Consort

Chapter Three: Awakened

Chapter Three

     There was no light in the small room when the young boy opened his eyes. Everything was deadly silent, and the dreadful buzz of tinnitus rang in his ears. He groggily sat up, and a shooting pain snaked down from his neck to his chest, causing him to wince and gasp in agony.

Glancing around the room, the boy quickly concluded that he would have been much better off blind, the shadows cast in front of his eyes creating a pitch black abyss of never-ending darkness that chilled him to the very bone.

"Hello...?" No answer. His voice, filled with question and anxiety, reverberated around the room, bouncing off the walls and crashing back into his ears with an almost deafening echo, like the sound had been amplified. The boy winced again, pushing up to his feet, and his head thumped off of something hard and cold above him.

"What in mother's fuckery is-"

A loud, ear-splintering scream cut off his curse, causing the detective to gasp and jump with fright, banging his head off of the hard surface again. Feeling above him weakly, the boy desisted that it must have been the ceiling.

"Who's there?" The boy narrowed his eyes, quickly searching the shadows. After a short few moments, he deemed it pointless - not a thing was visible. His vision was blurred a hazy red around the edges, and his head was pounding. Panic pushed through his entire being, his neck still throbbing. He felt frantically across the pale, icy-cold flesh of his neck...to find nothing there. Slightly relieved but not completely at ease, he pushed to his feet shakily, and then banged his head again, cursing loudly again as he remembered he couldn't stand up. Instead, he edged along the ground, shaking hands navigating his way along the dry, concrete surface. A few seconds passed before a horribly, sickeningly sweet scent filled his nostrils, and a dull ache in his stomach and chest fired up. His throat began to burn the more he crawled along the ground, until his hands met a sticky, hot substance upon whatever the surface was he was crawling across, and then he winced as pain shot through him again. He stopped moving, wincing, and then heard another loud screech, followed by a cry of the same strange nature as before that he could not pinpoint. The young boy held his breath, realising that the noise was closer than before, and then he began moving quicker, not able to see a thing as he moved blindly; and then he just...dropped.

His body hit a hard surface with a deafening thud, and yet still he managed to push up again, feeling weakly above him as his limbs ached and his throat burned. No ceiling. He pushed to his feet, shaking his head, and kept moving forward, blindly panicking as he looked around him and realised he still couldn't see a thing. He stumbled blindly forward, not knowing what else to do, not knowing where to go, and then by some strange twist of fate...there was a crack of light. Not far ahead of the confused young detective, there was the smallest stretch of light. Small...but enough to guide him to what his mind told him could be some form of solace. And so his weary legs moved faster, or as fast as they would allow him to, until he pushed against the surface to reach the light, pressing all his weight against the surface as he flopped against it.

A door swung open against the pressing weight of his body, creaking open loudly and sweeping to the side to bang against the wall behind it. The detective slipped to the floor, gasping as he hit the ground for the second time in...he wasn't sure just how long. Time seemed to drag past, wherever he was. He wasn't very sure at all, to be honest.

As he righted himself, blinding light pierced into his all-too-sensitive eyes, and he winced, shielding his eyes for a moment before peeking out between his fingers to see that a white-painted, clinical-looking corridor stretched out before him. Everything was silent, too silent for his liking; the silence seemed deadly, as though the most gruesome of screams would pierce it in a matter of seconds and remove whatever sanity he seemed to hold.