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Take?The word spliced through her drug-fogged mind.
And then she realized that they were holding a video recorder.
She screamed again, this time in surprise, when they stalked towards her with an intent she was just lucid enough to recognize as a threat. Her hands groped at Rafe’s clothes, searching for his knife. She found it in his pants, and flicked it out, just as they were nearly upon her.
“Who are you?” she stammered. “One of his friends? His lovers? Who the fuck are you?”
The eyes narrowed in a way that was almost reptilian behind the holes of the mask.
“End scene,” they whispered.
When the camera they were holding cracked down against her skull, she almost didn’t feel it.
???????
(This is your problem. You’re too stiff and you can’t improvise.)
There was a muted roar in her ears, out of sync with the throbbing in her head. Donni drifted in and out of consciousness, as her fear crested the darkness like a subterranean monster breaching the waves of a pitch-black sea.
Johnathan, she thought, and shuddered.
When she opened her eyes again, she felt a little less dizzy, and the roaring noise had stopped. There was a click, followed by a pop, and she felt the damp chill of the night air on her face.
“Get out,” the voice said, and then she felt herself being lifted, stumbling over the wet ground.
It was so fucking cold and she could see trees. Lots of trees, their branches lit up in silver where the moon peeked through the clouds. Lights pulsed and flickered through the curls of vapor threading between their branches: pinks and greens and blues.
The only building was a strange white edifice that picked up the faint colors of the lights.
“Where am I?” she asked, but it came out muted by the music that was playing from some hidden speaker, cranked up so loud that she could barely hear her own thoughts.
The whole scene was like something out of her nightmares. The bad ones. The ones that had her waking up soaked in her own sweat and quaking.
She twisted her body to look around her as her captor jerked her along, realizing that what she had taken for a building was actually a construction consisting of many, many sheets of posterboard and trifolds, all set up like a gruesome science fair. Except instead of pictures of hydrothermal vents and space bears, she was looking at dozens of pictures of her own face blown up to grotesque size.
There was her at book club, with the diffused glow of Opal’s jack-o-lanterns behind her, the note from her windshield clutched in her hand.
There was her in the parking lot outside Y-Mart, looking like a stunned deer.
There was her embracing Rafe at the funeral, with his hand splayed on her back.The look on his face, she thought, shuddering. No wonder Christophe had looked so knowing.
There was her kissing Rafe in his car with her eyes closed. She’d seen that one before, but there was another of the two of them in bed, and this time, her eyes were open.
There was her standing in front of Christophe’s mutilated body, her lips parted in a silent scream. She didn’t remember screaming. She must have passed out shortly afterwards.
There were so many fucking pictures. So many pictures that she did not know where to look. But she was very, very afraid. Because some of these pictures had been taken in her own home.
Her captor had been following her for weeks.
As they stumbled into the makeshift maze, under the watchful gaze of her own blown-up eyes, her foot kicked something soft. She looked down and her stomach jumped anew as she realized it was Madge, with a dried bloodstain on the front of her cleaning uniform. Her face was swollen and discolored, and it looked like she’d been dead for days.
“Oh n-no,” she choked, bending over to heave.
And her captor let go of her, taking a neat step back.
He—because she was sure it had been a man, with him pressed up against her as he had been—was tall and well-built, wearing the mask that Rafe had described. The mask that had hung over the trailer at one point, while Johnathan violated her on his futon.
(It’s not that difficult to get movie props from movies that weren’t very popular)
