by M. E. Betts
Even through the swaddling of tulle and satin covering her face, she could still make out the bright sunlight and the smell of fresh air coming in from the open window. Mrs. Flannigan had, to Daphne's delight, given her permission to linger in the room to her heart's content, even allowing her to try on the costumes if she wished.
Daphne, however, was perfectly content to laze about in the trunk, although she was unable to resist donning a red-jeweled tiara before burrowing in. Her hiding place was private and cozy, yet bright and sunny through the translucent fabric. She heard Irish music start up from downstairs, followed by cheering and rhythmic clapping. Daphne tapped her toes lightly together in time with the music, her feet clad in her white, spring-time dress shoes.
Although she knew that she would later regret missing out on playing with the other children, she couldn't bring herself to leave the delightful room and all of its contents. She spent what felt like hours basking in the sunlit trunk. After a very long time, she heard a voice that confused her at first, coming from outside of the trunk.
"How's that, Scarlet?" a man asked. "You like it?"
Daphne furrowed her brow, questions formulating in her mind. Who was Scarlet? Who was the man in the room in the room with her, and where did he come from? She decided to ignore the voice, keeping her head buried in the starched, netted petticoats around her.
"Yeah," the disembodied male voice said, "I gave her a little something extra...keep her from wanting to puke from the H, plus make her a little more sedated. Oh, and a hallucinogen thrown in there."
Daphne heard a second male voice in response to the first, although it reached her ears as a muted murmur.
"Oh, yeah," the first voice said. "She'll be fine. Trust me. I know what I'm doing."
Daphne realized that the music had stopped. All of the festive sounds were gone. The birds, the chatter and the gently babbling fountains, one with a mocking, silent Pan. All the sounds were gone, other than the two men speaking to one another. The smells were different, too. She no longer detected the smell of fresh air through the fabrics surrounding her, or the smell of corned beef, cabbage and fresh-baked Irish soda bread. She now sensed a vaguely musty odor, like being in a basement, along with cigarette smoke and something else she couldn't put her finger on, something that smelled vaguely hot and metallic.
She felt, more than ever, that the safest thing was to stay inside the trunk, to keep her head concealed within the layers of fabric. She wished her legs weren't dangling out, but she was more comfortable sitting perfectly still than drawing attention to herself by retracting her feet into the trunk. She breathed deeply, internally attempting to will away what she was certain to be bad guys outside of the sanctuary of her wooden container.
As she cowered, she became aware of a creeping sensation on her lower back. She panicked, thinking there must be something inside the trunk, some kind of insect or spider. Her eyes flared wide open, though she repressed the urge to scream. She still wanted to avoid detection by whom or what ever it was standing in the guest room, outside the trunk. As the sensation continued, slowly tracing a path along her lower back ribs, she attempted to move slightly in the hopes of ceasing contact with whatever tiny creature was beneath her. She found, however, that she was unable to move or shift at all. She froze up in her terrorized state, her breathing slow and shallow. After several seconds, she succumbed to the psychological stress, and her consciousness shut down.
During one of Daphne's few sexual encounters, she had realized that she seemed to have a love/hate reaction to having her back touched.
It was after she had been released from the mental health center. Another former patient, Jacob, had convinced her to contact him after her release.
"Look me up," he told her just before he was discharged. "You only got a couple months left, yourself. Promise?"
Daphne had agreed, having forged a friendship with him over the past few years. They were both quiet people who appreciated being near one another without the need to force a perpetually ongoing conversation, though they would exchange thoughts and ideas about common interests. They both had an intimate knowledge of the various flora and fauna found in the region, and they often sat outside together, identifying the plants growing on the grounds.
"You ever try dandelion greens?" Jacob asked Daphne one day while they sat in the lawn, dotted with the bright, yellow-flowered weeds.
"Yeah," Daphne had said, declining to elaborate that dandelions had been a staple of her diet at times.
"How do they taste?" he asked.
Daphne shrugged, a light grimace on her face. "Bitter as shit."
