Bea

The raindrops hurled themselves against the glass pane, angrily beating against the window like spears launched from the muscular shoulder of a javelin thrower. I traced a path down the window, pressing my palm against the cold glass and looking out at the dimly lit street. What I would have given to be outside, even with the pouring rain, even with the crashing thunder, even with the crackling lightning... I shook my head furiously. No. I couldn't think about escape when it wasn't possible. As I continued to stare outside, melancholy writing lines onto my face, a man approached me from the kitchen. He held a lantern up in the darkness of the night.

"Val. Get away from the window." the man said, his higher voice a familiar grate in my ears. I had heard horrible things being uttered by that voice, the cruelty of its message misled by its calm and complacent tone. I hated that voice. It was the voice of my captor.

I turned back to look at the man, and inwardly shivered. Outwardly, he seemed average, perhaps a bit strict. Small round glasses burrowed into the bridge of his nose, giving him an owl-like appearance. His soft brown eyes told nothing of what they had seen, of what his thin lips had smiled at. Mostly everything about him was ordinary, but I knew it to be far from the truth. Without a word, I robotically stood up from the chair and marched inside, watching the creaking wooden floorboards as they passed under my feet. When I reached my room, I hesitated.

"Get inside, Val." the voice said. I closed my eyes slowly, then stepped inside the iron room, cold and barren, burdened by my unshed tears. My footsteps echoed as my feet took me to the small cot where I slept the day away, waiting to wake for night, the only time where I could be somewhere else from this wretched room. Its walls stood unforgivingly at me as if daring me to pound on them, to bang my fists and slide to the floor crying, sobbing, a pitiful heap curled up on the ground, as I had done the first few weeks in my own kind of jail. I would not do so again. Never. Not after he had found me like that, dragged me out while my wrists still covered my eyelids so I could pretend I wasn't seeing my reality, taken me out into the room carpeted a violent red, and forced my hands away from my face, twisted them so I could hardly move, and pried my eyes open to drip acid slowly, slowly, slowly, onto them.

I heard the door to my room quietly close and lock. He would never slam the door shut, not even when I had held a shattered piece of mirror to my neck, threatening him, telling him to let me go or else -- or else I'd -- he didn't care. He told me to go ahead, he'd watch. I realized then that the only reason I was alive was because he didn't want to kill me himself. I could hardly stand the torture anymore. It wasn't that I was afraid of how much I screamed when he dragged me to the carpeted room. It wasn't even how hard I hoped that one of the hundreds of guests that slipped in and out of the house would finally notice there was a room in which a young woman lay awake so still on a cot that she might as well have been frozen. It was how silent, how lonely, how isolated it was living in my grey room, alone with nobody except the man and my imagination.

Suddenly, a soft knock resounded through the metal door. I bolted upright, my eyes open wide in the pitch darkness of my room. I could see, although the acid sometimes blurred my vision. One of the side effects of staying in that room for months was that soon, light was scarcer than the dark, and the dark was much, much easier to get used to. I heard the lock click, nearly inaudible. I heard the doorknob turn, the sharpest screech of metal against metal playing faintly from the motion. I heard the hinges groan as they swang forth, and I looked up in the darkness and saw her. Bea.

"Val," she hissed in the quietness, in the loneliness, in the void which she now filled. "Val, is that you?"

I could only look. It took me a moment to realize she expected me to answer. From my throat, a raspy "yes" pushed its way out. I nearly gasped at the sound, it being the first word I had said in too many months. Bea looked back in the hallway, and then motioned for me to come forwards. Entranced, I stood up silently and padded to the door. "Bea." I whispered, murmuring it over and over under my breath. "Bea, Bea, Bea." I stretched my hand toward her face, unwilling to believe that she was real.

