Chapter 5 Sophie
SOPHIE
PLAYLIST: PRISONER – RAPHAEL LAKE AARON LEVY, DANIE RYAN MURPHY
“Iadvise you to choose your words very carefully,” says the woman who took me suddenly. I didn’t even hear her come in. Was her name Kat?
My mind is so mushy.
I feel dead inside.
Numb.
I still hear the pigeons flapping and cooing, but I am too numb to feel anything.
“Because what I found on your phone does not help your case,” she says.
My stomach plummets.
What did she find?
I'm scared, but I also don’t care.
I feel like someone took my soul.
I am exhausted.
Endless exhaustion.
Maybe I should just die here, like a pathetic idiot. Luisa always told me that being bright and shiny would get back to me at some point. Maybe that’s the punishment for infecting everyone with my toxic positivity.
I just lie on the hard ground. In this stinky hole that I might never leave.
“This is your last chance to give me the truth,” she says, squatting in front of me and showing me a laptop screen. The light burns my eyes because I am so used to the darkness by now.
“Your little friend won’t live any longer,” she says. And horror strikes me as I watch what they are doing to Luisa. I push myself off the ground. I hear her horrific screams resounding through the silence of the room I am in. I watch her being shot. In the leg. She screams. And so do I.
“Nooooo!” I scream. “Please—I don’t know anything!”
Tears flood my eyes as the man on the pulls Luisa up by the hair, gags her, rips her clothes off, fixes her and pulls out his penis.
I can’t let that happen.
“What do you want me to do?” I shout. “I’ll do whatever, but please stop it!!!”
Luisa’s muted screams rip me apart.
“You’ll do whatever, hm?” the woman asks.
“Yes, whatever, but please let Luisa go—she’s my best friend—she deserves better! She has already gone through so much, please!! I’ll do whatever you want!!! Take me instead!“
“You really don’t know anything, don’t you?” asks the woman in such a playful tone that I am genuinely scared of her. And I call myself crazy for it, but my background makes me ask myself what must have happened to her to be able to be so cold and abusive.
She probably went through hell. And I, the idiot, have somehow compassion with the woman who kidnapped and tortured me.
“I don’t,” I say desperately. “But if that man you’re looking for really was my father, I’ll help you find whatever I can on him, I'll give you whatever I can find in my mother’s stuff, but please, please let Luisa go.”
I can barely see the woman’s face in the low light from the laptop. She has her eyes narrowed in an unreadable expression.
“Come with me,” she says, grabs me and pulls me up. I feel as wobbly as it can get, and hold myself to the cold stone I have been leaning on.
“Walk before I change my mind,” she says harshly.
“Let Luisa go,” I say, not walking.
The woman stops.
“Walk now, or she won’t,” she says, annoyed.
So I walk.
“Please,” I breathe out and stop. Walking is so exhausting.
The woman sighs.
“We never had her. Deep fake,” she says.
I close my eyes. Her words take a moment to set in.
“You’re fucking kidding,” I finally say in total disbelief as I open my eyes again. Everything else forgotten.
“I don’t make jokes,” she says coldly. “Now walk, or I’ll really get Luisa.”
She’s mad, I tell myself, and I am pretty sure I was abducted by a psychopath. I recite what I learned about psychopaths in my studies, and decide I'd better walk. For the time being.
So, I walk, one step at a time, following the light of the laptop in her hand.
She opens the door I found before.
“Urgh,” I gasp out, hiding my face in my hands because the light is too bright. I instantly get a headache.
I follow her up the stairs with what must be more than thirty steps, halfway on all fours, and when I reach the top, I can’t see properly with a dizzy head and collapse on the last step, panting.
I sit on the rough natural stone tiles, heart pumping, with an unfocused vision and a throbbing head.
It’s only then that I realise how disgusting I smell. I peed myself. This is a nightmare.
My head falls to the side, and I try to focus with squinted eyes.
I see natural stone piers, and a woman standing next to one, dressed in an all-black skirt with a wide-fit black blouse.
She seems to be older, but as she has her back to me, I can’t quite tell.
Her hands look aged. She is discussing something with the woman who brought me up and leans casually against the piers.
It was Kat, or wasn’t it? I try to remember.
They’re discussing angrily, gesturing widely with words I can’t catch. Is it even English?
Suddenly they other woman turns and walks over to where I sit, leaning against the wall.
