Chapter 5
You don’t know how long the cultists hold you in their little community center. At first it still feels like the whole dining hall is watching you. Then, as Arthur leaves with your cell phone, most of the group seems to lose interest. Starting at the fringes, the rest of them go back to their movie night or their group dinner or serving food or whatever. Just a few people stick around, keeping an eye on you.
You didn’t see Arthur give any orders about keeping you here, or anything. But you also don’t know where in London you are or how to get home from here–and even if you do, the cult clearly knows where you live now. Part of you wants to ask Can I go?, but it shouldn’t even be a question. Legally, they can’t hold you against your will. But if he’s working with the police, then legal protections won’t be of much use for you. There’s no guarantee that anyone will be held accountable for anything they do to you here.
Which basically means you’re fair game.
That’s not a helpful train of thought, you tell yourself, but it’s hard to redirect from it. You still have your work bag. You set it on your lap and open it up, and search through to see if there’s anything useful in it. There’s your spare phone charger to plug into the office, your car keys, a travel pack of tissues, your lip gloss in case you need to touch up. Gum. Ibuprofen. Blister pads. Panty liners. Nothing that will be immediately helpful if you have to fight your way out of a cult.
You know what? It’s better not to even go there. You steel yourself and get up, swinging your bag onto your shoulder and moving towards the exit.
A man steps into your path. You throw on your brakes hard to avoid colliding with him. The wrong move, you think–you should have plowed straight forward, kept your goal in mind, pretended you didn’t see anyone trying to stop you because why would anyone try to stop you?
Now you’re cowed, and they know you’re cowed.
You take a deep breath, draw yourself up to your full height, and ask, “Where is the ladies’ room?”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “I think you can wait,” he says.
You make a show of your offense. “Excuse me?”
“Take a seat,” he says.
You haven’t been forbidden from going to the restroom since you were in seventh grade. The outrage that comes over you is not entirely feigned, but the man is much larger than you.
“Werner,” Arthur says, suddenly reappearing.
The man turns around immediately when his boss arrives, then steps out of your way.
You look at Arthur. “Can I have my phone back,” you demand.
He smiles at you. “Of course,” he says. He waves a hand. “The restrooms are that way. Perhaps you’d like to tidy up before our friend arrives?”
You figure that “our friend” could mean somebody you actually know, or it could mean, like, the official executioner for this cult. You fold your arms and then hold your hand out, waiting for your phone.
He uses the cane as he walks across the dining hall. It doesn’t appear to just be for show. Every step is small and labored, and once again every eye in the hall is on you. This time you feel the judgment of being the kind of heel to make a disabled man hobble over to you.
Social pressure is a very real phenomenon. You don’t want to make a scene, even though making a scene might save your hide here. You feel uncomfortable putting the cult leader in discomfort, even though he had the police bring you here under false and certainly illegal pretenses.
He puts your phone in your hand. You look down at it and turn it over, but the case seems unchanged. It blinks on for you. You automatically go to your call history, but there’s no record of outgoing calls since the one you made to your mother.
Hell, when is your mother going to call you back?
“I’ll be…” you say, and then trail off. You don’t want to spend any more time in Arthur’s company, but you don’t want to be too far away from him, either. His followers scare you. Maybe more than he does, because you have a shot at running from just one man, but you don’t think you have a shot at fleeing an entire neighborhood full of people bent on…
What? Predestination?
“Of course,” Arthur says.
You walk stiffly, woodenly to the bathroom. You don’t actually have to pee–you were looking for an excuse, and so many men get uncomfortable when women bring up basic biological needs. But now that it occurs to you that you haven’t since you left from work, you use one of the three stalls in the bathroom. Public restrooms are a good initiative, you’re pretty sure. In fact, all of these community outreach things the cult seems up to would probably be great if it didn’t come with an entree of exclusionist dogma.
What does it mean, to be judged? You don’t ever want to give that man the authority to judge you.
For lack of anything better to do, you shake out two ibuprofen onto your palm and gulp them down with water from the sink, using your hands as a cup. You have to assume that if there’s a community garden here, they’ve bothered retrofitting the water pipes. And the stress you’re dealing with right now means that you’re almost certainly going to get a headache sooner or later.
