It hurts.
It hurts.
At first she thought it was a mistake.
The sun had only just set, leaving a thick darkness that could easily confuse one face for another.
Maybe it was even a surprise party, the kind her unconsciously cheerful friends would throw, packed with their adorably clumsy mistakes.
But the sensation of restraints biting into her wrists and ankles, combined with the heavy throb pulsing through her skull, painted a far more coherent picture.
“Huk… huuk…”
Aside from the rapid, rodent-like pounding of her heart and her ragged breathing, the room was utterly silent.
She was completely alone.
Helen feared that unnatural silence more than anything. If only they would wave a club in her face and spit out some vulgar threat, she could at least negotiate. Without a single sound, her mind filled the void with ugly fantasies that began to devour reality itself.
Kidnapping. Confinement. Mutilation. Assault. Rape. Murder.
Helen’s guesses tracked the way vague images sharpened into words. The longer it went on, the more vicious they became. The air she had just inhaled left her dizzy, and that dizziness twisted into something grotesque called claustrophobia.
“Hee… hee…”
Her shoulders shuddered with a fear the unknown had summoned, one she could not control. She twisted her wrists and ankles, but whatever bound them refused to yield. She could not even identify the material.
Her heart, once a modest percussion instrument, now roared like a rushing torrent. Cold sweat drenched her skin. The navel on her belly became a tiny pond. Her fragile flesh burned crimson.
With her vision blocked, her hearing grew painfully sharp. A terrible sensory plasticity. She did not want to assign ugly meaning to every scrap of white noise, yet the endless hallucination circling above her, tightening around her heart, kept transforming. It became an assassin that slipped inside her, inside her eardrums, inside her veins, inside her skull, approaching without mercy.
Her blood ran cold. Her mind began to fracture.
Then a floorboard creaked.
Footsteps followed.
Even if the new stimulus was dangerous, Helen needed it. She tilted her head reflexively, listening hard.
The voice that leaked through the thin wall was so faint she could not guess the speaker’s gender. Yet her nerves had grown razor-sharp, so the words arrived with perfect clarity, as though someone stood at her shoulder speaking to a person who was only slightly hard of hearing.
“……If I look into it, I’ll find out who’s backing the Waterproofing Agent.”
“Oh my god… just for that…”
The realization that she was enduring this hell simply because of one Waterproofing Agent sent a sudden, multicolored blaze of rage flashing before her eyes.
The emotion was so fierce it startled even Helen. In all her previous life she had never felt anything like it.
She wondered, cautiously, whether this was her true nature. Unfortunately no conclusion came.
And since a thought experiment without a conclusion was nothing more than daydreaming, she decided to tie off any further reflection on her own character.
Oddly enough, that rage dulled the fear a little. She even felt a strange sense of relief. Her mood remained bleak, but the uncertainty had cleared and the terror had thinned.
Once reason returned, a path out appeared. This was not the random kidnapping-rape-theft-murder of some lunatic; it had a clear purpose. If she offered the right compromise and cooperation, she might survive.
A bizarre vitality surged through her. Helen twisted her body with more energy than before. The burlap sack over her eyes had been tied with laughable carelessness; it slipped off easily.
“Ugh…”
The moment the sack came away, a U-shaped beam of light flashed across her vision. Then an unbearably bright glare flooded her eyes.
Someone had entered the room where she was held. Before the light could damage eyes already adapted to total darkness, she whipped her head aside.
“Huh? How’d you get that off?”
Gloomy voices drifted from a distance, mingled with the low murmuring of a group.
After her eyes adjusted somewhat, Helen kept her gaze on the limestone floor that reeked of blood, not wanting to offend the speaker. When she heard footsteps approaching she finally looked up.
A tall young man with pale skin, a long nose, and black hair.
His clothes were wrinkled and shabby. He clearly had no formal education. If she handled her tongue well, she might slip through this crisis.
“Um…”
“What the hell are you looking at?”
The pale man lashed out with a lazy kick. Helen’s body convulsed and tumbled across the floor.
