Chains

“The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here.” I'm telling you, one moment I'm tucked away in my sanctum of a bedroom, and the next? The stench hits me like a sucker punch - an unholy blend of decomposing cabbage and garlic, somehow laced with an almost saccharine sweetness. It's an olfactory assault unlike any other. Swallowing back bile, I try to make sense of this new reality. 

The room is a cavernous abyss; the only light comes from harsh fluorescents that paint everything in sickly green hues. An irregular drip-drip-drip echoes around me, the sound amplified by the oppressive silence that hangs heavy in the air. My brain struggles to process it all - none of this should be possible.

And then it happens: the metallic scrape of chains against stone cuts through the quiet.

Remember those horror flicks from the Reagan era? The ones that spat in the face of societal norms? Videodrome, Day of the Dead, and others like them were my bread and butter as a kid. My mom would say I was magnetized to them, spinning out make-believe characters to keep me company. A solitary child's way of amusing himself.

But there was this woman who took up residence in the corner of my room. Unlike my other silver-screen conjured companions, she remained silent; her mouth never moved to form words I could understand. Her language was a penetrating stare that refused to blink. "She's not real," I'd reassure myself.

She wasn't a product of my mind's cinema reel. She was as dependable as an old buddy or the whiskey-hound Mr. Heissen who regularly gatecrashed my dad's Saturday night liquor gatherings. If we hit the road for a trip, her phantom reflection would emerge on the car window glass. Sometimes she'd materialize during static-ridden commercial breaks on my 13-inch Magnavox TV set. She even made appearances in our refrigerator’s milk jug reflection, akin to one of those missing children ads.

This lady was stout and roundish like a dumpling, with eyes as black and expansive as spilled coffee. Always donned in a plain long-sleeved white frock and white kerchief over her dark hair; except for one red heart emblazoned right at the center of her dress was her trademark look. She kept herself at arm’s length from me but there was this grating noise that tagged along wherever she went—like chains dragging across coarse concrete.

"The woman with those black-hole eyes!" Mom would reminisce years later, "You couldn't get enough of her, Freddy."

Her visits were erratic - sure they were disconcerting but Dad shrugged it off as nothing more than a kid's wild imagination. He and Mr. Heissen would rib me about the woman over their whiskey-fueled Saturday nights. Even when I didn't broach the subject, Mr. Heissen was relentless, always prying if I’d seen her recently. Besides the chain-dragging soundtrack that accompanied her appearances, Mr. Heissen asked me if she ever made muffled sounds like her mouth was stitched shut and if there was a smell of decaying cabbage and garlic with a sweet undertone whenever she appeared.

Then life happened. Those horror movies lost their charm; Green Day became my new gospel; chasing skirts around high school became my favorite pastime; college coincided with that Y2K hysteria where everyone thought World War III was imminent but I kept up with alcohol-fueled parties and guitar jamming sessions - all these things started erasing every single detail that defined my childhood. The woman with those black-hole eyes gradually faded into oblivion until she was nothing more than an echo of a memory.

Fast forward to moving into my first apartment post-college graduation - lured friends with liquor to help me move in. After a long day, I collapsed on the couch and drifted off. I woke up in a sudden state of alarm - heart hammering, gasping for breath. That familiar yet distant chain-grinding sound echoed from the corner of my living room accompanied by the stench of rot. Something stirred at the periphery of my vision. The silence was overwhelming, punctuated only by my labored breathing.

Adrenaline surging through my veins, I whirled around.

It was her.

She looked exactly as before - same white dress, same scarf over her black hair, those same black-hole eyes and that red heart on her dress. That muffled wail or hum, that eerie hum. She rolled up her sleeves to reveal what looked like savage shackle wounds on her wrists. Those black and bruised sores, looked like they’d been festering for ages. "She’s not real," I kept telling myself over and over again like a mantra.

But she hadn't left that time; she'd begun to materialize everywhere - mirrored in the glassy surface of my computer screen, lurking in the periphery at work, even reflected in Heineken bottles strewn across my stained carpet. My friends had pegged me as unhinged; parents were certain I'd spiraled into madness. Sleep had transformed into a crafty fugitive while my job performance plummeted into oblivion.

"The woman with the void-black eyes? Have you completely lost your marbles, Freddy?" Mom would spit back.

Then one late night there she was again - her body contorted grotesquely in the corner of my bedroom, accompanied by the grating soundtrack of chains grinding. The stench was overwhelming. In a desperate attempt to reclaim control, I approached her for the first time. Her gaze scanned over me; then I saw it – a gag in her mouth like a piece of cloth brutally forced down her throat. Those muffled sounds were actually desperate attempts at speech. 

Abruptly, everything tilted; we weren't alone anymore but joined by a short stocky man– clad in a field-grey uniform sporting a swastika on his shoulder, “Heissen” stitched across his broad chest. We found ourselves inside an underground bunker-like room linked to an elaborate labyrinth of corridors and rooms reeking of damp earth, rotting cabbage and garlic but with an oddly sweet undertone to the smell. Fluorescent lights sputtered out a sickly yellow hue, casting an uncanny glow on the woman with those void-black eyes who huddled fearfully in a corner, shivering and chained to a wall while water leaked from above, drip drip drip.

The fluorescent lights flickered sporadically like dying candles caught in gusts of wind and I could see further back in one corridor a heap of bodies. I’d never seen death before but these corpses were piled up haphazardly, limbs entwined as if they were overgrown weeds. The familiar smell was the stench of death. I found myself brandishing a Walther P38 at her. I yanked the cloth that had been forcefully lodged in her throat from her mouth. "Please don't kill me. Please! I'm not a spy!" she begged, tears carving tracks down her face. She was speaking German, a language foreign to me, but I could comprehend her. "Shoot her, Friedrich!" ordered Heissen. A gunshot echoed; blood blossomed on her white dress forming the shape of a heart. As I swiveled around, Heissen had vanished and I woke up in my bed soaked in sweat and convulsing uncontrollably. The woman with those void-black eyes never returned again.