The first thing I notice is that she is wearing no shoes.
My eyes wander up her skinny legs, over her perfectly manicured hands that show every bone, up to her neck with a golden cross necklace around it.
Being Christian and doing this, pah, I secretly think. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
My eyes wander further to her face.
She has a slim face showing lines around her eyes and mouth, and I assume she must be something in her late forties, maybe fifty. Her eyes are dark brown, her skin olive, and she has long, dark brown, almost black hair tied in a low bun.
She stares down at me like I’m a very annoying inconvenience. She squats down and grabs my jaw.
“I am warning you only this once,” she says.
“You better deliver me something, or I will put a bullet in your head before you can say please,” she says threateningly.
Her fingernails dig painfully into my skin.
“Your father has betrayed me once, and I am no fool trusting twice,” she says, her voice getting even darker as her fingers squeeze my jaw painfully.
“You are a murderer, and only breathing right now because you will be useful to get me what I want, nothing more. You are a piece of shit I will happily crush with my shoe.”
I swallow hard and nod. She stares at me so intensely, as if she could see the expected lies in my eyes. My eyes wander to the ground because I don’t want her to see the hate I feel for her right now, but I can’t keep my upper lip from slightly pursing up.
“Get yourself cleaned up,” she says with a disgusted sneer, and lets go of me like I am filth. “You smell like piss, sudicio.”
I don’t need to know the word to understand it.
“Come,” says the woman named Kat, holding out her hand. I hesitate. “I’m not doing anything. We’ll just get you cleaned up and fed.”
I scoff slightly because I find the change of dynamics quite irritating, and it leaves me wondering if this is all a game they play with me. I am also not quite processing what has happened.
Kat leads me upstairs to a room, where she shows me a bathroom with a shower and, to my relief, a toilet.
The room is painted entirely black. It has a king-size wooden bed with a black velvet headboard, black sheets, a black nightstand, a black armchair in the corner and tulle-like, black curtains framing several windows.
Apparently, I am in Dracula land.
Kat locks the door when she leaves, and it reminds me that I am still a prisoner. In a house, wherever. I check the windows and can see a street, but they’re all locked. I mean, I could smash them and jump onto the streets? But then, I am so exhausted. Everything feels like too much.
So I use the bathroom, then shower. Judging from the bathroom and what I saw downstairs alone, this house must cost a fortune.
In the all-black bathroom, I find a walk-in shower that takes me a moment to figure out how to turn on. But when the hot water meets my skin, I moan because it feels wonderful—like I am washing away the nightmare of what has happened. Not that I would ever forget.
But I am in the denial stage right now. I know the aftermath will come around; if I am still alive then. A displaced laugh escapes my mouth from the absurdity of everything.
When I am done scrubbing off the filth, and my skin is flaming red from the hot water, I turn it off and wrap myself in a towel.
I wipe the steamed mirror and look at myself in it.
Dark eye-rims, bloodshot eyes, slightly fallen in, probably from dehydration.
It’s the first time I realise myself as a being again.
A being with needs. I am so thirsty I could drink an entire ocean, so I open the tap and drink.
I feel and see my wrists, and they look like both of them were broken.
They’re obviously not because I can still move them, but they’re heavily bruised and hurt like crap.
My fingers tingle slightly, probably from being tied up the entire time.
I wonder how long they kept me down there. I have no clue what day we have and no sense of time.
When I open the bathroom door, clothes lie on the bed, and a plate of food sits on it.
Without hesitation or questioning, I take the plate with bread, fruit, vegetables, and meat and eat all of it as fast as possible. I don’t even taste it properly. It’s more like shovelling it in, and I begin to feel like a human being again after I eat the last crumb of it.
Only then do I check out the clothes. I pick up something with a floral print and hold it up. A white square-neckline dress, with narrow straps, a red Tudor rose print, a tailored fit and a flared skirt.
“Seriously?” I say. “What is wrong with you people? Dressing me like a doll? What is the point of it?”
There’s also a thong from a soft material I have never felt before, a bra that looks as if it might fit me, and shoes. Well, more like heeled cork sandals. With red straps. Leathery red straps that are unbelievably soft, with a buckle closure.
I also find a bag with necessities to freshen my appearance.
I let myself fall on the bed, still in my towel, with wet hair. I don’t care.
How the hell did this happen?
And what happens if I can’t find anything about my father?