Chapter 28
Jake awoke with a start. Everything was dark, and it took him a while to realize where he was. Then it came to him. He remembered talking to the old fart with the rotting skin and then all of a sudden being hit by someone from behind.
The room was dark and damp, so dark that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. That is just a saying, because as it turned out, he wouldn’t be able to see his hands anyways. Some one had tied them tightly behind his back. He didn’t know how long he had been this way, but long enough for his shoulders to start cramping. He tried to get into a more comfortable position, but every time he tried to move, the rope around his wrists seemed to tighten even more, causing more pain to snake across his shoulders.
He moaned and tried to sit up. With a couple of attempts, he did manage to upright himself. It was then that he realized that his legs had also been bound.
“What the fuck is going on?” Jake asked no one in particular.
His head started throbbing; most likely from the blow he had received. Acid flared up, causing abdominal pain as well. What nightmare had he stumbled into? He felt a terror begin to envelope him and atightness crawled across his chest. He found it difficult to breathe and tried to will himself to calm down, to think rationally but this didn’t seem to help. It seemed that his situation was becoming more and more helpless. Panic was settling in.
All of a sudden, one of his macabre visions came into view, almost as if it were real. It was his mother again, but this time her skin was slowly sliding from her face, a putrid stench coming from her.
Jake screamed and tried to back away from the apparition that was in front of him now, smothering him with its stench, causing him to gag.
“Look what has become of you now” croaked the vision. “If you had been a nice little boy, Jakie, you wouldn’t be suffering like this. You thought I didn’t know what you did all those times when you went out to play, don’t you? But I knew that you were no good even before you were born. You are spawn’s evil, you little bastard and you are getting everything you deserve.”
Almost as quickly as it had appeared, the ghost or whatever it was vanished from his sight. He closed his eyes trying to wipe it from his mind, but he couldn’t seem to forget what he had just seen and heard. He started to scream, and continued screaming, thinking that he was slipping into the depths of madness. No one seemed to hear him, or didn’t care. He finally stopped, and lay by the wall, panting like a dog.
“What sort of madness is this?” Jake wailed. “What is happening to me?”
He lay there for awhile not really expecting anyone to answer. No one did. The room was silent except for a scraping noise off to one side of him. He listened and there it was again. His eyes had become accustomed enough to the darkness to make out the shape of something against the wall. He squinted to see better, and when he did, he couldn’t catch his breath. There, not more than three feet from his foot was the biggest, most vile looking rat he had ever seen, its black eyes staring into his very soul.
At first, Jake recoiled and let out a stifled yell. The rat just looked at him. It sat there for so long that Jake thought it was another of his visions.
All of a sudden the rat began to creep closer and ever closer to him, baring razor sharp teeth. Evil seemed to emanate from the creature.Now Jake wasn’t so sure if this really was a vision or not, and began to let out a cry again.
The rodent stopped, but only for a moment. It leapt suddenlybefore Jake had a chance to react. The next thing Jake was aware of was a searing hot pain in his right ankle. The rat had landed upon his leg and tore a large ragged chunk of flesh from it.
Jake shrieked and kicked with all of his might, but it was no use. He was bound too tightly to do any good. The creature jumped down and scurried across the room. It turned around to glare at Jake one last time, bits of Jake’s flesh dangling from the corner of its mouth, the blood dripping in little pools onto the dirt floor.
Just before Jake passed out again, he could have sworn that he saw the vermin smiling and laughing at his peril. Madness was in fact creeping upon him. He couldn’t tell truth from fiction any more.
Some people say that paybacks are a bitch. In Jake’s case, his was going to be the mother of all bitches. It’s strange how sometimes fate rears its ugly head and affects your life. Jake’s life was to become more and more unbearable, whether imagined or not, as he was shortly about to find out. In Jakes’ deteriorating state of mind, it would all seem too real.
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