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When she felt sufficiently calm, Clara took stock of her body. Starting with her toes, and working her way up, she mentally searched for injuries. Finding none, she willed her eyes to open.
She was scared of what she would see.
Clara suspected what she was going to see when she opened her eyes was the place that had haunted her dreams for the last twenty-three years. A place that, while it had only just become clear to her when she was hypnotized, was as familiar as her own home. She might not have known the specifics of what it looked like, but she knew what it felt like. It felt like fear.
She quickly assessed her current situation. She was sitting in a chair. It felt like her ankles were taped to the legs of the chair, and her wrists to the arms. There was tape over her mouth, too. She wasn't usually claustrophobic, but the feeling of being restrained was eating at her; bubbling inside her until she thought she was going to explode.
She forced herself to breathe slowly again. In and out through her nose until she felt like she could think again.
Just like panicking over Naomi wasn't going to help, so panicking about her own situation wasn't going to help. She could do this. She could keep herself calm, alive, and in one piece until Jonathon and the police found her. She’d survived this once before, and she could most definitely do it again.
First thing’s first, she needed to get her bearings. And to do that, she was going to have to make herself open her eyes. Surely, she could manage that. She’d give herself a countdown. That was what she always did when she was in the shower, standing under the delightfully hot stream of water when she didn’t want to get out. She’d count backward from ten and then when she reached zero, just turn off the tap. She’d try the same thing now, only this time when she reached zero she’d open her eyes.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Zero.
Open.
As soon as Clara opened her eyes, she immediately scrunched them shut again in protest to the glare. She went slower this time, inching them open just a little, giving them time to adjust to the bright light after being closed for so long.
Once she’d gotten them open all the way, her heart sunk.
A tiny part of her had been hoping she was wrong, and she wasn't going to find herself back in this room.
It was like being thrown back in time twenty-three years. She suddenly felt like a scared, helpless six-year-old all over again.
She reminded herself that she wasn't. She wasn't a little girl anymore, and she wasn't helpless. The Doll Killers were older now; they had to be in their late sixties or early seventies. She was a strong, healthy, twenty-nine-year-old. At her house, they’d caught her by surprise, and then drugged her. Now all she had to do was bide her time, and then when an opportunity presented itself, she’d grab it.
Besides, Jonathon knew that the Doll Killers kept their victims in a toy shop—that should make it a lot easier for him to find her.
However, as she looked more closely at the room, her optimism dipped.
The room looked the same; only it wasn't.
There were subtle differences to the room she’d seen so clearly in her mind just a day ago. The furniture was the same as she remembered. There was the bed, the dressing table and stool and wardrobe. There was the kitchen sink, table and chairs, and fridge. There was the bath, toilet, and sink. There was the TV, couches, and lamps. None of it was real, it was all wooden play furniture, but it was all just as she recalled. There was even the same picture painted on the pretend TV.
But the room itself was different somehow.
Smaller, maybe? Although she knew that might just be her mind playing tricks on her, when she was smaller the room would have seemed bigger. And the painted windows on the wall looked different, too. The ones she remembered had a park painted as the view, but these showed a beach scene. The toilet, the real one, was in the far right corner of the room; but as she remembered it, it should be in the far left corner.
