Before reading it he stood up, walked a short distance from the chair, and did three sets of push-ups. One set with his palms flat on the floor and hands shoulder-distance apart. One set with palms flat again, but hands wide apart. A final set with hands back close together, but closed like fists, knuckles on the floor. A hundred of each, with a short break in between.
He barely broke a sweat. He was pleased.
Sarah Becker heard the muffled sound of the man’s measured exertions below her, but spent no time trying to work out what the noise might mean. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t know what time it was, and wasn’t inclined to know that either. Her internal clock told her it was probably day, maybe afternoon. In some ways that was worse than it being night. Bad things happened at night. It was to be expected. People were scared of the dark because when it was dark it was night, and when it was night things sometimes came to get you. That was the way of the world. Daytime was supposed to be better. Daytime was when you went to school, and had lunch, and the sky was blue and everything was pretty much safe so long as you stayed out of places where people were poor. If daytime wasn’t going to be safe, then she didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to know.
If she craned her neck upward, she could just touch her forehead against the top of the space she inhabited. It was utterly dark. She was lying on her back, and able to move her hands and feet about two inches in any direction. She had been in this position for a long time, which she estimated to be at least four days, maybe six. She remembered nothing from the period between being on 3rd Street Promenade and finding herself lying flat on her back, with a narrow window in front of her face. After a few moments she had realized she could see the ceiling of a room, and that the window was a hole in a floor, beneath which she lay in a space only very slightly larger than her own body. The window in the floor was approximately five inches tall by four wide, and reached from just above her eyebrows to just below her mouth.
She had started screaming, and after a while someone had entered the room. He whispered some things to her. She had screamed a little more, and he had placed a small panel in the hole in the floor. She had heard the sound of his footsteps going away, and only one thing had happened since. Sarah had woken from a doze in what had felt like night to find that the panel above her face had been removed again. The room above was nearly dark, but she could make out the head of someone watching her. She tried to talk to the man, to plead, to offer, but he said nothing. After a while she stopped, and started crying instead. The man’s hand came into view, holding a beaker. He tipped water out of this onto her face. At first she tried to turn her head away but then, realizing how thirsty she was, she opened her mouth and swallowed as much as she could. Afterwards the man replaced the panel and went away.
Some indeterminate period of time later he had returned, and they had their conversation about Ted Bundy. This time she drank the water.
Over time she had found her mind becoming clearer, as whatever drug she had been given slowly worked its way out of her system. The downside of this was that her initial feeling of floating inconsequence was harder to maintain. She had tried to push up the panel with her nose and tongue, straining her neck up as far as it would go, but its position had been carefully judged and it was impossible to move in this manner. Like the space itself, it had been immaculately designed for someone of her size, almost as if it had been made in preparation for her and her alone. Sarah was physically fit, a good rollerblader, and stronger than most girls of her size. She had nevertheless been unable to make any impression on the space that held her, and had stopped trying. Her father often said that the problems in many people’s lives were caused by the energy they wasted trying to change that which couldn’t be changed. She was not yet old enough to understand exactly what he meant by that, but on a literal level she took the point. She hadn’t eaten in what seemed like for ever. Until it became clear that a source of additional energy was going to be provided, it made no sense to waste what she had. Struggling was stupid. So she lay still, and thought about Nokkon Wud.
Mr Wud was something that she and her father had invented. At least, they thought they’d invented him. He had come about, indirectly, through Sarah’s mother. Zoë Becker believed in many things. Well, maybe not believed in, as such, but wasn’t going to take any chances where they were concerned. Astrology? Well, yes, of course it’s nonsense, but there’s no harm in knowing what it says and it’s surprising how often it seems to be very accurate. Feng shui? Just common sense, of course, but windchimes look pretty and make a nice sound so why not have them anyway? And if a certain type of bird happens to fly across your path, which some people might think could be unlucky, then there are rhymes to say and small hand gestures to make which surely can’t do any harm.
As often within families, Zoë had inherited her superstitions from her grandmother, rather than her mother, a hardheaded ex-publisher who believed primarily in jogging. Michael Becker had no truck with such spells and signs, and neither did his daughter. Mr Wud had come about as a private joke between them, a response to the superstition that most drove Michael Becker up the wall. Whenever anyone in the family said anything that could – to even the very mildest of degrees – be said to be tempting fate, then Zoë Becker would immediately follow it by saying ‘Knock on wood,’ as swiftly and unconsciously as you might say ‘Bless you’ after someone sneezes. If someone said ‘I’ll never end up like that,’ she’d say ‘Knock on wood’ and rap the table with her knuckles. If they said ‘My father’s in good health,’ she would say it – increasingly quietly, as she became aware that her husband found the habit wildly irritating – but she would say it. She would even say it, and this was the kind of occasion that made her husband want to gnaw chunks out of the piano, if someone said something like, ‘I’ve never broken my leg.’ Michael Becker would point out that this was a factual statement, and not flipping the bird at the fates. It was merely a recital of a true condition of the world, and hedging it off with a superstitious mantra was ridiculous. You wouldn’t, he’d patiently observe, say ‘Two plus two equals four – knock on wood,’ and so why use the expression after any other kind of fact? It was an explicable habit, and borderline bearable, when used after a statement that showed hubris in the face of the world’s potential to hurt. But if it was just a goddamned fact …
Zoë would listen to this, as she had many times before. She would then point out that it was a well-established tradition in many parts of the world – in England and Australia, for example, where they would say ‘Touch wood’ in similar circumstances – and that there might be some basis to it because trees had power, and anyway it didn’t do any harm. And Michael would nod, walk quietly out of the room, and go gnaw chunks out of the piano.
Sarah sided with her father on the subject, and over the years they’d developed the character of Nokkon Wud, an evil sprite, probably Scandinavian in nature, whose sole job was to listen for people challenging the fates by rashly making factual observations. He would then swoop invisibly into their homes in the dead of night, and give their lives a stir for the worse. You’d better not feel lucky when Nokkon was around, because he’d know, and punish you for it.
Over the years this had evolved into their parting routine, in which they genially wished some ill upon each other so that Nokkon would hear and know he wasn’t required in their lives. It had also proved useful when Sarah’s sister, Melanie, had started having nightmares a year back. At Sarah’s suggestion, Michael had told her this was Nokkon Wud at work, flying past the bed, sniffing out for people to harm. All Melanie had to do was recite a little rhyme – which her father spent a long time writing, with more redrafts than most of the scripts through which he earned his living – and Nokkon Wud would know that he wasn’t needed there and go bother someone else. Melanie tried this solution, dubiously at first, but was soon saying it before she went to bed every night – and in time the bad dreams went away and it mattered less whether her cupboard doors were sealed absolutely tight. Her mother didn’t really approve of the joke, and never personally invoked him, but would sometimes smile when Nokkon was mentioned. He explained things about the world, and was now enshrined in Dark Shift as one of the recurrent minor demons ganging up on the heroine.