Prologue
By Selenite
Donald Gordon held down his wife Adrienne's arm forcefully, making the nerves in it tingle with the loss of circulation. He closed the iron manacle around her wrist and slid an old rusty screw through the fastener, tightening it hard. As Adrienne wept and pleaded for him to release her, Don explained his own logical reasons for not doing so.
"You see, Adrienne," he explained. "I can't trust you anymore!" Don knelt down quickly, and as he manacled her left leg to the cold metal of a devilish contraption called the Throne of Terror, he continued to give Adrienne his side of the story.
"You forced me to this," he continued gleefully. "Now--I'm going to have to punish you!" With her left leg secured, Don now moved to shackle her right ankle.
"Don, PLEASE don't DO this!" Adrienne wept as Don slipped the iron cuff around her ankle and inserted another screw. It seemed to Adrienne that every time Don shackled one of her arms or legs, each manacle seemed to be tighter than the last.
Don patted Adrienne's legs teasingly. "Good girl! Good girl!" he cried and laughed maniacally. Surprisingly, Adrienne hadn't put up much of a fight. Don had expected her to use a sharp object or something else like that to escape. So far, all she had done was cry and beg him to set her free. She had even said, "I love you," but in Don's crazed state, appealing to his love for her was useless. He moved to secure her last limb, her left arm, to the chair.
Adrienne, however, had another idea. She quickly reached into the left pocket of her black jeans and pulled out a Christmas ornament--the snowman that Don had given to her on the night he proposed, Christmas Eve.
"Look," pleaded Adrienne. "Look, honey! It's the snowman! Remember this? Remember when you gave this to me?" Tears streamed down her face, and her hair dangled in front of her eyes. She hoped Don would remember, if only for a moment! A moment was all she wanted, all she needed!
Don examined the snowman for a few moments, standing hesitantly in front of the Throne. He could remember it, quite clearly, in fact. He looked at its smiling face, its carrot nose, its tiny little black hat. Deep in his heart, beneath all the evil that had possessed him, he felt the tiniest spark of hope, and he wanted to let Adrienne go.
However, this feeling lasted only for a moment. Don quickly tossed the snowman aside and dashed to shackle Adrienne's left arm. Before he could do that, however, Adrienne retrieved another object from her meager inventory--a sharp iron fireplace poker.
Adrienne slapped Don with the poker twice before he wrestled it away from her as she screamed. With the poker now in his hand, Don lunged for Adrienne, tilted her head back, and prepared to shove the fireplace poker into her screaming mouth and down her throat. Then he thought about this for a moment and threw the poker aside with a clang.
"No!" he cried fiercely, manacling Adrienne's left arm at last. "I have something better in mind!" He tilted his wife's head back with one hand, choking her a little. His other hand was on the lever of the Throne of Terror. "You BITCH!" he shouted, and pulled the lever.
The lowering mechanism for the axe-blade pendulum on the Throne creaked to life. Adrienne, horrified, stared as the cold metal swept in front of her eyes and sailed straight for her head. Adrienne's mouth flew open, almost to the point of straining her jaw, and she screamed as loud as she could, but her cries could not stop the blade.
The axe ripped through poor Adrienne's head, tearing it in two and exposing a bloody mass of tissue, which by now was completely unrecognizable as any human body part.
After the blade had stopped swinging, Don stood up and kicked the gore off of his shoes. "I warned you," he said patronizingly. "I told you to stay out of my darkroom and away from me, but did you listen? No!" He sighed and pushed his long greasy hair out of his eyes. "I warned you, Adrienne. I warned you."
He turned, took one last look at the headless body on the Throne of Terror, and walked out of the theater slowly through the front doors.
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