I felt at loose ends. No breakfast awaited me, and I was too edgy to lie down. Instead, I sat in the hard metal chair at my table. Feeling tired, the stress of the change in my almost comforting routine had worn me out. My inner voice whispered I was institutionalized.
My eyes drooped and a steady buzzing pressure built in my brain. I rose from the chair to unsteady feet and just made it to my lumpy mattress before collapsing and pulling myself into a fetal position, hugging my legs as close to my chest as I could.
A slow blink turned into surrender to sleep, and I dreamed of the same vast outer space-like landscape as I had earlier, with its twinkling clusters of lights and clouds of many colored hues. Even as foreign as this mindscape was, I felt a certainty in my gut. As if I were where I was supposed to be. The luminescence I had hallucinated as my uncle remained. When I registered that fact, his voice sounded, resonant and masculine as if it was inside my head.
“Cassandra? Are you okay?” He paused, then added, “You aren’t hallucinating this, and I am coming for you. Believe it.”
I gathered my wits enough to respond. “If I’m not making all ‘this’ up because I’ve finally flipped my gourd, how exactly do you plan on getting me out of here?” Confusion pulsed my way, but I didn’t know the cause. His response sounded firm like a brick wall of reason.
“Leave the how to me. Why’d you disappear so suddenly earlier? Are you okay?”
“The guards came and took me somewhere, but I didn’t hear them enter my cell while I was dreaming you. Why won’t you answer my question?” My frustration at his evasion slowly morphed into panic, because if he couldn’t give me an answer, then I was creating all of this just to assuage my need to escape. My inner voice assured me that it was no delusion. I felt so tired. My awareness started to fade. The beautiful landscape flaked and crumbled apart as I sank into a real dreamless sleep.
The next sound I heard was my alarm. When I tried to roll over to turn it off, I found my limbs tied to the bed and my head felt like it was going to detonate into tiny pieces. A hand shut off the alarm at the same time the bed depressed along my side. Laser Eyes came nose to nose with me. My head continued to throb in time with my heartbeat. We existed in a vacuum of time between predator and prey—no sound, no air.
He broke the silence with a voice that sounded like rocks ground against one another. “What do you dream?”
Seconds ticked then he spoke again, “What do you dream?”
It took me a moment to realize that the impatiently repeated question was for me. I tried to swallow, but fear desiccated my mouth, and my throat clicked before I managed to utter, “Nothing.” My voice sounded alien to my ears. I had a moment to wonder if it was me who had spoken.
His face was so close to mine I couldn’t see his mouth, but his eyes made me think he might have smiled. “We will see.”
Laser Eyes left my side so quickly it felt like the outline of his body should still be hanging in the air like a twisted real-life version of the Road Runner. My mother had chased me around the house once after Saturday morning cartoons, poking the end of my nose and saying, ‘Beep, beep!’ The happy memory was out of place, but my mouth twitched at the gift my mind had given me.
I turned my head as Thing One pushed back through the almost closed door with a rattling rolling cart on top of which rested a car battery. Thing One pulled a tangle of wires and clamps off the cart and clipped them on my toes. Immediately I wiggled my feet in my restraints trying to dislodge the clamps. The metal teeth had too tight of a grasp on my flesh.
Thing Two ghosted into the room with a thin towel and a bucket. The guards made eye contact, and with a nod, Thing One flipped a switch on the machine. My body became the pain, one big arc of pain. My joints felt like fire. I messed myself, but I was beyond caring.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of blistering agony, Thing One turned off the machine and removed the restraints. After all, where would I go? Thing Two began to clean me, turning me this way and that.
Soiled clothes and bedding vanished, and I lay cleanly naked on the bare plastic mattress. Laser Eyes returned. I didn’t see his face or his horrible eyes this time because I kept my own closed, but it felt like his presence.
A hand touched my left foot and ever so lightly traced fingers up the inside of my leg to my most private parts, then up to my stomach and breasts. The hand ran back down to my center and began to slide inside of me.
