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Only a whisper of my escalated breath can be heard over the pounding in my chest.
It takes several seconds to remember where I am. And the moment it registers, the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
Someone’s watching me.
Slowly, I sit up, my eyes adjusting to the darkness that’s pressing in around me. I turn my head to look out of the window, light rain pattering against it.
Lightning washes the old room in a flash of bright light, and I take the brief moment to get a good look around.
No one is in here—at least not that I can see.
But I feel the weight of eyes on me, searing the side of my face like a hot iron left on a silk dress.
“Who’s there?” I whisper. The words barely make it out, my throat underused and dry.
When no one answers, I look toward the nightstand and search for the markings on the side of the table. There are six tally marks, but with it being so dark outside, it has to be after midnight. I’m on day seven now.
Before I let the pill take ahold of me on my first day here, I scratched a line into the cheap, soft wood to mark the days, vowing to keep track any moment I awoke from my drugged slumber.
Rio’s always there when I wake up, ready to escort me to the restroom and shove soup and water down my throat before I’m knocked out again. He’s been putting the drugs in my food, and I know that I could refuse, but what's the point? I'm not getting out of here if I'm starving and dehydrated. And I've found I don't mind drinking the poison.
Too drugged to care, he watched me scratch a line in the wood on the second night, and for some unfathomable reason, he started tallying them for me when I told him the days are blurring.
He doesn’t say much, nor has he mentioned any men attempting to take advantage of me. If they tried, they certainly didn’t succeed considering I’d feel the evidence of it. I doubt any of them would bother with a bottle of lube.
So, whether it’s because he doesn’t care to inform me of his good deed or because no one has attempted it—I don’t know.
There's another soft creak from my left. My eyes snap in the direction of the disturbance, right in the corner of my room.
"Who are you?" I ask, though the words don’t come out any better than the first time.
I hold my breath, waiting for a response. Several stilted seconds pass, and then just barely, I hear another low creak, as if someone shifted their weight from one foot to the other.
Something I noticed sometime after my arrival was that part of the plaster had been chipped away, revealing wooden bones beneath. Two planks are exposed, with a large enough gap between them to allow all kinds of bugs to creep in.
It made my skin crawl the moment I noticed it, but it was quickly forgotten when Rio came in with steaming soup in his hand.
“What do you want?” I call out.
Another flash of lightning, so quick that I barely have time to process what my eyes are seeing.
There—between the two wooden planks—is an eyeball. Wide and staring at me intently. Just as sudden as it came, the light flickers out, and the room is cloaked in shadows once more.
Jolting violently, I fall backward off the bed, landing painfully on my tailbone. I hardly feel it when panic has taken over. I’m not even capable of screaming for help, too lost in terror to do anything but desperately kick my feet, scrambling back toward the wall and away from the eye.
I plaster myself against it, chest heaving and heart racing. The rain outside grows stronger, droplets slamming into the window with a ferocity that rivals the beat of my heart.
My nails dig into the wood as another low creak breaks through the pounding in my ears.
Someone is in there. Can they see me now, tucked into the corner of the room?
Sucking in a deep breath, I hold it, waiting for something to happen. It feels as if my head is shoved into a guillotine, trapped in that heart-stopping moment of anticipation for when the blade drops.
I’m expecting a figure to break through the planks, a terrifying demon straight from a horror film, bent backwards on its hands and feet and crawling toward me at an unnatural speed.
Something I’d enjoy watching from behind a screen—safe and sound.
But I’m anything but safe in this place.
