Land of the Living

by Nicci French

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Abbie Devereaux lies flat on her back, her arms and legs tied down, her head covered with a hood. She senses, but can't see, the eyes that watch her. She feels the unknown hands that touch her in the dark. She knows she has been kidnapped, even though she has little memory of her most recent past. And she knows that all she has to do is stay alive, even though everything she is experiencing tells her she won't. Miraculously, she escapes. One nightmare is over...but another is about to begin.

No one believes her story. Not the police who find her beaten and bruised on the outskirts of London, not the psychologists who interview her at the hospital. Desperate to piece together the fragments of her life and prove she is telling the truth, she returns to a strangely familiar existence. She discovers, but cannot remember why, she moved out of her boyfriend's apartment, left her job as an office planner, and moved in with a roommate who herself has mysteriously disappeared.

Now trying to reclaim both her mind and her life—and stop a monstrous psycho-killer—she must dare to retrace her steps to the place where the horror began.

Release date: May 1, 2003

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

DARKNESS. DARKNESS FOR A LONG TIME. OPEN MY EYES and close, open and close. The same. Darkness inside, darkness outside.


I’d been dreaming. Tossed around in a black dark sea. Staked out on a mountain in the night. An animal I couldn’t see sniffed
and snuffled around me. I felt a wet nose on my skin. When you know you’re dreaming you wake up. Sometimes you wake into another
dream. But when you wake and nothing changes, that must be reality.


Darkness and things out there in the darkness. Pain. It was far away from her and then closer to her and then part of her.
Part of me. I was filled to the brim with hot liquid pain. Although the darkness remained, I could see the pain. Flashes of yellow and
red and blue, fireworks exploding silently behind my eyes.


I started to search for something without really knowing what it was. I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know what it was.
Nightingale. Farthingale. It took an effort, like hauling a package out of the water of a deep dark lake. That was it. Abigail.
I recognized that. My name was Abigail. Abbie. Tabbie. Abbie the Tabbie. The other name was harder. There were bits missing
from my head and it seemed to have got lost among the missing bits. I remembered a class register. Auster, Bishop, Brown,
Byrne, Cassini, Cole, Daley, Devereaux, Eve, Finch, Fry. No, stop. Go back. Finch. No. Devereaux. Yes, that was it. A rhyme
came to me. A rhyme from long, long ago. Not Deverox like box. Nor Deveroo like shoe. But Devereaux like show. Abbie Devereaux.
I clung to the name as if it was a life ring that had been thrown to me in a stormy sea. The stormy sea was in my head mostly.
Wave after wave of pain rolling in and dashing itself against the inside of my skull.


I closed my eyes again. I let my name go.

EVERYTHING WAS PART OF EVERYTHING ELSE. Everything existed at the same time as everything else. How long was it like that for? Minutes. Hours. And then, like figures
emerging from a fog, things resolved and separated. There was a taste of metal in my mouth and a smell of metal stinging my
nostrils but the smell became a mustiness that made me think of garden sheds, tunnels, basements, cellars, damp dirty forgotten
places.


I listened. Just the sound of my own breathing, unnaturally loud. I held my breath. No sound. Just the beating of my heart.
Was that a noise or just the blood pumping inside my body, pushing against my ears?


I was uncomfortable. There was an ache down my back, my pelvis, my legs. I turned over. No. I didn’t turn over. I didn’t move.
I couldn’t move. I pulled up my arms as if to fend something off. No. The arms didn’t move. I couldn’t turn. Was I paralyzed?
I couldn’t feel my legs. My toes. I concentrated everything on my toes. Left big toe rubbing against the toe beside. Right
big toe rubbing against the toe beside. No problem. I could do it. Inside a sock. No shoe. I wasn’t wearing shoes.


My fingers. I drummed them. The tips touched something rough. Cement or brick. Was this a hospital? Injured. An accident.
Lying somewhere, waiting to be found. A railway accident.


The wreckage of a train. Machinery on top of me. Wreckage. In a tunnel. Help coming. Heat-seeking equipment. I tried to remember
the train. Couldn’t remember. Or a plane. Or a car. Car more likely. Driving late at night, headlights on the windscreen,
falling asleep. I knew the feeling, pinching myself to stay awake, slapping my cheeks, shouting, opening the window so the
cold air hit my eyeballs. Maybe this time I failed. Veered off the road, down an embankment, rolled over, the car lost in
undergrowth. When would I be reported missing? How do you look for a lost car?


