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Halloween Fiction - The Chair
by JC Andrijeski
Devon fights…
She fights at first just to be there. Just to…
Keep her eyes open.
If she closes them…
Well, if she closes them for too long, she’ll die.
That should motivate you, Devon…
One of them doesn’t really open, though. Not anymore.
She can hear it.
A steady drip, drip, drip under the bolted down chair where she sits.
She’s… tied. Tied up…
Ankles handcuffed to the front legs. Wrists handcuffed behind her, the chain wrapped through the metal back support of a heavy chair with no padding. She hears the sound, like a light, tapping hammer against her skull.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Each drop hits more liquid.
More liquid every minute.
…a growing pool. It lays below her, mostly under her seat where it drips down from her sliced thigh and the larger gash in her abdomen. It’s already soaked through her black pants. She doesn’t look at the pool…
She doesn’t look at it.
Her elbows touch behind her, trembling.
Well, shaking maybe.
Shock. She must be in shock. The body kind of shock. Some part of her wants to fight or flight… at least until she collapses in front of the sliding glass doors of an emergency room.
They left her here.
Bastards just left. Didn’t even bother to finish her off.
Devon’s eyes drift up, to a metal shop light hanging on a long, half-chewed wire from the ceiling. The ceiling lays high above. Cross-beams with rivets, a broken catwalk. Corrugated tin roof with holes and sheet-metal walls. Cement floor. The expanse and size of it are clear to her suddenly, even in the dark… even with only one eye. It’s a modern-day cavern. An empty, rusted-out ruin.
Warehouse.
Jeez… cliché, much?
The smile doesn’t linger on her swollen lips.
Where, though? Where is she? Should she try yelling? Is it worth it, spending time and energy trying to get the gag off to yell?
She doesn’t have a lot of time. Has to choose wisely.
The warehouse is empty… vast.
She hears doves somewhere. Pigeons? They fuss and coo and rustle feathers against metal and more feathers. The sound comes from up high, echoing down to her. She imagines she sees them, huddled next to framed, dirty, dust-covered windows. Shafts of broken sunlight slant down, illuminating dancing dust motes. None of that light touches her.
It’s quiet. Really damned quiet.
No cars. No voices. No footsteps to echo.
Would anyone hear her, if she yelled?
Probably not, she decides.
Why would they have left her here, alive? She tries to think about this, to make sense of it, then realizes the answer is simple. She doesn’t matter. She is nothing to them. It amused him to leave her alive, so he did.
She’s probably not in the city at all, not anymore.
Her mind finds and scuttles other possibilities. She wastes more time, trying to remember the ride out here, in case she gets a chance to report in. How many of them took her. What they looked like. She didn’t see shit on the drive here, or as they dragged her inside. She tripped a few times. On metal edges, steps, maybe. She didn’t see anything that could help her now.
She’d been terrified.
They whipped the bag off her face…
Nothing but the hanging light, those tools, rough hands…
Screaming.
It went on for a long time.
Questions. She won’t remember those, either.
…she tried to listen. Before that. She tried to…
She hadn’t been trained for this. No one told her this might happen.
First job. Big deal first job, working for the president.
Just a noob. A rook.
A red shirt.
She tries to make a report. To herself. A report on what happened…
…three men forced a black bag over my head at approximately 7:15 am. I’d just reached the edge of the perimeter on our secondary check, at the southeast corner of the UN building on East 42nd and 1st. I was overpowered, drugged, then blindfolded with a bag before being marched down the emergency stairwell I’d been patrolling. They took outside the building through a lower access door, where I was almost immediately shoved in the back of an unmarked van…
Well. Her mind said “unmarked van.”
She remembers a sliding door, the grating sound before it slammed shut with a muffled bang and the snick of a lock. In the movies it’s always an unmarked van...but it could have been some suburban minivan, for all Devon knew.
Maybe with a “My Kid is an Honor Roll Student” bumper sticker…
Distraction. She doesn’t have time for distraction.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
She doesn’t know much about the human body, but she knows it needs blood.
Hers is running out. Too fast.
No one is coming.
They’d cut her…
Christ. How did this happened?
Wrong place, wrong time.
…but she can’t think about that anymore, either.
Her one, good eye scours the space again.
Heavy wooden table. Dirty, covered in tools.
