5:8
Siobhan shifted her wrist in the restraint. She’d tried it, oh, about two hundred and twenty times already but the two hundred and twenty-first time could be the charm.
“Jack?”
“Siobhan.” She corrected. For the thirty-second – Thirty-twelve-millionth – time?
“Jack.”
“Siobhan.”
The masked figure in the hoodie snatched the hat from her head. A sigh filtered through the mask.
Siobhan sighed too, only her sigh was dramatic and full of scorn. “Seriously. Did you think that was going to work? This time somehow being different than the last two-thousand?”
The figure reared their arm back, apparently to throw the hat, then pulled back and gently smoothed the fabric of the cap. They walked over to place the cap on a small round table next to a wing-back chair. Sitting in the chair they planted their elbows on the arms and steepled their gloved fingers in front of them. She called them “they” because not once in the time she had been held by them – hours? Days? Weeks? She wasn’t sure. They kept blowing dust in her face and knocking her out – had they revealed any detail that might give away their identity. Identities. Whatever.
Her alchemy Magick, being perverse, had decided to break the dust down after the first dosing. Calliandra eriophylla – known as fairy duster, Sclerocactus polyancistrus – pineapple cactus, fedlera rupicola – cliff fendlerbush, passiflora incarnata – passion flower, valerian (that stink, you couldn’t miss), lavender (less stinky, more aromatic, but it wasn’t bashful, for sure), aloe, and aster (with its sage-like notes). Which she’d never considered putting together to knock someone out. Not that she particularly cared to have learned the formula by being knocked out by it herself, but knowledge was knowledge.
The figure waved its fingers and from the shadows glowing filaments surged. So, it was going to be this again. Yay. She’d been growing complacent or maybe even bored. Time for some stabby-stabs.
The filaments darted across the dark space and began to poke and prod at her. Somewhere in the course of kidnapping her the “they” have stripped Siobhan of her own clothes and put her in a tank and shorts that exposed a large portion of her skin.
And wasn’t that just one more thing she did not want to think about? Every time she did it sent her mind skittering back into the dark corner it had created for her to hide and her mind would just crouch there shivering and shaking and refusing to think. And she needed to think. So, she just stopped considering how she’d ended up in new clothes.
She’d come to like this, shivering in the dark and cold, strapped to some weird apparatus that at first she’d thought was the metal frame of a crappy bed until she’d tested the give of it with heels and elbows and realized it was actually a giant frame loom. The threads of the warp provided support as well as a means of restraint.
You’d think thread wouldn’t be that strong, but then Siobhan suspected this wasn’t exactly thread. However, her wrists and ankles were bound there was no give to them. She’d yanked against them enough to know the only thing yanking did was give her welts and ‘thread’ burn.
If the pattern proved the same as the other times “they” had done this then Siobhan only had to suck it up until she passed out. She didn’t know what the purpose was of the filaments stabbing her. Any more than she got why “they” would follow this up with a rousing bait and switch of healing followed by slapping some form of apparel on her.
There was a hat, which had just been tossed on the small table.
There was a pair of shoes which they’d either delicately place on her foot like she was Cinderella and they were the Prince in search of a bride or they’d jam them on her like she was that stepsister who cut her heel off to fit when her foot proved too big. The shoes weren’t glass slippers. They were more like hand-sewn leather shoes. Something a Celtic dancer would wear to dance or maybe a jester from ye old days of olde would sport. Siobhan had taken to kicking them off before they could be laced on, asking if maybe they had a nice pair of running shoes or maybe some comfy house slippers instead, which then lead to them clamping her legs while they laced the things on.
Finally, there was the jacket, which didn’t go on so well what with her being tied down to a damned loom, but they certainly gave it the old college try by draping it over her. Not that she didn’t welcome the warmth – this place was cold and she was definitely not adequately attired for it – but Siobhan always made sure to squirm as best she could in her bound state and try to throw the thing off. It was the principle!