I mustn’t wait to be rescued. I might die of dehydration or blood loss just yards from people driving to work. I would have
to move. If only I could see the way. No moon. No stars. It might only be twenty yards to safety. Up an embankment. If I could
feel my toes, then I could move. Turn over first. Ignore the pain. I turned but this time I felt something hold me back. I
flexed my legs and arms, tightened and loosened the muscles. There were restraints. Over my forearms and just above my elbows.
My ankles and thighs. My chest. I could lift my head, as if in the feeble beginning of an attempt at a sit-up. Something else.
Not just dark. It was dark but not just that. My head was covered.


Think clearly. There must be a reason for this. Think. People in prison were restrained. Not relevant. What else? Patients
in hospitals can have restraints placed on them in order to prevent them harming themselves. Lying on a stretcher. Restrained
on a stretcher prior to being wheeled in for an operation. I’ve been in an accident. Say, a car accident, which is most likely.
Statistically. Severe but not life-threatening. Any sudden movement could cause, and the phrase came to me out of nowhere,
severe internal bleeding. The patient could fall off the stretcher. It’s just a matter of waiting for the nurse or the anesthetist. Perhaps I had
been given the anesthetic already. Or a pre-anesthetic. Hence the vacancies in my brain. Strange quiet, but you do hear of
people in hospitals lying around on stretchers for hours waiting for a free operating room.


Problems with the theory. I didn’t seem to be lying on a stretcher. The smell was of dankness, mildew, things that were old
and decaying. All I could feel with my fingers was concrete or stone. My body was lying on something hard. I tried to think
of other possibilities. After famous disasters bodies were stored in improvised morgues. School gymnasiums. Church halls.
I could have been in a disaster. The injured could have been placed wherever there was room. Restrained to prevent them injuring
themselves. Would they be hooded as well? Surgeons were hooded. But not their eyes. Perhaps to prevent infection.


I raised my head again. With my chin I felt a shirt. I was wearing clothes. Yes. I could feel them on my skin. A shirt, trousers,
socks. No shoes.


There were other things at the edge, clamoring to be admitted to my brain. Bad things. Restrained. In the dark. Hooded. Ridiculous.
Could it be a joke? I remembered stories of students. They get you paralytically drunk, put you on a train at Aberdeen. You
wake up in London dressed only in your underwear with a fifty-pence piece in your hand. Everyone will jump out in a minute,
pull off the blindfold, and shout “April fool.” We’ll all laugh. But was it April? I remembered cold. Had summer been? Was
summer still to come? But of course a summer had always been and there was always another summer to come.


ALL THE ALLEYS WERE BLIND. I had gone up them all and found nothing. Something had happened. I knew that. One possibility was that it was something
funny. It didn’t feel funny. Another possibility, possibility number two, was that something had happened and it was in the
process of being officially dealt with. The hood—or bandage, yes, very possibly a bandage. That was a thought. I could have
received a head wound, eye or ear damage, and my entire head was bandaged and hooded for my own protection. They would be
removed. There would be some stinging. A cheery face of a nurse. A doctor frowning at me. Don’t worry, nothing to worry about.
That’s what they’d say. Call me dear.


There were other possibilities. Bad ones. I thought of the stone under my fingers. The damp air, like a cave. Until now, there
had been only the pain and also the mess of my thoughts, but now there was something else. Fear in my chest like sludge. I
made a sound. A low groan. I was able to speak. I didn’t know who to call or what to say. I shouted more loudly. I thought
the echoing or harshness of the sound might tell me something about where I was but it was muffled by my hood. I shouted again
so that my throat hurt.


Now there was a movement nearby. Smells. Sweat and scent. A sound of breathing, somebody scrambling. Now my mouth was full
of cloth, I couldn’t breathe. Only through my nose. Something tied hard around my face. Breath on me, hot on my cheek, and
then, out of the darkness, a voice, little more than a whisper, hoarse, strained, thick so I could barely make it out.


