Page 87 of Their Cruel Love

I sit on this top section to catch my breath and wipe away sweat. I’m sweating despite the lack of real exertion. Chalk up a fear of utter darkness next to a fear of heights. It is the unknown that almost beat me.

But what is here? My first sweep reveals everything one might stock a torture dungeon with. Or a sex dungeon.

The stone table proudly sits in the middle while this stairway is off toward the rear wall. I recall the trapdoor’s position above, at the crown of the hill. Most of the room is toward the east then.

Stone table. Walls covered by glass-fronted display cabinets and cupboards. Devices and weaponry line the far wall. Battle axes, scimitars, coils of rope, and wire. A scythe the devil would love to wield, various floggers and whips, and an entire bottom shelf of leather harnesses and masks.

None of this proves they were making snuff films though a tripod that could take a camera sits off to my right. I descend the stairway and realize the table has manacles just as Phoebe described.

From her dream. From the image shown to us at the board meeting.

Positioned to hold someone splayed out, on back or belly.

A chill snakes in as I stroll past the camera tripod and circle the table. A hose is coiled on the wall and small metal grills in the floor must cover drains. So they have water being pumped here. The floor slopes toward the drains. I imagine them clogged with pooling blood, flowing from someone tiedto the table. Hosing must make it spill to the outside, through an outlet drilled in the cliff, down the cliff onto the wave-washed beach. If I’m right, there would be ample DNA in the drains and on the cliff face. And who will ever know, on this small island in the middle of a nowhere ocean?

Are they killing people for fun? I cannot do forensics and look for gobbets of flesh or spots of blood. No portraits of victims sit on the walls. I look around again. A laptop lies on a narrow desk, and if there are severed fingers in a freezer at the resort, those cupboards could hold clues.

I try the laptop first. Though connected to power it’s passworded. Phoebe’s USB might circumvent the password. I move on to the cupboards, pull out drawers full of BDSM gear and things that could qualify as torture implements—pliers, thumbscrews, clamps, and scalpels—as well as stuff I might find in any drawer. Notepads, pens, staplers, reams of printer paper. There are no specimens of human origin, no souvenirs of body parts preserved in formalin.

Then I reach a set of drawers with large posters rolled up inside. When I unroll them, one after the other shows a woman strapped down on the table or kneeling, being hurt, being tortured, being fucked while a man strangles her. A small plastic lunchbox contains something that rattles. I touch it gingerly, ready to be revulsed, horrified. This might be teeth.

Evil coils and weighs heavy in my churning stomach. I resist the urge to vomit, holding down the corners of the last poster where she’s on the floor, bleeding out from somewhere beneath her.

How am I going to tell Phoebe what I’ve found? The posters are of Milli. Her friend was here and is likely dead.

I unclip the lid of the box.

There are no teeth. Inside is a blue-and-silver mermaidpendant with a decorative chain. The back of the pendant is inscribed. If I had any doubts, now I do not.

To Milli, Happy Birthday from Phoebe.

“Fuck!”

I can’t do this to her. I won’t be able to say the words.

This concrete knowledge that we are on the island with a bunch of happy killers should be the worst of this. We have no way off, have seen no boats, no conveniently parked helicopter, we’ve no way to reliably communicate with the rest of the world. We’re outnumbered and have no weapons.

But telling Phoebe her friend has been murdered, like this…

It tears at me, cuts me mortally deep, aching way down where my heart beats.

An ugly thought spawns as I trot through the facts and round them up.

What were they going to do? Why are these the only posters? Were they going to set up this room with posters of Milli dying to shock Phoebe?

We left her in the room, alone, tied to the bed.That might not have been wise. I guess we didn’t quite believe that murders could be happening here. We didn’tbelieve, not in our guts. Not really. There were always those niggles of, maybe not? Maybe it’s just films, not killing? Maybe not here?

I slam shut the drawer and sprint for the door that opens onto the ledge.

34

Phoebe

Three taps at the door jolt me from my futile poking at the lock on my ankle cuff with my fingernails. I couldn’t budge it anyway. Holding my breath, my hands shaking for some stupid reason, I stare at the door.

“Yes?” I ask cautiously. Fear is creeping about in my bones. I hate how what happened has robbed me of my courage. I’m in a tank top and underwear, and this cannot be Razor or Marcus.

“It’s Aimee,” comes the quiet reply, as if she’s talking with her mouth right next to the door. Relief floods me. “Can I come in?”

---