"I haven't tasted shit," Jacob teased, "so I wouldn't know how bitter it is."
Daphne had contacted him shortly after leaving the facility, and they had met up and camped out together under the stars in the remote Kentucky wilderness. As they lay naked together catching their breath, zipped into the same sleeping bag, Jacob had nuzzled into Daphne's hair, gently kneading her back with his fingertips. Although it felt good on her firm, tense muscles, it also made her acutely aware of every scar left behind from Mrs. Andersen. Jacob couldn't feel them due to the severe scald burns he had sustained on his hands in early childhood. Daphne's body instinctively recoiled from Jacob's touch, though she didn't want to. She wanted the pleasurable sensation to continue, the feeling of consensual, pleasurable skin-to-skin contact between herself and another person.
"Sorry," Jacob said.
"No, it's okay," Daphne assured him. "It's just my scars--"
Jacob felt her back with the inside of his wrist, where he had more sensation. "Oh," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"They just always remind me--"
"Shh," Jacob said, kissing her gently below the ear. "Don't be reminded. It's a great night. Neither one of us needs to let it be ruined 'cause of our past." He drew her into a tight embrace, his face coming in close to hers. "This is going to hurt, Scarlet."
Daphne felt a fraction of a second of confusion. Jacob touched his finger to her mid-lower back, and she heard a faint sizzling sound quickly followed by a white-hot stinging sensation where his finger had been. He continued pressing into her as the searing pain intensified, soaring and screaming through her body and mind.
She abruptly regained her lucidity, finding herself back in the spare room at the water treatment building in the woods of Missouri. Red lifted a glowing, hot knife away from her back. Daphne panted, pain-induced madness coursing through her. She was on a tabletop, in a face-down position with her arms stretched and secured above her head, wearing only her panties. Her hands were cuffed to a chain, the latter of which encircled the beam running from floor to ceiling. Her ankles seemed to be secured to the legs of the table somehow, though she wasn't sure with what. There was no give to her limbs, front or back. Red straddled her to easily access her back.
"That was just the beginning," he told Daphne. "Bear with me, because there's going to be a lot more. As the heroine gradually wears off, the pain will get worse."
He touched the hot metal to Daphne's lower back again, slightly higher up than before. Daphne spiraled back down into the maelstrom of traumatic pain, and her lucidity dissolved once again. She was sucked through a dark, deafening vortex, an epicenter of agony beginning low in her back and rippling outward through her being. She felt that the vortex owned her, that it was sucking away her will to live. She felt a pair of hands slapping either side of her face, and the hot metal was taken away from her flesh.
"Stay with us, Scarlet," Logan's voice said from the darkness. For a moment, Daphne saw his face, lit up from a source unknown to her. Then, before her gaze could fully scan his visage, he turned inexplicably into Jacob. The vortex disappeared, the deafening roar ceased, and Daphne found herself in the Kentucky woods, surrounded by sun-drenched foliage. It was a bright and balmy August day, the one preceding the night she and Jacob had spent together beneath the stars. They had spent much of the day dirtbiking to various spots, from w
hich they would take short hiking excursions.
"I'd have probably never learned to ride one of these things, if you hadn't twisted my arm," Daphne told Jacob as they rested for lunch atop a high hill. "It's not really my thing, although I have to admit, it's helped us cover a lot of ground in one morning."
"I can't wait for you to see what's next," Jacob said, his eyes twinkling with anticipation as he finished the last of his trail mix bar. He and Daphne gathered their things, mounted their dirtbikes, and continued westward down the fragrant, shaded trail that twisted and dipped through the woods. Daphne's hair flowed from beneath her helmet, fluttering behind her as she followed Jacob to their destination. After a few minutes, he signaled from ahead of her to slow down. They came to a stop, and Jacob dismounted his dirtbike.
"We have to climb a ways," he informed Daphne as he started up a rocky incline. "Shouldn't be too far, though, maybe 50 yards at best."
