Page 115 of Shattered Veil

The man turned on his heels to leave, his footsteps a noise that I could only describe as an odd, airy squish. I could feel beneath me that the flooring was padded—realized as I tried to sit up straight that the material under my sit-bones had eased the strain on my joints unlike a typical carpet or hardwood—and the slow-cranking gears in my mind struggled to catch up. I grunted, twisting to look at my wrists secured behind my back, and managed to catch a glimpse of the chain links—they were looped through a metal fastening that was screwed into the wall. Metal-on-metal clinked as I observed it, and one would think that that was what made profanities leave my mouth in a horrified exhale.

It wasn’t—it was the sight of the room as a whole that shook me.

I was situated in the corner of a repurposed closet. Or, at least, that’s what I assumed it to be due to the size of the room. My eyes scanned from floor to ceiling, and I saw that the same material that I sat upon spanned along the walls. It was a grey padding. A grey, textured, soundproofing padding that was all too familiar for I had seen it before—only through a camera’s lens, but I had seen it nonetheless—and I knew that it was what had covered the ominous room in 2D.

The sight was chilling…and while my breath rattled with quiet curses, my mouth dried even further, and my hands shook within the cuffs, that reaction was nothing compared to when the man returned.

He stood in the doorway, tall, and seeing him jogged my memory to the point that I remembered it all. I recalled him pulling me over, his reasoning for doing so lacking substantiation, the pat down, the pinching in my glute and ache in my thigh, the feeling of handcuffs biting into my skin, and my inevitable drop into unconsciousness in the back of his car. Officer Dowler had sedated me—there was no doubt about that—and now that I had come to, he was eyeing me with purpose…and he wasn’t alone.

Like anyone else, I’d experienced déjà vu before, and typically, it’s a mildly unsettling sensation—one that makes me slightly shiver and wonder why the moment I was in was so damn familiar. The room alone didn’t spring the feeling on me, but seeing her hit me like a freight train. She was the sight that I had seen in my dreams over and again—the one that had rendered me confused and attempting to piece the puzzle of premonition together. The blonde woman had bruises along her left cheek—from the tip of her eye to the bottom of her jaw—and her eyebrow and lip were both split. The injuries were no longer fresh, the blood appearing to have fully dried as it dripped down her face, and the discoloration along the swelling was a nasty purple.

In my dreams, I didn’t know her. Of course, I didn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have questioned her place within them. But the extension of the reality beyond the vision of her face snapped me into quick recognition, and I was choked.

“Skylar?” My voice was hoarse, as I had anticipated it to be.

There was no question that it was her. With slim and sharp features, skin akin to ivory, and dressed head-to-toe in black, she looked just as I remembered her aside from the wounds on her face.

Cringing away from the man as he held her by the upper arm, she spoke in a plea, “What do you want? I don’t understand, I—”

“I explained this to her,” Officer Dowler noted casually, shaking his grip on her. “Many times. You know this woman, yes?”

I stammered, “I—um—what—”

“You know her?!” he raised his voice, and Skylar flinched.

It ran through my mind to ask if he was the one that had hurt her—to yell regarding why he would do such a thing—but there was no room for questioning here. The situation that I was thrust into was one in which I was expected to be obedient…and I considered the need to toe the line of obediency and wit. Because I had already spoken her name, I replied:

“Yes. I know her.”

“How do you know her?” he asked. I looked at Skylar rather than him. She avoided my gaze, and he admonished, “Don’t look at her, look at me.”

“Friend,” I hesitated. “Friend of a friend.”

Officer Dowler appeared to suck on the inside of his cheek. “Right.”

Skylar whined, “He doesn’t know anything! I don’t know anything—”

He looked down at her as if he were mildly frustrated. “If you don’t know anything, then why the fuck are you spreading word about my shit?”

“I don’t even know what your stuff is!” she cried.

“No.” He sardonically spoke, “Of course you don’t. You just…happened to say enough to scare your little stripper friends into up and quitting.” His fingers tightened on her bicep as he pulled her closer, and she shrank downward as he towered above. “And I don’t give a shit about that, but do you know how many calls I got about missing women? Ten.” His narrowed eyes turned to me. “Ten. All of ’em crying about shit that they heard from a friend named Skylar. That’s ten too many, and I don’t need other officers questioning my authority and butting in on my shit.”

“All I told my friends was that Delaney was gone,” Skylar said, her voice strained. “I saw the article, that’s all I know—”

“And then they saw the one for Taylor,” he finished for her as if he had heard the story already. “And Casey. And Melanie. And they were all said to have overdosed, and it seemed so strange.” Randy’s tone warped into an odd, menacing coo upon the last two words, and a shiver rolled down my spine. “Strange because you have such a little fucking community, and you knew that no—none of them used drugs.” He mockingly gasped. “They would never. And that made you nervous. And jumpy. And since ya make so much goddamn money ripping your clothes off, you quit. Seems like your friends quit, too. And then…I saw in your phone that someone had sent you that article about Delaney around about the same time as a phone call to the same contact…after that, you spam-called about fifteen different numbers—some picked up, some didn’t…and the contact that had sent you the article said to plan on meeting the next morning at…” Randy turned to me, smiled, and said, “Your place.”

“For coffee,” Skylar interjected in a panic. “Just for coffee—”

“At your apartment,” he continued. “Now, why in the world would she be running to your place to meet up after she gathers up all this lovely information?”

“Coffee,” I agreed with Skylar. “Swear—swear to God, just coffee—”

“What do you know?” Randy asked me casually. “And who told you?”

“Nothing, I—”

I silenced myself when he roughly grabbed Skylar by the jaw, angling her face and all of the damage done directly toward me.

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