“No,” it said. “Make another sound and I’ll block your nose as well.”

I WAS GAGGING on the cloth. It filled my mouth, bulged in my cheeks, rubbed against my gums. The taste of grease and rancid cabbage filled
my throat. A spasm jerked my body, nausea rising through me like damp. I mustn’t be sick. I tried to take a breath, tried
to gasp through the cloth but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was all stopped up. I tugged with my arms and my ankles against the
restraints and tried to take a breath and it was as if my whole body was twitching and shuddering on the rough stone floor
and no air inside me, just violent space and red behind my bulging eyes and a heart that was jolting up through my throat
and a strange dry sound coming from me, like a cough that wouldn’t form. I was a dying fish. A fish thrashing on the hard
floor. I was hooked and tied down, but inside me I was coming loose, all my innards tearing apart. Is this what it’s like?
To die? To be buried alive?


I had to breathe. How do you breathe? Through your nose. He’d said so. The voice had said he’d block my nose next. Breathe
through my nose. Breathe now. I couldn’t take enough air in that way. I couldn’t stop myself trying to gasp, trying to fill
myself up with air. My tongue was too big to fit in the tiny space left in my mouth. It kept pushing against the cloth. I
felt my body buck again. Breathe slowly. Calmly. In and out, in and out. Breathe like that until there’s nothing except the
sense of it. This is how to keep alive. Breathe. Thick, musty air in my nostrils, oily rottenness running down my throat.
I tried not to swallow but then I had to and again biliousness flowed through me, filled my mouth. I couldn’t bear it. I could
bear it. I could, I could, I could.


Breathe in and out, Abbie. Abbie. I am Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. In and out. Don’t think. Breathe. You are alive.

THE PAIN INSIDE MY SKULL rolled back. I lifted my head a bit and the pain surged towards my eyes. I blinked my eyes and it was the same deep darkness
when they were open and when they were closed. My eyelashes scraped against the hood. I was cold. I could feel that now. My
feet were chilly inside the socks. Were they my socks? They felt too big and rough—unfamiliar. My left calf ached. I tried
to flex my leg muscles to get rid of the cramped feeling. There was an itch on my cheek, under the hood. I lay there for a
few seconds, concentrating only on the itch, then I turned my head and tried to rub the itch against a hunched shoulder. No
good. So I squirmed until I could scrape my face along the floor.


And I was damp. Between my legs and under my thighs, stinging my skin beneath my trousers. Were they my trousers? I was lying
in my own piss, in the dark, in a hood, tied down, gagged. Breathe in and out, I told myself. Breathe in and out all the time.
Try to let thoughts out slowly, bit by bit, so you don’t drown in them. I felt the pressure of the fears dammed up inside
me, and my body was a fragile, cracking shell full of pounding waters. I made myself think only of breathing, in and out of
my nostrils. In and out.


Someone—a man, the man who had pushed this cloth into my mouth—had put me in this place. He had taken me, strapped me down.
I was his prisoner. Why? I couldn’t think about that yet. I listened for a sound, any sound except the sound of my breath
and the sound of my heart and, when I moved, the rasp of my hands or feet against the rough floor. Perhaps he was here with
me, in the room, crouching somewhere. But there was no other sound. For the moment I was alone. I lay there. I listened to
my heart. Silence pressed down on me.


AN IMAGE FLITTED through my head. A yellow butterfly on a leaf, wings quivering. It was like a sudden ray of light. Was it something I was
remembering, a moment rescued out of the past and stored away till now? Or was it just my brain throwing up a picture, some
kind of reflex, a short circuit?


A MAN HAD TIED ME in a dark place. He must have snatched me and taken me here. But I had no memory of that happening. I scrabbled in my brain,
but it was blank—an empty room, an abandoned house, no echoes. Nothing. I could remember nothing. A sob rose in my throat.
I mustn’t cry. I must think, but carefully now, hold back the fear. I must not go deep down. I must stay on the surface. Just
think of what I know. Facts. Slowly I will make up a picture and then I’ll be able to look at it.


