The Big Brother Hole Ch. 04

He'd come up with a plan to look at the human mind under the pressure of loneliness, something he was quite familiar with, and began to conjure up scenarios he'd considered and had thrown back in his face three years ago and of how he could create the exact conditions he needed for his experiment. When the police raided his London flat or his 'rooms' as he alluded to them, they found pages of plans.

As a one-time Cambridge Student, he figured that the fens would be ideal for his experiment but try as he might he couldn't secure enough land at the right price for his purpose. He headed further south into Suffolk and found some former Ministry of Defence land which was ideal for his purpose.

The land contained some original buildings with original fittings. He had bunkers, a guardroom with cells, a medical building, and an operations room. He rented the place unseen.

He moved in the day he paid the first instalment on the lease saying he was in the television industry making a new reality TV game show. The estate agent was only too pleased to get shot of this white elephant of a site and he managed to get this very pale looking chap to sign a lease for two years, and it was watertight; this was a coup and he couldn't wait to tell his boss he shifted 'that bloody place' with its buildings lagged and lined with asbestos and all sorted of nasty things possibly buried there.

The large bunkers he had removed at great expense, employing contractors from many miles away, paying cash with no paperwork just in case his leased World War Two/Cold War complex had listed building status; he didn't know, he didn't care, he had a mission. Much as he thought the bunkers might have made a good labyrinth he just could not envisage his captives believing what he needed them to believe for the validity of his experiment.

Once removed he found he was left with a large hole, and it was perfect beyond his dreams of high fences. His contractors totally believed that he was going to be filming a game show there, and built the site to his very definite specifications, the signed a non-disclosure agreement he found on the internet and all was set. They imported tonnes of soil and packed and supported it as he wanted it. The installed the stream with a silent pump, filter and solar purifier with an option to release small to medium size fish into it at a certain point. Across the site, dozens of cameras went into the trees and a system that meant they could turn on smoke as and when they wanted it. This was also adaptable for anaesthetic gas which would be a major part of his plan.

His mother had died quite suddenly and when he checked her office and her papers he found some interesting websites, order forms and paper work. Switching on her computer he found the websites she had ordered supplies from and using her credit card, he was able to order virtually anything else. Her prescription pad was also quite useful.

There first experiment with the gas resulted in their first prisoner suffocating in her sleep as the gas was too heavy and they used too much. She was one Mary Connor and had been lured from a local Irish traveller site by Sean with the promise of untold riches in the Mad Professor's house that she could steal. The old boy was nutty as a fruitcake and she could virtually help herself once she was through the door.

She'd been drugged with Rohipnol in her Vodka the same evening and then dropped in the hole. She woke with a headache the next morning and wandered around the Big Brother Hole calling out all day. The Professor was keen to see what she would do with a rabbit and prepared to put a couple in with her. The Professor had worked extremely hard on a way to put fish in the stream but hadn't for the rabbits.

"Gas 'er," said Sean simply. Sadly she died the first time they tried the anaesthetic and was buried by Sean in the massive woods surrounding the Hole.

Sean had worked on site from the beginning and just wouldn't go away. He hung around even though the Professor had asked him not to. But soon it became evident that he had just the right attitude. He would do precisely what the Professor wanted for precisely the right amount of money. He was enough of a sadist to revel in watching the prisoners, especially the female ones, suffering without wanting to report it, and would spend all of his waking hours sat in front of the video screens following them around and catching that suffering from different angles.

Tina, full name Tina Chappell, a poor unfortunate 21 year old kidnapped from her work as a cleaner in a Norwich office block by Sean who followed her in one morning and started to clean just as she was. He made her a coffee, and that was that.

She was dropped into the hole via the crane. Fish were released and rabbits stuffed into the snares but poor Tina was a twenty first century girl and had no clue on what to do with this kind of food. She cried when she found the rabbits, and stroked them thinking of the chinchilla she had at home and her year old daughter she'd bought it for. She wept, more and using her hands buried what was her sustenance for two days.