Then you inspect the only window in this room. There’s a chance that, if you keep calm and pretend like you belong, that you might be able to climb out the window and use your GPS to walk back to somewhere familiar. Get on the train, get to your car, get the hell out of here.
You don’t know where you’ll go. You always felt better knowing that you had your apartment in London, that there was a bed that you could return to no matter what happened. A safe home base. You don’t feel that way anymore. Ever since Layla said your apartment number, you’ve felt like someone stripped your security blanket from you.
You cover your eyes when you remember Layla. Based on the inherent trustworthiness of a woman who warned you that people are after you and tried to accommodate your paranoia as best she could–you feel like proper shit about calling the police.
The window in the bathroom is far too high for you to climb out of. There’s a radiator just under it, and maybe there’s a chance that it could take your weight. You take off your work shoes–which are just killing you right now, and are also not the kind of shoes that you can run in–and try to put a foot on the radiator, but it’s hot through your no-show sock. You put your leg back down. You think about kicking the wall to excise your temper, but with your luck you’d break a toe, so you just put your shoes back on.
Then you hold your phone in your hands. Your mother still hasn’t called you back. Out of all of the moving pieces that you have here–thrown wildly into your life over the course of this last business week, thanks so much–the only one that you think you understand even a little bit is Steven.
Why?
Steven’s mother sends him postcards. If, indeed, they were from his mother.
And Steven has a goldfish.
That’s two more things you know about him–that you’ve seen with your own eyes–than anyone else has been able to tell you all evening. Fuck Arthur and his accusations of… being a secret US Marine?! And Layla might mean well, but all you know is that she’s working against this guy and his dirty police. That means you probably owe her the mother of all apologies, but she didn’t have much to say about Steven.
So you call him.
You stand there in the bathroom, wondering when the cultists will get tired of waiting on you, with the phone to your ear and the reedy electronic buzz as it rings. If Steven picks up, you don’t know what you’ll say. What the fuck seems like a good place to start.
He doesn’t pick up.
You think about calling the police but you know how well that turned out last time. Hell, you think of calling the American embassy–surely you’re entitled to their protection–but Arthur has an American accent.
And the thing about cult leaders is, they are convincing.
Frustrated, you put your phone back in your purse and go back out to the dining hall. Arthur is still waiting there for you, his weight distributed evenly between his cane and his feet. Someone has started up the movie on the projector again, and it’s showing a bizarre slow-motion shot of what looks like an owl destroying a hotel room.
“Shall we?” Arthur asks, without commenting on how long it took you.
You say nothing, but you follow him.
So do some of his people. Many of them seem to go back to what they were doing, but there are a few people–mostly men, you notice–who seem to wash along in his wake, like remora. Not all of them come from the dining hall–some of them find him back on the street and seem just to want to be in his company. This isn’t surprising. You hold your purse like it’s a lifeline, as though there’s anything at all that you can do to keep yourself safe here. You don’t have pepper spray; the only thing you have to defend yourself with is the cat-shaped keychain that you can hook two fingers through and punch someone with, if the situation really calls for it. It was a gift from your college roommate. You’ve never had call to use it.
The most dangerous weapon is the weapon that someone can take from you. And then, you’d be without your keys.
Arthur walks you back through his little community again. When you step into the parking lot you see the police car and the two officers standing there, and you think for a moment that he’s returning you to them–that you’re going to have to get back in the car with them and go where they take you.
And then Arthur opens the door to the police vehicle and a man in handcuffs falls out onto the street. You blink, startled, but then he twists onto his side and you see. It’s Steven. Arthur crouches down and takes a set of keys from the police officer–the same police officer who came to collect you earlier this evening–and unlocks the cuffs and helps Steven to his feet. You feel an almost instinctive revulsion as he brushes off Steven’s shoulders. They murmur something to each other that you can’t hear. Arthur keeps touching him–straightening Steven’s jacket, putting his hand on Steven’s shoulder.
They stare at each other for a long moment, talking so that you can’t hear. Arthur nods, and then whatever he says must startle Steven, because he looks behind Arthur in horror and…
He sees you.