My name is Abigail—Abbie. I am twenty-five years old, and I live with my boyfriend, Terry, Terence Wilmott, in a poky flat
on Westcott Road. That’s it—Terry. Terry will be worried. He will phone the police. He’ll tell them I have gone missing. They’ll
drive here with flashing lights and wailing sirens and hammer down the door and light and air will come flooding in. No, just
facts. I work at Jay and Joiner, designing office interiors.


I have a desk, with a white and blue laptop computer, a small grey phone, a pile of paper, an oval ashtray full of paperclips
and elastic bands.


When was I last there? It seemed impossibly far off, like a dream that disappears when you try to hold on to it; like someone
else’s life. I couldn’t remember. How long had I lain here? An hour, or a day, or a week? It was January, I knew that—at least,
I thought I knew that. Outside, it was cold and the days were short. Maybe it had snowed. No, I mustn’t think of things like
snow, sunlight on white. Stick only to what I knew: January, but I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Or perhaps it was
February now. I tried to think of the last day I clearly remembered, but it was like looking into a thick fog, with indistinct
shapes looming.


Start with New Year’s Eve, dancing with friends and everyone kissing each other on the stroke of midnight. Kissing people
on the lips, people I knew well and people I’d met a few times and strangers who came up to me with arms open and an expectant
smile because kissing is what you do on New Year’s Eve. Don’t think of all that though. After New Year’s Eve, then, yes, there
were days that stirred in my mind. The office, phones ringing, expense forms in my in-tray. Cups of cooling bitter coffee.
But maybe that was before, not after. Or before and after, day after day. Everything was blurred and without meaning.


I tried to shift. My toes felt stiff with cold and my neck ached and my head banged. The taste in my mouth was foul. Why was
I here and what was going to happen to me? I was laid out on my back like a sacrifice, arms and legs pinned clown. Dread ran
through me. He could starve me. He could rape me. He could torture me. He could kill me. Maybe he had already raped me. I
pressed myself against the floor and whimpered deep down in my throat. Two tears escaped from my eyes and I felt them tickle
and sting as they ran down towards my ears.


Don’t cry, Abbie. You mustn’t cry.

* * *

THINK OF THE BUTTERFLY, which means nothing but which is beautiful. I pictured the yellow butterfly on its green leaf. I let it fill my mind, so
light on the leaf it could be blown away like a feather. I heard footsteps. They were soft, as if the man was barefooted.
They padded closer and stopped. There was a sound of someone breathing heavily, almost panting, as if he was climbing or scrambling
towards me. I lay rigid in the silence. He was standing over me. There was a click, and even from beneath the hood I could
tell he had switched on a torch. I could hardly see anything, but I could at least see through the grain of the fabric that
it was no longer entirely dark. He must be standing over me and shining a torch down on my body.


“You’re wet,” he murmured, or maybe it sounded like a murmur through my hood. “Silly girl.”

I sensed him leaning towards me. I heard him breathing and I heard my own breathing getting louder and faster. He pulled the
hood up slightly and, quite gently, pulled out the cloth. I felt a fingertip on my lower lip. For a few seconds, all I could
do was pant with the relief of it, pulling the air into my lungs. I heard myself say, “Thank you.” My voice sounded light
and feeble. “Water.”


He undid the restraints on my arms and my chest, so that only my legs were tied at the ankles. He slid an arm under my neck
and lifted me into a sitting position. A new kind of pain pulsed inside my skull. I didn’t dare make any movements by myself.
I sat passively, and let him put my arms behind my back and tie the wrists together, roughly so that the rope cut into my
flesh. Was it rope? It felt harder than that, like a clothesline or wire.


“Open your mouth,” he said in his muffled whisper. I did so. He slid a straw up the hood, and between my lips. “Drink.”

The water was tepid and left a stale taste in my mouth.

He put a hand on the back of my neck, and started to rub at it. I sat rigid. I mustn’t cry out. I mustn’t make a sound. I
mustn’t be sick. His fingers pressed into my skin.


“Where do you hurt?” he said.

“Nowhere.” My voice was a whisper.

“Nowhere? You wouldn’t lie to me?”

Anger filled my head like a glorious roaring wind and it was stronger even than the fear. “You piece of shit,” I shouted in
a mad, high-pitched voice. “Let me go, let me go and then I’m going to kill you, you’ll see—”


The cloth was rammed back in my mouth.

