Adam and Eve

Am I dead?

I’m hurting. Surely when you’re dead you don’t hurt?

Were they lying about heaven?
I can’t see anything; my head is pounding, my skull attempting to break free of my skin. Why do I hurt this much?

Where am I? The air is cold and musty; it catches in my throat as I breathe.

I try to move my head from its warped position in the crook of my neck: it makes a horrible clicking noise as I do so.

There is a tiny strip of light above me! Little dust particles are dancing in it, forming tiny galaxies in their movements. The light is the sort you get in the autumn in the evening, the most beautiful kind that reminds you of old books and creaking hammocks.

How can something as beautiful as that exist when I am this broken?

I look towards the source of the light: it’s coming from a sliver space underneath a decaying slab of a door, strips of paint hanging off it like vines.
The door is placed at the top of a thin staircase facing me, like the one that we had going into the basement when I was a child.

I try to move my hands and feet to crawl over to them, but they won’t move. I look down to find thick pieces of rope around my wrists and ankles, blood crusted around the edges. They are tied so tightly that the blood supply has been cut off and they hang limply off my limbs.

Why am I tied up? Is this a joke? Some sort of neighbourhood prank? But what kind of sick kid would do this to me?

My breathing starts to hitch as I listen for any sort of movement but there is nothing. What if no one finds me? Is no one looking? How long have I been here?

I can feel my chest beginning to tighten as I start to panic.

“Hello?” My voice is hardly above a whisper and my throat feels like sandpaper as I try to shout, “Hello? Can anybody hear me? Is anyone there? Help! Someone please help me, please!”

“Shhhhhhhh...”

My whole body seems to freeze, my blood turns to ice and my skin to snow. It was so quiet I could hardly be sure I had heard it at all yet that noise terrified me more than anything I had ever known.

I tried to convince myself it was only some leaves rustling or the wind as I choked out, “Who- who’s there?”

There is a silence for a tantalising second as I dare myself to breathe before the same whisper from before, that is both infinitesimally quiet and impossibly loud at the same time, comes wafting down through the floor boards, “Shh, hush now.”

I force my voice to be louder as I choke back any sobs, “Tell me- tell me who you are, I mean it.”

“QUIET!” I let out a small whimper as the sound swarms around my head, echoing the room.

I can someone or something moving around above me until the friendly patterns of dust above my head are broken by the shadow of boots beneath the door.

Then, gut wrenchingly slowly, the door at the top of the stairs creaks open. The light that manages to slip behind the figure snags at my eyes and pricks them with little needles of fire.

How long have I been here in the dark? Why has no one found me?

The man at the top of the stairs scuttles towards me, his movements jagged and jumpy. He comes over and slides down the wall next to me, plucking me off the floor as if I were as feeble and defenceless as a petal he can blow away into the wind.

He pulls me over to him and nestles me in to crook of his arm, stroking my hair which is sticky and plastered to my head with sweat and blood. Why am I bleeding? Where his skin brushes against mine a desperately wish to recoil but I don’t have the energy to even attempt it.

“Shush now, why are you crying?” He murmurs into my ear, I wasn’t even aware of the salt staining my cheeks until now, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, we’re saving you, don’t you see? We’re saving you! You should be grateful!”

Grateful? Did he honestly believe I should be grateful? Or was this just some sick mind game he wanted to play?

“But hush now, you have to be quiet or they’ll hear you. Can’t let them hear us, no can’t let that happen, no, no, no. Quiet now, quiet, quiet, shuuuush.”

Who is he talking about? Is there someone else here? I try to look up at the man but the hand that had been stroking my hair is now clamping my head to his side, making movement impossible. I just lie limply, with no idea what to do, until he speaks again.

“Here, now you’ve calmed down I can take these off you,” He cuts away at the rope around my wrists and ankles, “See, isn’t that better? Isn’t it better to be quiet, to be nice and quiet?”

He starts to rub my fingers, helping the blood a feeling flow back into them, occasionally snagging at the surprisingly deep rope cuts.

Suddenly, there is a loud thump from the floorboards above us, accompanied by a ferocious hiss, “Cain!” The man jumps up and heads for the stairs before turning back and throwing me over his shoulder, as if I weighed nothing more than a sack of dried leaves.

Well, maybe I do, I can feel my ribs digging into his shoulder. Exactly how long have I been down there? I wasn’t like this before.

The man carries me up the stairs and through the door at the top. I search desperately for a way out, an escape, but the sudden vastness of the intense light out of the cellar and abrupt, dizzying movements after god knows how long of sitting in that cellar, cause my head to spin and my vision to go blurry.

I close my eyes and hold my breath until I feel the man place me down on the cold floor, leaning against a wall. I involuntarily slump down into the floor, forcing myself to take into the solid ground beneath me as I wait for my equilibrium to settle.

I listen for where the man is; I can hear him talking with someone in another room, their voices nervous and fast.

“We need to keep her quiet. Quiet, quiet, very quiet.”

“Yes, quiet, quiet, but we need more. We need something else; we need to know if they’re coming; quiet is good but quiet is not enough. We need to save them; masks and quiet aren’t enough, Juliet, we need something else. They are coming, Juliet, they are coming.”

“Shhhhh, I know what to do.”