Page 24 of Ethereally Tainted

And she knows her mother did the crime.

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SWEAT RUNS DOWN MY forehead and clings to the shirt I slept in the night before. My breath echoes through the room while my heart beats so hard I fear it will crawl out of its confined space. It is hard to grasp reality; the dream I had felt all too real.

Because it is.

My eye catches the blinds between the outermost and innermost windows drawn. No light comes from the windows, indicating that night has fallen outside.

I never closed the blinds yesterday.

Panic takes hold of me, and I know I’m being irrational, but when I try to leave the uncomfortable bed, my feet won’t budge. Something holds me back.

My arms and legs are pinned to the bed and unable to move more than a few inches. A robust and leathery aroma surrounds me, and my wrists are becoming increasingly tender as if my veins will stop circulating my blood.

I am trapped.

Fucking trapped, and panic rises within me as I struggle to wriggle free, but it is in vain. I am stuck with no way to move, and all the horrible memories of the dream are blown away as a new, more awful feeling spreads over me instead.

The sight of something moving in the corner of my vision makes my heart pause, and at that moment, I experience the feminine essence that is like the feel of wet grass on a scorching summer day. In the distance, a woman appears in my field of vision, and her look promises pain for eternity. A scream tears from me as I feverishly try to break free, but a severe blow to my head causes my vision to blur until I see nothing at all.

The darkness surrounding me is seemingly endless, and the smell of wet grass and leather combined causes my stomach to twist into knots. I’m no longer in my bed, and my vision is clouded, but I can make out the faint sound of multiple voices in the room. I want to scream, to run from here, to do something to break free from their grip on me, but it is like something has been injected inside me because the world is spinning, and I cannot utter a word without slurring in confusion. As I am strapped into what feels like a chair, my hands and feet are restrained, and I’m unable to move at all.

A wave of panic and terror invades my senses the moment I attempt to lift my head to see my surroundings but fail to raise it.

The leather straps around my arms and head feel tight against me, making me feel even more confined, and the leather smell is strong and pungent.

The voices in the room echo and reverberate, bouncing off the walls and reaching a distant corner of my mind. Everything is a blur around me, yet it feels like I’m in a fog, unable to make sense of anything. I hear eerie whispers in the darkness, making me think it must be another nightmare.

A woman with well-mussed shoulder-length hair stands on one side of me, while a tall man I recognize as Mr. Ricci is on the other. The woman’s fingers dig into my arm, her grip painfully tight.

“What are you doing?”

I open my mouth to speak, but the words get tangled in my throat, and I’m not sure anyone understands me.

I am numb, with no possibility of ever breaking free from their hold.

If this is a nightmare, I sure as hell hope I wake up soon.

This woman is dressed in blue scrubs, which seems strange to me, but in her hand, she holds something gigantic and razor-sharp at the same time. The thing looks like a murder weapon, and I want to scream at her to take it off me, but all I hear are groans coming from me. She pushes the needle into my arm, and as she does so, I feel the sting and watch as several tubes are slowly filled with my blood.

In the intense pressure, my blood drains from my body as I try to pull away from her. I feel fragile and unable to fend for myself, just like a newborn that relies on its parents for survival. I feel like I’m walking through a shadow of my former self, a mere remnant of who I was before Grimhill Manor. The person who was always so full of life and pursued every moment with such vigor can no longer savor the sights and sounds of life. In a single day, I watched as everything I had was decimated, leaving an oppressive feeling of emptiness behind me.

I have stopped struggling against them, my veins forcefully giving up their blood as I lay still. If this is a nightmare, I will wake up in my room, safe and sound. And if this is a nightmare, maybe I will wake up in my childhood home with the safety of a bonfire and my grandparents.

I yearn to break away from the walls that have been confining me and experience life outside the heavy silence surrounding me. I dream of everything I ever missed out on, of warm summer days in the breeze by the beach, of rainy nights up in the mountains where no one can hurt me ever again.

WhereIcannot hurt anyone again.

Eventually, the woman removes the needle when she is done, and everything turns black once more. An infinity of darkness.

Chapter 9

Grey

The mumbling song fromthe front is a constant hum, and the voices sound like they’re coming from a tin can. There are hardly any colors in the film, but everything is displayed in black, white, and gray, as if it comes from the twentieth century, which makes it even more boring. It sounds like a horrible children’s program where the voice actors can’t even portray the feelings correctly.

A man firmly holds a gun in his hands, aiming it at a woman, but instead of appearing to be scared, the sound she lets out is rather a joyous celebration. As much as she tries to whimper from fear, she comes across as more of a woman who fakes her orgasm during sex and tries to make her moans sound pleasing to the ears of the male above her. Her facial expressions are shit, and not an ounce of true terror is displayed on her face. What a fucking pity, that would at least have made it interesting. It’s so much more delicious to experience it in real life, at least then you can smell the aroma of fear in the air, and you get to see the real emotions instead of this nonsense.

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