Devoured Possibilities
After the Henge Event, people strike bargains with unknowable beings to manipulate their future. Nadia pushes her own boundaries to investigate and save those caught in the middle.
Nadia peeled back a small crusty scab on her thumb as she sat on the mossy log where she and Sam were due to meet. She could never resist picking at scabs, despite knowing there was a risk it would lead to infection. Not that she got into scrapes often. She had been a bookish child who was always the last to be picked for any sports team, and her mother, ever the worry-wart, had never let her go on outings without supervision.
On this occasion, the injury was from leaping out of a first-floor window at the aptly named Caligula Club, which she had infiltrated on Sam’s instructions. She had been more worried about damaging the recording equipment she had brought with her, but Sam had later waved away such concerns.
Sneaking into restricted places was a habit she had only recently picked up. A few months before, Sam had suggested (and Nadia had eagerly agreed) that they start up a project to expose those who had exploited the Henge Event.
Sam was late, as usual. Even though this part of the woods was deserted, Nadia felt too conspicuous, as if at any moment a whole crowd of people would spot her sitting alone and know what she was doing there. She tried to clear her mind and focus on the rustling of the leaves and the dappled light on the dirt path, but she had never been one for meditation, or for nature, for that matter.
The crunch of leaves behind her made her jolt, but her nerves settled once she saw it was Sam, lugging a hefty backpack. When they were at uni together a few years before, Nadia had watched others orbit around her and had initially dismissed her as some rich idiot. Then, slowly, a friendship blossomed out of a joint fondness for literature, documentaries and medical shows.
“Sorry. Got accosted by some guy on the way here,” Sam said, running a hand through her long hair. Nadia shuffled up to give Sam space to sit down on the dry section of the fallen tree. Sam bent down and peered at the woodlice that trickled out of a hole at one end of the log, then perched beside Nadia, their legs touching.
“No worries, I wasn’t waiting long. What happened, are you alright?” Nadia asked.
“Oh, yeah, just some harmless eccentric. Went on about how much he liked our site, how we were fighting the good fight, all that jazz. Just a bit hard to shake off, you know. Not like some of the people I’ve had to face recently… I mean, you’ve seen the messages.”
Sam had once shown her all the death threats she had received for daring to go on camera and talk about criminals manipulating innocent people as part of their perverse bargains with Hengers. Sam often spoke about the threats with a touch of glee - we must be doing good work if we have people this riled up!
“Right, so, I got a tip off about a building. It’s all in here.” Sam said, tapping the backpack. “I think it's a country manor, on the outskirts of Bristol, near some village called Stanton Drew. Apparently, a van full of people dropped them off there and they were never seen again. No police reports. Supposedly it's young homeless people and a few wayward teenagers, so no one is all that fussed.”
“Shouldn’t we report it to the police, then? They can search the place.” Nadia suggested.
Sam gave an exaggerated sigh, then knocked her shoulder against Nadia’s.
“Come on, Nadia. If you want justice done, you don’t go to the police. At best, we’re accused of wasting police time. At worst, the police will be in on it and God knows what would happen then. Besides, I can’t be sure anything is there. Could be hearsay. I’m just saying: go there and poke around a bit. I’ve put some equipment in the bag, and some petty cash for travel and snacks.”
Sam had been the one to start the whole cloak and daggers routine, but the paranoia had latched itself onto Nadia too. They never spoke about the Project over text or email, unless it was to arrange to meet up. Sam had even warned her against using her bank card when she got close to anywhere she was investigating, claiming the authorities or hackers might track her down.
“You’ve been amazing, you know that?” Sam continued. “The number of hits we got after I posted the article about the Caligula Club was insane! I even mentioned that my ‘investigative journalist’ had to jump out of a window when those creeps got suspicious. Everyone loved that detail.”
“Yeah. It was kinda harrowing.”
