The silence, made of nothing but stone, temporarily fell away when the soft cloth slipped from around my eyes and landed at the base of my neck. I blinked in the alien surroundings profusely, curtains shunning all daylight, stained plates and cups loitering around the thin carpet as though they were disgruntled colleagues in a disorderly conference, frays in the cushions of the brown, broken-down, couch. The piece of furniture looked almost as depressed to be here as I felt, and I could've sworn it'd shrugged hopelessly at me and sighed. But I couldn't've been sure. I wasn't sure of anything anymore. I didn't know where I was, I didn't know what this was, and I didn't know who the even-paced breathing behind me belonged to, didn't know who'd just loosened the knot in the cloth around my head and granted me sight again.
"Who's there?"
My question, riddled weak with the looming tears collecting in my esophagus, prompted this ominous presence out of the shadows, dirty, faded converses shuffling out across the carpet to the couch, a tired wooly jumper, which looked like it would fall apart with its next wash – not that it looked like it ever got to take a ride around the washing machine – and blonde hair so addled with grease that you could ring it out and fry an egg with its secretions.
I gasped in realization and near choked, my throat not equipped to house thundering hearts, tears, and gasps all at once.
It was her.
The couch sank under her weight as she almost too cautiously took a seat on it, blue eyes colder than the inside of a freezer as they took on that of my quivering chestnut's.
"If you scream, Emily, you'll be giving me no other choice but to use the chloroform again." She spoke, very calm, very calculated.
Well I was glad that someone was calm, because I was freaking out outwardly and inwardly, moisture leaking from more holes in my skin than I could place a bucket under, heart wild and untamed in my chest, cheeks tickled with salty pear-shaped capsules, the flesh of my wrists thin and raw under the restriction of the rope cuffing them together, as I wriggled them with unhealthy aggression. With futile aggression.
Aggression.
The aggression with which she'd marked her canvases those dark reds and brooding purples hadn't been futile in the least. It'd been purposeful, violent, so heavy I'd near felt the wounds and abrasions depicted in each painting physically, and with this memory, I became hysterical, sniveling and hiccupping out. "Am," Another snivel, "Am I going to die?"
"I know your frightened," She paused, steely blue's stilling on me, "Don't be."
She reached for the packet of smokes sitting next to her on the couch, shortly after disappearing behind a gang of smoke clouds.
I hung my head low then, kinked strands of scarlet hair falling around my face with gravity's tug.
I hadn't seen this coming, not at all. It'd just been a normal day like any other, and if someone had informed me that I'd be in the predicament that I was in now: bound to a wooden chair in an unknown location, at the hands of a psychopath, I would've said, 'Not in this movie, mate.'
But this wasn't a movie. This was real, and sat across this pokey little room from me was indeed a psychopath.