The Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

quickly though, it might make you feel sick.’
    Louise stopped drinking and began to dab some of the water around her lips and face, pausing as she remembered the woman locked in the other cage. Was she strong enough to speak to him yet? She decided she needed to try, do something to establish a relationship. She’d seen a programme about a kidnapped woman who’d built a bond with her captor that ultimately saved her life when he could no longer bring himself to kill her as he’d planned. ‘What about her?’ she managed to ask, barely recognizing her own weak, scratchy voice.
    ‘Who?’ he asked, his smile twitching now, blinking on and off.
    Louise looked towards the other animal cage then back to him. ‘Her. Karen. She said her name was Karen.’
    He stared coldly into Louise’s face, his smile nothing more than a memory now. ‘You mustn’t talk to her. She’s a liar and a whore. She made me think she was you, but she isn’t.’
    Louise watched his face contorting with hatred, his lips pulled back over his teeth like a hyena laughing, the veins in his neck swollen and blue with anger. Sensing that she had put Karen in real and immediate danger, she hurried to undo her mistake. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘She hasn’t said anything, I promise. I made her tell me her name. It wasn’t her fault. Please, there’s too much water here for me. You can give her the rest of this. Please.’
    Her desperate attempts to calm his anger towards the woman cowering and whimpering in her cage on the other side of the room seemed to go unheard. He was stalking across the floor, his eyes fixed on Karen.
    ‘The whore gets nothing!’ he shouted, his voice echoing hollowly in the brick tomb. ‘The whore gets nothing, except what all whores really want.’
    Louise covered her ears with her hands, instinctively curling herself into a tight ball pressed against the wire mesh, watching in horror as he drew closer to the only person in the world who shared her nightmare.
    ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ she forced herself to call out, somehow certain his anger would not be turned on her. ‘Leave her alone, please. She’s done nothing wrong.’ Tears slid down her cheeks, salty through dehydration. Strands of dry, sticky saliva stretched across her mouth like a spider’s web as she silently pleaded with him to stop.
    He fumbled in his trouser pocket, trying to remove an object that was bulkier than the keys he had produced earlier. Whatever it was caught on the fabric of his pocket and he tugged violently to free it, his eyes never leaving Karen Green’s cage. ‘I’ll give you what you fucking want, whore.’
    Louise tried to close her eyes, tried to look away as Karen desperately pushed herself into the wire at the back of her cage, trying to find a way to escape the approaching madness. She could see what he was holding now. It was the strange box he’d touched her with when she’d first opened the door to him – the thing that had left her paralysed and helpless.
    Almost dropping the key in his fury and excitement, he struggled to unlock Karen’s cage, his words slurred and incoherent. Finally he opened the hatch and leaned into the cage. Karen’s scream pierced through the hands that covered Louise’s ears and penetrated into every millimetre of her body.
    Karen was pressed hard against the wire, the skin on her face patterned with the squares of the wire cage, blood running down her chin from the split lip that opened raw and painful as she tried to push her body through the tiny holes, all the time imploring him to stop in her faint, defeated voice. ‘Stop. Please stop.’ But he didn’t. Instead he kept getting closer to her, inch by inch. Moving cautiously, as if she was a wild animal that might turn on him, he stabbed out at her with the stun-gun. He repeated the action several times, missing his target and then backing away, extending her misery and dread, until finally he struck her at the base of her spine.
    For