Nadia could still remember the smell of burning flesh and the empty eye sockets of the three teenagers that had been held there. No doubt similar horrors happened before the Henge Event, but now such mutilation served a greater purpose than mere sadism. Although everyone was masked at the club, someone had decided she didn’t belong there. They had called out and grabbed her arm and, driven by nothing but pure panic, she had flung open a window and leapt out.
Some nights the memories overwhelmed her. She’d call the Samaritans, but when they answered, she couldn’t find the words. She wasn’t even sure anyone would believe her.
“You can always talk to me, you know? Well, not over text obviously, but if you want to meet up more, just say the word. I’ve got a few interviews lined up this week, but I’m sure I could find time.”
Nadia shook her head. Sam put an arm around her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. Nadia found herself burying her head against Sam’s neck. The scent of her perfume overrode the memory of other smells. Nadia’s body shuddered as she tried to hold back tears.
“You have been so brave, Nadia.” Sam whispered, stroking her hair. “Think of all the good you’ve done - you’ve helped put awful people behind bars, you’ve let the world know what’s happening. Even politicians are talking about our website. And I’ve protected you all the way through. Think of all the good there is still left to do, all the twisted crap that still needs to be exposed.”
Once Nadia realised snot was trickling down her face, she jerked backwards and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She was so undignified, she thought. Self-centred, too, to weep and waver over what she was doing. People were suffering, and if the police were going to continue to dismiss everything as hysteria then she needed to step up.
Sam’s phone buzzed. She took it out and scrolled through something, chuckling to herself.
“You good? You good.” Sam stood up and stretched her legs. “I figure Saturday might be a good time to poke around Stanton Drew. The earlier the better. Don’t forget to turn the camera on the second you approach the building.”
---
Back at her studio flat, Nadia rifled through the backpack. Along with some equipment and a USB flash drive, there was a folder filled with drone photos of a van entering the manor driveway. In the side pocket, she found a box of chocolates and some designer sunglasses. She grinned. She didn’t care for designer accessories, but she appreciated the gesture.
She made a hot water bottle and settled into bed before plugging the USB drive into her laptop. There was scant information on it. Aside from electronic duplicates of the photos and some records about the area, there were just a few notes about the people who were supposedly missing. Almost all of them were teenagers. A word document held a few bullet points, most of which were about paranoid conspiracies and barely comprehensible, but the part that caught her eyes was underlined:
Preparing for a second Henge Event???
Nadia lay back and breathed deeply, trying to release the dread that was seeping into her.
What had happened at Stonehenge six months earlier was a hotly debated topic. Some said that absolutely nothing had happened, that the record-breaking earthquake was a natural, albeit unusual, phenomenon. Those who proclaimed that something unnatural did happen largely hewed to the belief that an ancient scroll that had been recently found in the Hypogeum in Malta had been read out loud in the centre of Stonehenge by a man called James Kilgallon, a rich oddball and amateur historian.
His companions, along with some tourists who had been present, claimed he had disappeared, replaced by a James Kilgallon shaped anomaly - a section of air that looked a little too pale, a little too painted. From that anomaly, dark things oozed out. The ancient stones rose off the ground, quivered, then toppled down, sending a shockwave through the surrounding areas. The police had Stonehenge in lockdown after that and placed security around other stone circles as well.
Then there were rumours that what had come from the anomaly were beings that were adept at changing the flow of an entire world. Beings who could be talked to, bargained with, offered up sacrifices, in order to pucker up the fabric of reality and provide desirable outcomes for whatever the bargainer desired - love, wealth, obedience, power. The anomaly had been closed somehow by one of Kilgallon’s companions, so only a few such beings had seeped through, but it was enough to set the world on edge, the UK in particular.
Yet, in a sense, nothing had changed. People talked and talked, sharing theories about the past and the future, but little action was taken. The police were sluggish in responding to any reports about “Hengers”, as the beings were called, claiming that they were inundated with hoax calls and paranoid ramblings. Politicians said there was nothing to worry about. Scientists said they had to gather more data. An event that everyone knew was a turning point for humanity slipped so easily into the hundred other apparent turning points for humanity that had occurred in the last decade.
