Chapter One
She must have blacked out…
The music was no longer playing. It was as if she could almost physically feel the absence of sound, as though she were deaf. She wasn't deaf, was she? No, a few heartbeats after hitching her breath and becoming very still, pushing past the pain that seemed to radiate from her arm and into her shoulder, chest, and head, she found that she could make out a faint creaking noise…
She had to think. Where was she? Darkness, dank air that was mouldy—a cellar somewhere? Someone had trussed her up and put her in a cellar. She heard the creak of floorboards above her.
There was a person—no, that monster—walking around on the floor above her. She couldn't determine what it was that he was doing up there, but chances were it wasn't something that was going to be good for her.
She tried to tilt her head. She couldn't—why? She could feel (by the absence of any actual sensation) that there were straps that were holding her head taught, so tight that her forehead and chin were almost painful in the numbness that permeated out through her jaw and neck. Everything felt too stiff, and her head hurt so bad.
What was going on? She'd always been told she was a clever girl, why couldn't she figure this out? That little voice inside her told her that she was in shock. Her breathing was erratic, and the fact she could taste salt meant she'd been crying. Still was crying...
Mum! Dad! Help! Mum! She was screaming the words in her head, but they wouldn't come from her lips. Why?
A tear rolled down her cheek and her nose felt all snotty. She'd not cried like this since she'd fell so badly from her bike that she had to go to hospital for stitches. Where was her daddy? He'd promised to always help her. Why wasn't he here? The little voice inside her told her she was becoming hysterical. She didn't care.
Dad! No sounds left her lips. Why? Where was her daddy? Wasn't he supposed to be there for her, to save her from Bad Things like this? Why had he not stopped this Bad Man from hurting her?
The man, the monster—the Beast—had done something to her arm. She didn't know what had happened, as it, too, was strapped to the chair she was in, but it was obvious that, that... brute had done something to her. She whimpered. Had he broken it? She couldn't see, the strap holding her head was stopping her.
The pain—the throbbing ache that was branching out and sending tendrils of agony through her—scared her more than she wanted to admit. "A given type of injury has to have a relative correlation to a type and intensity of pain," came that little analytical voice inside her. Did that mean it was a really bad injury or..?
The snick of a lock turning and the sudden infusion of light from above and to her right broke her out into near-panic. She squinted against the brightness, almost missing the shadow cast over the wall as a man descended the wooden stairs with heavy footsteps, thomp, thomp, thomp…
Weirdly, the first thought that entered her mind at this moment was how much his raspy breath sounded like that of her asthmatic babysitter, Mrs. Grunnings. Unlike Mrs. Grunnings, the cloying, sweet smell of pipe tobacco clung around the shadowy figure. The stench as he grew closer threatened to smother her as he stalked toward her.
Her eyes were having trouble making out details. The light coming from the doorway above upstairs was the only source of illumination, and the figure looming over her was back-lit. He stopped, roughly a meter away, his features shadowed into strange, menacing angles.
Belatedly, she tried screaming. All that came out was a muffled squeal, and she realized why she hadn't been able to call out before: there was a gag in her mouth. It tasted odd. Maybe it was an old rag or dusty cloth. She'd sucked in air to scream and coughed as dust and particulates of fibres made their way into her lungs.
Despite her urge to gag, she tried screaming again. Her vision blurred as her eyes swam with tears that were now streaking down her face, gathering on the underside of her chin, so that the tickling sensation was all that she could focus on for a moment. Her thoughts churned faster and was becoming less ordered the longer this monster stood near her, though she felt less logy as whatever this monster had made her breathe crept away from her normally very efficient mind.
Focus! that little commanding voice inside her shouted. Her attention was drawn back to the shadowy, towering figure as the heavy, raspy sound of his shallow breathing quickened its pace, the faint outline of his left hand starting to quake as he reached behind his back, pulling out something that gleamed dully in the faint light that peeked through the door upstairs…
"Pretty dolly," he murmured, taking a half-step forward.
There was a saw in his hand. Hermione had seen her parents' medical textbooks, and she recognised it for what it was. A bonesaw.
She whimpered, seeing murderous anticipation on his face. Her own face was stretched into a rictus of terror, somehow mixing with revulsion, when she saw that the hand not holding the bonesaw was rubbing at his crotch.
The darkness shrouded the details, but Hermione knew what this horrid man was doing. Two years ago her Daddy had told her about Bad Touching, and this beast was bad touching himself in front of her.
Not good, not good, not good! What if he touched her like that? She was bound up—how could she stop him?