Now, she called them “they” though only one at a time did the dress-me-up, dress-me-down thing. Over however long they’d been at her Siobhan had come to the conclusion there was at least three of them. They all wore masks, gloves and hoodies along with baggie black cargoes but they varied in height. You couldn’t tell if they varied in build because, again, hoodies and baggie cargoes, but you couldn’t really hide being four or five inches shorter than your cohorts.
And though they definitely had some kind of voice distortion thing going on which made them all sound pretty close to the same they each had variations in their word choices and the cadences of their voices. So, yep, three. Maybe more. But definitely three people had snatched her and now seemed determined to alternately slap clothes on her and stab her with microfilaments that really stung when they broke her skin.
The thing that kept her going, separate from “fuck them they don’t win”, was that her friends would come for her. How? Eh. Would? Fuck yes. She only had to hold out until then. So, she braced herself, closed her eyes, and prepared to be turned into a pincushion again.
Stab. Stab. Ouch. Stab. Ouch. Ouch. Well, that’s probably going to leave a mark. Whoo, getting dizzy. Siobhan focused on her internal monologue, drowning out the voices whispered, screamed, warbled (yep, warbled), and even sang “Jack” at her. The voices wove in and out and around the sound of slithering and hissing the threads made as they came out of all directions to stab her.
Not Jack. She gritted her teeth and repeated in her head. Siobhan. She’d probably say it if past experience didn’t tell her the only thing coming out right now if she opened her mouth would be screams. As it was, she definitely whimpered. A lot.
Ouch. Not Jack. Ouch. Stab. Stab. Ouch. Stab. Siobhan!
“What?” Well, that was weird. As in not what she normally heard about now.
Siobhan would swear she heard the sound of running feet but it was so hard to sort any sound out of the “Jack! Jack. Jaaack. Slither. Slide. Jack!” She was tempted to open her eyes but, again, past experience in how ever long she’d been on this damned rack reminded her that the first (and second) times she’d done that she’d taken several filaments to the eye. Best she just keep her eyes clamped shut and her lips clenched hard and wished by all that was Magick that she could do the same for her nostrils and ears.
“Siobhan! Siobhan!”
She almost opened her mouth. Almost corrected, “Jack”.
No. She was Siobhan. Wait… they didn’t call her Siobhan.
She felt the filaments being pulled from her skin, her skin pulling up from her face as the tiny hair-fine hooks that dotted the surface of the strands remained buried in her.
“Careful. Stop. She’s bleeding.” That almost sounded like Gwen.
“Cut the things then!” And… Patti?
“They won’t cut!” Ivan?
It could be a hallucination but she hadn’t hallucinated her friends in this place. Not yet at least. Maybe she really was broken. Or breaking. Or on the verge of breaking.
“Fuck this! Stand back everyone!” what sounded like Kim said and then heat burst a short distance from Siobhan’s flesh. Everywhere. Her face, her exposed arms. Her belly. Her legs. But it didn’t touch her. Not at all. Instead it hovered, like the cloying heat of summer, just above her skin. And then there was no more tugging or the sucking, sucking, sucking of the strands like the mouths of tiny undersea creatures set to pull that which was Siobhan from her.
Very slowly, very carefully, ready to flinch back if a filament reared for her eyeball, Siobhan raised her left eyelid. Just enough to squint at the figures surrounding her.
“Kim?”
Hands wielding balls of fire drew back, replaced by what sure looked like her friend.
“Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
Siobhan wet her lips, tested the movement of her mouth, then said. “No. But I think you may have melted my mascara. Having a little trouble seeing here.”
Kim was pushed aside and then Gwen was leaning in to Siobhan, her fingers gentle on her cheeks. “She always messes that up.”
“And I always seem to be the closest when she does.”
Gwen brushed her fingers over the lashline of Siobhan’s right eye, making it possible for Siobhan to open both eyes to confirm that, yes, her friends really were there. Where ever there was.