After a minute, they found what Jacob had been looking for. Daphne stared to her left, looking at the gaping opening of a dark cave.
"Looks dangerous in there," she said, goosebumps creeping over her as she was hit with a wave of cool, musty air from inside.
"It's deep," Jacob told her. "People have gotten lost in there and never come out."
"You're not going to suggest we go in there, are you?" Daphne asked.
"There's something I hid away in here," Jacob said. "Before I went away. I want you to go in with me to get it back."
Daphne paused. "Can I ask what the 'something' is?"
Jacob shook his head. "I'd rather not say. I'll explain after we find it."
"I don't think it's a good idea for us to go in there," Daphne said. "We're almost guaranteed to get lost if we go in deep enough, and no one even knows we're here."
"I brought a length of unbreakable steel cable," Jacob said. "A thousand feet--we shouldn't need any more than that. We secure the end out here and feed it out as we go along. And I've got flashlights for the both of us."
Daphne hesitated. "I have my own flashlight," she said, sighing in concession as she rummaged through her backpack. "Who do you think you're talking to? This better be important, though."
"Trust me," Dylan said as he rolled a heavy boulder until it was closer to the mouth of the cave, "it is."
With the cable fastened beneath the boulder, Daphne followed Jacob into the shadowy mouth of the cave. For the first time, she was forced to ponder the possibility that Jacob would betray her. She thought of her talon at her hip, the titanium knife nestled into its sheath beneath her cargo pants. Although she felt slightly guilty thinking about using the weapon on Jacob even in a hypothetical context, feeling that it was unlikely to come to that, the presence of the trusted talon gave her the confidence to follow him into the extensive, remote cave under such secretive circumstances.
She pointed her beam of light around the narrow, rocky corridor. It went straight for about 50 feet, after which it appeared to come to a T intersection. At this point, they would have to either go left or right.
"It's to the left up here," Jacob said, feeding the cable from the spool as they walked. "Hopefully I remember all the twists and turns after that."
The cave was quiet other than a light, steady dripping from somewhere down the way, echoing softly. Daphne followed Jacob to the left, down a short corridor and into an immense cavern. As she pointed her flashlight to the right, she was greeted by a vast, empty space with no end in sight, at least not with the limited lighting. Ahead lay a series of tunnels. Jacob paused, choosing the second one from the right.
Daphne continued to trail behind him as they snaked their way through narrow tunnels and small caverns. After awhile, it occurred to her to ask about the cable.
"How's our life line doing?" she asked.
"All good," Jacob said.
"Really?" Daphne asked. "We haven't used more than a thousand feet yet?"
"It's all good," Jacob repeated.
She followed him for a few more minutes before she could no longer suspend her disbelief.
"Alright," she said, pointing her flashlight toward the cave floor and searching for the cable. "I'm calling bullshit."
Her gaze scanned the cave floor, and she realized that the cable was, indeed, gone. She looked back up for Jacob in front of her, but he had vanished.
"Jacob?" She pointed the beam of her flashlight up ahead, where there appeared to be a long straightaway.
He couldn't have gone ahead, she thought. She realized that she wasn't just scared--she was truly terrified, more than she had ever been before. He couldn't have gotten around her in the two-foot-wide tunnel to go back the other way, not without her noticing. She turned with the intention of fleeing the cave, fairly certain that she could remember her way out. She found, however, that the tunnel behind her was somehow capped off with a wall of solid rock. It was seamless, as if it had always been that way.
"No," she protested aloud. "No, I just came from there. Jacob! Jacob, what the fuck?"
She broke into a run in the only direction she could go, straight ahead, as she pointed her beam of light down the tunnel before her. As she rounded a curve, the heated metal was being placed to her back again, her flesh searing. She let out a low, throaty howl of pain, pushing her legs to move faster, carrying her deeper into the cave's depths. As she ran, she gathered her wits slightly, and her hand moved for her knife. As she unsheathed its blade, she stepped to the side slightly with her right foot, springing her weight off the tunnel wall and spinning around to confront her pursuer. Instead, she found herself confronted with another rock wall that had somehow popped up behind her, cutting off her path and once again preventing her retreat. Before she could turn to continue her onward sprint, she felt the hot, unyielding metal touch her again, slightly higher this time at mid-back level.