My eyes popped open as I laid there without the will to fight. The touch was almost a caress as if he assumed I should enjoy it. The offending finger withdrew ever so slowly. I heard the whisper of shoes sliding across the floor, and the cart with the torture device rolled from my sight. A rattle of metal on metal, like utensils of some kind clinking against each other, drew my focus.
Laser Eyes came back into my field of vision holding a sharp instrument. It reflected the light from the fluorescent fixtures. He leaned down to balance its point in the center of my navel.
In his creepy unnaturally grating voice, he said, “Shall we try again? What do you dream?”
He smelled with evident relish the finger coated in my blood. My voice sounded even more abused and misused than it had the first time I spoke, “What do you want me to say? I don’t remember my dreams.”
They hadn’t broken me. My mind was all I had, and I would be damned if I gave it up to this crazy sick freak who was probably responsible for my parents’ death. My inner voice seconded the notion.
Laser Eyes offered a small tight smile as if I had made him jubilant by offering up continued resistance.
“Is that so?”
When he pushed the metal into my navel, it almost didn’t hurt, but then pain blossomed. I raised my head in a jerky, stiff movement to look down the length of my body. Bright red blood pooled in the small indention. I replied in a rush of sound, my voice cracking, “I don’t remember!”
A slow turn of the cold metal in my flesh made my hands rise to wrap around my tormentor’s wrist. I strained to keep my head in its uncomfortable position, allowing me to gauge the depth that the tip had sunk into my middle. I sucked in to lessen the pressure against my skin.
“Ah, so you do have some sense of self-preservation.”
I knew I was no match physically for him and that letting me hold his wrist to keep the cut from going deeper was just a game.
“What does it matter what I dream?” I begged. I tried to make my face look as confused and panicked as possible, which wasn’t hard. I was confused, and I did want to know what it mattered.
Laser Eyes held my gaze for an eternity. The pressure against me eased, and he stood next to the bed taking the cold instrument out of my navel at the same time. He turned his head slightly as if to speak to someone besides me.
“Bring her to my quarters tomorrow at first light.”
Thing One and Two scurried back into my line of sight to begin cleaning the room. Laser Eyes left my cell without a backward glance. The return to silence was more unsettling to me than my little chat session had been. Once the door closed behind him, there wasn’t any proof anything had occurred other than the wound in my navel.
Thing Two cleaned my cut with alcohol and left it uncovered before he pulled a fresh tunic over my head. I let the guard dress me, offering no resistance. My mind shrieked about the deadline of dawn tomorrow. What sadistic scenarios awaited me then?
I hoped, dreamed, and wished fervently my mental mirage about an uncle coming to save me was real and that it somehow would happen before I was due to appear before Laser Eyes again. I wouldn’t survive the third meeting, and my inner voice echoed the sentiment. Before Thing One and Two left they did away with all traces of my painful torture and interrogation.
At first, I laid on the cot letting my mind replay all of the morning’s events over and over just to cement the facts in my memory for later scrutiny. I started to feel a buzzing at the back of my mind accompanied by a pain that seemed to top my earlier electrocution,
mostly due to its concentration in my head.
The room began to fade around the edges, and I wondered if I'd had an aneurysm and death would be my final escape after all. A blindingly white light flashed, destroying what remained of my ability to see my cell. An intense prickling sensation coursed through my pores like an army of razor blade chiggers digging in.
The pain receded as quickly as it had peaked, and the same brown eyes in the face that had been in my earlier hallucination came into sharp focus. When my vision fully cleared, I observed the dome of a daytime sky overhead with hardly a cloud and nothing but flat, tilled farmland as far as the eye could see. I lay on my back with the brown-eyed man from my dream leaning over me. His face showed age in all the usual places. Closely cropped black hair hid bits of gray. The light brown of his iris drew me because it reminded me so much of my mother’s eyes. Tan skin hinted at his mixed ethnic legacy. I wondered if he spoke Spanish like Mother had.
Before it could fully register I was no longer in my cell, my uncle’s face altered into an angry, concerned expression.
