My eyelids are swollen. I lie on a hardwood bench when my consciousness returns to me. I extract myself from the heavy pull of oblivion like a fly picking itself from a spider's web, one filigree wing, one twiglike hind at a time. Sticky silk clinging. I open my mouth and panic seizes me by the throat. It is not so that I cannot breathe. Rather, I cannot seem to stop my throat from swallowing. Over and over again it convulses in involuntary gulps as if some great object has lodged itself inside it and nothing can be done to shift it.
My wrists and ankles are strapped down. I know something in my pelvis has been broken and yet I suffer no pain at all. It is an eerie feeling. As if I am not in my own body, but merely a spectator, judging the human form that is resting on the table.
I wish to open my eyes.
There is no silence here, but a continues rumour and clatter which origin I cannot identify and sounds so awfully familiar all the same. I wet my lips. Dead skin sticky and catching at the seam of my mouth.
I wish to open my eyes. Please.
Let me open my eyes.
Such pleas, silently and unuttered, ascend from my mind. But no answer comes to console me. No safe, soothing voice descends to comfort me. And with the option of escape being a distant possibility, I silently resign myself to my predicament. Sinking in and out of consciousness, I lose all awareness of the passage of time; at some point I realise I can slightly turn my head, and when I do, the hardwood slap under me creaks once. Seconds pass in an agonizingly slow way. I finally open my eyes, and blink into the half-darkness of the room and wonder if every motionless silhouette surrounding me, is simply furniture, or something worse.
Another creak resounds. And at first, I wonder if it is an echo before I realise it as coming from somewhere deeper inside the cellar.
Footsteps.
My first instinct is to strain against my bounds. My breath speeds up. My chest seizing from it. My throat keeps swallowing and I resist the urge to trash, and wait, my frantic gaze fixed on the interior door that lies open to my right. My hands clench and my wrists cut into by the rusted steel until I deliberately must relax them beside me. A flash of indignation brings a spark of anger to life inside me as the sound of someone approaching grows louder.
It will hurt you, the voice returns. It will harm you.
The footsteps are almost to the room, slow and steady, and an unexpected apprehension shoots through me out of nowhere, a certainty that it will not be a person to round the corner but something worse, something utterly inhuman and appropriate to this shadowed, little room with the mouldy scents drifting in from the grille.
I blink and inwardly shake my head to clear it of the idea. My breath speeds up again. I hold it. And in an unconscious decision, I rip my gaze away from the doorway, focussing it on the roof with a frightening intensity. My lungs burn.
They pass.
The footsteps pass by the open door and distance themselves.
Still stricken, I remain motionless, certain that if I turn my head something will be watching me from the doorway, something warped and grotesque. Something that would drive me mad to see. My lungs burn.
Silence reigns.
I allow my breath to escape. Images flash by as my mind tries to reconcile the sharp, jagged fear that had just overwhelmed me. I push it deeper away. Everything feels too far away. Distant. Impossible to reach.
I should try to get up. I should try to find a way. But the blackness is creeping, reaching for me, the emptiness drawing away the living heat from my flesh, suffocating me. My mind screams. If I could just…
The next time I awake, I know I am not alone. The figure is now behind me, but it isn't really there. I can't make out any features... it's like a smudge in the air, like my eyes are unable to focus. Just a vague shape against an equally vague background. I know it is human, but my eyes make it too thin and too tall. And its outline is hunched over me, trying to... to crawl inside me, I think for some reason. Inside me. Like an insect burrowing into the ground.
I startle at the next sound.
"No— you can't put her with the other crazies," A voice tells another. "Ripped out a throat, once. Doctor won't allow it."
An indistinguishable question follows. My mind feels like it is wading through sludge — like that one time I had to wade through a moor to retrieve a dead body. Grouse sticking to my clothes and clinging and slowing my steps.
The same voice answers: "—about a decade ago. You didn't work here yet."
A murmur.
"Yeah," a pause, "I know— I know. Come on," a hard slap, "one of the boy's got a birthday coming up, and the kitc—"
'They' then depart, leaving me alone with my thoughts. And grim thoughts they are. It is clear to me that my desperate situation is only going to get worse, and it can lead to only one conclusion. I am going to die, not immediately but quite soon.
I allow myself to cry.
I find I cannot.