Her gaze drifted over Ivan, busily digging at the threads of the loom with his sword, his attention focused like a laser. If only he could actually manifest a laser from his eyes. That might work better than the sword which was having zero effect on the threads. Then on to Gwen’s face, hovering close. And beyond her to Prairie who had her hands clenched in front of her and was doing a pretty good job of really messing up her knuckles with the pressure she was applying. Even from here, eyes half caked with mascara and mind clouded from pain, Siobhan could see the way her fingers were turning white. Kim had dropped back slightly to Gwen’s right and was tracking her gaze over every inch of Siobhan’s exposed skin, probably checking for burns. Next to Prairie Patti stared with eyes large in her stark features then raised her mouse to collarbone height and pet it with her free hand.
“Where’s Ben? And Dan?”
“Chasing the person who was in here with you.” Kim supplied.
“Oh. Okay. That’s sensible.” Siobhan jerked her arms, showing where they were knotted into the loom frame. “Can someone get me of this thing?”
Ivan, who had been working his sword into the threads that made up the warp, probably trying to cut them though with no success, stopped and asked, “How? This stuff doesn’t cut. And when I twist it flexes but doesn’t give. I’m afraid if I twist too much it will damage you.”
“How did you get the threads off of me? Because I’m guessing it was you that got the threads off of me?”
Kim raised a hand. “I burned them. They don’t seem to like fire. I’m hesitant to do it to this thing.” She glowered at the contraption holding Siobhan. “Seeing as I don’t think your skin would like fire any more than the threads do.”
Siobhan closed her eyes, resting her head back on the loom. And took the first real breath she had since waking up in this thing “Smart call.”
“Well, first, how about we lower it to the ground?” Prairie suggested. “I can’t imagine that it’s very comfortable to be suspended in the thing like a fly waiting for a spider.”
Ivan made a search of the edges of the frame with his fingers. “I think I found how this is hooked in place. It shouldn’t be that hard to release. It’s kind of ingenious. It’s got a support in the center and I think it swings like a see-saw. We just need to release the catches holding it in place and I think it will swing down easily.”
Ivan pointed out where the catches were at the bottom corners of the frame. Prairie and Kim stooped and released them and the apparatus did as Ivan had described, swinging back under Siobhan’s weight. Ivan and Patti rushed to steady it so that it smoothly went from vertical to horizontal, leaving Siobhan staring at a smooth expanse of ceiling above her.
Ivan immediately started working at the threads which were wound around one of Siobhan’s arms. “Ah, this is only tied. I should be able to get it loose.” There was some tugging and then he said, “Huh.”
“Huh?” Siobhan turned her head to look at him.
“Yeah. it’s not really what I thought it was. It’s almost weaved into these thread things in this frame.” Ivan prodded the frame with a thick finger.
Patti came and looked at where he indicated then suggested, “How about I have Sass try? The mice did good work with the threads in Diana’s story.”
“Worth a try.” Ivan stepped back to let Patti close to the frame. Patti set Sass down on the threads. A look of concentration crossed her face. She hummed, holding the mouse’s gaze. Then the mouse wiggled a bit and scurried across the frame to where Siobhan’s right wrist was bound. Catching the threads in sharp little teeth (Siobhan tried really hard not to think about it) Sass started gnawing.
Prairie moved up beside Patti and placed a hand on her arm. A look of complete peace, what Siobhan had come to think of as Prairie’s “Magick face”, softened Prairie’s features. The humming intensified, picked up, it sounded like, by the mouse and then the threads just fell away.
Siobhan slewed her gaze between the mouse, Patti, and Prairie. That was… new.
“Uh, what was that?”
“Oh,” Prairie gave a soft smile. “I realized that I can see something in here that…” she trailed off, her gaze going to the frame Siobhan was tied to, “looks a lot like that thing. It seems to be holding everything in place. I was able to help Dan move it earlier to get Ben, Kim, and Gwen out of a pit.”
“A pit?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll tell me the story later?”
“I’ll tell you the story later.” Prairie nodded. “Anyway, I thought maybe I could help Patti do the same. Only differently.”
Patti nodded but kept humming. Sass, meanwhile, had moved across the frame and released the threads holding Siobhan’s other arm down. When Siobhan started rising, Gwen pressed a hand to her shoulder.