Devon doesn’t want to look at those tools, given that most are covered in her blood. She makes herself stare at them anyway. Some are sharp, sure...most are sharp, rusted, like a horror movie or something from the Tower of London. A few blunter things. She can’t say for sure, but doesn’t think any of them would help her get out of the chair. Not with no hands. Not fast enough.
A spark ignites somewhere in her mind.
Keys.
He’d snorted, staring at her with those hard, slate-like eyes.
He’d been finished. Worked up a sweat. Probably a calorie deficit day for him. Like going to the gym.
Orange-tinged blond hair sweated to his forehead and neck. Face, neck and upper body speckled with small and large red dots, larger patches of the same fluid on the sleeves of his blue t-shirt and his hands. He made a show of wiping those thick, hairy hands on a dirty rag before he left.
She’d already been counting down the minutes.
Maybe he had been, too.
Or maybe the clock had already stopped, from his perspective.
He’d left the keys.
Well… sort of. He’d thrown them across the empty warehouse.
He did that casually, too, tossing them in a high arc, like tossing a bottle opener to a friend at a party.
They went far, though.
Devon heard them land. She hears it again now, a distant thunk in her head as she fights to remember. She hears them skitter across the cement a few feet...or maybe a few yards...like a distant replay.
That bastard grinned at her after he did it. Teeth yellow from smoking. Face broken with a darker scruff than that pale. Blond hair. Between that and his darker roots, he must have bleached his hair, come to think of it.
Distraction.
He threw the keys… that was right before he left.
She thinks she remembers the direction. She thinks…
Devon bites down on her lip. Hard.
The pain forces her eyes (eye?) open once more.
It brings her mind briefly, sharply, back into focus.
You’re not going to just sit here and die, Devon.
You’re not going to play some stupid wait-and-see denial game… like some fatalistic ass, waiting for angelic intervention…
That time, she doesn’t think.
She starts to rock the chair.
She starts to rock it for all she’s worth.
* * *
It’s difficult at first.
Side to side. Baby steps.
Then wider swings.
The legs teeter a few times, chunk down. Make her flinch.
It takes a few, good seconds to get her rhythm down...
Then it’s a little scary. The chair starts to sway for real. Those legs chunk down harder. Land less steadily.
Some part of her still winces back.
Some part of her doesn’t want more pain.
Death, Devon.
Death is worse than a little pain, damn it…
…she makes herself do it, anyway.
When that final rock tips her over the edge, she’s startled. Like some part of her still doesn’t see it coming.
Her body tries to catch it in reflex…
It can’t.
She lands, hard, exhales in a pain-filled grunt.
Moaning, she gasps. Winded. She lays on her side, panting, wasting oxygen, moaning, feeling like she just wants to die. She’s sure she’s broken her arm. It feels like she just hit it with a hammer.
She did, more or less. On purpose.
It feels like an eternity of time she’s wasted.
She can see it now, though. She’s half-laying in it.
That pool of blood. It’s big.
Scary big.
It motivates her.
She starts to writhe inside the bindings of the chair. She tried to pull the chair with her, across the cement floor.
On her side, she can move her body, like a snake. It hurts her abdomen. It hurts enough to distract her from her throbbing leg, from her arm. She can even move the arm under her, but hit hurts like hell.
All of it hurts like… well, it hurts a heck of a lot.
More than anything she cares to remember.
She does it anyway.
She’s going to get across the floor. No matter what.
If they find her dead, she won’t just be sitting in a chair.
She won’t just be sitting over a pool of her own blood.
* * *
At first, she thinks she’s not getting anywhere.
It’s slow. Really slow.
She looks back though, when she has to rest. She sees a smear of blood, coming mostly off of that cut he made in her leg. A lot probably off that hole in her abdomen, too.
She looks forward again, moving.
Writhing. Gasping.
Nothing ever hurt so much.
She’s tired.
She doesn’t want to think about being tired.
She doesn’t want to think about what it might mean.
She’s really damned tired, though.
She fights to see through the one eye. It’s fogged a bit now, not really working right. She blinks, fighting to clear it. It works, but not really.
She can’t get tired.
She can’t...
The first time she snaps out, she realizes she’s been lying there. She doesn’t know how long. Dozing...
Time for a nap, Devon? Really?
…but it scares the shit out of her.
She’s fading. She has to hurry.
She writhes faster across the cement floor, groaning a little from the wounds that have stiffened just enough to remind her she’s been lying there.
She makes it a few more feet.
A few more.
She’ll stop, just for a second.
Needs to rest.
Needs to…
* * *
“Hey! Hey, lady!”
