The Voice - Part Eleven

(warning: contains non-consensual sex)

Jillian tried to mark time, but it was almost impossible. Every encounter with her kidnapper left her shaking and exhausted after the residual adrenaline ebbed away.

When he left her, she lay gazing up into the pitch black, telling herself that everything would be alright. She calmed herself and made up unlikely scenarios in her head. The idea of a knight charging in on a white horse would have made her laugh out loud before, but now she understood why people invented him in the first place. They invented him because they needed to believe that they could be saved, no matter how hopeless the situation.

She began to have intense, nonsensical hallucinations. At first, they were just flickers. But the longer she spent in the dark, the wilder they became. Bright, multicoloured firework shows, and enormous green glowing, pulsing hot-cross buns. She knew what it was - in the absence of any real stimulus, her visual cortex began to make up images. Prison cinema.

So, she slept.

Her dreams were beautiful, joyful, like nothing she'd ever had before. Over and over, between little snatches of wakefulness, she revisited her Grandmother's garden. Full of bright light, and green smells: leaves dripping after the rain and insects buzzing from one brightly coloured azalea to another. The dreams were so painfully real that when she woke up into the darkness, she'd cry at their loss and try to force herself under again, back into the garden.

So when she woke blinking and tearing at the light, she thought at first it was another dream. Only after she'd sat up on the squeaky bed, and looked around there room and the light spilling in from a high, barred window, did she allow herself to admit that she was awake, she wasn't bound, and she wasn't dead.

Jillian crawled to the edge of the bed, and got off it. Her legs felt wobbly and weak and, her bladder was bursting. She looked around and saw an open door almost directly in front of her with a pedestal sink beyond. Letting out a whimper of desperation, she stumbled towards it.

The little bathroom was clean and white and completely empty. But she tugged at her knickers and sat down on the toilet seat with a sob of relief.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she whispered. The flow seemed to go on forever.

After she finished, she noticed how truly bare the bathroom was. A bath, with no curtain, a sink and a toilet. No towels, no soap, no loo paper. Nothing. The toilet did flush, but when she tried the taps in the sink nothing came out. The bath taps were the same. And, as if by some cruel trick of nature, the moment she'd emptied her bladder, she felt an almost unbearable thirst.

Walking out into the room, she surveyed her surroundings. There was a bed - a rickety old iron thing with bars at the head and foot, and a plain wood chair, and a window, high up on the wall. She stared up at it and saw nothing but clouded sky through the bars.

Jillian moved the chair under the window, trying to gauge the height. She stepped onto the seat of the chair and stretched her arms upwards. Only her fingertips reached the sill. Gingerly, she put one bare foot on the chair-back and got a little more reach. Her hands closed around the bars and, with a painful wrenching of muscle, she pulled herself up and looked out through the glass.

She was up high. She could see rooftops and the canyon of a small street. She didn't have a clue where she was, but far off in the distance, she could she the post-office tower. She was in London, north of the river. But where?

"Get down from there before you hurt yourself."

 

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