She spun and pointed her flashlight behind her, slashing with her knife. As she had suspected, she saw nothing but rock behind her, so she progressed down the tunnel. She was burned again, slightly higher than the last time but still center, near the spine.
"Jacob," Daphne whimpered, convulsing in rage and agony as the tunnel wore on. She felt the heated metal again, but this time further from the middle, on her lower left shoulder blade. It was less sustained than the previous ones, lasting only a few seconds. It was quickly followed by several more, fluttering lazily over her flesh with cruel nonchalance. There was a brief reprieve before the process was repeated.
She came to a cavern, lit with daylight from two separate holes where the ceiling was open to the outside, more than fifty feet from the cave floor. To her horror, she noted that the beams of sunshine revealed human skeletons numbering in the dozens, many of the bones picked clean. The tunnel resumed across the cavern, and as she reached its threshold, the torturous burning migrated to her right shoulder blade. In her mind, the tunnel echoed with the nauseating sound of her sizzling flesh as the phantom attacker pursued her, relentless. From the cavern behind her, she heard laughter followed by murmuring voices. Though she couldn't make most of it out, she was certain she heard one sentence clearly.
"Tree of life," said a deep, male voice. "It's a Celtic thing."
As the fluttering, maddening pain continued, circling its way around her shoulder blade and making its way toward the spine, she came to a dead end. Although the path behind her was still open, she could her voices approaching, their tones menacing even as their words were unintelligible.
Daphne was on the verge of shutting down, her heart and lungs working in high gear. Her flashlight and her eyes, open wide with enlarged pupils, scanned the dead end. She looked more closely, spotting a hole in the floor to her right. She approached it, crouching, and saw that it was pitch black inside the hole. She had no idea how deep it was, or to where it led. As she saw the lights and their unknown bearers come closer, she decided that she would take a chance. She sat down on her rear end, lowering her legs first into the hole before she slipped down, closing her eyes and holding her
breath as she descended through the mysterious portal.
To her surprise, she came to a soft thud on a mat of fluffy brush. Bright light illuminated her eyelids, and as she opened her eyes, she found herself outdoors in the sanctity of full daylight. She looked around her, realizing that the hole had deposited her onto what appeared to be a very large nest. Judging by its size, about 10 feet in diameter, Daphne presumed it must have been built by a freakishly large bird, who had nestled it onto a narrow ledge in a rocky cliffside overlooking the forest.
She was already intensely anxious about finding herself in such a precarious situation, being stuck somewhere she had no business being, when things got worse. An owl approached, an owl so large that Daphne refuted its realness. She estimated its wingspan to be something just short of twenty feet. As it swooped over the treetops and toward the cliff ledge, Daphne looked around, desperate to find a way down, or even back into the cave. She crawled to the edge of the precipice. As she looked down, she saw that the hunk of rock cradling the nest protruded from the rocky hillside, which had a nearly vertical drop of more than 100 feet.
Realizing that there was no escape, short of jumping to her certain death, Daphne focused on the advancing owl. As it drew near, she saw that it was carrying something in its beak. It perched on the cliffside nest, facing Daphne with its back to the forest. Towering at over four feet from the ground to the top of its head, the bird seemed to radiate light from its insides, glowing in wavy, vibrant whites and browns that seemed more deeply saturated than real life. It dropped from its beak 4 sheets of paper, which fluttered onto the nest at her feet.
She reached down to pick them up, inspecting them as the owl looked on. Three of the four sheets were death certificates bearing the names of her parents and brother. As she read over them a second time, the names changed to reflect her adoptive father, mother and brother. The fourth sheet had only a single word scrawled onto it in what appeared to be Daphne's own handwriting.