“You’re going to kill me. Good. I like that.”

FOR A LONG TIME I concentrated on nothing but breathing. I had heard of people feeling claustrophobic in their own bodies, trapped as if
in prison. They became tormented by the idea that they would never be able to escape. My life was reduced to the tiny passages
of air in my nostrils. If they became blocked, I would die. That happened. People were tied up, gagged, with no intention
to kill them. Just a small error in the binding—the gag tied too close to the nose—and they would choke and die.


I made myself breathe in one-two-three, out one-two-three. In, out. I’d seen a film once, some kind of war film, in which
a super-tough soldier hid from the enemy in a river breathing just through a single straw. I was like that and the thought
made my chest hurt and made me breathe in spasms. I had to calm myself. Instead of thinking of the soldier and his straw and
what would have happened if the straw had become blocked, I tried to think of the water in the river, cool and calm and slow-moving
and beautiful, the sun glistening on it in the morning.


In my mind, the water grew slower and slower until it was quite still. I imagined it starting to freeze, solid like glass
so that you could see the fish swimming silently underneath. I couldn’t stop myself. I saw myself falling through the ice,
trapped underneath. I had read or heard or been told that if you fall through ice and can’t find the hole, there is a thin
layer of air beneath the ice and the water and you can lie under the ice and breathe the air. And what then? It might be better
just to have drowned. I had always been terrified of drowning above all things but I had read or heard or been told that drowning
was in fact a pleasant way to die. I could believe it. What was unpleasant and terrifying was trying to avoid drowning. Fear
is trying to avoid death. Giving yourself up to death is like falling asleep.


One-two-three, one-two-three, I was becoming calmer. Some people, probably about two percent of the population at least, would
have already died of panic or asphyxiation if they’d had done to them what I was having done to me. So I was already doing
better than someone. I was alive. I was breathing.


I WAS LYING DOWN now, with my ankles tied and my wrists tied, my mouth gagged, and a hood over my head. I wasn’t tied to anything anymore. I struggled into a squatting position, then very slowly stood up. Tried to stand up. My head bumped against
a roof. It must be just under five feet high. I sat down again, panting with the effort.


At least I could move my body. Wriggle and hump along, like a snake in the dust. But I hardly dared. I had the sense that
I was somewhere up high. When he came into the room, he was underneath me. The footsteps and his voice came from down below.
He climbed to get at me.


I stretched my feet in one direction and felt only the floor. I swiveled painfully around, my tee-shirt riding up and bare
skin on my back scraping painfully along the roughness beneath me. I stretched my feet. Floor. I humped forward. Slowly. Feet
feeling. Then not feeling—not feeling the hardness underneath. Stretched over a space, a blank. Nothing underneath. I lay
down and moved forward again, bit by bit. Legs hanging over, bent at the knee. If I sat up now, I’d be sitting over a fall,
a cliff. My breath juddered in my chest with panic. I started shifting backwards. My back hurt. My head crashed and banged.
I kept wriggling and scraping backwards until I was pressed up against a wall.


I sat up. I pressed my bound hands against the wall. Damp coarse brick against my fingertips.

I shuffled upright along the wall in one direction, until I met the corner. Then in the other direction, my muscles were burning
with the effort. It must be about ten feet wide. Ten feet wide and four feet deep.


IT WAS HARD TO THINK CLEARLY because the pain in my head kept getting in the way. Was it a bang? A scrape? Something in my brain?


I was shivering with cold. I had to keep thinking, keep my mind busy, keep it off things. I had been kidnapped in some way.
I was being held against my will. Why did kidnaps happen? To take hostages, for money, or for a political reason. My total
wealth, once credit card and storecard debts were deducted, amounted to about two thousand pounds, half of it bound up in
my rusty old car. As for politics, I was a working environment consultant not an ambassador. But then I didn’t remember anything.
I could be in South America now, or Lebanon. Except that the voice was clearly English, southern English as far as I could
tell from the soft, thick whisper.


So what other reasons were there? I had argued myself towards an area where everything looked really really bad. I felt tears
bubbling up in my eyes. Calm down. Calm down. I mustn’t get all snotty, blocked up.