He looks… confused. He actually performs a real double-take, looking from you to Arthur and back to you again. He asks your name.
You don’t know what your face does, but you don’t move. You keep your hands on the bag.
This seems to worry Steven more. “Are you okay?” he asks, moving toward you.
Arthur taps the back of the hand resting on his cane with his other hand. It’s a strangely finite gesture. “Our mutual friend is unharmed,” he says, and for a moment you don’t know whether he’s addressing you, referring to Steven, or the other way around. Then he says, “She’s just been enjoying our hospitality this evening.”
Steven gets even closer to you, reaches out towards your shoulders, and then seems to think better of it and brings his hands back in tight to his body. “Are you okay?” he asks again in an undertone.
You swallow and whisper, “I think I’ve been kidnapped.”
If Steven’s a criminal, he’s a very good liar. His eyes widen a little when you say it, and then he looks around at Arthur and at the police car peeling away. He looks back at you.
“Are you hurt?” he whispers.
You shake your head, because you’re not. You’re just scared. Nobody’s actually done anything to you, except intimidate you a bit, and borrow your phone without your permission.
“Okay,” he says. He hesitates for a moment, giving you a full once-over as though to check for injury or something, and then he holds his hand out to you. You have just a moment of misgiving, a moment of no one touch me, and then you extend your left hand to his. Your palms fit together. As you touch his, you realize that your hand is very sweaty, but it’s hard to care about that right now. He checks your face, then asks again, “Okay?”
You nod back and take a deep breath. “Okay,” you say. Then you twist your hand and entwine your fingers with his. It’s more intimate than you might otherwise be with an acquaintance, but it’s nice to have someone to hold onto.
You’ll ask him if he’s an international fugitive when he’s not the only human being in your vicinity you trust even a little bit.
Steven nods a little, the corners of his mouth turning down. “Can you do something, just really quickly,” he says in an undertone.
You raise your eyebrows at him, trying to point out that you might have decided to be on his side, but that doesn’t mean he should be testing you right now.
He turns his head just to the side and asks, “Do you see anything there?”
Oh boy.
You look around, just a bit, getting a sense of the alley. There are trash cans, hanging plastic sheeting floating in the wind, a dumpster.
“She can’t see him,” Arthur says, closing the distance among you. He stands within arm’s reach of Steven–you recoil at first and then make yourself relax, the fingers of your right hand tight on your purse strap, your left hand holding on to Steven. “That’s a privilege that only you have now.”
What? You look at the plastic, but there’s nobody here but the three of you. You look back at him, urgently.
“Steven,” you say.
Steven turns and you see that his eyes are very large and very dark. He’s sweating slightly. Some of that could be chalked up to… well, he’s also been kidnapped, you’re pretty sure, but what if he’s on something? Or…?
“How long has it been since you slept?” you ask.
He closes his mouth, wets his lips. Then he says, “I’m not sure.”
“More or less than two days?” you ask him. It’s important.
His eyes flick to the side and then back at you. “Less,” he says.
“Are you sure?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s less.”
Okay. Okay. So Steven might be hallucinating. People do that when they go for too long without sleep. And you’re in an alley with a very dangerous man, and if he knows that Steven is hallucinating, he might use that to his advantage.
“Steven,” you whisper. “I don’t see anyone there.”
He looks back at… whatever he sees, and his grip on your hand loosens a little bit.
You tighten your fingers. “I mean,” you say, and he looks at you again. “I mean, if you’re not sure. Just ask, and I’ll tell you.”
He’s shaking a little bit, but he nods. He turns to look at Arthur. “I think we’d like to go now,” he says. “If that’s all right.”
A strong gust of wind blows down the alley. Something about the close buildings must turn this place into a wind tunnel. One of the trash cans gets blown over and rolls; the hanging plastic billows out towards you. Steven jumps and you hold even tighter to his hand. A fearful noise tears out of him.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Arthur says. He reaches out and puts his hand on Steven’s other shoulder. “That’s all he can do without your help. He only has as much power as you give him.”