Or maybe he was going to do something else… involving that bonesaw?!
Hermione screamed with everything she had, hoping beyond hope that Daddy Daddy Daddy save me! Save me Dad, from this bad man!
Her whimpers seemed to excite the monster even more. His low voice came out breathy, in a dead monotone that somehow betrayed the excitement that was boiling just underneath the surface...
"Pretty dolly." Taking another staggering half-step towards her, the dully shining tool in his hand was cocked and steady. "Does little dolly like her new dress?" Without pausing for a reply, he whispered to himself, "Yes, methinks she does…"
Hermione howled in panic and loathing as she felt rough, calloused, sticky fingers catch the hem of a sundress she knew she hadn't put on that morning. She'd been in trousers and a smart button-down shirt—.
The monster's fingers were working their way up the bare flesh of her left thigh, and further, one finger teasing at the edge of her knickers in such a way that made Hermione's stomach recoil.
She heard his breath hitch. What was he going to do? Hermione could barely make out his eyes as they studied her as though he were on the cusp of a decision, but was restraining himself.
"Please, please let me go," she whimpered, but the gag stole her words and her mouth just made an mmph mmmph noise. I want to go home!
With a speed she'd never have guessed he possessed, he struck her, the strap holding her head biting into her forehead and stopping her from being able to absorb even the slightest bit of momentum. She saw stars. Galaxies of pain ached and throbbed through her consciousness and coalesced into her jaw. The coppery taste in her mouth told her that she'd bitten her tongue, and the tight strap around her throat was making it difficult to swallow.
As she came to, her eyes were able to mostly focus on the man who, to her relief, had stepped toward the opposite end of the cellar, where she could now see there was something hanging from the earthen wall. Its shape was strange, as though it were maybe a bulky starfish or four-limbed squid, but as the man dug out a matchbox from a random-looking pile and set alight a fat, squat candle, Hermione could finally make out what exactly that ill-shapen form was: it was a person.
However, it wasn't like any person Hermione had ever seen before. At each joint—where the limbs were attached to the torso—there was thick black thread sewn there, binding limbs that did not match the body they were affixed to. There was no head, nor a right leg, though the right arm propped up next to the body was still weeping blood, awaiting the seamster's attention.
Blood, an arm... Hermione's screams tore at her vocal cords, and somewhere in the back of her mind, a cold, analytical part of her lizard brain was amazed that she hadn't fainted. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, and she caught the strong, sharp scent of blood now mingling with the acrid smell of poop and wee… That was her! She hadn't lost control of her bladder or bowels since she was a toddler. Her mother had been proud of the fact she'd potty trained early. From the look of hunger in the strange man's eyes, though, she was almost certain that he was even more aroused by her loss of bodily function.
Get away, get away, get away! Gathering every ounce of strength she had, she tried to struggle against her restraints. She had to get away, She had to leave the monster behind! Despite her struggle, she remained seated and bound to the hardback chair, aching and bleeding from various wounds—most of which were self-inflicted from her struggles to get free.
The monster moved back towards her, despite his great, heaving bulk almost gliding as he moved. One rough hand once again slowly made its way up to her private place. What was he going to do to her? Why was he touching her there?
It was at that moment that she saw the bonesaw again, still held in his hand, as it descended to rest teeth-down on the goose pimpled, not-so-meaty flesh of her inner thigh. She looked down at the blade in a moment of pure horror before bringing her eyes back up into those dark eyes, catching them with a crazed grin—-
And she screamed. And screamed. And screamed...
Pain, terror, and the unexpected addition of fury that gripped Hermione ignited something within her, and it came out as a raging inferno, incinerating the gag that was in her mouth, and setting everything in that dark, horrid cellar on fire. This included the man who, up until that point, had been sawing half-way through the joint between her femur and the acetabulum of her pelvis. The force of the blast coming from Hermione's mouth sent him flying back, unable to scream because of the force of the impact driving the air out of him, and the fire that was immolating him being sucked into his lungs.
Hermione didn't notice any of this, because she found herself pulling at the straps that were now charred and brittle, freeing herself from the chair and falling down to the floor, with the odd sensation of being squeezed through a straw—
A floor that was carpeted, green triangles upon blue rows of diagonals, a design so familiar to her that, even in her current state of terror, bewilderment, and of bleeding out, she recognized that she was somehow at the Library down the road from her house. With that puzzling realization, however, her body succumbed to the shock of her wounds and the nightmare of the hell she'd experienced, and blackness overtook her.