Darkness Within

Chapter 1

The dream was real. Terror consumed her as she looked out from the eyes of a stranger. She stood at the stove. And stared down at the brown stew, vegetables floating in the boiling liquid and felt her breath catch. She froze as the reality slammed into her and her throat tightened, her ragged breaking the silence

No, oh God, no please...

Paige Rowland rolled over onto her back but from there, her limps stiffened with terror. Her eyes snapped open, but it wasn't the dim light of her bedside lamp she saw or the glow coming from the closed door of her bathroom.

Instead, everything was replaced by rough surfaces and the smell of blood and dust that nauseated her senses.

Oh God, it was happening again.

The instantaneous turbulence of being inside of another woman's body consumed her and she shivered against the cold draft of the unexplained, the imagined feel of ropes holding her prisoner.

Cold.

Pulling and twisting against the ropes that secured her to the hard surface, Vicki struggled to breathe as the transition finished.

The pain of terror tasted vile and her wrists and ankles burned; raw from the futile and insistent struggles against the bonds holding her arms to her side. Her legs were stretched out and spread, tied to the table. The taste of bile, of acid, seeped into her mouth and down her throat, her stomach roiling and quivering as sweat beaded between her breasts despite the chill.

Her prison was a mass of mortared logs and open beams overhead, everything rustic and old.

A cabin?

Paige crinkled her nose as the smell of bleach hit her and the urge to gag tickled her throat.

Rolling her head weakly to the left, the only movement she could control, she spied a dark couch, the middle sagging as if the springs were broke. It sat against the wall and in front of it was a gouged, wooden coffee table. It looked as if someone had taken a sharp knife to the top.

Gulping, the newspaper caught her eyes and the headline hung over the edge. She squinted to see the date, location, anything. . .

The Wallace Gazette, February 01, 2003.

The words Idaho State Police and missing women caught her eye.

Struggling to concentrate, she took in more details, anything to help her later. To her right, an old wood-burning stove threw a little heat off, dulling the chill but not enough to stop the shivers from racking her small frame. A cutting board and a cleaver sat on the mahogany counter under a magnetic strip holding a gleaming set of butcher's knives, which were the only things in the small room that looked new. The pair of cabinets on the wall above the sink basin were a distressed brown and looked as if something had taken a hammer to it.

The dull thump of boots climbing onto a porch startled her, and her heart felt as if it was going to burst. A small moan escaped the woman's lips and for the moment, her lips.

Oh God, oh, God, oh, God...

The woman struggled against its bonds again, the rope churning into the red, swollen flesh. The woman's fear poignant, it ached through her like blood poisoning. The sound of the stomping on the porch outside the front door was like a drum calling her fear to rise higher, marching it up to terror. Paige was a captive inside of a prisoner, force-fed fear in gulping, panicked breaths and sniffling sobs. It was always the same; the helpless feeling of not being able to save the woman but knowing their pain and terror as they lay, waiting for death.