The Professor watched with interest as she personified her food source, he stood in his silent control room making notes on the amount of time Tina would scream herself hoarse begging for release from the nightmare. The earth bunds to absorb noise from inside as well as out were perfect.

She'd dug at the walls and they just fell in on her. She was totally unsuitable for the research and the Professor struggled with how they might train her and not lose the integrity of his research.

Sean suggested that perhaps they should drop her off some matches and a knife and this made sense to him. She had never lit a fire in her life and other than some charred logs the matches were all used trying to get some heat in her cold springtime home. Crying herself to sleep she prayed long and loudly for rescue, shivering in the damp April chill.

The Professor was intrigued and thought how sad it was that contemporary humans were unable to survive and do the simplest tasks and turned to a God none of them truly believed in almost instantly. He noted in his diary that she was had the knife and was cutting up the next rabbit Sean had put in the snare for her, and he guessed that she would eat it raw. She had been in the hole for eleven days by now.

It wasn't until mid-morning the next day that he noticed that she hadn't moved. What he'd taken for the rabbit being cut was actually her slitting her wrists and she must have bled out sometime in the freezing night, hugging the soft cold rabbit to her as comfort as her life ebbed from her.

The Professor was most annoyed at this girl's cowardice and how his work was set back AGAIN, and blamed Sean's interference for this setback in the research. The body was brought out and the damage to the walls repaired and Tina placed into the cold room in the medical centre.

He decided that soft Home Counties women were not cut out for his experiment and he should pick stronger women for his subject altogether. His tiny mind picked on northern, specifically Yorkshire women after watching how strong they were in some of his mother's favourite DVD's on her shelves - 'Emmerdale', 'Last of the summer wine' and 'All creatures great and small'.

If the TV and popular culture were to be believed Yorkshire women would be more hardy against the cold and able to light fires, deal with the animals he'd purchased for food and generally have the frame of mind to survive the ordeal.

He and Sean travelled up the M1 and A1 seeing a stocky no-nonsense looking woman on her own in a petrol station. She made things easy for them had put cash into the coffee machine in the petrol station entrance and again Sean made use of Rohipnol as the Professor bumped into her making her drop the birthday card she'd just bought. The Professor chatted with her and saw her to her car and she got further and further down her coffee cup and within twenty minutes they were driving their car and hers back down the motorway. Her car had been hidden under a blue plastic tarpaulin in the yard had I only searched a little harder the day we escaped.

She was kept out cold while the Professor and Sean lowered her into the hole. To the Professors disgust it turned out that this wasn't a tough Yorkshire woman like on TV but was an imported bloody priest from the South of England.

Again he cursed Sean, they had gone to a ton of trouble and he was disgusted that bumpkin Sean didn't know a Yorkshire accent from a southern one and all that effort was wasted.

Sean said he would go down into the hole and kill her and they could go back to Yorkshire and get another one. The Professor was enough of a Christian to know that this was wrong and baulked at this idea and said that Sean would jolly well go down into the hole and teach this priest what to do to stay alive. Sean took a crash course with his SAS survival manual and two nights later the gas was released and the Professor lowered the crane into the hole with Sean's motorbike.

He met up with the pretty priest and said that he'd lost control of his motorbike and woke up in the hole. She was friendly and really pleased to see him. He seemed not to want to escape, and convinced her there was no way out. She asked him how he knew that. He snarled and hit her for the first time. The sadist wasn't going to take that from a priest.

He set the snares from wire 'he happened to have in his pocket' and built fish traps to stop the farmed trout they bought and released into the stream. He started the fire and showed her how it was to be kept going. He walked her around and told her what green leaves she could eat then built a shelter and invited the priest into it and she thanked him. He cooked a rabbit for her and later that night felt she should reciprocate physically.

