches. A butcher’s knife, smeared with blood. A rusty carpenter’s saw