LITMIR.BIZ

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Simone passes it over to her father. He smiles, takes the torch, switches it on, and sets off cautiously down the steps.

      “Hello?” Kennet calls gruffly. “Josef? I need to speak to you.”

      Not a sound comes from the cellar. Not a clatter, not a breath.

      Simone clutches the crowbar and waits.

      The beam of the torch illuminates little more than the walls and the ceiling of the staircase. The dense darkness below is untouched. Kennet continues down the stairs, the beam picking out individual objects: a white plastic bag, the reflector strip on an old buggy, the glass of a framed movie poster.

      “I think I can help you,” calls Kennet, more quietly this time.

      He reaches the bottom, sweeping the torch around to make sure no one is rushing out of a hiding place. The slanting beam moves across the floor and walls, jumping over objects close by and casting sloping, swinging shadows. Kennet begins again, searching the room calmly and systematically with the shaft of light.

      Simone sets off down the steps, the metal construction clanging dully beneath her feet.

      “There’s no one here,” says Kennet matter-of-factly.

      “So what did we hear, then? It was definitely something,” she says.

      Daylight seeps in through a dirty window just below the ceiling. Their eyes are growing accustomed to the dim light. The cellar is full of bicycles of various sizes, a buggy, sledges, skis, and a bread machine, Christmas decorations, rolls of wallpaper, and a stepladder spattered with white paint. On a box someone has written in a thick black felt-tip pen, Josef’s comics.

      A tapping noise comes from the ceiling, and Simone looks over at the stairs and then at her father. He doesn’t seem to hear the sound. He walks slowly toward a door at the far end of the room. Simone bumps into a rocking horse. Kennet opens the door and glances into a utility room containing a battered washing machine and dryer and an old-fashioned wringer. Next to a geothermal pump, a grubby curtain hangs in front of a large cupboard.

      “Nobody here,” he says, turning to Simone.

      She looks at him, seeing the grubby curtain behind him at the same time. It is completely motionless yet at the same time somehow alive.

      “Simone?”

      There is a damp mark on the fabric, a small oval, as if made by a mouth.

      “Open up the plans,” says Kennet.

      It seems to Simone that the damp oval suddenly caves inwards. “Dad,” she whispers.

      “What?” he replies, leaning against the door post as he puts his pistol back in his shoulder holster and scratches his head.

      There is a sudden creaking noise. She wheels and sees that the rocking horse is still moving.

      “What is it, Sixan?”

      Kennet takes the plans from her and lays them on a rolled-up mattress; he shines the torch on the drawing and turns it around. He looks up, glances back at the plans, and goes over to a brick wall where an old dismantled bunk bed stands beside a wardrobe containing bright yellow life jackets. A chisel, various saws, and clamps hang from hooks on a precisely marked tool board. The space next to the hammer is empty; there’s an outline for a big axe, but the axe itself is gone.

      Kennet measures the wall and the ceiling with his eyes, leans over, and taps on the wall behind the bed.

      “What is it?” asks Simone.

      “This wall must be at least ten years old.”

      “Is there anything behind it?”

      “Yes, quite a big space,” he replies.

      “How do you get in?”

      Kennet shines the light on the wall again, then on the floor next to the dismantled bed. Shadows slide around the cellar.

      “Shine it there again,” says Simone.

      When Kennet aims the beam at the floor next to the wardrobe, she can see that something scraping countless times along the floor has worn an arc into the concrete.

      “Behind the wardrobe,” she says.

      “Hold the torch,” says Kennet, drawing his pistol again.

      Suddenly, from behind the wardrobe, they clearly hear the sound of someone moving slowly and carefully. Simone’s pulse increases to a violent throbbing. There’s someone there, she thinks. Oh my God! She wants to call out Benjamin! but doesn’t dare.

      Kennet gestures to her to move back. She is just about to speak when a loud bang explodes on the floor above. Wood is shattering, splintering. Simone drops the torch and they are plunged back into darkness. Rapid steps thunder across the floor, there is a clattering across the ceiling, and dazzling beams of light sweep down the iron staircase and flood the cellar like high waves.

      “Get down on the floor,” a man yells hysterically. “Down on the floor!”

      Simone is frozen to the spot.

      “Lie down,” rasps Kennet.

      “Shut your mouth!” someone yells.

      “Down, down!”

      Simone doesn’t realise the men are talking to her until she feels a powerful blow in the stomach that forces her to her knees.

      “Down on the floor, I said!”

      She tries to get air, coughing and gasping for breath. The intense beams of light continue to sweep through the cellar. Black figures pull at her, drag her up the narrow staircase. Her hands are locked behind her back. Struggling to walk, she slips and hits her cheek on the sharp metal handrail.

      She tries to turn her head but someone is holding her firmly, breathing fast and pushing her roughly against the wall next to the cellar door.

       53

       sunday, december 13 (feast of st lucia): morning

      Simone blinks blindly in the daylight, but it’s difficult to focus. A number of figures seem to be staring at her. Fragments of a conversation further away reach her, and she recognises her father’s terse, stringent tone. It’s his voice that makes her think of the smell of coffee when she was getting ready for school, with the morning news on the radio.

      Only now does she realise that it is the police who have stormed the house. A neighbour must have seen the light from Kennet’s flashlight and called them.

      A cop, about twenty-five, yet with lines and blue circles beneath his eyes, is looking at her with a strained expression. His head is shaved, revealing a bumpy skull. He rubs the back of his neck with his hand.

      “Name?” he demands coldly.

      “Simone Bark,” she says, her voice still unsteady. “I’m here with my father—”

      “I want your name, not your life story,” the man says rudely.

      “Take it easy, Ragnar,” says one of his colleagues.

      “You’re a fucking parasite,” he goes on, turning to Simone. “But that’s just my opinion of people who get off looking at blood.”

      He snorts and turns away. Her father is speaking in an even tone, and he sounds very tired. She sees one of the officers walking away with his wallet.

      “Excuse me,” says Simone to a female officer. “We heard someone down in the—”

      “Shut up,” says the woman.

      “My son is—”

      “Shut up, I said. Tape her mouth. I want her mouth taped.”

      The officer with the shaved head takes out

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