Nadia couldn’t let that happen, not once she had heard about the people being hurt by esoteric rituals around the UK. It was always teenagers that were exploited. While infiltrating the Caligula Club, she had overheard a man claim that the flesh of teenagers was most sought after by the Hengers, as it was an age full of possibilities that could be devoured and regurgitated into possibilities for others. She felt compelled to prevent any more vulnerable teenagers from suffering.
The activity around the country manor was probably perfectly innocent, she told herself. Some overly suspicious neighbour had undoubtedly worked themselves up over nothing. Once she had proven there was nothing odd going on, she could spend a pleasant afternoon wandering the streets of the village and perhaps even take a peek at the nearby stone circle from behind the safety cordon.
---
Nadia’s alarm buzzed at an ungodly hour of the morning that Saturday. She made her way to Bristol by train, then had a long ride in a stuffy, sweltering bus, and arrived in Stanton Drew in the early afternoon.
The lanes were narrow and lacked pavements. In London she could swan around without anyone batting an eyelid, but here she felt conspicuous, especially as a pedestrian. Every time a car passed, she wondered if “they” were in on “it”, then shook her head as if the paranoia could be shaken off like dead leaves from a tree.
She kept a hand on her phone in her pocket, ready to call Sam if anything felt wrong. Only as a last resort would she ring the police. As Sam always reminded her, they weren’t on their side. Their lacklustre response to anything involving Hengers suggested they were being held back from investigating. Perhaps more importantly, Nadia suspected Sam would excommunicate her if she dared speak to them.
A large wrought-iron gate with a security chain looped around it barred her way to the manor, and a low wall and a tall hedgerow stretched either side of the gate. The driveway curved round from there, the bushes obscuring her view of the manor. Having scouted the area on Google maps, she had expected this. She wandered further down the road until there was a more sparse section of bushes.
A car drove past as she stood staring at the gap. Her heartbeat quickened, and she strolled on until the car was out of sight, then scurried back to the gap. She took a deep breath in and focused her attention on the surrounding sounds. No more cars. No sounds coming from beyond the hedge. No personal drones buzzing up above. She was alone. Unseen.
She put on her leather gloves and crawled through the mass of stems, instantly realising it was not as traversable as it looked. Her clothing snagged on the branches, and something scratched her sunglasses. Some buzzing insect hovered right by her ear and she clamped her mouth closed, afraid it might decide to crawl in her mouth.
Nadia got through to the garden on the other side, her pride diminished. She was an amateur, she thought, utterly unsuited to the work she now found herself doing. What had Sam seen in her that made her think they could be partners on such a complex project? She remembered how Sam had spoken about her potential, and Nadia had just laughed nervously. She had tried so hard to be kind to others and aware of injustice, but the most action she had taken before this was going on protests and helping out at a homeless shelter.
She got to her feet and brushed the dirt from her gloves. The manor stood at the end of the winding driveway, austere and dilapidated. The garden itself was unkempt, weeds littered among the tall grass. A large grey van stood in the driveway, the same one in the photographs Sam had given her. Besides that, she could have mistaken the place a holiday home for someone who hadn’t visited in a while. She pulled an owl necklace out of her bag and clipped it around her neck. It was the same spy necklace she had used at the Caligula Club, still intact from her fall.
Not wanting to be out in the open for too long, Nadia quickly strode to the side of the building. Curtains obscured the insides of every room, and all the windows were closed. Keeping close to the wall, she moved around to the back of the building to discover a wide veranda, with several wicker chairs and tables laid out.
Sat one of the chairs, holding a cup of tea, was a stylish old woman staring straight at her. A smile spread across the woman’s face.
Nadia bolted.
“I don’t bite!” the woman called out in a clipped accent, but Nadia didn’t turn back.
She sprinted round the manor and down the driveway without thinking. She only remembered it was locked when she rattled it and tried to force it open. The woman was striding across the lawn towards her, so she ran along the hedgerow, trying to find the gap she had crawled through. All the shrubs looked the same from this side.
