Short story / Psychological thriller
The Taking
A dark psychological thriller. Three years after Oliver’s wife goes missing, a stranger arrives with a secret and a riddle…
“I’m not a kidnapper, nor a killer, nor a rapist,” Carlo tells Oliver. “Your wife lives in comfort, her every need is met, and she is free to leave. I’ve never touched her or coerced her.”
Then he drops his head, as if ashamed. “Though I confess I took something from her. But I promise you: she neither knows nor cares.”
Oliver is beyond grief, his teeth gritted. “What did you take from her?”
Carlo is older. Tailored suit, round glasses, and a serious demeanor. He doesn’t seem like a crank.
“The only way you can find out is if I take the same from you. And I promise you that when it’s gone, you will neither know nor care.”
He hands Oliver a photograph of Beth. Oliver feels his throat tremble.
She is standing outside, looking at the sky, wearing a red scarf. She looks older, happy, peaceful.
Beth went missing three years earlier, but the detectives found no trace. The investigation went cold. Until today when this stranger appeared on Oliver’s doorstep, saying he knows where Beth is.
Oliver offers Carlo money, all his savings, his car, his house, everything he owns… Carlo refuses. Oliver’s confusion turns to anger. Buried feelings of impotent rage return.
Carlo raises a finger. “If any harm comes to me, you’ll never see Beth again.”
He instructs Oliver to tell no one about their agreement, or… he can guess the consequences.
After Carlo leaves, Oliver pores over the photo for hours. He gets an enlargement printed and pins it to his wall. He puts the photo under his pillow, but he cannot sleep.
It’s proof of life. But is it real?
In the last three years, Oliver has grown distant from his life. Nothing fills the void inside him. He doesn’t want his parents’ pity. Or his colleagues’ silence.
Even their daughter has moved away, lost in her own trauma.
One night, his landline rings. He snaps up the handset and hears Beth.
“Goodness me, I feel so silly,” she giggles.
Her sweet voice fills Oliver’s chest with hope. “Beth?” he asks. She doesn’t respond. “My love, are you OK? Can you hear me?”
Beth laughs nervously. “I don’t know, is it…? Is he..? Someone famous?”
Oliver feels a weight plummet through him. He realizes this is a recording. A man’s voice enters, calm and reassuring. It is Carlo.
“You don’t recognise the man in the photo?” Carlo asks her.
“No. Oh golly. Are you sure I know him? Is he here?”
“No, Beth. Shall I tell you?”
“Oh gee, I suppose you’d better.”
“That’s your husband. His name is Oliver.”
Oliver hears Beth snort lightly. “But I’m not married.”
The line disconnects.
Oliver’s mind sprawls in a tide of possibilities. When was this recorded? Why didn’t she remember him? Why was Carlo there?
He regrets not recording the call. He tries callback, but the number was withheld. He moves his bedding to the sofa by the phone, so he’ll be ready when the next call comes. He doesn’t leave the house for fear of missing a call.
There is never another call.
He is woken by a courier who needs a signature. The package is the length of Oliver’s hand span, and narrow. It bears a warning sticker ‘Biological Substance’. Oliver is shaking, imagining the worst. Is it her finger? A thumb? A rasher of her flesh?
He takes a paper knife and carefully slices through the sticker. Cradled inside is a vial of blood.
He runs to the toilet to vomit. The porcelain chills and steadies him. Who is Carlo? Why is he doing this? But the vial is real forensic evidence. He knows he must go to the police, despite Carlo’s warning.
The lead detective from Beth’s case comes by that evening. He sees her picture on Oliver’s wall, the dirty linen tangled on the sofa, stacks of dishes, empty bottles, the spray of vomitus…
Oliver forces the photo into his hand.
The detective sighs. “Nothing indicates it’s recent. She looks older because she’s squinting at the sky. And a printed photo doesn’t have time or location data. It doesn’t prove anything.”
Oliver tells him about the phone call, and that he didn’t record it. The detective is sympathetic. He agrees to take the blood to the lab.
A few days later, he calls back with the results. It’s pig’s blood. The packaging reveals nothing of forensic value. The return address is fake.