“Can you sit up?” he barked. “We’re too exposed here, and I need to get you someplace safe as soon as possible.” He motioned behind him to a beat up truck parked on a narrow, hard-packed dirt road.
When I didn’t answer right away, he frowned in restless impatience, drawing his eyebrows together to create more wrinkles between them.
“Can you stand? Are you injured?”
When I still failed to respond, he reached out calloused hands and gently pulled me into a sitting position which caused my ears to ring and a spinning sensation started a nauseous heave in my stomach. I turned my head to the side as quickly as I could, but I still sprayed bile or whatever happened to be in my mostly empty stomach.
The wind blew in a blessedly cool caress against my neck, and when a hand touched my shoulder, tentatively I shrugged it off, too afraid that if I moved again, I would feel the need to vomit in the dirt.
A deep inhalation ended in a gruff, “Sorry, but we need to move, Cassandra. We can’t stay out here.”
When I didn’t feel the need to throw up for a good minute, I faced the man who claimed to be my uncle and said in a clear voice that surprised me, “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me your name. The answer to two of your earlier questions happens to be yes I am hurt and no, I can’t stand.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners, but his mouth remained sober. “My name is Gerome. Would you like me to carry you?” He paused for a moment then added just as seriously, “Try not to throw up on me.”
I gazed into his face that seemed so strangely foreign yet so achingly familiar at the same time. “I promise to try.”
As Gerome pulled me gently against his chest, he stood on the uneven earth. I caught two lone footprints on a tilled row not five feet away. Curiously, there were no steps to the spot or away from it. Gerome couldn’t have jumped to where we were. Why would he? Confused, I wondered at the little mystery inside such big ones. Before I could ask my eyes lost their focus again, and the world faded to black.
Chapter Two: The 5 W’s
A tremor made my hand shake as I reached for the dented metal knob of the front door. Pulling my fingers into a fist, I squeezed until I felt a bit steadier. In the few weeks I had been living with my uncle Gerome and his wife Maggie, I found myself staying inside too much. The comfort of my room called to me with a nearly irresistible seductive power.
Refusing to let my fear rule me I began forcing my participation in everyday activities instead of hiding myself away. Leaving the house got easier each day.
For one thing, Gerome wasn’t much of a talker and the more fragile I seemed, the less likely I would be to get answers. I didn’t think his failure to share information about my mode of rescue or how he'd found me at all was intentionally meant to keep me in the dark. It could have been an incredibly misguided attempt to protect someone he viewed as a broken child.
Gerome’s wife Maggie was red-headed, imposing, tall, and busty with a callipygian backside. By far, she was the largest woman I had ever seen and the only person for whom Gerome smiled slightly. She kept trying to fatten me up every chance she got, and I used one of those opportunities to pepper her with questions.
Unfortunately, she followed Gerome’s lead regarding my treatment, although somewhat reluctantly. The most I got from Maggie had been, “Dear, your parents were living in the open without support, hiding in plain sight from all comers. They left themselves vulnerable to danger, going it alone that way. You’re lucky to be alive at all. Gerome thought you might have been dead for years. How he found you and got you out of there, I’ll leave him to explain. You’ll also have to enroll in school for training. As you are, you’re quite dangerous.”
Puzzled, I asked, “Trained for what, and why am I dangerous?”
“You’ll need to ask Gerome about that. I’m not sure how he wants to tell you. It’s a lot to take in, Cassandra, just know we won’t hurt you here.”
Maggie’s soft brown eyes were kind so I couldn’t bring myself to scream at her, but I wanted to.
About a month of being put off by Gerome was enough for me. The whole thing was strange but how would I know normal? How did he find me? How did he get me out of the cell? Why couldn’t he find me sooner—like, say, before I’d suffered eight years in that stinking place? Who were my parents to the people who had murdered them and why had anyone wanted to kill them at all? The questions stretched off to a future I couldn’t seem to fathom.
