A non-ending, black expanse of nothingness ..

A silence broken by sound of liquid trickling ..

Was it from the ceiling ?

Maybe. Though it didn't seem to be that high .

A low-height ceiling ?

She closed and opened her eyes a couple of times with the hope of gaining some visibility .. Then strained her ears .. Did some sound get lost into the sound of trickling ? The sound of grinding of some metal plate on something solid .. maybe stone ? Or was it hammering ? Like the sound of mincing of .. meat ? Her nose twitched at the thought. 'No it was just her wild imagination .. the effect of those horror series she loved watching on TV', she tried to convince her mind. 'Hmm .. What have I been watching last night ?' 'Strange!!! Why can't I remember the name ?' she asked herself. She tried to remember the story, instead.

A young woman suddenly wakes up to find herself caged inside a dungeon. A masked figure was pulling a body, chained and gagged. It laid it on a wooden table, and she could hear the victim's sobs - a desperate, futile yearning for life. There was another table with a number of plumber's tools on it. Plunger, pipe wrench, sledge hammer, pliers, basin wrench, hacksaw, spanner, hole saw, jigsaw and what not? She wondered what were these doing there.

She tried to turn her head but was shocked to find that a crown had constrained it from moving. Yes it was indeed a circular ornament, but too heavy for a crown. Then as blood started trickling down her earlobes, cheeks and chin .. she discovered her head to be fastened with a metallic thorn sort of arrangement. It pressed at her temples the more she struggled to set free. The man had taken out a jigsaw by this time and from the woman's groans she knew what he was doing to her. A series of cries echoed left and right and looking through the corner of an eye she could deduce the other cages to be filled with women too. 'Hey you .. mother-fucker .. son of a bitch' she shouted. She couldn't hold herself back.

The figure turned back at her and she found the mask resembling a puppet, but a horrendous one, she hadn't seen before. A pale white skin, a receding hairline in the front giving shape to a huge forehead, a pair of bloodshot eyes, a strange symbol drawn in red on its cheeks, blood smeared on the edges of lips. Clad in a black leather jacket and loose trousers, a bow-tie worn neatly around the shirt collar, the man seemed to be in a halloween party mood, except for the jigsaw held in his left hand from which fresh blood trickled.

Suddenly the man stepped aside after opening the victim's gag, as if deliberately, and the woman lying on the table started screaming her lungs out. The jigsaw blade had scraped off her face's flesh and circular patches in red were etched on her cheeks just like the symbol on the man's mask. The woman had been striped completely naked now, and whether the shaking of her body was due to the pain, shock or fall in temperature inside the room, she couldn't say. The man started humming the tune of an old bollywood number - from a classic black and white movie of the colonial era, though she couldn't remember which one.

He kept humming while caressing her skin with his knife - starting from her neck and stopping at her breasts, then going down her tummy, stopping again at her vagina. He had made small slashes, she found now, with the skill of an artist lending last-minute touches with his brush to his favourite painting. The girl was screaming perhaps more from shock of what she anticipated ahead than the pain she had to endure so far.

One by one the man was picking up the tools in his hand. Now he held a wrench and hacksaw. With deft hands of a plumber the man wrenched her nipples like he'd turn a screw and cut through the soft areole with the hacksaw. As they fell off her breasts, he fondled the nipples with his gloved hands and held them to his mouth. The girl had been crying profusely till now, her tears having mingled with the blood on her face, making it thinner. She had fainted, it seemed and a shiver ran down her spine discovering that the cold-eyed stare was aimed at her. She tried to remember where she had seen that face, but in vain. The killer had disappeared from the range of her view suddenly.

After sometime which appeared like ages, the man returned with a bucket of water. The victim's body trembled for sometime before coming to a stop and during that time she was left to do nothing other than curse herself for her hopelessness. He rinsed the body thoroughly with water, then wiped it clean with a towel. His tongue rolled out from his mouth and kept licking the blood oozing out from the wounds like a cat licks milk from a saucer. He felt his erection at last and started unzipping his pants.

She nearly jumped out of her skin. It pained her to watch the extreme insult of womanhood, being a woman herself, but she couldn't take her eyes off him. It was as if the man was a magician and she was in his trance. The woman lay on the table like pounds of mangled flesh now - a dismembered corpse with eyes gorged out from the face. The man held a sledge hammer in his hand this time. He pointed a finger to the wall across her cage and she saw something written in red. Was the place inside a cave ? Her mind returned back to her dream.

The first picture which came into mind. 'No .No. this is over generalization', she thought. There was always deviations in dreams from what one saw or read . Maybe it was a cellar below a washroom with a leaky ceiling. But still being inside a cave was a more fanciful thought. But what was that stench now ? It didn't' appear to be stony or associated with earth or debris. Not chemical .. Something organic .. Yes. Yes .. She could recognize it now. . the smell of fish not taken out of fridge for a couple of days .. She wondered what some rotten fish was doing inside a cave and controlled a strong urge to retch. Why was she feeling restless anticipating something queer about to happen ?

Suddenly something crawled up her legs .. pairs of tiny feet scurried past her thighs .. waist; pulling along a thick, rough weight of fur. It sat on her breasts parting and she could hear only her heartbeats now. It seemed a pair of eyes was staring at her, as time stood still. Just when she thought her mind was playing games in the dark, she felt its whiskers brushing her cheeks and when it opened it's mouth she could make out the two pairs of yellow incisors.

A field mouse!!! As she screamed her lungs out, expecting her dream to come to an end abruptly, like all dreams did; she found that she couldn't move her arms and legs freely now. Where was she ? She ought to be in her bed with a pillow tucked between her legs, expecting the one under her head to be lying on the floor - a sleep habit she always received a scolding for. But she seemed to be lying on the floor instead and it wasn't dry and cold like her bedroom, instead it was wet and slippery.

To her horror she found her hands and feet to be chained exactly like the victim of the tele-series. She tried to remember the face of the victim in the horror show before the killer butchered her. Following the source of liquid dripping below she looked above, having come out of her dreamy state now. As she moved her head, trying to sense the place, her chin rubbed with the cold surface of a bathtub. And she immediately recognized the hot and cold water taps .. the basin .. WC .. the faulty shower .. the mechanic .. Where was the mechanic ? In a flash she remembered the lines on the dungeon wall of the horror TV show.

'Wait for me in your dream, my sweetie'. She knew very well what those words implied, but try as she might she could hardly keep her eyelids open. The scene of the TV episode got enacted before her once again and the title of the show sent chills down her spine. She searched frantically for the name of the channel, but in vain. The camera zoomed over to the girl lying on the table now, inches away from the knife of the killer and she recognized herself this time. Almost immediately a pair of gloved hands grabbed her.