Hostage

The trading ship came to a sudden halt and the crashing of the waves were now drowned out by the waterfall of rain, as if the gods were desperately trying to pour buckets of holy water down on my sins. I was puzzled as to why the trade ship had stopped, had we already reached the trading dock? The rusted hinges of the mahogany door groaned in time with the hull of the ship and the tapping of footsteps echoed around my makeshift prison, “he wants to see you,” the messenger instructed me. A blanket of fear enthralled me and I felt as if all the air in the world had suddenly run out.

 Crate after crate were stacked up in fours, filled to the brim with soya beans, the sharp rain beat down onto the deck where I had been kept. The messenger leads me, like a firefly would a toddler, down stairs that looked like the jaws of a shark. We descended deeper into the beast until the flicker of candles were visible, the messenger murmured “he has been summoned Sire.” A monkey, stuffed into a stiff position was posed on a teak desk, its glassy eyes stared vacantly into nothingness. Next to the furry creature there was a bottle, its contents spilt out across the desk, labelled ‘extreme cellular expansion pills’, one of the rarest methods of torture. Behind the mighty desk sat a man whose eyes were so intense they bored holes into your soul. His alien-like hands rested on the desk, interlaced like a strangler fig, above them a fantastically important looking red jewel hung around his neck.

“Sit,” he was pointing to a velvet cushion placed in front of a basket. I installed myself into the dip of the cushion, curious as to what was in the basket. The lid of the straw basket began to rise, as if a ghost was lifting it, but it was not ghost, it was something far worse. A powerful, poisonous grey snake flicked its blood red tongue in and out of its smiling mouth. Its eyes, a piercing yellow, never left mine and the snake began to sway, gliding sneakily, side to side. The snake’s cool, scaly skin met mine and it wrapped itself around my neck and I could feel its wet tongue flick into my ear. Shivers slid down my spine and I swear to all the Gods above the snake spoke, and what it said turned my insides to stone.