"Arghhhhh"
Screams from within a basement near the hill echoed with dread.
"Please you have to let me go" a lady's wailing could be heard at close distance but sadly most people weren't around at the moment.
" Hmm, now I've got you where I want you" a figure in yellow oilskin raincoat growled with a butchers knife in his hands as he approached a drag space with a disheveled lady chained to the wall. He kept on grumbling as he approached the figure.
" I hate the loud noises, why are you trying to struggle when it's the end" he added dropping the knives in his hands, the butcher knife caught the amber glow of a solitary forty-watt bulb hanging from a braided cloth cord, he then walked toward a drawer to bring out a bottle of pill in which he poured a bunch into his mouth.
The figure upon closer look was that of a lady matching the scream and the sight of the man was horror to her. His eyes were bloodshot while his grin grew dark under the dim light which he lit to pick up the bottle of pills. " Damn stomach rumbling" he sighed and the Ecstasy in his eyes vanished then replaced with tender look.
" This is turning to a tournament of torment my dear," he dragged a stool containing a bowl of clean water and a towel in it. He them squeezed the towel and gently cleaned the lady who was nakedly chained ensuring that every corner of her body was devoid of debris of the basement.
He walked around the basement, first to the wall to increase the dim light and then to a small fridge bringing out a refrigerated bowl of cereal and walked towards the lady to spoon feed her.
The lady stared at him trembling and struggling to be free of the chain but sadly enough it didn't budge. She running out of strength could only succumb to the disguised kindness as she knew very well that the bowl of cereal was already drugged and soon she would be out cold.
[Ohio University]
* * *
Nearly two weeks had passed since the incident in the woods. The yellow crime-scene tape had begun to fade into a dull, plastic orange under the summer sun, and the massive sea of black sedan cruisers had receded by eighty percent. The state investigators, unable to locate a digital trail or a matching hair follicle in the national databases, had slowly re-routed their primary tactical assets back to the Columbus grid. Many had come to believe that it was indeed a wild animal attack since even the local news confirms it with different theories and made up evidence from logic.
In the third row of the terraced lecture hall, the air smelled of stale coffee and graphite dust.
The course was Advanced Seminar: Sports, Performance, and Regional History, a massive, ninety-minute lecture designed to fill the core humanities requirements for the upper divisions needed to move to second year in their respective programs.
Ryan sat with his head propped in his left hand, his hoodie pulled low over his brow, his varsity jacket draped loosely over the back of his wooden seat. His eyes were completely away from the digital slide presentation the professor was running at the front of the room. The lecture on nineteenth-century athletic clubs didn't hold an interest to him, instead, his right hand was moved a the pencil across the margin of his notebook with a slow scratch.
He was drawing a face. It was an oval, perfectly smooth, entirely devoid of hair or features—a porcelain marble that looked exactly like Damon's forehead before the fresh nourishment had settled. Next to him exactly one seat to his left was Fiona. She had her heavy knit cardigan pulled tight around her throat, her textbook open to page 114, but her fingers hadn't turned the page in twenty minutes. Her sharp eyes were fixed on the side of Ryan's face, her mind spinning rapidly through the conversation she had overheard near the library plaza the week before.
Ryan didn't acknowledge her gaze as he was immersed in drawing out his imagination into his book page.
As Fiona continued to watch his pencil point trace the edge of the drawn jawline, the ambient noise of the lecture hall—the professor's droning voice, the clicking of forty separate laptop keyboards—suddenly began to dissolve and was being replaced by a sharp, low-frequency vibration. It was neither the sound of a wild animal nor a campus siren. Instead a distinct metallic
"clang-clang-clang" of heavy iron links striking against a steel pipe.
The sound was incredibly close, so loud and rhythmic that it seemed to vibrate through the wood of the desk beneath her palms.
Fiona's breath caught violently in her throat. She looked down at her own hands, then back at Ryan's notebook page. The blank face in the drawing seemed to shift under the fluorescent light, its charcoal edges thickening into the shape of a cold, iron collar.
"No..." she murmured, her voice a dry, trembling whisper.
The sound intensified, a terrifying, industrial rattle filled her head until her vision began to blur at the edges. The room felt suddenly freezing, the air thick with the faint, metallic scent of old well-water and zinc.
With a sudden, frantic lurch, Fiona stood straight up from her seat. Her knees struck the underside of the wooden desk with a loud, hollow "thud" _caused her notebook and water bottle to tumble heavily onto the floor tiles.
The professor stopped mid-sentence, his dry-erase marker hovering an inch above the whiteboard. Forty heads turned simultaneously, their curious, sleepy eyes locking onto her pale face.
"Is there an issue, Miss...?" the professor asked, his brow furrowing as he checked his seating chart.
Fiona staggered backward a step, her hands shaking violently as she clutched her cardigan to her chest. The metallic rattling in her ears was still screeching, a bone-tingling baseline that made her teeth ache.
"I... I apologize," she stammered, her voice cracking with an intense, uncoordinated panic as she reached for her bag. "I need to... use the restroom. Excuse me."
Without waiting for a response, she stumbled out of the row, her boots making a loud, frantic scuffing sound against the stairs as she bolted through the rear exit doors into the wide, empty corridor.
Inside the row, Ryan didn't look at her trailing form. He just continued his drawing couldn't be bothered o rather didn't want to be bothered.
"Damon said her vibe was shifting," Ryan thought, his jaw clamping tight as the friendly student-athlete persona completely drained from his posture. "She's way too weird to even begin to debate that."
With a swift movement of his forearm, Ryan reached across the empty space between their seats. Her canvas tote bag had been left behind on the floorboards, its zipper half-open to reveal a small leather bound journal and a stack of printed historical articles from the local regional grid.
He didn't touch the bag with his fingers; instead, he used the edge of his boot to pull the strap beneath his own seat while he continues to draw.