After Sundown Read online

  I smile. “I’ve got a great idea…”

  Research

  Tim Lebbon

  “This is science,” Alan said. “Nothing more. There’s no emotion in this. We can’t dilute the experiment with feelings. And it’s very simple science at that. Non-intrusive observation and data collection. Then at the end, we’ll draw conclusions.”

  Sue was watching me as her husband spoke. Her gaze was analytical. She noted my widened eyes, perspiration levels, and the throbbing pulse at my neck. She waited until Alan had finished before taking a photograph of me. After checking the photo on her tablet she grunted softly and took another, then another, until she was satisfied.

  “I’m sure you understand?” Alan asked, as if expecting a response. Even though the gag was tight in my mouth, I could have nodded, or answered with my eyes. I gave them nothing.

  Sue tapped a comment into her tablet.

  “It probably won’t take long,” Alan said, checking my bindings. They’d tied me in a small but comfortable armchair, my arms strapped tight against the arms, coils of rope around my chest and legs holding me still. “And we won’t keep you this constrained past today. But you need to calm down before we can let you go. Accept what’s happening. Maybe you can even play a willing part.” He chuckled, glancing sidelong at his wife. She did not respond. “It’s almost like a plot out of one of your books, yes?”

  No, you stupid fuck, it isn’t, and I’ll never give you the satisfaction of thinking otherwise.

  But as they finished securing me to the chair, and Sue took a few more observations, and Alan checked the small basement room to make sure it was safe for me – and, I assumed, safe for them as well – I realised he was right. This was very much like something I might write.

  I wasn’t in a very good place to appreciate the irony.

  My head was still woolly from whatever they’d dropped into my food or drink. My mouth was dry, my limbs ached, and there was a throbbing pain behind my eyes. I had no idea what the drug might have been. I hated research, so avoided it at all costs. If one of my characters was drugged, I just stated that, without taking the time to Google what the drug might be, its effects, its sources and uses. It had never appeared to be a problem. I’d sold over seven million books worldwide.

  One thing that had surprised me was my instant acceptance of the situation. There was no doubting, no belief that maybe I was dreaming. This was real. I’d always thought Alan and Sue were strange.

  “We’ll leave you to calm down,” Alan said. “You need to get used to this. Just for a while, just for...” He trailed off, and I realised they hadn’t yet decided how long they were going to hold me down here. I’ll be a good pet, I thought, and I looked at Sue, her empty gaze as she observed every flutter of my eyes, every slight movement of my body.

  She was enjoying this.

  Despite their assurances, I feared I might be down here for a very long time.

  * * *

  They were watching me. There were two cameras fixed high in opposite corners of the room, cheap mail-order units probably linked by an app to Sue’s tablet. People used them to keep watch on their pets while they were at work. I saw the cameras even before they left me alone, and when they went I closed my eyes for a while, breathing deeply, and tried to gather myself. It was difficult not to panic.

  If they were going to kill me they’d have done it by now, I thought, but I knew that wasn’t necessarily the case. If they killed me straightaway, there’d be no story, no experiment. This was, as Alan had told me, science.

  I knew what they were doing.

  I looked around the room, avoiding staring directly at the cameras. It was a very small basement, featureless, almost useless. Maybe ten feet square, the walls lined with old tongued and grooved timber boarding, with a few darker areas close to the floor that might have been rot caused by condensation or damp. The floor was rough concrete, and the ceiling was the naked underside of the flooring above, with joists and struts exposed. There was no decoration anywhere; even the timber panelling was unfinished. My chair was the only item of furniture. The steep wooden staircase leading up to the doorway into the house above had no handrail or risers, and I guessed Alan had lined this place and built the staircase himself. There was one light bulb fixed into the side of a floor joist, wire snaking through a hole directly above.

  That was all. There was nothing else in this room. Only me. It was perfect for what they wanted, and I started thinking back, trying to locate the time and place when they might have decided to do this.

  Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it’s happening.

  I had a book deadline in six weeks. I’d almost finished the first draft of my fourteenth novel, and I believed it was the best I’d written. I hardly ever left my house this close to the end, writing for ten hours each day, eager to reach the finishing line so I could find out what happened. I remembered telling Sue and Alan about my working methods, and their surprise that I never planned in great detail. The climax was often as much of a surprise to me as I hoped it would be for the readers.

  They were obviously intricate planners. They probably found that side of my process confusing, even shocking.

  It’s Alan’s 60th, Sue’s text had read. Come along for a couple of drinks. She’d guilted me into it. I’d backed out of attending a party they’d thrown at our local pub the previous weekend, claiming that I couldn’t afford my concentration on the novel to be disturbed by an evening of drinking and socialising. It hadn’t been a lie, but it had been an excuse. I liked their occasional company, but over the past few years I’d been less and less keen on larger groups. Some people called me a loner, like it was a bad thing.

  I had maybe five thousand words to write until the book was done. A good three or four days’ work. I was itching to reach the end, and now...

  Now, maybe I never would.