“It’s alright, really, I’m not going to call the police on you.” The woman said, now only metres away.
Nadia gulped, then turned to face her. She didn’t believe her, but she hoped she could at least talk her way out of trouble. Sam would enjoy the story, she thought.
“I’m so sorry, I thought this place was abandoned,” Nadia said, trying to match the woman’s posh accent. It was a skill she had picked up at university, but somewhat more difficult to do when she was out of breath. “It was just a bit of a lark.”
“Of course. Humans are driven by curiosity. The modern world seeks to smother such things and put everyone in neat little boxes, don’t you think?”
Their eyes met, and Nadia relaxed. Such beautiful blue eyes couldn’t belong to someone who meant to do her harm. And her voice - so mellifluous and calm. The tension throughout Nadia’s body eased.
“How old are you?” The woman asked.
“Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four! Still so young. Why not come in for some fruit cake? I made some just this morning.”
Nadia followed her, a loose, airy feeling in her limbs, as if gravity had suddenly weakened. The woman had the bearing of an old actress, she decided, every movement and gesture graceful. Nadia had come here to do more than eat fruitcake, but at that moment she couldn’t quite remember what.
The interior was more spacious than she had expected, with tall ceilings and huge mirrors on the wall. The curtains were still shut tight, but the woman flicked a switch and the room was flooded with light. Nadia took a place at the rough kitchen table, though she could see an ornate dining table in the room beyond.
“Here you go,” the woman said, placing a plate of fruitcake in front of her. “You must be quite brave to go exploring abandoned buildings. What led you to this one?”
Nadia dug a fork in the slice of fruitcake, then paused. The woman had said she had just made it, but it felt stale, and looked store-bought. Why did she offer it to her, anyway? Nadia thought. Nothing felt quite right. She needed to call Sam. She stared at her plate, trying to piece together the last few minutes.
The woman grabbed Nadia’s chin and turned it towards her. Nadia saw a flash of the pale blue eyes then squeezed her eyes shut.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. She leapt to her feet, squinting her eyes so she could only see the bare outline of the room, then stumbled towards the kitchen door. The old woman grabbed her from behind and flung her to the floor with unnatural strength. The stranger pinned down one of her arms - Nadia tried to push her away with her free hand, but her attacker pressed her knee down on her wrist and Nadia squealed in pain.
“Open your eyes for me, can you do that for me?” The woman said, still with a beautifully melodic voice, despite being breathless from the struggle.
With her free hand, the woman placed her thumb and forefinger on Nadia’s left eye, trying to prise it open. Nadia tried to bite her hand, the old woman slapped her, then Nadia opened her eyes in shock.
Their eyes met. Nadia drowned in the woman’s gaze.
---
Harsh light shone through Nadia’s eyelids. She groaned and tried to curl up, then felt the restraints on her wrists and ankles holding her down.
“Nadia, Nadia, Nadia.” The woman whispered, somewhere to the side. “It’s safe to open your eyes. It won’t change your situation now.”
Nadia felt the stranger’s hand touch her forehead to brush her hair to the side. She flinched. Then, eager to rip the band-aid of uncertainty off, she opened her eyes.
She was strapped to a medical trolley bed. She wore nothing but her underwear and a loose gown. On a table beside her sat her cut up clothes. Unwearable. Her spy necklace was also there, smashed. There was a chance Sam had looked at the uploaded footage already, Nadia thought, there was a chance the police were already on their way. The camera would have caught the woman’s face. What she had done wouldn’t be in vain.
Lifting her head, she saw she wasn’t the only one in the room. Nine other trolley beds were lined up in the cold, windowless basement, each with a young person stretched out on it.
None of the bodies were quite right. The teenage girl next to her had her jaw twisted ninety degrees round, and three amputated fingers on the arm she could see. The boy diagonal from her had a plate-sized hole where his belly should have been, although she could see his chest rise and fall with each breath. She felt nauseous. The clinical setting rendered everything worse, proving the mutilator had worked with premeditation and precision.