He hadn’t killed me. That was a good sign. Except it wasn’t necessarily all that good a sign—in the long run it could be a
bad sign in a way that made me feel sick even to think about. But it was all I had. I flexed my muscles very gently. I couldn’t
move. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I’d been captured, or when, or how. Or for what reason. I couldn’t see
anything. I didn’t even know anything about the room I was lying in. It felt damp. Maybe it was underground or in a shed.
I didn’t know anything about the man. Or men. Or people. He was probably close by. I didn’t know if I knew him. I didn’t know
what he looked like.


That could be useful. If I could identify him, he might… Well, that might be worse. Professional kidnappers wore hoods so
that the hostage never saw them. Putting a hood over my head might be the same thing, the other way around. And he was doing
something to his voice, muffling it up somehow, so that he didn’t sound like a human at all. It could even be that he was
planning to hold me for just a little while and let me go. He could dump me in some other part of London and it would be impossible
for me ever to find him again. I would know nothing—nothing at all. That was the first bit of remotely good news.


I had no idea how long I had been here but at the very most it couldn’t be more than three days, maybe even two. I felt dreadful
but I didn’t feel especially weak. I felt hungry but not ill with hunger. Maybe two days. Terry would have reported me missing.
I wouldn’t have turned up at work. They would phone Terry, he would be baffled. He would have tried my mobile phone. Where
was that? The police could have been called within hours. By now there would be a huge hunt. Lines of people scouring waste
land. All leave canceled. Sniffer dogs. Helicopters. Another promising thought. You can’t just grab an adult off the street
and hide them somewhere without creating some sort of suspicion. They would be out there, knocking at doors, marching into
houses, shining torches into dark places. Any time now, I’d hear them, see them. All I had to do was stay alive as long as…
Just stay alive. Stay alive.


I had shouted at him before. I’d said I’d kill him. That was the only thing I could remember having said to him, except I’d
said “thank you” when he gave me water. I hated the fact I’d said “thank you.” But when I’d shouted, I’d made him angry. What
were his words? “You kill me? That’s a good one.” Something like that. That’s not promising. “You kill me?” That might seem good to him because in fact he’s going to kill me.


I tried to seize some other kind of comfort. It could just seem funny to him because I was so much in his power that the idea
of me getting back at him could be completely ludicrous. I was taking a risk being rude to him. I’d made him angry. He could
have tortured me or hit me or anything. But he hadn’t done anything. That might be useful to know. He had kidnapped me, he
had me tied down and I’d threatened him. It could be that if I stand up to him he feels weakened and unable to do anything
to me. If I don’t give in to him, that may be the best way of playing him along. He may have kidnapped a woman because he’s
frightened of women and this is the only way to control at least one woman. He might expect me just to be pathetically begging
for my life and that would give him the control he wants. But if I don’t yield, then it’s not going according to his plan.


Or it may be the opposite. It may have shown nothing more than that he’s in control. It doesn’t matter to him what I say.
He just finds it funny and is proceeding with his plan, whatever that is. Surely the point is to be as much of a flesh-and-blood
person for him so that he finds it harder to do anything to me. But if that is threatening to him, then it may make him angrier.
I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t escape. All I could do was to slow him down.


What was the best way of doing that? Making him angry? Happy? Scared? I lay on the floor and stared into the stifling darkness
of my hood.


THERE WAS A CHANGE of texture in the blackness around me. There was a sound and a smell. Once again there was that hoarse croaking whisper.


“I’m going to take your gag out. If you shout I’ll bleed you like an animal. If you’ve heard and understood what I’ve said,
nod your head.”


I nodded frantically. The hands—large, warm hands—fiddled behind my neck. The knot was untied, the cloth pulled roughly from
my mouth. As soon as I was free I coughed and coughed. A hand held my head down and I felt the straw pushed into my mouth.
I sucked the water until a bubbling sound told me it was gone.


“There,” he said. “There’s a bucket here. Do you want to use it?”

“What do you mean?” Get him talking.

“You know. Toilet.”

He was embarrassed. Was that a good sign?

“I want to go to a proper one.”

“It’s the bucket or you can lie in your own piss, sweetheart.”

“All rig. . .