now. He didn’t want to know what kind of person-what kind of thing-could make a sound like that. And yet he had to find out. All his moral reflexes were telling him to help.
As he stood in the gentle rain he thought of his mum. What she would say. She would tell him he had no choice. It was the moral imperative: Someone Is In Pain: Therefore You Help.
He looked left. The voice seemed to come from a row of old Georgian houses with dark purple bricks and elegant old windows. One of the houses had a sign up at the front, a wooden placard shining with rain in the lamplight. The Benjamin Franklin Museum. He had no proper idea who Benjamin Franklin was. Some Yank; a writer or something. But that didn’t really matter. He was fairly sure the moan was coming from this house: because the door was open. At 5am, on a Saturday morning.
Alan could see a dim light beyond the halfopen door. He clenched his fists once, then twice. Then he went to the door, and pushed.
It swung wholly open. The hall beyond was quiet. There was a till in the corner, a table stacked with leaflets; and a sign that read: Video Presentation This Way. The hall was illuminated, barely, by some nightlights.
The museum seemed undisturbed. The door was open but the interior was perfectly still. It didn’t look like the scene of a robbery.
‘Errrrlmmng…’
There it was again. The curdling groan. And this time it was plainly apparent where it came from: the basement.
Alan felt the talons of fear grasp his heart. But he stifled his nerves, and walked determinedly to the end of the hall, where a side door led to some descending wooden stairs. Alan creaked his way down them, and stepped into a low cellar room.
A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The light was soft, but bright enough. He gazed about. The room was unexceptional-apart from one thing. A corner of the floor had been recently and comprehensively dug up, the earth was turned over-to leave a big black hole going down a metre or more into the dark London soil.
It was then that Alan saw the blood.
He couldn’t not notice it: the big sticky stain was vivid and scarlet, and spattered over something very white. A pile of whiteness.
What was this whiteness? Feathers? Swan feathers? What?
Alan walked over and prodded the whiteness with the toe of his shoe. It was hair: human hair maybe. A pile of shaved white human hair. And the blood was spattered luridly across the top, like cherry sauce on lemon sorbet. Like a sheep’s miscarriage in the snow.
‘Errrllllbbbbb!’
The groan was very close now. It was coming from the room next door. Alan fought back his fears one last time and went through the small, low-slung door that led to the next room.
Inside, it was very black, apart from the narrow slant of light thrown by the bulb behind him. The ominous moan reverberated around the room. Fumbling to the side of the door, Alan slapped at the switch and flooded the room with brightness.
In the centre of the room, on the floor, lay a naked old man. His head had been completely shaved. Brutally shaved-judging by the grazes and cuts. Alan realized that that was where the hair must have come from. They had shaved his hair. Whoever they were.
Then the old man moved. His face had been averted from the door, but when the lights came on he turned and looked at Alan. The sight was unnerving. Alan flinched. The terror in the old man’s eyes was unspeakable. Wide and red, his eyes stared out, frenzied with pain.
The earlier drunken-ness had gone: Alan now felt queasily sober. He could see why the man was in agony. His chest was cut with marks, slashed with a knife. A design had been carved into his soft, old, wrinkled white skin.
And why was he groaning so weirdly? So incoherently? The man moaned again. And Alan wobbled with faintness.
The man’s mouth was abrim with blood. Blood oozed from his mouth, as if he had gorged himself on strawberries. Red blood was oiling down from his elderly lips, dripping onto the floor. When he moaned, more blood bubbled and gurgled, splattering his chin with gore.
And there was one final horror.
The man was holding something in his hand. Slowly, he opened the hand, and mutely extended it: as if he was kindly offering something. A gift.