Page 81 of Besieger
One of the attackers barked something, the words slurring out under spittle and foam, and he swiped a hand across Stefan’s face, nearly toppling him over.
“Leave him! You are here for me, mutt!” The girl snarled, desperate to put herself between Stefan and her assailants. It got her to stand dangerously close to the car, her body against the very door they had tried to shove her through.
“Are you trying to get kidnapped?!” Stefan wobbled on his feet and grabbed hold of her wrist. Her skin was burning hot; the heat of it almost made him flinch.
“Shut up and get out of here! I had this handled—”
Her eyes glistened with a shine that frightened Stefan. It mirrored the glow in the men’s eyes. The light caught their pupils and made them look too watery, too bright, too shiny.
Are they junkies?he thought and decided he was not allowing this girl to fulfil her drug-fuelled abduction fantasies. She could curse and hit him all she liked later, once they were far away and safe from these lunatics.
Having seen enough of the kidnapping fiasco, the car’s driver came out and swung at Stefan, his arm cutting through the air in a blurred arc. A heavy object smashed into the back of Stefan’s head, and his knees threatened to buckle. The girl was now cursing both him and the men. His grip on her arm loosened and a fist rammed into his stomach, driving the air from his lungs. Another blunt blow landed between his shoulder blades, and his legs finally gave way beneath him.
The last thing he remembered was the girl’s face twisting into a feral grimace, her mouth shaped in a snarl, a row of sharp teeth spitting insults at him, as hands pressed to her face and shoulders. The car doors slammed on Stefan’s consciousness.
When Stefan woke up in the basement, he at first thought he had somehow made it for the band practice and had fallen asleep on the mouldy couch. It smelled like he was underground, the cellar so huge and covered in bare stone, some slabs prised loose to reveal the cold, damp earth beneath, flattened by many feet. It reminded him of the place where the Bulgarian revolutionaries had once hidden from the Turkish authorities during the Ottoman Yoke. Stefan had never wondered how the great revolutionary Vasil Levski[27] felt while he lay low in a stranger’s cellar, waiting to see if someone in the house would betray him. Then again, the Apostle of Freedom was not in his underwear only, chained to a wall with a swollen ankle.
Swollen ankles, Stefan corrected himself. The moment he tried to move his legs and stand up, pain shot up his calves and he hissed, then cursed.
“Your legs might be broken,” a level-headed voice said in the dark. “They break your legs so that you can not escape.”
“Um… hello?”
Across from him a pile of rags shook like a dog shaking rain off its fur, and Stefan recognised the form as a man. Dirt and sweat had drenched his hair turning it black; it lay matted across the man’s forehead and neck. His face had a sickly sheen to it, as if he were running a fever, the sunken eyes weighted by a calmness that was almost unnerving. The man appeared to be in his early thirties, a body chained to the wall by a cuff on the wrist,wearing a mischievous assortment of rags and garments. His feet were bare, the soles as dark as the hair on his head.
Stefan focused on the man’s eyes. He did not like how calm, and how intelligent, they were. He could not tell whether the stranger’s composure came from optimism or insanity. If Stefan could not get up and fight, if he could not run, both were equally dangerous in his current state.
“Have they hurt you?” the man asked, tilting his head to the side so he could see better. “Other than your legs?”
Stefan wriggled his arms making the chains dangle and jingle.
“No,” he remembered being hit a couple of times. The back of his head hurt and if he moved too suddenly the room whooshed sideways, making him slightly nauseous.
They had chained him to the concrete wall; the chains were too short and they pulled his whole body upwards, forcing him to sit and arch his back at an odd angle. It was as if they had thrown him down here, fastened him with the first set of manacles they found, and left him there. For later. Or never.
“Good. Do not let anything bite or scratch you.”
Stefan stopped trying to adjust the angle at which his arms hung and looked up, frowning.
“What do you mean?” Stefan’s mind shook off reason’s frail hold and spiralled towards the gruesome horror films he used to watch with his friends. “They are not going to fill the room with rats, are they?”
The man laughed, the sound raw and haggard, before it turned into a fit of coughing.
“Rats!” He barked, struggling for breath. “We are the rats, boy.”
The ragged man’s name was Vasili, a local from Vratsa, who did not know how long he had been kept here. One could easily lose all sense of time in the dark, between the howling and the screaming. Vasili did not know how many men were out there; a dozen, maybe five, maybe more. Nor had he seen or heard of any women in the cellar; there was no trace of the girl Stefan had tried to save. The men always came down to Vasili; they never brought him up. Their leader made occasional appearances, but Vasili preferred the stinking solitude to facing that man.
They kept Stefan in the basement for days. The silence and lack of attention frightened him as if they might have simply forgotten about him, a fate worse than outright killing him. To be left to die here, alone, every memory of him obliterated, full of mould and hunger, buried under his own feces and despair. The uncertainty gnawed at him, like rot on a fruit, his mind ripened with paranoia. He grew mistrustful of his own thoughts and senses.
The one time they had a visitor it was to check up on Vasili; Stefan was an afterthought. The moment the figure stepped across the threshold Stefan understood why Vasili preferred the uncertainty of the rare visitations. It was obvious this man was the leader.
He was a formidable creature, tall and broad-shouldered, and like the rest, his eyes gave him away. The irises were yellow, causing the whites of his eyes to glow in a sickly tint, and they constantly darted back and forth, drawn to every minor sound. The fingers of his hands ended in sharp thick nails—ugly, filthy things. He was muscular with tightly-bound, scarred tissue running up his wrists and forearms as if something had clamped itself around him and scratched and torn, while he refused to let go. The pattern repeated time and time again until his arms bore the scars like brown and grey stripes. He moved with the grace of a caged animal, a battle-worn alley cat.
“Where is my new pup? Still cowering in its filth?” The leader said, his voice a rumbling rasp. He sounded as if he was not usedto speaking, letting the sounds fall unevenly between his teeth, unnervingly guttural.
He walked over to Vasili and seized the prisoner by the scruff of the neck, hauling him upward as high as the chains allowed. The leader examined Vasili, searching for something in his sweat-drenched form, the circles under his eyes, the way his chest rose with each breath.
“You are not eating!” The leader kicked the soiled can of slop at their feet, spilling its contents. “You will need your strength for the transition.”