“Oliver, you know these crazies come out of the woodwork in a missing person’s case. Put this man out of your mind. It’ll do you no good obsessing over this. I’m truly sorry we never found her, but you’ve got to stop torturing yourself.”
Oliver realizes the detective doesn’t believe him. He can’t trust him.
He must do this alone.
For weeks, he receives nothing from Carlo, no contact of any kind. He chides himself bitterly for ignoring Carlo’s warning about involving someone else. He’s destroyed the one chance he had to see Beth again. He was selfish and reckless and worse: he has condemned Beth to her fate.
Then he receives a text containing a GPS location. It’s a few miles away. He dresses and goes out for the first time in weeks.
The location is a field where he and Beth often walked. It’s deserted except for some birds searching for grubs.
Then he notices a red scarf tied on a fencepost. It’s Beth’s — the one in the photo. He unknots it, pressing it to his face, inhaling her scent. The sensory overload is a gut punch. He buckles in the wet grass and weeps.
Back home, he opens her wardrobe where her clothes still hang, climbs inside and slides the door closed.
For more than a year, a steady stream of torments arrives. They bring Beth back to life in his memory, but only emphasize her absence in reality.
A copy of a novel which Beth had once read him in bed…
A video close-up of her eyes watching TV somewhere, laughing then crying…
A flier for an upcoming performance of Gorecki’s Symphony №3 — the first symphony they saw together…
A delivery bike brings a prepaid takeaway of pho and summer rolls — her favorite meal…
The tortures never end.
He isolates himself. His employers stop calling. Automatic payments handle his bills until they don’t. He ignores visitors, neighbors, and unexpected deliveries. He doesn’t wash, pees in bottles. He orders enough food to survive, and drinks himself to oblivion every night.
Beth haunts his imagination.
Sometimes he thinks she is waiting in bed. Or sunbathing in the garden. Or listening to the radio in the bath. But when he checks, she has gone.
He swears at himself. He must be quicker next time.
One morning, a bang in the front yard wakes him. He rolls off the sofa, the sheets sticking to his bed sores. He can barely turn the lock with his curled and blackening fingernails. The sunlight is blinding.
On the path lies a photograph album.
Perhaps it is photos of Beth. At last, something from Carlo to satisfy the grim hunger that keeps him alive.
He shoves the bourbon bottles and takeout boxes off the coffee table. He lays down the album and opens it.
He is confused. The photos are not of Beth. They are of him.
Oliver leaving his office. Oliver walking down the street. (When is this?) Oliver going into a pharmacy. Oliver getting into a taxi. (Who is taking these photos?) Oliver getting out at a cheap hotel near the airport. (No, no…) Oliver walking into the hotel bar. (No, NO! FUCK! NO!!!)
The next sequence shows him in a booth with a teenage girl. Looking into each other’s eyes. Her lipstick on his glass. His fingers between her thighs.
The girl is their daughter.
The next picture shows a hotel room door.
Then abruptly: Beth in close-up, drawn and puffy, like she’s been crying for a long time.
A wider shot reveals she is in a psychiatrist’s consulting room.
Carlo sits opposite her.
The same photograph album is open on her lap.
In late summer, a pair of drain engineers enters Oliver’s property responding to a clog. The garden is overgrown and the stench of trash fills the air. Through the kitchen window they see Oliver crouching, naked, filthy, staring at them, bug-eyed.
He is committed to a psychiatric institution, where he is sedated and prescribed a course of antipsychotics. He is put in the care of a specialist psychiatrist.
Months later, Carlo comes to his room. Oliver shows no sign of recognition.
Carlo checks Oliver’s charts. Profound schizophrenic breakdown. Total psychotic dissociation. He is lost in a fugue state he might never return from — flushed of thoughts, emotions, and the memory of his trauma.
Carlo returns the chart to its holder, then walks down the hall to see another of his patients.
Beth is curled up on her bed. Birds flutter outside her window.
“Dearest Beth, I took his sanity. And now he neither knows nor cares.”
But she doesn’t hear him. She just smiles at the birds.
Written for Belle’s Unofficial Challenge on Vocal
https://vocal.media/writers/riddle-me-this-an-unofficial-challenge
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