  I closed my eyes again as the panic began to build. There was still time to let me go and call this a prank. Alan had been a travelling musician for some years, and he’d told me about some of his antics on tour as a session guitarist with various bands. Sue was a nurse and something of a free spirit. One drunken evening Alan told me they’d used to swing, but hadn’t done so since moving here a few years before. I believed it had been the planting of a seed, if not an actual invitation. He’d not mentioned it since.

  They were extroverts, an unusual couple with interesting stories to tell. This could be another of their stories, even now, even after drugging me and tying me up. Nothing more dangerous or deadly. If they were filming this instead of just watching, perhaps they’d play it some nights after too much drink, laugh and joke about the time they made their local novelist friend believe they’d kidnapped him and kept him prisoner in their basement so that they could see...

  Sue’s eyes, I thought. There had been no humour there. If this was a joke, however ill conceived, I didn’t think she’d have been able to make herself seem so serious.

  I needed the bathroom. I looked at one of the cameras, then twisted to look at the other. They’d have thought of that, surely? They wouldn’t allow me to sit here in my own filth.

  I struggled against the bonds. The ropes were expertly tied, with tea towels laid across my arms and legs so they didn’t cut into my flesh.

  I’d intended coming to their house for three or four hours, then going home and making notes on the final part of my novel. Sometimes alcohol greased the wheels of my imagination, and though I could never actually write while under the influence, ideas often came freer and more fully formed. Maybe it was my body relaxing while my mind was set free. Maybe it was something else. Whatever worked for my writing, I didn’t analyse it. I was afraid that thinking about it too much would break it.

  Alan and Sue were thinking about it. Perhaps too much. Perhaps enough to break me.

  I heard the door open thirty minutes, an hour,
or three hours later, and when I saw Sue descending with a bucket in one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other, I knew this was no sick joke. It was, as Alan had said, science.

  * * *

  “We had a dog called Skittle when I was a kid. My dad always liked telling me we had a wolf in the house, as if that would scare me. But I just thought it was cool. Who wouldn’t want a wolf living in their house?”

  Sue looked at me for so long that I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. Maybe yes, maybe no. Whatever, it seemed to satisfy her. She tapped her tablet and went on.

  “I used to think my dad was cruel, but I’ve come to see that he was just curious. He wanted to know things. Maybe some of what he did to discover those things was cruel, but he never saw it that way, and I don’t either.” She was sitting on the floor in front of my armchair, back against the wall. By my estimation I’d been down here for three days. There was no daylight, no clock, but they’d turned the light off for three long periods, and during the day I could hear sounds from upstairs – a radio playing when Alan and Sue rose, cooking noises from the kitchen, the distant sounds of traffic. Later, a TV.

  Three days. I should have finished the novel by now. They kept my hands tied to the chair’s arms, except when they released me so I could use the toilet. They both stepped back for this, holding broom handles with carving knives taped to the ends. They never said anything, but the threat was implied. Try anything stupid and we’ll stab you.

  Three days.

  “One day he tied up Skittle and kept her like that for six days. Didn’t feed her, only gave her a little bit of water. He wanted to see what she’d do. She barked for a while, then whined a lot, but she still slept through the nights in our back garden. When he finally let her go he dashed back indoors and closed the door, because Skittle was a big dog and he was worried she might attack him, maybe try to eat him. But she didn’t. She could hardly walk by then, but she made it over to our bird feeder, knocked one of the nut cages down, and started chewing at the metal to get to the nuts inside. When my father went out, Skittle came up to him and curled herself around his legs, whining. She even went onto her back for a tummy tickle. Isn’t that odd?”

  I waited for Sue to finish the story. I wanted to know what had happened to Skittle, partly because I liked dogs and found the whole tale unbearably cruel, but mainly because I didn’t like a story without an ending.

  Like my novel, I thought. A hundred thousand words without an ending, and I should have written it by now. If only they’d give me a pen. Some paper. Half an hour untied.

  Sue did not finish the story. She tapped some more information into her tablet, then stood and left. As the door closed behind her the light above me flickered out.

  Maybe it was night, and time to sleep.

  I knew where I was in the novel, but I could not finish it in my head. Ideas swirled and collided, scenes coalesced, but the telling of my story required writing. Once written, it was told. Otherwise it was just building in my head, scenes and ideas backed up awaiting release. It wasn’t about the long period of taking notes and planning, or the stretch of time from publication onwards. For me, letting a story out of my head and getting it down on paper, or onto my screen, was the purest form of storytelling. Before that it was an idea, and after that it belonged to someone else. At the moment of telling, the story was mine.

  This was one I needed to finish telling.

  I drifted towards uncomfortable sleep, and as I did so I remembered with startling clarity the moment when this situation was seeded. My eyes snapped open again in the darkness, and I realised it wasn’t quite pitch black. A weak light bled under the door from above. That would be their kitchen, and that was where we’d been standing.

  “But you seem so grounded,” Sue had said. This was maybe a year before. We’d been casual friends for a while, sometimes meeting in the local pub for a few Friday night drinks, occasionally going to each other’s houses. Alan had gone to the bathroom, and she was pouring us all a glass of wine. “I mean, so normal. And yet, all those things in your head.”

