DARKNESS

She was in water. That much she knew immediately. Though she could not move her body, she knew she was floating. There was no light, but her ears were filled with the distant sound of heavy machines thumping and chugging, and the deafening rush of water. At least she wasn't cold. She had been cold. Very cold.

Though it was a detached, disassociated memory, she could vaguely recall laying naked in a bathtub, the dull throb of pain in a long line down her forearm, staring dumbly at the water as red flowers bloomed out and stained the white porcelain finish of the tub.

Beyond that, everything was a muddled mess. She had a husband. It was her husband's old-fashioned razor that had done the cutting. The razor she bought for him years before. She searched for his face in her memory but could not find it. All that remained were notions of ideas. Concepts of a partner, a mother, a son, but no image or memory that might solidify into a cohesive history. Only these loose feelings.

Somewhere, far away, a man was screaming. Not fear or pain, but excitement. White, blinding light and a taste like pennies on her tongue exploded inside her and she was gone again.

FALLING

Somehow, she was falling and floating at once. The sound of machines and water roared in her ears. It occurred to her that even though she could feel water in her nose and mouth, she was not drowning. In fact, as near as she could tell, she was not breathing at all.

This did not panic her. What she found troubling was the feeling of being sucked downward. Her legs and arms were bound, and she could feel herself being pulled by the flow of liquid.

A surface, hard and dense, pressed against her back and she was suddenly certain that she was in some sort of tube, and that she had recently been delivered into a horizontal position. She felt gravity pulling her body down toward the bottom of this tube, against her back rather than toward her feet.

Those feet bumped a flat surface and the feeling of being sucked stopped abruptly. She was floating again, suspended in the warm, flavorless fluid. She tried to open her eyes but they refused. The lids felt taped or glued shut. At best, she could see a slight pinkish hue to the darkness.

Then, again, there was nothing.

PAIN

The bleating sound of an alarm somewhere close by was louder than anything she had ever heard in her life, such as it was. The sound was causing her excruciating pain. For the first time, she felt distress build inside her chest as she tried to raise her hands to cover her ears and was unable to. The sound was torture and she could do nothing to stave it off.

The noise wavered and was replaced by the sudden shift in pressure. The water was draining quickly. She could feel herself becoming denser and sinking. Her face breached the surface and the cold bite of air caused her skin to tighten and break out in gooseflesh.

Instinct told her that she should begin breathing when her face broke the surface of the water. Yet her lungs refused to work.

More panic swelled inside of her. She could feel her legs trying to kick, but they would not obey her command. Her arms wanted to raise and pull at whatever was covering her face, but they remained dead at her side.

With horror, she realized that she was not bound, but simply unable to command her body.

She was paralyzed.

Darkness took her again.

TUGGING.

Something was pulling at her face. It didn't hurt, but it felt strange. Not just at her face, but at her lips. It would have tickled if it hadn’t felt so strange, as though someone was removing dead skin from her lips in long strips. It didn’t hurt, it was just odd and seemed to scratch an itch she didn’t realize she had. With each tug, cool, delicious air briefly darted into her mouth.

When the tugging stopped momentarily, she became aware of the fact that her mouth was open, and she was breathing. Barely. It was hardly more than a mild breeze, but air was indeed passing in and out of her mouth. She felt it cooling her lips with each slow, even pull. The tugging resumed, this time at her neck.

This went on for hours.

The ticklish tugging and picking. It moved from spot to spot. Sometimes at a wrist, sometimes a thigh. Sometimes at her hairline.

Whoever was doing the tugging had gentle hands and smelled of oiled leather and shaving soap. They were also fond of humming Ave Maria.

LIGHT.

Blinding white light needled into her brain. The tugging had gone on for hours or days. It seemed to touch everywhere. Every joint and every opening had been tweaked and tickled and poked and explored until her entire body felt raw and new, as though it had been exposed to the air for the first time.

At long last came her eyelids.

With the final tug, she came to realize that what had once kept her eyes closed was now gone. She was free to open them if she wished. The will to do so did not come easy. The compounding sense of dread and simple exhaustion kept her in darkness. She was afraid of the light, afraid of seeing the shadowy person who had put her in this place and, worst of all, afraid of what she might see when she looked at her own body. After hours of denial and reflection she was eventually forced accept that the persistent tugging was a result of the somehow familiar sensation of stitches being removed from a healing wound.

That feeling had lighted onto nearly every inch of her body.

Rather than opening her eyes, she fell back into the abyss.

COLD.

Goosebumps rose along the length of her legs and arms. She could not see, but could feel the rippling sensation of her skin gathering as cold air wafted over her body. A hand gripped her ankle and her lips parted to cry out, but no voice came. She felt cold metal biting into her wrists and for the first time, she understood that her arms were restrained above her head. The hand on her ankle was binding her leg into a leather cuff.

The facts of her situation were gathering in her mind into a concept she could finally wrap her mind around. While she had no idea who or where she was, she now at least understood that she was on some sort of table and was restrained at the wrists and ankles… and she was naked. The chilly air stirred around her body. She could feel cold, smooth leather under her butt and back and thighs.

