Abhorrent Practices - Book 1

Chapter 3.1 - The Witch (Scene 1: Cell Mates)

Alyss lay motionless. Someone was prodding her arm rudely.

"So, what's your name, darling?"

The voice slurred clumsily over the words. She could smell the sickly sweet stench of stale alcohol in the air. Better not to move. Whoever it was, if he thought she was asleep, he might just leave her alone.

"Is she dead?" A second voice, even more drunk. This one seemed to be having even greater difficulty speaking. Each word seemed to stumble awkwardly before falling from his slack mouth, like a heavy sack dropped into a cellar.

"Nah. They don't put dead ones in here with the likes of us. They got a special room for them."

She felt a large, rough hand take hold of her upper arm and shake it. The feel of rough, calloused fingers against her bare skin came as a shock. Where was her dress?

"Hey!" she protested, snatching her arm away and sitting suddenly upright. She turned her large, grey eyes on the man crouched barely six inches from her, the tiny points of light in her pupils sparking suddenly red. "What do you think you're doing?!"

Her quick eyes darted left and right, her pupils widening as she drank in her surroundings. She was in a cell, no more than twenty feet long and less than fifteen feet wide. It was dark, the only light stuttering from a pair of lanterns hanging from the ceiling far above her head, one fixed either side of the trap door through which she must have been lowered.

"Nothing!" grumbled the man. "Just making sure you wasn't dead, that's all!"

Alyss looked him over. His clothes were stiff with dirt and grime. Even in the dim, faltering light of the lanterns, that much was clear. She wrinkled her nose against the rank smell of alcohol which oozed from his every pore.

"Well," she replied, "I'm not." She shrank back slightly and shivered as the cold stone wall of the cell touched her bare shoulders. Where was her dress? Unable to retreat further, she fixed her gaze upon the man's grizzled face and glared defiantly. "So, if you don't mind, perhaps you could give me a little room to breathe." She waved her hand at him, as if shooing away an annoying pet.

The man straightened suddenly, as if she'd slapped him hard. He screwed his face into an ugly grimace.

"No need to be like that," he muttered, his slurred words almost unintelligible. "Was only trying to be friendly." His eyes crawled over the soft, caramel-coloured skin of her bare shoulders like a predatory spider and followed the folds of her chemise down to where they pooled in her lap. "You do want to be friendly, don't you?" he grunted.

Alyss felt her stomach tighten. There was no way out of the cell. No way to call for help. As brutish as this man was, she daren't risk offending him. In here, she was completely at his mercy.

"Jeb?" The second voice again. Peering through the darkness and beyond the drunken brute in front of her, Alyss could just make out a large ragged shape slumped against the wall at the far end of the cell. "What's going on?" His words were again heavy and stumbled clumsily in the darkness.

"It's all right," Jeb reassured him. "She's not dead."

"Good," belched the bundle of rags on the far side of the cell. "She friendly?"

"Not very. But she will be. Come over here and hold her arms."

Alyss jumped to her feet and threw back her shoulders defiantly. She fixed the man in front of her with a glare that belied the fear welling inside her.

"I wouldn't do that!" she snapped, trying to inject an air of menace into her voice. "I'm ... I'm from Grielle."

Jeb rose slowly and unsteadily to his feet, turning his head to address the heap of rags in the corner.