Not having any experience with women he tried to bring the conversation around to sex. She didn't respond and started to feel a little nervous about this strange man who seemed to know just too much about this place and survival. After two nights of patiently waiting for her to put out (at least he felt he'd been patient) and ended up attacking her and she kicked him squarely in the testicles and he beat her for it. The Professor, watching the whole thing on the cameras, flooded the hole with gas and they both passed out.

Sean came round first and took Emma's glasses out of spite having seen how short sighted she was when he showed her how to light a fire with them. He knew that the Professor was annoyed with him and left him there to teach him a lesson, so he just hung around the Hole tormenting her and looking for a time when he could have his revenge. Two nights later he was lifted out - by the new management of the hole.

He had purchased the Rohipnol through local drug dealers and they had taken a liking to this strange show-off giving him access to one of their slave girl prostitutes and their locally brewed vodka. The more pissed he got and the more women around him bolstered his self-esteem and much as he knew it had to be secret, he gradually told them the Professor's plan.

They weren't just ordinary drug dealers of course, they were hard faced Russian mafia who saw the financial benefits of the project, namely selling the video of what was going on in the hole and exploiting this pair of lunatics in the way that the Mafia always had.

They'd followed Sean who'd already briefed them about the Mad Professor and they played along, talking about his ground-breaking concept and the value it would show to the wider world. The Professor was charmed by them and agreed, especially when they reached for their cheque books. He was gradually running out of Mummy's money and his project was in danger of closing down. They were using the anaesthetic gas at almost two canisters a week and no small practice or even dentist used gas to that extent.

They provided better recording and IT equipment for the scheme and initially the Professor was pleased with the increased financing of something he still considered a science experiment as his mother's money had almost all gone. Their new kit was broadcast quality and beamed the images to a satellite they'd rented to send pictures to the sociology department in Moscow - this was going to be a bargain and make him internationally famous. But he couldn't find them name of the university it was supposed to be going to; but it was all aiding his scientific research and would put him up there with his mother - higher even!

The Russians told Sean to 'help the fat incumbent of the hole to lose weight' and Emma's strange diet began. She would go days without food, and she noticed that her periods had stopped.

Once she had slimmed down the Russians suggested that a man should be thrown in to liven up the viewing experience. The Professor argued that it wasn't about the viewers but the social psychology.

"Yeah right," said the Mafia, and promptly ignored him. Two weeks later a young man from Lowestoft was kidnapped off of the street by the Russians and brought to the site. The Professor knew nothing about it, and argued that he would remember being kidnapped and would tell the woman and the whole precept of the woman not knowing what was going on would be lost.

Sean explained it to them using smaller words; aah... the Russians hadn't thought of that so to get back on track, the young man was smothered in the boot of the car he'd been brought in, taken back to Lowestoft and dumped in the sea wrapped in an old carpet.

Sean realised things were too big now and tried to escape and was caught and brought back and threatened with dire warnings should he run again. Mind you, the Russian Mafioso soon had the measure of Sean and he quickly won his loyalty through the increase in wages. He convinced the Russians to let him and the Professor seek the next victim. The Russians liked this, the less input they had the better it was, so far nothing in the UK had any connection to them. Sean would have to be quick though, the Russians wanted some return on their investment.

Five weeks later the Professor jumped in his mother's red Citroen and they headed back to Yorkshire, the Professor still wanted some tough northerners in the experiment. I was kidnapped from another Yorkshire Service station and dropped in the hole with my car and my nightmare began.

I woke up from it two hours later on my hospital trolley, lost for a moment and a smiling nurse came over and asked if I was OK. I shook my head and tried to work out where I was, and for a moment wondered why I, the ambulance man was on the bed this time. The nurse put a hand on mine asked if I was hungry. I admitted that I was and she smiled, went off and returned with a white china mug and a triangular package. So I had my first sandwich and a cup of tea. The sandwich was an ordinary, boring, coronation chicken sandwich that I'd taken for granted for so many years.

