She lay for a moment without moving, savoring the unviolent darkness that blanketed her beaten and bruised form. Her whole body felt ached and torn, her head spinning with the pain of numerous blows to her skull. She was sure that every bone in her body was shatter, every inch of skin torn. She did a mental check of her injuries, gratefully discovering that she only had one rib that ached menacingly, but despite the pain that her body sported, her most prominent wound was the gouge out of her hand.
She moaned and shifted uncomfortably, the small stones of the dirt floor biting into her bard breast and legs. The movement was painful, but not impossible. Gathering her strength, she pushed herself up into a sitting position, looking around in the dark room. Through one unswollen eye she spied four vague forms huddling in the barley perceptive darkness.
"Hello?" she croaked her voice rouge from her yelling and screaming. She heard a movement from her right, but otherwise received no answer. "Hello?"
"So how'd the bastard come across you?" a cold, hardened voice asked. It belonged to a woman, though Christine could not tell her age from the rouge timber of her voice.
"I was riding…he wanted money…" Christine shuddered, still hardly able to comprehend what had happened. Two kidnappings in three months. I'm never leaving the manor after this again; she thought to herself, then crossed her thoughts. How did she know she would ever even see the manor again? Or Raoul?...or Margareite…or Erik. Her eyes shut tightly against this last thought. She could not entertain such morbidities. At the moment, in her situation, insomuch as it was, all she needed to do was focus on staying alive.
"Ah… yeah that's how he got me, too," the rough voice sounded again.
"Where are we?" Christine asked, fighting to see with her good eye.
"Couldn't tell you if I wanted to, child," another voice said somewhere in front of her, a ways away. It was deeper, huskier, and older.
"How long have you been here?" Christine asked, her voice becoming smooth again.
"Depends on who you're askin' hon," said the first voice. "I've been here at least a year, if not more. I lost count months ago."
"Three years here," answered the second, her tone bitter.
" Lil' one's been here a all her short life. Her mother was Madaline before she gave birth the little rat. Now Madeline be Dead Madeline," commented the first voice as a soft light from a single lamp lit the room. Christine would have gasped, had she had the energy when greeted with the sight before her. The speaker was a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, her skin smooth, but gaunt over her naked body. She, too supported many fresh scathes and bruises, old scars sprinkled across her bared chest, stomach and legs, her skin dark with dirt and smeared traces of blood.
Looking around her she found the older voice. The woman was perhaps in her thirties, with dirty brown hair, dull eyes and in very much the same condition as the first, her stomach baring a crude, deep scar that marred her navel and ran into her pubic hairs between frighteningly skinny legs.
Dragging her eyes away from her, she studied the other two bodies she had gathered an impression of earlier. One was a young girl, no older then ten, her greasy blond hair hanging about her young face in dirty locks hiding her eyes. She must have been the "lil' one" that the other woman had been talking of. Her starved body was naked as well, and her leg was bent in an odd angle. Christine grimaced, sure that it was broken. Her ribs ridged through her skin, her pelvic bone jutting out.
A shuffle of movement farther to her left drew her gaze to an atrocity that leaned against the wall. If the others were in bad shape this one was a corpse. A moan escaped the lips of the woman. She bled leaking trails from a stab wound deep in her belly, puss gathering around the puncture of the kin. A rope was biting deeply into her neck, chaffing the skin into a raw wound. Her arm hung limply and grossly to the side at such an extreme turn that she hadn't a doubt that it was broken, if not shattered. Her head, as the little girl's, was bowed in pain, unaware, most likely, of the world around her. She moaned again, lolling her head up and to the side now, causing Christine to turn away from the side, gagging violently. She felt rough hands gather around her waist and dragging her up to stumbling feet, still gagging, her stomach beginning to heave uncontrollably.
"Over here now," said the older voice. "That's right. Can't have you heavin' up in the only clean part of this place. Right here." Christine's nose picked up the strong scent of vomit and human waste, bringing her to the feeling that her stomach would be throw up with the emptying contents of her stomach. When she had nothing left to vomit, the woman was back, gathering her in her arms and supporting her away from the coner. Christine glanced at the creature that lay against the wall again momentarily.
Her face on one side was ripped and torn, but the other side of her face, the right side, was stripped of skin but for a few patches that moldered and rotted. The blood dripped down desguistingly beyond her bared cheekbone and descended her neck, pooling about full breasts that we mutilated with the traces of a knife. Christine's stomach swirled again, and she gagged, but managed to look away and recompose herself.
"You be needin' the corner again?" the woman asked, but she shook her head. "Not a pretty sight, is he? Naw…Naw that Andrew got to 'er. He liked to rip apart his women."
Christine balked.
"Rip apart?" she protested. "She's mutilated!"
"No need for such big words now, miss," the first woman that had spoke replied from the farthest corner of the … room. What was she in anyway? "The rest of us not be high people like you."
"What's your name child?" asked the older one, now seating herself against a wall again.
"Christine Daae."
"Well, miss Daae," said the oldest one. "I'm Martelli, but you can call me Marti- everyone does."
"Mary." That was the older woman. "The lil' one's Kassandra. The skrewed up one is Callendra."
Christine nodded, beginning to shiver. She wrapped her arms around herself gazing at the others in none but their skin. She at least had a night-shift; tore and bloody as it was, it was something on her back. Where was she? How soon would she face the same fate as the rest of these women? Beatings and rapings, from what she gathered. Her heart wrung as she thought of little Margareite, her mind murmuring that Kassandra was very much like her little friend. Perhaps she could bond with this child as well?