My own voice adopted an angry edge, and I replied candidly, “Listen, Constance, I understand where you’re coming from, but I seem to remember a certain city homicide detective going to the mat for you when you assaulted a suspect during an interrogation.”
There was no way for me to retract the statement, but I’m not sure that I would have wanted to if I could. I had been a witness to her loss of control as well as having been her confidant when she needed someone to talk to about it. I hated to slap her in the face with an incident from the past, but Ben had gone so far as to lie for her, and that was no small gesture from a man who valued honesty as much as him.
Sometimes, I suppose we all need to be reminded of the debts we owe and to whom we owed them.
I could hear her breathing at the other end, but not a single word was spoken for the span of a half-minute.
“Listen, Constance,” I finally said. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to…”
“No, Rowan, you’re right,” she replied, her voice a mix of emotions. “See if you can get him sobered up. I’ll get out of here in a few minutes and head over.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. “Thanks, Constance.”
I hung up the phone as I stood and then started out the door on my way to the kitchen to enlist some aid in getting Ben up and about. Whatever curiosity I’d harbored regarding how the process of the un-binding was going was immediately eliminated the moment the rasping pain raked across the back of my neck.
The wall before me became a psychedelic whirlpool spinning at an ever-increasing velocity. My body tensed then jerked as my knees gave way. The burning agony drew itself across my neck once again, halting, then biting anew as it dug deeper into my upper spine.
I was trying to call out for help when the floor suddenly filled my field of vision, only to be replaced almost immediately by indigo darkness.
CHAPTER 14:
I was floating.
Or maybe I wasn’t really floating. I had no visible point of reference in the darkness, so I couldn’t really say for sure. All I knew for certain was that it felt like I was floating, and I was happily willing to accept that as fact.
I blinked for no other reason than to make sure my eyes were actually open. Again, it felt like they were open, so I took the sensation at face value.
There was little else I could do, and the truth was, I didn’t really care.
I was comfortable.
In fact, I don’t think I’d ever been this comfortable in all my life.
Since I couldn’t see anything, I decided I would just listen.
Actually I wasn’t any more interested in listening than I was in seeing, but I did it anyway. Why? I had no idea other than the fact that there was this little nag in the back of my head.
It told me it needed to know something. I don’t know what information the nag was after, but it wanted something, and it wanted it now. I tried to ignore it, because after all, I didn’t see any point. It wanted to know something, not me.
The nag was on a mission. It told me I needed the information too.
I tried to reason with it. Given that I couldn’t see, and for all intents and purposes, I couldn’t feel, I didn’t really know that I could hear either. So, why bother trying?
The nag wouldn’t listen. It wanted me to try hearing in the worst way, and it wasn’t going to give up until I did.
I told it no.
It nagged harder and became an annoyance.
I told it to go away.
It wouldn’t. Instead, it just kept growing beyond annoyance and became a pain.
A real pain.
Physical.
Tangible.
Now I was no longer comfortable.
I gave up and listened. I doubted that it would do any good, but I did it anyway. I was willing to do just about anything to make the nag go away.
Had I cared, I would have been chagrined when I started to pick up the faint sounds around me, fading slowly in from nowhere to eventually fill my ears with ambient noise. But, I didn’t care about such things. I just wanted the nag to go away, so I kept listening.
Cicadas warbled out their song, the buzz rising and falling, fading away, then starting anew.
Okay, I could live with that. Why the nag wanted me to listen to cicadas I couldn’t fathom, but if it made the nag leave me alone, I was happy.
But, the nag didn’t want to hear the insects. It wanted to hear something else, so I listened harder.
Metal scraping against earth sounded softly in the darkness. How I knew it was metal against earth I couldn’t begin to say. I just knew it as simply as I knew two plus two equaled four. It was a fact.
The ambience grew as I listened intently. The cicadas, the metal, the earth, the wind… The crunch of dry leaves began sneaking through, adding themselves to the mix and setting up a rhythm.
Scrape, crunch, thud, warble.
Scrape, crunch, thud, warble.
Underscoring the odd rhythm was an off-key hum, and the nag became very interested in it. I focused on the hum and noticed that it ran in an audible parallel to a severely muffled background of driving bass.
I despised the nag. It was making me take notice of my surroundings, and now I was starting to be curious. I didn’t want to be curious. I wanted to be comfortable like before. But, that was slipping further away with each scrape, crunch, thud, and warble.
Now I was noticing that labored breaths interrupted the hum at random intervals, falling in and out of cadence with the crunch and scrape that seemed to be setting the beat.
On the heels of a metallic clunk, a tinny stream of noise masquerading as music suddenly vomited into the blackness. Severe notes, squealing outward from what might have been a guitar, intermixed with the heavy bump of a frenzied drumbeat. In reality, it wasn’t very loud at all, but given the disparity of it against the otherwise quiet darkness, it may as well have been a thunderclap.
The nag started down a new path.
It wanted to know about this driving thrum that insisted on being called music. I was just about to appease the annoying little monster when a hot stab of pain shot through my chest.
I felt myself jerked upward, without warning or apology.
Stark, blue-white brilliance exploded in my eyes, hot and fierce like an arc of lightning.
The afterimage of a swirling tunnel and a wooded grove began fading from my retinas.
Blackness.
Crashing luminance, intense and stark.
Nude flesh. Pale, flaccid, and marred.
Blackness.
Again, the impressed image began to fade.
The violent strobe burst, casting a woman’s body in harsh light.
Woman. Corpse. Blood.
Blackness.
Scrape, crunch, thud, warble.
Light, coming faster and faster.
Blood. Shoulders. Blood.
Blackness. Light. Corpse. Blackness. Light. Blood. Blackness. Light. Shoulders. Blackness. Light. Head. Blackness. Light. Shoulders. Blackness. Light. Face. Blackness. Light. Brittany. Blackness. Light. Blood. Blackness. Light. Brittany. Blackness. Light.
Headless.
Pain.
Pain.
“…Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” I heard Cally’s steady but frightened voice calling out.
With each number she recited, focused pressure drove into the center of my chest, released, and then instantly repeated. I felt something tightly pinching my nose and something pressed against my mouth. Hot air rushed down my throat, and I was suddenly overcome by a need to cough. I tried, or at least I thought I did, but nothing happened.
I spasmed suddenly and felt my body jerk as I sputtered and gagged. With a heavy wheeze, I drew in a deep breath.