Safe
Jane Nash: Horror story ‘Safe’
‘You’ll be safe in my hands.’
She wasn’t so sure and even with no other option on offer, shook her head, no.
He glanced over his shoulder and spread his hands, palms up. The trusting Truth Plane.
‘I promise.’
His hands looked odd held waist height while he was sitting in his van, leaning towards the open passenger window. She didn’t like his balding head. A patch of his old skin shone like the side of Aladdin’s lamp. She could see his collar darkening from the beads of sweat running down his neck beneath a crescent of salt and pepper hair. She sensed him to be untrustworthy but what experience did she have at 17?
‘I promise.’
She hesitated until she heard footsteps running down a side street towards the plaza. She wanted to escape her stalker. She nodded and went to climb onto the passenger seat of his small white van.
‘Get in the back. They won’t see you there.’
Her stomach lurched. It was one thing to be a passenger but in the back of the truck?
‘Get. In. The. Back.’
She scrambled into the cave of the back of the van, toppling forward as it moved slightly and took off. Gravity and the lurching of her stomach held her to the metal floor. The scrape of her raw throat from bile’s acid took more of her attention than the chains beside her. She swallowed hard as her mouth filled with saliva. She vomited.
The van sped up. There was nothing to hold on to and her long hair was now threaded with pieces of sick around her face.
Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light in the back. She became aware of a shackled foot. She followed the leg up to the face of a boy, whom she estimated to be possibly 8 years old.
His eyes were wide open exposing the sclera all around his black pupils. Don’t worry, she whispered loudly to him, wiping stray vomit from her chin. The boy reached across to her and she held out her hand in return. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt, his skin smeared in patches, black.
His nails like talons ripped into her from the inside of her elbow cutting through the flesh like a hot knife to butter, all the way down to her wrist. Blood sprayed out over his face and began to sop the grimy metal floor.
She screamed as he sprang towards her, affixing himself to her wrist, blood covering his pallid, ecstatic face. She tried to shake him off but was frozen, her mind screaming to move but nothing in her body responded. She found her voice and screamed out to the driver
‘You said, I’d be safe in your hands.’
‘You’re not in my hands.’
The leech child drained her. She lay in her own vomit, looking at the ceiling of the van. He made busy with her arteries and veins. I don’t want to become a vampire she thought until she realised that was a silly childhood myth.