It was heaven and the nurse giggled as I crooned over it. My taste buds had tasted nothing this interesting in over a month and I explained that. The nurse was so impressed that she went to her locker and came back with a large bag of cheese and onion crisps. I asked her to marry me, only once I'd seen that she had a thick wedding band on.

Thirty minutes later I was taken to sleeping Emma's bedside by a very twitchy police officer and then told we both needed to be careful as this was the Russian Mafia we had upset. I asked if I could stay by Emma's bed that night, knowing what she would be like if she woke suddenly.

The room was warm, I'd had several cups of tea and that point could have slept through an air raid. A doctor had suggested that I needed a night's sleep myself and that the police would put me up in a nearby hotel. I said no, sat in the comfy chair by the side of her bed while she recovered from her surgery. A nurse put a blanket across me, at some stage and there was a mug of tea.

It was shortly after four in the morning when I was woken by the nurse,

"This is Harry," whispered the nurse and I heard a cup being put on the table by Emma's bed, "you just have to meet him..."

Next there was a hand on my shoulder and another on my cheek.

"Harry?" whispered another female voice, and through half opened eyes I looked at a face that could have been Emma. This was her Mum who along with her Dad had driven through the night to be at her side.

I tried to stand, but was 'shushed' back into my seat by her Dad. I sipped my tea and spoke quietly with them and brought them up to date with what I knew and they told me about their side of the hunt for their daughter.

Emma had been reported as missing all of those months ago and was last seen on some rather grainy CCTV at the petrol station with a big smile on her face and buying the birthday card she was on her way to deliver.

To confuse things Sean had covered her number plates with those from his broken down car at the yard. His was a Ford XR2 while hers was a Focus. Nothing peculiar for the motorway cameras to see.

The Police missing person report had not been taken that seriously at first; she was a rather bookish, prim, wrong-side-of-29 year old that might just have decided that being a spinster vicar in Yorkshire wasn't for her and could just have driven somewhere for the high life.

Her mobile phone went unanswered, it was switched off and in her car where she'd put it down while she sipped her coffee chatting with the rather nice older chap that had seen her to her car after almost knocking her over in the service station.

Mum Charlotte, Dad Tom and Sister Ann had started an on-line search for her bringing in support from the church at all levels, everyone knew Emma and knew that she was far from the kind of person that would just take off and disappear from the face of the earth.

Only one person made a connection. He'd read of the still missing priest from Yorkshire and seen her photo in the e-newsletter he'd read. Later that night, he'd seen a short video clip of a naked red haired girl with the self-same smile giving a tall man a blow job as he stood against a car on its side and thought how much she looked like the priest.

The girl giving the blow job looked much too happy doing what she was doing so he never contacted anyone. Besides, there was no way he could explain to the rest of the world why he was watching pay per view porn adverts on his home laptop. He sent an anonymous email two days before we escaped.

Stowmarket Police had never had one as weird as this and even off duty detectives came in to see what was going on. One of them googled 'Reverend Emma Rogers' and was taken straight to the website. He phoned the mobile number they'd bought especially and spoke to her Mum and Dad and told them that Emma was alive, wounded but the surgeon said she would make a full recovery and advised both of the Wiltshire GP's stay at home for that evening and come bright and early the next morning when Emma would be in a much better condition to welcome them herself.

They tried to do that, but at a little after midnight and both wide awake jumped in their car and drove to Ipswich.

Despite their insistence I stood and welcomed them. The nurse took us to a small family room and made tea for all three of us. They had already been told by the police what had happened to their daughter.

"You brought her out," said Tom, with a choke in his voice.

"Both of us sir," I said, "Team effort all the way, I couldn't have done it without her". I'm not sure why I called him 'sir' but it seemed like the right thing to do. I knew I wanted to remain in her life, being friends with her parents couldn't do any harm. And after all, I had just spent the best part of a month living with and making love to their daughter. I think her Mum might have guessed though; when I spoke of 'Em' she beamed at me, and however much I tried to hide it, it must have been obvious to her what we had been to each other.