Dead Man's Grip

it around his baseball cap and removed the bolt cutters he had acquired in a hardware store. He switched on the flashlight, then snapped the padlock on the door of the brick building and switched the light off again. He checked the windows of the houses once more before lifting the boy out of the car and carrying him inside the building, along with his rucksack. He pulled the door closed with an echoing clang.
    Then he switched on his flashlight once more. Directly in front of him was a short, narrow flight of concrete steps going down, between two brick walls. A pair of tiny red eyes appeared momentarily in the darkness at the bottom of the steps, then darted away.
    Tooth put the boy down on his feet, still holding him to stop him falling over.
    ‘You need to take a piss, kid?’
    The boy nodded. Tooth helped him and zipped him back up. Then he carried the boy down the steps, brushing past several spider webs. At the bottom was a gridded metal platform, with a handrail, and a whole cluster of pipes, some overhead, some on the walls, most of them bare, exposed metal, rusting badly and covered in what looked like fraying asbestos. It was as silent as a tomb in here.
    On the other side of the handrail was a shaft, with a steel ladder, that dropped 190 feet. Tooth looked at the boy, ignoring the pleading in his eyes, then tilted him over the handrail and, shining his flashlight beam down, to enable the boy to see the vertical drop. The boy’s eyes bulged in terror.
    Tooth pulled a length of blue, high-tensile rope from his rucksack and tied it carefully around the boy’s ankles. Then he lowered the boy, who was struggling now, thrashing in terror and making a whining, yammering sound through the duct tape across his mouth, a short distance down the shaft and tied the rope around the guard rail.
    ‘I’ll be back in a while, kid,’ Tooth said. ‘Don’t struggle too much. You wouldn’t want your ankles coming loose.’

105
    Tyler’s glasses were falling up his nose. He was scared that at any moment they would drop into the void below. But worse, he could feel the rope slipping, especially down his left ankle. He was swaying and starting to feel giddy and totally disoriented.
    Something tiny was crawling over his nose. A cold draught blew on his face, the air dank, musty and carrying the fainter, noxious odour of something rotting.
    The rope slipped a little more.
    Was the man going to come back?
    Where was his phone? Was it in the car? How would anyone find him here without Mapper?
    He began to panic, then felt the rope slip further. His glasses fell further, too. He froze, stiffening his legs and feet, pushing them against the bindings to keep them as tight as he could. The creature was climbing over his lips now, tickling his nose. He could feel the rush of blood in his head. Suddenly, something touched his right shoulder.
    He screamed, the sound trapped inside him.
    Then he realized he had just swung into the side of the shaft.
    The walls had looked rough, he thought, in the brief moment he had seen them in the beam of the torch. The edges of the ladder would be rough, or at least sharp. As gently as he could, he tried to swing himself around, swaying, bumping into the shaft again, and again, then painfully against the ladder.
    Yes!
    If he could rub the bindings around his arms up and down against the rough edge, maybe he could saw through them.
    His glasses moved further up his forehead. The insect was now crawling over his eyelid.
    The rope slipped further down his ankles.

106
    This place had worked well for him last week, Tooth reasoned. It was dark, no one overlooked it and there were no cameras. Aside from the power station, there were only timber warehouses, closed and dark for the night, on the far wharf. And the water was deep.
    Someone had replaced the padlock on the chain-link fence. He cut through it with his bolt cutters and pushed the gates open. The southerly wind, which seemed to be rising by the minute and was coming straight off the choppy water of the harbour basin ahead, instantly pushed one gate shut. He opened it again and hauled an old oil drum, lying on its side nearby, in front of it.
    Then he jumped into the Yaris and drove it forward on to the quay, passing the skip crammed with rubbish that had been there last week and the old fork-lift truck that had been conveniently left for his use. Not that he would need it now.
    He got out of the car and took a careful look around. He could