When she opened her eyes, she was disappointed to find she could see little. Something white and sheer covered her face. A veil or a gauze bandage perhaps. She could make out a halogen lamp on an adjustable arm, like one might find in a dentist's office, but otherwise the room was a blur. She suspected it was quite large though. The echoes of hard, sharp instruments clattering against a metal tabletop told her that.

When she opened her mouth to scream, again she found that she had no voice. Briefly she considered that perhaps she had gone deaf and was unable to hear her own shouts, but she realized that she could hear the unnerving sound of a man merrily humming a tune next to her.

Cold, latex clad hands gripped her jaw and tilted her head back. The murky shape of the man's face was barely visible through the fog of whatever was covering her eyes. Unable to focus, her eyeballs lolled dramatically back and forth, unseeing and unseen.

Then, a voice.

“Hand me those shears. No, the smaller ones. Thank you.”

The sensation of gentle tugging at something surrounding her midsection. Bandages. He was removing bandages. It was a familiar sensation, though only from a distance. A lost memory of some long-ago surgery or injury. That familiar but frightening feeling of gauze being cut away and unraveled.

The sucking sound of a vacuum hose startled her. She would have yelped if her voice had not abandoned her.

That cold, latex covered hand settled on her left breast. He seemed to be weighing it. He was gentle but indifferent. The feeling was uncomfortable, as though her breast was bruised. Though there was nothing particularly sexual about the maneuver, the confused sensations of fear, pain and bewildered arousal fluttered through her body. She tried to twist in her bindings, but was unable to direct the signals from her brain to the proper appendages. What was intended as a reactionary jerk away came out as little more than a twist of the hips, bringing her thighs together ever so slightly.

Inside her mind she was screaming, both in fear and frustration. She tried to clinch her fingers into fists but could only manage a slight twitch, pulling her hands into claws above her head. Something burned at her wrist, sending a river of fire up her arm and into her armpit. Just as abruptly as she had awakened, she dropped deep into sleep.

BITING.

Something was biting her. From the darkness she was swimming in, she was vaguely aware that some pesky creature was taking tiny bites from her body. Nipping in a tight, perfect line along the bottom of her breast. With each nibble, she heard the tiny plink of metal dropping onto metal. Then it stopped. Small bulbs of light drifted lazily around her like dandelion seeds in the dark. Each bulb contained a memory, like a little movie, and she casually peeked into them as they floated past. In one, she was eight years old, playing in a park with her brother. In another she was a student, passing a bottle of wine between three faceless friends. In yet another, she was in bed, a large, warm body pressed against her back, her dainty little hands clasped in thick, meaty fingers between her breasts. Male lips breathing hot promises against her neck.

The biting started up again. The other breast. Tiny little pecks along the sensitive skin between her breast and ribs. Trying to block it out, she reached for another bulb. Inside she saw herself, aged twelve, sitting in a bathroom stall crying. Blood on her fingertips, her panties in a wad on the floor. She pushed that memory aside and felt around for another. Her hands closed around larger bulb.

Inside that bulb, the lights of a movie screen flickered. She saw herself resting her head against a man's chest, burying her face in his shirt. The image on the screen showed a monster, half man, half insect, crawling across the ceiling of an industrial loft apartment. The woman who was her slid a hand down the front of the man's body, resting in his crotch. She squeezed and massaged him there. The man ran his hands through her hair, tangling it in his fingers as he pushed her head into his lap.

The biting gave way to cold momentarily, and then abruptly, agony. White hot pain exploded in the darkness and sent her falling into the depths. The last thought she had before slipping into unconsciousness was that her chest was on fire.

PRESSURE.

Hands pressing on her legs, pushing them back. Cold air against her bare skin. Frozen steel positioned under her knees, under her heels. She knew exactly what was happening. She was in stirrups. She was on a medical exam table and her legs were locked in stirrups. It was a place she had been dozens of times in her life.

Perhaps. Memories were tricky.

Whatever was wrapped around her eyes was thinner and looser than it was before. She could make out the hazy shapes around her. The walls were white and undecorated, and the fixtures were stainless steel. The humming man was back she could see the white rectangle of a lab coat and even the loosely defined features of his face. A beard perhaps. A mustache certainly. She could smell antiseptic cleaner and rubbing alcohol and latex. And something else. The peculiar, metallic taste of electricity. It weighed heavily in the air.

When she tried to move her arms, she was unsurprised to find that they were bound to the table at her sides.

“You're awake.” The humming man said, startling her. She didn't realize that he was watching her. She tried to respond, but her lips and throat refused. She pulled away as much as she could when he patted her lightly on the leg.

“You won't be able to speak. I haven't fixed that part of you yet. Soon,” The man said, his hand still on her calf. “We will have you up and about in no time. But right now, there's still plenty of work left to do. So, we're going to have to send you back to sleep again.”

As he spoke, she could feel him adjusting something that bit into her arm. An IV. The now familiar warm tingling sensation spread from her wrist, up her arm and into her chest. As she drifted off to sleep, she realized that at no point in any of this had she been particularly scared.

She'd taken it as her reality and never questioned it. Somehow, that realization is what sparked the first twinges of real fear in her.