Serendipity

Chapter 15

When I wake up, it's dark wherever I'm at, a pervasive quiet pressing down on me. It feels like I'm floating in nothingness, my senses stuck in a vacuum. I try to look around but it's just the same shade of darkness no matter which direction I try to focus on. I'm not sure how long I lay there when a pinpoint of light pierces the darkness surrounding me. Then I'm free-falling toward it, my mouth open to scream as it rushes closer, growing larger and larger the faster I fall, but no sound emerges. Just as I reach it and think I'm going to fall through, I'm not moving any more.

I'm standing in a room with knotty pine paneled walls and a painted ceiling. When I look down, the floor beneath my feet is made of wide, dark wood slabs. Looking back up, I notice I'm standing at the end of a tall bed, the frame made of young trees stripped of their bark, knots and whorls highlighted by dark paint then sealed with a clear coat to bring out the blonde grain. There's a dark red comforter thrown across it, partially pushed off to one side, and dark red flannel sheets under it. There's no other furniture in the room, the only source of light coming from a fire crackling in the fieldstone fireplace to one side and the cold light from the moon slivering across the floor, like the thin, bony fingers of a dead hand.

At first, there's just silence in this room with a really low buzzing, as if the sound from a television has been muted. Then faintly, the sound of a voice crying, the unintelligible words like fingernails scratching down my spine. Turning around, I can't tell where it's coming from when it seems like I'm alone in this room. But the sound gets louder, the pain in the voice coming through loud and clear.

"Please don't hurt me anymore, Jeffrey...I promise I won't say anything to anyone. I swear! No, please. No one will know what you did. No...no, Jeffrey! No..."

I turn around again, this time seeing someone with their back to me, kneeling between the thighs of another person, a smaller person, who's laying on their stomach with legs spread open and tied to the posts at the end of the bed. From the broad bare back, it appears to be a man, and he's leaning over the back of the prone figure. I feel like a voyeur of a really bad homemade s*x movie, watching something I really don't want to watch, yet unable to tear my gaze from it. All I want to do is close my eyes and cover my ears as the whimpers of the woman get louder, eventually turning to a scream of pain. The man's movements of one arm are slow and calculated, while the other is moving in a rhythmic motion.

With each movement, I feel a stabbing, white hot pain in my back, piercing through the shock. All I can do is fall to my knees, my mouth open to scream but nothing coming out. My whole body starts to tremble, the pain excruciating to the point of being on the verge of passing out. Wave after wave, the hot pain is there, slicing through my back. It almost feels like déjà vu, as though I've gone through this once before but not remembering the details.

Soon, the n*ked man climbs from the bed, leaving the woman to lay there, alone. I step closer, the pain now a dull ache. The closer I get, the louder the ragged breathing of the woman sounds. On suddenly shaky legs, I reach out to grab ahold of the closest bed post to steady myself. My gaze lands on the tie wrapped around the post, following it up to where it's tied to an ankle. My gaze wanders up the leg, getting to the back of the knee when I start seeing spots and smears of red on the backside and on the inner part of the thigh covering several bruises forming. That's when I realize she's n*ked. As my gaze moves further up, I see deep red liquid pooling in the dip of her lower back, rivulets tracking down the sides of her waist before being absorbed into the sheets beneath her. Three long cuts, done nearly parallel to each other, almost touching and crossing in a few places, stripe across her back diagonally, the ends of her dark hair starting to stick in the thickening liquid. Her face is covered by the rest of her hair, wisps moving from her breath, one arm still tied to the bed post at the head of the bed, the other loose with the tie still on it.