In the beginning...

Single-writer in-character stories and journals.
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Claude Lambert (DELETED 8569)
Posts: 38
Joined: 04 Jul 2016, 15:33
CrowNet Handle: Followers to Stone

In the beginning...

Post by Claude Lambert (DELETED 8569) »

Monotonous.
Imposing.
Velvety.

Those were the words that came to mind when he’d first heard that disembodied voice. Most would turn away and try to forget what they had heard, tell themselves that it was a dream born of rotten spirits and sour grapes. For it was the voice of something sinister that had called to him that night, a voice which had carried with it the tones of those composed in the lowest places of the Earth. The eerie articulations weren’t designed for salvation, but to insight fear and sickness; slipping past the cages of man’s heart and mind to plague all of his ambitions. Only those desperate for escape would see those venomous vocalisations as a saving grace, the last hope that would pull them from their suffering. He had become this desperate. For he had turned first to God for help, had knelt in the cold light of the abbey until his knees were numb and his throat was parched from prayer, and in that quest he had not found the comfort of faith, only the chill of loneliness and rejection.

It is said that where God abandons, the Devil feels fit to welcome.

In spite of all he thought he knew, he was a butterfly in a spider's web. The end would not come quickly and any struggling he might do would only fold him ever more deeply into the trap. Still, he had resigned himself to this fate and had accepted the consequences; in his failure to find hope he had longed for release in any form it chose to take. Through it all, the futility of his efforts to seek out a God that did not care for him had nurtured a hatred, a symbiotic darkness to those which would make prey of him. Perhaps it was that which saved him in the end, because when the voice called and lured and pressured, and he had answered, the outcome had not been entirely expected. For there was another sound in the darkness, a cleaving force that tore the spider’s web in two. It had not set free the butterfly, nor caused the spider to starve to death – it had left a trapped man entombed with his grief and sanctioned the Devil to hunt on for an easier meal.

Claude had not understood what had happened to him that night. The explanation had come to him at the break of the next day, when he could open his eyes and absorb the words spoken to him in full clarity. He had found himself in a place that was not familiar, a room that was bereft of the comforts and evidence of a life. Blank walls had enclosed him like a cell – 4 foot by 4 foot. The floor beneath him was, to his horror, bleached tiles and dark grout. A layer of mould had accumulated between the ceramic squares, making their clinical whiteness ever more depressing and alerting him to the fact that the room had been designed for nefarious purposes. Cold light stretched languidly through the window, splashing pale hope onto the top half of the room where it could reach. Claude had noticed that the small rectangle of a window was too high for a normal man to reach, and yet there were bars there – just in case. He also noticed that, whenever he moved, he jangled.

It was not a pleasant sound. Not like that jingle-bell ringing that teased one’s heart at Christmas time, a sound that melted pleasantly like dusted sugar on a tongue. The jangle had a weight to it and a hardness which tethered the German to the ground by his ankles. It had become clear, even before the haze of inebriation had fully passed, that Claude had been imprisoned, though he remained unaware of the charge. There was a steel door at the end of his box-like room that drew his attention. There was no handle on his side, only a shutter that would allow the people on the outside to look in. Claude had seen enough of fiction and reality to attribute his circumstances to that of a psychiatric inmate, yet even those patients had the luxury of a bed and a toilet. Whomever had kidnapped him, had at least gone to the effort of redressing him in what looked like off-white scrubs. The uniform had been washed many times, making the texture coarse and irritating against his skin. Had these people not learnt of the miracle that was fabric conditioner?!

The German was broken from his contemptuous thoughts when he heard the approach of footsteps. The sharp, clipping notes appeared to count down to his doom, and when they had stopped outside of that metal door, Claude had drawn himself back to the corner of the room and pressed his back against the wall. People generally do not make a habit out of kidnapping others or shackling them to the ground of an insidious looking room if their intentions are pure, therefore Claude did not hope for a positive interaction with his captor. The door of his room screamed open, flooding the box room with stark white light. The kind of pain that assaulted the German in that moment was incredible, as if the light was physically lancing into his nervous system. He drew up an arm to shield him from the brightness, to block out some of the pain, but it was invariably futile. It was only time and exposure that had allowed that agony to ease, and when it was bearable, Claude peeked out from over his own forearm and saw a figure standing in the doorway.

“Good morning, Mr Lambert.”

The voice from the silhouette had the kind of synthetic warmth that one would discern from a machine. From what Claude could make out, the accent was from the region, was female, and was highly educated. She had the manner of a nurse, and there was something clutched to her breast between her criss-crossed arms; it looked like a clipboard.

“Where… am I?”

His own voice was as rough as parchment, as bristly as the clothing that made his skin redden and itch. The sound he had made, like a yelp of pain when he spoke, came with the instinctive need to wrap both hands around his throat as though it was wounded. Incidentally, his fingertips brushed over a small indentation on the side of his neck, so perhaps it wasn’t just the liquor to be blamed for the memory lapse and his current situation.

“You’re exactly where you wanted to be,” she said cheerily. “You’re at the mercy of a higher power.”

“Wonderful…” the German sighed, and he promptly added insane to the list of denominators he had used to characterise the woman speaking with him.

“You wanted to throw your life away, did you not?”

A pause as she checked the clipboard, but, there was no need for an answer. Claude’s arms dropped to his side.

“So, you will be given the opportunity to do just that. You’re going to be part of a programme, Mr Lambert.”

She took a few steps forward then, aligning herself with the man on the floor, and then crouched upon her hindquarters. It was only when she did so that Claude could define her features from the darkness and the blinding light. He could discern rich scarlet hair that pulled away from her flawless porcelain skin and into a bun; he could recognise the blue of her eyes, the rose dusting of her cheeks, and the glistening cherry red of her lips. She was young and pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine, she shouldn’t have been there. Claude could also tell, from a sweeping glance of her trim frame, that she was dressed like a nurse from the 1950s; only, her white uniform clung to her body in a manner that was hardly virtuous or health-conscious, and she wore fishnet stockings and Louboutin stilettos. The first three buttons of her blouse were left undone, exposing the pillowy contours of her bosom and their black lacy nest. When she’d caught the direction of his amber eyes, she chuckled lightly causing them to wiggle, then closed the view with the relocation of her clipboard.

“The doctor will be along shortly,” she whispered, looking down her nose at him before she rose sharply and stomped away.

Claude’s attention had been drawn between the cold blue steel of her eyes and the contrast of red and white gnashing together as her words were formed. Despite the revelation gifted to him about some medical programme he had been volunteered for, he could only focus on her conflicting presence. Everything about her was a joining of contradictions. Dressed as a nurse, the symbol of care and virtue, she had instead twisted the image into something dangerous and perverse. Her voice was another source of contention, where this false nurse would speak with false sentiment. She was a living oxymoron, which gave him great feelings about his appointment with the so-called doctor. Claude wondered whether the aforementioned physician would even be in receipt of a medical degree, or if this was some theme they were toying with; Bonnie and Clyde play Doctors and Nurses. He needed a plan of escape. Quickly.

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