Chapter 45: Chapter 45

Ellie The first thing Ellie noticed was her head hurting in near migraine pain. She opened her eyes slowly to the gloom, completely disorientated.

“Where am I?” she muttered as her surroundings came into focus.

Ellie was surrounded by grey, and she could feel something heavy on her right ankle. She squinted as a person came into focus and it took her a moment to realise it was Brian.

Slowly her memories came back of being grabbed in the hallway, by him, that man standing there. She rubbed her head but nothing could soothe the pain.

“What’s going on?” she addressed him as she realised she was shackled to the wall by a chain to a rusting iron cuff around her ankle. “Who are you?” Ellie realised that question was the most pertinent, but she already knew the answer.

“Oh come on darling, I thought you were brighter than that, sure you don’t know who I am?” Brian leered at her, his features contorted repulsively. She couldn’t imagine how she ever found that thing attractive. He was no longer a person to her.

“Brecht!” she spat, adding “William’s little sidekick.” She needed to demoralise him as much as possible. She had to stay angry, or the sheer terror that was waiting in the side-lines was going to overwhelm her, and she wasn’t going to let him see that.

“Be careful little girl, because from where I’m standing, you’re the one in chains, so perhaps we need to watch our mouths?” his condescension was fit for a four year old, but there was an edge to his voice, a malevolence Ellie had only heard when working on the lock down ward at St Lukes, where the criminally insane were housed. But now the tables were turned, it was her locked up and the sociopath was in control.

“Why did you knock me out?” she demanded as her head throbbed fit to burst.

“Well, I know what a little firecracker you can be,” he winked, making her feel absolutely violated that she had ever been intimate with that monster.

“You disgust me,” she hissed in return.

“Why? You seemed to rather like it at the time,” Brian or Brecht or whoever he was jeered at her.

“Yeah, that was before I knew you were a sociopath,” she knew it wasn’t the best retort, but she was under duress.

“You’re a psychology graduate and you couldn’t spot a sociopath? You should have stuck to music.”

“Fuck you!” she shouted, rising to his bait.

“You already did that,” he smiled sweetly as she leapt up and ran at him. He jumped back gracefully, grinning from ear to ear as her chain prevented her from punching his lights out.

Ellie’s anger at him, at herself, sustained her as she stood there glaring in hatred at the evil man that had ingratiated himself into her life then taken it from her.

“So why am I here? Why did you take me?” she demanded, needing answers.

“Well I clearly overestimated your intelligence, thought you’d have worked it out straight away and were leading me into a trap. Doesn’t matter, we have a use for you.” And with that, he stepped through a portal and vanished, leaving her alone in the cell.

“Fuck!!!!!” she screamed at the top of her lungs as she punched the air repeatedly, trying to vent her frustration. She collapsed on the floor as the floodgates opened, releasing a torrent of saline down her face, soaking it instantly.

Ellie made no effort to wipe away the tears as more just followed. She wanted to be at home in her flat, to be going to work tomorrow, to have a life, a real life, not just impending death in some universe.

It mattered little where she was, and only a miracle could get her out of there. She thought of Maya in the astral plane, she might never know that they had come for her, she would just be dead. Were they already dead?

When Ellie had thought things couldn’t get any worse, the thought of her friends being killed by those monsters caused a further convulsion in her diaphragm and she threw up all over the floor.

She thought of her parents, who would never know what happened to her, she just vanished one day, just another missing girl. And Maya’s parents in her world, and the Ka’s and Les and Rob’s, no-one would ever know what happened to them. No-one would ever hear of their incredible story, nor of its less then incredible conclusion.

Ellie wanted to get married one day. She wanted children, little curly haired cherubs that called her mummy. She wanted her 2.4 children and career and husband and their cars with their nice house with the enormous mortgage.

She wanted her mother to sob on her wedding day and her father to give her away. She decided she wanted tea parties and well, before deciding that that was pushing it, but she continued to mope over the things she would never have because of the day that Maya walked back into her life.

Eventually the tears started abating; she guessed they got tired too. Ellie leaned against the wall, the occasional sob convulsing her upper body. She was completely and utterly drained.

She started looking around her properly for the first time, but there was little to see. The walls were stone, probably granite, made of large bricks maybe a foot wide set in cement. The stone floor was warm, as was the humid air. She suddenly noticed a window, and moved to look out of the two foot deep wall, seeing nothing but the sea.

The window was about a foot square, barred with no glass and she realised she could hear the sea crashing below. She couldn’t understand how she had missed the now deafening roar in the time she had been in there, nor missed the fact there was no door. She looked around and couldn’t quite believe she was in a room with no door.

The light from the window was so faint it was hard to make out anything without a great deal of concentration, but it was so, there was no door. It was a prison built by travellers.

For the first time there was a spark of hope. Joe might know of the prison, he might bring them there, they might have got away.

Ellie had to hang on to that scrap of hope. It faded fast when her brain decided to remind her that there was no way they could have escaped the madmen, no way at all.

She sank back on to the floor, her eyes readjusting to the gloom after looking through the window. The movement caused her to feel the heat, and she started to perspire in the tropical humidity.

Ellie wondered what use they would have for her. She wondered how long she would be chained up in that cell. All she could do was wonder as she curled up into a ball on the now uncomfortably warm stone floor. She wondered if she would get the chance to starve to death, or whether death would come sooner.