“Stay down. I need to fix you.” Closing her eyes, she let her hands flow slowly over Siobhan’s exposed skin. Face first. Then shoulders. Then on. She traced Siobhan’s shape, reminding it of what it was meant to be. Siobhan felt a flush of warmth follow behind Gwen’s hands. When she moved, Gwen pressed on her ribs. “Stay.”
“Fine.” Siobhan settled back against the loom as she felt the bonds on her legs give way, then Patti stopped her humming and picked Sass up to give the mouse a gentle pet. The mouse nuzzled Patti, a look of mouse-y bliss on its face.
Not moving for fear of Gwen’s gentle (ahem) reprimand, Siobhan spoke to the ceiling. “You said Ben and Dan ran after someone? Shouldn’t they be back by now?”
“Oh.” Kim jerked. “Yeah. I didn’t hear any loud dying but, yeah… Let me go check.”
“I’ll come with you.” Ivan offered.
The two of them made a hasty run for a door situated a short distance from the wing-backed chair “they” had sat in.
“Can I sit up now?” Siobhan asked.
Gwen threw up her hands. “Fine! Whatever! Move! Mess up all my healing.”
Then she threw herself on top of Siobhan where she had only started to sit up, careful of the shifting threads of the warp. The thrust of Gwen’s leap drove them both through the threads, landing them with Siobhan’s butt firmly planted on the floor, threads of the warp cradling her at armpit level and holding her arms out like they were on an armrest, and Gwen straddling her waist.
“Yes. Yes.” Siobhan, glad as All Magick that Gwen had healed her before leaping on her, carefully moved her arms to grasp Gwen’s sides.
It was all she could do not to put her head on her friend’s shoulder and sob. But that wouldn’t make the right leader-like impression so she firmed her jaw, lifted her chin, and then nodded. Someone had to stay calm, even if that someone had just endured who knew how much torture.
She swallowed and shoved the memory into the dark shadow in the corner of her mind. Later. She’d fall apart later, when she was home and alone. Inside the shadow the memory beat useless fists against the walls and there was nothing but screams. And tears. Shadows swirling, sucking her down into the depths of helplessness and despair she hadn’t allowed herself to feel while ‘they’ had worked her over. And screams. But on the surface she remained calm. In control. Later, she promised herself, and closed her ears to the ringing sound of screams from ‘her shadow’. “I missed you too.”
“Never get kidnapped again! I mean it!”
“Here.” Patti moved to the top of the frame and carefully swung it on its pivot so that Gwen and Siobhan could scramble off the floor – after Siobhan had extricated herself from Gwen’s monkey-grapple.
“How about we get out of here?” Siobhan started to rise and found her legs weren’t quite up to supporting her yet. Before she could slump back to the ground Gwen planted a shoulder under her arm. Patti moved to the other side of Siobhan and did the same.
As they drew abreast of the chair, Siobhan halted their shuffle for the door. “Check to see if there’s a hat there.”
“A hat?” Patti asked.
“Yes. I think it might be magic. Or, I don’t know, just a hat. But judging by the way they kept slapping it on my head I’m going to say at least they thought it was magic. The jury’s still out on that since it didn’t seem to do anything to me.”
Gwen and Patti carefully maneuvered Siobhan into the chair then started a search of the area around it. Siobhan stiffened her back, trying to keep from touching the chair more than she had to. In the time she’d been held by “them” she’d come to hate the damned thing and the way they’d sit in it and hammer at her with their words and their gazes.
“Nothing,” Gwen called.
“Nothing,” Patti echoed.
“Damn.”
Siobhan started to plant her hands on the arms of the chair to lift herself but her fingers curled away from the surface. She curled her lips and tried again. Again her body said ‘no’. Before she could try again Gwen grabbed her hand and yanked her to her feet, hurrying to slide up to her side and wrap an arm around her ribs.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here and find the others. Maybe they caught the asshat that was fucking with you and we can get some answers.”
Enter The Woods 