Devon’s head lolls on her neck.
The ground hurts. Something sharp there. Glass?
A nail.
Light in her face.
Really bright.
It’s dark in here. Really dark.
She’s still tied to the chair.
“Whatcha doin’ down there, lady?”
The voice slurs, then laughs. The laugh echoes, a hollow pinging against the metal insides of the cavernous space.
Devon blinks up, unable to shield her eyes from that light. Her wrists are still cuffed to the back of the chair.
She’s still tied to the chair.
Panic fills her.
A memory of that drip, drip, drip…
She fights to speak. “Help,” she whispers.
“Lady, you’re bleeding a lot. Damn. A lot… that’s really fucked up…”
“Help me…” she whispers. “Please… help me…”
She fights to move. Maybe to plead with him.
Maybe just to show him she can’t.
“Hey,” he says. “What you doing in here, lady? What happened to you?”
She has the absurd desire to laugh.
Then to scream at him.
He laughs again, maybe at the look on her face.
Devon feels sick, dizzy. Is this real? Is someone really here? Is she dead? Dreaming on a gurney in some emergency room?
But no. The chair. The chair is still there.
She wouldn’t dream the chair.
He doesn’t seem right, either. High, maybe? Maybe he has a phone.
Then she sees it.
He’s using the phone to look at her. Using the light on the phone…
Hope turns into anxiety, clutching at her chest.
“Please,” she whispers. She fights to make more noise, to speak. She clears her throat, swears she tastes more blood, then fights away the image. “Please,” she says, a little louder. “Please… call someone… please…”
“Call someone?” That off-key laugh. “Who you want me to call? Who done this to you, lady?”
She fights to see him through the bright light. She stares at the phone…
It is maddeningly out of reach.
“Please,” she whispers. “Please… call someone. Please…”
Another voice startles her.
It is louder, deeper.
“What the hell?” it says. “Who are you talking to…?” A longer pause. Then new voice gets close enough to see past the light. “Jesus Christ… Rudy! What the fuck are you doing? Don’t touch her!”
He sounds disgusted. Afraid.
“What are you doing, man?” he says, angrier now. “Get away from her. Seriously, man. That is gross…”
The first one crouches down, so that he’s closer to her.
Devon smells alcohol on his breath, smoke.
The face she sees is young, shockingly so. Younger than either of the voices she thought she heard. She sees rounded cheeks, large eyes with dilated pupils. She can’t make out many features.
He’s like a happy ghost. An apparition.
“Leave her alone, Rudy,” another voice says. “You don’t want to piss off whoever did this to her…”
“Fuck, man!” the first one says. “Chill, okay? She’s bleeding!”
“I know she’s bleeding,” the deeper, angrier-sounding voice says. “Just leave her alone, okay? Leave her there… and don’t touch nothing.”
“We can’t just leave her,” the first voice says. “Can we?”
Devon hears doubt in his voice.
That doubt scares her.
Terrifies her.
“Please,” she says. She fights to make her voice louder. “Please… I have money. I can pay you…”
“Money?” A note of interest grows in the first voice. “How much?”
“A lot…”
“Here? You got it here, lady?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “No. In my bank. But I promise, I––”
“See?” the angry voice says. “She doesn’t have shit. She’ll say anything right now...you can’t believe her, man!”
“No,” Devon pleads. “No… I promise. It’s true…”
“Come on,” the angry voice says. “I ain’t calling no cops. No way.”
“You can call after you leave,” Devon says. “Secret. Won’t tell. Don’t tell them your name…”
“No!” the second one snaps.
He seems to be looking at her, but she can’t see him past that ring of bright light. She can only feel the weight of his stare.
“I’m on parole, lady,” he says. “No offense, but you’re already dead. No one can help you now but God.”
“Keys!” Devon blurts. “Do you see keys? On the ground? Anywhere?”
“Keys?” the first voice pipes, interested again.
Devon realized only then that he’d fallen silent.
“Yes.” Devon nods. She turns back towards him, away from his angry friend, fighting to speak. “Yes. Please look. Please. I’ll say I found them. I promise I will. I won’t tell anyone about either of you…”
“On the floor?”
“No!” the angry voice says. “Come on, Rudy. Let’s go. She’s giving me the creeps.”
“I can look for a minute, man. Chill.”
“She’s already dead.”
“One minute. Chill, man.”
