"Wake up friend." The voice was low, monotone, and sad. There was a hint of desperation in his voice. "Oh hello there friend." He cooed, and it might have been comforting if my hands weren't strapped to the arms of the oak wood chair. The room was lavishly decorated, with a large four poster bed and huge bay windows on the eastern wall. The sun was setting, and the light cast the room into a sea of orange-red. My captor was staring at me with large, almost soulless eyes. No, not completely, no. There was an inhuman fire hiding in the space between his pupils and iris. "I'm so glad you woke up friend." There was something about the way he moved. It was almost snake like. He more slithered than walked around my chair.
"What do you want with me?" I attempted to sound confident, but my voice cracked at the end of each word. The man's head turned to the window, then, after a few minutes, whipped violently back. Our eye locked on each other, we each tried to see into each other's minds. He seemed to bore deep into my mind, perhaps even my soul.
"Don't be afraid, friend." He came very close, and I could feel his breath on my neck. "No one else will ever touch you again. You're mine now. No one will steal my friend from me." He wrapped his arms around me. He was ice cold, like metal that had been outside in an arctic winter. But that wasn't what made me shiver. It was the way he talked. It was the way you talked to the pig before you cut the bacon off of it's body. It was the metallic scraping sound from behind his back, and the new red stain on both of our white shirts.
Blackness. Nothing. I waited. Still nothing. No light at the end of the tunnel. Just a sound. Barely audible, from somewhere to my left. One beat. Thud. Two beats, much louder. Thud thud. Four beats, then eight, then the noise was so deafening I could no longer count. It was when I tried to cover my ears that I discovered I couldn't move. I could however scream. The scream wasn't intentional, but it came. Loud and panicked, I screamed again. Waited. Nothing. No sound. Waited. Thud...Thud thud...Thud thud thud thud... This time it came from behind me. I thought about screaming, casting it away with all my measly power. Instead I asked a question. "Who are you?
" E hoa, ko ahau ki a koutou." The voice paused and a few thuds followed. "I am you, friend."
"Where are we? I thought I died." Again there were more beats. They came in the manner of a student tapping their fingers while studying.
"We are in Te rangi...the afterlife. We are...Thud thud...we still live. We are in pōroa... The unwaking sleep."
"Like a coma?"
"Yes."
"How long have we-"
"40 days. It is the third Thursday of February, and we are in room C116 according to the doctors."
"Who found us? Who took us in?"
"We do not know."
