Sinner's Game

6 - Useless

Anna

Blurred images spun inside of Anna's head, slowly taking shape. There was a faint buzzing, which sounded so distant yet felt so close. The pictures begun to sharpen as the buzzing decreased in volume. Anna slowly got her grip on reality back.

Her eyes darted from left to right, her whole body ringing alarm signals which shot through her body. There was deep, stinging pain, but she couldn't yet locate where exactly it came from.

Dark walls of boulder and stone formed the surrounding room: a tunnel shaped structure spanning a diameter of roughly 5 meters. The area was lit in a dim, shady light, just enough to see clearly, but the light's source was nowhere to be found. Anna saw some twists and turns of the cave in the distance, but her view wasn't going very far in either direction.

Anna wanted to gasp, realized she couldn't. There was a deep, stinging pain originating from her mouth. She couldn't open it, the pain only worsening at each subsequent attempt.

The beast that had captured her was nowhere to be seen. This was probably a hiding place of some sort. For some reason, it didn't look like anything they had seen before, the place contrasting with the colourful and shiny landscape they had been travelling through earlier that day.

Or was it that day? How much time had passed since she had passed out?

Anna remembered the fate that had unfolded onto her. For a second, she remembered the twitching hands restricting her movements. She remembered them pushing her inside the gooey mass, limiting her breath until she had passed out.

She barely managed to contain her tears.

But Anna wanted to cry out. Her mind immediately wandered to blaming Hendrick again, his sneeze that had ruined everything. But she realized that blaming him would be of no use now. She had escaped by herself, and she had been caught by her own fault.

Now she was here, and it would most likely be the end of her. She wondered if her attempts to be perfect and please her parents had been of any use. They appeared to be so trivial and useless now. How stupid she had been keeping herself drawn inwards, refusing so many nice things just to please them with their over the top expectations.

And even though she had tried to be useful to her parents her whole life... she had been a burden to her friends now. She had been useless, and she made a point to herself that she would change that if she somehow managed to get out of this.

Metallic scratching sounded through the cave as the demon moved around a corner which laid out of Anna's sight. She stayed as quiet as possible, tried to remain calm. It moved closer, turning its mask sideways as if to examine her. The music box, which seemed to be inserted into its back, let out a single sound, almost as if curious.

Anna took the opportunity to analyse her options. Her hands appeared to be lifted above her head, strings holding her mid-air by her hands. They were the same strings that the being had used earlier to capture her, the hooks still embedded through her palm and clinging onto her flesh. There wasn't much dried blood on her palms, which probably meant the hooks were intended to capture, not break.

She followed the hooks upwards to find out where the strings were attached to. It looked like they were attached to the ceiling of the cave... the weird part was that the strings didn't look like they were fixed there; they moved back and forth slightly, as if they would expand inside of the wall, ignoring the fact that stone was solid matter. Her back leaned against stone, the ground was around 1 feet beneath her.