A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [97]
I heard nothing, but there were vibrations where there had been stillness, in the stones beneath my feet and the air against my cheeks. I rapidly arranged the gourd where it had been, put near it the remainder of the loaf with the intact section of crust turned to the door, and threw myself on the floor in an attitude meant to suggest death.
A lock turned, then a bolt, and another bolt. Hinges groaned open and—light! Gorgeous, wavery, bouncing, blinding light. And an oath. I tried to ready myself to spring up, without visibly breathing. Tiny, quick breaths. Several feet at the door, entering.
“Close it.” That was my abductor’s voice, restricted still by the false beard.
Hinges groaned again; the door thudded; boots scuffed the stones. The light came closer, my eyelids reddened as it neared my face, and I came up running, hit the lamp from the man’s hand and sprinted for the door, and had my fingers on the handle before my head jerked back painfully and I went down on my knees. I hit out and the man grunted, but he did not let go of the hold on my hair, and in a second they were all on me, and I was caught.
“Don’t hit her,” said the leader, and they did not, merely slammed me up against the wall. I winced away from the dazzle of his electric torch in my eyes.
“Hold her.” I thought at first the obvious, but it quickly became apparent that it was a very different sort of invasion they had in mind. The man holding my left arm pulled it away from the wall, stretching my wrist out from my body while his other hand pinned my shoulder against the stones.
“Bring the other lamp.” When I saw what my abductor was pulling out of his pocket, I went berserk. I nearly freed myself, and it ended only when three burly men, bruised, bitten, and bleeding all, held me down on the floor and their leader put his hand over my nose and mouth and cut off my air. My frantic attempts to bite the man or free myself from his fingers exhausted my air; the room began to fade. When my air and my panic had both run out, he took his hand away, and as I gulped great draughts of air, he got to work.
I had never before experienced the sheer inexorable power of strong men. In utter humiliation and near abject terror, I could only look on as That Man knotted a silk scarf cruelly tight around my upper arm, took out a dark velvet case containing an already-filled hypodermic syringe, probed the hollow of my arm with knowledgeable fingers, and injected me directly into the vein. He slid his blunt fingers under the knot, loosed the scarf, and stood away.
And my body exploded. My every cell woke up and shouted in recognition of the substance being pumped through my veins, and a rush of pure, raw sensation flooded over me like a huge, slow electrical wave, leaving me quivering from the soles of my feet to the back of my head in what I can only describe as ecstasy. As it went through me, it seemed to shear my mind straight down the centre and split it, so that for perhaps a minute I experienced a sort of palimpsest of consciousness, a simultaneous awareness of events as they were now and as they had been six years and three months before.
I was aware of the stones at my back, the sharp smell of spilt paraffin, and the moan that issued from my twenty-one-year-old throat, a sound obscene even to my own ears and which caused the men pinning me down to cackle and joke among themselves as they stood away from my body and set about cleaning up the broken lamp and the old vomit.
At the same time, and every bit as vivid, was the hospital bed beneath me, the medicinal hospital stink of cleaning