She looked right back at me, touching my hand and bringing it to her face. I nearly recoiled at the sense, and her brows furrowed, scrunching up like squished caterpillars to form a mountain of concern. "What's happened to you?" she breathed, trading her focus from one eye to the other. I smiled peculiarly, just submerging myself in everything that was her. The way she smelled, the way she sounded, the way she felt. She had been my best friend, well, before. Before the man, before the room, before the red carpet, before the rain. She had been my best friend when I had lived in the sunshine of day. Bea noticed my smile and my marked absence of words. "Val. What's wrong?" she whispered. I touched my throat gingerly, and then shook my head. Bea's eyes seemed to melt when she realized that I meant I wasn't going to speak. "Okay," she murmured, nodding habitually as if saying yes with her body was going to make her brain agree as well.

A creak sounded from down the hallway. The man appeared at the end, the same lantern from before dangling in his fingers. "Who are you? Val, what are you doing?" he said sharply. His voice cut through my hope like a knife through tissue paper. Bea stepped in front of me protectively. The man advanced down the hallway, and as he got closer with every step, Bea's grip on something in her hand got tighter and tighter. My eyes darted fearfully between the man and Bea, but I couldn't move a muscle. Panic overtook me, and I silently collapsed against the wall, already feeling the burn of the man's anger that was to come. The creaks of the floorboards got closer. Bea's breath got faster. My eyes could hardly make out anything with the lantern so close, so I relied on my ears. But then I clamped my hands over them, not wanting to accept Bea's screams, which I could almost already hear echoing through the hall. I could feel the pain surging through my eyelids, pulsing in my fingers, coursing and forcing my chest up and down in erratic heaves. The man's steps got closer, louder, I tried to drown them out, but all I could hear was Bea, Bea, Bea, and then a crash, glass everywhere, a bulb flickering out, I could see again, I turned, something glinting, something sharp, in and out, in and out, the man groaned, fell over, a loud thud on the ground, a whooshing breath, Bea panting, Bea, wait, Bea?

Trembling, I uncurled my legs. Bea reached for my hands, whispering "Val, Val, Val, I got you, Val." She slowly peeled my fingers away from my ears, and the sound came rushing in. There was something missing. I tilted my head towards the man. Silence. No heartbeat. My body shook, and I looked up at Bea. Wordlessly, she helped me to my feet. I stepped over the man and let Bea lead me to the door. Turning back, I saw the end of something silver buried deep inside the man's stomach. I walked slowly, hearing everything differently. My steps now led to the sunshine. Bea began talking to me, but I wasn't really listening. She'd seen a scrap of paper on the ground at a lunch party hosted by the man, his name was Dr. Something-or-Other, and wasn't he my stepfather or something, she knew I had written on that little bitty piece of paper, that distinctive y had never really left me, even way back in elementary school, well anyways the paper seemed old, but you know, not that old, and then she'd followed a few other clues and figured out that chances were I was here, and if I weren't, well there was probably some other lost soul and she had a duty to figure out, like, what this guy was up to, you know, and so just to be safe, she brought a knife, because who knows what people want at 3 am with your best friend who disappeared like a year and a half ago, and now here we are, and does that make sense, Val? I didn't answer her. I touched the cold window again, the one I had felt an hour ago with such despair. The rain still pelted the glass with a ferocity I had long been numbed to, but now I loved the rain. There was no more of the man in the rain now.

I looked at my reflection in the window, but I didn't see Bea. Where was Bea? I turned around to look for her, but she was gone. I walked back to the man. He was still gone, no heartbeat, face down on the ground. I stepped back into my room, feeling a chill down my spine, but Bea wasn't there either. I wandered in and out of all the rooms in that spacious house, discovering many places I had never before seen, but there was no sign of Bea. I walked back to the door and opened my white wooden gates into the rain. Stepping out into the thundering sky, I let the water wash over my face, blending in with the tears that I hadn't let myself cry.

With the rain came clarity. The truth came spilling out of me like a destructive avalanche. There hadn't been a Bea. Bea had been my name before the man. I had been the one to leave the man, his liquid life staining the carpet a dark, dark red. But, I was now the one outside, out in the rain, out of the man's clutches. I was finally, finally, finally free.