“Are these the people you were hoping to save, Nadia?” The woman said softly. She now wore medical scrubs, and gestured with a gloved hand to the other beds. “Beautiful young things in the prime of their life, so many doors of possibilities open to them.”
“You know my name,” Nadia croaked.
Her captor held a cup of water to her lips, and although Nadia wanted to show defiance, she found herself drinking up gratefully. The woman then waved Nadia’s phone in her face. Nadia gave an empty laugh. She always used fingerprint security, never thinking of how it might backfire.
“Friends with Sam Petersen. You’re the same young woman seen lurking about the Caligula Club, I bet. Hm?”
Nadia sighed and closed her eyes. Dread crawled over her, as physical as if she had been buried with a hundred insects. She breathed in the smell of cleaning products. It was so unlike the dark, smoky corners of the Caligula Club, and yet the end result was the same.
“Why? Why is this…?” Nadia trailed off.
“Your body keeps a score of all possible threads of the future. The ‘Hengers’, as people call them, know how to bottle fate. Who wouldn’t want that? Each bargain we make with them brings us a little closer to understanding the universe.”
“Your eyes…”
“A gift. Fleeting. It sapped the possibilities I’ve absorbed, requiring me to perform more inflictions.”
Nadia shivered. Her clothing was too thin to provide any warmth, and the possible “inflictions” she could face multiplied in her mind. Sam was the only one who even knew she was here. None of her other friends or family knew what she had been investigating. The inevitability of what would happen next overwhelmed her.
The woman clicked her tongue, rose from her stool and moved to another room, closing the door behind her.
“Hello?” Nadia called out to the other victims in the room.
From her position she could only really see two. The teenage girl with the unnatural jaw turned towards her, frowning in anguish. She opened her mouth, but all that came out was a soft gurgle.
From the other room she heard the woman speak a harsh, unfamiliar language. For a moment, the lights in the basement seemed to blaze even brighter. Something was there, in the other room. She couldn’t see, hear or smell it, but some unnameable sense felt it tugging at her. Her breath caught in her throat as she struggled against an unfamiliar, almost spiritual, pain.
The woman came back into the room alone, but the sensation didn’t subside.
“You’ll have to excuse my poor bedside manner,” the woman said, though Nadia struggled to hear her through the pain. “I found reassurances didn’t help one jot with my other guests here. And I can’t use anaesthetic, I’m afraid. It disrupts the full potential of the infliction.”
She dragged a metal trolley ladened with surgical equipment from the corner of the room. Scalpels and forceps and tools unfamiliar to Nadia gleamed in the light. She twisted her head to the other side and squeezed her eyes shut.
She felt something being tied around her left thumb, tight enough her thumb grew numb. Her spiritual pain now seemed to flow there. It felt as if the pain was in another thumb, mirrored in another dimension, overlapping with the one she knew and had used every day of her life.
Then came the physical pain. Agony. Nadia screamed out despite herself and heard groans from the other victims as they echoed her pain. It hurt worse than anything she had experienced, the twin pains intermingling into something that felt like it cut to the core of who she was. Something was being cut off from her, and she, too, was cut off from it. Her whole body shook.
The woman stepped away, and Nadia felt compelled to look at her. There, in the stranger’s gloved hand, sat Nadia’s thumb. She held it bloodied end up and Nadia sobbed as she watched black vapour rise from it. The woman pressed the thumb against her nose and snorted the vapour. The whites of her eyes turned black.
“Possibilities!” She cried out in joy.
Blood pumped out of Nadia’s thumb hole and dripped onto her restraints. She felt faint, but still she kept her eyes on the woman and tried to stay awake. After a few minutes, the woman threw the thumb on the table and returned to the other room once more.
Nadia stared at her discoloured, bloodied thumb. No coherent thoughts went through her mind, just thumb, thumb, thumb, as regular as the pulsing pain she felt.
