The Coming Storm - Prologue

Prologue The Prologue is taken from a victims perspective, leading into a chain of events that pushes the protagonist to his limit.

Prologue

 

She had lost track of time long ago. Minutes, hours, days. They had all become an endless sea of darkness trapped in a place where hope had abandoned her. Her life before the dark was becoming a distant memory, an abstract dream of faces she couldn’t put names to and places she now believed only existed in her imagination. The one thing she could remember was the stories her father used to tell her when she was a little girl. Tales of princesses being chased by monsters and the brave prince that rode a white horse who would come to save her. She always liked to pretend that she was the princess and that after the brave prince had slain the monster he would scoop her up in his arms and carry her into the sunset. But that was then, now she understood completely that they were just stories, there was no prince but monsters were very real.

She heard him before she saw him, the sound of his feet coming down the stairs. Every heavy step he took threw her body into a violent fearful convulsion. The chain held her in place rattled as she shook.

Two feet. That’s how much room he had told her she had to move around. His first words to her. Any more than two feet and the chain would tighten and the cold metallic collar around her neck would start to squeeze and continue until she could no longer breathe, so she had never moved more than a couple of inches. Crouching down, making herself as small as possible she closed her eyes knowing that the light from the opening door would blind her. The hinges on the door ached with age letting out a rusted squeak as it opened. She had learnt through trial and error not to speak without permission. He liked her to be obedient.

Slowly she opened her eyes, catching the dying light as the door closed. Back in the dark she could only make out his outline, which was all she had ever seen of him. She imagined that he looked like the monsters her father had described, twisted and deformed with eyes the same colour as their souls.

She watched him from the corner of her eye as he paced back and forth across the small room, his feet kicking up dust that caught in her throat. This was the worst part, waiting for him to decide what he would do with her. Beat her? Stick her with the needle? Talk at her or simply leave. She’d come to dread the talking the most. He would talk for hours about nothing, his tone changing from calm to maniacal in under a second. The more he spoke the more wound up he could get and the more frightened she became.

He stopped moving. She braced herself. A single bulb came on over her head lighting the room. He stood with his back to her. She could see the switch on the wall less than three feet from her. She looked back at her chain, it was attached to a pulley on the wall, looking at the chain she could see that there was more than enough for her to have moved freely from one end of the room to the other. Scanning the room in the light her eyes fixed on the door. Hanging on the back of it was two keys. One larger than the other, the larger one was for the door the other. She put her hand up to the lock on her collar.  A pit opened up in her stomach as it all became clear.

She heard his feet shuffle in the dust. She looked up at him, seeing him for the first time. He looked normal, there were no deformities just a smile that could be mistaken for kindness.

‘It’s time Kate.’

She recoiled on hearing her name, he had never spoken it before, never asked it. She had never revealed it.

‘Time for what?’ she managed to spit out.

‘Time for the fun to begin.’  

 

 

Author's Note

Please excuse any grammatical errors, I sometimes write faster than my brain allows.

also comments and opinions are freely welcome, i would in fact, love some constructive criticism.
This passage is also under work and if needed will be altered.