Monday, January 3, 2023, 12.32PM

Isabel stepped out of her taxi cab after it had stopped right in front of the gas station at number 76. She grabbed her phone and dialed the number she had received. Her call was answered within seconds.

“Allo?” A woman with a French-sounding voice said.

“It’s me, Isabel, I’m here for the video?” she half stated, half asked.

“Ok, where are you now?” the woman’s voice continued.

“I’m here at the gas station,” she said. Before she could say any more, the woman at the other end of the line instructed her to turn around and cross the street.

“You will find a black door behind a red building. Call back when you are there.”

Isabel saw that the call ended and turned around to look across the street to find that there was indeed one red building that stuck out between all the brown and grey tints. It occurred to her that the further she traveled down into Belgium, the more dusty and broken down the roads and buildings had become.

She crossed the quiet street and walked into the little alleyway between a paint shop and the red building to the left of it until she saw the black door marked with an old, rusty sign that said “delivery” in French.

Isabel called the number again and before anyone answered, the lock of the door clicked and it opened slightly towards her.

“Third door on your left,” the same heavily accented French voice said before disconnecting the call again.

The hallway was lit with a single tube light halfway down its length. It was empty, except for thick layers of dust and scattered debris from the deteriorating walls. The building definitely had seen better days. It was eerily quiet inside as it had been outside.

Isabel passed two door frames on her left hand side, but only one of them actually had a door in them. When she got to the third, she was three quarters of the way down the hallway. The brown door was closed. She looked at the small mail slot in the door at the height of her chest and smirked before she knocked.

“Come in,” a heavy male voice said in Dutch with a thick French accent.

Isabel opened the door and entered a small room that was sparsely furnished. Immediately in front of her she saw a bulky, bald man and a curly haired skinny woman sitting on a white couch across from a small salon table and an identical couch, which was placed against a lime green wall that Isabel recognized immediately from the two abstract paintings that hung in black frames on each side of a black door behind the empty couch. This was the same room where the French blonde and redhead from the videos recorded their RavageMoi interviews.

Immediately after Isabel entered the room and the two got a good first look at her, a heated discussion in French erupted between the woman and the man. Isabel did not understand a word of it. The woman pointed a finger at Isabel and seemed to get upset, but Isabel had no idea what this was about.

Judging from their body language, the woman was very upset about something and she seemed to curse at the man, who seemed to put it a lot of effort to calm the woman down again. She got up and came close to Isabel to take a good look at her, but quickly turned around again to the man to continue yelling at him. It was only when he produced a small white plastic bag from between his feet on the floor and threw it to the woman that she seemed to calm down a little. 

When he threw her a second similar bag, she stopped her cursing and sat back down on the couch.

The man tried to laugh the incident off and welcomed Isabel without getting up and told her to take off her jacket and backpack and come sit on the empty couch.

Isabel felt slightly uncomfortable with the skinny olive-skinned woman with the dark curly hair. It was as if she was a witch from a fairy tale that looked straight through her with her piercing brown eyes. She was completely dressed in black and wore excessive gold jewelry around her neck, wrists and fingers.

The muscular white man looked  familiar from the videos, though he visibly aged a lot in the years since. He acted jovial, but had a slightly sad look on his face and immediately lit another cigarette after he put the previous one out in the ashtray on the small table.

Behind the two of them stood a small camera on a tripod. It was obviously pointed at the couch where Isabel sat down.