I had a room to myself at the back of my aunt and uncle’s simple two bedroom pier and beam home. We all shared a bathroom, which can be a little unsettling when you aren’t used to waiting a turn or smelling anyone else’s odors. Maggie sometimes forgot to flush, and Gerome wasn’t tidy about cleaning his whiskers off the sink.
I had privacy but still couldn’t get rid of the paranoid, watched feeling. Eight years of constant surveillance will do that to a body. I had a mirror in my room, a window, furniture, and my own clothes.
The mirror was the strangest, unsettling thing. In my first days, I sneaked peeks at myself. I could finally see how other people saw me. My features brought a picture of a fox or a mouse to mind since my nose and chin came to such a narrow point, and my mouth was generous but thin-lipped. In the mirror, my skin was so pale you could see the veins, even though it still retained some color from my days in the prison courtyard. I had light brown eyes like my mother and uncle. My hair was coarse and dark like both of my parents, although my mother’s had been ironing board straight and my father’s so curly that if it got long it became unruly. Mine was somewhere between the two textures with a light wave.
It felt good to see myself and remember my parents. My pre-incarceration life seemed dull and far away. I would do whatever I could to keep it close. Often, I wondered if the things I remembered weren’t just wishful thinking.
Gerome appeared to hold a leadership position here. Wherever 'here' was, since no one had been forthcoming. How did I relate to these people? How did I even begin? If I didn’t figure out something soon, I’d just continue to be alone out of habit.
Speech didn’t come naturally. I could think a whole paragraph in my head, but only two words might leak out. I truly never thought I would leave my captivity alive, and suddenly here I had a chance at a life but no idea how to start. As crazy as it sounded to my inner voice, sometimes I missed the old routines. Doubt about what the next step would be on any given day hadn't existed. Except the last one of course.
Gerome and Maggie had already left the house for the day. My aunt was the resident doctor, and I knew she spent her days in the infirmary. My uncle was another matter since I still had no clue where he went or what he did.
Reaching for the knob, I steadied my hand with determination and opened the front door. A gust of dirt-laden wind assaulted my face. The weather here was a mercurial ever changing entity. It chose to blow hot or cold as it so desired based on secret wh
ims no one would ever decipher. Tugging the thick hood of my coat over my hair, I pulled the door closed behind me and stood on the porch. I looked down the rows of almost identical houses, trying to decide which way to go.
I could roam the compound freely so long as I didn’t go past the twelve-foot chain-link fence enclosing the whole of it. How I would even attempt that I didn’t know since armed guards patrolled it regularly. So I’d gone from one prison to another, but this one gave the illusion of freedom. The people here acknowledged I existed though not many talked to me. Most of them dressed the same in layers of clothing and bulky coats. I guessed it was to ward off the cold wind here rather than it being a uniform.
I’d been making a habit of walking in the mornings to a small park area with concrete benches, playground equipment, and a lone basketball hoop. Once I decided on my destination, I stepped off the porch and trekked down the unpaved pathway between homes to the main road leading off the open park square. I ambled over to sit in the warm morning sunlight on a random bench. Warmth from the sun’s direct rays seeped through my clothes and reminded me of my prison courtyard. My mind kicked back hard to that last day and the torture.
Suddenly I could see Laser Eyes in my mind and feel his finger as it violated me. The way he smelled the digit coated in blood with that nasty look of enjoyment on his face repulsed me. I could almost feel his hands on me and hear his voice again. My stomach started to roll. I bent to the side of the hard bench and lost my breakfast on the dried grass. I looked up with a shaking hand over my mouth. A knot of kids about my age froze mid-conversation to stare. I broke eye contact as fast as possible, the damage done. I would never relate to these people—ever.
A hand gripped my shoulder, the fingers like iron clamps on my collar bone. My uncle’s rasping voice whispered low in my ear.
“Don’t mind them. They don’t have your strength. None of them could have survived what you did for years without losing their minds. You’re light years beyond them. You might as well be in another galaxy.”
Chimera (The Weaver Series Book 1) Page 2
