Once upon a time, she would have thought it enough to drive her mad. But she understood more about madness now than once she had.
With her eyes fully open, no longer able to deny that the world around her was real, her face contorted with hopelessness and she shook for several moments. Forcing herself up, she took a deep, shuddering breath and then swallowed her despair. Her right hand came up and she wiped at her eyes. She felt as though she would cry, but no tears came. There was sand in her mouth, tiny pieces of grit that she could not rid herself of. Dehydration was having its way with her, and she hadn’t enough saliva to summon a wad of spit.
Collette hugged herself and simply sat there in the sand, aware that some had sifted into the legs and arms of her pajamas as she slept but not yet able to muster the motivation to do anything about it. What was the point? There would only be more. Really, there wasn’t anything here but sand.
She took a long breath and forced herself to look around. The round chamber she was in— she never thought of it as a room, and it was too airy and open to be a dungeon— had no door, but a dozen windows all around the circumference. They were tall, arched windows with no glass and during the day the sunlight flooded in and heated the chamber. But the windows provided no hope for exit. They were twenty-five feet from the ground and the walls were made entirely of smooth, hardened sand.
It was all sand.
The floor was the soft, shifting stuff of dunes and lonely beaches. The walls were as hard as cement, but it was the same material in a different form. This had been her prison for days, though how many she could not have said. Time seemed to move torturously slow here.
While the sun shone, her prison was not only lit, but heated. By afternoon it often grew so hot that the sand seared her bare flesh and she had to keep to the shadows. Midday was torture. Food and water were often brought to her while she slept, and if it was the same fiendish thing that had imprisoned her here that delivered her meager meals, she had never seen it again. Not since that first night.
Not since it slaughtered her father and tore out his eyes.
“Daddy,” Collette whispered. Still seated, she hugged her knees against her chest and lay her cheek atop them.
She closed her eyes and let the night breeze caress her. For it was dark now. There was no way for her to tell how long she had slept, but it had been hours. When she had drifted off in the cool shade of afternoon, night had been distant. Now evening had come. Later it would grow cold there in that sand prison, but for now it was only the breeze that hinted at the dropping temperature. The sand beneath her still retained the accumulated warmth of the day.
The windows were still visible, the moon and starlight turning them into portraits of the night sky, but in that chamber the darkness was deeper. More intimate. Collette had been alone there too long, however, and that intimacy had become part of her prison. She wanted someone to talk to. Someone to shriek at. Anyone upon whose shoulder she might weep. Company, even in her misery.
A dry laugh escaped her lips. Misery loves company. It took on an entirely new meaning in her mind. She was going to die. Of that she was certain. Having witnessed the mutilation murder of her own father, there was no room for doubt in her mind. But for a woman with only the faintest, little girl’s impractical hope, there was still something about the solitary nature of her imprisonment that was a separate sort of hell.
Where was she? What was the dreadful apparition that had brought her here? Where had it gone, and when might it return? Such questions occupied her waking mind for every moment that she did not spend in anguished grief for her father and for her own predicament.
And what of Oliver?
That question returned again and again, and with it both dread and that one tiny spark of hope remaining. More than ever, now she was certain that Oliver’s disappearance was not of his own volition. Something had happened to him. He had been abducted, or led astray, or driven somehow to leave the night before he was meant to marry Julianna. And Collette believed— she had to believe— that there was some connection to that creature, to the murder of their father, and to her own captivity. If the thing had murdered Oliver, why not leave his corpse?
If he wasn’t dead, on the other hand . . . was it impossible to think this world was the place to which he had vanished?
There was another question, however. One that she avoided as much as possible. When her mind drifted there she would do whatever was necessary to obstruct its progress. The question was: Why am I still alive? The demon— if that was what it was— had torn out her father’s eyes, slain him in his own bedroom, but the only physical harm it had done Collette amounted to cuts and bruises sustained when it had abducted her.
Now it imprisoned her. Fed her. Kept her alive.
If she spent more than a few seconds wondering its purpose, the question would cripple her.
“Oliver,” Collette whispered, running her tongue over her dry, chapped lips and staring at the night sky through the windows high above, wondering if her brother could see them as well. “Where are you, little brother?”
A breeze swirled around inside that round chamber and she shivered a bit, though it felt good. Sweet. Collette took a breath and looked into her mind’s eye, as she had done during every period of wakefulness since she had been taken, and thought of movies. In her head there was a collection of all of her favorite films, many of which she’d seen a dozen times or more. She knew them well. Well enough to visit them now, when she needed the escape they provided more than ever. If she focused enough she could replay the key scenes from all of these films in her mind, and she had found herself in some way she didn’t quite understand able to wander into the worlds those films created. Not as an actor, nothing so imaginative. But as a tangible observer, as though the events were unfolding around her. The Philadelphia Story. October Sky. Field of Dreams. Casablanca. An Affair to Remember. Heaven Can Wait. Say Anything.
“We’ll always have Paris,” she whispered in the dark, feeling the abrasion of sand on teeth and tongue.
She could see the inside of Rick’s Café Americain with utter clarity; the screens and the drooping leaves of plants, the lazily turning fans, the beautiful women and shady men all breathing in an air of danger. And at the piano, Dooley Wilson sang. Not “As Time Goes By,” but some other tune she was not old enough to recognize. A contest of wills arose at the bar, eyes flashing angrily, and then Bogart entered, eyes heavy with melancholy and gravitas, to resolve it.
No, not Bogart. Rick Blaine. Not Dooley Wilson, but Sam the piano player, the weapon Rick and Ilsa will use against each other.
The music is sweet. The wine is dry as bone. As sand. Standing in the midst of the café, Collette hears a whisper, a voice like parchment paper, the words too soft and muffled to make out.
“Your eyes . . . he’s going to take your eyes . . . maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooooon.”
With a sudden, sucking breath, Collette snapped her eyes open, wrenching herself from the trance state to which she had retreated. The whisper had not been a part of the scenario she was painting for herself. It had come from outside.
The chamber seemed lighter, though not with approaching dawn. It was only that she was more acclimated to the night now, and the moonlight and the glimmer of stars seemed to reach more deeply into that prison.
She reached out to touch the wall with her fingertips, another movie scene flashing across the silver screen in her mind. Dorothy in Oz, tapping the heels of her ruby slippers together and saying, in that sweet, lost voice, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”
Collette wished she were Dorothy, that she could tap her heels together and just be home.