It had been a girl once, not yet quite a woman. The little white choir gown it wore was fouled with stains; Winters could not tell if they were from the rusted chains that encircled its body and ran through the pitons driven into the back wall and floor of its cramped little cell, or if they were long-dried blood or filth. The hands and feet were desiccated, the flesh drawn back so far that the nails looked like claws, the individual bones of the hand and foot glared out under the patchwork light the cell let in.
Over its head it wore a shredded canvas bag, but holes in it let out two matted cascades of tawny, malnourished hair.
“Rhonda?” Winters whispered into the cell. “Rhonda Younge?”
It had been looking downward, but as it raised its bagged head, Winters realized the bottom had been clawed at, frayed away enough to expose the chin. It opened a black mouth filled with shattered teeth – but no tongue, Winters would remember later as she tried to sleep in her savage triumph. The scream that came out was the scream of one for whom words have never held meaning, a wretched howl that beat against the walls of its cell.
Don’t worry, I’m still writing. I did completely screw off on Day 10 and wrote barely 900 words on Day 9, but it is still all right, since I was more than a day ahead to begin with and the last couple of days have kept me just barely ahead of prescribed word count. That video up there is sort of the cultural “it” thing of the moment, and you’ll notice it is incredibly disturbing after a certain point.
That sort of ties in with what I’m writing about now: A weird place that occupies the ideal of something but is in fact a creepy backdrop for a total psycho killer. In my current storyline, the woman a shady group of people have sent to track down this creepy killer has reached that killer’s hiding place. I’m not sure if it came through or not, but I wanted to invest in her just a little bit of the heroic as she tries to navigate this sinister, dark place and is finally shaken by the terrible things she finds inside. Of course, that wouldn’t make for a good rest of the book, though. What will happen next is a treacherous alliance between the two of them, as he offers her the secrets of the townspeople, who are more important than she’s realized. This is a big turning point in the story, and I’m nearly coming to the end of it, thankfully.
(more…)