Devon sees the first one, the one with the phone, wandering around the empty space. She cranes her head and her right eye towards the flickers of light and reflection on random metal surfaces as he shines his phone screen around, aiming it at different spots on the cement floor.
A few seconds later, he lets out a jubilant laugh.
It echoes up to the metal rafters, bouncing against the walls of Devon’s head.
“Hey! I see ‘em! I see your keys, lady!”
“Here,” she manages. “Please… bring them here, Rudy… please…”
Angry guy mutters.
Clothes rustle somewhere over where she lays, like he’s folding his arms, or maybe shoving his hands into his pockets. The material is light, noisy, like a windbreaker or maybe a nylon jacket.
“Bitch knows your name, man,” he says.
“Whose fault is that?” Rudy says cheerfully.
Devon hears a jangling sound as he scoops up the keys. Like music.
She listens as he brings them over to her.
She hears footsteps…
Then his face is near hers again, grinning like he just won a prize.
“You want ‘em by your hand, lady?”
“Uncuff me. Please.”
“No, Rudy!” the second voice snaps. “Leave the bitch her keys, and you did your good deed. Let’s get the hell out of here. Now. Before someone sees us and figures what you did.”
The first one leans down, placing the keys clumsily in her fingers behind her back. Devon reaches for the slick ring. Grasps hold of cold metal with all of her might. She gasps, fighting tears, even as the kid whispers in her ear.
“Sorry, lady,” he tells her. The smell of his breath still makes her wince. Pot smoke and cheap booze. “Sorry. I hope you get out of here okay…”
“Call,” she begs him, whispering back. “Please, when you get out of here… just… call someone. Even with the keys, I won’t have time, Rudy. I won’t get out of here in time… please call someone for help…”
He grins at her again.
Devon only sees emptiness in those hazel eyes.
She never gets a good look at his face. All she sees are those hazel irises blackened by too much pupil. Teeth that glow nearly florescent behind the blue-white panel of his smartphone.
“Please, Rudy,” she pleads, her voice a shadow now. “Please. Help me. Don’t leave me here to die… please… I don’t know where I am…”
But it’s dark inside her cave again.
They’ve already gone.
* * *
She loops the key ring through two of her fingers.
Grips it there. Wills it to stay.
Using her free fingers, she feels over the surface of the cuff, looking for the hole. A notched opening, a tiny square merged with a tiny rectangle. She finds it on one cuff. Holds a finger there.
How much time does she have?
An hour? Maybe two?
When did they pick her up?
When did he ask the last question?
How long had it been since he stuck that knife in her thigh? He left it there, for awhile. It might have bled less then, with the knife in it. He left it sticking out of her, until he was ready to leave…
She gasped, gripping the key with all of her strength as she fought it closer to that tiny, odd-shaped hole.
There are other keys on the loop of metal, though.
Three keys. One for each set of cuffs.
Is she holding the right one?
33.333% chance that she’s holding the right one.
She prays. Like a child, she prays it’s the right key. As if that will solve all of her problems. As if that’s going to end it.
She won’t drop the keys.
That much she knows.
She won’t drop them.
Adrenaline, feeding her blood. Maybe killing her faster. Maybe giving her just enough for a last try at life.
She positions that first key over the hole. It goes in. She could cry with relief. She grips it, though. She grips it tight. She twists. She twists it… carefully. It won’t unlock. It won’t move.
Her hands are slick. Wet. Hot. She’s doing it wrong.
Wrong? Or is it the wrong key?
She fights with it. Wills it to open.
Wrong key.
Her mind screams it. It screams it in the dark, pointing at a ticking clock, at the drips of blood she can no longer hear coming out of her thigh and out of that wound in her belly.
Focus.
She bites her lip again, tasting more blood.
Next key.
66.66666% chance that this one is right.
Process of elimination. Odds keep getting better.
Better for one.
Worse for the other.
She’s out of time.
Time…
* * *
It is the third key.
100% chance of being correct.
Even so, when the lock twists, she almost cries out in delirious relief.
She’d half-convinced herself it would be wrong. She’d half convinced herself it would be the match that fell in the snow…
To Build a Fire.
…but it turned, and she felt the metal fall away, and let out that cry, waking the doves in their high rafters.
She felt the cuff fall open and then she could move her arms.
Not broken, after all. Just hurt a lot.
Still gripping the keys, she moved like a geriatric. She didn’t pull her arms. Even with her hurt abdomen, she pulled her body forward, dragging her arms after her.
She still held those damned keys.