You don’t like this. You really don’t like this. But you keep holding on to Steven’s hand. Steven’s jumpy and apparently hallucinating, and Arthur is using a calm and reassuring tone and… ingratiating himself, you’re sure.
“Just remember.” Arthur leans in confidentially. “You don’t have to do everything he says.”
You stare at him, wanting to tell Steven You don’t have to do everything he says!Arthur only has as much power as you give him!
You’re almost alone in this alley. Now that you look around, you see that the occasional passersby seem to have dwindled. If you’re going to make a run for it, now would probably be your best chance. Hell, Arthur seems preoccupied with Steven, maybe he wouldn’t even give you a second thought.
He could have done something to your phone. Placed a tracking device on it. You don’t know where you’d go, once you got out of immediate danger–if you even could get out of immediate danger. And Steven is so twitchy that the wind seems to startle him.
If you left him, you’d be leaving him to the mercy of the cult. And you don’t trust them. But is it worth taking the chance for your own safety? Should you drop Steven’s hand and just run?
“Steven,” you say again.
He looks at you. With the cult leader resting his hand on Steven’s other shoulder, it’s clear to you that if Steven can’t turn to you, he’ll turn to Arthur. He’s vulnerable.
“I think we should go,” you tell him. “I think we should go now.”
He starts nodding his head, and then he just keeps nodding–like it’s not even a conscious movement, like he’s about to fall apart. He looks at Arthur and he says, “I’m sorry, mate, I really am, but I don’t have what you’re looking for, I swear.”
“That might be true,” Arthur says, his voice calm as ever. “But I think that I have what you’re looking for.”
No. No, no, no. You’re torn between the need for self-preservation and the need to defend another, weaker human being. You flounder for something to say to make Steven trust you above this man–whose charisma is proven by the people who follow him around. And whatever you say, you have to temper it against your fear of making Arthur too angry.
Steven wets his lips again. “What… what am I looking for?” he stammers.
“Answers,” Arthur says easily. “Someone who understands what it’s like to be in your current position.” He smiles. “Come. Let me show you around.”
“Steven,” you whisper. “Steven, please.”
He looks at you for a long moment, and then he says, “Yeah. Yeah, sorry, mate.” He looks around at Arthur. “Sorry, but I can’t help you. So we’ll just…” He takes a few steps away, and you follow, still hanging onto his hand, your shoulder jammed up against his side.
“There’s no need to be afraid,” Arthur says, sounding so calm and reasonable that of course you second-guess yourself. How could you not? He’s a man with a cane out on the street. “I can help.”
“We don’t want your help,” bursts out from between your teeth before you can stop yourself; and then you know that you have to run, so you step out of your shoes.
“That’s a shame,” Arthur says calmly, and then he taps his cane once on the brick street. You become aware, slowly, that the head of it–its weird double crocodile-headed pattern–is glowing purple, not just at the eyes, but down the neck.
“We need to go,” Steven says with sudden conviction.
You stoop and swipe your shoes up and into your bag. You aren’t going to love running almost barefoot over London streets, but you don’t have much of a choice right now.
“Go,” you agree.
You run.
Running with another person is as strange now as it ever was when you were a kid. Steven is stronger than you, and it doesn’t surprise you that he’s faster than you too–he’s larger, he has greater momentum. Your outstretched arms act like a chain between the two of you. He pulls you along. You work a desk job and your thighs are aching in moments and your breath keeps catching in your throat.
Steven pulls you around a corner and flattens back against the wall. You mimic him.
“We might have to split up,” he says.
“What? No!” It’s not like you know where you’re going, but if you’d wanted to be on your own, you would have left him there in the middle of the cult.
“I don’t think he’ll chase you. I think it’s me he wants.”
“He thinks I have something,” you say.
Steven looks around at you, confused.
“He thinks I–took something from your apartment,” you say, and then you can’t help but keep going, each burst of words coming out on a gasp of breath. “Or that I–saw something. He–he said you were a criminal? And a–I don’t know, he thinks…” You shake your head.
He shakes his head too. “That’s not me.”
