I Wish

Chapter 23

There was a certain kind of sound in there. A strange buzzing. It was the only other sound being made that wasn’t being caused by me. I was sobbing. It was awful. I wasn’t sure what to do, and let's be real there was no way I was going to be able to consider it either. There was just… no one. Just the dark. Almost absently, I struggled. Trying to get my hands free, trying to stand up, just trying anything. I didn’t know what they wanted from me, or why I was here. I didn’t know why they needed me… Oh god, what if they didn’t need me? I could feel the skin begin to tear at my wrists, the rope not budging any for my attempts. I wasn’t sure how long I was there. My perception of time was shot to hell.  Eventually I stopped struggling and let my body flop back to the floor. Covered in sweat, aching fiercely it ran into my cuts and made them sting like crazy. I was panting and out of breath, and it felt like an elephant was sitting in my chest. The buzzing got louder, and spots of dark colour started to appear. Clouding my vision until some detached nightmare version of myself buried in the back of my brain pipes up with a particularly uncomfortable piece of information. It wasn’t buzzing. It was laughter, hundreds of thousands of millions of people laughing whisper-soft. It was him, laughing at me, because they thought it was funny. I whimpered. It was high-pitched and strangled, muffled by the gag, and morphed into an unnatural hybrid sob. I could feel my body shake because the tears just wouldn’t stop, and they were so damn violent. I was not in any way at all proud that the noise left my throat. More time passed, and hysterically I thought that I must have been here for hours already. When I was completely still, and utterly paralyzed with fear, they spoke.

“Aww, didn’t you take a while to simmer down,” Issac sneered. I wanted to move, I wanted to do something now that they’d shown themselves. Except that their play had worked. They had waited until I ran out of fight, and now that I truly was… I might have shivered, but I was already shaking too much to be able to tell. “You know if you had just been smart enough to run screaming the first time she had invaded your dreams, you wouldn’t be here right now,” they followed that up with. It made my stomach roll to think about it. It would have been easy to blame Ivy for all this, and it was really tempting to boot, but I was stubborn. This was clearly the bad guy, and they had an agenda. I wasn’t going to play, not that I was capable of doing anything right now. 

“Get on with it,” the many voices hissed menacingly, “You are running out of time. She does not have long left.” Have you ever had to ponder the implications of what would happen if you vomited while gagged? The growing terror in the pit of my stomach did nothing to help that, as it occurred to me I might drown. My heart hammered too hard for me to focus on that. They way that they’d say not long left, it made me sound like to them I was already dead. 

“Always troubles with timing,” Issac sighed, a hand reaching out to idly stroke my hair. Feeling like a dog was not helping in the sickness department. They jerked their hand back so quickly I flinched, expecting my head to be yanked along with it. The gag loosened and might have dropped to the ground. If not for the dried blood making it stick to my mouth. They were none to gentle about helping me remove that. I thought I was home free on the hair pulling. I was wrong. Knees suddenly hovering a scant few centimeters off the ground, they smirked. It was wide, bloody and full of far to sharp teeth. “Now, do tell me. What is your name?” they demanded harshly, my eyes widened. My name… They wanted to know… They wanted to know my name. The first giggle that slipped between my lips was accidental. The ones that followed it rolled like an avalanche. I might have been able to stop, but at some point I made the decision to go for broke and started laughing louder and letting a mad exuberance shine through. Issac dropped me, and it was the least of my worries. The heavily booted foot connecting with my ribs was worse, knocking me across the room with more force than humanly possible. I collided with one of the walls with an almighty twack before crashing to the floor again. If I wasn’t doing my utmost best to avoid giving them the satisfaction of hearing me scream, it might have occurred to me to stop laughing. “YOUR NAME?!” they roared. 

“I have… absolutely… no idea,” I choked out dissolving into fresh pearls of hysterics. They froze, and with no thought to the idea that I might be lying, paled badly enough that despite the hurt a small dragon of gleeful spite curled its way around my heart. f**k you buddy, you earned it.

“What?” they rasped, sounding as if they had been the only beaten to a bloody pulp and dragged by the ankle through a forest. 

“She stole it,” I informed him breathlessly and so dizzy that seeing straight had long since left the building, “Ivy stole it. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.” They screamed in fury, and it echoed so loudly off the walls that I wondered if my ears would start to bleed too, and the look on his face. Okay, so maybe this was the not long left that had been mentioned. They certainly looked ready to kill me, and it was not even anywhere close to beginning to be anything resembling hard. For Issac that is. I blamed an overdose of fear making me loopy because all I could picture and they stormed, and raged, and stomped, was Chicken Run. You know the bit: in case of emergencies, please lean down and place your head between your knees and kiss your bum goodbye. I was going to die, and all I could think about was a homemade plane full of plasticine chickens, and rat flight attendants. Dissolving back into what could only be described as crazy people cackling, I figured that nobody should judge me here. With the way they were stalking towards me as murderously as they were, although with how much my vision had blurred that was an assumption, even I wasn’t going to be able to judge me much longer.

All of this was interrupted by the wall behind them being ripped clean away. Clods of dirt fell from the ceiling and a fine mist of brown covered everything, falling like rain. Sunlight spilled through the clear space in bright streams, a single black silhouette of a person the only thing blocking the light.

“Where is she?” Ivy asked with blistering intensity and bite. So I might have a shot of making it out of here alive, I thought deliriously, which was more than I could say for Issac. Thank… well. That would be a debate for another day.