Abridged Chapter Extract

 

Carrie-Anne awoke once more in the strange cell, aware that there was movement beyond the glass window to her left and shadows dancing crazy, disjointed moves on the floor to her right.  She was facing the floor.  It was as white as every wall in the room, bland and detached from anything less than clinical.  There wasn’t even a speck of dust to concentrate on, imagining it as a different shape or cartoon face.

She was lying on her front, with her head poking through a hole in whatever apparatus she was attached to.  Her limbs were still bound and as she struggled against them, she realised they had been tightened during her cataleptic state, brought about by the injection the willowy shaped man had shot into her.

What the hell were they doing to her now?  Why were they doing it?  The more focussed and coherent her thoughts became the more questions attacked her with spiking, jabbing probes with no answers at the end of their sharp points.  She was gradually growing accustomed to the fact that perhaps she really was in hell and there was no way to escape.  Perhaps she had died in the crash, and witnessing the van in flames was her spirit self, detached and separate from the burning pain of her body in the conflagration.  If that was the case, even praying wouldn’t free her from this predicament; that much was evident.

The shadows on the floor settled and she relaxed a little.  It was futile fighting her bonds, and impossible to raise her head to see who was in the room or beyond the sheet of reflective glass.  She was trapped like a Christmas turkey turned onto its breast to cook the most delicate areas.  Her oysters were bared for the taking.

“Miss Cruickshank?”

She tensed at the sound of the voice, the same voice which had warned her about cooperating earlier, waving the syringe in her face.  Was he as tall and imposing as he sounded?  Did his booming, thunderous tone scare others as it did her?

She didn’t care, as long as he didn’t hurt her, as long as her panties weren’t suddenly whipped from her vulnerable body and unspeakable things done for the sordid amusement of the watchers on the other side of the glass.

She murmured, words only in her head, garbled drivel on her lips.  A thin sliver of saliva dripped from her mouth and landed with a quiet plop on the white floor.  He addressed her again and she felt a cold hand on the back of her thigh.  She winced.  Was her worst fear of rape about to come true?  Was she to become the entertainment for a group of sexual deviants, torturing her with the same horrors David had inflicted upon the two boys of his choosing?

“I…” she muttered, a small bubble forming at the side of her mouth, bursting when the membrane could no longer contain the air inside.  A second one formed and she sucked it back in with a thick slurp.  “...I didn’t do anything.”

There, it was out, difficult as it was to speak in the position she was in.  But her statement was met with silence.  She expected to hear the inhospitable echo of mocking laughter, but there was nothing.  She caught a glimpse of shiny shoes as they passed by her head and she closed her eyes.  She didn’t want to whatever was coming, even if it was only the black, leather uppers of an anonymous torturer.

“Try to relax, Miss Cruickshank.  This won’t take long.”

She wanted to scream.  What won’t take long?  Why am I here?  Why have you pumped me full of drugs?  What the fuck are you doing to me?  All those questions raced around in her mind like an insane, baffling game of chase-the-rabbit, but it took all she had to mumble the only thing that had come out of her mouth.  She had neither the mental nor physical energy to say more.  She awaited her fate with all the acceptance of a rabbit caught in the bright headlights of an oncoming truck.

She flinched again as a hand swept the hair away from the nape of her neck and cried out weakly as something sharp penetrated the muscled flesh there.  The pain, short and not so sweet, ended almost as soon as it began and she heaved a grateful sigh of relief as she felt an antiseptic swab rubbing against her skin, soothing the wounded area.  The medicinal smell made her gag.

What were they planning?  Decapitation?  Alien implant extraction or implantation? She almost laughed, and would have found the energy to ask those questions if the sudden dizzy feeling which washed over her didn’t have her smirking and high as the highest cloud.  The fear evaporated, replaced by a numb indifference.  The worry was overtaken by bland apathy.  It reminded her of the effects of valium, which she had been so dependant upon for the first three months of her incarceration, when the night terrors had become too much to bear, when the thought of mingling with some of the most reviled female offenders in the country made her scream and hug the walls of her confinement in abject terror.

“Miss Cruickshank?”

She smiled, and then remembered her face couldn’t be seen so murmured a reply that could have been anything as far as she was concerned.  She thought it might have been, ‘Yes?’

“Miss Cruickshank, you have been given a strong sedative and anaesthetic.  You may feel drowsy and if you feel like sleeping, then sleep.  Don’t fight it.”

She imagined she nodded her head and giggled.  It was a quick, automatic reaction to the drug.  For some reason she was reminded of her childhood phobia of dentists and grimaced.  How she had screamed and kicked when that masked master of pain had loomed over her, brandishing gleaming, silver instruments of torture.  How she had called for her mother who sat waiting in reception, reading a tatty magazine, unaware of her daughters terror. 

Then she laughed loudly, imagining her face a bed of deep furrows, much like the droopy face of a cross-bred, over-pedigreed dog.  She felt as happy as she had ever felt in her entire life.  Whatever they had injected into her bloodstream, she wanted more of it.  Hell, they could sign her up for some shares in the company.

She laughed again and then stopped as a strange sensation shot through the back of her neck.  There was a ripping, tearing sound as desensitised flesh was torn from bone and muscle.  Suddenly a headache took over, making her wince with its throbbing suddenness, but it was soon forgotten as the happier side of the drug overcame it and left her feeling, if not elated, then a little closer to the heaven she suddenly dreamed of.

