For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

gradually back. Her eyes squinted at the sun, which in this place was shaped like a long, thin sausage. She struggled to make out a shape rolling past in the sky.

It was a severed rope.

The further she was dragged into the room, the deeper the stink dove down her throat. She felt its fury in her lungs. She coughed and choked.

Two gloved hands heaved her off the ground, which was a shame; it hadn’t been as comfy as her bed, but with such a sore head she was probably better down there. She was dumped in a chair. There was a rustling as the same hands to have dragged her pulled something from a Millbury Hardware bag.

A thin, black snake wrapped around her wrist, fastening it to the arm of the chair. Before long, the snake’s friends joined him, wrapping themselves around her other wrist and ankles.

Her vision finally sharpened, her thoughts cleared.

She looked at the snakes: cable ties.

Renata, glasses and cane discarded, watched fear fall over Sandie as the reality of her situation hit home. The girl writhed against the ties, her eyes darting around the cellar like a trapped animal. Her feeble excuse for clothing betrayed every detail of her dread: the skin of her arms contracted into goose pimples, she flexed every muscle defensively, her neat cleavage heaved in panicked respiration. Renata looked the girl over. She was an illustration of beauty, more a representation than a living thing; from the flawlessly manicured nails to the assiduously applied make-up, she was an imitation. The contours of her body were toned to perfection, a figure into which hours of sculpting had been poured. The teenager’s every inch was engineered with meticulous care. She was a dictionary definition, nothing more, but the wannabe intellectual had always vied to be let out, to be taken seriously. No amount of books under her arm could make this wish a reality. Renata removed Sandie’s glasses and peered through them. As she suspected, just plain glass. They dropped to the floor.

Sandie’s choking turned to rasps as the lubricant of her throat dried. She wheezed and spluttered, mascara running down her cheeks. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what is this? Renata, you—’

The woman raised a hand, silencing the girl. She pulled a tub of Vicks from her pocket and held Sandie’s head in place as she applied the gel under her nose. The menthol began to numb her nasal passages. The choking eased.

‘I wasn’t born this way,’ Renata said, dabbing the Vicks under her own nose. ‘I was made.’ Sandie watched in horror as she removed the leather gloves from her hands, still ruined from the physical trauma of her brother’s exhumation, and wiped leaking scabs onto her pleated skirt. She knelt upon the hexagonal slab on which Sandie’s chair was positioned and whispered into the girl’s weeping eyes. ‘I can’t feel what you feel. I can’t feel what any of you feel. Your love, your pain – none of it. I understand that now.’ She placed a hand on Sandie’s tear-stained cheek. ‘But what you feel, my dear, is still of use to me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Sandie said, watching her rise and walk to the door. ‘Renata, please. Whatever this is, we can—’

The hand raised again, then moved to the light switch. The fluorescent bulbs flickered off.

‘Take some time to settle in,’ Renata said through the darkness. She stepped out of the cellar.

The door slammed.

The blackness embracing Sandie robbed her of all spatial awareness. The length and height of the cellar, the distance between the roughly brick walls, the position of the door through which the woman had left: it all disappeared. She floated in space. Disorientation dominated her every sense.

Panic remained.

A solid rectangle of light formed at the opposite end of the cellar, throwing the girl’s world back into perspective. The door opened with a struggling creak. Her sense of time had warped so perversely that it may have been days she’d been sat here. Hunger gnawed at her insides and a desperate thirst, at odds with the violent need to urinate, moaned within. With senses so shaken, as well as the deprivation of her body’s natural requirements, the rectangle took on an almost angelic form. It was like a vision, a heavenly apparition from which possibility poured:

The cops! Daddy!

The room was soaked in a terrible glare as light exploded from the ceiling. Wrists still bound to the chair, all the girl could do was squeeze her eyes shut, but it was no use. The brightness corrupted every molecule in the cellar, passing through her clenched eyelids effortlessly. She recoiled at the sudden barrage of light, gripping the arms of the chair.

Slowly the blaze of light became bearable. She unpeeled an eyelid and saw a figure in the doorway. Not the cops, nor Daddy, but Renata, her face straightened into the same expression of sombre duty as it had been the hours, days, months, or years since she’d left her. The woman descended with a tray, kicking some of the piled, damp books on the floor aside as she approached Sandie.

‘Please,’ the girl croaked. The words were sandpaper in her throat. ‘I need water, food…the bathroom. Renata…I’m begging you.’

The tray came into focus. Half a baguette sat on the plate, ham and salad spilling out its sides. From the sight alone she could taste the pepper on the tomatoes and the dressing glistening on the lettuce. An ice cube bobbed in the glass of water by its side. Renata knelt by Sandie and carefully held the baguette to the girl’s mouth. Scepticism was swept away by bodily need; she snapped like a turtle, clamping her jaws around the crusty bread. Renata regarded her deeply. She tipped the glass delicately against the youth’s lips. The water drained in seconds.

‘I need to pee,’ said Sandie, sitting back with a sigh. Renata gazed into