  “So did you ever read anything?” I asked. I’d given them a couple of my books which Alan had consumed. For some reason I’d never found out whether Sue had read them.

  “Not my bag, baby,” she said, chuckling. “I prefer non-fiction.” She handed me a glass, and we stood against opposite worktops, smiling. It was a moment of comfortable silence. I heard the flush from upstairs, and Sue glanced at the open door out into the hallway. I thought at that moment, She’s going to suggest something awkward. Alan had already told me about their swinging habits in the previous town they’d lived in. My wife had left me four years before, and they both knew that.

  I honestly hadn’t known what my response might be. But what she said next was something very different.

  “All those sick ideas. All that nastiness and crime, gory murder and mutilation. All in your head.”

  “Actually, out of my head,” I said. “I get it all out on the page. I guess that’s why I’m pretty laid back and level headed.” I laughed, and she laughed along with me.

  “I wonder what you’d be like if you weren’t able to let it all out?”

  “Something I hope I’ll never have to discover,” I said, and then Alan had entered the room, and we took the wine through to their lounge, and I remembered little else from that evening.

  That was it, I thought. That single moment. That one comment. And now Alan and Sue – but mainly, I thought, Sue – were going to find out just what would happen if I wasn’t able to write. All that nastiness. All that murder and horror.

  I blinked at the shadows and tried to assess how much of my writing was more than just storytelling. How much of it was essential? How much was the venting of pressure, the bleeding away of a darkness seeded in my soul?

  Bullshit, I thought. It’s work, that’s all. It’s what I do.

  But I had never believed that, and it wasn’t the discomfort that kept me awake for hours that night, staring into shadows and listening to the silence.

  * * *

  On day four or five they let me get up from the chair. Alan had to help me stand, and Sue leaned over the back of the chair and pushed against my shoulders. My legs felt tingly and numb. They’d let me slide off the chair to use the bucket, but until now I’d been put straight back into position, tied and gagged.

  I was readying a plan to escape. Being good, letting them do this without striking out at them, was a big part of it.

  “You’re standing okay?” Alan said. “Not going to fall over?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay, then.” He caught Sue’s eye over my shoulder. “Sue’s got you some food. Same rule with the gag, yes?”

  I nodded. Sue untied the gag and Alan pulled it from my mouth.

  “New one next time,” I said. “That one stinks and tastes bad.”

  “Of course,” Alan said, throwing the piece of material at the stairs. It fell through into the shadows beyond. I heard it slither to the concrete. I hoped he’d forget about it.

  Sue fed me while I was standing, and then I used the bucket. It was strange how fast I’d become used to going to the toilet while one or both of them watched.

  “How are you feeling?” Sue asked.

  “Are you joking?”

  Neither of them responded. Alan held one of the broom spears, standing at the foot of the steep timber stairs. I thought if I could knock it aside and go at him, I might be able to push him into the wall. But Alan was bigger than me, and much fitter, and I hadn’t been in a fight since I was thirteen. Considering everything I wrote about, it was almost comical that I didn’t have the first clue about how to look after myself. I let it all out on the page, I thought, and my heart stuttered as I thought about the unfinished book sitting on my computer.

  “We’ll leave you untied for a while,” Sue said. “We c
an see you on the cameras, and the door is always locked.”

  “It’s still not too late,” I said. “Let me out, we’ll forget about it. Just a joke, right? Just one of those things.” And I meant it. I was so desperate to get home that right then I would have happily welcomed freedom if it meant never talking about what had happened here. There were only a couple of people who might be missing me. My agent, perhaps, although she wasn’t expecting the book for another few weeks. A friend in France I emailed once a week.

  “You know this is no joke,” Alan said. “You’re sick. Filled with twisted ideas.”

  “You get it out on the page,” Sue said, and smiled.

  Who’s sick? I was going to ask. Who’s twisted? I kept quiet. Though I did little research, I knew that truly mad people rarely understood that they were mad. Antagonising them would ensure I ended up tied to the chair again. At least now I could walk, stretch, keep my muscles limber.

  After only four or five days, I already felt like an old man.

  * * *

  On day seven or eight, I lost count. On day fourteen or sixteen, I started scratching lines on the timber staircase to count days and they tied me up again, switching the light on and off for random lengths of time to confuse me. Sometimes they left music on in the kitchen above, turned up loud so I couldn’t sleep. They masked traffic noise from outside, and filled silence with sound and light so that I could not assess the time.

  On day twenty, or maybe thirty, I started to cry and beg them to release me. They exchanged a knowing glance and left me alone, tied up and gagged, and sitting in my own filth.

  More ways to drive me mad. This was science.

  Tucked down the side of the seat cushion I kept the old gag that I’d retrieved, painstakingly, from beneath the staircase. I’d taken a risk, waiting for a moment when I believed one or both of them were out of the house, hoping that even if the cameras did record rather than observe, they’d not have time to watch all the footage.