Vice

Forty Three

Thea awoke to the sound of a blaring alarm. The noise blasted through the room, rattling the chains above her and shaking free loose dust from the ceiling. She flinched as her eardrums exploded in pain. She squinted against the pain to see Ragnar's shadow drifting around her.

"Mr. Hayl was not pleased with your state." His voice drifted above the alarm. "He would like me to take a different approach."

A few moments later a bright spotlight positioned in the corner was cast directly on her. On reflex her eyes shut tightly against it. The light burned red against her eyelids.

Ragnar's breathy voice came from right beside her ear, "You should have listened, mein Mädchen."

All sense of time was lost after that.

Each time her eyes relaxed and she felt on the verge of sleep the alarm would sound. Each time she opened her eyes the spot light would flood her vision rendering her blind to the world. She could feel her eyelids blink but all she saw was white.

With no images to process her mind began began to make its own.

Faint colors sifted across her vision. Colors like the ones that flick across the back of your eyelids when you shut them at night. They began to form recognizable shapes. Occasionally, they would take the form of a silhouette of someone she thought she knew. At first she wanted to call out to them, but the pain reminded her where she was.

Ragnar had disappeared for a while. When he returned the bags underneath his eyes were gone and he beat her with new vigor. The lack of sleep only added to the intensity of her pain. Her body was bruised and broken; her throat raw from screaming in agony.

When his fists grew too tired to hit her he grabbed one of his favored utensils and took to carving her skin.

Then the pain was gone. Ragnar was gone. All that was left was the bright white light and the sound of the alarm. At times it seemed as though she had lost all sense. She couldn't keep a thought in her head without it being ripped into the white abyss that surrounded her.

The figures produced by her own mind began to invade her until, slowly, they morphed in her vision into one collective image. A single dark figure that stood in the distance watching her. It moved forward through the milky void, reaching for her with the distorted ligaments of an abstract painting. The being moved forwards nearly in sync with the rise and fall of the siren.

Somewhere deep inside her, she could feel pain being inflicted on her by an outside source. But she was far too distracted with what her mind was creating. 

The figure was close enough that she could make out segments of it. A pair of piercing green eyes glinting in the white light. A smirk that taunted her. Two perfectly polished dress shoes covered the oddly shaped feet. Curled red hair fell from its scalp. The being encapsulated everything she had ever known into one entity.

A set of large calloused hands reached for her and wrapped around her neck, cutting off her air supply.

The siren faded into a constant ring which dissolved into the whispers of those that had left her behind.

"Goodbye Thea."

As quickly as they disappeared, her senses came back to her one by one.

First was the pain. An excruciating pain in her left hand had been the reason for her sudden reintroduction into the world around her.

She giggled.

Someone was dying for her attention.

"She's delirious." A voice sounded off to her right. The alarm had been replaced with a constant toe curling ring.