Slopping, wet sounds followed as the willowy man carried on with his task and she unexpectedly found herself enjoying the experience.  It tickled slightly, and didn’t hurt, which was for the better as far as she was concerned.  Whatever he was doing he was doing well, and even though she felt something sharp and cold slice into the inner flesh and tendons, she felt none of the pain which should have been associated with it.  She didn’t care why he was doing it now, as long as whatever drug he had administered didn’t wear off, leaving her vulnerable and agonised.

Although the floor was a plain white, dust free environment, she rapidly managed to find shapes within the blank movie screen in front of her where there were none before.  The bars of her forgotten prison, elongating in her minds eye, were first to manifest before becoming shadowy birds which flitted from one corner of her vision to the next.  Then they became bars again, bendy and without solid form, double jointed and pointed.  They crept towards her from all corners of the room, and she smiled welcomingly at their arrival.  They quivered in excitement the nearer they came.

She no longer felt the sensation in the back of her neck.  Instead she experienced the sensation of the willowy man detaching himself from her own being and moving away.  He left an empty space behind him, a feeling of nothingness devoid of human experience or emotion.  Whether it was the drug that had been forced into her which made her aware of this or a part of her psyche that was previously untapped, she didn’t know. 

She didn’t care. 

She also realised, in a strangely defining moment of clarity that taught her not to take everything her physical senses witnessed as the be-all-and-end-all, that every conscience thought in the room and beyond, in the larger confines of whatever building she was in, was accessible to her.  Suddenly she knew - although how that talent came upon her escaped her perception - that there were five people beyond the glass window, watching her every move.  They were watching in wonder, some totally oblivious but expectant of what was about to happen, others knowing exactly what fate lay in store for the bound and drugged subject.  She sensed two life forces in the room, although she was sure that only one of them was human.  For some reason, as a girl who had been terrified of The Exorcist movie as a child, the thought that something inhuman was sharing the same space as her didn’t frighten her in the slightest.  She thanked the heightened heavens for the drug they had given her.

When she managed to open her eyes, a task that was becoming more difficult the deeper the drug worked its way into her system, trying to drag her under into the depths of an indefinite state, she saw the form of the willowy man, or the outlined manifestation of his form, linger against the wall where the large window was.  He was speaking into an intercom, but the words were meaningless and jumbled; gibberish incarnate.  She tried to pick out language and phrases from what he was saying but gave up as everything he said lost meaning to her drugged-up, irrational mind; even what he seemed to be saying was too out-there for her liking. 

Did he actually say ‘the food is ready’?

She giggled at her own stupidity, relishing in her own sense of humour.  But those lissom, lengthening bars she imagined weren’t disappearing, they were becoming more solid.  They continued to flicker and thrash on the floor beneath her, elongating, strengthening.  Were they creeping closer?  And as she asked herself that question, she smiled and imagined herself nodding in affirmation; it was creeping closer, and creeper was the only name suited to whatever it was.  She knew this as instinctively as she knew the sky was blue.  The limbs seemed to wrap around her, each pointed end seeking out and delighting in the still, subdued form of her body.  She thought she felt them caress her skin, sliding over it like soft butter on bread.  They twitched and tightened, gripping her shoulders, hips, thighs and calves.  Not pinning her down, but attaching themselves, moulding their shapes to her contours.  It was becoming part of her, her form now its shape, and she felt a connection, not only of body, but of mind.

She had something it wanted.  And it tickled in its search.

She didn’t know when the realisation dawned that those black, elongated forms weren’t the bars of her mind’s prison, but something real, concrete and organic, but when it did, she didn’t seem to mind.  She now belonged to this creature as much as she did to herself.  Everything she had now belonged to it and it made her know this as soon as it delved into the wound the willowy man had inflicted on the back of her neck.  Her thoughts were suddenly drifting, melding with this new life attached to her, sharing each and every experience she had ever had.  She felt it probe her mind, literally, with a tongue or the lengthy penis of a macabre lover.  The experience wasn’t unpleasant.  She smiled, watching some of the shadow bars on the floor writhe and flutter as though heightened by a great climax.  And as it came inside her head, she climaxed with it, moaning with the pleasure, an undiluted joy that was beyond words, outwith her realm of understanding.

When it was finished it left her, slipping off like a silk sheet from her body, leaving her sobbing, wanting more and needing the warmth of her new lover once again.  She sensed it moving away from her, to the other side of the room where it was ushered beyond her awareness.  Almost crying out, she struggled against her bonds and the drug which kept her docile.  How could they do this?  How could they give her so much pleasure and then withdraw it as though she was nothing but a piece of meat to be used and discarded when their fill was satiated?  How could they join both minds together only to separate their physical beings, leaving only a tenuous line of connection holding them together?

She cried and her tears plopped onto the floor below her, forming a pool that reflected her heartbroken face.  In that moment she knew she was dead.  She sensed from the mind of the thing that had bonded with her that her number was well and truly up and she would never leave this place alive.  They had gotten what they wanted from her, and they would take it again and again until she had no more left to give.

Now she was so much meat, and even as the screaming began in an adjoining room, she found she didn’t actually care all that much.