Slowly, some sense came back to her, and something in her mind clicked into place. The stranger may have taken many possibilities from her, but she had opened up a possibility too.
Nadia tried to wrench her mutilated hand out of her restraints. She gritted her teeth as she pushed through the agonising pain. Finally, she wriggled free. She ripped off the restraint around her other wrist, then off her ankle restraints, too.
The woman on the bed next to her gurgled, her eyes open wide in shock.
“I will come back, I will send someone back, I promise!” Nadia whispered.
She swept everything on the side table into her bag that rested on the floor - phone, clothes, broken necklace. It seemed an impossibly loud noise, but the woman didn’t re-enter. She grabbed her cold thumb, slipped on her shoes, then darted across the basement, cradling her left arm against her chest.
There were two doors leading out. Nadia opened the one the woman hadn’t gone through. Dark stone stairs twisted upwards. She stumbled up the stairs, half her weight leaning on the stone wall as dizziness threatened to topple her. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked. She pulled it open and tottered into the dining room.
For a second she was overwhelmed by how ordinary everything suddenly looked - an expensive furniture set dominated the room and fine china sat in the cabinets, while down below young people were being mutilated. She quickly wrapped a torn strip of her shirt around her thumb, then pushed on.
She fled the house and scrambled through the hedgerow, barely acknowledging the scratches the branches gave her. All the pain was concentrated in her thumb, which was still pumping blood and she had no real way to stop it without putting herself in danger. Once out on the road, she pulled her phone out.
Calling the police was the obvious choice, she thought. Yet the woman’s self-assurance had unnerved her. Surely nobody would feel that entitled to inflict horrors unless they had some reassurance that they wouldn’t be discovered. It seemed likely that whoever had passed on information to Sam had tried going through official channels and failed.
As she held the phone in her hand, it began to ring. Sam.
“Oh god, Sam, I don’t know what to -”
“I’m on my way already. I’m, like, ten minutes away. Are you okay? You’re free?”
“How did you… Did you see the footage?”
“Yeah, until the camera was smashed. You left the mic in your bag, so I could hear some of what happened. Just… Just run now, ok? Run to The Druid Arms, I’ll pick you up from there. I’ll get you to a hospital. Don’t hang up.”
Nadia shuffled down the lane with the phone clutched in her intact hand, her body kept upright by nothing but adrenaline. Her gown was pasted to her body by the cold sweat that drenched her. A car passed by and beeped at her. The driver yelled some obscenity, then drove off. Nadia didn’t have the energy to even process what was happening.
“Nadia!”
Sam’s car pulled up to her just before she reached the pub. Sam opened the passenger door and Nadia collapsed into the seat beside her.
“You’re safe. You’re safe.” Sam said, rubbing Nadia’s shoulder. She placed her phone between them and opened up a voice recording app.
“I’ll drive you to a hospital, I’m driving you there right now. Don’t pass out on me. I just… I just don’t want the doctors to get their hands on you and then muddle up your memories, okay? Okay, Nadia? While I’m driving, tell me everything that happened. Tell me everything. Our audience has to know.”
So…This is the first time I’ve posted my story after midnight. Hopefully won’t turn into a habit. I also wrote some of this on Wednesday and Friday - not technically against my main rule of writing a story a day, but against the general spirit of the thing.
I’m pleased with a lot of ideas here, and frankly I’m pleased to just sink my teeth into a longer story. I feel like this could be made much longer - it’s certainly something I’d be interested in taking another look at. I had thoughts about Nadia’s background that I didn’t get around to inserting.
As always with longer pieces, I feel the main let down is the prose - mechanical and clunky in some places, and a fair amount of repetition. I really struggled with the pronouns… I slightly regret making the captor female. There are also a few things that feel like plot holes - why was it so easy for Nadia to escape? Does having hypnotic eyes really fit into the whole possibilities angle? Is it plausible the woman hadn’t noticed the hidden microphone?
What are your thoughts on Devoured Possibilities? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.