Crumpled might have been the better word.
“Guh—!”
She did not scream.
Not from extraordinary patience. She wanted to scream, but the bizarre pain made it feel as though her mouth had vanished; only clumsy coughing emerged.
“Kek kek! Kehuk— ueeek.”
Helen lay wedged against the wall like a badly pinned butterfly specimen, coughing over and over.
The man’s casual brutality shocked her so deeply that she kept vomiting gastric fluid streaked with purple.
Sensing a threat from the writhing girl on the floor, the man fetched a long gas lamp with a parchment-like shade and held it close.
“Uhu hu hu…”
He stared openly at Helen’s exposed form, then suddenly shoved his hand deep into his trouser pocket and shook it with vigor.
“Kuh… keo… you fucking bastard…”
Helen’s thin lips twisted in disgust the instant she recognized his sadistic nature. Her clenched fist looked as if it gripped an invisible dagger, ready to stab at any moment.
Yet that was all she could do. Suppressing the primal terror of the merciless violence about to descend, she was forced to watch the man’s face contort with an orgasmic mixture of interest, delight, and reverence.
She had no idea how much time had passed.
But the thick blood and tears sliding down her forehead and from the corners of her eyes suggested quite a lot.
“Phew… I really enjoyed myself today. See you tomorrow.”
“…”
The door opened and closed. A hot, dark, sticky wind groped Helen’s cheek.
Only after the man left did she lie sprawled, drawing shallow breaths. The pain and dread rolled over her like the beat of a drum. She tried to swallow them by reciting a Bible verse she had once heard somewhere, repeating it again and again until she stopped.
Come to think of it, Helen had never cared much for faith, whether in her old life or this one. She had always seen it as a tool or a place for the weak-hearted to dump their burdens when misfortune arrived.
It was the same now. (Which is why atheists’ sudden piety is called autobiographical.) Besides, her tongue was swelling badly; her pronunciation was turning to mush. She decided to stop before she committed unintentional blasphemy and earned genuine divine punishment.
“Fucking piece of shit. I will kill you.”
Instead she poured every ounce of strength into replacing blind terror with controlled rage, spitting out raw words that carried her true feelings.
The act raised her chances of survival a fraction. She now focused every nerve, trying to detect whether a guard waited outside.
“…”
Not even the usual chatter of watchers reached her. The silence was absolute.
Certain she was alone, Helen moved at once. The fact that she looked like a child had lulled them into carelessness, and that carelessness had handed her an unexpected advantage.
“Nngh…”
Curled like a shrimp in a dark corner, she forced her creaking body upright and crawled slowly toward the wall.
Ever since her capture she had felt the knot on her wrist loosening. All that rolling and straining had been worth it.
When she reached the wall she pressed her bound wrists against a sharp, weathered crack in the old plaster—the kind that always appeared right before the surface crumbled.
Scratch. Scratch.
“Damn it… is it here?”
Scrape. Scrape.
“Good.”
Her hypnotized-rabbit body coordination was a mess, so her aim kept drifting. Still, she felt the thin fibers snapping one by one.
The wounds still burned, yet a strange gratitude rose inside her. The pain had dragged her back to sanity faster than when she had simply cowered and bled.
Little by little Helen regained her usual composure. She moved her arms up and down with the least possible noise. This might be her first and last chance; she refused to waste it.
Pop.
The knot fell away limply. She freed her ankles as well. Then Helen lay flat, opened eyes that looked half-dead, and stared at the gas lamp the man had left behind.
Red stains had bloomed across her white blouse. Her tailbone and left wrist were badly injured, but the rest of her could still move.
“You want me to make it…?”
She forced herself upright and began collecting stones that were heavy enough, or fragments that would serve the same purpose.
She removed one sock.
It had a long, sturdy cuff. Helen carefully stuffed the collected stones inside.
She moved the gas lamp to a corner so the spot where she had last lain would be hard to recognize.
Then she waited.
In a dark corner the light could not reach.
Holding her breath.
She waited.