Start here with the first episode

The Hook

Danny’s skin was suddenly drained of blood and his eyes rolled up into his eyelids as he clocked out into another fainting spell. His head sinking into the soft cushion of the pillow while his hand let the mobile phone drop to the floor.

There was only so much his heart could take.

His wife on the other hand had imagined fainting to be different, supposing it to be with delicate femininity, but reality was a tad different.

She felt sick so suddenly and then went down like a pack of bones into the dinning chair hitting the tiled floor with a loud thud.

When she opened her eyes, there was no one in the living room but a man standing with his back turned to her.

She couldn’t see much. Her eyes blurry from the fall and her head aching with every beat of her heart. The pain was as excruciating as the lights she was letting into her pupils.

When the man turned, it wasn’t Danny and she had never seen him before. He wore a smile and carried on his right hand what looked like a glass filled with whiskey. She could tell from the whiff off her nose.

“I will stay still if I were you, you fell too fast too hard before I could get to you” he looked concerned.

“I called the medics from the hospital down the road on phone, hopefully someone will be here any minute”

“Who are you? ” she spoke through her clenched teeth. Her fear giving way to irritation.

She ran her eyes over his physique.

He appeared to be in his mid-forties. His forehead was almost square, large and imposing, but not laughably so. A few lines were laid upon it, but they were dismissive as tricks of light. His eyebrows were impossibly straight and his eyes were as though they were only but a slit.

“Who sent you?” She snapped at him as she attempted to sit upright holding her head in her arm.

“Did he send you?” torrents of questions

“The medics would be here soon” was his reply as he walked out of the front door.

Just then a team of medics walked through the front porch as she fell backwards into a faint.

When she opened her eyes, she was in an unfamiliar place.

This room had four concrete walls, a linoleum floor, a toilet with no paper and a bare mattress on which she was securely chained to the concrete floor.

There was nothing even to mark time, no window, just the silent hum of a central air conditioning system.

The walls – they bore grave evidence of dozens of previous occupants. Nail scratch, scrawlins and writings that portended ominous signs of doom.

“Where is this place?” she muttered with confusion written across her face.

She was clad in a steel-blue gown all the way to her knee, the fabric appeared to be so distressed by so much wear yet still rough. It smelled of detergent so pungent that she had to hold her breath intermittently to avoid choking.

She had a long standing asthmatic condition and she could already feel a crisis building.

She looked across at the door but it had no handle. There was no bright light from the hallway, no lights through the cracks. The room was poorly lit save for the fluorescent tube encased in a soot-covered case leaving only shadows in its wake.

The anxiety that she was keeping at bay had only just began to win. She found her voice and screamed away into the air tugging and yanking the chain off her wrist, not just out of fear and confusion but now of burning anger.

Would someone come in five minutes or five hours? Would she know the difference? There was no time, no sunlight, just deathly quiet.

Somewhere in the inside of her elbow she felt a tingled evidence of a needle prick. She turned to see the irritable sight of a darkened patch around her arm. Had she been injected with something?

On realisation of what was happening, she swallowed the rising bile and lay still on the mattress, feeling the cold floor right through it. No noise. No movement.

“Only a complete display of passivity will get me out.” she reasoned.

“Time to meditate. Time to bury my screams in my bones, shut my eyes, empty my head” the voices in her head adviced.

For what seemed like forever, she finally heard the fiddling of the door handle and the rattling of a bunch of keys. Someone was coming.

The door swung open in slow motion letting in an enormous amount of light into the poorly lit room. Light so blinding she could only make out the silhouette of a short bearded man holding something in his hand that resembled a syringe.

“Julia, we must apologize for the discomfort but we can’t take any chances. You have been having a series of fainting spells and it appears that you have been acting a bit erratic” he paced for effect.

She didn’t flinch. The only action from her was the gentle rise and fall of her chest as the involuntary task of breathing took their routine.

“This is a bit worrisome. As we are yet to tidy up our end of the bargain.”

“Do you remember our agreement?” he quizzed her as he approached her bedside.

She stayed still. Building up a reservoir of spittle in her mouth.

She watched as he walked up to her and gets a better look of the man.

She had never set her eyes on him her entire life.

In a quick and practiced move, she let’s out a trail of spittle right at his face by sucking in her cheek and propelling the spittle forcefully into his right eye socket.

His height made the target even easier.

This incensed the diminutive man even more as he pulled out the syringe, flicked on the needle a couple of times before he buried the needle deep into her vein.

The last she remembered was an image of the colors of rainbows at sunset.

**************

Danny woke up again with a start. He felt much better as energy returned to his body. He propped himself up on the hospital bed, and for the first time since being on admission, he placed his bare feet squarely on the tiled floor.

He looked quizzically at the intravenous line and yanked out the plastic tube and needle from the catheter. Red crimson blood dribbled slowly like a lazy river from the puncture, but he cared less.

He had to get out of the hospital at once and his destination was home.

The answers to the questions in his head can only be found as soon as he is right inside his home.

Keep the comments coming. Lets see how this story turns.