She might never put them down. Ever.
No time to waste.
She dragged her arms forward, crying, in spite of herself.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
She leaned forward. Fumbling in the dark. Dark like no light ever existed.
But that’s not quite true, either.
She can see an orange light… through those dirty windows above the sheet metal walls. She can smell the dirt on the cement floor, and piss, and she can see that light.
She’s not dead yet.
Left leg first. Maybe because it feels urgent. It’s the leg that got stabbed. She has to get it free. Now. Right now.
She fumbles for the hole. Finds it.
She kept the key in the lock of the cuffs that had locked her wrists to the back of the chair. It dangled from her wrist on the hand that didn’t look for the keyhole that still held her to the metal chair.
66.6666% chance of being correct on the first try.
That time, it worked on the first try.
She freed that leg and groaned, holding onto the last key, key number three, the one that would finally free her from the chair. She gripped it tightly in her fingers. She held it as she gripped her free ankle, tears running down her face.
Thinking. How to move her body. She fell apart from the chair strangely that time, still tied to it, but at a weird angle now.
She tries to think her way through where she is.
She tries to rewind her way back through the dark.
Wrists free. Fall forward.
Left leg free, fall to the side.
She wraps around herself, dragging the chair. It makes a hollow, scraping sound as it grates across the cement floor. The sound echoes. She pants, and that echoes, too. She feels a nail there, something she shouldn’t step on.
She’s still gripping the key.
The last key. The final key. She holds it like the holy grail, gripping it with fear in her wet, hot, throbbing hand.
The answer to her final problem.
She may never let it go.
100% chance of being right.
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Excerpt:
I tilted my head, still smiling, but letting my puzzlement show.
“Why are you talking to me at all?” I asked finally.
“Why shouldn’t I talk to you?” he said. “I’ve already told you that you’re the first person to walk in here that I thought might be worth my attempting to communicate.”
“Because I’m female?” I said.
“Because you seem to be less of a fool than the rest of them,” he corrected me at once.
“But you said Nick had a mind?”
“I said he had a mind of sorts. Not the same thing at all. Although, given the nature of his intellect, he has undoubtedly chosen the right profession for himself.”
I smiled again. “I’m sure that will be quite a relief for him.”
I heard laughter in the earpiece that time, right before Nick spoke up.
“See if he’ll tell you his name,” he said to me.
“Certainly, if you really want to know,” the suspect said, before I could voice the question aloud.
“My name is Black. Quentin Black. Middle initial, R.”
I stared at him, still recovering from the fact that he’d seemingly heard Nick give me an instruction through the earpiece.
Clearly, he wanted me to know he’d heard it, too.
“You heard that?” I said to him.
“Good ear, yes?” he said. Smiling, he gave me a more cryptic, yet borderline predatory look.
“Less good with you, however. Significantly less good.”
He paused, studying my face with eyes full of meaning.
I almost got the sense he was waiting for me to reply—or maybe just to react.
When I didn’t, he leaned back in the chair, making another of those graceful, flowing gestures with his hand.
“I find that… fascinating, doc. Quite intriguing. Perhaps that is crossing a boundary with you again, however? To mention that?”
I paused on his words, then decided to dismiss them.
“Is that a real name?” I said. “Quentin Black. That doesn’t sound real. It sounds fake.”
“Real is all subjective, is it not?”
“So it’s not real, then?”
“Depends on what you mean.”
“Is it your legal name?”
“Again, depends on what you mean.”
“I mean, could you look it up in a database and actually get a hit somewhere?”
“How would I know that?” he said, making an innocent gesture with his hands, again within the limits of the metal cuffs.
Realizing I wasn’t going to get any more from him on that line of questioning, I changed direction. “What does the ‘R’ stand for?” I said.
“Rayne.”
“Quentin Rayne Black?” I repeated back to him, still not hiding my disbelief.
“Would you believe me if I said my parents had a sense of whimsy?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Would you believe that I do, then?”
I snorted a laugh, in spite of myself. I heard it echoed through the earpiece, although I heard a few curses coming from that direction, too.
I shook my head at the suspect himself, but less in a “no” that time.
“Yes,” I conceded finally. “So it is a made-up name, then?”
The man calling himself Quentin Black only returned my smile. His eyes once again looked shrewd, less thoughtful and more openly calculating.
Even so, his weird comment about “listening” came back to me.
Truthfully, he was looking at me as if he were listening very hard.
The thought made me slightly nervous.
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