The Interrogation

By Beverly Greene

NOTE: This story is protected by international copyright laws and may NOT be reproduced in any form without the author's expressed written permission.

I looked at her face but could not see her. Just outside of the small spotlight battering me with its brilliance, I could see only that it was a woman standing before me. I could make out that she had a tan, but even her ethnic background was impossible to determine, much less her hair or eye color or other identifying facial features.

I scrutinized what I could see of her face, hoping for some kind of recognition, some form of hope to which I could cling, but I found none. What I found instead of a menacing figure standing before me, observing me as if I were a caged wild animal in some horrific experiment. She almost blended into the empty black surrounding the circle of light, in which I seemed to be the center of attention. She wore a black cap to cover most of her hair, a black jacket, black military style pants, and even black boots. To my amusement, I noticed as well that she was wearing black gloves. I wondered if she feared leaving finger prints of my battered body with an unconscious smirk. The pain, the darkness, the light, the fear, had all joined together in a band to steal my mind away and I feared that I would not be able to prevent the attack.

I laughed. For no apparent reason, I laughed. Not the kind of laugh that you let escape when you hear a great joke that you've never been told before. Not the kind of laugh that you give as a congratulations to a child or pet who has done something particularly amusing. Not even the kind of laugh that you give at a dinner party when you're trying to be polite to the couple who seems to think that everyone finds their vacation story as amusing as they do...every single time they tell it. No, this was a laugh that even I had never heard before. Never in my life had I ever even imaged that such a sound could emanate from my throat, yet it had. Scratchy and shaky and more than a little coarse, the sound rang in my ears long after I knew the sound could be audibly heard.

So, this is what losing your mind feels like, I thought to myself. That is the sound that your mind makes when it reaches that unspeakable breaking point from which no one can return. But it did. Just as quickly as the ghastly laugh had emerged from my mouth, the fear returned and with it, my understanding of my current situation.

"WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?"

My voice boomed into the small room, bouncing off of the walls and assaulting my ears with its sharpness. I felt as if the room was only as large as the spotlight. It seemed that the walls were only inches from my body and moving closer with every sound, every moment, every echo of my fear. I was sure that at any second, the walls would come together like a trash compactor and crush me into a small pile of dust that no one would ever remembered used to be a human being.

My breath became labored as it had never been before. I already felt the crushing effects of the walls determined to erase my existence from this plane of reality. Every inhale was short and sharp and almost inaudible out of fear of causing the walls to come at me even faster that they already were. Every exhale was long, sounding like the last sigh from a dying person.

*BAM*

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