It’s probably what he’d say if it were him, he might just lie to you, but you just don’t think that Steven is that good of a liar. The fact that he says no–well, it’s about as reassuring as Layla telling you that she didn’t have a gun on you in the restaurant. Steven could probably hurt you now, if he wanted to, if he were so inclined, but you have to trust that he wants to get away from Arthur and his people as much as you do.
“We have to keep going,” he says. “He has dogs.”
“What?”
“Something like dogs.” He steps away from the wall, getting ready to run again. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Fuck,” you sigh, and you run again.
This time it’s worse. You don’t know where you’re going, and you’re afraid that people are watching you from the buildings you pass. Every time you approach an alley you whip your head around, terrified that you’re about to see a bunch of cultists spill out after you. You reach a point where you’re barely moving faster than you would if you were walking. You’re trying to run–your adrenaline is certainly pounding hard enough that you feel like you should be able to keep running–but your legs just can’t take it.
And then you hear something.
For a moment you think it’s an engine. If the cultists come after you in a car, you’re done. And then the depth of the sound shifts, and you realize–it’s a dog.
“Oh, shit!” you gasp. You can’t outrun a dog anymore than you can outrun a car.
Steven turns his head to look behind you both, still running, and then grits his teeth and begins pulling you faster down the street. From the look on his face before he turns back to watch where he’s going, you have to guess he agrees with your assessment. You don’t turn around to look. You don’t think you want to know.
“I think it’ll go after me!” Steven shouts.
Statistically, he’s probably right. How does the joke go? He doesn’t have to outrun the dog, he only has to outrun you. And if you split up–well, the dog can only chase one of you.
“I’m sorry!” you wheeze at him.
“It’s okay! Get ready! You go right!”
You squeeze his hand to let him know that you hear him, and then feel the tension between you.
And then Steven lets you go.
You lurch to the right, pulling for the edge of the road. Your hand stings with the sudden break between you two. You and Steven weren't actually one person, but you were hanging on tight enough that it feels like you’re being ripped apart. You lunge for the wall, make it around a corner, and only then do you dare to look back.
There goes Steven, chased by…
Nothing.
Well, shit, if it’s not going after Steven, it’s going after you. You turn to keep running, and you see someone approach on a motorcycle and nearly dive out of the way so as not to be seen, so afraid of cultists.
It’s a woman with curly hair.
“Layla!” you gasp.
Layla comes to a hard stop maybe ten yards away, gritting her teeth hard as she takes the momentum. She looks at you.
“Where is he?”
You look behind yourself again, but you don’t see a dog chasing you. If this man has attack dogs–well, you heard it.
“Steven?” you ask.
“Sure! Fine! Yes! Steven!” Layla shouts at you.
You point. “We just split up. He went–”
Layla grips the accelerator and the engine revs, then her face contorts into a snarl. “Get on!”
You don’t argue with her. You’re nearly barefoot fleeing cultists. You’ve never ridden on a motorcycle before, but you’ve ridden on a jetski; you swing your leg over the back and wrap your arms around Layla’s waist.
“Hold tight,” she says, and whips forward again.
The motorcycle is deafening. You don’t have a helmet. After everything you’ve been through today, that’s what’s sticking in your head. Your parents would kill you if they could see you on a motorcycle without a helmet. Hell, they wouldn’t be pleased even if you had appropriate protective gear. Layla is taller than you and you just about tuck your face into your shoulder.
You were a kid when you rode the jetski. One of your friends–maybe from third grade?--wanted to have his birthday party out on the lake, and his mom took you two at a time out on the water. You remember precious little from that day, except that water sprayed up and behind you. Your friend’s mother, driving the jetski, took the brunt of it, but water bounced off of her, too, and you felt like the whole lake had pelted you in the teeth. It was fantastic.
Layla drives fast, like a woman who knows lives are in danger. You want to apologize to her for what happened earlier tonight, but you know she won’t be able to hear you over the engine. You sit up and look down into your bag and find that you’ve lost one of your shoes in your sprint down the street.
“Fuck,” you mutter.
“What?” Layla asks, a word you feel reverberating in your chest more than in your ears.
“It’s fine,” you shout. After everything that’s happened, the shoe doesn’t really signify. Better your shoe than your life.
She accelerates.